Recent reviews by ZombieRommel

Incredible technology that works as advertised. It's making Sonic X Shadow Generations actually playable. The Sonic portion is normally locked at a disgusting 60FPS (for a game whose hero is all about speed, WTF?) and the Shadow portion is locked to 120FPS. With Lossless Scaling frame gen, I can effectively play both at 240FPS (my monitor's refresh rate cap). I tested with Lossless Scaling on and off, and it's difficult to overstate how enormous of an improvement Lossless Scaling grants. Going to try it with other frame-locked games soon like Mega Man 11 and Otxo. Easily worth the money.

EDIT: Tried this on Shredder's Revenge and it FEELS LIKE A WHOLE NEW GAME at 240FPS. It feels SO MUCH BETTER. Seeing all these new frames is allowing me to actually play better and respond faster and more in line with what my natural reaction speed and eyesight can handle. Before, it was more of a game of trial and error to see what attacks the enemies were going to do and learn to respond. Now that I can actually see so many more frames of Bebop loading up on a punch, I can dodge it naturally. This app highlights how utterly boneheaded some devs are to frame-lock their games. Holy balls. Thank you, devs!!

So far, this is a mostly enjoyable beat em' up romp with a few annoying issues here and there.

I'm liking the core combat and the general pacing of move unlocks. You unlock moves as you level up your character (from beating up enemies) and also from buying them with in-game money at the dojo. I'm playing this game just a few days after I returned Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Rita's Revenge because I was upset with the combat depth, and thankfully, I can report that there is a lot of meat on the bone here. You get your bread and butter combo, which you can enhance by buying more moves, along with character-specific strong and special attacks (strong attacks might be something like a roundhouse kick whereas specials are more akin to a Street Fighter hadouken or hurricane kick).

I bought the game with the Double Dragon DLC and I think that's enhancing my enjoyment quite a bit. Billy and Jimmy feel really nice. I just unlocked a clothesline and it feels pretty amazing to use it and just flatten enemies.

The core cast is okay too from what I've seen. Aesthetically, a lot of the designs seem made by and for weebs, which kinda sucks, but they are at least fun to play. In addition to the main roster there are a couple others you can unlock by beating them in the campaign. I just unlocked Marian, who is a boxer, and she's been fun to play since pretty much all her attacks are fist-based.

I have a few qualms with what I've experienced so far.

First off, every enemy in the game will do an invincible wakeup attack that puts you into an inescapable stun state. So, in most beat em' ups, you'll knock an enemy down and then either lift them off the ground to continue your combo or wait for them to stand back up as you mash jab. In this game, if you do the latter, you will get punched and comboed. From what I have seen so far, this means you have to back off and wait, or stand there and block, both of which hurt combat pacing. I think you can also do a neutral jump, but I am pretty sure you can just be anti-aired out of this.

There is a parry mechanic (done by tapping guard at the right time), but I haven't gotten it to work yet against this wakeup attack. Skill issue on my part? Who knows. I'm playing on the difficulty that's above normal but below the highest, and it's just annoying as hell to deal with. If devs ever patch the game again, they should either get rid of the invincible wakeups or widen the parry window against them.

There is a block button, but you can't turn left or right while using it. You are locked into place staring forward, and it feels stiff to let go and face the other direction. Characters seem to have an unlockable back attack (hold block + press attack), but this attack can whiff depending on spacing. So like, an enemy might walk up to your buttcheeks and then backpedal a couple feet and make you whiff. For this reason, having enemies on either side of you feels even worse than it feels in most other games of this genre, due purely to the mechanical stiffness that's built into the game.

Given this is a River City game, there's a widen open cityscape to run through. What's a bit annoying is that if you go into a shop to buy something and come back out, all the enemies respawn. Since there isn't a requirement to clear the mobs outside of specific missions/objectives, I usually will just run past all of them. This feels lame. I don't really know how I want to phrase this, but in a beat em' up, I want the combat to actually mean something. If I can just run past all the enemies, then the mobs are meaningless and may as well just not exist.

