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It is a good kind of expansion which adds a lot more content and expands base game without rocking the boat. It expands and improves base game even if it leaves some flawed aspects of this game unaddressed.

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This expansion is like a breath of fresh air. It adds a lot of content for a small price. Most importantly, it adds variety to the game with more varied maps and void items which is an additional layer of complexity which you have to consider. It mixes things up, it adds more complexity and replayability. To me it made already great game even better.

Expansion adds a lot of new items. Greater variety adds more complexity and makes game less repetitive. What is most interesting are void items. These items are interwoven to a game in a very interesting way. There are places where two realities meet and you have to close a rift into other reality. This leaves items out of other world yours for the taking. There are also more ordinary pods which also spawn few small and fast bugs. They can attack you or to buff or turn your own summons against you.

Void items are the most interesting as they transform your traditional items to void versions of them. It changes how they function and there is always a trade off between one or another. The only issue which I have with them is that during gameplay, they get repetitive pretty quickly. Few more of them are needed. Of course, as with all new content, balance is a main concern when it comes longevity and health of new content.

Additional maps are very much needed. In a repetitive game, variety is the key. Especially when progression is tiered. There are Tier 1 maps, Tier 2 maps, etc. Maps which only show up at certain stages during your progression. Additional maps add new life to the game.

Siphoned Forest
• It is a great change in scenery and mood. Previously game was dominated by wet, closed up jungles or swamps. There were few more open maps. I do enjoy how open this map is as they are my favourite types of maps. Change of scenery to winter is also welcomed. I do enjoy open, white fields.
  
  Sulfur Pools
  
• I do enjoy this planet quite a bit. It is open with some tunnels. It has a nice sulphur colour in its soil. There are nice pools of possibly sulphur in its islands. It is easy to navigate map. It looks alien and it adds refreshing scenery to the map rotation.
  
  Aphelian Sanctuary
  
• It is my least favourite map. It is similar to Scorched Acres in its architecture. What I dislike most about them are oversized buildings with forced paths. Without character which is not concerned about trivial terrain features like Pause or Mercenary, you will be forced slowly going around buildings with a character with questionable mobility options. Architecture is not pretty, terrain is hard to traverse. It is like Abyssal Depths or Sundered Grove. Difficult to memorise, difficult to traverse, difficult to look for teleport gates, overly punishes low mobility characters with no dashes or teleports.

Game adds two new survivors. One is locked while another is available right out of the gate. They feel fresh and feel unique additions to the game.

Rail Gunner
• Risk of Rains is rightly criticised for not being a difficult game. Most of difficulty comes initially from steep learning curve of figuring what you are supposed to do. When you do figure it out, game simply can't offer you any challenge anymore and it tries to kill you with one-shot abilities. Rail Gunner feels like survivor made for those people. Her kit so far requires most skill from all survivors to play well. She is built around being able to aim with her sniper rifle and hit weakpoints of the enemies. At first it might look simple, weakpoints are huge, rifle hit box is generous. However, soon you will be landing these shots while being under attack, jumping in the air against small and manoeuvring lizards. Her kit is all about sniping and you can do insane damage from a massive range. She feels great to play, especially with lunar item which doubles your damage.
  
  Void Fiend
  
• This character is all about balancing states in which you happen to be. Less skilful players will go out of one state into another uncontrollably. However, knowing when to enter into void state is important as it is your primary damage state. Enter too soon and you will waste damage which you needed to spend on toughest enemies. Keep pressing your high damage buttons, you will leave your void state when you need damage the most. It is quite skilful character which is based around state and health balancing. While being survivor, you can sacrifice void build up for additional health which is a massive early game advantage. While in the void state, you are sacrificing survivability for more damage as you cannibalise your own health pool for more power. It is one of more advanced characters in this game as it is more difficult to master its interplay between various abilities.

Simulacrum is a new wave based survival mode where you are fighting against increasingly powerful enemy waves. It is done really well. It has a generous safe bubble in which you have to survive. Then there are various loot crates outside that bubble. Being outside, you take increasingly more damage. This creates a dilemma, risk going for far away chests in order to get more loot or not? Then during mid wave, your shield generation will move into another place, allowing you to go hunting various chests. This mixes up monotony and makes mid section very exciting.

However, I do dislike how tedious this game mode is. You will be easily playing for an entire hour as start to this game mode is very slow. Afterwards, you will scale out of proportion as your enemies and the only way for you to die is to an instant death from an invisible enemy. In other words, it is the worst of Risk of Rain 2. Instant death abilities from God knows where. It is an interesting game mode to try it out, however, it is not quite there being actually good to play. It takes way too damn long to scale up and then you are just there, being unable to die while enemies pose you no threat.

While I do think that this DLC was a gust of fresh air to this game, I'm disappointed that it did not addressed key issues within the game.

Balance of drones
• Balance of various drones is a long term issue in this game. They simply do not scale well. They are expensive, they do not do a lot of damage and their usefulness is situational. Most importantly, in a game all about the scaling, you cannot repurchase them when they die. They crash and they might be destroyed or might not appear in your map in a way which is obvious that your drone was destroyed and you can re-buy it. This game needs to do more about balancing scalability and usability of their drones.
  
  Terrible end boss
  
• The end boss is still terrible. I'm glad that they put new boss, but it is so out of the way and hidden that most players won't even find it. They had a golden opportunity to make a better end game boss and put current one as optional. However, they chose not to do so which leaves a final environment one massively frustrating part of this game. I prefer to obliterate myself each time than to face that bullet spongy, instant killing, bullet hell nonsense of a boss.

It is a slightly better version of a prologue We Were Here. Quests are little better, game is a little longer, but besides that there is not much more to it. Bugs which plagued early versions seem to be patched out as we did not encountered any problems in our three playthroughs of a game. It is good puzzle co-op game which often goes dirt cheap during sales too.


Outside of being competently made, cheap co-op puzzle game, there isn't much to talk about. This game won't wow you with its puzzles, graphics, sounds, level design or anything else. It is just here to have some fun with your friend at a low price. This is all that it is and what it needs to be. This is why I will focus in this review on several key negative things in this game.

Simplistic puzzle design
• This game has simple puzzles who rely too much on just relying the information rather than thinking together. It is just few types of puzzles in different environments. The whole game consist of these puzzles:
  
  • First room (Match symbols + hidden symbols)
    
  • Second room (Say the order + Say the order + Match symbols + Say the order)
    
  • Third room (Match portraits + Tell input)
    
  • Fourth room (Say the direction)
    
  • Fifth room (Match symbols)
    
  • Sixth room (Press a button)
  
  Do you see a problem here? In this whole game there are 4 Matching puzzles, 4 Ordering puzzles and 2 trivial puzzles with next to none challenge to players. When you will be playing We Were Here and We Were Here Too games you will be essentially playing just two puzzles over and over again. While all puzzle games have to have consistency like Portal or Magus Opus, they do increase variety and complexity as time goes by. In this game complexity never goes up. Sometimes there is an arbitrary timer which never goes well in a puzzle game. Game is rather stale with its puzzle design, short in length and is not challenging. However, due to how cheap and short this game is, these issues never start becoming an issue.
  
