Trent “Twist” West

Boxing with Morrowind for best Bethesda game. Just… what a journey, what a soundtrack, what a universe. I cannot wait to see what they do with this property in the future, so many routes and futures to explore.

It’s just a circus of ripped, unchanged game mechanics. It’s literally like they bought Destiny, Anthem, Division, Diablo, and Borderlands code off the black market and stitched it together without changing a thing. None of the system fit well together and they’re all awkwardly jammed in to prod your nostalgia from better, more original games.

Red War Campaign? Gone. Curse of Osiris? Completely Gone. Warmind? Only Ana's left. Titan, Io, Mercury, and Mars? "Vaulted." The Leviathan? Every single activity that had to do with it got tossed in the garbage. Exotics that depend on the aforementioned activities? Available for chump change. Nightfalls? Completely removed without warning, only The Ordeal remains. Vault of Glass? They said they were adding it, with how little content came with BL it should have been available at launch. Cosmodrome? They added 1/3 of it, The Plaguelands and entire eastern section (Rocketyard, Kings' Watch, The Blast, Refinery, Devil's Lair, Devil's Spire, Bunker RAS-2, Seraphim Vault, The Mine, Bunker WAR-4) were excluded from the remaster. Europa? Pitifully small, blizzards that toss around ONLY sparrows, and quests that force you to jog for 10 minutes before seeing anything worth fighting. Stasis as an Effect? Broken, chainable effect that forces you to either take a team with you or sacrifice ALL of your shields to break free. Stasis as a Subclass? Ludicrously overpowered, there should at least be a downside to using it, because without limitations you can equip 6 passive abilities and 6 active abilities, all of which buff you into a solo beast and only 2 of the passives actually weaken you. I love that they gave solo casual players love, but this is insane.

Game freezes every 2-20 minutes, reviews are disabled on Xbox, text-to-speech is annoying and auto-enables at random moments, driving is so terrible to the point that auto-drive is the only way to get around without crashing, collision physics are insanely disproportionate to reality, microtransaction-loaded (Exclusive OP agents, Time Savers, Skill Points, etc). Only thing this game has going for it is that hurting civilians finally has tangible, game-altering effects more than just altered radio news or just plain nothing at all

Five Years, Barely a Angstrom of Improvement. The visual glitches are the worst of any Ubisoft game with an obvious lack of care and effort that is also present in For Honor’s awful story, Arcade was written better than this poor excuse for a campaign. For Honor’s control scheme will instantly deter all medieval melee fans, as it has taken the controls they're used to and basically made them auto-attack buttons that have no impact or weight behind them for the sake of fitting in an archaic combo system that you’d expect to see in an MK-style fighting game, not a 3D ground war between Knights, Vikings, and Samurai. Matchmaking is trash, you will either meet terrible newbies or trolling vets in this wasteland of wasted time, energy, and money. Absolutely all players in between have switched to Dark Souls, Chivalry, or Mordhau. Ubisoft is still ignoring players, censoring and fabricating reviews, and won't admit how ruined For Honor has become. With every new character comes a new meta that gets nerfed into a garbage pile in under a month from whining children that can’t play a MOBA to save their lives. I want my money back.

Whoever said “no good story is too long” should play this mess of a game. The story, its primary selling point, started FANTASTICALLY! It looked like it was going to have a nice, thought-out, original story and play out like an Old Western... Nope. This played out like almost every dramatic, over-sensationalized TV series, it continued to simulate conflict with a growing poor amount of care from both VAs and storywriters. The game has several dozen fake-out endings that make the drag out worse than it should feel so that, by the end of the entire campaign, you just don’t care anymore at all about the story. The real ending of this story was dead in the middle because there was absolutely no reason at all for it to continue from there: the events were perfectly set up for the first game, all loose ends were tied up nice and neat, and it was ~10-12 hours into the content. No, instead they dragged it out for 25 or so more hours because “they wanted to give the game more content than ever before.” I bought the game for an Open-World RPG and what I got was a third person western Dead Island. The Open-World itself lacks all parts that made first game even remotely fun, numerous activities were removed to make space for story and side missions. On top of that, they gave us a massive map that gives absolutely no incentive to explore, once you’ve seen two or three random encounters, that’s it, that’s all for the area. They completely softened up the realism of the first game to the point where you can unload on an enemy and they’ll stand right back up and be fine. Realistic Injury was the shining star mechanic of RDR1, and seeing it gone in the prequel almost immediately turned me away. Red Dead Online. Whenever you see something that ends in “Online” and there’s a Rockstar Logo on it, you know you’re gonna have a bad time. An RDO server is essentially Communist Russia, players are forced to grind cash that they can never actually have enough of in activities like hunting and... PvP. These are the only two reliable sources of money, and neither reward you all that much anyway. If you LOSE a PvP match, the difference between the Winners’ and Losers’ cash is appalling. No matter how well you do personally, you are a loser and always will be because you came in second place. The game actively punishes you for not being good enough (or rather, rich enough in real life). The low rewards, micro-transaction cash, and the excessively overpriced equipment make for another joyless grindfest where we’re all just pigs for the rich 7-year olds to slaughter. Overall, 10/10, this game is everything wrong with the video game industry rolled into one, and that was clearly Rockstar’s intention because no company would really actively sabotage their reputation by unironically giving us such a terrible waste of tenth of a terabyte. Surely this has to be some form of political commentary on what snakes the gaming industry has become.