Recent reviews by 🍁 Inubashiri Momiji 🍁

Helldivers 2: Electric Boogaloo was initially a fun game with a solid (albeit repetitive) gameplay loop that works well, and has been suffering from success ever since it gained traction on the hype train of gritty thirst trap Malevelon Creek compilations on tiktok, overlaid with phonk music that is sure to give any dopamine-addicted Gen Z'er a hit.

With the many reviews regarding its cancer of an anticheat software aside, the base game is pretty good, with different enemy, mission, difficulty and weaponised doohickeys that will keep the entertainment honeymoon period lasting for a few dozen hours.

However, as you are more immersed in the game, its flaws start to gnaw at you like a scavenger terminid at your ankles. Remember the good ol' days when code commits/patches were thoroughly tested before release? Well, forget about that, because Arrowhead decided to take a quantum leap backwards into the Stone Age of quality assurance. Why spend hiring QA testers when you can have the entire playerbase complain about it in every patch note, right?

You know that feeling when you fix one thing and break two others? Well, Helldivers 2 does that on steroids. Every time you log in post-patch, take a 2d6 dice roll for initiative with your sanity. Will this patch fix the game-breaking bugs, or will it just introduce a whole new batch of glitches that'll make you want to tear your hair out? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen! A great example of this was the (fixed) bug that caused your Exosuit Mech to **Spontaneously Explode** when you fired a missile while turning. While the "Made in Tien Kuan (China)" jokes were hilarious all-round, it is the last thing your helldiver needs while battling 34 heavy enemies that are immune to small-arms fire because they hadn't properly tweaked heavy enemy spawns then. They even had to nerf the ever-present fog/dust cloud on Errata Prime because nobody can see a damn thing on that god-forsaken planet which shows that Arrowhead avoids playtesting like the plague, apparently.

With every item or feature that is introduced to the game, you can be sure that the game is less stable than its previous iteration, where its current build causes any lightning-type weapon to reliably crash the game when fired. With the studio promising a patch/content every month, one wonders if they have overpromised on this, and IOU'd themselves into an eternal loop of rushing the next patch and fixing the glitches introduced by the previous patch into oblivion.

And let's not forget about the weapon nerfs. The playerbase might just smugly type "skill issue :^)" on the forums if anyone just about dares to criticise this, but they all silently hope that their favourite weapon isn't next on the chopping block to be nerfed into the ground. Who needs balance when you can just randomly tweak numbers and hope for the best? One day your trusty railgun is keeping the endless horde of heavies at manageable levels, and the next patch it's about as effective as opening wide against a bile titan about to feed you his lunch baby-bird style.

The devs try to justify this by saying that they want players to use whichever weapons they want, and so instead of making every weapon balanced and viable, they see what's "meta" and punch it down so you can trust that every weapon is about as effective as spitting balled up toilet paper at your anti-democratic foes.

Another justification is the oft repeated "wE wANt yOU tO rELy oN sTraTEGmS tO cLEaR eNEMiES!1!!" which it takes only a few minutes hunting for Super Samples to realise that the game has weather modifiers that removes a stratagem slot, increases stratagem deploy times, messes with their accuracy and outright prevents you from using them. While powerful tools to call upon, you're better off not relying on them.

Lastly, my biggest gripe of all, are the Hunter spawns in this game. Spend just about any amount of time in this game, and you'll notice patrols of enemies literally popping into existence in your field of view and immediately attacking you. Sometimes, they can even pop right on you, and coupled with these unholy abominations taking off half your health in a hit, has a nanosecond cooldown between hits, AND slows you down, it's a random roll of the dice where the game decides that you're having too much fun and makes the most contrived BS to send you to the timeout chair. Did I mention that they're programmed to hit your head which, due to a bug, has no armour?

I really do like the game and have the overwhelming urge to ̶b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶ spread the glory of democracy to the darkest corners of Cyberstan, but with every patch, I begin to view the very first release with strange nostalgia, and wonder if anything of value was lost if they decided to just roll the game back to version 1.0.0

-Note: Do use a controller when playing due to how dodging works in the game-

With great sneezing comes great times in quarantine, and that time is spent on games.
"Yes this commission work takes 3 months to complete boss, honest!"

You can tell that the devs put a lot of care and effort in the game, polishing and adding weird little things for you to catch to scratch that completionist itch in you. With so much faffing about built in, you're forgiven to pick flowers, admire the scenery and catch some bugs, only to get pummeled into red paste by an angry monkey firing laser beams - probably because he didn't like how your armour's coordinated. It's kinda like Animal Crossing: Prepare to Die Edition if you think about it.

On top of that, you can invade the privacy of your local sentient cats in various places, and sell the incriminating pictures to a shady old man in a corner for his "research." If you got the tickets, you get the pictures.

