Recent reviews by Biiox

Mine asteroids > Buy generators > Upgrade ship > Repeat.

The tech tree is very bland, there's 4 sections with like maybe 5 types of nodes in each section and all the upgrades feel very minor. The asteroid shooting parts aren't very engaging either.

About 90% into the game you kinda get into power fantasy territory which causes frame drops and then it's over.

Saw that the dev posted it's the final update and decided to try it but it still feels unfinished.
It's okay if you wanna burn a couple of hours but I found it too boring and mindless even for an incremental.

Death Stranding is infamous for being weird and is indeed not a game for everyone, funnily enough I had no interest in playing it for a long time, what made me change my mind is a free game on Steam called Moon Runner that I played a while back and ever since then I’ve been wanting to play Death Stranding.

If you’re having doubts about the gameplay side I’d suggest giving Moon Runner a try to see if that’s up your alley as it’s core gameplay loop is heavily inspired by Death Stranding and it’s also just a great game on its own.



It's unconventional in both the story and gameplay and I think you should at the least be able to tolerate either aspect as it's got a rather long runtime, here's what you should expect.


Be ready to not understand what is going on for most of the time, the narrative is full of symbolism, metaphors and meta-references and can often feel very pretentious and a second later the goofiest out of context thing happens while the characters keep a straight face.

The cutscenes are long and for parts of the game they are used to introduce a cast of eccentric characters and their own (often) tragic stories.
While they don't always make sense they are mostly great performances by the actors and I enjoyed watching them, kind of like watching a mini-series in between chapters.

Something I think is worth mentioning though is at the very end of the game there's about 2 hours of a near uninterrupted back-to-back cinematic dump.



The main objective you’re tasked with is to connect America and your main way of doing that is by making deliveries between the major cities, stations and preppers who hide out in shelters and expanding the network in which you can operate in.

You start by carrying packages on your back having to trek across harsh terrain and as you progress the game and expand the network you unlock more ways to make deliveries faster and carry heavier loads.

By the end of the game you'll have access to stuff like bridges, jump ramps, floating carries, exoskeletons, bikes, trucks and depending on how much you're willing to invest in it you could rebuild a highway track that spans a large portion of the map or construct a network of zip-lines that are amazing to cross the mountains with.



Vehicle and terrain physics:
The real enemy of this game are not the terrorists or the ghosts that try to kill you, it's the terrain. Most of the challenge is figuring out how to navigate it.

Now the truck is arguably the best method of delivery in the game, able to hold a bonkers amount of cargo, far more than any other method.
The truck trivializes many parts of the game (which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing), and so I don't know how much of this is by design but the truck physics especially on uneven terrain are horrendous, specifically when the truck meets a slope.

You can use the truck to climb mountains and it's still pretty efficient, but the truck can lose control and not in a way that feels natural to how physics should work.
If you lose momentum on a slope it'll start to dip sideways even if it doesn't make sense that it would in that situation, it always tries to lean horizontally. It feels like it's actively fighting you.
It could be caused by hitting a small rock or a straight up sudden temporary invisible walls.
The truck can also sometimes randomly accelerate and crash into rocks or fly off a mountain like it's possessed.


The 800 meter limitation:
When you're 800m away from any piece of cargo that you own and that is not stored in a private locker (being inside a truck doesn't count) that cargo is considered lost and it's gone from your game.

Many times I tried to use a truck to pick up a large amount of deliveries to multiple destinations, calculate an efficient route where I would then disembark the truck and use zip-lines to deliver to the remote hard to reach locations only to receive a message halfway through that all my cargo was lost.
800m is about a minute's distance away and when using a zip-line you don't even have a chance to react and turn back before the distance warning pops.

This was probably done for performance or balance reasons and I generally would understand except 800m is just too low, it should have been something like 2000m or have some time based buffer to allow you to finish what you're doing.


UI/UX:
The UI is atrocious for a game where a large percentage of your time is spent on planning your routes.

The main offender is the map that only covers around 70% of your screen, is hard to navigate with many elements stuck right in the middle of the screen and is busy with unimportant information, even with the filter options it was a cause for struggle throughout the game.
The rest of the menus also suffer from similar problems, being unintuitive and cumbersome to navigate.

This is by far the worst problem in the game for me and the most pervasive, you should not be spending so much time trying to understand what's going on.



Keep in mind that I played this taking my time and going for 100% achievements meaning my gameplay to story ratio was higher than what you might experience.

I would assume most people playing normally and mostly focusing on the story missions would take 40-80 hours to finish depending on how much they explore with less of the struggles previously mentioned and a more cinematic experience.

Note for completionists:
Post game you are free to collect all missing collectibles, 5-star all shelters, make deliveries, level up and finish whatever business you have left, it gets a bit grindy and repetitive but there are absolutely no missables, no need to stress.

