Recent reviews by .VSHD

One hundred percent useless now due to the recent update. Do not buy this.

Game isn't good and they're charging stupid amounts of money for content. I've been playing this since the closed alpha and it still feels like it hasn't moved beyond that. I'll give my full review soon.

Glad I got this on sale several years ago. It's not worth the $50 price tag.

I won't go into a full review since many other users have touched on the same issues I have with Leadwerks. I will highlight some things, however. I will say that it's powerful visually. But if you're an artist with little to no programming background (like me) you won't go beyond anything else but a semi-pretty looking environment. Which brings me to the cons:

- Visually on the level of PS3/Xbox 360 era graphics. This might be a pro for some.
- Very limited polygonal support. Do not look to create super detailed scenes or import high quality models.
- Model import feels convoluted even though the documentation makes it look easy.
- Limited base content. Leadwerks doesn't come with a lot of things out of the box. A few models, handful of textures and sounds. Which isn't a whole lot to work with.
- Lack of any concrete tutorials beyond the basic functionality and showing you how to script a door opening.
- Lack of further developer support. Leadwerks hasn't received a development update since April 2020.

Moving on to the pros:
+ Leadwerks is fast and allows for quick iteration.
+ Hammer style level editor (Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike) which I will always adore.
+/- If you're a programmer Leadwerks has full C++ support. However, you need to pay for this feature.

That being said. Leadwerks is kind of a hard engine to learn and it's in the arena with tough competition (Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine, and a handful of smaller game engines.) With its lack of tutorials, base content, and limited feature set I suggest to everyone that you pass this up until the developer comes back from the dead. Learn one of the game engines I mentioned above. You'll be better off with one of those.

EDIT:
Turns out the developers of Leadwerks have been working on a new game engine called Ultra Engine. Which is slated to be a Unity killer (good luck with that.) This is the final nail in the coffin for Leadwerks. Again, don't buy this, it's no longer getting support.

I wanted to give this game a try again after taking a long break from it. My experience follows:

- Not much has changed since my previous attempt at playing this. Even with the paid expansions, game is just as crappy as I remember it being.
- The community is just as bad as CSGO.
- Poorly optimized even after all these years of being out. There's no way in hell my computer's frame rate should be tanking. Specs below. This is absurd.
- Some of the dumbest mechanics ever. There's no reason why I should have to unequip a tool just to grab something off the ground. (This might be me being nit-picky but why is this even there?)
+ Sounds are great.
+ Taming Dinosaurs is fun.

Ryzen 5 3600XT 6-Core 3.8Ghz
AMD Radeon RX 6600 8gb VRAM
And 32gb of RAM.

I'll stick to Conan Exiles.

I normally don't write reviews for games but this one deserves my full thoughts.

First off, this is not an "Apex Legends" clone. Bloodhunt and Apex are two completely different entities all together. If we're going to call games clones, aren't all BR's just PUBG knock offs? No. Each BR has it's own style, mechanics, and ways to play. In my personal opinion, this is probably the best BR to come out in a while. Apex had its attractions for the first few months I played it. Now its become nothing but a sweat fest filled with try hards and nothing changes about it except its mediocre maps and a joke for a "team deathmatch" game mode. Apex and Bloodhunt are on opposite sides of the spectrum. The only thing cool about Apex in my opinion is the fact that it takes place in the Titanfall universe, that's about it.

Pros:
- The game runs really well with Ultra settings enabled on my older RX570 8gb GPU at 2k resolution.
- The sound effects are great! From rain hitting surfaces, the gun sounds, feeding. Everything just sounds so good to me.
- Gun play, and movement feel good. To me, this is the most important aspect in any shooter.
- There are six different archetypes of Vampire to choose from. Each of them with their own unique styles, visuals, and mechanics.
- The game's level has a lot of vertical nature to it as well as a lot of space to move around in, pretty decent sight lines for players who want to go at range. It also has a good collection of choke points and tight quarters for players who like close range engagements. It doesn't feel cluttered. Between looting, finding civilians to feed on, etc. There's always a good reason to go somewhere.
- The game does have missions and challenges where you get bonus experience for completing them.

