Recent reviews by [-NoE-] Mortis Angelus

The main regret I have with this game is that I managed to persuade a bunch of friends to buy into the early access. That means I got several friends to waste their money on a game that would eventually never be finished. To those friends, I am sorry.

That all said, the multiplayer sessions we had together was epic. Even the single player concept was awesome, and claustrophobic, and the way the creatures attacked you was just great! However, nothing was finished, everything was clunky, and the nothing really worked.

This game is a sad story of a great concept, riding along with the successful movie "The Martian" getting further hype from that. This was The Martian on steroids! No poop-potatoes for us. No, we, would survive gloriously.

But alas, nothing really came of this. So me and my friends shelved the game for 5 years. And we haven't really touched it since then. Has there been updates? Yes. Have there been improvements? Yes. But it is still far from the promised game, and is very barren compared to other survival titles.

This was a great concept. But nothing more. Yet, I am still hopeful for the next game from this studio; but they really need to hire more people and have a clear vision and end-goal this time!

360+ hours later over a time period of at least 6 years, this old game is a true gem in the genre (imho). And it is everything the newer Sandstorm wishes it could be; even down to the main menu: Fun game play, nice gun play and feel to them (albeit do start to become dated - yet are still solid), easy to make a party, easy to join servers and does not over complicate the combat. Good in-game VOIP and my favorite: No vehicles or special abilities. It is just you and your fellow team mates that will affect the battle

That all said, I do wish the bots and the AI did get an overhaul. They do work in a too simplistic way; either they are morons with the aim of a stormtrooper, or they are the perfect marksman, headshotting you from the other side of the map. But on the flip side, it is this jank, that also makes the game a party game whit a big group of people.

For me, this game is the perfect relaxation game; I don't have to think when playing this game.

It's PVP is a different story; all the things that makes PVE fun (the jank and the overly accurate guns) makes PVP very difficult with laser sharp accurate shooting. And while maps are well suited for PVE (most of them) they can be rather lack-luster for PVP in terms of strategic movement and cover. Especially the forest maps.

All in all, and probably very biased at this point, I cannot recommend this game enough ON SALE (It's so old now, and NWI has proved they don't care about their players; otherwise Snotstorm wouldn't be as bad as it is). Grab a few friends, have a few beers (or in my case a lot of candy), crank the party music up loud and have a lot of fun, PVE or PVP. And if you wanna be tactical, crank up the difficulty and bot-count. There's plenty for any style of gaming here.

Get it. Get it now (if now has a sale)

THIS REVIEW IS FOR MULTIPLAYER - I have NOT played single player campaign yet!

TLDR: Yes - but a lot to fix

(For positive remarks, see further down)

After 24 h in Multiplayer, and my first time experiencing proper Halo multiplayer, and coming from games like Titanfall 2, Battlefield and Insurgency, I will say this:

There is great potential in this game, but it could still be so much more. Now, I'm not gonna go in talking about Forge and stuff like this that I have no prior experience with. I will, however, add a few cents about the main issues I have (in no particular order):

1) Network code needs to improve. So many hits and miss with the desync of players; clear easy kills and shots don't register at all. Way too often this happens.

2) Make it easier to see what armor upgrade you picked up; most of the time I have no idea which pick-up I have.

3) For a game that relies very heavily on team work, the way in game voice chat is implemented and disabled by default makes it virtually impossible to form any kind of strategy when playing with pubs. This is super frustrating for someone with Insurgency as a background.

4) Continuing on that: In-game chat is useless for so many reasons: A) The window has to be manually closed after sending a message, making it impossible to send a quick message and then continue with the game. Once I send, close the window! B) Messages seemingly doesn't pop up at all when people write unless you specifically open the chat window yourself, making it further usless as a communication device. C) Why is there no global chat? Sure... we can't bash the other team and reduce toxicity, but neither can we be champs and say "GG, WP" to the other team either.

5) Make more weapons useful! Tweak them a bit so they can be used more often.

6) Make Ranked Tactical Slayer. I'm far more comfortable with insta-kill, twitch aiming than the other game modes, due to my background in aforementioned games. Sure, Halo is not supposed to be about that. But on the other hand, if that is the case, why have such a mode inserted then? I love playing Tactical Slayer, and I'm a bit sad I cannot get ranked in that.

