Recent reviews by Kellervo

The good? This is the closest we've got to a Battlefield 4 in a long time. It has a ton of content, and the operator abilities don't shake too much up. There's a fair variety of maps in Warfare and it's just fun to play with friends. It has huge weapon customization and even better, provides you with in-depth details so you can see EXACTLY how your gun will handle right down to the recoil patterns and accuracy cones.

The bad? Horrendous optimization for AMD CPUs & GPUs that routinely leads to 90% frame drops. Constant in-your-face FOMO and monetization involving multiple types of currencies and auction houses and loot boxes and gachas. An obnoxious, click-heavy lobby UI that can take upwards of a dozen clicks just to get through so you can modify your gun.

But what got me to write this is how horrible the map balance is, and how the weekly playlists have been 'okay' at best, or really bad experiences. There's far too many maps where things like out-of-bound lines can allow another team to spawn camp with impunity from elevated terrain, or inconsistencies that give one team a rooftop directly overlooking, or a key entry way directly onto a point, arbitrarily forcing one team to be at a huge disadvantage trying to contest a location. There's far less flexibility here compared to Battlefield games, resulting in point fights inevitably funnelling into one or two Metro-esque killzones.

The weekly playlists are the worst of this, since they tie FOMO rewards behind them and so far, one has been absurdly unbalanced in favor of one team (why, in a head to head, should one team spawn on an emplaced artillery station with lines of fire on the other team's spawn...?), and the other relies on these artificial map boundaries to funnel teams into kill boxes. It turns the game into more of a COD twitchfest, but the servers are terrible and can't keep pace, with hit reg and phantom/teleporting players occurring constantly.

Keep in mind this is a very early access launch - there's a few bugs, a bit of jank, and you will have death due to random or buggy AI & mechanics. If that'll enrage you it might be best to sit out for a few months. If not, it already has a pretty solid gameplay loop that just needs some work to turn into something really special.

The devs have also been very quick with the updates - game hasn't even been out for 9 months and it already has six updates that have done a lot to help improve on it. Really excited to see where it can go from here.

TL;DR - The game oozes with aesthetic and style. Incredible art and audio that just needs some gameplay polish and balancing. There's so much potential here, and if you're willing to deal with some odd quirks, I say buy it now.

You get to wage war against three factions - socialist automatons, mindless bugs, and a giant corporation, all hellbent on threatening democracy.

You get to win against all three. :>

There's a framework for a really good game here. It is nowhere near finished right now based on the content, but it has a Valheim-esque loop that's a bit more streamlined.

Just wish the combat was smoother. The Soulsy aesthetic doesn't carry over to the combat, melee can feel very awkward and clumsy at times.

I'd recommend this, but only if it's on sale, or if you really, really like FEAR-style shooters.

The gunplay is fantastic, and the one thing this game absolutely nails. Combat is intense, and you have plenty of tools and abilities to make each fight a blast. It looks fantastic for an indie game. Some of the horror elements work, but not all.

The problems? Lack of content for the price, and the padding. The main story is roughly 4~ hours of content altogether, with the optional missions tacking on maybe a few more. If you're not a completionist you're going to burn through the game in a handful of hours. The HVT Kill List seems like it would add more content, but you ultimately kill almost all of them in the course of just playing the game, and when HVTs do show up, they're just mooks with a different model and will frequently die in a single shot.

The guns are also all very serviceable, but there's a serious lack of variety with only one weapon per class, and most attachments pointless or ineffectual. The one unique gun in the game, the Penetrator homage, feels a bit underwhelming and makes the later missions comically easy.

The horror elements are very, very hit or miss, as the creatures vary wildly from one mission to the next, and most of the designs are technically impressive, but aesthetically off the mark, or even -silly-. Combat with them is where the gameplay is at its very worst.

The story is also virtually nonexistent. The game tacks on some lore with short, 1-3 sentence 'intel' pickups, but they ultimately don't tie together very well. You rarely interact with anyone, and when you do they almost immediately die, or die later in the same level.

TL;DR - If you really, really love FEAR and don't mind doing a ton of side mission stuff, it's worth the buy. Otherwise, might be best to wait for a sale.

If you have any interest in action horror, or liked the original Dead Space, this is a must have. A perfect remake that builds on everything from the original game, in ways that show these devs give a damn about what made the original so great.

You can fight a duel to the death with your evil twin, ricocheting rockets and railgun shots off of each other's coins while you double-jump and slide around like ferrets on crack, until you both end up skiing down a pyramid trying to kill each other before you hit the metal-melting sand below.

If that isn't enough you can parry an angel's holy swords back into his face and fire a Cerebral Bore into his forehead, juggling him into the air with a gatling nailgun and a pump-powered shotgun.

If either of those sound even remotely enticing, you'll probably like this game.

This is a straight up classic 90s FPS, a cocktail of copious amounts of blood and serotonin.

Presentation is top-notch, weapons are chunky and the soundtrack is perfect for the mood.

This game always puts me into a zen-like trance where time ceases to have any meaning and the next thing I know it's well past midnight and I've built a giant factory to turn out millions of screws.

There's never enough screws.

I can not explain all the ways that I love this game without making a giant wall of text, so let me summarize what I didn't like about the game;

1. It ended.

The gunplay is massively improved over Metro 2033, as are the stealth mechanics. The guns as a whole are superb - even The Bastard and Duplet become veritable powerhouses with the multitude of attachments in the game. My only complaint regarding guns is the lack of variety in terms of sound - there is a single suppressed sound for shotguns, and one for everything else. Combat is handled superbly well aside from one mid-game boss fight, which was confusing at first and came at the worst possible time.

But the gameplay isn't even the best part.

The atmosphere is intense - several levels were horror trips on par with Silent Hill or Amnesia - I had to stop twice just to get my head back together. Even when the game isn't trying to frighten you, it is absolutely oppressive. The world is every bit as detailed as BioShock Infinite's, yet instead tackles different themes.

The morality system plays a subtle role in the game, and the sheer amount of /depth/ to the writing and story is absolutely superb. I can not recall a single instance in the game where dialogue repeated, or a single patrol or encounter which had no unique dialogue or story to it. Everything I had done earlier in the game was referenced by people - alternately in awe of my accomplishments, or in hushed whispers of the atrocities I had unleashed.

There is one feature - hitherto unmentioned - which will harken to BioShock Infinite: But it's incredibly well done and only furthered my immersion in the game. For the first time in a long time, I genuinely cared for the characters, their struggles and their morals. This was not empathy, it was genuine sympathy.

I will play through it again - and don't buy into the **** about Ranger Mode. This is a classic, with or without it.