Recent reviews by mell0w

after disabling gpu scheduling to fix the crashing, it was everything a game about being a student at hogwarts should be. the attention to detail is amazing, the animations are fluid, the movement is satisfying, the combat is not the worst thing I've ever seen. this game gave me that rare "off on an adventure" sense of wonder that lots of games don't quite seem to get right

and you can pet the cat

even the glitches are fun

[MW3 review, MW2 below]
After having fallen off with CoD around the blops 2 era, I decided to give it a go for the nostalgia. I thought I wouldn't like the PvE battle royale format they were doing with zombies, but it's quite fun - when it doesn't crash. The crashing is the worst part; essentially everything is fine, unless I haven't restarted my pc since the last time I played MW3. Seems to be a memory leak, but either way, if I've played CoD, and haven't restarted my pc, I can't play cod again without it crashing - or anything else for that matter. Hogwarts Legacy will hit me with out of memory errors, LDPlayer will restart my video drivers, even windows starts running noticeably slower. It's very frustrating for there to be this standard of having to restart your pc if you've closed the game, given that you're forced to restart after the first-time setup prompts already. I've lost more resources and insured weapons to crashing than dying. Also, when this game crashes, it crashes hard - my monitors will both go black and only one of them will come back, half a minute later, and on 480p, as if I don't have a graphics card installed at all. I'm very much under the impression that it just whole ass crashes my entire display driver. It takes everything with it, too - spotify, discord, web browsers - all of it, dead. Which also requires a full restart. Disclaimer: I'm running this on an RTX 4070 Ti.

This game also comes with a variety of obscure issues outside of that. One person in our group can't join my lobby; I can join him, I can join others, he can join others, others can join me, and others can join him - it's only him that can't join only me. His ground/floor is also missing in-game, it's just rainbow-colored static. And we discovered there's apparently nuances in CoD points in the steam store, after submitting tickets to both activision and steam asking why they couldn't be redeemed. There's CoD points for MW1, and then there's CoD points for everything else, and they are not interchangeable.

Multiplayer is okay. I saw a lot of negative reviews were taking a shot at the recycled maps, and while I'm the target audience for that content, the community is the same as it's always been. Normal quickplay is almost guaranteed to be a frustrating match; there's gonna be a kid built specifically to run around with a knife and they're going to piss you off until you change your loadout and camp wide angles to counter them, and then someone is going to have something to say about you camping. Naturally, it's pointless to try to communicate to a teenager on the internet that it's gaslighting for them to start the game with an annoying loadout and then talk ♥♥♥♥ to someone that changed to a different playstyle to shut them down. It's much less frustrating to default to playing hardcore playlists; knifers are heavily reliant on the time-to-kill in the regular quickplay environment giving them ample time to reach you before you can kill them.

I'm on the fence about how I feel about the microtransactions. Between the bundles and the battle pass, there's a multitude of options for you to pay for things instead of earning them. You're essentially handed completed weapons that you can then use to work your way backwards with.

Overall, the fun I've had with the game when it's not crashing isn't enough for this review to be changed to positive.

[MW2 review]
I thought I'd at least be playing the game before it frustrated me, but it takes half an hour just to make it to the main menu. The game doesn't open until you let it update your graphics drivers or tell it to ignore that they're outdated - when I've been hearing that updating them causes problems. Then the game opens with an unskippable intro cutscene. Then three user agreements, all of which force you to scroll to the bottom to accept. Then several device/graphics setup menus, which you could sink another 20 minutes into sifting through. One of them is a motion sensitivity thing that lets you disable motion blur right out the gate, but it changes other settings with it that you may not necessarily want set up that way, so you're making an extra trip to the settings to disable only motion blur anyway.

Then it wants me to sign into Activision. I go to make an account and of course I made an account years ago for something else and need to reset my password instead. That would be fine, except the Call of Duty platform itself seems to create a fresh new profile, with an auto-generated CoD-specific username. I need a token to change my username, I generate a token every 6 months, and I start with zero tokens. So if I choose to purchase this game, I'm stuck running around with the name "anon83865518#4022166" (not joking) for longer than I'll even be playing it. After you sign in, you need to restart the game, and it has you accept all three user agreements again - then plays another unskippable cutscene. I've had to go through the user agreements a total of four times, for whatever reason.