7) Make us spawn close to our fireteam team mates! What is the point in having Fireteams, if we still spawn on the other side of the map from them? Especially in BTB! This was the core benefit (imo) in battlefields fireteam-mechanic. Play alone and you get spawned wherever. Play in a group with friends and you always spawn next to someone you know.

8) FIX THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GRENADES AND THEIR INCONSISTENCIES! After 24 h I still have no freaking idea how grenades work and how to make them kill. I seem to go from full shield to dead when a grenade explodes 5 meters away from me, but enemies I've shot at standing on an exploding grenade does not die.

9) Ease up on the armor cosmetics unlocks. I know this is supposed to be a free-to-play and thus focus more on microtransactions. But still; if we who grind, grind, we also wanna feel we can grind without paying. And if one buys the single player, the freaking premium battle pass should be included!

10) Balance vehicles and anti-vehicle guns: A) Vehicles, especially the ghost, is way too overpowered and agile/nimble. And the physics of the warthog is just bananas. Feels like a 2 kg cardboard box. B) When the scorpion/wraith tanks hit the battlefield, there really need to be more anti-tank measures available. Since M41 is a power weapon, they are never really available at the right moment. This makes tanks extremely overpowered. Compare this to Battlefield where tanks are dangerous, but players then also have access to RPGs to counter them.

Nice to get that out of my system. Probably other stuff still that I could come up with.

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But are there any positives?

Yes!

1) Game looks gorgeous and the way the game flows is imo very polished.

2) The guns are responsive and feel and sound great. This is coming from someone who has been a single-player-Halo-purist since Combat Evolved, and I was afraid the game would be too CoD-like (looked like that from all the gameplay videos). But this was a positive surprise.

3) While some maps have an odd design/layout most are great. I.e. Great core gameplay. Now please add more maps!

4) Game is also annoyingly addictive for reasons I cannot explain. I can be shouting and cursing the game for it's delay issues and unfair deaths/kills and in general when I feel the game is fighting me due to issues mentioned above - yet as soon as a match is finished, I want to jump in to another one.


So yes - despite all the negatives, I do recommend this game. Especially if you can get a group of friends to play with, as sticking together in this game is the only way to victory. But if 343 does not get their stuff together and add more refreshing updates and also work on the issues above, I do fear that this game will disappear by the end of this summer.

I was hyped when I saw this release; An actual licensed supercar! And then they go and f*** it up! I bought it, launched the game, found the issues, wrote the review, and then refunded.

The positive:
+ It is a beautiful model
+ Has same hitbox as dominus

The bad:
- Can't customize paintjob. You will select your color, and that's it. No dual color, no color finish options (matt, metallic, pearl etc...)
- No decals
- Can't select other rims, except McLaren's own rims
- McLaren's rims cannot be used on other cars
- Can't select hats
- Can't change engine sounds

It reeks of license agreement policies; McLaren wants to protect their licensed car, and I get it. But it also defeats the entire purpose of having such strict guide lines for a game about rocket propelled remote controlled cars.... Jesus McLaren, ease up a little bit. And I thus think Psyonix should have skipped purchasing this car all together from McLaren.

If you are okay with the limited cusomizing options, then by all means buy it, but I think it is too limiting and too narrow minded by McLaren. Psyonix: If you are going to start adding licensed cars into the game, please make sure that they will still be customizable!

TLDR: A Legendary game with hours upon hours of story to plow through, it is a game that is as easy to recommend as cutting butter with a hot knife. It has flaws, indeed, but as a whole, there is nothing that should hold you back from playing this game if you love star wars and/or RPGs.

This game is Legendary. Even so, it took me 15 years after its release before I got around to play the game. But that was just a positive thing. Only recently, have I grown the interest in RPGs, so to play it earlier would have been a disservice to myself and to the game.

"Legendary". How does a game obtain such a status? Considering this came out in 2003, its graphics, story, acting and length is amazing. I can't remember anything back in 2003 to look this well, or to have been so complex in graphics. Storywise, Final Fantasy still ruled the world, but for a 3D RPG-game, this is amazing.

The best thing about the game, is how the game manages to shepard you through both story, character development and gameplay as a combined experience. This mostly due to your team mates always having something to tell about their past, while exploring a planet or doing a story-mission. It gives that extra level of immersion.