Few hours worth of crack, starts off very active and gets basically braindead idle towards the end for a decent while.
Fun but needs better pacing and more content.

The new character design is cartoony and all the humans look like blow-up dolls and I'm still not sure whether I like it or not but besides this and the fact that there's baked in TAA that you can't remove the visuals are great.

Other than that new controls are okay but still have room for improvement, the game is designed for controller with the many tools and abilities but I chose to go with keyboard & mouse for a better aiming experience at the cost of having a sub-par control scheme for the keyboard.

The game is pretty short, even with going for for all achievements at a leisurely pace it took a little over 10 hours to complete.
There's also no grindy or missable achievements and it has mission select.

Good remake, just wait for a sale.

I feel I need to point out some things that annoyed me but might not interest other people:

1. The game's art seems rendered (and has some minor compression artifacting) instead of being vectored so it always looks lossy, especially when it's zoomed. In a game that places such an emphasis on it's art it's very noticeable.

2. The settings menu seems very lacking with settings only for resolution and a post processing toggle. Fortunately it has Music and SFX sliders in the audio section. (No idea why separate them when it's so bare-bones.) Also it has language select only at the starting menu with a large selection of languages except when using mouse the arrows don't work so you can't go back and have to cycle through them all just to find out the game virtually has no words in it except for the menus.

3. Loading screens.

4. Sometimes puzzle instructions would fail to load and bug out.

5. That driving puzzle.

6. Movement controls and pathing are janky and don't feel good for lots of parts.

* Bonus point:
You can always pause regardless of what's happening even though the game is like one big cut scene, seems trivial but I've learned not to take this one for granted.


Overall nice game despite the issues. Maybe wait for a sale.

I first played this almost 10 years ago and recently decided to replay it for 100% completion and then continue with the rest of Supergiant's catalogue. The time played is inaccurate, it took me around 20 hours to finish everything.

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My only problems were with the slightly awkward controls.
There's an auto aim setting that you can't turn off when playing with a controller, to manually aim you have to use the right stick but you attack with the face buttons.
If you choose to play this with a controller I recommend you bind the weapons to the trigger buttons instead.

I chose to play with keyboard + mouse but it still felt a little clunky and at times, even my melee attacks would seem to "snap" to random directions like it was auto aiming but it was never frequent or bad enough to make me want to stop playing.


Note for completionists:
After finishing you can either start a NG+ where you get to keep all your weapons, upgrades and levels or Score Attack mode where you don't (you only start with all idols and spirits unlocked).
Finishing the game on Score Attack counts for the NG+ achievement so you can skip NG+ and go straight to Score Attack and get everything else there.

Bad story badly told.
10 Minutes of annoying voice acting and holding W.

Sony just announced that going forward it would be mandatory to link your HELLDIVERS 2 account to a PlayStation Network account to continue playing

Despite all my friends buying the game on launch I waited around 2 months after launch to purchase the game because I had some reservations about the game and the business practices of the people behind it.

The biggest factor though and what ultimately won me over was the fact that I didn't require a PSN account to play, as I had problems with setting up a PSN in the past and even got in contact with PlayStation support over the phone and they were no help.
(While writing this, just for good measure I tried to login to my PSN account again and got multiple time-out errors)

I did see the small and barely noticeable message in the store page saying an account is required and only after verifying with multiple people and then being able to skip the account linking myself through family sharing the game that I decided on buying the game.


Sony is now pulling the rug under the pretense that this whole time this was a "grace period".
This was never mentioned as a technical issue that's due to change anywhere before.
I paid for a product that I would not longer be able to use at the end of this month and I plan on attempting to refund it if they go through with it.


Here is a little more comprehensive list of the reasons for the refund and why you might want to stay away from this game:

• Requiring a PSN account to play, and being always online.
  
• Using FOMO tactics such as pre-order bonuses and twitch drops.
  
• Having a premium currency in a fully priced game is undoubtedly shaping the amount of grind and effort required to unlock content and not the other way around.
  
• Insisting on linking the cosmetic armor sets with the stats and perks system and having them purchasable with the aforementioned premium currency.
  
• Insisting on obfuscating helpful information (i.e. weapon/stratagem/armor stats) from the players in the guise of 'roleplay'.
  
• Terrible optimization with constant frame drops, crashes and a very noticeable amount of bugs or straight up broken mechanics.
  
• Adding anti-cheat to a strictly PvE co-op game that further impairs performance and still doesn't prevent people from cheating.
  
• Limiting the maximum amount of resources you can hold at a time to force engagement.

Very enjoyable collection of short puzzles, only wish there was dark mode as the game is too bright.

It made me feel smart.

I don't feel so smart anymore...