Recent reviews by John Dough

Saw videos of Helldivers 2.
Looked fun.
Found it in steam store, scrolled down to press "Buy Helldivers 2", nowhere along that way did I see any mention of requiring a PSN account to play, nor do I now Unless I scroll even further down and scan the entire page to see a small section nested within all the other information.
Played since close to release without this being a requirement.

Since I do not have either the time to learn how to make a PSN account and link it to steam, nor do I wish to support this practise of hiding fine print requirements and enforcing them months later in order to harvest my data and put my data at risk, I have requested a refund for the title. It is extra shameful on behalf of Sony to require the linking of a PSN account when many of their customers can't even make a PSN account.

Shame, it is a fun game that has worked quite well since they fixed most of the game-breaking bugs and server-handling, was looking forward to facing new factions ingame but I have now uninstalled this game. Sorry Arrowhead, you chose poorly regarding your publisher.

It's a fun escape room experience, cozy graphics, low stakes. Pretty relaxing experience overall.

As a sequel to Payday 2 this game is very disappointing to me. Bear in mind that I write this what, a week after release? So perhaps a year from now it will be a different story.
With that said:

+ The stealth mechanics are pretty fun, at least on the bank heists, it feels like you can sneak quite easily and the stealth objectives are quite fun. After a while you realize it is all the same though from heist to heist, "pick lock this door, rewire this thing, hack this computer, open this small safe for a usb stick".
+ The visuals are quite nice, it looks pretty modern and the level design isn't too bad in my opinion.
+ The combat at first is fun, but once you realize that the semi-auto sniper can easily headshot any enemy and one-shot them the combat becomes repetitive and more like a chore than something action packed, but this is essentially like in PD2.

- This is my main critique, but this will hopefully be resolves quite soon. The matchmaking barely works at launch. This has been mentioned by many. But for me, I have now played every heist twice, and I have played 70% of the heists on my own because I don't get matchmaked with anybody else, and other than that I have played with only like one other person. I played a full lobby once and that was through crossplay so the players were not so fun to play with.
- Repetitive. The game becomes repetitive fast, each heist is essentially the same except the visuals are different. Bank, jewelry store, warehouse.
- The user interface in the main menu is horrendous. The heist selection is confusing and if you click a heist or video you have to start over if you go back. They should have just replicated Crimenet.
- It doesn't feel very adrenaline filled once you go loud, the AI feels super slow and it's like you are just mowing down robots. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the action just feels kind of flat. Like there is the payday music, and you can hear some shouting, but it doesn't really raise the pulse for me.
- There are no multi-day heists. You have what, like 7 heists in this initial release that take maybe 30-40 minutes to complete individually? Pretty vanilla heists as well, it's essentially the same levels as the first 4 heists from payday 2.
- No safehouse. They really skimped on payday 3 by doing the bare minimum. They had a formula for an amazing game, but pushed it out so fast that they cut some of the things that they worked on for years to get nice. It is like if DICE had released Battlefield 2 back in the day and removed all of the vehicle gameplay.
Technically this is a heist co-op game, and you have the main characters from the previous titles, but so many of the features have been removed from the previous installments. And we will be expected to buy these features that should have been launched with the game as DLC and season passes later on.
I foresee these updates to be more and more buggy however, this is definitely a rushed out game and I'm sure that the developers will be neutered and made to move on to their next game within the next month.

Final verdict: If you want a simple heist game, buy Payday 3, it's pretty fun. If you are expecting an upgrade from Payday 1&2, don't buy it because this ain't it. Maybe later on this review will be negated in many regards but at the moment this game is mid-tier in my opinion. Quickly beat and not at all memorable. I have 8 hours on this game so far, but a lot of that time has been spent simply waiting to be able to join a server.

I mean, it's counter-strike.

I first started playing this game a couple of years ago, based on the tags of "open world" and "COOP", which I thought would be really cool inside of the universe advertised by the post-apocalyptic screenshots of the game.
Turns out THERE IS NO FREEROAM WORLD OR COOP IN THIS GAME AS OF RIGHT NOW, ONLY BASIC GAME MODES SUCH AS TEAM DEATHMATCH AND CAPTURE THE FLAG(battery).

So back to when I first played Survarium, I downloaded the game and realized that there was actually only a Team-deathmatch type gamemode and a couple of other basic PVE game-modes (capture the battery etc.) and found out on the forums that the open-world element was still being worked on and would be put ingame (soon!). So I shelfed the game for a couple of years figuring they would have gotten some basic free-world up and running by now.

Here is what I have to say about the game now:
* The graphics look okay for a non-AAA studio, but I can't say that I think they have changed much in the last couple of years which doesn't give me much hope for the future. I like the level design where there is a lot of nature and foliage(nothing to really hide in though), but I do not think that the game is optimized very well. My computer runs BF1 and other recent games on pretty high gfx settings, but Survarium feels choppy and sluggish at higher settings. Perhaps this is just something that I experience, but it is something to be aware of.

* The gameplay gets boring very fast. It is the same three or four maps (if even that many, I'm not sure) being played over and over, and after each round you get some xp that after a few hours unlocks some new weapons and gear depending on what level you are. It is the typical f2p microtransaction boogaloo that you would see elsewhere, where you grind for some gear, and if you want to stand a chance against the people who have put in 200 hours in this game you can pay a few bucks to get some goldmoneis to buy a better weapon NOW. (I wouldn't put in any money into this game as it is right now and I recommend you don't either).

* The responsiveness of the game makes me feel detached from it unlike other games. When you walk it almost "feels" like walking in syrup. When you fire your weapons you can't really "feel" it if you know what I mean.

* There are more things overall, such as the sound, that make me not superlike this game but I honestly don't feel like putting in any more time in this game even if that means typing out a much longer review.

My recommendations:

If you are looking for an open-world freeroam game, do NOT download this game, go elsewhere for now. If they haven't released anything big in this game after years of development while stating that they have YUGE plans such as coop, AI and freeroam, then I honestly don't trust that much is ever going to come. But then again, perhaps there is stuff going on behind the backdrops as the developers have claimed the last few years, but I would take it with a grain of salt.

If you are looking for a free-to-play team-deathmatch fps with okay graphics but no substance which will simply waste your life, go ahead and download this.

This game is so derpy. I LOVE IT.

Bonus content: Floppy-disk simulator in the main menu.

999/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eVZfEWxnbg