The music... I like Megan McDuffee's work. I actually followed her on instagram and watched her stuff on YouTube before she was ever involved in this game. Her songs here fit the overall theme and game, BUT they get played to absolute death. I think part of it is that the songs have vocals. Games in this genre benefit from catchy instrumental tracks. Too many vocals and you end up with the feeling of repetition.

The voiceovers are terrible and when you exit shops, you are FORCED to listen to whatever quip the shopkeeper says. This is super annoying and makes the developer's self-indulgence extremely clear. Probably, the devs were super proud of these quips and thought their writing was clever. But at the end of the day, it should always be the player's prerogative to skip this stuff. I'm hear to punch people, not engage in the "world-building" and story.

The story is mostly pretty whack and convoluted. You talk to multiple contrived NPC's... the emo boy, the jock, etc. It's all extremely cringe. Remember Double Dragon? Your girlfriend gets gut-punched and abducted. Go find her. Bad Dudes? The president is kidnapped, go find him. We do NOT need these elaborate setups and extraneous NPC's littering the play space. Give us more fundamental combat, smart upgrades, solid hit detection, etc. The shops are okay for the RPG elements. But too much effort is wasted on fleshing out the story and the world in a game like this, where it's unnecessary.

I still give the game as it stands a 7/10 for an altogether enjoyable combat loop outside of the issues I highlighted. Also, I should probably address the title of the game. It's called River City Girls, but there are a couple of male characters on the default roster and 2 more if you download the Double Dragon DLC. So don't be put off here.

The game could be an 8.5 for me if the combat issues were fixed, the shop outros were skippable, and the game was a bit more linear and consequential as opposed to a wander-fest padded out with unlikable NPC's.

This game is charming, but it is pretty shallow in the moment-to-moment beat em' gameplay. Thinking of refunding for that reason. It feels like a lot of the game's budget went into the stage variety. Because it's basically 3 different games. You have the on foot beat em' up portion, the shooting Zord portion, and the Megazord punchout portion. The developer chose to use their time/budget to get all 3 of these to a decent standard for an all-round Power Ranger experience rather than go super hard on any one of them, and IMO this is a bit disappointing. I would rather the devs have focused solely on the on-foot combat. I can't tell you how disappointing it is to play as Zack (black ranger) and not be able to do any breakdancing or capeoira moves. He fights just like Jason and Billy. I experimented with all 5 starting rangers and they are all almost identical. You get 3 hits or so on your first few attacks, then a pop up attack, and a finisher. You can choose to press up+attack to follow the enemy in the air after the popup. Kimberly gets a starter longer range kick if you hold forward+attack, and some of the rangers have slides instead of jumpkicks as dash attacks, but this is only a cosmetic difference. Even the screen clear attacks are identical except for cosmetics...Zack uses ice, Jason uses fire, Billy uses electricity, etc. etc.

If you are looking for actual combat depth in a beat em' up, Fight N' Rage remains king, closely followed by Double Dragon Gaiden.

I was a big Power Rangers fan growing up and this game kinda bums me out. It hits the right notes in terms of presentation and giving you a sugar rush of "being a Power Ranger" with the trifecta of modes, but it fails to obtain even a modicum of depth in the most important part of a beat em' up experience... the fighting.

This game had a lot of potential; it could have been so much more. It would have been absolutely amazing to pull off Eddy Gordo-style capoeira with Zack, hard hitting karate punches with Jason, shoot people from afar with Kimberly's bow, pull off long-range combos with Billy's staff etc. Instead of Power Rangers, we get Clone Rangers. Sad.

I am loving this game but had some technical hurdles at first.

1. By default the game caps your refresh rate to 60hz even if you set the FPS cap to unlimited. I had to download a reshade tool to fix this (nothing else worked) - https://github.com/Filoppi/reshade/releases/tag/v4.6.1 - This worked and completely unlocks the refresh rate.