The story itself is intriguing, and towards its third and fourth act, it becomes really good, and you as a player really start to feel the importance and seriousness of the situation you are in, and how the fate of the galaxy lies on your shoulders. This combined with a good, but now very dated, dialogue system, makes everything you do feel like it really matters. Consequences of your choices actually do matter in this game. Except for when it doesn't (more on that later). And the plot twists.... Oh them plot twists. So good! Albeit some of them are very predictable if you know Star Wars and its lore.

Without any hesitation, this is a sure buy for anyone loving star wars, and story diven games, where choices you make matters!


But does the game have a "dark side"? Yes. Yes it has, and most of those issues is caused by the age of the game and the limitations of game design from that time. Most annoying to me was the menu system and how all your items are handled/managed. It is extremely annoying and difficult to actually compare items as there is no comparison screen to have the equipped item side-by-side with the one you want to change to. Especially when upgrading your weapons and items at the workbench. LIkewise, finding the correct mission item in a sea of obtained items is also tedious and annoying.

Probably the one thing that hindered me from playing this game a few years ago, was the slow start. The game is incredibly slow when you are stuck on the first two worlds. Neither Taris or Dantooine feels very exciting, and everything you do feels more or less like a chore, rather than exciting adventure. Sure, you mount a rescue operation on Taris to save a person. But because you know pretty much nothing about neither yourself or about that person, it feels tedious. There should have been more background/character development in the beginning, so that when the ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan, you would care for the characters you try to save. But once you get off the first two worlds, and the game gives you freedom of choice, the game becomes infinatley more interesting!

Because it is pretty much a turn based game when in combat, fine movement controls has not been prioritized; your character wabbles around like a penguin sometimes, and it is not an issue. Nor are there any platforming sections, so fine movement is really not nevessary. Until you reach a certain point at the end of the game, where you all of the sudden need to move and turn your character with a lot of precision in order to solve a puzzle. The puzzle itself wasn't that difficult, but to get the character to turn correctly was just ridiculously difficult and made the puzzle seem like the most difficult obstacle in the gamee. The amount of cursing I did during that puzzle should not be discussed... 0.o

I said that consequences do matter. And often they do. Say something wrong and you end up losing some piece of important information or not receive a good upgrade or something similar. But so many times, you can be an utter ass, get the other part angry with you, but you still end up with the exact same end result, apart from perhaps receiving some dark side points.

There are also many bugs resulting in lost quests, and a moment when the game decides to break its own rules on Sith hierarchy, also leading to loss of a quest item.

These are things to be aware of, but nothing that should stop you from playing this game. Especially on sale. In this day and age of fast pased shooters and games made for short attention spans, this game is a gem to behold and is worthy of your time - as long can find the time. Took me about 70 h to complete (says 90 h, because the first 20 h is from my first attempt at the game).

This game is excellent. Nothing short of a master piece! The tools and freedom this game gives makes it possible to really let your creativity flow almost endlessly. And what is more amazing, is that most of the DLCs are actually relevant (with the occasional exception like "snowfall"). And like most people tell, it is annoyingly addictive. Four hours will never pass so fast as with this game. And in all honesty, it can be dangerous for your day-to-day life, because you will end up missing important stuff as you lose yourself into the creative world of Cities: Skylines. It is a sure buy for anyone who likes to build, be creative and just play a relaxing game. I give this game 9/10.

Hold on! Only 9/10? I just told you it is amazing?!

Yes, it is amazing, but it still has some flaws.

1) Thanks to the workshop and the amazing mod-community, the possibilities in this game are endless. But my question is, why aren't most of the stuff already in the game? The things I really miss in the vanilla game are the following:

- Traffic Manager President version
- Move it
- Road Anarchy
- Fine road adjustment
- Tree-brush
- The ability to spawn water; for creating artificial lakes
- Automated Bulldozing; considering bulldozing does not cost anything to perform (unlike in real life) there is no reason why the Mayor should order buildings to be destroyed after they've been abandoned.

I would also like to see this game less americanized; one such example is the water treatment systems. This game is produced in Sweden and developed in Finland. The two countries IN THE WORLD with the best, industry leading technology in water treatment and cleaning, and recycling technology, and yet the vanilla game does not feature proper recycling stations (might be in "green cities DLC", but it should exist in the vanilla game as well).