  Useless radio
  
• I would question entire use of an radio in this game as people who play co-op games are very likely to have something a lot better already like Discord voice chat. Radio tend to mess up other voice chats and is never really used. Radios should be a feature which you could disable all together as they do not add anything of value. It is not like you have limited time to communicate, batteries which would run low, etc. It is just strictly inferior alternative to voice chat programs.
  
  Disappointing ending
  
• There are two endings. One is where one of you leaves the castle which is fun and exciting when you realise it being there. Another ending however is incredibly lame. After you go throughout all the trouble of finding secret levers and you escape together only to get a cutscene where one of your dum dum friends just go right back to the haunted castle filled with deathtraps. Just why? What does it reveal? What you are going to do with this ending? What are motivations of a character? You just feel cheated of a proper ending to a game after doing everything right.

It is a short puzzle game with repetitive and easy puzzles which does not overstays its welcome. It has plenty of things which are rough around the edges like poor alternative ending, useless radios or models glitching light through them. However, you can try a free version which is very similar game to this one. We Were Here Too also frequently goes on deep sales and you could pick it up this game next to nothing. At a full price this game is little bit on the expensive side if you do not plan to change roles and replay this game at least once.

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Dead Money is an average Fallout New Vegas DLC. It is not abysmal as Old World Blues is, but it is not amazing like Honest Hearts are. It has many great ideas, gathering your crew, surviving in a hostile environment without your gear. Sadly, it is held back by poor implementation of those ideas.

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Dead Money could best be described as a very mixed experience. All the new mechanics which game introduces fall short and are either pointless, annoying or just plain bad. However, writing of characters are top of the line for Obsidian studios. Gameplay of this DLC is terrible, environments are boring, but characters are great.

Writing in this game is a mixed bag. At one hand, characters are well written, their interaction and story in general is interesting. On another hand, it is full of plot holes and inconsistencies where you can change character's pre-disposition with a skill check. In the end, I came satisfied with the story as it has many interesting things going on.

Story
• While story is interesting, breaking into long abandoned casino, I could not help, but notice plothole after plothole. Here is a nice little list of what to expect:
  
  1. God without a bomb collar threatens to break you and avoid dying himself.
     
     
  2. Christine being continuously operated upon does not go insane. She has extensive brain damage and can't even write. Her brain lost ability to form sentences during surgery, but she can be fixed right up by next auto doc. Not only that, just by replacing her vocal cords (they had Veronika's local cords in stock even after 200 years), our character can immediately talk with damaged brain which prevents her from forming any sentences...
     
     
  3. Villa automatically transferred inhabitants, but Don had a plan for Christine. They also had set up their own plans in motion which does goes directly with unexplained statement that Casino itself had scattered the crew upon entrance.
     
     
  4. Father Elijah counters your arguments and has no reason to enter the chamber himself, but does it anyways in most dialogue options. He also is not shown as obsessed nor thinks his plans through which stands in direct contradiction to what game was telling about him for most of the DLC.
     
     
  5. Don casually threatens to kill you with bunch of explosives when he is sitting right next to you and then later cries how you are "mean to him" in later dialogue.
     
     
  6. Don and Veronika have a massive plot hole. Veronika was shown in an audio log to be intimidated by Don to do this robbery. However, Veronika is a mistress of owner of a casino. He had built this whole place for her, but she did not loved him for some reason. However, Don threatens to send her back to her home village with nothing. This is pure nonsense, because she virtually owns the whole casino and the town nearby and does not depend on Don in any way. Her motivations are not developed at all and do not make any sense.
     
     
  7. You are constantly blamed for your non-existent greed in this game. Elajah talks like you came here to rob, to bask in wealth beyond measure. Game tries to portray that your greed had killed you. However, radio signal never talks about any wealth. It talks about a possibility to retire in an expensive villa.

The cast for this game was genuinely interesting and unique. I only wish there was more interactions with them as I did not that there was sufficient payoff with them. They all are destined to play out what was created for them regardless.

Don Domino
• In my play-through, I managed to make an enemy of him. However, characters have a nasty habit of threatening you for no good reason. I did not found him too interesting, because he was acting irrationally. He knows about bomb collars, however he sets a chair full of explosives right next to him. He starts our initial dialogue by threatening me and right after that we are best pals again. It is bi-polar writing which does not make much sense. Game says how he is behind original events here and he got stuck pursuing his obsession in breaking into vault. However, war had happened over 200 years ago. He is now supposed to be over 250 years old. Fallout in general seems to be unable to make its mind about timelines as characters casually talk about their life before the war, but world is set few generations after nuclear exchange.
  
  Christine
  
• She was very annoying character. As a Mute you could barely follow her. Realistically you could understand her only from Courier interactions which you needed considerable stats for.
  
  When she regained her voice, she was incredibly generic and did not had much to say either. Her whole revenge arc is unfinished. If you let her to have her revenge, she simply dies searching for Elajah. The very same she planned to ambush via the only route to the vault and Elajah came to me through that route. It is one massive plot hole which is never explained. Developers really should had allowed for her to deal with Elajah, allowing you to take all the gold. However, then whole concept falls apart. This is a prime example how game story falls apart when you start thinking about it.
  
  Dog/God
  
• Clearly the best character out of them all and community favourite for a good reason. He his a bi-polar disorder, however instead of personalities, his personalities are split by brain activity. When Dog is around, his frontal lobe shuts down. When God is around, he struggles with muscular control, empathy. However, none of this is explained in game, but character shifts are extreme like that. These are not only different personalities, but different people as one is good at fighting while another is good at thinking.
  
  He gives you interesting glimpses into the story. That this was done before and from Dog you get to know what Father Elijah was up to. I find it interesting that you can get most out of most looked down upon character. Character which is so incompetent that he does not need collar to be controlled. I did not had much time with God. However, I did liked where his character arc was going. It was a struggle between these two. Throughout whole DLC Dog is defined by God. He etches his name to enforce his identity. He harms himself to keep God away. Dog is a primal, base instincts of an individual. He is honest, kindhearted. It takes little to be nice to the Dog.
  
  However, as story progresses God is a lot easier to use for finishing quests. His story culminates with him trying to convince Dog that he is here to help, to guide him, to keep him safe. Dog on the other hand is sick of it all. He tries to kill himself and voice inside of him, because he lost will to live. You can confront them and help them out. This character and how it developed made the most interesting character in this DLC and I liked him probably more than any other character in New Vegas.

This is where it all starts falling apart. While story is better than it might appear from my review, combat is one giant, failed experiment.

Speakers
• The one thing they tried to do which is original and it is the one thing which everyone hates about this game. Speaker mechanic is absolutely horrible. It does nothing, but frustrate the player and slow down game's progress. Usually you have to destroy the speaker which you do not see. Later into this DLC, speakers are actually hidden. So, you have to go in and hope to god that you will see it, because you can't go back. You can hope to run through the zone, but next invisible speaker will blow you up. It is just an extremely frustrating mechanic which was not thought out or even worked out properly. It is more of a gimmick than something which enriches gameplay experience. It has no purpose of being here. It does not lock certain areas. It does not prevent from exploring. It does very little outside of being an annoying obstacle.
  