2. The game has a very annoying camera re-center when you are driving. For example you might want to turn the camera to look around at the environment while still driving straight and within about 1.5 seconds the camera auto-centers and there is no way to turn it off. You can actually edit this value in the Mafia 3 resource explorer (you can change the re-center timer to 99999 seconds). Link to thread about the re-center issue here: https://www.gog.com/forum/mafia/howto_disable_camera_auto_center_in_mafia_i

Keep in mind that "CarFollow.FollowTimeout" is just the third person car camera view and you'll need to change these values for the first-person car camera as well as the boat cameras.

THAT SAID, the initial headache of getting things setup was worth it because the core game is fantastic. I'm from Louisiana and have been to New Orleans many times, and it is so, so cool to see the city represented in New Bordeaux. It is not a 1 to 1 recreation, but there are certain real landmarks that appear and the vibe of Louisiana as a whole is captured really well. You've got bayou everywhere, dozens of little suspension bridges, terrible drivers, alligators, pedestrians in Mardi Gras outfits, and so on.

I've been playing Mafia 3: Definitive Edition alongside Mafia: Definitive Edition and overall I'd say Mafia 1 is more about linear story progression and campaign missions (which it does very, VERY well), and Mafia 3 is more about fulfilling the fantasy of actually taking over a city. It's a bit weird to explain because you are ostensibly a Vietnam vet "good guy" but you are kinda acting like a lawless maniac as you kill hundreds of rival gang members and corrupt cops, recruit lieutenants, perform shakedowns, etc.

I've seen a lot of criticism of the core gameplay loop, but I actually like it a lot. Movement, shooting, and taking cover are almost identical to Mafia 1, which is to say "serviceable", but enemy hit reactions are incredible and shooting them generally feels great. The big departure from Mafia 1 is that you can upgrade your character (Lincoln) by doing missions for the various underbosses you recruit in your territories. So like, you can do a bunch of missions for one underboss and eventually be able to upgrade your rifle accuracy, stability, reload speed, and ammo. Do missions for another underboss and you can upgrade your vehicle suspension, health pool, stamina, etc.

In addition to passive upgrades, there's an interesting assortment of actives that you can radio in. Basically you hold down what amounts to a sort of weapons wheel and then pay your in-game cash to have your underbosses do various favors, like send you an AI goon squad with Tommy guns to help you, call off a police search, or bring you a new vehicle. This part of the game reminded me a lot of the old "Mercenaries" games if anybody remembers them from the PS2 era. You get a real sense that you have a logistics and support network behind you which IMO is what separates the game from Mafia 1 the most.

There's a lot of driving from point A to point B, but driving feels great (on simulation mode) and the higher level cars are notably faster and handle better than the 1930s deathtraps from Mafia 1. It does get a bit tedious at times, but the environment consistently looks good and there are actual Playboy magazines with full uncensored centerfold spreads you can collect. LOL this is easily the best collectible item in any video game ever. I have never felt compelled to collect stars or coins, but Playboy nudes? Yes please.

On the whole the voice and mocap acting is really well-done. I did laugh a few times at some of the characters' pronunciations. "Work" becomes "woyk", church is "choych" and hurt is "hoyt". My late granddad pronounced things like this, so it was definitely a feature of the dialect, just kinda feels like every other white character in the game plays up this particular dialect quirk (or should I say quoyk).

Audio is pretty great. "Surround" and "Stereo" are available, and using surround with either Dolby Atmos for Headphones or one of Immerse's headphone options (I use the Beyerdynamic software) results in very good positional audio. It is pretty amazing to roll up on a compound and be able to pinpoint enemies from their footsteps and voicelines. To be in a warehouse and hear a guy shouting racial epithets as he storms down the stairs.