I would also like to see a patch that would enable better support for modern, multi-thread CPUs; as it is now, the game does not utilize modern CPUs that well.

The worst offender for this game, though, is the traffic AI. While you certainly can mess up traffic by yourself a lot, many times the AI is the main issue. Have a 4-lane single-direction highway that ought to keep the traffic flowing? Hah! AI will use only one lane for some reason.

So in reality, this game is closer to 8/10. But because the devs DO ALLOW mods, almost all of the "issues" (which are really nitpicking on my part, apart from the traffic issue) can be solved and you, as a gamer, can have an almost completely free sandbox where you can do whatever you want.

Just buy it already!

TLDR:
If you want to feel awesome, powerful and epic while brainlessly killing stuff, then buy this game. It does this better than most other games. A true testimony to the power of a space marine!

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THE REVIEW

I know little to nothing about Warhammer and/or Warhammer 40 000. I have not even finished this game But that doesn't matter. Not for this game at least. It is a clear recommend from me!

This game is pure fun and it is one of the few games where you take on control of a character that is supposed to be immensly powerful that actually feels powerful. Every punch, stomp, kick or throw feels like it comes from a thing that could lift a house. They have implemented slow-motion effects in just the right places to emulate that feeling without it feeling tacky or forced.

The gunplay also is satisfying, but not as much as the meelee. But unfortunately, the game is designed around horde-attacks, meaning that you really want to keep your distance as much ass possible to avoid getting overthrown by the ridiculous amounts of enemies the games throws at you. Which brings me to my cons:

The ridiculous amount of enemies. I mean sure: this game would not be challenging without the hordes. But it gets incredibly boring and repetative with the endless hordes that seemingly comes from nowhere. Okay, scratch that; It never feels boring because of the great combat mechanics mentioned above. But the point is, it could be so much more if they just would have added a bit more mechanics to the game and added more enemy variety.

Another issue is that the story is uninteresting. I literally have no idea what I am fighting for, other than that this is a typical Warhammer-story of orcs invading/attacking humans and space marines have to save the day. I don't particularily care for anyone or anything. I just blast on, killing anything in my sights.

The final thing I want to complain about, are the AI team mates. They are not so bad that they are "useless", because they do kill enemies. But they are not as effective as they should be, considering they are space marines just like my character is. That in combination that this game suffers from the age old issue of enemies focusing all their attention (or most of it at least) on you, even if your team mates shoots and kills them more than I do. Enemies just run past my team mates, and tries to kill me. And that can be so frustrating.

All bad things aside, I still think the positives outweigh the negatives. Technically, there are more cons than pros. Much more. But the winning thing is that the game works. It just does. And it is that feeling of power that this game deliver so much better than many other games of its genre. So I will still highly recommend it, because even if it gets incredibly repetative, it always manages to bring out that 10-year old in me that just wants to blast orcs up in the air and shout "YEAH!", laugh and enjoy a simple game.

Great software that finally gives us the background we always seen on TV-shows and in movies; the moving sci-fi background.

My only complaints are:

1) No support for larger format than 1080p on Win 7

2) No OSX and Linux support. I work in science, and having this on my work laptop (OSX) would be epic. :D

A GAME WITH HUGE POTENTIAL, BUT WITH A LACKLUSTER PC-PORT!

TL,DR: So why do I still recommend this game? Because even if it is filled with minor, yet somewhat annoying, flaws, most of the things I've listed above can (if they want to) be fixed with patches and updates. The game to its core is still solid, even if it is not a perfect experience on PC. But mostly, buy this game so we hopefully can get more Halo-games to PC.


Let's be honest here: I bought this game for one reason only: To try to vote with my wallet and show Microsoft that we want ALL Halo-games to PC. I even paid the "full price", whereas I usually would have waited for some kind of sale for an old game like this.


Now, as I write this "review" I have only played the tutorial of the game. I have watched the cutscenes from this game many times over but never been able to play it as I have never owned an Xbox 360. So instead of giving a deep analysis of the game, here are a few things I have noticed in my first 60 minutes or so:


- The in-game cutscenes (not the pre-rendered ones) are stuck in some weird 30 fps interpolation. The game displays 60 fps (according to the fps counter), but it lags/jitters just like the game would at 30 fps. As soon as the cut-scene is over it is butter-smooth again.