The cherry on top is a combination of the technical difficulties and how they chose to go about their idea of a "free weekend." The comparison I made is, the free weekend is like "unlimited" internet in Australia. You're restricted to 3 (of 15) maps, with a fraction of the available game modes - Ground War not being one of them. So if you're playing with friends that own the game, you default to feeling like you're holding them back from playing the game the way they'd like to, just by being there. Of the 3 maps, one of them is pretty far up there in terms of the worst new player experiences. It packs 12 people into such a small space that you have enemies spawning behind teammates spawning behind enemies. And because you have to unlock the ability to create loadouts, you have no idea what tools are available to you, or how to swap to a preset loadout that might work a little better - or even that you can swap loadouts at all.

But at least that map doesn't make the game borderline unplayable. One of the maps (El Asilo) will cause pretty severe intermittent frame stuttering to start - enough to break the fluidity of movement in an otherwise fast-paced action game, in a way that makes it not feel quite so fast-paced anymore. Which is on the polar opposite end of the fast-paced spectrum from the previously mentioned map. It doesn't stop there though, the frame stuttering will carry on into other maps that were playable before, until I restart the game. Restarting the game resets the volume in windows volume mixer. When the game crashes - which is also a thing that happens - sometimes it's for the best, because you'll keep forgetting that you need to restart between matches.

TL;DR this game is barely worth playing when it's "free."

great game. lots of content in the f2p model with no p2w option.

2d minecraft. in spaaaaace. a lot in common with terraria but still nothing like it at all.

I'll never forget the slow descent into madness that came with the expert realism achievement. 10/10

"you're doing it wrong. do it right!"

hilarious game worth a playthrough or 3

has its pros and cons.

combat is really satisfying, mage and warrior are both enjoyable to play. story is good. there's definitely an abundance of stuff to do.

lots of glitches, but none of them are gamebreaking. sometimes it feels like the game is working against you. you'll try to cast barrier on yourself to jump off a cliff and the game will teleport you far outside the range of having the barrier applied to you before it goes off. companions get in the way a lot. sometimes in combat people would just stop functioning until I did something specific - jumping, switching characters, etc. there's a loooot of gathering nodes that you can't reach (they're too heavily obstructed by the environment for whatever reason) and it's mildly infuriating when one of them is rare. the "hold your position" button tends to ignore one of the party members half the time. rift shards are placed in ways that make you go far out of your way sometimes, I gave up on them before I was even out of the first area. the romance options left something to be desired, I just didn't bother. I hope they do something different with the whole war room thing in dragon age 4, it was annoying to be going back to it all the time.

this game was one of those extremely rare occasions where rather than simply not having time to finish it, I consciously decided not to invest the time.

it's quite open world, despite every map having sections that are only open during certain times of day. the area you start in, after a few hours, is like hey come back after this time of day but by then you're off in another map. you start with a certain amount of days, you can increase that capacity a bit, you can freeze time to draw a day out. cool in concept, sure. the game doesn't really tell you that there are certain areas that increase in difficulty as each day passes, and others that are just stupid hard to begin with, but ok.

then the gameplay loop comes in. you kill bigger enemies to obtain a currency that allows you to pause (and thus extend) time - with the only other battle reward being items, as you "level" (incredibly incrementally) by completing quests - then you use that time to kill more big enemies to pause time to kill more big enemies. this may have just been a user error but a majority of the time I found myself needing to know the map to return to the last "defeatable" large enemy (the same currency used to pause time is also used for numerous other things, including surviving newer big enemies that are significantly stronger) so that I could keep pausing time long enough to make seemingly insignificant amounts of progress.

this is the fastest you can go from opening the game to joining a lobby and getting straight into the action. also woodland critter fashion is pretty fun.