Story is generally okay and Lincoln is overall likeable. I do feel like the racism of the southern white guys in this game is played up so that you do not feel bad about mowing them down, just like how in any WW2 campaign you are not supposed to feel bad about killing thousands of nazis. Not sure if this criticism makes sense. You could replace the enemies with zombies and it wouldn't make a difference. Worth noting, there is an "interrogate" mechanic in the game, but in order to interrogate an enemy, they have to be weakened first. How do you weaken them? By shooting them like 40 times lol. So you go up to these guys that are riddled with bullets and covered from head to toe in blood. They should be dead 10 times over but they miraculously remain alive so you can interrogate them and add them to your crew.

The writing overall is good to great. The priest character has a pretty great line fairly deep into the campaign - "If all you look for in the world is evil, that's all you're ever going to see." This feels like a remarkably prescient line given modern cancel culture and grievance politics. Lincoln actually parrots the line back to one of the militant Black Panther style underbosses at some point. She is lecturing him about how evil white people are and he busts this line out - "A wise man once told me that if all you look for in the world is evil, that's all you're ever going to see." And I was like DAAAAAAAMN. The writing definitely gives you a lot of "Racism bad, mmkay?" but it also throws some occasional nuggets like this that give you pause. Writing overall is better in Mafia 1 IMO, which is pretty much immaculate. But the bar doesn't sag too much here.

I'm really excited to see where Mafia: The Old Country takes the series' gameplay. The movement, cover, and shooting of Mafia 3 is very good and on the cusp of being great. I'd love to see more natural parkour added, perhaps some combat rolls, the ability to shoot while staying crouched (without taking cover) or going prone. Would love to see some environmental destructbility. It would be amazing to roll up with a goon squad and shoot up a wooden door with Tommy guns until it's blown apart.

Anyway, Mafia 3 is definitely worth the purchase if you don't mind getting your hands dirty for thirty minutes to an hour to iron out its technical issues. It's a gritty, grounded open-world game set in a terrific environment with shooting, driving, and upgrade mechanics that all work together well to sustain engagement. Holds up remarkably well in 2024 for a game that originally released in 2016.

Great game. As others have pointed out, it's way more of a classic linear adventure than the other Mafia games. You're basically just going from mission to mission with little in the way of sidequests. That said, the missions are all fun and varied and the story gets to shine. The game was re-written from the original and the writing is VERY good. Scenes are well-acted by the mocap and voice actors also.

Now, let's get down to why I wanted to leave a review: to help your sorry ass with the RACING MISSION.

Here is the ONLY WAY I found to beat the mission. It's the "ram". I've seen other reviewers here mention this mechanic, but nobody really explained it well.

What is the ram mechanic? It is basically a little pit maneuver to the side of whichever direction you are steering. It swerves the front end of the car in that direction WHILE regaining lost traction. That latter part is super important.

So how do you beat the race?

When taking turns, let off the gas, or at least don't punch it hard. Hold in the direction of the turn and tap/spam the "ram" button WHENEVER YOU HEAR YOUR TIRES START TO SQUEAL. The tire squealing means you are losing traction and you're going to have to decelerate to keep speed. The "ram" lets you regain traction and therefore keep your speed.

What nobody mentions is you can SPAM the ram button within the turn. It has maybe a 1-3 second cooldown. So in a long turn, you can hold in the direction of the turn and spam the button maybe 3-4 times as-needed.

The other part of beating the race is to drive through the grass portions slowly while spamming the "ram" in the direction of the turn. This is especially important during the first few turns at the start of the race to put yourself ahead of the pack. The grass naturally makes you lose traction even if you are going pretty slow, so the ram lets you regain the traction.

The word "ram" is a bit of a misnomer, because I think when most people hear it, they think the car will SPEED UP and GO FORWARD. But it doesn't. It's a little jolt to the side, and whenever there isn't a car for you to hit a pit maneuver on, the mechanic just lets you regain traction as you're losing it. It is a FAR BETTER mechanic for making turns than the handbrake, which usually will make you lose traction and speed.

I recommend mapping the "ram" to a mouse button. I put it on one of my side mouse buttons and drove with WASD. The part that really made things "click" for me was recognizing the tire squeal as the sound cue that I needed to use the ram. Things got progressively easier after this and it only took me a handful of tries afterward.

