Dust 最近的评测

Do people play this with their eyes closed or what ?

The best way I can describe this game is that it's a very good game, but not one that I'd recommend without a lot of asterisks.

- Great soundtrack. No downsides for that one!

- Nice writing, even if the environmental descriptions are overly flowery, which contrasts pretty heavily with the sometimes stilted dialogue (excluding Moses and a couple other characters, makes sense for them not to have dialogue that comes across as natural)

- Very cool worldbuilding, especially if you've played or are planning to play the other games, but holy log overload, Batman. Every other room or so will have either a PDA or documents that you'll spend 10 minutes to read if you wanna get the whole story from each survivor's/victim's viewpoint and piece everything together, but then again maybe I'm a slow reader

- Neat art direction, it's just too bad that it's so dark most of the time that you absolutely cannot tell what you're looking at until you've been staring at it for thirty seconds; and it commits the modern cardinal sin of using gen AI and other things of that nature in some parts of the game. The PDA portraits in particular are VERY distracting as they all use the same awful "looking around" animation that look very similar to those "New A.I. Tool Makes Historic Photos Move, Blink and Smile" articles that were trending a few years ago
(Edit 23/08/2024: Apparently, this review was published hours before a new update made it so that the portraits are less distracting; can't verify that as the game isn't on my drive anymore, but I thought I'd mention that nonetheless)

- Nice puzzles, but sometimes the game will throw a smorgasbord of items at you to use in ten different puzzles going on all at once across three different characters with two of them being able to interact with each item with their own ability, and each of them being able to access four rooms with multiple interactive objects and machines, which can quickly feel overwhelming and confusing; all of which isn't helped in the slightest by some puzzles operating on Sam & Max: Hit the Road "World's Largest Ball of Twine puzzle"-tier moon logic (to me), and other puzzles having weird hitboxes in the sense that you think you're clicking on the right thing but you actually missed the interactive portion of the object by a few pixels causing nothing to happen. In short, you WILL resort to trial and error often, and you WILL pixel hunt sometimes

(Also, related to the previous point, if you decide to buy this, let me save you some time right now: when you reach one of Mose's sections, specifically the Artifact lab with all the Russian research and the PS139 creature in the next room, immediately go to the northernmost spot in the room and hug the wall, a couple of essential items and a clue will pop out. It's the only place in the game that's like that for some confusing reason and the pathfinding between the two blue points nearby doesn't take you near this spot. If I can save someone else the riveting time that I had spending an hour trying to find what I missed, believing that I got soft locked, then finally looking up a guide and quitting the game on the spot for the day, then it's mission accomplished as far as I'm concerned)

It was just a few steps away from greatness. Heartbreaking, really.
As far as the campaign is concerned, it just needed to restrict some tracks to lower speeds, like Atoll, which was absolutely not designed for more than F2000 speeds. Otherwise, fine.

As far as the multiplayer is, or was concerned, seeing as how the daily average number of players doesn't go past 5... the ship and weapon modding made it sure that it was dead on arrival. There's a reason why every ship in Wipeout is more or less equal with only small stat differences between them all, and more importantly, there's a reason why there are no weapon loadouts and why weapon pickups are randomized.

Here's a single example as to why Pacer's way of doing the latter is an insanely bad idea.
Shockwave in this game acts much like Earthquake in Wipeout, damaging and slowing every ship in range; it just has a shorter range and it can be modded.
Shockwave has a plethora of mods, like every weapon in the game. My attention was immediately drawn to two of them in particular.
One made it so that ships hit by Shockwave would be flung to the sides. I should mention that hitting walls in Pacer isn't like hitting walls in Wipeout; you don't bump off of them, you take high damage and you grind to a halt.
The other mod made it so that you could have two Shockwaves with slightly decreased range.
I will remind you, dear reader, that Shockwave hits every single ship in front of you as long as they're not halfway across the track, and that you can fire this weapon with every single weapon pickup that you come across. I'll let you imagine how much fun that was and how fast it got banned in the few tourneys there were after the release.