  Ghost people bullet sponges who never raise up
  
• Game made a big deal how dangerous Ghost people are. How they are impossible to deal with. How they will rise up. How there is a horde waiting just around the corner. So you better preserve your ammunition and sneak around.
  
  All of this is an absolute nonsense. Not once I saw Ghost to raise from the dead. They are supposed to be invincible to your attacks and you can only keep them down for short. Well, except if Dog eats them. Also, except if you blow them up. Also, you can use melee. Oh, you can shoot them with lasers. Don't forget bullets! If you shoot them anywhere, but torso. Developers had an interesting idea, but they had no balls to implement it.
  
  As you can see, whole point of Ghost People is made pointless. Developers were so afraid that players will struggle that they made them pointless. Or they did not had any vision for them in a first place and made them giant, resurrecting bullet sponges as they are. Except, they added every way you can attack them as a counter to their resurrecting ability.

There are few more issues with this game. The issue is that it set itself up as some sort of survival gameplay, but forgets about it the moment you are set on your first mission.

Wanna Be Survival Game
• Game makes a huge deal about surviving, preserving your resources and avoiding conflict. Game strips you of any items which makes game more interesting as you have to slowly acquire your resources. That however does not last more than half an hour in total. You will soon be overflowing with resources and from mid-game you will have end game weapons and more ammunition than you know what to do with it. Whole survival aspect in this game is non-existent, however game makes a big deal about it.
  
  Monotonic and boring Villa
  
• The whole Villa area is just bad. It is made up from identical streets with partly ruined buildings. It has brown, reddish filter on everything. Everything looks just as horrible and nothing is distinct. Even Mojave desert is more full of colour and variety than this city and I speak about plain desert, wasteland and nothing more. That is truly an achievement in making most boring and painful levels through whole series. The cherry on cake is that level design prevents any real sneaking. You are often face to face in a tight corridor with ghost people. You can't sneak past them and are forced to fight them. So much from keeping low profile, eh?

I had managed to complete the last encounter with luck and run straight to the exit. I never managed to do it again. I imagine it could be frustrating experience, but for me it ended on a sweet note. The whole experience is rather mixed experience. It is certainly not the worse thing you could play, Old World Blues is even worse, but it might be slightly worse than Lonesome Road and significantly inferior to Honest Hearts.

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An average filler content. It is not bad per say, but it is neither good. World would not miss much if it would not exist.

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Lonesome Road is a mixed bag for me. It is not aggressively bad as Deep World Blues are. Nor it tries and fails to do something unique like Dead Money does. This is DLC which balances between as many bad things as there are good ones. I could say that level design is bad, however it does contain iconic new enemies to fight. I could say that writing is bad, but it goes somewhere interesting in the end. DLC as a whole is not a great one, but you can see talent and hard work of developers carrying through here, making this an acceptable if forgettable experience.

Big nukes go puff
• Nuke detonation in this game could be a lot better. For one, they do not have that much of a splash radius, no radiation. It is just a big boom which sometimes fails to even wipe enemies who are nearby. However, by Fallout New Vegas standard, explosion is impressive and interaction is interesting. I did liked detonating nukes which gave this rather dull experience of slogging through THE DIVIDE more enjoyable.
  
  Marked Men
  
• They were rather interesting. They are ghouls, previously soldiers turned into ghouls and now they form their own hard-core survival group/private military. They are well armed, equipped and trained. I would like to see more of them. Another faction made out of heavily militarised ghouls. You could write about discrimination which pushes ghouls into supporting this faction. You could write a good, tragic backstory for them. They do fit Fallout series rather well. It is just unfortunate that from gameplay perspective they are nothing more than rather tedious bullet sponges. When it comes to story they are "the bad guy" who is just here, does nothing, has no motivation, but they are certainly evil. Why? I do not know, I shot first, they shot back. Thus they must be evil! They are represented in the story with just as much explanation and care as I gave to you.
  
  Tunnellers
  
• These could be very interesting enemies. Their models are amazing. They look very distinct. They can have unique strengths like ambushing players with swarms appearing at any moment out of nowhere. Just like Cascadors being incredibly fast, hard to hit and having a nasty poison. Or like Deathclaws being these massive, towering giants. These little guys could look awesome with modern lighting technologies and properly done behaviour. Though, I'm dreaming here. Developers are too lazy to properly code in enemy behaviour these days.

Thinking back, I would not want to play it again. Story is amateurish, levels are lazily done, enemies are as cheap as they can get. For every thing I remember fondly, there are three things which I disliked about this experience.

Rambling story
• Story of the Lonesome Road is just bad. It falls under many trappings of sub-par stories. It is vague. There is barely any story going on. Barely any explanation. However, that does not stop writer from writing a lot of text. Most of it are vague accusations, descriptions. It tries to present an information never going into any detail.
  
  Story also does not make much sense. It presents "The Couriers" as an all powerful organisation who decide fates of communities and nations. It says that couriers create cities and it is only because of them they grow. It presents your job as some deep spiritual journey, you do what you do not to earn some money, but because you feel something deep down inside which attracts to this place. Your personal inner turmoil can destroy entire regions like with Courier nuking the Divide. This is also when I struggle to explain what precisely had happened, because game never really explains anything, besides accusing you of of destroying communities before hand. How? When? It is like story to a game which does not exist and another courier just assumes we played it.
  
  Another aspect is that game even does not do its sandbox correctly. I wanted to be as neutral to positive as I can with NCR and Legion. I was in my game right before final quest. I had killed Mr.House and installed Yes Man. However, this DLC does not account for that. It just sees that I have positive relationship with NCR despite not working for them and then throughout entire DLC another courier talks with me like "I stand with the bear".
  
  Lonesome Road has a very lazily done writing which nobody remember.
  
  Corridor level design
  
• Even if this DLC is called "A Lonesome Road" it is no excuse designing your maps as corridors. This DLC has one of the worst environments out of all New Vegas series. Only Dead Money has comparatively terrible level design. There is so little to say about it. You go in a straight line. Gather tons of loot. The biggest sight you are going to see are destroyed buildings, roads. That is it. It is a long, tedious and very boring journey. It feels lazy. Why developers had added corridor level design and made it so bad that you have no option for stealth in an open world game which is supposed to allow you various playstyles? Levels, environment in this DLC is very badly done.
  
  Honest Hearts have an amazing level design. Open world, but focused. Canyons, but beautiful with many sights to see. Map has plenty of secrets and environmental objects which tells its own story. This is how good map design looks like. Lonesome Road has none of this.
  
  The Lonesome Road is lonesome
  
• In this DLC you won't be interacting with anyone. You will get occasional monologues from your colleague. You might count ED-E as conversations, but robot can't say anything. It just plays recordings of its past. You know what is far more interesting than a story of some random robot? Audio-logs! You know, ones which we used to get who tells the story of a world around you. While lack of story telling fits the title of Lonesome Road. However, being bored to death with dry and dull world is not exactly why people turn on their games. They want to be entertained, not bored to death.
  
  Cheap tricks to kill a player
  
• This DLC sadly relies on too much cheap tricks. It loves placing few Deathclaws just around the corner in a way you can't sneak past. It loves spawning massive Deathclaws out of nowhere. It loves forcing you to go through hordes of enemies hidden by a hill. This game absolutely loves its cheap tricks and will try to kill you out of nowhere.
  