Oh, and there are like 3-4 scripted drivers who "blow out". So if you're in the final lap and you have 2 guys ahead of you, you're only going to have to pass one of them.

Slow down on that squiggly S turn as you're going down-hill. If you keep too much speed and clip the shoulder, your car is going to launch like you're in the Dukes of Hazzard.

One final tip: The game runs at locked 60hz by default. I guess it's a holdover bug from this being a console port. Run the game with the following settings to get your true refresh rate:

-Fullscreen: OFF
-Window Borders: OFF
-VSync: OFF

Set Windows to auto-hide the taskbar if you can see it after making these changes.

Good luck!

This game beats ass. I've played various Final Doom mods and pretty much expected this game to be a reskinned one, but I was wrong. It just feels way better and more thoughtful. Shooting and chainswording enemies feels amazing. Level design is intelligent and definitely a throwback to old Doom games. Lots of arenas that have to be cleared before you are able to move on, find keycards etc. Someone in another review said that this game does what Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal tried to do, but better, and he is 100% right. Sound effects are great. Heavy booms and thuds. Everything feels impactful. This game is a great complement to Space Marine 2. More of the same universe and gory fun, but way more streamlined on constant action with very little in the way of cutscenes, or listening to dialogue while going up and down elevators, etc. Basically a full bore arcade experience with the occasional hunting for keycards, which isn't too bad and allows you to breathe. Challenge is good on Hard mode so far. Finding it's got a similar characteristic to Space Marine 2, which is that at times you'll find yourself barely hanging on with just a tiny bit of health. No RaGrEtS buying this game and its DLC today. Good work, devs.

Awesome game!

Double Dragon Gaiden sits right atop the Steam beat em' up heap along with Fight N' Rage.

The mechanical depth here is impressive. You've got a jump (and you can also double-jump), an attack into a combo, a "special" button that varies per character, and a special move button (which uses your special meter).

You can tech-roll to recover from air juggles and also tag out to interrupt your character getting combo'd.

When you start the campaign or survival, you pick two characters and can tag out at any time so long as your special gauge is full. Like in the old Marvel vs Capcom versus games, recoverable health of the character tagged out replenishes over time.

This leads to a kind of meta-strategy as you are playing. You have to know when to tag in and out to keep both characters healed up. Some characters are going to excel in certain situations more than other characters too.

For instance, if you know you are going to be surrounded and need to take out a heap of enemies, a character like Abobo can either smash the ground or do a jumping piledriver that clears out all the enemies around you. But if you are trying to avoid lightning strikes from the sky, you'd want to switch to Billy or Jimmy for the faster move speed.

On that note, all the characters have different move speeds, health pools, attack speeds, and other special properties.

For example Jimmy Lee can do two of his special moves while in the air leading to extended air combos. The Lee brothers are also the only characters in the game, to my knowledge, who can pick up enemy melee weapons and use them. Their "special" button causes them to enter a simple grapple state, where they can bash or throw enemies.

Meanwhile the ninja Yagyu Ranzou can't pick up weapons but has a dedicated katana, and his "special" button causes him to do a teleport attack that can hit grounded enemies. So you can do combos with him that lead to a grounded state and then pick enemies off the ground with his teleport attack.

There's TONS of stuff like this, and I could go on and on.

The harder you make the game, the more money you beat out of enemies, and you exchange money at the end of runs for "tokens" which you can use to unlock new characters, stages, and artwork.

There are a lot of characters and what's super impressive is that none of them feel cut-and-pasted in. I assumed the boss characters would feel generic and stripped down, kinda like how it feels to play as Bebop & Rocksteady or Shredder in Shredder's Revenge.

That's not the case. Each of them has their own fully fleshed out moveset and characteristics. I just finished a Survival session as Linda, who wields a dagger and a whip. She's got good move speed and her dagger is used for fast up-close attacks. All her whip attacks use her special meter and give you insane range and crowd control potential.

