Recent reviews by TravisTech

After playing the game to completion on PS5, I was very excited to see it coming to PC as well, and it doesn't disappoint. All the smooth action I loved from the PS5 version, paired with solid performance options and generous system requirements.

This is a good game. It does a lot of things right that I really respect, particularly the fact that you're traversing levels, which means that you'll learn room layouts and start to be able to anticipate what's coming up next. The weapon designs are fun, and a lot of work clearly went into making the reloads and fire animations look and feel right. The game's getting steady updates, and each character has a pretty unique toolset that will guide them towards particular loadouts, but can also surprise you if you experiment. Overall, it's worth the money if you like games in this genre and maybe played Immortal Redneck until you got tired of it.

1/12/22: After playing with the 1.0 update for almost a month, I can confidently say this is one of the best games to come out last year, and quickly became a personal favorite of mine. The Talent rework, 3 more characters since I initially reviewed it, and an entire new area to battle through have all brought an incredible amount of variety to a fantastic game at an incredible price. I'm hooked and eagerly await what the devs might have up their sleeves next.

8/31/22: So the new DLC dropped, and despite feeling like I'd plumbed this game for every bit of entertainment value it could offer, they managed to loop me back in with two new characters with fun abilities, further tweaks to ascensions, and four new weapons that, while maybe too reliant on certain builds to maximize functionality, are all an absolute blast to play with. I'm especially fond of the Cloud Weaver, which if it isn't an homage to Yondu's arrow I'll buy a hat and eat it.

An extremely competent rogue-lite, with an engaging core loop of fight, discover, die, upgrade, repeat. It's visually distinct, with an impressive array of weapon choices and favors to take. Finding a good setup that compliments your current scroll perks is immensely satisfying, and it's easy to feel laid low when you pick up a bad scroll. It's well worth a look if you like fun old school shooters and rogue-lite progression.

It's more Saint's Row 4, and the game has a good mix of weapons and lets you play as Gat or Kinzie and switch between them at will. and the combat is as fun as ever, and the powers get a nice mix-up this time. The game is expectedly short and has no coherent mission structure, but the solid writing and expansive shoutouts to the previous games in many forms makes this worth a look if you've any real investment in the series.

From a promisisng start in the sun-dappled tropics with visceral combat and an emphasis on choosing where to make a stand and where to run, the game very quickly goes south with impossibly large hordes, weapon degradation moving out of the realm of usability for the number of foes that you are forced to dispatch, and frustrating emeies that take what could have been a good survival horror game and turn into Borderlands with sticks. If the game were committed to a consistent tone or balanced gameplay I could easily give it a recommendation, but these are simply not present in this game.

It's been a long time since I've had to call someone over to say "check this out" as often as I did for SR4. However, the game's fantastic level of spectacle, from the excellent-feeling superpowers to the wide variety of guns that you can dress up in an impressive number of skins, most of which are shoutouts of some form or another, to the hilarious dialogue and diverse mission structure draws you in, and in turn makes you want to show everyone else this game. The combat is satisfying and fast-paced, the dialogue clever, and the DLC almost all worth it.
Saint's Row 4 is a ridiculous, campy, over the top blast of a game, and it's my deepest hope that VOlition will continue to produce games of such stellar quality and excellent comedic timing.

The game is a horrible mess. Unbearably long load times, occasional, game-wrecking lag even on a good connection with good hardware, and a messy and unintuitive interface left me disappointed. Combined with a problematic cash shop and a lot of other major mechanical problems, and it becomes obvious that Crytek's fledgling attempt to penetrate the F2P market is desperately unpolished and bad in all the ways that usually suck the joy from titles like this.

An unbalanced mess of a game that punishes players uninterested in putting in a couple hours each day and is only fun for casual play at best. Despite the most well-guided attempts of Nexon, the game continues to be subject to hacks and scams, and to not put too fine a point on it, the game is ugly by any modern standard, owing largely to it being a 6 year old game now, built on a nearly two decade old engine. The game comes alive at times, particularly in the harrowing co-op gametype, but even then it was undermined by bullet-sponge enemies and horrible balance.

What an incredible game. It looks good, plays great, and pulls you into its mindset with minimal effort. Definitely a must play title.