Recent reviews by ArcTheWolf

A friend got me SM2, I played it a little bit and was like oh ♥♥♥♥ I really need to get the context of the first game. Waited for SM1 to go on sale picked it up. I will say for a game this old it has stood the test of time very well. It holds up visually, the gameplay mechanics are solid. The only fault I could draw with this game is this was yet another fine examples of an otherwise amazing experience that get's completely shattered right at the end with an unreasonably massive spike in difficulty for the final boss.

Combined with a terrible checkpoint that put me in the position of having to pick up my guns again, pick up ammo again, wait 5 seconds to skip cutscene again, all just to try the fight again. Then combined with that insane difficulty spike that isn't even remotely close to being consistent with the entire experience I had up to that point each death would only act to be more enraging than the last. I had to redo this boss fight a total of 17 times. Up until that point I had died maybe 7 times across the entire experience. Bear in mind this is all happening on normal difficulty as well. Then combine that with the fact you cannot change difficulty mid playthrough so to make that fight easier my only option would have been to restart the entire game or try again and again until I won.

Needless to say I did keep going, and I did win, and the rage that was cause by that final boss wave fight made killing the actual final boss in QTE cutscene style very satisfying. The game was a 10 out of 10 the whole way, then I got to that fight and that took what was an amazing experience and ruined it. Brought the game down to a 5 out of 10 for me. But then the satisfaction of that final kill saved it a bit landing this game at a 7 out of 10 for me. I will probably never play this game again though, this is very much a one and done game.

Just finished my first extraction. Don't know how anyone can form a valid opinion of the game when they don't even play more than 20 minutes of it. I had an absolute blast finishing my first extraction. Framerate is pretty stable on medium low settings (I'm running an RTX 2060 6 gig GPU and an intel i5-1400F at 2.8 ghtz). If my ♥♥♥♥ PC build can handle this game then pretty much anyone above me should be able to handle it. Stable 60FPS outside of the occasional spike when moving into a new section of map. The game obviously needs more work though but that's to be expected it is an Early Access game after all. I've seen AAA games with multi-million dollar budgets launch with more bugs than this has right now. I loved Hunt Showdown (hated the playerbase because everyone was cowards who camped extraction). This really scratches that itch for an extraction shooter but because everyone is working towards a common goal you don't have to deal with cowardly morons. Can't wait to watch this game continue to grow and evolve into an outstanding game, the concept is in place, a decent foundation has been laid, all there is now is to just keep on building.

Got to car on first try. Car got clipped and flung off the road. Haven't seen that car again since. 10 out of 10 would crash the car again.

This right here is yet another classic example of why indie devs will always reign supreme. I will admit at first I was completely against this game because I looked at it yet another Phasmo clone, and in a way it kinda is. But damn does it still stand out on it's own. This right here may very well be my game of the year. It was just so much fun. Seriously get this game, you will not regret it, and that's coming from a guy that can't stand these 4 player go look for spooky ♥♥♥♥ games. This is a cut above the rest, I think it's the roguelike element to it that makes it truly special.

Years ago I wouldn't have. But now absolutely. My experience so far has been nothing short of amazing. Back when the game first came out due to the lack of NPCs and things to really do the only thing people had was loot hording and killing each other. It's amazing how much the mindless killing decreases when you add NPCs, storylines, quest chains, and all around the basic things that make a Fallout game a Fallout game. I had a quest I was doing pretty early on that sent me to an island to get an egg for a guy. Once I got on said island and "You've Discovered Deathclaw Island" popped up and a very angry level 10 Deathclaw showed up I panicked. I tried taking pot shots at it, swimming back across the river and trying to whittle it down. Low and behold 4 random players showed up and assisted me. Pleasantries were exchanged I thanked them for saving my bacon and we went our separate ways. There is honestly a very enjoyable experience to be had now with Fallout 76.

The Final Transmission. The actual ending to the game that was locked behind a $15 paywall. Not off to a great start with that. But oh it will get worse. It starts off strong taping into Jacob's guilt over Max and Elias. This is actually a key element of the story. But The Final Transmission absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥ you on resources in a way you have yet to experience up to this point. As I write this review I am in the final boss, I have no means to health, all I have is ammo, I'm at full health for the start of the fight but no injectors.

I had to load some saves back so that I could just dump the money I did have into ammo for my strongest gun and hope for the best. It was either buy on health injector and have no ammo, or buy ammo and have no health. Now yes I could load even further back and go an hour and a half back and try again to get to this point without getting hit so that I have more resources. But who in their right mind would willingly go an hour and a half back just to then play all the way back to the most anti-climactic ending I've ever seen. I'm at the point where I'm tempted to just look up what happens on YouTube because this ♥♥♥♥ ass boss takes so little damage from my attacks.

Combine that with teleporting away when you go to attack and spamming ranged attacks after doing it. It's just not fun, I got the final boss down to 75% health left and I've just loss the entire will to play the game. This goes down as yet another example of developers having an otherwise great game and story and then jumping out the top floor of the studio and faceplanting on the sidewalk with how abysmally bad of an ending they make. The base game did the same thing with yet another abysmally bad placed checkpoint that absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥ you.

It's because of ♥♥♥♥ like this, an ending locked behind a $15 paywall, the use of Denuvo for what a year and a half that rendered the game damn near unplayable. This is why The Callisto Protocol was not a critical or financial success. Yet another pathetic flop of a game just like all the rest.

