Recent reviews by Charmics

Missions are 20-30 minutes long, and often have unpredictable "twists" that end up forcing you to restart from scratch. This is artificial bloat, and it's terrible.

This is way less of a game and way more poorly designed than it would make you think.

This is a positive review for a game that I consider to be VERY early in development. There are a lot of good ideas here but the game is NOT ready to be played and is absolutely full of bugs, at the time of writing. However, the developer is very transparent about this and seems to be working hard to improve the game, and that's what's important! I look forward to re-buying this later down the line. The *blood*line, even!

I absolutely love the concepts here, and the presentation is incredible, but the controls and UX are simply way too clunky.

I tried both gamepad and mouse and simply, neither are adequate. Far too many different bindings that change with every context, far too many holds for things that absolutely don't justify it, far too many finicky menus that don't do what you want.

90% of this awkwardness and tedium could be cut out without making a single change to any of the actual content just with smarter design.

This happens to be one of the best games of our time, though it does, unfortunately, still install EOS by default (though you can bypass that). Instead of talking about all that, though, I will talk about the game itself:

The gameplay is incredibly vertical, with a ton of focus and depth. It is clear that a key part of Dambuster's vision when they restarted development was to maximize fun, and they absolutely succeeded. By keeping the scope limited and refining the core systems, they have achieved something truly remarkable, where the moment-to-moment gameplay is some of the best I've ever seen. Everything from zombie-smashing to vendor-trading intertwines in a satisfying and engaging way, and every system is simple to engage with, but has layers of depth that the player can discover and master as they play, offering the potential for a remarkably complex experience.

Graphically, the game is a treat, with only one real weakness. It looks great and runs well, designed for native resolution rendering but with FSR as a fallback if on a lower-powered system. If your GPU is capable of DLSS, though, you won't need upscaling anyway. Furthermore, despite being DX12 UE4, it basically doesn't stutter, a feat few games of this family can claim. The main weakness of the graphics that I alluded to was the mixture of screen-space and cubemapped reflections. They are an excellent way to get cheap reflections, but the player and other dynamic elements are mostly absent, particularly when viewing the reflection head-on. It's no great loss, but it would have been nice to see them provide a more comprehensive option. I should also take this chance to mention that the gore system, while well done, is simply not something I care about. I find that it serves its purpose well.

Another thing to talk about is the world and story. The game leans heavily into having a lighthearted, carefree attitude, which makes it fun to engage in and keeps a smile on my face as I play. Some of the writing is a bit on the nose, but that's the whole point, so I see it as a feature, not a bug. The story itself is fine, with believable and interesting characters, but nothing groundbreaking. The world, however, is a joy to explore, with meticulously detailed environments and set pieces strewn everywhere. You are constantly stumbling across scenes that make you ask, "What was going on here?" and if you look, you willl be rewarded with clues or even answers.

There are a few other weaknesses of the game, in particular, ones which a new player will face. For example, Amy, one of the playable characters, is very weak and has a bit of an anti-fun design, and several systems, like Force, Fuses, and Repairing, are poorly communicated, as well as the base player stats. Additionally, many of the tutorials resort to large boxes of text, and force you to click on particular buttons. Overall, the onboarding process is not great, and seeking external resources may be a good idea during your initial hours.

The last note I would make is that the QOL tends to be very high, with good UX and accessibility, and good controls for both gamepad and mouse. Gamepad controls are not fully remappable, but I find them to be perfectly serviceable despite that. If using a gamepad, though, you should go into the advanced settings and turn all the accelerations and ramps to 0.

These issues are relatively minor, and the game itself is a breath of fresh air. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this type of experience.

Today is a great day, not just for Helldivers 2, but for customers rights, dare I say, for LIBERTY.

Absolutely god awful UX, like just the absolute worst. Random buttons, hold to activate, poorly laid out menus, etc etc. Completely unacceptable.

I also experienced broken graphics, even on maximum settings. Furthermore, "Loot Sense"? Really? In f*****g 2022? Not to mention the completely uninspired combat.

Good atmosphere alone cannot prop this entire game up.

No UI scaling, making it hard to see / read things
Autosave system is worse than useless, might as well forget it exists and get used to reaching for the quicksave button
Really awkward camera controls, makes it hard to look at even basic things

Seems like a really good game but c'mon guys, please.

Lacks standard input options. This has nothing to do with "skill" as the developer will claim, but everything to do with basic accessibility.

I've tried with both gamepad and kb/m and the controls simply make the game much clunkier than it has any need to be.

Great little game, honestly would be worth a few bucks.
The English support is great, ignore steam if it says it doesn't have it, it totally does.
Also, needless to say, literally the only appeal of the game is the Sekiro combat. Everything else is merely serviceable.