Recenzii recente de Morbo513

An arcade-flight game with an interesting premise, a nice art style and good customisation, undermined by the use of soulless AI voices, clunky controls and tedious mechanics. If your flying game manages to make the act of flying unfun, you've kinda ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the dog. Not unfixable, but can't recommend for now.

Surprising amount of depth for a game based on the Terminator franchise. Mechanically, it's somewhere between Men of War, Company of Heroes, Wargame, Jagged Alliance 2, Ground Control, World In Conflict and Act of War. Probably closest towards Men of War in terms of scale.

All your units have ammo for their weapons, with vehicles having directional armour and components, as well as fuel, spare parts for field repairs, and an ammo pool for infantry to rearm from. Infantry squads also have ammo, and can equip a variety of support weapons. All of which persists between missions, from the very beginning; Ammo, fuel and spare parts are replenished from a limited supply; you need to actually acquire special weapons to save them.

Infantry casualties must be replaced between missions from the civilians you rescue during them or from disbanding other squads - with additional squads and new vehicles being awarded for completing side objectives or just found in the missions. Vehicles must be crewed by troops trained to do so - who you can freely dismount at-will if you need to crew another vehicle or avoid making one a target; many can carry passengers with a specific number of seats rather than squad slots. In the same way, buildings are garrisonable and have decent destruction. Projectiles are physical and must actually connect with their target to do damage. Armoured vehicles are very resistant, if not impervious to small arms.

The game certainly has its flaws; it's a little unpolished on the interface/controls/responsivity side of things. There are balance and pacing issues, with the 3rd mission being a huge difficulty spike - and pulling your attention six different ways at once. Make sure to get that Bradley going the second you have control over it, and, and start pulling your squads back to the central bunker and other defensive positions within the base before the game prompts you to; use engineers to set up mines in every choke-point behind the initial frontline. Get your armour crews to the southeast corner as soon as you can afford to give up the repair bay/supply depot area. In general, the more squads you manage to pull out, the better off you'll be for the rest of the campaign.

Most weapons are purely lethal to infantry, and it's hard to go through any given mission without losing a few from each squad. Vehicles can die just as quickly, and armour facing doesn't seem to account for much on the scale of things. The maps consist mostly of a lot of open ground which even the machines' most basic armoured vehicle will dominate - you're pretty much forced to crawl anywhere there's an enemy presence, to get in range before engaging and to do so safely. Unless your name's Sun Tzu I'd recommend against playing on the hardest difficulty.

Most special weapons types can only be used by specific squad types, when the majority of them are something that - while they might not be proficient with, they could probably figure out and put to use if it came down to it.

There's only 2 infantry formations - tactical blob, and line - and wider-spaced variants of each. There's been a few situations where a staggered column or wedge wouldn't have gone amiss - but more than anything else, I wish it had a more CoH or MoW-style cover system, where troops conform to the terrain features at least as much as their formations.

Skirmish mode is very undercooked with only 4(?) maps, with a couple having versions for both modes. The domination mode ends the instant one team or the other controls all the points, which are themselves captured just as quickly with a unit standing on it.

What I like most is that past the first 3 missions, you get a lot of choices to make - speaking to characters to get quests within the mission, and multiple ways to complete the main objectives - with side objectives being meaningful and consequential.

Voice acting ranges from decent to hammy, but never offensively so. Unit barks are good and convincing, as well as informative - and you can even overhear conversations between troops like in CoH. The game has a decent notification system for when a squad runs out of a given ammo type, takes a casualty or is wiped; ditto with vehicles being immobilised or having their weapon knocked out.

If you like the Terminator franchise or just the idea of real-time-tactics with a metagame against a robotic enemy, it's a pretty easy recommend.

Edit April 2024 - Oh look, they had a big corporation moment and shoehorned in the requirement for players to sign up for a PSN account - with Sony's notorious lack of security - and link it to their steam account. Supposedly in the name of security. Yeah checks out mate. This is the first I and most people are hearing of it. Not interested.

The game its self, for the most part, is great. Some of the best 3rd-person gunplay since MGSV; fun, challenging gameplay and mechanics. It's lacking much in terms of features and content compared to the first game - time will tell if that's addressed, but for the moment it's still very enjoyable.

The main reason for the negative review is that Helldivers 2 uses nProtect GameGuard - a kernel-level anti-cheat software, aka a rootkit - and widely regarded as amongst the worst of its kind. It runs at the highest possible level of privilege in your PC's system - enabling it to monitor files and control hardware. It acts as a keylogger, monitors which programs you have running, and still lingers after uninstallation..

