Recent reviews by Dr. LightMare

So there is just no new content coming? just patches? Okay, i'm tired of waiting.

EDIT: The game won't even start anymore despite reinstalling it, reinstalling the EA app, reinstalling their anti cheat, game file validations, anti cheat tweaks and windows settings tweaking,

This game is great, it has all the things you would want from a Battlefield-style game and its even unique in its own category by having 3 teams fighting each other. Sure that can lead to double teaming which is never fun but the scale of most fights this allows outweighs the negatives. Also instead of choosing a map from a list, you have to play on one of the maps that are currently open, there are usually 2 at most. The map ends when an alert starts, an event that decides what faction gets the map for themselves and gains a small benefit from it e.g. cheaper aircraft for the next map. When the alert ends, the faction with most territory controlled wins the alert and claims the map. This game also features base building but its a grind to unlock, you have to buy most of the structures with the in-game currency and you start with very few pieces unlocked by default, but once you have all of them its really fun making massive fortresses near front lines to keep the fight going.

The game has 6 classes to choose from, 1 of which being different from the others.
Light Assault: a guy with a jetpack and a rifle that shoots mini rockets to damage vehicles with
Heavy Assault: a guy with LMGs, a rocket launcher and an ability to turn on a personal shield to eat a few more bullets.
Combat Medic: your typical first person shooter medic that can heal and revive fallen allies.
Engineer: a guy with a repair tool and access to a variety of turrets and mines, can also drop ammo for allies.
Infiltrator: a mix of the TF2 spy and sniper aka a sniper that can go invisible, they can also put down motion sensors to detect enemy movement.

And last but not least: MAX, basically a juggernaut suit you can equip. While using it, you are really tanky to bullets but cannot drive vehicles or even enter some of them. MAX can have multiple different weapons for different situations, guns for destroying vehicles or aircraft or just for mowing down infantry. each faction has some unique ability for the MAX as well.

With the 3 teams being unique in different ways there are always some unbalanced things involved, first thing that comes to mind is the main battle tanks. Having played all 3 factions i sure have noticed that some factions have it easier in some categories for example the NC main battle tank almost always wins 1v1s against any other tanks mainly because of its unique ability to take reduced damage for a short time. Now i get that you aren't supposed to fight it head on but there is not much you can do when it rushes you instead.
Similarly the TR main battle tank can output insane damage in a short time but its still as vunerable as any other tank. But the VS main battle tank, what does it get? it can hover and boost for a bit, sure those are kinda nice but it forces you to play from a range to take advantage of that but the tank's cannon is also forced to rotate along with the tank so if anything bumps you, your aim is gonna be thrown off. I whole heartedly think that the VS main battle tank should get some alternative to the boost ability, most people just use the tank to climb mountains and camp spawn room doors with it because you don't have to move and risk throwing your aim off by moving and bumping into something.

The faction "traits" are also kinda off balance imo, NC has the more hard hitting stuff, TR has faster fire rates and VS gets no bullet drop, but the thing is i have never even noticed bullet drop on any other faction (except on sniper rifles) so it feels kinda meaningless. Maybe it was different when the game first came out.

All of those potentially unbalanced things don't have that much of an impact on "the bigger picture" though, but they can feel unfair at times, i recommend you make a character for all 3 factions and try out the things you find unbalanced and then judge it again. I for one think that NC has the best tank to kick some ass with, TR seems to have the best infantry weapons thanks to the high fire rate and VS i don't think has anything too special, the main battle tank is the most noticeable for me. It can have some weapons that have no bullet drop but they have to be unlocked unlike the traits of the other 2 factions.

If you like shooter games, you will find a role you like in Planetside 2, you can be the dedicated medic of your squad, an engineer driving around with a truck resupplying your team's vehicles with ammo, or a transport pilot dropping off squads to attack objectives, a base builder building some fortifications to hold off an incoming push, be a gunship gunner blowing up tanks, be an anti air tank driver keeping the skies clear or annoying af infiltrator with SMG.

1 last note: this game is reaching the end of its life, player counts are dropping but you can still find populated matches going on if you log in at the right time and secondly, there are cheaters, some of them aimbotting from the sky, noclipping around. they aren't that common at least on Miller server where i play but you can see some occasionally, remember to report them and move on to a better fight.

Started off lacking content but now it gets better after every update, starting to be an improvement to The Forest.

So far one of the best if not the best survival game i have played. Highly recommend if you like realistic survival games and detailed character progression.

EDIT: The new big update removed most of the vehicles and replaced them with 1 buggy one :/

The idea of the game is fun but the matchmaking seems really odd, no matter how much you lose you still keep getting matched against real sweatlords, very rarely do you get a close game with even teams. It's mostly getting rolled or being on the rolling team.

Also in my personal opinion the game does a really poor job at indicating received damage so most deaths feel like instant kills, but there are things in this game that do kill you near instantly too.

Weirdly enough i enjoy the training/bot matches the most because there you get to enjoy the game without feeling like you are playing in a 500k USD tournament, but the training/bot matches get boring really quickly because of how easy they are. There is no middle ground in this game, its either super easy with bot matches or the rolling veteran team or its super sweaty and hard while getting rolled by the veteran team.

(all of these experiences are from matches played with 1-2 friends who are the same skill level as me)

I occasionally have a fun game but for the most part it's just frustrating as hell.

EDIT: Recently there has been a ton of issues joining matches, there is roughly 20% chance that some sort of issue happens and best case, you have to requeue. In the worst case, your whole PC blue screens or you get stuck in a join loop to a bugged match and can't play anymore. At the moment i'm stuck in the latter, tried to play a quick match or 2 and the match didn't load so i force closed the game trough Task manager, after restarting it attempted to reconnect me to the match, it loads for 3 mins before kicking me back to the menu and i can't click anything ingame anymore, forcing me to restart which starts the reconnect again.

So far the best Halo game 343i has created, with a couple flaws:

-MP weapon variety, i'm already bored of the new weapons and i would much rather have some of the classic weapons return like the Plasma rifle, Brute shot or the original Shotgun.

-Progression system & ranks (at the time of writing this review) is god awful, XP gain is slow (50XP per match with 1000XP required for 1 battle pass level). If you don't buy the battle pass, you wont get nearly any armor pieces or other customization options. Armor coating prices are ridiculously high.

-MP playlists, you cannot pick which mode you want to play. All you can do right now is pick from Ranked, Bot, Big Team Battle or Arena playlists, You cannot pick if you'd like to play only CTF or Oddball.

-Player collision, you can run trough your teammates (RIP boosting teammates up high) and often even enemies which leads to really annoying melee encounters.

EDIT: why does the game take 10 mins to launch even on SSD?

Game is good but devs are slow to fix exploits and bugs. PVP mechanics would be great but they have some improvement to do as well as the community.

Played for 1 minute, already had a heart attack.

Good puzzle game with good story, it also has COOP that follows a different story.

I love this collection of Halo classics but the content updates have pretty much completely stopped now, all you will see are posts about double XP weekends and unnecessary emblem releases and if you even dare to disagree with what kind of emblem they added, the community moderators will remove your post and ban you from posting there. Are people not entitled to their own opinions anymore? This isn't the Halo i remember anymore.