- The game does NOT like if you run your system audio in 192 khz. It creates a lot of static noise and crackeling. Taking the quality down to 96 khz fixes these issues. Not a biggie, but I would prefer a fix for this. Annoying to have to change audio settings everytime I open this game

- People say this is an "excellent" port for PC and I highly have to disagree:

1) The UI-scaling is too big and the field of view is too narrow. It feels like I'm looking at a sub-FullHD game upscaled to 1440p, rather than actually looking at something that is 1440p. I kinda expect that for the game though, as it is a X360-port. But I think it should be mentioned. I just can't help the feeling that I would like to zoom the camera out more than is currently possible.

EDIT: I now found out how to zoom in/out with the camera. But I still feel it would be nice to be able to zoom out even further.

2) Keybinding is limited... Seriously! Whichever company that was responsible for porting this game; SHAME ON YOU! Why on Earth did you decide it would be a good idea to make some actions re-mappable, and some locked down? E.g. You have specific buttons for rotating the camera left/right, but they are locked to buttons "delete" and "insert". Like WTF???? There is NO - and I really mean it - NO reason for locking down key-bindings on a PC-port.

3) Camera-movement is way too aggressive. Clicking any of the WASD-buttons moves the camera way too agressively and quickly to either direction. This is a direct result of poorly ported controls from an analogue stick input to keyboard controls. On Xbox 360 you can easily decide how fast the camera moves with the joysticks, but on a keyboard it is 100 % speed from the get-go. The same goes for rotating the camera. Not only must you hold ALT + Mouse movement Left/right to rotate the camera, but also here it activates 100 % movement; like mouse input would be either ON or OFF, and not speed dependent. FIX THIS PLEASE! Lower the speed of the camera.

- When grouping units, why the frack is there no group-indicator or number indicator so I would know which key I binded which group to? This again feels like a rushed over-sight: "Yes, we must add grouping, because all RTS-games on PC has it! But don't bother adding any indicator. They won't need that!"


So is there anything good about this game? Probably YES. Probably everything that was great about it already on Xbox - I will see when I progress in the game. I'm mostly complaining about PC-port-specific issues. But the point is: Even if it was great on Xbox 360 with the mechanics it had there, it might not be up to snuff for PC as the mechanics we are used to on this platform is vastly different; RTS was born on PC, so we expect a bit more from an RTS title in terms of how to control things. On Xbox (or any console) I think this is one of the only RTS-games that has ever been released, so the stakes are also much lower. I've also seen other reviews complaining about localized/region locked multi-player. I don't know, but if those claims are true, then STOP IT MS! STOP IT! Global matchmaking please!

So why do I still recommend this game? Because even if it is filled with minor, yet somewhat annoying, flaws, most of the things I've listed above can (if the devs want to) be fixed with patches and updates. The game to its core is still solid, even if it is not a perfect experience on PC. But mostly, buy this game so we hopefully can get more Halo-games to PC. But if you are a hardcore PC-RTS-gamer, this game might put you off just because of those odd choices when it comes to controlling the game mechanics and the camera.

Can't recommend a game that says it's "Free to play" but won't let you play the game unless you pay to unlock even the first basic character. I was doing the tutorial mission and when one got the hang of the mechanics this game felt like the perfect mix of Xcom and any typical hero-based moba. Great!

I started spamming my friends (while finishing off the tutorial) that they should get it. A few started downloading the game. Then I was brought to the main menu, and realized I could not play any further, because my characters were all locked behind a pay-wall. WTF?!? I wanted to explore the game with my friends, but I couldn't because the game limits you in every single way possible as long as you don't pay. It seemed like I could play with bots, but that really appaling, as you realize very soon in the tutorial that being unable to coordinate attacks between different heros, leads to not really being able to play the game properly, as bots do not communicate with you. In other words: bots are useless.

Realizing this pay-wall-party, I immediatly shouted to all my friends on Discord that they should stay the f**k away from this game. I have nothing against free-to-play-games, and even paying for stuff in such games. But at least let me start the game and see if I even like it before forcing me to pay stuff. Otherwise the game is really not free-to-play, is it?

Conclusion: I do not recommend this game due to elaboratate limitations if not paying for the game. Free-To-Play is not Free....