Presenting a gaping security vulnerability, a huge invasion of privacy, degrading the performance of the game and having the potential to brick peoples' PCs - and not even preventing hackers from creating cheats for the effort - it's already a bit of a stretch for games that take themselves seriously as competitive arenas. Why the ♥♥♥♥ does a co-op game of all things need one?

Lots of good things about this game - I'd give it a mixed rating if it were possible - but the question is "would I recommend" and for the moment, the answer is no.

Things I like:
+ Customisable fleet and ships
You can equip any ship with any weapon(s) and equipment, and compose your fleet build-list how you please. There seems to be a huge variety in weapons and ships, which are discovered through gameplay - adding an element of long-term progression.

+ Physical Projectiles
Cannon and plasma projectiles must travel through space to their target and can be evaded, and missiles can be intercepted.

+ Pretty effects
Just watching the spectacle of all the flying cannon, missile and beams is entertaining

What I don't like:
- Hard to read
Enemy and player ships are indistinguishable from a distance. When displayed, health-bars for both player and enemy ships and stations are the same colour, which really doesn't help. Neither the minimap nor zooming out offers much information, and it's easy to lose things like surveyors and harvesters in the mix.

- Combat is meaningless chaos
It's a whole lot more about the composition of your fleet than how you actually use it, which amounts to shoving them all into control-group 1 and right-clicking on the closest/most threatening enemy ship. You could get a little more advanced, putting dedicated anti-capitals into one group, anti-smalls in another etc but so far that level of micro doesn't seem worthwhile. Ultimately, the choices you make in customising your ships don't count for much, as long as you have a decent balance between anti-capital and anti-light weapons amongst them. It's a double-edged sword - because you can equip any ships with any weapons, the ones you choose to build or add to your fleet don't really mattter beyond "bigger is better", and the interplay between the ship classes and the damage types doesn't really influence much. Beyond that, there's no formations or stances. Ships do at least maneuver independently in combat so as to avoid incoming fire.

It's functional - but not compelling.

- Clunky controls
Setting ships to fly at different heights or to specific points is awkward - Homeworld already solved the problem of 6 degrees-of-freedom in RTS 25 years ago, and its controls and orders systems have yet to be beaten, and should be shamelessly ripped off by any game wanting to do something similar.
Along the same lines, you can only tell your units to target one enemy at a time - there's no box-targeting. You can't queue orders either. Surveyors (which project a build radius) have to arrive at their destination before you can give the command to build there, rather than being able to place a building blueprint down and have it start constructing when the surveyor gets there.


- Weird economy
You must build refineries and harvester ships to collect matter, and build power generators to do as their name says. At the same time, the maps are filled with scattered derelict stations you control by having a ship or structure in its vicinity - which generate passive income. It's difficult to tell whether the game wants me to build more forward mining bases, or to take control of as many of the derelicts as possible. The asteroids are often spread way too far apart to make them a reliable source of income - after 5 minutes or so, most asteroids will be exhausted so the refinery there becomes redundant.

Resource costs for units and buildings are deducted immediately on construction, when the resource system as a whole seems to borrow a lot from Total Annihilation/SupCom and their successors - I think this game would lend its self much better to having resources be drained as the unit/building is constructed.

You're always limited in what you can build by your resource caps, which are increased by building storage facilities. It doesn't feel like a "clean" progression - teching up and building your economy feels almost completely mutually exclusive with constructing combat ships and defences, you're either doing one or the other at a given moment.

- Other stuff
Boilerplate sci-fi story, setting and aesthetic; Nothing really stands out in this regard.
Much of the unit and campaign dialogue is AI-voiced, with the few real voice-lines sounding very amateur. They lack any filters, effects or background noise - just clean voices, which doesn't help with the already lacking immersion aspect.

As it stands now, ships just take damage when the projectile touches them. It's serviceable, but not great. This could be improved with damage decals/skins, fire and smoke trails, more hit impact effects (including sounds) and such.

You have a limit of 40 ships (maybe this was only in the campaign missions I played), each of them costing 1 population regardless of whether they're a huge capital or a tiny corvette - and there's no way to recycle/recall them.

The repair stations are weird - they repair ships within a radius, but it's not clear whether they only do one at once, or all that're within the radius. Getting ships to move within that radius is finnicky, and you have to order each damaged ship individually to do so with any reliability. It's also not clear when a ship is being repaired or not, unless you sit and wait for their health number to tick up. Something like a repair beam or some kind of visual indicator would help - and it'd be nice if they repaired a bit faster.


In conclusion - it's no Homeworld, and I think it'd be unfair to expect as much from an indie title. That said, with a few passes on various gameplay systems and aesthetic elements, it could become very good in its own right.

Edit 09/2024
IR got an update that made it a whole lot more appealing, with more in the way of customisation and diversity of mech capabilities - now 6 chassis each with a unique set of abilities, and further customisation of each loadout with modules - buffing armour, thruster fuel regen, that sort of thing. It's brought in a fair few players.