So The Callisto Protocol on launch was obviously abysmally bad. Denuvo didn't do it any favors in the optimized experience department at all. Now that Denuvo is gone the game is in a very stable and playable state now. Finally being able to actually play this game now has allowed me to experience a truly wonderful experience. Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last 20 years knows this game is very much a love letter to Dead Space. This game does a fantastic job of building up the tension with lighting and lack of lighting almost as good as the Dead Space Remake did.

The game's combat is mostly melee focused which gives it a uniqueness that sets it apart from Dead Space. The story is a very solid one, the only complaint I have about the story is the fact the last chapter is teased at the end of the game and then locked behind a DLC paywall. Frankly something as important as the ending of the story should never be locked behind DLC. The only true issue I had with the game was the checkpoint system. Autosaving is a good thing in most games but the placement of these checkpoints are beyond bad often put to far before a major fight resulting in you having to apply upgrades and get supplies from a reforge then make your way to the fight then collect stuff at the fight then watch a cutscene starting the fight, then do the fight only to die 10 seconds into the fight if you're in bad shape to then have to do it all over again.

There was a particular fight I had to redo 8 times to finally get it right and the fact I had to spend 90 seconds before each attempt was beyond infuriating and really killed the flow of the game and the fun factor. Because of this abysmally bad placed checkpoints when it came to the final fight I actually had to load a checkpoint from 3 autosaves back because the final fight room legit had a panel you interact with with no indicator this is the final fight to then pull you into a cut scene, lock you in for first phase of fight, then it checkpoints after you finish first phase of fight and because that checkpoing happened when I was one-shot I couldn't even try to heal. The checkpoint locations is my only real complaint about this otherwise amazingly fun game.

What can I say, it's the classic Gun issue. They make an incredibly good looking game that really caters to everything that makes a slasher game good. Beautiful executions, solid gameplay loop, visually pleasing to look at. Then what do they do, oh right they say "We've done our part time to abandon it and hand it off to another studio that didn't actually have anything to do with making the game in the first place". So the obvious thing happens, everyone leaves the game because why stick around with a game that the devs no longer care about. Gun makes their money on sales then just walks away. At least with Friday the 13th they had the excuse of Victor Miller and his lawsuit putting an end to the game.

But this was just them blatantly getting paid and then leaving to start yet another game that I'm sure will be a great looking game that they'll rinse and repeat with just like they did here. This game isn't even a year old and it's completely dead. This game is so dead there's only 3K people playing it on a free weekend no less. So what do I do I sit in a lobby for 15 minutes waiting to get one more player on killer side so we can actually play a match. This was after playing a match where everyone on victims team was level 0 against 3 level 10 killers. Match was over in about 90 seconds. So I wait 15 minutes hoping to try again but alas after the 15 minutes it starts the match starting countdown and then says "Network Error unable to find enough players to play the game" and kicks me back to the main menu. All of this mind you is with crossplay enabled too. I am so glad I didn't buy this game at full price a month ago when I was really thinking about finally getting it. This free weekend has showed me all I need to know about how dead this game really is.

Edited to add: The fact there's $90 worth of DLC is just another disgusting part about this game. How do you have $90 worth of DLC in the first year of release yet you abandon the game and the player base is non-existent. But hey they'll still gladly accept people who pay $40 for the game and then $90 for the DLC for a game people can't even play half the time because of how low the player base is. Seriously don't waste any of your money on this game.

So yes we all know the multiplayer servers are absolute garbage. I don't know what they were even thinking if they were even thinking at all when it came to the number of servers they had up for this game. There was no doubt that there was going to be massive numbers of players playing this collection and most of them would be wanting to go straight into the multiplayer as that is where the most fun is to be had.

That being said my experience so far in the campaigns of BF1 within this collection have been nothing but fun. The fact that all I had to do was plug my controller in to play and I'm right back in the year 2004 playing on console enjoying what I loved most about these games since when I was a teen I didn't have the ability to play online. While it is a shame that the multiplayer is in an abysmally bad state at the moment (I am assuming they intend to address this issue relatively quickly) the game itself is visually pleasing and mechanically sound (again speaking only from what I have experienced so far). If you loved these games when they first came out I see no reason to not recommend them as it is only logical to play these amazing classics with some better visuals.

Sure you could just mod the original Steam releases but if you really just want to install and play without having to do anything more than install and have an updated appearance this is the best way to go. Another thing people are overlooking is that these are running on 64-bit CPUs and actually able to make use of the power 64-bit CPUs have. The original Steam releases could not make use of the additional computing power provided by 64-bit CPUs. So despite the multiplayer not working on launch I'm still gonna have to recommend this one because my experience thus far has been nothing but fun.

UPDATE: I will be posting all future problems in this game in the comments section of this review because I can't be bothered to keep updating this review every time Arrowhead ♥♥♥♥♥ up.

This game is beyond useless. Three hours ago I was able to play no problems at all with my friends. Now magically three hours I can't. It's a case of Person A can connect to Person B, Person A can connect to Person C, Person A cannot connect to Person B and C at the same time. This is the most ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ net coding I've ever seen in the history of video games. And what do people say oh it's only P2P no they have dedicated servers. Nobody ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ has a clue, this game is run by incompetent morons who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. All that Sony money and they can't make something as basic as the co-op function of their co-op game work with any level of consistency. This game has the audacity to be damn near unplayable and thinks it has the right to 72 gigs of my drive. GARBAGE. Don't give arrowhead another cent, not one cent more. They deserve to fail at this point.