Recent reviews by Vanidas

Haha, Fascism go brrrrr

The mechanics for all three factions seem extremely poorly thought-out, and CA decided to compensate by making them blatantly overpowered. I really enjoyed the Changeling's campaign at first, but he gets stale and repetitive after the first couple playthroughs. The other two are pretty boring from the get-go. Certainly wouldn't recommend this DLC for $25.

In the Forest sequel, they added young tribal children. Meaning, I can officially say...

"Not just the men... but the women, and the children, too!"
10/10, would Anakin again.

Fun fact: did you know that if you're caught reading reviews instead of buying this game, you can be declared legally insane?

But you wouldn't do something like that, would you?!?!

I don't understand why you're reading reviews instead of buying this game. You monster.

Gameplay is fun, game is broken. Go for a different RTS, you'll have a better time.

Interesting core concept, doesn't have enough substance in the execution to keep me interested.

Halo: Infinite has some great elements, but as a whole, it was incredibly disappointing. Both the gameplay and the story.

Starting with the story… The Banished were given an enormous amount of potential via HW2 and third-party content. But in Halo: Infinite, almost everything is dropped. The idea of Atriox trying to turn his band of rebels and mercenaries into a galactic superpower is dropped entirely, and their conflict with the Spirit of Fire is gone with no explanation. There are huge gaps in the story (not because of h5) that cause major issues. The Banished had some interesting ideas, but now all the characters associated with them are monologuing cliché villains with minimal depth. Watch Atriox’s introduction in HW2, then watch Escharum’s introduction in Infinite. There's a huge difference in quality. The damage to the Halo universe extends way beyond this. Every single faction, setting, conflict, and character (except the chief) we’re supposed to care about has been written out. It honestly sucks, I was invested in these ideas and wanted to see what the writers would do with them. Now it’s all gone, for no reason. There are countless additional issues I could go over, meanwhile the writers spend 3 conversations trying to explain that Zeta Halo was turned into a living thing for some reason. Nothing in this story makes any sense, and it all feels so lazy and disrespectful.

The gameplay also has major issues. Almost all the weapons and power abilities are extremely poorly designed. To name a couple… The Ravager is a grenade launcher with low damage and almost no explosive damage. The Shotgun trades half or more of its damage output for additional range (CQC is literally the point of the shotgun...) The Gravity Hammer’s lunge gets you next to your target, then hits you with an enormous delay in which you can be melee’d to death. The Shield Wall absorbs a couple shots and then that segment breaks. On top this, the Cloak and Grapple hook break the game. I’m seeing people use cloak to stroll right through the middle of an active firefight with no repercussions. It’s not supposed to be foolproof. It’s not fun losing that neat vehicle or weapon you found to an enemy you can’t see or fight. The Grapple Hook has the same issue, you can use it to board something with a massive distance between the two targets, and I’m not even sure there’s a way to counter this. Basically, every single weapon and power-up is either useless, or simply takes away the fun from other players, which is not something I can say for any Halo game to this extent.

The art style is also a big problem. It’s nice to see Chief and the Elites getting their classic designs back, but everything else has issues. A lot of the weapons and armor look really blocky, out of place, and poorly textured, even after the updates since the Tech Preview. On top of this, 343 seems to mistake quality for quantity by cramming tons of particle effects onto the screen for no reason. It actually feels irritating to get kills, not only because there’s tons of visual noise when doing so, but because the kill sound is like 3 different sound effects spliced together. How am I supposed to enjoy the gameplay when it’s constantly throwing crap on the screen to distract me? This is something people have criticized H4 and 5 for, so I know I’m not alone in this.

I could go on like this for much longer, but you get my point. The core elements of the gameplay are really poorly designed, and many of the positives are incredibly minor elements that don’t have much impact on the game. The story is extremely incoherent with major gaps and dialogue that makes no sense, and drops all the potential established by prior stories, or third-party content. I can excuse a lot of this, but 343 has had twice the amount of time and has produced an extremely poor-quality product with less content, that compounds countless issues from previous games. I’m sure a dedicated team of experienced developers could fix this, but… it’s 343.

This game is genuinely great at its core, but unfortunately, it’s been mismanaged into the ground.

There are still multitudes of bugs, graphical errors, and performance issues that’ve been present in Warhammer 3 since launch. Some gamemodes have even been outright unplayable for me. Patches are extremely slow and the last few caused significantly more problems than they solved.

The AI in this game is some of the worst I've ever seen, and the devs compensate by giving them blatant cheats and an absolutely deranged level of anti-player bias. Some campaigns, I’ve had 5 factions at war with me sending 2-4 stacks each into my home province within the first 10-15 turns. Yes, really.

CA's also going through an annoying period where they're raising prices on DLC by 150% while also giving us noticeably less content. Meanwhile, they've gone radio-silent except to release a really bizarre and tone-deaf statement essentially saying, "Stop complaining, this is the way it's going to be for the foreseeable future." Additionally, it's been almost impossible to get them to acknowledge major issues.

I really hope this game gets the proper care it needs to recover, but CA seems hell-bent on wasting the goodwill they earned from Warhammer 2. Check back in 2-3 years, hopefully it'll be worth the money then.

Edit: CA is currently going to war with their own forums and mass-banning people for making jokes or criticizing the game. I retract the above statement, Warhammer 3 and CA aren't worth your time.

This game is a meme, and now I understand why.

You can, too.