  Over-tuned enemies
  
• In the end, this DLC plays really badly. All enemies and weaponary are over-tuned. Every enemy has high-tech weaponary. It makes you wonder, what Brotherhood of Steel is supposedly doing by hoarding all the advanced tech for themselves while a random group of ex-soldiers are all equipped better than pre-war military. How they maintain their advanced weaponary? Why they have so many of it?
  
  In the end, you are left to fight bullet spongy enemies. Having a missile launcher which is so advanced that it fires missiles like an automatic rifle is cool only until you understand that enemies are so incredibly spongy that they will need more rockets to kill than it takes bullet to kill most starting enemies in Fallout New Vegas.

The Lonesome Road is not terrible, but former quality is simply not there. It is a lazily done experience. The whole DLC story is done by amateur. Levels are thrown by modders. It is just one giant corridor and that is it. Enemies are being spawned on top of your head or countless high level foes being deliberately placed on a random corned to instant kill you. This whole experience seems like it was rushed, developers lacked passion and in the end, I was happy to be done with it. I recommend playing it together with Dead Money only if you are desperate for more content. Only Honest Hearts is an actually good Fallout New Vegas DLC.

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Space Hulk has an amazing potential to be tense, horror game where you and your squad of terminators are clearing abandoned space hulk. With all the heavy armor and firepower you go through abandoned derelict only to be ambushed by a swarm. By turning a corner. By one jumping out of the vents. By opening doors an encountering an army. Game could be intense, on an edge where sound effects and dynamic AI would try to catch you off guard. This is what Space Hulk promises to be, but in reality it is just bland Left 4 Dead clone. You walk down the narrow corridors and occasionally game spawns a horde of bullet spongy enemies who surround you and slowly whittle down your HP.


Game itself is very repetitive and you will see everything there is to see in first few hours. There are humanoid type enemies. There is only one type of them with three variations. There are genestealer type enemies with one common type, one more stronger type with range attacks, one exploding enemy type and that is it. Later they will get reskined, but will function identically in a same way. Ultimately there are tank type bosses which are just bullet sponges which either get stun locked with specialised guns or are DPS check if you did not pick direct counter to them.

Limited number of squadmates
• The first issue is that in this game you have very limited amount of squad-mates. Two in total where game is designed with four people in mind. Even in single-player, game is nigh unplayable, because there is simply not enough of you to deal with amount of enemies are out there even if AI would be competent. This absolutely guts any solo experience which this game has.
  
  All powerful main character and pointless customisation of your squad-members
  
• In a solo mode, you are all powerful class with best of everything. You can equip any weapon and supplement your weaponary with vast arrays of psychic powers which are merely activatable abilities on cooldown. It would be fine, but your squadmates has a zero customisation options themselves. Your Apothecary has only one viable build if it wants to keep its heal available which is essential ability. Your Gunner has few specialised weapons, but AI is too bad to use any of them. Plasma Cannon has splash radius and it seems to end up killing him quicker than without it. Assault Cannon needs sustained fire and has spin up time. AI can't properly handle anything more complex than a Bolter which seems to be even better for its quick response time. This leaves your Gunner class using only Bolter until you unlock Hammer&Shield combination and discover how broken it is. It does not have any animation, it just kills enemies around your squad-member and gives it immense resistance bonuses. Since AI is questionable at holding enemies at range with firearms, it is the best weapon in the game after which you won't be using anything else on him.
  
  Pointless upgrade tree
  
• Upgrade tree is boring and particularly bad. One branch focuses exclusively on unlocking useless perks and upgrades. It for some reason thinks that hacking time is important and one tree branch focuses on getting better at hacking. Hacking in this game is barely useful and used only to destroy turrets without line of sight. Otherwise, you fire a round or two at them and they get destroyed. Other branches are not all that much better. Psychic branch just adds abilities which make others obsolete. Infantry branch just adds random upgrades to your squad-members mixed with occasionally useless upgrade.
  
  Broken difficulty curve
  
• Game was incredibly hard in first two or three levels. and the difficulty just nose dived. I'm not sure why, maybe I learned to work over game limitations. However, I do think that the issue was with broken objectives. Earlier in a game you often had to kill enemy nests or you would awaken genestealer nests. This would mean areas which are programmed to constantly spawn massive quantities of enemies on top of your constant stream of foes. You had to know if you reached the objective, the best way to complete it is just to rush doing the objective ignoring all the enemies. Otherwise, they will just keep on coming. Some areas get locked with never ending stream of foes without game telling that you must move out of objective area. Game is very rough around the edges. Then at the end, game is supposed to be hard, because it spawns special enemies. The issue with it that the biggest tanks can get stun locked with rapid firing plasma cannons which makes them harmless. Psykers can be one shotted and they are mostly attrition based enemies. Often they will bug out and will fire you while themselves stuck in walls or otherwise impossible for you to detect them. Then you will just continuously lose health until your squad will move out of your existing area.

Scalability and AI are particularly bad in this title which makes gameplay without 4 people or single player gameplay on anything other than an easy difficulty - virtually impossible.

Artificial Intelligence
• Artificial intelligence in this game is abysmal. It requires a tight coordination, but you have no tools to set up your squadmates to do anything. If game could put some rules for AI to follow like "Watch my six" and AI could always keep its watch there, game would be a lot easier. As it stands now, AI just kind of derps around.
  
  Scalability
  
• Game is also missing proper scalability. You can't have bots in singe player. Only 2 out of 3 bots are available. Game however does not scale with number of players/bots present. In multiplayer you can't have any bots which makes playing game with anything less than 4 players as a giant handicap. Especially when game throws DPS check enemies at you which essentially just stops your progress if there aren't any experienced players to counter them with plasma cannon.

This game was designed around the multiplayer, but co-op experience is absolutely horrible.

Constant disconnects
• The first issue is that networking is absolutely horrible. All servers are 9999 ping. Even when I tried to play with my friends, we still could not complete even a single round without constant disconnects. Game has no lobby system to keep match going and allow players to reconnect. If host is disconnected, everything dies and everyone go home without any rewards. Multiplayer is unplayable in this game.
  
  No scaling for lack of players
  
• Another cardinal sin is that there are no bots and game does not scale. If you do not have 4 players, you can't complete the game, period. Even if you could complete a match without a disconnect, difficulty of a game would make it nearly impossible to complete campaign on your own.

...There are only mediocre, half baked Warhammer games. This seems to be the trend with series. For every fantastic or good Warhammer game, there are three painfully mediocre games and ten cash grabs. This game falls into a painfully mediocre game, because it shows that developer cared about the game and put in some effort. It is just that game is either unpolished or incompetently done that you can't play it. Multiplayer is virtually unplayable, because of constant disconnects. Single player is virtually unplayable on anything else than easy, because of terrible bots and lack of third bot in a game designed for four player. The only thing that saves this game is level design and atmosphere which are good in this game. However, game itself is exceedingly mediocre and I'm being generous here as it could be easily declared as non-functioning.

https://youtu.be/P87BvEVlZCY
https://youtu.be/rOQif4M-wtk

---

Honest Hearts presents down to Earth Fallout expansion. Environment is beautiful and proves that developer knows how to make something more than wastelands. It actually introduces rain effects missing into the main game through modding and features simple, but effective story line.