Oh, and that's just one of two weapons that you can bring with you.
The other weapon could be, for example, Mines.
Which, again, you can lay with every weapon pickup that you come across.
Which you can lay on top of speedboosts. :)

All in all, while it's still extremely sad for any Wipeout fan on PC out there, it's a small wonder that Pacer never took off. AG racers tend to be cursed by being extremely niche, but this was something else. It's still pretty fun, it feels good to race (or at least to me), and it has a killer soundtrack (shoutout to Just_Matt who picked DV-i as one of the artists on the OST because she's now one of my favorite artists of all time), just go in with lowered expectations.

We don't have a successor yet. One day. Just not yet.

You and I, reader, both know that you like to browse /r/powerwashingporn in your spare time. Might as well go the full mile.

Overhated. The world's great, the combat's great, the characters are likeable. Not without its faults, but it's hardly the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game I was told it was for about 10 years.

Could the story have been improved ? Sure, there's a couple moments that felt like I missed something. How'd they get those anti-gravity devices in chapter 12 ?
Could the characters have been improved ? Yes. Vanille acts like a small child all throughout the game, for instance.
Could the storytelling have been improved ? Depends on whether you think that a videogame taking advantage of the fact that it's a videogame to tell its story is enviable or not. Personally, I thought the story (through the cutscenes) was told in a way that assumes the player knows about the world already, leaving the exposition dumps to the datalog, which was A-okay with me.

Didn't like chapter 11 though. Everyone says that it's when you get to Gran Pulse that the game starts to get good, and I don't know if that has to do with the fact that I've come to absolutely hate open world games since FFXIII's original release, but I just made a beeline to the next chapter. It looked ugly, which is something that's VERY unusual in this game for something to look ugly; half the enemies encountered required me to grind elsewhere in order to beat them, which wasn't required anywhere else in the last 3/4 of the game; and I didn't care about the "go there and kill that" repeated dozens of times type of missions that the area provided. I was led to believe you had to spend hours in this area before being able to proceed, thank God it's not the case. Just fight every small enemy once on the way to the next objective, clear out the tunnels, and you're good to go.

Would really like to see a remaster of this. The interface feels sluggish and can't keep up with the combat's pace, the biggest problem relating to this being the animation that's being shown to you the first time you do a paradigm shift in an encounter, costing precious seconds and making your lead character stand there like an idiot. Half, or maybe more than half of the sounds are distractingly bad stock sound effects; mainly thinking of Fang's attack sounds here. The menus and the background pngs look very pixellated on a 1080p resolution and could definitely use some TLC. Although this is maybe beyond the scope of a remaster, the AI could also use some work, so your teammates don't stand close to each other like a pack of frozen peas when the enemy has nothing but highly debilitating highly, damaging AOE attacks.

Other than that, it's very good. Extremely enjoyable up until chapter 10, after that it gets a bit sluggish for my taste. Solid 8/10. Just play it in Japanese.

Good for a few hours between people that don't really know the game that much. After that, every witch knows that the only real way to win is to disguise themselves as an object that blends in dark corners and to find a crevice or a very hard to reach spot to hide in, which feels like map exploiting to me (and not in a good "take advantage of the map design" way), and every hunter knows the aforementioned crevices and hidden spots, to throw chickens down corridors and reveal witches in a drive-by, and grenade/slam every group of object repeatedly.

Some maps are also straight up busted in favor of one group or the other. Cursed ruins (or whatever map where there's two gigantic towers) is hell even for hunters equipped with grapples, and the library at night is hell for witches because the map is just that small.

The moral of the story is that fracking is bad, especially when you're using nukes to do it.

Didn't age well at all compared to the two other games in the trilogy, obviously. Still worthy of a playthrough.

Game's great, but the installation process was hell. Buying the expansion made it impossible to play the game anymore unless I uninstalled it. The workaround was to download an unofficial autopatcher to replace the official one. It's apparently been this way for years at this point, which should only serve as a testament to Ubisoft's sheer incompetence as a publisher. They could choose to pool some of their resources into fixing issues like this game's installation process (on top of the always online thing) or Anno 1404's memory leak issue (which has STILL not been fixed in the History edition, which they charge 15€ for, and has replaced the original game + Venice expansion, delisting them), but they just choose not to. Hopefully, in the years to come, the people at the top responsible for all these messes will step down and let smarter people handle it.

Absolutely love it. Can't wait to use a Zip 22 in this.