Recent reviews by Lacene

It's rare for a game to be the perfect sequel. So often a sequel can get plenty of things right but still end up fumbling something along the way where the previous game did it better.

Monster train 2 is one of those rare games. It perfectly expands upon what was already good while also adding plenty of new things that don't feel out of place.

I changed my mind, the final map in this game is so incredibly broken in so many different places that I cannot recommend this with any level of confidence.

The TL;DR Season 15 is a difficult map but feels much fairer and more reasonable with it's difficulty compared to Year 1's maps of Kola and Amur. It's a bit easier but that's not really a fault of the map more that we have had 3 years of power creep and game experience. It also has fewer of the usual bad habits other maps have, though still present. The new trucks however feel very underwhelming.

Lets be honest, this map could never be as difficult as Kola and Amur. Those maps threw us into truly extreme conditions and we had barely any tools to deal with them. But more than that Amur in particular was, frankly, trollish in it's execution. The difficulty of that map was heavily front loaded with Urska river having in my opinion some of the worst map design in the game. It's garage was placed in the least useful place possible necessitating you driving on ice anytime you wanted to start from the garage and the less said about that damned tree the better. Once you unlocked the cosmodrone garage and the Ziks the difficulty flatlined.
What really set the Amur map apart was how fantastic it's capstone contract was, building a rocket, slowly dragging it out with multiple trucks and then seeing it launch with all of the fanfare it deserved.
Really the only way to top that would be launching ourselves into space and using a scifi truck to haul cargo on the moon. Modders, please get on that.

Anyway, Quebec, It is in general a lot less annoying of a map. It does only have two zones but then how often did you visit Northen Aegis in Amur? Most big obstacles are in fact fixable so no perma toppled trees and the one mandatory unfixable bridge every map must have does at least look like too big of a job for us to handle. I still have problems with it however.

The Harbor zone's main thing is the extremely long and winding paths you have to take that allow no real deviation from them. There is this long road network with several bridges you have to build (one of them twice!) but this road isn't that useful. This is because the east of the map where the harbor map crossing is as well as the town is never actually served by this road connection at all. While on the map screen it may look like there are paths or hills to allow you to the interior of the map you cannot actually reach it from there as you'll always face sheer rock cliffs that you cannot scale. You do have to either take the ice path down south, or take the northen path...which also demands you cross a frozen lake. It's asinine, the longer route should be safer and easier to compensate allowing you to use larger trailers for easier bulk transit but as it stands the highway that you rebuild doesn't actually feel that useful outside of accessing the factory or sawmill. Technically once you have the roads fully built you could go from the garage, to the map crossing near the factory, all through the lake map and then cross back at the harbor there but that is a bit silly. It also STILL has a broken road section needing you to wade through snow. If I'm taking a detour that bloody long I should be able to run a highway truck through it!
I don't dislike ice crossings but I do dislike them being near mandatory as it effectively locks you out of using the medium weight trucks that are too heavy to travel over the ice but not heavy enough to plough through it, a problem when there's already less and less reason to use them over the various overpowered giga trucks we have in the first place. Just having a couple of routes to access the interior of the map from the repairable bridge near the garage or getting up onto the mountain trail from the landslide near the oil refinery would make the map feel much less tedious than asking the player to travel around 50% of the map's exterior in order to get anywhere because a huge number of contracts will center around the port or town.
There are also three contracts that just require you to carry 8 units of cargo somewhere, 2 of them being along 95% the same route. It's lazy and I have enough hours in this game that I really don't need the padding.
There are also pontoon crossings now. They're neat. They have a 25% chance of just eating your trucks and it getting clipped into the pontoon needing a recovery. But they're neat.

Lake Ribiere is significantly better a map in my opinion albeit with fewer contracts, it's a shame it doesn't have have a garage of it's own but the map is a lot more open, and it's road network when fully repaired is actually useful and does serve most of the parts of the map that you would want to access frequently while being a lot longer a path than taking the more difficult interior trails. Not the logging camp and again the game teases you with the main trails getting very close but having no way to actually cross over without a huge detour but it is better; And this map doesn't have that much logging. Well it does, but you haul logs to get wood planks crafted for other contracts, and this helps space out the deliveries rather than asking me to haul 10 loads at once making it a lot more bearable. There is still a unfixable section of the road near the quarry, and the devs have also tried to pile up obstacles there to prevent players from using trailer bridges too which just feels petty. It also didn't work, suck it Saber.

