Recent reviews by Arc'Xeno (jdsh)

I decided that, due especially to recent events as of writing this review, it was long overdue to put this down.

DON'T TOUCH, JUST AVOID AT ALL COSTS.

Since sunsetting Destiny 2 has been in a depreciated state with its overpriced expansions varying from fantastic hits to horrific failures, and there is only one place to look at fault for: Bungie's executive suite. Not the developers themselves nor their immediate management are the problem here as they have tried to do right by their work only for the top to treat them as dirt. The senior and executive leadership has been dropping the ball so hard that it leaves craters the size of nations in their wake. This has happened on repeat for years and before Lightfall's nightmarish year of everything hitting the fan we would put blame almost anywhere else, but since then it has only been more blatantly clear as time goes on that the heads of Bungie are and have been the problems from the start and they are dragging everything they touch into the gutter, Destiny 2 most certainly included.

It is most certain that there is no future left in this game at this point with not only the downscaling of Bungie's developers but also in all future content for Destiny 2. Even though it has been over a year since I last played (immediately before Lightfall's launch) and I had enjoyed the game when I had played it at this point I truly regret wasting as much money as I have on a game that for me would be far too ephemeral for my liking.

Let this be a warning not to touch anything Bungie related as of now there is no sign that they will correct their behavior in any near future without extreme action taken to rectify it.

As of writing this this is at the highest peak of Warhammer Fantasy and Creative Assembly's achievements, but guess what?
ITS NOT EVEN DONE AND ITS ONLY PART 2 OF 3 AND IT JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER.

Among one of the best spaceship strategy games of all time. If you were ever a fan of the tabletop I recommend this with the Emperor's Seal of Approval.

Edit: This. Game. Only. Gets. Better.

So, Civ VI had a free weekend, so I tried it. Not worth the asking price (not even worth the half price). AI seemed to have odd issues (only had chance to notice ones with wars and diplomacy). The fact that almost every single dlc is rated at either very negative or overwhelmingly negative (all from either technical or conceptual problems) is pretty disheartening and gives reason not to buy. If you get this on a really good sale (>60% off) or for free, go for it if you want. Otherwise I don't recommend this game (for crying out loud there's a mod for Civ V that does Civ VI better than Civ VI).

Very fun and enjoyable space game that lets you do what you want (epic space battles included).

So here I am on the day of the last update for Fractured Space (everything else after this will be at most hotfixes) and for the last time I’m going to give my critique on FS. It’s been a wild ride with this game from its ups and downs, its amazing gameplay to mind-numbingly dull machine-of-a-matchmaker and all the things in between. I want to say thanks to the devs who helped to make this game great as it is. I must also, however, scoff at those in ECG who (either knowingly or otherwise) would help lead FS to its own downfall.

It’s not unfair of me to claim I loved this game, and if I didn’t I probably wouldn’t have ever even bothered with a review, let alone play for over 3000 hours. There were however, problems, that as time went on and the game left the realm of being something I at least personally considered being possibly one of the next big e-sports MOBA (with greater emphasis on grand strategy and tactics rather than just flashy gameplay) to an arcade-esk spaceship shooter thing that had (and still has) significant balancing problems that will now never get addressed (or even acknowledged all things considering). For what the game did good was its incredible artwork and visuals along with (for the most part with the exclusion being the later balancing issues) very fun gameplay. The art team did wonderful work on this and they desire their due praise for it (at more than one point I was offering to fork up 10-20k plat (around $50 to $100 US dollars) for certain skins because they were that good). Q&A (the bug hunters and fixers) were for the most part on the ball when dealing with issues with the game. Most of the rest of the team were very diligent with their work (of course though there were a fair few mistakes made in the process that may or may not have been corrected when it should have).

With all that one would have thought this would have done better, but it didn’t. Primarily in-part due to (and even I hadn’t a clue on how truly bad this was) some of the most extreme lack of new-player retention that I think I’ve ever seen. True the game was never the simplest nor easiest game to get into, but yikes that was atrocious retention. Along with this was the marketing or essentially lacking thereof excluding a couple of times where there was some marketing but proceeded to die off as fast as it started (with the exclusion of 2016 Phase 1 launch that actually kept players around for a while). I also realize after the fact that this game had to operate on a negative budget for its entire 4 year development cycle (I also only learned of this recently and had to take a few minutes to pick up my jaw). Then, for those more interested more interested in gameplay issues, came the extreme unbalancing act that were the introduction of implant that to this day haven’t been properly fixed to be in line with other things (stares with extreme disgust at jump implants). HUD changes every couple of months that were more of a nuisance than a severe problem at times. We got game modes that came and went and (thankfully) were brought back for the most part (I still miss frontline). During 2017 I suspect there was some level of ‘desperation’ to improve things (this is the only real way I can rationalize some of the sheer stupidity of ideas I got more than slightly annoyed with) and multiple very poorly planned out (let alone thought about) experiments that drove more than a few people away, one of whom I know was probably the most die-hard fan of the game, who went as far as altering/buying new IPs and getting entirely new computers just to get around some permabans he got for doing some dumb things than he isn’t exactly proud of himself for doing. He got driven away because of bad experiments like the bots in pvp and such. Other changes that drove of strong fans of the game were changes to sniper class ships that more or less deleted one ship and put the others in a somewhat better position than before but still having glaring issues that weren’t enough to redeem for plenty. I can go on a bit more but the point is made and I am weary of going on with this part.

As I play the latest and last new game mode Infection, I am reminded of another game mode, Frontline, that was killed off due to “lack of popularity” but certainly not due to unfun gameplay (quite the opposite). Frontline was like one-laned conquest all in a single sector with and end game of sudden death, led to a creativity boom in the community. Here with Infection however (and now with the game) I just feel…..meh? All my emotion that I’ve ever had seems to be as non-existent as its ever going to get outside me entirely forgetting about the game (which won’t be for long while).

What I am assuming (if anyone from ECG wants to correct me on this I insist that you come forth and present the actual reasoning for this) lead to the leadership terminating development was for one the obviously long-running deficit that was accumulated during FS’s development cycle, the general market downturn for free-to-play and more heavily the MOBA genre as a whole (with the only exceptions being the really big names like League of Legends, Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm) suffering. Multiple other MOBAs like Wildstar and its developer and parent company permanently shut their doors and went out, Dreadnaught (FS’s primary competitive partner) had to let go of a third of its staff due to only gaining less than half of their expected launch revenue, and others that have put down their shutters to try and stave of what probably is their own inevitability. The market has gone bad and is in serious decline combined with an only increasing deficit from development finally got them to close it down.

In the end, this game might be fun if you can get your friends into it as well, but beyond that, well….I’m only going to have this on my computer for maybe a month or two after this as I play some last games with long-time friends I made in this game, but after that I will cease with this and permanently move on along with everyone else I met here (barring anything significant that garners my attention enough to come around again). For the makers, thanks for the memories, but this will probably be goodbye (unless you go make another game that peaks my interests).

Note: All the stuff from the previous reviews had to be deleted because of character count.

One of my personal favorite RTS's of all time, previously played THOUSANDS of hours on the CD version before it came out on Steam. Best medival strategy game of the turn of the millenium.