Recent reviews by LukeBu

Compared to the first game, Monaco 2 is much harder to stealth perfectly. The game is much more about surviving hectic and sometimes unavoidable mistakes. After initially being baffled by how some abilities were league's better than others, I saw that with the right upgrades, and specific situations, each character is useful, if still quite unequally. It's a different take than the first game, but I enjoyed it with friends, despite the occasional annoyance at its jank, camera, and no longer being primarily a stealth game.

I like the new barter system honestly. No widescreen support and poor optimization make it a no for now. I shouldn't drop 40 fps when I break a pot on my 7800 XT, and this should not run lower fps that Stellar blade on medium settings using Steam deck. I liked the first game enough, but would like to see the combat get a little more interesting. We shall see.

At first glance, this game is FTL. It has ships with weapons that target little rooms. You select target and move little people around to patch holes and put out fires, albeit with some Warhammer 40k flavor.
I have asked many times why there aren't more clones or sequels to FTL. It's a great old game.
Void War added everything FTL has to make it great, removed some unnecessary inconveniences, and built a diverse roster of units, modules, weapons, and strategies to make it even better. Now I hear they have a road map to add even more. How am I so lucky?

Boring. Talk talk talk about nothing. Killed some pigs, fell asleep.

PRO: The best combat of any MH game to date.
Graphics look amazing on the highest settings, if you have a supercomputer.
Plot was interesting. Co-op is great, if only plot and menus got out of the way.

CON: Poor ratio of graphics to system use on low end rigs using low settings.
You have to tinker with settings a lot to find the sweet spot FPS to appearance.
Small monster roster.
Co-op only lets you join certain ways through certain menus in a confusing mess.
Many areas have a fog that makes everything look monochromatic.
Much of the plot is given in cut-scenes, and the worst option; slow walk-and-talk on rails sequences.

MIXED: A lot easier than other titles.
It is the most convenient MH experience.

I would rather have more monsters, and have it run on more machines at the expense of graphics, but the game is a ton of fun. It's not chock full of content, but I'm hopeful it will have regular events and title updates adding new monsters, and hopefully a really big expansion.

It is already a great game at this point.
They didn't change anything to mess it up, which is what happens when franchises are this good.
Except when it comes to the whole not being able to pause on certain bosses issue.

Cobalt Core is an excellent card space battler rougelike-like, with strong FTL vibes and a cute animal asthetic. The ships and characters you unlock vastly change how the gameplay operates. Not all characrers and ships are created equal, but there are a lot of fun combos that work really well. Getting everything you can out of your deck, passives and proper positioning is very satisfying.

As a huge fan of DD:DA, with thousands of hours across multiple consoles, save files, and even multiple accounts to have a full party of my pawns, this sequel took me off guard a little.
At first I was paralyzed by my usual need to explore everything. I saw a game where I just wanted more of the same, but, instead it was imperfectly delivered. It made me very sad.
Menus weren't as convenient, camping, planning, and weight management, were taking up so much time, and I wasn't enjoying it. The game was filled with walking through goblin infested roads, trying to solve quests that sometimes broke in unexpected ways, and I even used a mod to get access to an item necessary to my pawn build, I accidentally locked myself out of my first playthrough. I was sad that they expanded the color system to allow for more classes, but only netted one more. I was hugely disappointed by this, and still am, mostly since the first game and expansion were so important to me.
I kept giving it a chance, and I'm glad I did.
I learned to look at it differently.
The combat is top notch, even if they unnecessarily lowered the max skills you can equip. The travel is interesting, even if not enough to keep me from using fast travel every time as promised. The inventory management is not as good as the first, and the changes they made did not help, but it is something I learned to deal with quicker, especially late game, mostly by changing equipment less. The late game event/ending was a unique and interesting way of spicing things up.
So while my feelings are very mixed, and I would make a lot of changes to this game,(enemy variety, better dungeons, inventory management, quest mechanics not being broken by nonsense in a few cases, more abilities on your bar for most classes, and wanting more classes) it is still really good.
My expectations were a little to high, but why shouldn't they be, Capcom is pretty awesome!

P.S. add optional multiplayer, even if I am just playing a pawn.
P.s.s. As a Steam Deck super tinkerer, it was very hard to get this to not run like ass most of the time on Steam Deck. It is much improved, but as far as I know no one else is even trying anymore. Even on my pc it seemed like it should run better. Please keep optimising it.

Great game! lots of fun with friends.
I'm a tad unhappy with the solo experience, post patch, and the fact that arrowhead doesn't test any of their updates before going live. Otherwise this is a fantastic, exciting game for a group of four.

Great co-op! It's a bit high stress, but it gets exciting quick!