---

Game spends effort in setting up this DLC to feel more like an organic part of this world. You are going through Mojave and you hear a radio call, advertising job of convoy guard. You are being accepted, because you have that fancy pip boy on your arm. You converse with people in a cave and can have hilarious dialogue with one show off and how he is trying to bullshit you with stories he makes up on a spot. After initial set up, you prepare your luggage as light as it has to be and then you head out. Game loads and you appear at the canyon only to be soon ambushed with your colleagues all dying in an ambush. From there you are met with a local which guides you to their leader. NPC tells you when you are going the wrong way. There are close call with a bear. Eventually you reach Graham and he gives you a short introduction to a situation there.

While Old World Blues were rambling, inconsistent and its humour was forced. Story telling in this one is the opposite. It is down to the point and plot is explained from moment to moment rather than everything being told you at the start. It is a work towards a tangible goal - evacuation which later is changed to war. This is a quick questline with few side quests. Through it you decide the fate of two tribes and decide Graham's fight with his own internal demons.

The Good and the Bad
• I did liked how developers took their time and effort to create believable savage tribes. How only few members knew how to communicate with us. I did missed more characterisation from a rival tribe. What was the whole purpose of our contest. Caesar influence was half-heartedly thrown in as an influence, but it was never developed further. Rival tribes are left unexplored and DLC is light on content as a whole. It had built this amazing map, but if you just do the main quest, you find out that there are only few quests, concentrated in one side of a map to do. You complete it quickly and are on your way just as quickly. Even final battle is left incomplete. You have to move through half of an entire map for no reason when battle is already happening in a canyon. Then you just go through cave to cave with your and enemy tribes mixed from an area to an area. There is rarely active fighting present. It all feels as half finished.
  
  What needed to be done
  
• Outside of pouring more love to this DLC, there isn't much that could be done. It is a short addition to the main story. Nature of DLC prevents from it being a properly developed experience. You could create more side quests. Original idea of drug induced hallucinations was first seen here and later done again in Far Cry series. However, there is an distinct lack of such side quests. Nor there are any efforts to try and to know your enemy through quests or to give player an option. Imagine how cool it would had been if Legion affiliated player could kill Graham, bring back his head to Caesar and him being unable to reward you, but being very grateful and in your debt for it. Just like Graham said it would be. That would be simply a genius writing. Sadly, that is not to be. We have amazing environment. We have amazing character. We have amazing setting. We have amazing technology. We have amazing story. Yet, we sadly cannot stay there for longer and do more.

What had amazed me in this DLC is map itself. It is lively with vegetation. It has plenty of fresh water. There is wild life. It actually feels like a place where a small community could live in. This is in direct contrast to all the other Fallout New Vegas maps which feel as unnatural and unbelievable. There is a contrast in colours. Warm yellow and green overtaking red rock. As a whole map is placed in a canyon, you often can observe map from up hill. It is a long and narrow map with river flowing through much of it. As you explore map, you discover new life from the vaults taking root there and being commented by a locals as it being unnatural. You notice that it once was a national park, you find local stores, discover last conversations of people living there. There are even notes of survivors who logged events after an apocalypse until first vault dwellers re-emerging to the surface.

Another surprise to me was rain. A simple effect on player's camera, but it gives so much to a game. Yes, it could be done better, but for such an old game, it was still impressive to see. DLC for this game tend to push game technologically in one or other area. It is just sad that developers themselves did not add these effects to a base game. However, modders had copied the code and put the exact same thing as their own work to the main game.


I think that the Honest Hearts is the best DLC done for Fallout New Vegas. It is a part of a main story. A burned man is featured heavily as a legend in a Mojave and it feels great to see the living legend in action. I enjoyed characters, story. I found out new map to be the best in entire New Vegas series. DLC could be longer, it could feature more dialogue and options. As it stands now, it is a sweet, but short adventure beyond Mojave desert into world beyond.

This DLC stands as a proof that masses do not have much taste. Where something is well done, they ignore it, because it does not inflate the game. It does not make story more epic, you are not fighting dinosaurs while nukes fall all around you. Thus, they are not interested in story. It does not give you broken weapons which makes game trivial. Thus masses are not interested in loot. Its story adds and explains a huge part of a main story, a legend of the burned man. This is why people are not interested in it. It is serious, it adds to game quality. They prefer easy to digest trash like in the Old World Blues. It is a little bit sad, but I guess I knew this all along. The higher I soar, the less and less I can relate with the commoners.

---

Old World Blues is a terrible experience. Everything good about old game is thrown aside. Writing is horrible and amateurish. Fighting is extremely bothersome with bullet spongy enemies.

---

Introduction to this DLC is something. It is half an hour of exposition where you can do very little. At first there is a massive slide show of where you are going. Then you wake up in your hub with no explanation. You eventually go to the professors running this place. Conversation there is legendary bad. It is about 20 minutes of never ending talking and jokes between each robot. Game on the other hand forces you to do massive skill checks in order to get insignificant rewards. This introduction feels like a bad mod where developers had too many inside jokes. Robots are bickering with each other as they are paying attention to you. Humour is completely forced. It is a joke after a joke, often with no build up. Joke is delivered flat. This DLC is the most perfect example of quantity over quality. It has a lot going in it, but everything in it are so poorly done that quite often it feels like an exceptional mod rather than content created by the professionals.

Do not trust what others are saying about this DLC. They do not know how to review a game. They do not know what they are experiencing. Thus, they only selectively remember good parts and cherry pick what to say. Other than that, they like mere children only are capable of describing to you what you will be doing in a game.

Combat
• The first thing that I became aware is just how absolutely horrible combat in Old World Blues is. Every enemy has massive amounts of HP and huge resistances to damage to the point it is impossible to effectively fight them without an appropriate weapon for them. Each enemy has a massive weakness to one type of damage, robots to EMP for example. This leaves the only effective weapon to fight robots are dedicated EMP weapons. All other weapons feel like BB gun in Mojave.
  
  Overcrowded
  
• Monster allocation is also completely busted. Some buildings next to your HQ are completely pointless and hold nothing of value. However, they are filled with a brim with Trauma Harness enemies. These are most powerful enemies in an entire zone. You can enter into a wrong building and find out that a small storage area has 8 Trauma Harness just standing there, doing nothing. I had exhausted most of my supplies and ammunition just in that room alone.
  
  Paths to various buildings are equally terribly designed. Your most starter areas feature the most contested roads with most powerful enemies which this DLC can offer you. However, as you explore further, there is nothing as difficult or as contested as a starter zone. In fact, you could avoid combat for the most part if you know how to slip through your starting area.

First, I do not like these whacky, out of place worlds. Fallout New Vegas is very grounded experience. Old World Blues is science fiction with plastic space lasers who goes PEW PEW PEW. There is a massive difference in tone between these two games and the problems starts when developers had tried to tie Old World Blues to our world. This not only goes against old lore, but it seems out of place for the established world. Story could been better if it was made as stand alone experience without clumsy explanations how everything is logical and ties together. It is unneeded and just annoys a player who cares about Fallout lore.

