Recent reviews by Karolk

gleba

Let any fish
Who meets my gaze
Learn the true meaning of fear
For I am the harbringer of death
The bane of creatures subaqueous
My rod is true and unwavering
As I cast into the aquatic abyss
A man, scorned by this uncaring earth
Finds solace in the sea
My only friend
The worm upon my hook
Wriggling, writhing
Struggling to surmount
The mortal pointlessness
That permeates this barren world
I am alone
I am empty
And yet
I fish

I love holding metal objects during an active thunderstorm.

The Infantry Combat overhaul was a bold step for the game, but a very welcome one. As is apparent with the current reviewbombing going on, it does not sit well with people who think this game was supposed to be cod.

There is no shortage of blazingly fast paced movement shooters that focus on individual mechanical skill such as movement and aim, but this game is far from being about that. Methodical teamwork and looking at the bigger picture on the battlefield is the major appeal of Squad.

The way that the ICO update tipped the scales of combat puts emphasis on planning, positioning and execution, punishing teams that don't cooperate and try to win purely by brute force and aim / reaction times. This does two things: players are incentivized to act accordingly and cooperate, which creates the core gameplay loop that makes you forge bonds with your fellow squadmates. The other is minimizing "unfair" and irritating deaths, such as getting onetapped by the guy cheesing game mechanics. Emphasis on teamplay being baked into the core game mechanics just gives matches better flow.

The way suppression works now gives a much more visceral feel to the game. Getting caught out of position, pushing trough enemy fire, encountering armor is just straight up horror now, and I'm here for it. The stakes are high for every contact, fighting to regain the initiative in a firefight just feels so right.

For sure, this update is controversial, but it in my mere opinion it has worked wonders steering Squad away from becoming another "competitive gaming" run and gun shooter with all the toxicity that comes with that. A lot of the recent negative reviews only go to show that some people are better off playing arcade/esports titles and refuse to take Squad for what it is at its' core. One must not forget the roots of this game in PR:BF2.

Every purchase contributes to funding synthetic bodies into which the consciousness of both Adams brothers will one day be uploaded, so that they can keep developing this ☼MASTERWORK☼ for millennia to come.

Millions will populate and play Due Process, this starts with you.

car go vroom

CoH 2 sweats review bombed this game simply due to not being to cope with a new meta.
Graphics are good, not overdone which means it runs like butter at 4K res. not as gray and gritty as CoH2 which again contributes to CoH2 fanatics being ups but in my humble opinion it looks great. Sure, there are janky animations here and there but nothing crazy.
The UI is kept simple and to the point. It does need some QoL updates like rescaling but it's a good foundation.
The biggest deal of this release is 4 factions on launch. People tend to forget that CoH 2 released with 2 factions and try to compare this to a game that has been polished for a decade.
I might be deaf but I can't really complain about the sound. Stuka go brr just fine.
The absurd claims comparing this to a "mobile game" are just baseless cope.

The "For science" update ,for the most part, made the game actually playable and enjoyable, reigniting some hope for this iteration of KSP, but I want to see some further consistent progress before i can change this to a positive review.

The new model for missions and doing away with currency cost for parts makes the exploration mode much more approachable and fun than the original career mode, focusing more on exploration than doing arbitrary, stupidly specific tasks to get some money. Overall I like how it was executed, but it leaves out the endgame after you unlock the tech tree, in KSP1 you could sell research for cash which would in a way make research gathering useful even when you have maxed out the tech tree. People complaining about it being "too easy" and saying "I can max it in 2 launches" are an outlier, folks who can do multiplanetary launches with minimal parts. They are not representing the average casual player. A solution for this divide would be adjustable point multipliers in the difficulty settings like KSP1 had, though they might already be in the game as I have not checked.

Would I recommend this game over KSP1 as of now? Not yet. There are still a lot of things missing, which makes the "2" hard to justify for now. The devs managed to vastly improve performance and iron out most of the game-breaking bugs, but framerates still leave a lot to be desired and over 8 hours of testing this patch I still ran into some bugs such as being unable to dock and parts of my ship going past the speed of light out of nowhere, turning the game into a slideshow. Symmetry is also has numerous issues while building in the VAB.

Overall this patch brought back some hope that the devs are actually doing something, it's just that the game was nowhere near ready for release, even early access.



Below is the original review pre- "For science patch":
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If you don't read anything else: RTX 3080 Ryzen 5600x 35-40 fps avg at the LOWEST settings at 1080p.
Abyssmal performance, stuttering galore, missing basic features and QOL stuff that was in base KSP1.
Not even mentioning their marketing material which overwhelmingly focuses on features that will not be in the game for years if ever.
Sure, sometimes it looks impressive graphically, there are definitely good sides to the graphics and user interface, but for every positive you can Take-Two things that are complete broken jank.

TLDR: there's a foundation that can be built upon, but right now it's absolutely not enjoyable to play due to performance, bugs and missing features. Hopefully in the coming decades my grandchildren will be able to witness this game in a fixed state.

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EDIT 7 Months into ""release"":
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This will get buried in the reviews and nobody will ever read this, but I am writing out of sheer discontent more than anything.

Nothing.

The skeleton crew of devs at IG left in place by take two interactive is ineffective and unable to deliver anything of substance period. 7 months of work has amounted to nothing other than hotfixes fixing five out of fifty million bugs.
No real content updates (apart from like 2 engines they didn't manage to squeeze in on "release" day), no gameplay features, forget about the roadmap.

As some recent reviews already iterated, It seems like the publishers already knew this was going to be disastrous early on (publisher's fault, they literally tore the original dev studio apart), therefore a great bulk of the remaining budget went into overblown marketing to try and at least scam the buyers to recoup some of the investment that went into the project. They took something that should have been completely scrapped, put a nice gift wrap on it and put it up for sale.
Getting scammed out of 40 bucks is one thing, but rewarding take two with said money for what they have done is the greatest evil of all.

The state of development becomes a lot clearer once you look up how the star theory studio, (who originally started the development of ksp2) were stripped of the KSP IP and then poached for less pay, which led to the creation of Intercept games (the current dev studio of ksp2).

The only two reasons why I dont try to refund this purchase are morbid curiosity and having spent probably over 1 k hours on the original since early alpha (2011), which makes me hold on to some naive nostalgic hope for the reboot. Can this pull a project zomboid and return from complete vaporware status? Very likely never. This release has ruined the prestige that KSP's name once held, one of inspiring many future engineers and tinkerers.

Footnote, for anyone curious about getting into ksp:
Just go for KSP1. It is a complete and polished game which this will never be. It stands on it's own legs without mods, but if you so choose it is moddable to the point where you can get graphical fidelity that is on par with ksp2, and you get so much more gameply to boot.

Ps: the sound design in this game is amazing, kudos to all those who worked on sound design and sound engineering for ksp2, it is truly a shame that their effort was wasted.

Asocial society simulator