As for the new trucks they are underwhelming.
The Elephant is basically a sidegrade of the Kolob 74941, a large heavy tractor that can only use a high saddle. It's main selling point is the loading crane stolen from the bandit and colossal roof rack. The problem is it feels utterly toothless. It's engine feels far too weak for the truck itself that in any sort of harsh terrain like broken ice or steep hills, which are common in Quebec, it just stalls out and it's wheels lock up even when you aren't pulling that much. It also is very light on the nose and so understeer or just no steering at all is very common making it an unwieldy beast. The roof rack isn't even that much of a bonus as the truck is so thirsty it needs that just to have any range. The crane is nice, it's pretty much the strongest loading crane in the game, but it's mainly there so you can re-hitch trailers in the wild since it is a tall truck.I tried to make use of it with the heavy lowboy trailer for general cargo carrying but the PLAD and Kenworth 963 are just way more useful and capable without as much hassle.
The Mercer is... okay. It's a perfectly serviceable medium truck but it both has a somewhat small fuel tank and not that much power under the hood. It's unique gearbox does make it consume a lot less fuel in AWD however with only one low gear and a tendacy to wheel lock if not in low gears makes it a bit of a pain to use. The problem is Quebec's conditions make it a terrible pick, even with the extensive road network fully repaired you are still going to have to venture over ice or deep snow frequently and it's not really well equipped to deal with either.
This is in essence my issue with "hard" maps, because of the conditions I'm just ending up using the same 3 or 4 trucks constantly because if I try to use anything else, like the trucks unlocked in the very map itself, I'm just going to get stuck and then have to use old faithfuls to rescue them anyway.

Could be better if the devs actually concentrated on the main game rather than shoving god awful minigames in my face every 5 minutes.
No I don't want to play bootleg magic, bootleg starfox, bootleg road rash, bootleg punchout or bootleg mario kart.
I'm probably missing a dozen more minigames from the list.

This is a game from a different time, it plays like something from the PS2, looks like something from the PS3 and has none of the anti consumer baggage of other modern games. It is sad that this alone is worth praising but such is the state of the industry and the racing genre in particular.

This game is very particular on what it offers, unstructured highway racing with traffic that is heavy enough for you to remain aware of it but never enough to actually pose much of a hazard at all. With nothing but long straights and gentle suggestions of curves the game shouldn't be that interesting to drive, especially with it's fairly simplistic handling. Yet the framing of hunting down new rivals and the fact few races last longer than a minute really stops you from dwelling on that fact long enough to notice.

Act one's progression is pretty rough, being overly restrictive in what you can start with and the money to earn a new vehicle takes a bit too long for my taste. One thing to note is the game generally wants you to not return to the garage that often if you can help it. Between long drive bonuses and the win multiplier it is optimal to not go back until the game forces you, or you reach the credit limit and instead use parking areas to refresh your tires and nitrous.

The AI also leaves something to be desired, it's kinda stupid and prone to ramming you into walls quite often as well as car balance being all over the place. Most races will end as a one sided stomp as well as the car the opponent has rarely actually matching to it's performance. But when you do have an opponent who can keep up or is slightly faster than you it does become surprisingly tense and fun despite the reality of you just going in a straight line and barely steering for a minute.

It's fun, rough in a way that is just down to it's fundamental design rather than being EA but still enjoyable. If you actually manage to get invested there's a lot of hours for how comparatively light the content is.

I finally managed to get past my soft locking woes and managed to play through the DLC. My views on Frontline 59 are mixed. This DLC is basically a more condensed form of the main game with all the good and bad parts of that game pushed into extremes.

The difficulty is extreme, hard mode in Wingman was already a lot more difficult than ace difficulty in AC7. Lack of any health regen and no checkpoints will do that.
Yet at the same time the difficulty always felt a lot fairer too, in Wingman you fail a mission because you yourself got shot down. In AC7 you usually failed a mission because of a timer or an NPC getting shot down instead which is a lot more aggravating.
Mercenary mode is even more insane of course, but that needs a full game clear to even unlock, it's fine if that mode is simply unfair.

Wingman also, in general, had a lot fewer crazy set-pieces that actually affected gameplay. Sure being transported to the Fanta-dimension was dramatic but outside of a glitchy hud missions still played more or less the same.

F-59 however has been copying AC's homework a little more closely with a couple of these missions and the result is very much showing why AC now has checkpoints and health regen.
Don't get me wrong, the premise of mission 4 and 6 of the DLC are genuinely fantastic, and the final boss of the DLC is a much better fight mechanically than anything 7 or it's own DLC could offer. I don't want them to change anything about the missions themselves; If there is a sequel, I do hope that they continue the trends they started in the DLC and double down on the lunacy.