What is the point of it all?
• Storyline in itself is convoluted. I honestly can't tell you why I needed anything. It is a standard collect 3 items, but when you finally deliver them, doctor himself have no clue why he had asked for those items. He merely gives you a key to open Dr. Mobius (main villain) lair and all the talk about going out evaporates. You go to confront main villain and it can't even stomach an effort being evil. He is just a demented old man who is addicted to drugs. He will have a friendly chat with you, explains his reasons, you agree with him and then the only option is to kill him. However, soon after that you are left with two options: either kill other doctors or trick them that you are Mobius and force them to stay in the dome. So, you essentially did the same thing as Dr. Mobius was doing all this time, but with more random acts of violence. There is also a random twist of betrayal at the end telling you that doctors never intended to reunite you with your brains. This however is instantly contradicted by leaving player an option to remain brainless and as for doctors, it is never explained how you alone are their key to the world outside. Or why they can't just put their brains to a random lobotomites. Story is full of plot holes, it is inconsistent and there is no development. Entire storytelling is done in first half an hour and then that is left are random dialogues and jokes. Story is a joke in this DLC.
  
  Tie-in obsession
  
• Instead of letting it to be an out of place, whacky experience, developers were obsessed to tie everything together. So, they had ruined two more DLCs, Lonesome Road and Dead Money. Rather, people working there already set their minds to make them nonsensical. First, with the other courier which just rambles on and on about nothing. He is of course everywhere, but nowhere. Always one step ahead and leaves before you. It is a tired and lazy trope. Then it creates ties to world around it. How it created animals you see in the wasteland. However, when you confront them, professor is clueless and game seems to support courier theory that animals were imported to Big Mountain to be experimented on rather than vice versa. It also has all the tech found in Dead Money and briefly mentions how they done everything. The issue with this is simple. Fallout universe was not so advanced to have space bases. Then it comes to the fact that it has tech way above what we are used to. Then there is an issue of this tech being affordable and transferred to Earth. However, mutated animals appeared much later when bombs hit. So, who was travelling to those bases? It ignores that it was over 200 years after apocalypse and how base would be self sufficient if it is already in post apocalyptic state. How those professors were so out of touch that they did not knew that there are intelligent life on Earth when they themselves came from there, were transferring tech there all the time and had visitors in the past.
  
  I could go on and one. This is such a bad fan fiction that you could write a book exploring all the plotholes story creates and it will be a longer text than the story itself...

It is not the fabled zone from Stalker games. That map is at least atmospheric while working with very limited graphic budget. This one is just feels cheap and dull. It is a prime example of what happens when developers need to do something quickly and they can't put proper care and love towards their own work. The end result, a mass produced content which is fine while you are consuming, but it is not memorable nor you want to repeat it.

The more barren version of Mojave Wasteland
• It is a very boring zone. Outside are your usually grey wasteland variant. Buildings are your usual cold war bunker variants. DLC fails to introduce any effects or terrain which would be interesting to watch. In fact, at large map seems to be randomly thrown together as a mod. You can quickly prototype such quality map, because you do not care how each element ties together. What is player's experience. Quality of a map is even lower than a random patch of desert in Mojave.
  
  Various Curios and Oddities
  
• There is also aren't any bits of story to gather. Computers contain comically over the top scientists talking about how they are comically evil or obsessed over some small thing. Information is just plain boring and has no twists or development. Compare this to whole mini-stories found in Vaults! This by comparison looks downright amateurish!
  
  Loot for Days!!!
  
• Zone in addition has a massive quantities of loot. You get tired of looting every cupboard, every table which is filled to a brim with valuables. This DLC is particularly hard offender, because you will be constantly dragging stuff back and selling it. It ruins whole in-game economy if such a thing even was in a game. Worse, it fills maps with valuable loot which you want to sell which takes directly away from exploring maps, enjoying the atmosphere and then eventually finding actually something very valuable.

It is by far the worse Fallout experience I had so far. It was so bad that it had killed my desire to play this game for a while. It had left a sour taste in my mouth after sweet main campaign.

This DLC takes away from the story with its lore-rapping elements. It creates an out of place, all encompassing place which does not need to be there. Fallout New Vegas would had been better if this DLC was never developed.

---

It is one of those games which I always regretted for not playing more when it was popular. I remembered it fondly and it certainly was fun playing this game with my friends in CO-OP. Unfortunately, I had waited for too long and this game is dead.

Back when I was in high school there was a lot fewer original games. I was amazed by the fact that your character is a rolling ball and you have a third person camera shooter with special abilities and classes. Game felt unique and amazing. It certainly was unique for the time as there were quite few mainstream games which were this creative in times when Team Fortress 2 could be considered fresh, innovating, groundbreaking with its own classes and cartoonish graphics.

Game had significant player-base, mostly due to strong console presence. It prospered during XBOX 360 days and was very popular game on XBOX Live Arcade. I do not know if there was a cross over with PC community, but servers were teeming with life. Game was a hit, everyone enjoyed playing it until...it just died. Game died as console gamers moved a generation ahead and developers never shown an interest in further supporting and developing their own game.

I do have few good memories with this game and I did enjoy playing this game in LAN with my friends. Unfortunately, I will have to advise other players from playing this game. The main attraction - multiplayer is dead. Other game modes either feel unfinished or are just plain bad.

Tedious and grindy campaign
• Campaign is nothing to write home about. Story is nonsensical and it is unclear what we are exactly doing from mission to mission. It is just gleefully killing enemies and then we must acquire some super duper plot device which in truth gives us anything we want. It is just a terrible plot which goes nowhere which anybody could write.
  
  Campaign itself is too long and tedious. Later on it just spams you with enemies. Every damn room is filled with bullet spongy enemies which makes this game annoying to beat. Initially there is a small element of secret hunting, but levels are linear, plot is terrible and levels drag on with bullet spongy enemies.
  
  Game has little variety in its own enemies or gameplay. At one point I thought that game mixed it up a little when I was teleported supposedly on my own on an ice planet. I went to explore it and it was refreshing to fight wildlife or rather simpler enemies for once. However, quickly unpolished nature of this game showed up when my Madball rolled on spikes and I was forces to go all the way back. This is when I discovered that I did not needed to do any of that and my comrades were just around the corner. I tried to make game fun for nothing. I tried to collect keys for nothing.
  
  Movement Pushback
  
• This game has a strange sensation. Your character is seemingly pushed backwards when it hits some surfaces. This creates an awful, unpolished feeling. What I missed in this game were actual rolling mechanics. There is no such thing in this game, your character loses their momentum instantly, it can't speed up nor even heaviest Madballs have an issue in changing direction. However, when they hit random terrain elements in a map, they can instantly be stopped. It seems to be a bug where engine registers total stop of a character when you expect to still have sideways momentum and to keep on rolling.

https://youtu.be/wvHc-IklM-o

This game has countless smaller issues which adds up to game feeling unfinished, unpolished, cheap. They could be hints what company should improve if they ever would want to create a sequel. These points are also illustrated in my video.

Sliding Mechanics
• Surfaces in this game have no friction. You are free to slide around terrain. It adds up to unsatisfactory movement which characters in this game has. Rolling resistance, sliding in some areas, these things could had significantly lightened up this game and made it more unique than it is.
  