If you get the game, make sure you head over to the gameplay options and disable the "Special KO" freeze and enable double-tap run. These features were evidently patched in and not present at launch, and I couldn't imagine playing this game without either feature.

Not a super long game, but it's extremely fun to play and the Survival mode and extra characters give it legs. A great time-killer game... oh and did I mention the music is superb? It's at least as good as the Shedder's Revenge OST.

Only downside I can really think of is a stage progression in the campaign where everything is dark except for your spotlighted character. Makes it hard to see which enemies are around you and is a bit brainless. But this is a small gripe.

The value you and enjoyment you'll get as a beat em' up fan is huge.

9/10

Great game if you are into beat em ups. Not too long but pretty challenging. 5 characters, 3 to start, and 2 are unlockable. They all have their own playstyles and quirks. For example the scythe ninja has a very fast crouch-walk, whereas the heavy grappler Haggar-esque archetype has rocket shoes he can use to boost back and forth. Each character has a bunch of special moves, and in a rare display of big-brain in this genre, they can all block by holding the attack button. Took me about two hours to beat the game on normal. I can definitely see myself going back to beat the game on hard after I unlock the next character.

Your first playthrough on normal unlocks hard, a new character, AND new music. The music is great, the SFX are great, and the attacks all feel good. This game would have been totally at home in arcades around 1992-1993. If you like beat em ups and enjoyed other recent genre greats like Fight N' Rage, Shredder's Revenge, or Streets of Rage 4, give this one a go.

This is a decently fun game but I can't recommend it. It is locked to 60FPS, so moving the camera around feels a little juddery if you are used to playing games at high refresh rates. The enemy AI is very primitive. If they see you, they start blasting or navigating around the level geometry like Pac-Man ghosts. I fundamentally don't like how your weapon inventory is handled, either. Basically you pick up dead enemies' weapons and they come with 1 extra mag. Kill more enemies, take their weapons. You can't just go in with your favorite gun and keep it the whole level. What this means is that you'll often be using guns you don't want. Later in the game, you can meet a nun character to limit the weapons the enemies spawn in with, which effectively limits the weapons you can use, but having it be two-sided like this is not fun.

For example, on a recent playthrough I limited the weapons to JUST the 9MM pistol. I got very far in my run because the enemies also use the pistol and it does bad damage compared to other weapons and isn't as accurate long range. Let's say you want to use an LMG or a shotgun on your playthrough... all the enemies will spawn in with these weapons and they will mow you down very quickly.

You can get upgrades from a bartender but they only last as long as your given session - I would have much preferred some sort of system where once you bought a perk it was always in your inventory and you could just roll with a set of like 3-5 of them. Also, many of the bartender upgrades aren't really upgrades. They're more like sidegrades or weird game modifiers.

And then of course, there's the artstyle. It's black and white and very basic. Finding fallen weapons can sometimes be a bit difficult because of the lack of color contrast. And while the game's style works for what it is, I quickly found it boring.

Conceptually, the game is good. And for the most part shooting feels alright. But I feel like the developer fumbled the ball with some obtuse design decisions. And the caveman-level AI ultimately makes the game feel sort of cheap as opposed to intelligently challenging.

As far as top down shooters on Steam go, you could do worse. But it is annoying knowing how good this game could be with a few different tweaks - uncapped framerate, more color in the art style, more interesting long-term progression, smarter AI, etc. As it stands I can't give OTXO more than a 6/10.

I don't understand all the b*tching about this game. If you enjoy CoH1 and you specifically enjoyed CoH1 multiplayer PVP, CoH3 is an EASY recommendation.

Out the gate we have four very diverse and unique factions, and they are filled to the brim with actual depth and choice. I'm 25 hours in right now and I'm still discovering new things about the US Forces alone.

The Battlegroups in CoH3 feel more reminiscent of the doctrines of CoH1 as opposed to the commanders of CoH2. The choices you make feel weighty and consequential. Choosing something will lock you out of another path, but the split-tree setup of the battlegroups means you always have two prize eggs to go after. The Battlegroups have personality and show that forethought went into them, unlike the CoH2 commanders, which often felt like piecemeal ideas and number tweaks stitched together to sell microtransactions.