But at the same time with the more extreme scenarios the game is much more in need of checkpoints, resupply lines or something in order to maintain the higher action and more dramatic scenarios without it turning into a frustrating slog. Best compromise I can think of would be to keep the current no checkpoint/resupply to Mercenary mode or make it a modifier.

During the tutorial section I was fined twice for traffic collisions before the game had even granted me control of the truck. That is the level of polish you're going to have to expect here.

The game has promise but they've leaned too hard into "iTs A tRuCk In SpAcE gUyS!!1!" angle and made it a pain in the ass to control in a 6 DoF environment. You can only control the pitch of the vehicle and you cannot strafe at all, this is combined with most turning causing your truck to pitch up or down alongside rolling and a stabiliser system that is little more than a mild suggestion. Turning it off and on felt no different, it's that useless. While going point to point this is not much of an issue, aside from feeling like you are staring through a letterbox because our character is apparently 4 foot tall and can barely see over the hood.

The issues begin whenever you have to do any sort of precision control such as hitching up, almost always these will be slightly off the main horizon of the system (or you'll be lower than expected since you need to keep the nose down to even see where you are going). Lining up for these when you can only pivot around your center and not strafe at all means you need ridiculous amounts of space to line everything up since if your truck is not completely perpendicular to what you want to dock with there's a good chance the docking system will just refuse to let you hitch. In the demo the game would twist you into position so long as you were somewhat close but for release they have made this much stricter.

I get that it's supposed to feel like a big rig in space, but being able to do some minor course correction without needing a 45 point turn isn't going to ruin that, the truck is still going to feel heavy and have a ton of inertia. It is after all a STAR truck, not some clapped out Kenworth.

Also the maintenance aspect, I like it. Batteries running out frequently or the truck in general being an unreliable heap that is always breaking does add some nice distractions from just flying down the spaceways (at half the speed limit because you are always stuck behind some slow AI that jackknifes the his truck every 20 yards). But the default prices for your batteries and other consumables is utterly insane. Why the hell are air filters costing over twice my job payout when they barely last? There are settings to adjust these things to be fair but to change them you have to start an entire new save which is pure insanity.

TL;Dr it's undercooked

It's vampire survivors with DRG branding slapped on top and some minor terrain deformation.

The problem is I already have VS, I've had it for a couple years now and DRGS offers very, very, little to an already stale formula. Yes there is mining, being able to tunnel through rock and mine minerals is a nice side objective in addition to the usual kiting activities. But it's not enough.

This bullet heaven or whatever the genre is called nowadays has plenty of games in it and they have all iterated upon VS in some way. Be it including strafing or full on manual shooting and reloading. DRGS has only brought with it the ability to hump the walls to get some extra resources. Yes you can tunnel past a horde in the short term but the "islands" of rock you chew through are never really big enough for this to be a significant strategy. Guns feel bland and ineffective for the genre they are in too, with many having incredibly cumbersome firing patterns and long reloads that feel punishing when you have no control over them. Upgrades likewise feel boring, outside of overclocks all you are getting is simple % stat changes. 15% damage, 10% reload. You don't ever feel strong, merely that you are at best keeping pace. In fact a lot of the overclocks themselves are also just basic modifiers but bigger, very few actually change how you might play the game, a stark contrast from DRG where even balanced overclocks can significantly shake up a weapon.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the fact this game actually has some challenge and I wish we could get swarms as big and omnipresent in DRG itself.

Which really is the crux of what I don't like about this game, it doesn't feel like a DRG spinoff. It feels too much like an inferior version of VS with a superficial gimmick tacked on.
You aren't getting lost in caves, because they are always just small rectangles with a few small islands of digable rock or small impassable pits dotted about.
You aren't doing various mining and industry tasks, all you have is clearing waves until a boss spawns then killing it so you can move to the next rectangular arena. The best you get is mining some morkite occasionally.
You aren't using creative weapons to kill bugs and in fact have no direct control over them at all.

The game feels agonisingly passive in how you play it. You kite bugs, hump walls and choose between 3 basic % buffs to one of your guns every few seconds. I hope eventually they do actually try to make this game be a little more interactive and a lot more like it's big brother as a true spinoff rather than a clone of an already existing game. But I had these same complaints back when the demo came out and practically nothing has changed between that and early access.

Just buy vampire survivors instead, it's cheaper and has more content.

Still not changing my review, Sony shouldn't have tried this in the first place and they likely only backpedaled because Valve gave them a warning for the hassle they caused. Saying "they heard us" on twitter is nothing but a pathetic lie to try and salvage some goodwill.

Imagine mmo tier raids in terms of flashy spectacle but with combat that's actually fun and you don't have to interact with broken, mentally unstable people in order to progress.