Recent reviews by Amaurus

Starship Troopers: Extermination is a 16-player CO-OP PvE shooter by the same people who made the popular Project Reality spinoff Squad. Players are relegated into 4 squads, of which they can choose any one. The game has a party system (although I did not test it) that will allow you to join a match with (presumably) up to 3 additional friends.

Game has a few obvious issues, but nothing that can't be readily fixed, most notably the lack of a votekick or sufficient anti-grief measures. Keybindings are a bit annoying because the game doesn't warn you if a keybind you assigned is occupied already.

It has a solid foundation so far; gunplay could use a bit of work, same deal with some enemy variety or pathing issues getting fixed. As others have mentioned, there isn't much content at the moment and all of it is relegated to the same map. You can at most get a few hours of enjoyment out of it before it might become a bit stale in it's current state, but that's because it's a singular map.

Performance is better than Squad, OWI's other game which is notorious for its performance issues, but the current map in this game is very light on detail, so it's entirely possible the performance is similar.

In regards to the developer, OWI is best known for the game I mentioned previously; Squad. Squad has its own host of issues, but most of the issues stem from hacky fix on top of hacky fix. Fixing one bug in Squad would break a feature, and some seemingly simple things would require substantial engine rewrites.

As far as I can tell, Starship Troopers: Extermination does not have these same engine quirks, indicating it is likely rebuilt from the ground up, which gives me hope that they will spent the time to do things right.

Honestly, if the game was 40$, I'd have been much more hesitant to buy, but 25$ is a solid price for what it is right now. There is a lot of opportunity to really flesh out the game. I would not be surprised if they made options for more personal scenarios with only 4 players in a match, or massive scenarios with 32 or even more players.

First match with the new emotes, wagged my finger at someone complaining about emotes, and he teamkilled me. He got permabanned for intentional teamkilling.

Honestly worth it for that reason alone.

Solid early access game. A forewarning, the game in its current state is a bit difficult. It has a heavy focus on macro (constant building and expansion). Without decent macro skills, many of the maps can be almost impossible. Micro is also pretty important even on some of the earlier missions, where mis-microing your units leads to clumps of them dying to siege units. For a game comparison, the game is similar to They Are Billions and the devs seems to have made a few references to TAB.

During my time playing, I have not encountered any gamebreaking bugs. I have, however, encountered a few things that are mostly just inconveniences than anything. None of this substantially impacts my enjoyment of the game. The game is perfectly playable even with the issues.

For example - There is no warning when you are deleting a building if you have selected all of the buildings of that type (or multiple using double click). Other similar games will warn you at the very least before you go about destroying several buildings.

The escape key should be adjusted to not pull up the menu until all current menus are closed. A good example of this is the research menu that fills the entire screen. Sure, I could press the 'Return' button, but I find it easier to just hit ESC, which just brings up the menu. Like I said, minor inconvenience.

Rallying units default to 'move' orders, rather than 'attack move' orders. If you put a rally point down for your barracks and spawn about 10 units, sometimes the units on the outside of that clump wont attack, because they are trying to navigate to the rally point. Additionally, units on their way to the rally point can get picked off rather easily. I have had a few cases where a unit will just walk into an enemy unit and get stuck (if i give them no other orders) and just get bludgeoned to death.

Probably the most annoying part about this game is the pathfinding for the enemy waves. In certain circumstances, the enemies will effectively line up along chokepoints. A certain amount of going into the chokepoint is fine and expected, but I have had a few cases where if my base had water partially surrounding it, the enemies would go in a single-deep line around it.

Unit AI - Player units will occasionally get stuck walking in place. I noticed this usually happens when they leave their post to go attack a unit and then they just get stuck on their way back. The targeting AI on some units can seem a little wonky at times, with swordsmen not always attacking the nearest unit, which leads to them walking into enemies and slowly dying.

All in all, solid early access title. There are a few issues, but it is surprisingly feature-complete and bug-free for an early acess game.

Game is very cool. There isn't much emphasis on aim-game, moreso emphasis on planning and prediction. Beyond minor issues such as crashes, the main issue as it stands is the lack of players. I had awful luck trying to get a match in unranked (15+ minutes, no queue pop), but for some reason, the moment I tried ranked, it worked.

The playerbase is a bit small so that is probably not helping the queue times either.

A very solid and fun game. It is in early access and has quite a few bugs that can ruin your save and it is missing a fair bit of balance, but it is still wholeheartedly playable and quite fun. Many of the buggy features have already been partially fixed by either mods or bug fixes, such as experience gain being extremely slow.

I haven't played too much multiplayer beyond the siege gamemode and queue times in North America are quite variable. Whereas one day the queue is less than 3 minutes, the first time I tried to play I was in queue for over 30 minutes and ended up just joining a server manually.