- They've added bots to fill the empty void.
- Hackers are lessened. Very good work!

Cons:
- Bugs still exist. While not game breaking, they can be frustrating to deal with. But that's to be expected for an Early Access title.
- The developers seem to have embraced the idea of a Battle Pass. This isn't a huge con since the developers have families they need to feed as well. However, progressing through it needs to be a little faster.
- Sometimes the hit registration breaks in gun fights, giving your opponent the upper hand in some situations.
- Gun reloading I feel needs to be a little faster as well.

Other thoughts:
The game's anti cheat software has been called "Spyware" by a few reviewers. While I understand why they claim this, anti-cheat software is essential to make sure the amount of hackers are limited. I do not believe a developer of anti-cheat software has any interest in your personal information. These are only in place to prevent you from playing the game if they detect something fishy on your computer, that's all it logs. In our modern gaming world, this kind of thing is true with any anti-cheat software.

As the development of this game progresses, I will continue to review it. All in all, I think it's a wonderful addition to the BR genre with a few quirks. But hey, nothing is ever perfect even on full release. That being said, I do recommend this game to anyone interested in playing it. After all, it's free! So it give it a try!

EDIT, 21 hours later: I have reverted my rating and gave this a thumbs up because of the vast improvements this game received over the years of its life. I'm pretty impressed with the progress they've made. Even in these trying times with COVID and everything, the developers have managed to give us a consistent flow of patches, content updates, and a number of fixes. There are still some remaining issues that I covered in my previous review. But I am sure they will be addressed in due time. Great job, guys!

After close to seven hours of game play I feel it's time for a review. As much as I want to give this game a thumbs up. Since the December update I just can't. It went from great early access to a very poor full release, I'm not sure what happened there. Early Access shouldn't run better than full release.

First of all, let's start with the visuals:

For a game that's built with Unreal Engine 4, I'm not surprised that this game looks good. But in order for it to look good, you need to mess with poorly optimized settings. Even with my Ryzen 5 1500x/Radeon RX470 4gb VRAM Desktop, this game plays like garbage, even Arma III plays better than this and that's saying something. This is very unacceptable as people with modern hardware shouldn't be faced with this problem. We shouldn't have to turn our settings down to medium in order to have a passable experience.

Second, sounds:

Let me start by saying that this game sounds beautiful. The weapon sounds are very similar to their real world counterparts. Environmental audio, and explosion sound effects are top notch. Very good job here. Now for the bad... The voice acting, oh my god, the voice acting. What happened to the voice acting we had in the first Insurgency and Day of Infamy? First of all, the men sound alright I guess. But if anyone wants to play a female character... Be ready to want to rip your ears off, or wish you could never hear again. The actress they picked sounds like a smoker, with that whole "smoker's voice" going on. The overly dramatic squeaks, squeals, squawks, grunts, and groans are not necessary. While I understand the setting and the potential reasoning behind this, I think the voice actors could have shown more care with their work. The Insurgents sound like they took a kick to member and balls when they die going from hardened killer full of puberty back to prepubescent adolescent kid. Please, do something about this treacherous voice acting! I don't want to mute the game when I'm in the middle of a firefight.

Third, the game play:

The pacing is nice and tactical, the classic semi-realistic flavor Insurgency is known for. I'm really glad that they didn't let us down here. This game takes a lot of strategy and on the spot tough tactical decisions, I love this kind of thing. It's not a run and gun arcade shooter like COD or Battlefield. If you manage to find a server with an okay connection, the game's time to kill is super realistic, non-bullet sponge feature is amazing. If you find a bad server however, all of that changes and Sandstorm winds up being a glitch ridden mess with terrible hit detection, and massive lag spikes. When the lag finally clears...You find yourself dead even after expelling a full magazine into a target, unacceptable.

