Recent reviews by Squiddy

If you just need more Spelunky it's fine, but it's ultimately inferior to the first game.

The game is fun but it's been four months and there's still only TWO ships to take apart. There's minor variation on those two ships, sure, but considering these things are inherently put together systemically this is pretty inexcusable. Even for future updates they're only talking about more variants.

Edit: There is finally a third ship. Over six months after release.

Way to good for a little $5 software toy.

Just fun. The Luftrauser's comparison is obvious but it's a bit more than just a clone of that, with various subtle differences that do add up to make it feel like it's own game. Especially with a mission structure that manages to be unobtrusive yet offer a lot of content with a decent chunk of variety. Also, anime as ♥♥♥♥ in all the right ways.

Just make sure your keyboard doesn't suck. Low key rollover can make the game way less playable.

We did it. A game in dev hell actually came out and was everything it promised to be.

The base game is fine, it's still Halo, but there are just so many little things wrong with the MCC side of things. The worst offender is the audio being horrendously messed up. Many more fairly minor problems, but cumulatively it's just inexcusable.
- Said audio issues. Everything sounds weird and muffled. A couple of music tracks in singleplayer are borderline unrecognizable. This is universal, known, and not a bug. It was shipped this way out of sheer laziness. This is especially noticable in the singleplayer campaign where so many minor moments are lacking their original effect because the sound design has been butchered.
- No playlist that has vanilla Reach gameplay, everything is the bloom reduced modes. I get that people hated bloom, but turning it down just leads to ridiculous DMR dominance
- The only Team Slayer gamemode is said reduced bloom mode with DMR spawns, which is a nightmare
- The game won't start a match, even an FFA match, with less than the full set of players. This leads to playlists lying dead and empty in low pop regions far more often than they need to
- The game won't tell you how populated any given playlist is
- No voting system for the next map like the original game had
- Next to no thought put into which map is in which playlist, many maps that are absolutely awful for FFA in all the FFA playlists.
- Game seems to take your Xbox Live name when it first launches, and doesn't update after that if said name changes
- Absolutely horrendous default controls. Grenade on G by default is just laughably inappropriate for Halo.
- Many menus taking ages to load for seemingly no reason
- Original progression systems ripped out and replaced with a far, far, far worse system, presumably for future monitization
- No gamemode-specific stats post game. Why can I not view stuff like flag captures, time on hill, etc?
- Game seems to like putting groups of players in servers they all have high latency to
- Armour previews in a completely different engine than the rest of the game, so you can't actually see what any of the colours you're picking will look like
- Singleplayer is noticably buggier than it originally was. Physics glitches are far more common than in the original release, squad members will get stuck, stuff like that.
Any of these alone could be easily overlooked, but it just becomes a drag when every few seconds you're running into bad decisions and lazy corner cuts that the game you played a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ decade ago didn't have

A fun little game, but not really a 4X, as seems to be all over the page and many reviews. Honestly, if anything, the game reminds me of Paradox grand strategy games, especially the older and/or simpler ones. EU3, or EU4 before the years of updates and DLC. This game isn't terrible complex when you get down to it; you set some general direction empire-wide, put focus on a few specific planets, and direct your military to go blob out across the universe. It gets that similar large scale despite being so simple. There's definitely some neat ideas throughout the game too (and lot that could be expanded upon) but not a deluge of overly difficult decisions. Ultimately there's not too much to worry about, which makes it a neat little thing to click away at while watching or listening to something else.

It's genuinely a good game on top of all the cool simulation stuff. That alone makes this game something special. Plus all the secret stuff is genuinely enthralling.

I really dislike many of the changes they're pushing into the series more and more; the heavy character basis really is kind of obnoxious, as is the retinue system rather than the typical total war units system. Same with the combat getting more and more arcadey.
However even for me it's pretty much impossible to deny that this game really is the breath of fresh air the series' has needed for ages. It finally improves on all the little things which have largely been trash ever since Rome 2 released, or in some cases even Empire. Things like a soundtrack which is actually memorable, freedom from the same mediocre UI we've had for ages (even if this one is kind of a mess) and diplomacy you can actually factor into your strategy. Honestly, the biggest thing is units flowing far more naturally; breaking formation as the charge forth, noticeable impact on cavalry charges. It all comes together to make both campaign and battle experiences which are just more entertaining and enjoyable than any in the series since Shogun 2.

Sometimes you can just tell within hours of firing up a game that it's a genuinely deep, interesting strategy game you're going to be spending a long, long time with. This is one of those times.