Recent reviews by Lima India Golf Mike Alpha

Below Zero is a good game but is overshadowed by the first Subnautica game by miles.


For summary of my gripes with Below Zero:

-The game has a smaller map in comparison to the first game's map and depth, not to mention the fact that one of the biomes (the East Arctic) houses one of the key areas in the story, but aside from that it is a big empty nothing that only houses a few fish and a leviathan, making it an uninteresting biome that you will likely visit only once and never again due to how empty and evidently underdeveloped it seems from a technical perspective.

-Speaking on the story, it is underwhelming and generally not well put together, paling in comparison to the first subnautica's story through setting, buildup and climax. It is known by quite a few out there that the earlier iterations of the game contained a much more interesting (and overall better) story in comparison to what we finally got.
--It is also believed that the final iteration of the story was watered down by influence and insertion of political views and all that bother which is really disappointing and confusing when you compare the earlier iteration of the story to the final one.

-I personally find that the general gameplay and functions are well done, but parts of them bug me as I find there is a lot that could have been improved and tweaked before release, such as the slower seaglide in comparison to the first game's (it entirely defeats the purpose of having one if it isn't fast), as well as the seatruck just being a love-hate relationship of it looking and feeling good but performing bad overall.

-I personally found the sea life (fauna and flora) of the game pretty enjoyable and creative, although I must agree that there was a lot of wasted potential and flaws in the distribution of the game's fauna, going back to my earlier point about the East Arctic and how there is a surprisingly scarce usage of both fauna and flora in the deep areas of this biome, however there are more examples in other biomes but to a lesser degree than what I emphasise here.
--One thing I'd like to point out as well is the Chelicerate leviathan, an intimidating monster that the game unfortunately forces upon you more times than I find fair. If you have played through the story then you will have seen what I mean here, as in comparison to the first game, you are never once forced to encounter the Reaper leviathan as you can progress through the game without ever going near a single one of them.

-I personally really like the music of the game and I believe it fits the atmosphere and setting pretty well.
Although I wish the developers could have handled the situation of the first game's music composer a lot better (he was fired due to social media stuff), I do still believe that this game's soundtrack is just as enjoyable as the first one's and holds up pretty well.


Overall I do recommend Below Zero, although it is not that good in comparison to the first game.
You are better off playing Below Zero first in order to avoid souring your expectations when moving to the first game.

EDIT - 25/07/24:

I have fully changed my stance on Reforger from 'recommended but buggy' to not recommended at all in this current time.

Bohemia have released three new patches to Reforger since my review, and two patches have fixed two of the issues I outlined but have also somehow broken features that were completely functional beforehand.

I must highlight that the third patch that released today has made Reforger unplayable for a lot of people as it will now crash every five minutes with the crash code 'GPU hang'.

This has only emboldened my point on Bohemia. A crash-to-desktop issue that was far, far less common before this patch is now almost guaranteed very time you play.


Bohemia not only continue to treat Reforger like a tech demo, but also continue to market it as a fully released game. Almost everybody in the community noted that when the 1.0 update rolled around, Reforger did not feel like a full release but Bohemia insisted that it was and they will bring much more content to it. Boy was the community right.

Arma Reforger is not out of early access yet. Reforger is a tech demo that Bohemia glorify into being a playable and functioning game and the latest update including it's 'patches' have only proven that tenfold.

Whoever is running the show for Reforger do not care, they will not test their updates and subsequent patches they push out after the bugs they bring in those updates and the patches thereafter because they do not test Reforger.


Save your money until Bohemia grow a spine and start calling this what it is - a tech demo that they will not maintain in any professional and adequate manner until they have enough money.

Do not buy Reforger until they have addressed all of this. Only consider buying once they demonstrate professionalism in maintaining a tech demo. Happy hunting.


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ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW - OUTDATED BUT PROVIDES CONTEXT
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Good game, but needs it priorities sorted.