Additional problems and wrap up:

Invisible hands, invisible character models, map glitches where people can find their way inside the actual map itself and still be able to fire on you from inside the geometry, but you can't shoot back at them because the projectiles collide with the map itself, an unfair advantage here. I could name a few more but a lot of other reviews mention different issues.

Sandstorm boasts a lot of untapped potential, ridden with more than a handful game breaking bugs. In it's current state, I cannot recommend this game to anyone until they fix some of the issues I've listed here. Maybe in a few more months I'll revisit the game after some patches drop. From what it sounds like though, the majority of NWI are focused on bringing this to consoles. I would wait for an extreme discount or a major patch drop to fix this game up. I really do want to like it, right now it's nearly impossible to.

I do like this program because of it's simplicity, it's fun to use, and one of the reasons why I wish steam would have a middle thumb because this program has a lot of potential among Indies. I do hope that the next release, Spriter 2, comes with Game Maker support included.

The only thing that I don't like about it is the fact that it doesn't work with Game Maker Studio 2, which is a damn shame. One person did manage to make a runtime to allow this to be used with GMS1, not 2. Truly upsetting. Perhaps Unity would work with this, I have no idea but I may try that some day. For now, I can't really recommend this because it lacks support for Game Maker, one of the most popular 2d game creation programs which is odd that Brashmonkey didn't incorporate this.

Generic fighting, Arcade Edition is a lie... A trailer above says you get access to S1 and S2 characters for free, yet you still have to grind for fight money or pay real money to unlock them when they should have been there from the start, not too mention the lies about Arcade Edition being free to people who owned the original release. I have no idea why they chose to go this route when several other fighting games have their base cast in there and ready to play. I grinded fight money for a good while (maybe a week or more) just to unlock a single character... Not cool Capcom. Why do this when you had EVERYONE accessible in Street Fighter 4?

Graphics, sounds, and music are pretty good, it's just too bad everything else is lack luster, cash grabby, trash. When comparing this game to other fighting games I've played, this is much less engaging than Mortal Kombat X, Injustice 2, Tekken 7, Killer Instict, and King of Fighters. The combo system in this game has a very steep learning curve, I do not approve of this, and in order to pull anything substantial off, a hitbox seems to be needed and these things are damn expensive.

If Capcom plans on surviving the fighting game scene, they need to start taking lessons from much better fighting games where we as the people aren't charged for base cast characters, and crummy color changes for base costumes, fix network play, and tweak the game so it's friendlier to beginners. Being a fighting game veteran, it's ridiculous that the simplest of things are so hard to pull off. I used to love Street Fighter and how cool it was, but this one is very forgettable.

EDIT: Since the game's release and all of the changes now, forget almost everything I said above lol. The only gripes I have anymore is the netcode which still needs fixing and the fact that characters are still locked behind a paywall. After finding the right group of people to play with, one can have some serious fun with SFV. I would recommend getting it on sale.

After playing this game for 48 hours... With more time invested in it when I downloaded it from their website. I can say it's a good game....

A good game that's destroyed by a toxic community, Russian hackers, technical problems that still haven't been fixed throughout the game's five year life so far, and abusive admins....

Just a little while ago, I got into a conversation with one of the players of the game, talking about how great the game looked after the big .52 update that featured a new renderer, updating the game to more modern standards, something that should have been there year 2. I was joking about how the game looked like it had PS2 era graphics at first, before the update dropped. Admin Chandrain calls me out, claiming I had a bad memory about how PS2 era graphics looked, and that I was saying the game looked PS2 era which is very untrue, also claiming that I was arguing. The day the patch dropped, the very same admin was in chat during patch day, the person even thanked me for the compliment and said they were glad I was enjoying the game. Then Chandrian say things like that? Claims I have a bad memory? That's very laughable... I'm 31 years old, and lived through the NES, SNES, PS1, N64, PS2, Xbox, GC, SDC, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbox One era of consoles, I remember how each of their respective games looked, and know how to tell the difference between a bad looking game and a great looking game. I'm not the first person the admins abused after said people called out the game's issues, and things like that.

