Sniper Elite 5 – Vive La France!

Sniper Elite 5 is an action/stealth game by Rebellion, and there is with some excitement I press the play button, considering Sniper Elite 4 is one of my favorite modern stealth games. But as with everything modern Rebellion now touches, it turns out a bit lackluster. It’s also a one-step forward, two-step backward kind of situation with baffling design decisions. Sometimes I really wonder…

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Tails of Iron – Rat Life

Tails of Iron is a 2D action/adventure platformer with light RPG elements made by the British studio Odd Bug Studio. A bit on the “dime a dozen” nowadays, but what makes this title stand out from the rest is the intense care and love that went into it. It’s absolutely beautiful, with charming art, story, and characters. Yet, as we all know, graphics and setting aren’t everything. Luckily for us gamers, Tails of Iron hold its own on the gameplay front too!

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Weird West – First Impressions

I didn’t have any plans on playing Weird West, but I noticed that it was out on Microsoft Game Pass, besides being released on the usual digital stores. So I thought, why not give it a go? This is not a review, it’s just my impressions from a few hours into the game. Anyway. Weird West is an action RPG set in the wild west (that is weird, as the title implies) with a focus on “immersive sim” features. And for you that don’t know, it’s when a game has many systems in place that interact with each other – like weather with fire for example.

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Black Mesa – Remake Wonder

Black Mesa started as a free mod back in 2012, unfortunately, I have no experience with the game from that time. Black Mesa didn’t enter my gaming radar until it reached Steam in the form of Early Access, and while I wasn’t immediately impressed, nor interested exactly – I’m glad my outlook changed. Because, as it turned out, the updated version of the legendary game Half-Life is damn good! While I only have admiration for the GoldSrc engine (all those hours in Day of Defeat, and Counter-Strike), it is getting a bit long in the tooth. The Source engine, from Half-Life 2, which Black Mesa uses is technically old too, but it does feel and look more modern, especially since Valve still updates it with new features.

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Quantum Break – You Got Time?

Decided to replay one of my favorite, semi-recent AAA-gaming releases – because the last time I played it, the engine the game runs on almost broke my old computer. Now, I’m on a new fresh one – so I thought it was time to play through this science-fiction time-travel epic in full graphical glory, and maximized FPS.

Let us continue on that note. The visuals, all these years later, are still absolutely fantastic beyond just having high-quality textures. With that I mean, lighting, location design, structures, and models, in general, make the game come alive. It just looks great, and realistic, yet, has this slight futuristic corporate vibe to it that is common in near-future settings – a bit similar to the modern Deus Ex games. Unfortunately, even now when I have “up-scaling” turned off, some areas are still looking blurry, which is disappointing. Otherwise, the game runs well on my new rig, but, unfortunately, I get drastic FPS drop in scene-transfers, and when cut-scenes change to gameplay. I don’t know why that is. It’s not too bad I guess, but still an annoyance since it happens fairly often. I assume it’s an issue with the engine, because CONTROL, a more recently released Remedy game, shares the same engine, and I didn’t have these kinds of issues here. The only thing I can assume from this is that the engine got better optimized between the games. Nonetheless, the game looks remarkable still, and will not disappoint on a modern computer with a good GPU.

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