The game is in very active development, with the devs pushing frequent patches focused on bug-fixes, probably one of the best I've seen in an early access game.

A surprisingly fun battle royale. The wait times are probably the worst part, taking a few minutes before a match starts. Apart from some of major issues, such as hackers (I've personally seen one in 1.8 hours of gameplay), the game benefits from some degree of coordination. Current gameplay seems to be very heavily weighted towards pushing rather than holding a position down due to the high degree of mobility offered by the game. It does not compare well with Planetside 2 in the slightest. There are some minor sound design grievances, such as upon death, the sounds of the UI are quite loud comparatively.

Asides from all of this, the gameplay is fun. The game runs surprisingly well (90+ fps constantly on a 1070, GPU limited on a system that is limited by a relatively poor CPU.) It's a good enough game to mess around in for an hour or two. Beyond that, we'll just wait and see.

At a bit under 10 gigs of total space required, the game isn't too much to install and is at least worth a try. Worst case scenario you just uninstall it.

EDF 5 is a game for mindless fun, best enjoyed with friends. This game features several quality of life improvements over EDF 4.1, from simple things like picking up equipment will sometimes get equipment for other classes as well as the one you are playing, equipment can level up, prolonging their potential life cycle, to optimizations for the PC version.

Many of the classes have major quality of life improvements, improving overall mobility or survivability. In the case of the Wing Diver, the Wing Diver now has a mid-air dash that can be performed, improving mobility substantially. Every class has an equipment slot now that will provide generic improvements for the gameplay of the class.

A few notes about this pc port:
- The game lacks any in depth graphics settings. Beyond just a few options, the user has little to change to improve their performance.
- The game is locked to 60 FPS both in menus and in game. Framerate unlockers would likely affect the core gameplay
- There is no FOV slider
- From EDF 4.1, there is now an actual mouse cursor in the menus.

In my opinion, the price tag is a tiny bit steep (at 60 USD), but if you have friends who can play with you, you easily have many hours of fun ahead. The game can be played alone, but it can be quite boring at times.

Due to the nature of PC gaming, I would recommend against using the online matchmaking and instead find a group of players to play with. In 4.1 there were hackers who could ruin your save file permanently, the same people will likely be in this game as well.

A fun little game that can be played quite easily (and successfully!) with both a mouse and keyboard or a controller. Chippy is a simple game that is quick to pick up and also drops the player in the water with the expectation that you either swim or drown.

Factorio is the kind of game that, at a glance, immediately screams 'buy me' to plenty of people. To sum up the gameplay, you spend most of your time designing and troubleshooting your own factory and are constantly expanding it to the point where either you beat the game, or until you decide to take a break since it's 6 am. The entire supply chain, from resource gathering, transportation, and manufacturing the final product is initially all done by hand, but due to the scale of which you need to operate at, it is all eventually automated. That is one of the goals of Factorio; automate everything.

The game is as complicated as the user wants to make it with a learning curve that is only as steep as the user sets it. There are plenty of mods that make the game more challenging, easier, or add more options to the gameplay loop. There are native settings when starting your map that allow the user to increase or decrease the saturation of enemies or resources.

One of the best parts about the game is that it has multiplayer. The multiplayer works very well, allowing very large numbers of players to 'cooperate' on the same map. The host can save and quit at any time to save a session for another time.

Black Desert Online (BDO) is closer to a singleplayer game at times moreso than it is a traditional MMo. Beyond your own guild, player interaction is scarce. Trading gear is impossible due to the games limitations on trading (or rather, you cannot trade anything other than potions) which is designed to deter players from buying silver or gear using actual money. Asides from this, I have very few actual grievances with the game other than its monetization model. Also, I want to mention that this game has probably one of the most in depth and beautiful character creation studios I have ever seen in an MMO. Every single other MMO will pale in comparison.

Regarding this, the face price of the game is deceptive to say the least. If one were to purchase the 10$ version of the game, expect to spend another 40-50$ on purchasing pets for some major convenience later on. Pets are essential in this game since they will pick up items from slain mobs. While early on, drops are few and far between; once you hit 55~, almost every single mob has drops, which serve to annoy you to death through copious looting unless you have your precious horde of pets looting for you.

Beyond leveling, players have the option of participating in lifeskills. Lifeskills are basically the professions of Black Desert. The lifeskills are as follows: Gathering, Fishing, Hunting, Cooking, Alchemy, Processing, Training, Trade, Farming and Sailing. There's a surprising amount of depth to almost every single lifeskill and plenty of opportunity to make money through the games auction house.

If you are curious if this game is for you, I fully recommend purchasing the game and treating it like a trial or a life skill simulator. The game is plenty of fun even if you aren't actively leveling since there are many lifeskills (professions) to keep you occupied. There's plenty more to the game, such as PVP, but I haven't personally touched it at all yet