Recent reviews by JustBubba

Now I can be magical without guilt!

This is genuinely incredible. This is a must have for everybody, especially people with lower end specs. I ran this on my old home theater media pc with an rx560 and was playing palworld at 1440p with zero issues.

A bloated, abysmal slog.
A prime example of what is wrong with modern gaming.
When I open the game that I spent $100 on, it should open into my game, the one that yknow, I bought. And not an unintelligible graphic promoting 9 other games that I did not buy.
Oh and it's 200GB. It takes like an hour to download and an hour on top of that just to initialize things like shaders and whatnot.

Fell off hard.

How do you ♥♥♥♥ up this bad?

> Singleplayer offline game
> Looks inside
> Denuvo, and can't play without ubisoft connect online

Aside from the massive ♥♥♥♥ off DRM bloat from ubisoft, it's a solid game. (assuming you can get it to run on your system without having to yo ho a game you just spent $??? on)

The good:
I never thought i would enjoy blatant goofiness in a "vaguely serious ish" shooter game but this game pulls it off. The amount of "Fortunate son" chaos makes it hard for you to ever get bored, while still somehow remaining within suspension-of-disbelief territory.
That is the one thing it does so exceptionally perfectly that it frankly deserves an award.
The scripted vehicle missions are also astoundingly mechanically sound. I don't think I've ever seen NPCs drive cars as well as in this game. A+
Ballistics are also on par with the best around. They are what PUBG was trying to do, but actually done right.

The good enough:
Fairly solid gameplay loop, the missions are minimally grindy and boring. It has sub mechanics that are actually useful, for instance things like fishing and hunting are the perfect middle ground between forcing you to do it and ignoring the mechanic entirely. There are a couple side missions that make you wander around for like an hour to find three bears that never seem to actually spawn, but those are almost entirely optional. HOWEVER, you will WANT to hunt because it makes you BANK. A couple minutes of screwing around in a field can get you enough money to buy pretty much anything. Perfect amount of incentive, perfect amount of balance, the only thing that brings it down is the AI and world engine which I'll get to later.
The power balancing is a little shaky especially in the awkward interim between early and mid game. I nearly softlocked myself by not investing points into health boost on the hardest difficulty, but entirely fixable by just dropping the difficulty or not being an idiot like me and investing in useful perks and skills.
The stealth mechanics also just ~feel good~
probably because it is very slightly 4th wall breakingly overpowered after just a handful of perk points and silencers.

The not so good:
The reactive environment is.... more environment than it is reactive.
You can visibly see the range where enemies, encounters, and engagements spawn or activate.
After a few hours, you'll have 4th wall 6th sense and know exactly how close you have to be to a building or tower or beacon to be able to destroy it or activate enemy spawns.
This pretty much ruins most of the point of sniping and vehicles (especially air vehicles), since you can't actually see anything until you're close enough for the enemies to have already put more holes in you than a disturbing manga.
The NPC AI, particularly companion AI, is game breakingly atrocious.

The kind of annoying and/or 4th wall breaking stuff:
The world engine feels very "PS4 Port" like I mentioned earlier. "Everything" distance is laughably bad with no way to change it. View distance is bad, reactive environment distance is bad, it's just all around bad. You can see trees popping into the world around you, especially when flying anywhere. Enemies do not spawn far enough away for it to respect any of the environment and weapon mechanics it does so well.
And when they do spawn it's so weird it's jarring. You can stand in a field and turn around and there's a herd of deer where there wasn't a second ago.
And the BIGGEST BAD: Helicopters break everything twice.
Like I said draw distance is too low for air vehicles to be anything resembling useful, and traveling in them is jarring thanks to the LOD and previously mentioned spontaneous insertion of "things and stuff" into and outside of your field of view.
At the same time, armed helicopters are also so abhorrently overpowered that there is no point to play the game seriously after you skin enough skunks to buy one.
At the other same time, they're glass cannons at close range, so if you're close enough for enemies to have spawned or rendered in, you're probably already so unrecognizably dead that /d/ would get excited.
It's a weird Ouroboros of not taking advantage of complementary mechanics that it kind of all just breaks the feel of the world.


Overall, solid demo. They've got most of the core gameplay down, it just needs some polish.
Once they finish it, it'll be perfect.
Wait it's been out for 6 years and already has a sequel?
Oh...

Can't use it without an account, and it refuses to let me create an account.
It also makes my computer un-useable every time I start it up because it steals all inputs system-wide.

Literally unplayable in the current state.
Starting the game launches it via the EA launcher rather than actually starting the game directly
This means it won't work with:
steam big picture,
steam remote play,
proton or steamdeck,
and worst of all, controllers paired through steam.

You are honestly probably better off just pirating it.
It does not work on steam.

I hope you like loading screens

Mmm, waiter, more mechanical keyboard users please