Arma Reforger is one of the most realistic games in the milsim (Military Simulation) genre that I have played and it's a lot of fun.

Reforger is set in Europe during the late 1980's, the cold war is fading and the Soviet Union is nearing it's end, but a splinter group of the Soviet army are daring to battle NATO forces capture the islands 'Everon' and 'Arland'.

If you are into milsim games and have played the likes of Insurgency, Insurgency: Sandstorm, Squad or the previous Arma games then I reckon you will enjoy Reforger for what it has to offer.


However, after playing this game for over 6 months now, Bohemia (the developers) have shown that in spite of what they have tried to say about Reforger's development priorities, the bugs that the latest update has brought give a very ugly impression and, to me, implicate that whoever is pushing the updates at Bohemia are not making sure these updates are tested and polished adequately.

The very recent update 1.2 brought a handful of desired features and regardless if it's not a feature a lot of people want sooner than later (such as being able to shoot out of vehicles when sat in them, which was addressed in the last dev log but subsequently played down as not being a priority feature in spite of the many voices which plead for it to be added sooner), I still find the content that each major update brings as plentiful.

However, my actual highlight of update 1.2 is the tedious bugs that it brought to the game upon it's release, with the most notable ones being:
1. Heavy trucks cannot reverse in some scenarios (yes, literally unable to reverse despite not being stuck).
2. Some keybinds, default and/or custom, are broken and will not always register the designated key input (for me, most notably the weapon 'low ready' keybind.
3. The rare but very irritating 'animation locked' bug is still present in the game after it was introduced a while ago (and I can't find out in my own investigation if this has even been addressed by Bohemia yet).

It's bugs like the first and second one that were either simply not present or somehow not found in the public play-testing (experimental) version of the game that update 1.2 was released on for over a month.
That is a large indicator of barely any internal / developer testing ongoing before these updates are released to the public branch of the game and that needs to be sorted as I simply cannot recommend this game in it's current state that Bohemia are evidently maintaining it in.

However, if you do not mind these issues and want to experience Reforger then I would recommend the game, just ensure that you have a very good rig before you play, it's best experienced with the anti-aliasing settings on full (which are very taxing on your GPU and CPU). Happy hunting.

If you're here looking for a good Call of Duty experience then you're out of luck and out of time, I'm afraid.

To put it bluntly, MWII and MWIII are simply a waste of time and you can thank Activision for letting Sledgehammer Games create an extremely underwhelming 'experience' purely in the name of profit instead of any fun that should have been involved in the game.


For an in-depth explanation, here is my experience sitting through the COD MW series reboot entries:

Modern Warfare 2019 was, in my eyes, the best COD Modern Warfare entry for modern day gaming. It had everything that people wanted for a new Modern Warfare game and I fell in love with it quite quickly. The story, the animations, the sound, the amount of weapons to choose from and tinker to your desire with was truly brilliant, on top of the fact that it was made mainly by Infinity Ward.
However, in 2021, after Warzone (the first one) got merged with the wet fart that was Call of Duty Vanguard (a game also made by Sledgehammer Games), everything went down hill and Activision needlessly stomped on what could have remained as a good experience for MW2019 due to the ludicrous amount of game-breaking bugs and other background issues that the merge of these two games had caused.

Moving on in 2022, Modern Warfare II had an okay launch if you ask me, albeit dry content-wise. Over the course of it's development, things were looking up until the release of what I could only comprehend as corporate greed, injected into the game through it's purest form in what they named as the Blackcell pass that was added for Season 3's battle pass.
No you didn't read that wrong. A battlepass inside of an already existing battlepass.

Get this: You buy MWII for £60 upfront. Then to get those oh-so-sweet exclusive cosmetic rewards in Multiplayer, you pay an extra £10 for the in-game currency points to buy this in-game pass (you can only pay with these points and not real money, FYI) and then to get Even More sweet awesome cooldude exclusive cosmetics, you pay Another £25 for extra-exclusive cosmetics in previous the pass that you just bought with your in-game currency points. What the ♥♥♥♥ happened behind the scenes of this game after release?