  Confusing Score Screen
  
• As it says in the title, score which you get at the end of a level is hard to decipher. Sometimes you get no points for killing enemies. There are no details explaining why you scored as well as you did.
  
  Cheating enemy movement
  
• Enemy seems to cheat in this game. It can go through impossible to travel terrain. This can create quite frustrating experiences in the campaign where enemies will simply roll through unreachable terrain out out of your line of fire. One time enemy just rolled from the map and was impossible to reach. Annoyingly, it was a part where I had to kill all enemies in an arena. This forces me to restart game to a previous check point.
  
  Glitchy camera
  
• Camera in this game is not a best and constantly can glitch through objects.
  
  Poor Autolock
  
• Autolock in this game is quite terrible. It fails dealing properly with elevations. This makes firing enemies below or above you annoying. Especially since later on in a game there are plenty bullet spongy, fast enemy flyers.
  
  Poor Jumpads
  
• How do you mess something like this up? This game has jumpads which fail to elevate you and you end up jumping up and down.
  
  Interuptive Cutscenes
  
• Throughout the campaign you will constantly be interrupted with cutscenes. You will be in a firefight one moment and the next everything will stop for game to show you what has changed.

In the end there is no real reason why you should play this game today. It is a dead game with nothing to show for outside of its multiplayer. Its single player aspect is exceedingly mediocre. There is nothing interesting in it and while game can potentially be fun with upwards of three players, you could say that to any game. It was a good trip to the past, getting to know a game which I always regretted not playing more during its prime.

---

The game is good. I would recommend treating it more as an experience, because in-game mechanics are simplistic and do not hold up. However, atmosphere is top notch and gameplay is unique.

The Idea
• Game is built on Cold War paranoia and MAD principle. Idea of this game is that a nuclear war is starting and it is incredibly difficult to defend against nuclear strike. First one who blinks gets obliterated. Even if you 'win', you still lose most of your nation in nuclear exchange. In this game you are commanding your state bloc on that faithful day when Fallout plot begins.
  
  Atmosphere
  
• The strongest part of this game is an atmosphere. Simplistic graphics try to portray that you are looking at a radar screen in a command bunker. Music, sound effect create an eerie effect where your bunker is calm, but out there were are hundreds of nukes heading your way. You know that hundreds of millions are going to die in upcoming hours and you have to make your choice immediately. Do you retaliate at the cost of defending your territories? Do you try to hold out?

Gameplay consists out of three elements. Nuclear silos, aircraft and navy. It largely plays as a tabletop game with each element hard countering each other. Game is too micromanagement based, because the optimal strategy is to split your nuclear subs and aircraft carriers into a small groups. Rules how each element interacts with each other is rather limited and it feels more like rock, paper, scissors type of gameplay.

https://youtu.be/07WGOaFikjU

Silos
• It is main form of your air defence against enemy aircraft and nuclear strikes. In this game silos are simply too good both in ballistic defence role and anti-aircraft role. Any aircraft based assault is impossible since your planes will be brought down as soon as they enter enemy territory.
  
  In anti-ballistic role they can single handedly take out most of incoming nuclear barrage. This on its own voids the entire premise of this game and highlights why this game just isn't very good for long term gameplay. Mechanics are paper thin and balance is bad. The key is to focus all your defences in a very small area. They will be able to intercept most of the incoming missiles. In smaller continents like Europe this means that you will be able to cover most of Europe simply by focusing your defences in a middle. Game was made solely on an idea that all people will simply launch all of their nukes at once and developers failed to take into consideration what if player tries to defend its assets and focuses its silos in a small area.
  
  Aircraft
  
• Fighters in this game are largely useless. They are used for providing anti-bomber role, but bombers can launch their nuclear payload from half a map away at the edges of your anti-air defences. They are used solely in defensive role preventing yourself from being overwhelmed and as a meat shield. In naval warfare, they have more purpose as bombers need to come quite close in order to support other combatants. This is where fighters in aircraft carriers have some purpose in this game.
  
  Bombers in this game are incredibly slow and quite fragile. They are useless at invading enemy airspace. Its role is to launch nuclear warheads before full out nuclear release moment at fringe, hard to defend cities. In naval encounters it is usually not worth the effort, because bombers are too easily intercepted by enemy fighters which are are a lot cheaper and disposable. They have limited nuclear arsenal at their bases and thus some micromanagement might be necessary in a higher level game.
  
  Naval Warfare
  
• Battleships are your bread and butter. They are the big stompy ships which forces area control. The best way to use them is in a big clump with an areal support from your carriers nearby. There is not much more to it. Never engage in an equal battle, try to always have significant advantage in numbers. This is the whole strategy with using them.
  
  Aircraft Carriers are most versatile assets. They are used to support naval fleet. They are used in transporting bombers next to enemy shores. They are used in anti-submarine warfare. Their use is either in patrolling local waters for enemy submarines or concentrating their few bombers for additional nuclear strikes. They have special use then which prevents enemy from launching its nuclear arsenal, because your bombers will be able to take out roughly half of enemy nuclear missiles before they are launched and take out their silos, leaving enemy virtually defenceless.
  
  Submarines are just little bit too slow in this game. They are best used in wolf pack formations, being parked in unorthodox or random locations and being next to enemy shores waiting for enemy to release their nuclear arsenal. Then your nuclear subs unleash their own arsenal on enemy silos thus destroying them before they themselves are destroyed. They also can add crucial extra warheads during main nuclear exchange. However, the issue with submarines is that they are too slow to reach their location before game evolves into nuclear exchange phase. Their limited range leaves them quite susceptible to planes either. Submarines could be used in naval warfare, but in general they should stay away from it, because they are simply too valuable as nuclear deliver platform and deterrence from enemy delivering their own salvos later in a game or simply preventing them pushing with their own naval assets.

To try this game out. It is a short, cheap game which is being played even today. Part of gaming is finding new experiences, deepening your soul and this game is unique and interesting. This game is really good for that, but its gameplay mechanics don't really hold up when you get to understand them.

This game is a game which I unconsciously desired when I was young. To get knowledge of PC building without extremely boring PC guides. For something to demystify the whole process for someone without the means of doing anything myself. Any subject topic when starting from scratch can be intimidating. This game gives a great introduction to people with no prior experience of PC enthusiast's world an introduction of how it is like to do one or the other job.


Game plays on an fantasy of being a repairman, of being enthusiast, of running your own e-sports team in DLC supposedly. This is why such genre is a massive hit. It is relatively easy to make and since these games are easy to learn and to play, they have a wide audience. This game is the first to my knowledge which started this sub-genre.

It is a good introduction
• Game is relatively accurate in its representation of enthusiast PC gaming. Maintenance and tinkering of hardware is well represented, all though very abstracted and simplified. It is a game I would had loved to play one time in my life when computers looked big, scary and complex. Now, I come to this game only to find that I know everything what is to know about them what this game tries to teach me.
  
  Works as a fantasy of repairman
  
• It is quite atmospheric to work in a small room with computers. Dealing with customers emails, working from a small repair shop, ordering parts. Game sets you into a monotony which helps people to relax. It is like trucking simulations, gameplay is not entertaining moment to moment, but it gives you time to do something else. Relax, listen to music, to podcast or merely enjoying a fantasy of working on computers. You know, playing a fantasy where you are being productive in life for once.