Also like in CoH1, the game's pacing is even. Unlike CoH2, it's not just about late game heavy tank and artillery slogs. Intelligent and aggressive mid-game play matters. Fielding a light tank shock unit to force retreats and regain map control matters. Using barbed wire to cut off chokes, laying mines, and attacking cutoffs all matters. The resource and sector system is now back to how it was in CoH1, rewarding aggressive and risky plays to starve enemies of all the goodies they need to kill you.

In terms of presentation, the game looks good with all the settings maxed (keep in mind some of the most important settings CANNOT be tweaked during a match and must be tweaked in the main menu). Sure, it would benefit from raytracing, better ambient occlusion, and some tighter anti-aliasing. But all the unit models and cityscapes look excellent, high-rez and high-poly. Many of the uplift changes are subtle and lots of the complainers won't notice them. For example, if you tell an infantry squad to start moving one way and then abruptly make them shift to the opposite direction, you can see the soldiers' momentum and weight shift in their bodies. Every little piece of cover and every building can be destroyed in a totally bespoke fashion. It's all done with realtime physics whereas the previous games had scripted breakaway debris.

I have everything maxed out on a 3080ti, i9 10900k, 32GB RAM, Windows 11, and at the start of the match I'm getting 220ishFPS. Once more units hit the field this shifts to 160-120, and I don't know if I've ever seen the game drop under 110 or so. It's a very well-optimized release in terms of PC performance. This seems to have been a conscious decision, perhaps to orient CoH3 toward an e-sport footing, though it looks miles better than most bland, stripped-down e-sports offerings.

Admittedly, the sounds are on the whole are less bombastic than before, but they still sound excellent and realistic (I have heard it said that the first 2 games used more "Hollywood" sounds whereas the ones captured here are truer to the source).

Much to my surprise and delight, the voicelines of the factions HAVE PERSONALITY AGAIN. This was a huge part of CoH1's charm. You got to know the distinctive comments of the Pershing crew, the Riflemen, the Grenadiers, etc. They sounded like they were actually in a war and under stress when attacked. The Americans would make old-timey quips about how Jerry's gonna get it and Sherman crews would lament that "this tin can's a death trap!" IMMERSION. FUN. It was all there. The writers, voice actors, and sound engineers gave a damn.

That all went missing on a milk carton in CoH2. Maybe it was the stoic and cruel setting of the frosty Russian tundra that influenced this decision, or maybe THQ going defunct meant that the voice actors were paid with Sam's Club coupons, but the enthusiasm just was not there. It was a total phone-in, and I could not be happier that the CoH3 devs managed to rub the genie bottle one more time and recapture some of the magic that was lost for ten years.

Oh, and the online play has been smooth as butter, even though I (an American) am playing with UK teammates. Anyone who played CoH2 in the early days will remember how games would come to a screeching stutter-f*cking halt any time one player started lagging. The dreaded "waiting for player..." notification would appear as everyone's game froze and waited for the lagging player to resync. This no longer happens AT ALL. I've never once encountered any match latency. This is truly one of those games you can confidently play with friends in other countries without worry.

Is the game perfect? No. Still some bugs, still some stuff missing. Can't change player profile picture, replays are present but only with a command line workaround, some stats aren't showing up, there's no proper ranked automatch (even though ELO is accounted for under the hood), balance has some hiccups. But in the grand scheme of things, these are nitpicks. The devs focused on nailing the actual gameplay with the resources they had, and they achieved that.

I won't comment on the single player campaign as I really don't play single-player in RTS games except as a tutorial, and I already know how to play CoH. If you're hedging your bet on the single player campaigns, other reviewers will have more to offer you.

But what I can tell you is that if you value strategic depth, fun, immersion, and heart, this game's got it, naysayers be damned.

9/10