This change in behaviour from Activision only went on more as it was being rumoured a lot that MWIII could potentially have a change in direction that would see the game become DLC for MWII. Although this change did not go through, I'll always reckon that it wouldn't have mattered any way as when I heard that MWIII would be releasing just one year after MWII's release And that it would be made by Sledgehammer instead of Infinity Ward, I already knew that this reboot series was going to end on an unflattering note.
The rest of MWII's update cycle became quite underwhelming, especially when the final Atomgrad Raid episode had released which had concluded that sub-story of the game on an unexpectedly underwhelming and dare I even say on a cheap note, too.

In the coming months, MWIII released and, well you probably know the rest. I won't go into it much as the criticism and public opinion of the game make things quite clear. It was that bad that I didn't even give the game a chance and my wallet will forever thank me for that. I know I did.
An extremely underwhelming and disappointing flop of an entry could only mean one thing at that point: Activision had to make up for the utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ performance of MWIII's release, and they did so with a lifeless, greedy smile on their face as they stuffed MWIII with numerous microtransactions - what's believed to be twice as much as what MW2019 and MWII had combined.

I never went back to MW2019 or MWII and I didn't pay much attention to MWIII a month after it's release, but the Overwhelmingly Negative reviews this one's page has achieved already tells me that Activision only continued to add microtransactions to MWII instead of content, just after one ♥♥♥♥♥♥ year of a development cycle for this game.

Sledgehammer Games were and will continue to be unequipped in skill and even in understanding of how to create a good experience for a game through story, gameplay and stability of the two.
It's made clear that Sledgehammer don't take well to criticism at all, either. If you had your ears open at the 2023 Game Awards then you would have seen Christopher Judge (the voice of Kratos in the new God of War games) roast MWIII for it's ludicrously short campaign, which subsequently upset the lead developers at Sledgehammer.

The Sledgehammer leads also later tried to respond to the overall backlash of the game but only came off deluded when they stated that a lot of effort and love went into this game's entire development. I don't know if they have an actual PR team in that company but they probably ignored all of it when they were told to respond to the backlash in a meaningful way.


tl;dr Don't waste your money and time with Activision anymore. Modern Warfare 2019 was as good as it got and we will simply never have another good Call of Duty experience with the appalling display put on by Activision with Modern Warfare II and Modern Warfare III.

House alarms and the regret of using a shotgun ends an otherwise good run. I have died 30 times so far.

foap

Good game with bad executives.

Give Mick what he's owed, the executives at id are foul beings.

Just recently revisited this game after not playing it for a couple of years and I have to say that this game's fall from grace is a sadder sight than I've seen in almost any other game.

To keep it as brief as possible, the devs have lost all touch with's community in terms of what's right for the game and what people actually want; clearly emphasised with it's mixed review state that I have no doubt will be permanent with the state it's in.

My personal quarrels with the changes made to this game over the years are things like the fact that you can no longer select what map you want to play in the main menu, the ranking system is useless if I'm in Bronze tier and I'm still getting matched against level 500 people who play like they are in Grandmaster tier, the silent / obvious cheaters that you can still encounter in matches (whether they are using a wallhack or aimbot, you'll just know by their snappy aim) and the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hit-registration / damage localisation where someone wearing a Level 2 helmet can survive a SAIGA-12 shot to the head?

These are just a few of many problems I can see with the game in it's current state and to think that the developers can't seem to comprehend what's wrong and improve upon these things and instead give the strangest and arbitrary reasonings for them being implemented and changed to begin with.

Don't waste your bandwidth and time on this game, it's truly not the game it once was and it's hardly worth it anymore.

Memory Access Violation

Buy it
Play it
Uninstall it mere minutes later

in all seriousness though this game is alright but it isn't for me, I would recommend it though

GabeN