To me it is more of a mixed bag. It does few things well, but many areas are in dire need of improvement. It is focused pleasing a casual gamer who does not expect much from a game. Sadly for the game, here I have to judge this experience against all the other possible gaming experiences and game simply falls short.

It is designed to be grindy, but also it simply does not have much content in it. You will get template emails requiring you to do select few variations of a same thing. It is a massive grind and while content is being unlocked constantly, it is drip fed to you in order to keep you on a life support. You better make sure you love base gameplay, because you sure as hell be getting mountains of it.

Runs like a brick
• One of the pettiest complaints is that this game is poorly optimised. Game consumes a lot of GPU resources for not much to show for it. It is grossly unoptimised and incompetently made. The best example of this is when you want to install select few parts, game will literally freeze, throw a loading symbol and it will actually load a random part for you. What is this? 1990 era game? Get your shit together devs!
  
  Poor graphics/textures
  
• Game aesthetically looks like a vomit. It has that grainy overlay over its textures. A lot of parts are simply missing textures or have placeholder textures. For example, a lot of coolers are simply still untextured in this game, but nobody seems to mind half-baked state of this game.
  
  Poor simulation
  
• As a simulator it is quite a bad one. It simulates problems at a very surface level. The best example which I can bring up is that overheating is done instantly. Realistically it would be a problem in a long run, processor might run hot, it might take a lot of time, computer might throttle, artefacts might appear on screen, etc. In this game it is straight to a bluescreen. There are countless other simplifications, OS installation takes moments, but this can be omitted for a sake of brevity. Cable management also raised some question marks. The biggest issue is that this game takes a problem, makes it an abstract one and simplifies to a point to a simple cause and effect. The whole simulation aspect of this game is child-like. Which is again, great for kids getting into enthusiast world of PC building, bad for actual enthusiasts.
  
  Handholding
  
• In this game the only mistake you can do is to put used parts or use wires of wrong colour. That is it. Game literally won't allow you to miss something. It will keep PC locked until you find all the problems. This makes whole diagnose and fix tasks trivial and otherwise reduces a task of finding issues with a computer to being parody of itself. Even in brief moments when you fix computer and might forget to run anti-virus program, game won't allow you to fail. There is no challenge or difficulty in this game, the only way to fail is to pick a wrong colour cables...
  
  Letters
  
• In order to pick any job in this game, you first have to read customer's letter and accept his job. The problem with this is that letters are lazily generated. You will quickly start noticing templates. Few letters which are written by a human are more interesting. However, humans do not talk like they should in this game. Your customers do not talk like human beings, but rather entities which try to pretend being humans.
  
  Even generic letters are written in such bizarre way:
  -"I'm into cable management. Are you into cable management?";
  -"MSI components are meant to be the bomb";
  -"I'm total MSI fanboy";
  
  It is like your clients are lizard people from Earth's core. Come to think of, this game sees its clients as technically gifted in some areas like diagnosing issues while being incredibly stupid or lazy in doing anything about it. Additionally, even most poor teenager can afford thousands of dollars building new PC. Even a request for a small upgrade can be done by purchasing best parts on the market. All these clients are simply loaded and they do not care much about price tag. They even let you take their property!
  
  Another issue with your customers is that they always know what is wrong with their pc, they are obsessed over cable management, all they can think is getting new, but not used parts. They are sending PC to get specific benchmark scores. Whole experience is very gamey and unrealistic. Instead of getting a real repair shop experience of users not having a clue what had happened with their computer, these things know exactly what they want and what is wrong with their PC. On top of that they know exactly how much repair will cost. There is no interaction with them about cost of repair, timetables, etc. It is either unreasonable in one or other direction. Incredibly short and tight on budget or incredibly long time window and virtually unlimited budgets. There is nothing in between for these lizard people.
  
  Budget
  
• In this game budget is the biggest missed opportunity. Nearly every client has an immense budget. If a person comes for a modest upgrade for their computer, you simply replace their GTX 1650 Super with RTX 3080 Ti. If customer has RTX 3070 Ti, he will be more than happy to pay for a brand new RTX 3080 upgrade and nobody will mind just giving their old RTX 3070 Ti away in the process. Budget in this game rarely matters and the whole gameplay aspect of trying to fit into limited budget, making compromises and cutting corners simply do not exist.
  
  Imagine a game where you could try to cheat and use used part on a basis that client does not know any better. You would do so, because clients would usually be obsessed over how much repair cost and often being impatient. Imagine how cool it would be that game would organically motivate you to cheat and try to pass used parts as new to unexpecting customer. Sadly, I dream of a better game which does not exist.
  
  Used Parts
  
• The biggest, single unrealistic thing in this game is that you are literally stealing from your customers. It is probably how developers are seeing their own customers. You take part of their computer, you charge a lot for your work and you make them pay for new parts. However, you keep their old part for yourself. What kind of mickey mouse business we are running here? Developers obviously never had seen a repair shop in their life if this is what they came with naturally. It also breaks game economy as you have constant supply of free stuff and in order to balance this game, developers lock basic functionality behind paywall. Even simple parts ranking list costs a lot of money. Opening ebay costs money. As a simulator, this game is utterly unrealistic in all the other areas.
  
  Mess in a shop
  
• Shop menu is a mess. Developers gave a separate list for each parts with standard ranking options. So be ready seeing 10 versions of a same GPU intermixed with Radeon incomprehensible GPU branding. With time game will simply keep adding different versions of a same part. You will have 10 options for a same part when you simply want to just purchase 1 type of part all the time.
  
  Stagnant progression
  
• In a dozen hours I had played this game, I'm yet to unlock better GPU than GTX 980 ti. Forget about overclocking or anything more exotic. This game really drags out the few bits of content it has. Game feels like an actual work. You go from day to day, doing the exact same thing with nothing changing in between. It is not PC building simulator. It is hell job simulator!

I quit when game had bugged out on me. I had searched forums and found out that other people also have similar bugs. In my run, computer which was brought for upgrades started to overheat. This had happened when I replaced GPU to more powerful one. I reloaded and then replaced CPU to more powerful version. Same thing happened and there was nothing I could do, game simply decides that in some cases computer will overheat and there is nothing you can do. I will attach the footage of this bug. Here is a list of things which I had tried to no avail:

1. Changing thermal paste;
   
2. Attaching more powerful CPU cooler;
   
3. Attaching more fans to PC chassis;
   
4. Replacing PSU with far more powerful one;
   
5. Specifically checking if I did not forgot any wiring;
   
6. Changing just CPU or GPU in a computer;

Nothing had solved the issue. Motherboard change might had brought something up, but this was a simple upgrade task which rules out any broken units.

https://youtu.be/KIQjE6GczLM


The game is distinctively average. It does not do what it is supposed to do well. It is extremely grindy and most of the content trickle in through tens of hours of playtime. This game does too much handholding and most repair in this game is a meaningless grind. It is all about people being obsessed about used parts and colour of a wire which you are going to use. I would recommend this game only to people who know next to nothing when it comes to enthusiast PC world and want to see how its all done. For anyone else, this game will be overly simplistic and unrealistic computer behaviour will get frustrating.