Recent reviews by Novus

Team Fortress 2 has been, and still is my favorite and most played game of all time. This game deserves to be the e-sports title that CS is, no contest. The state of the game in 2024? Casual Matchmaking killed all but the most popular community servers, and the influx of cheating, instant headshot bots has killed casual mode. There's almost no place left to go outside servers hosted by large content creators or niche semi-popular alternative game modes. Stay clear until Valve resevelops VAC as a whole.

Pros:
- Good graphics, better use of color than other souls games.
- Bosses just as challenging as DS3, if not better.
Cons:
- Doesn't fix balance issues with different builds. Dex is still PVP meta, Strength is solo meta, etc. Unnecessarily punishes non-meta builds.
- Random FPS drops + Non-fps related stuttering on systems exceeding recommended specs on low graphics. Not gamebreaking, but increases difficulty
- No questing tracking/tools of any kind, consistent with a souls-like game, but still a valid criticism.
- Player-Enemy collisions often buggy, getting stuck on props that should be destructible, getting stuck between an enemy and a wall, etc.
- Surprisingly frequent crashes, including a few in which I was stuck inside a wall or in the ground.

Commentary:
While an open-world souls-like game in concept seems like a great idea, this is a very poor implementation of an open world title. It's neither true open-world, nor completely linear. While it expects you to explore and find things to do, bosses of far higher level than you roam around the beginning areas, and the first true available boss reflects spells (Sorry, Astrologers). Level scaling is a joke, is region dependent, and seems almost random depending on the area of the map you're on. Late-game area enemies, in some places, are incredibly low level and a laughable challenge, while some are incredibly difficult. Player-Enemy collisions are a joke, and I often found myself stun-locked and stuck between a large enemy, and a poorly designed hit-box of some prop on the ground, or wall.

No organisational systems for quests and very little guidance makes it difficult for people who want to experience as much as possible to not sequence-break the game. Access to NPCs and stories make it so that unless you follow a guide and tutorial from the beginning you're gonna miss out on storyline content, forcing you to make multiple play-throughs to experience most of it.

Overall Experience:
An excessively drawn-out, boring version of a souls-like experience of exploring mostly empty fields and caves sporadically placed around the map with good bosses, assuming you have the patience to grind and fight through all the repetitive parts of the game, with poor performance to boot.

Fun

This game is pretty good, it has the feel and graphics of a portal game, by which I mean very crisp and not difficult to run on a budget PC. There's so many stories and playthrough capabilities with this game by default, so there's new things to experience every time you play. The voice actor is incredible, as he should because this is a game about 100% narrated storyline. The only thing this game dosen't have is workshop capability, and that's a little bit of a bummer because this game has so much potential, but I digress. This game is wholey-rounded and deserves a sequel, Even though it's technically a sequel.

If you're reading this right now, you probabally have the knowlege on what this game is, A thrifty puzzle game with an interesting portal mechanic that will tease your mind, along with the fact it has a cunning story and is a legend in the gaming industry, this game is really a sight to behold. Despite being slightly old, this game offers high quality textures and models, along with a very smooth framerate. The story is amazing, most people will agree that portal is very intriguing in the story AND the puzzles. This version of the portal franchise has a multiplayer mode and workshop created levels, so the fun never ends.

There's a few thing s wrong with this game. The serverside dyncing is terrible on most servers, and I've never experienced the level of bad sync in any other game than this. The game crashes alot, I'm not completely against it, as it is very fun once in-game. Overall, it's an okay game, but there's some serious issues like game crashes and other things that make this game fustrating to play. The game does start up extremely quickly, though. So if you're looking for an inexpensive, almost a clone of the single player experience, with less combatability than a potato, you should play this game.