Still not really my thing - it's an arena FPS with a mech theme, rather than a "true" mech sim.

It feels like you're strongly discouraged from trying to occupy the mid-range skirmisher role, with the mechs, weapons and map design only really favouring the extremes - sitting up on a hill with sniper weapons, or zooming in to brawl in close quarters. The few weapons that would be appropriate for this middle-ground feel underpowered - the giant miniguns (intimidator?) in particular.

One of the things that bothers me most in respects to core gameplay is that both/all weapons are tied to the one trigger - you either fire both, or neither. As such, only a few combinations of weapons are synergetic, and for the most part it seems you're railroaded into doubling up on the same one.

The mech damage model is divided up into several "sectors", but it's unclear how damage really works. Do I need to bring a sector down to 0 and keep hitting it to score a kill? Do I need to reduce them all down to 0? Does hitting a 0hp sector transfer damage to others? Which sectors are tied to which parts of the mech's hitbox?

I think IR would do well with improved bot support and customisation/control of them - if not more single-player focused content in general. The audience is a niche, within the niche VR market. I imagine it'll quickly become difficult once again to find populated, ongoing games. I think there are people organising regular games of it on the discord - don't quote me on that.

I'm still leaning towards a "no", and still mostly for subjective reasons - but if you enjoyed Hawken, or if the idea of fast-paced arena-style robo-stompy-shooty in VR appeals to you at all, it's definitely worth checking out following this update.


Original review:

Iron Rebellion has got a lot of good things going for it - it feels, sounds and looks good, and its gameplay systems are pretty well thought-out. At the moment though, there's barely anybody playing (mitigated somewhat by bot support) and it's seriously lacking in content - maps, weapons, chassis.

Could also do with some kind of tertiary equipment that adds variety to each chassis/class, and helps distinguish them from one another - eg. the Scout could have things like sensor equipment (not that there seems to be any sensors to begin with), stealth or more movement abilities; the Assault could have a choice between mobility or survivability-enhancing equipment, that sort of thing. As it is right now, the chassis' only significant distinguishing features are size and armour vs speed.

My main turnoff is entirely subjective - gameplay-wise, this is more Hawken than Mechwarrior, and the latter is what I want in a VR mech game. Give me torso-twist, tank controls and a wide variety of customisation options.

As it stands, I'd recommend Vox Machinae over this - it's both VR and Flat compatible so there are more people playing in MP; it has a full singleplayer campaign, is more content-complete and has more variety in basically everything - mechs, equipment, weapons, maps and gamemodes - and more fleshed-out damage modelling. It also doesn't have torso-twist, but hey.

As for a more (classic) mechwarrior-style VR mech game, keep an eye on OVRLORD - the demo's been out for a while and it's heavily WIP, but worth checking out to get an idea of what it's going for.

the zogrim are on their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ again

Easily the best complete space combat "sim" out there at the moment. Despite being relatively simplistic, the game design is cohesive; flight physics, controls and input are tight, atmosphere, sound design and music are on point, the premise and plot are effective, and it strikes a good balance between challenging and power-fantasy - without wasting any of the player's time.

Unfortunately with the base 13(?) missions plus a gauntlet survival mode, it lacks the replayability and freedom of some games, and the longevity of others - especially if you're playing through the hardest difficulties. There are plenty of different combinations of weapons and ship systems you can use, but the missions stay the same - and I just stick to the ones that work best for me which are all unlocked at the start or can be after the first mission.

Nevertheless, outside of the long-dead Freespace 2 mod Disapora, I've yet to come across a space game that feels quite as plain fun, intense and rewarding in their combat gameplay. That includes Star Citizen (Praise be unto Mr. Roberts), Elite: Dangerous, the X series and the likes.

Within the context of TWH3, Chorfs are a good, fun addition to the game... that should've been included from the start. For £20, it's a robbery - at least it's better value for money than shadows of cringe, but I still could've bought several games for the same price and had more fun overall for it. Wait for a deep sale.

Their addition is the only reason I bought the game in the first place, rather than sticking with TWH2, and it just feels worse overall for reasons people more invested in TW can explain much better.

It's an interesting, arcadey take on the Mount & Blade formula, but very underdeveloped. Unfortunately it lacks any of the tactical depth its title would imply - the orders you can issue are "go here", "shoot this", but you're better off issuing none and just having your troops follow you in a big blob. Meanwhile, the shooting and movement are too basic to be much fun for longer than 5 minutes. There are different troop classes and upgrades, as well as personal weapons and mechs for your player-character to use/pilot, but the core gameplay isn't compelling - or even challenging - enough for me to want to pursue them.

"Mask off"