Rant aside, the game is great at it's core. With the hinted PvE mode being brought to the game in the form of Team Missions for now. It doesn't feel as pay to win as it did before, everything can be unlocked just by playing the game. Visuals are nice, sounds are nice, but there's still a lot of hit registry issues even on servers where the ping is normal 90ms range for me, levels that crash (London being the most notorious) and a number of game breaking issues from time to time.

Can I recommend this game?

As it stands, between all the issues mentioned above, and admins who don't seem to give a crap about their players...

No... Avoid this game if you don't want to be picked on by admins who clearly have a worse memory than you and don't understand humor, or the english language.

As an added bonus, the game still doesn't have ragdoll physics... A feature even Indie games have, games developed by teams who aren't as recognized as Vostok Games. I recall the PS2 era games having stiff deaths, so the era feels right as far as that's concerned.

I've disabled comments.

I need to say a few things about this game.

First of all, the first day I had it I played it for 14 hours straight as I couldn't get enough of it! On my first character, I grinded her from level 1 all the way to 37 and there's still a whole lot of stuff I need to do yet. Now on to the short review.

Pros:

This game is powered by Unreal Engine 4 so, visually, this game is pretty darn amazing. It's stylized and semi-low poly in a good way! The lighting, the models, the overall environments all compliment each other very well! I was playing it at a steady 60fps on an AMD Ryzen 5 1500x, 8 gigs of 2666 gaming memory, and an AMD RX470 4gb. The system requirements are quite low too, anyone with a modern to previous generation machine should run it with no problem as long as you have dedicated graphics.

Animations are nice and fluid, they each blend together from one move to next really well! I feel like the developers really took their time perfecting the animations in this game. Take it from someone who has used Unreal Engine 4, animations and their blending are pretty easy to do. Also, I studied martial arts and it feels like these animations were done by martial artists, that's how real they look and feel.

The sounds effects are great! I especially love the power of the impact sounds whenever you make contact with an opponent. Environment sounds are decent as well, from birds, water falls, and wind it's very natural sounding and I love that.

From a gameplay standpoint, using what they call a combat deck, you can modify the way your character fights. Each time you battle an NPC or player even and block their moves, you'll learn different moves at a steady pace. My character only knows a small collection of moves and as I said above, I'm still not done yet. Combat isn't too fast nor is it too slow, it's paced just right so just about anyone can get into it. You'll spend a lot of time dodging, regaining stamina, and trying to stay alive while you fight other NPCs and players. The game features a drop in, drop out multiplayer system, similar to Dark Souls. You're also given an option to switch into offline mode so it's just you and the world, so you don't need to deal with players if you don't want to.

Multiplayer has only two modes and I've only played 1 v 1 where you'r pitted against another player for three fights to the death. Again, the game is open multiplayer unless you choose otherwise, so often times you'll run into other players who want the same thing.

Cons:

There's not too many but here's a small list of what I didn't like.

First off, the story is a bit lackluster. You're thrown into a world where you aren't given much context at all. You start off getting chosen from a group of Prospects and are given a mission to prove yourself to the higher ups, fighting to the top and that's about the extent of it. You don't have a journal or quest log, there's absolutely no hand holding in this game. You're expected to know what to do when you first start. Granted, I don't see this as much of an issue, do some research on traditional martial arts :) and you'll see why it makes sense without context.

Multiplayer aspect is great and all but there will be times where you run into another player who just wants to fight without warning and they'll just start punching you. I found myself getting beat on by three people who were cooperating with each other, I stood no chance. This can get annoying, but it is what it is. I wouldn't recommend playing with Online Mode active unless you want to deal with higher level players. I'd say head on into the options and disable it at least until you got some good moves to build a deck with.

One final thing in the cons, sometimes the voice over for your character will go to the opposite sex, it's like the character went transgender during loading times lol. I did find a few bugs with some doors not allowing you to deactivate gate, that's fixed by quitting out and going back in.

All in all, I find this game to be a great experience! It's still early on in it's life and the developers have said that they will be adding more as time progresses.