All this is a pretty good segway from the underlying issues in the game. A pretty frustrating caveat I find are in new movesets by monsters such as Kirin, who probably played way too many MMOs and decided to spam its flashy new AOE move to delegate your hunter in their personal no-no square, dreaming of the DPS that they'll never be able to do. Many new monsters get cursed with similar moves, throwing them down like some sort of deadly Dance Dance Revolution.

As old as Plesioth's hipchecks have been plaguing hunters in 3U, and Garuga's sudden dash in FU, there has been undodgeable attacks in MH, but in MHW, it seems more prevalent here. Combined with the wonky iframe dodge mechanics the game has (compared to the older games), it is up to the RNG gods to decide if it's time for a chunk of your health to disappear.

An unholy embodiment of these two tricks would be Lunastra. This nuclear weapon with wings would sporadically release typhoon-force winds amidst nuclear fire, rendering my hunter to shield the heresy with her arms until her terminal case of jazz hands proved fatal. That attack is very much telegraphed, yes, but it has the radius to eliminate every sentient being in the galaxy, with the duration long enough to turn the unlucky into well done-steaks like the tasteless demon she is.

Those attacks are cheap, and only serve to frustrate the player when you're supposed to learn the monster's moves and dodge them skillfully. Where's Amatsumagatsuchi's big s u c c that I can dive away and laugh at my teammates getting launched into the stratosphere?

Don't get me wrong, MHW isn't a particularly difficult game. It has numerous QOL improvements and the clutch claw that makes hunts less painful. It's just those cheap spammy attacks that detracts from the experience as a whole.

Finally, the biggest issue with the game are the lagspikes. God forbid someone earns an expensive zenny-reducing trip back to camp, because the game would freeze up for 5+ seconds, even if you're playing solo. If you're unlucky, this can cause you to disconnect entirely, leaving you to fight a beefed up monster at 4x its usual health alone if you were in a party. This has been in the game ever since its disastrous launch with its partner Error Code 50352-MW1 and it's puzzling as to why it's still here despite all the complaints.

I really try to like the game, but at the end, my impressions are mixed, much like my morals as a cat paparazzi. I'll give it a solid floaty paolumu pendant/10, with a sprinkling of pub teammates that puts fainting goats to shame.

I'll shall refer to this recent installation of the series by its actual name:
Monster Hunter: Error Code 50352-MW1

I have played a lot of monster hunter, having spent over 1000 hours in MHX soloing subspecies like Hellblade Dinovaldo and Dreadqueen Rathian. MH:Error, when compared to MHX (or MHXX for that matter) pales in comparison. MH:Error has nice graphics, yes, but that's just the trend of "next-gen" isn't it, with the fix-it-in-post and microtransacting lil sods companies have become.

MH:Disconnect is fun for the first few days, but then gets old fast, like a little child with progeria strapped under a UV lamp. The lack of variety compared to the likes of XX or 4U is quite stark when you place them side by side.

I was first drawn to the series by the characters in the game, and they totally are not guildmarm or meowstress. MH:Failed to Join Quest falls flat on its face on that aspect too. We have a suicidal handler that runs around starry-eyed trying to get herself eaten and we have my character who occupies the final working braincell in humanity jumping after her. If I could reach my hands through the screen and seal Handler's mouth with flex seal whenever I return from a hunt...

Another pervading issue with the series, but disappointed that it wasn't resolved was the hitboxes. When you dodge roll into an attack, pray to your lucky stars and sacrifice a goat to appease the iframe Gods, because you'll never know if a stray pube from the monster's armpit would brush against your thigh and bite a chunk off your health.

And of course, like the dead horse I've been eviscerating throughout this whole review, is the connection issues. God forbid that someone sneezes in the room adjacent to you, because that connection to your friends would drop faster than you can say Error Code 50352-MW1 in a nervous breakdown.

But hey, this game is great if you're looking for a haircut, because you'll be tearing so much of your hair over this game that you might spawn a new trendy Monster hunter (tm) hairstyle!

It's quite fitting that the game is named Payday 2, since once you purchase this game, you won't stop paying for more and more DLCs day by day. Of course, you strictly aren't -required- to purchase the DLCs to enjoy the game, just as you aren't -required- to eat the icing on an oreo to enjoy the cookie, you "fun-is-just-a-psycological-trick" grinch.

DLCday 2 is like a year-round Halloween - wearing fancy clown masks and giving/receiving candy, just that the candy is actually bullets, and the friendly neighbour at the door is actually a cloaker ready to stick his foot up your ♥♥♥ and wear you as his seasonal spooky slippers.

The game truly shines when playing co-op with friends and/or strangers to complete a list of objectives against a never-exhaustive supply of law enforcement officers which may or may not include you spending half the time throwing bags into a vehicle, which has all of you run to and fro across the map like a cat chasing a laser pointer.

If it's not bag-throwing, it'd be comically useless drills in the game that as much as -god-forbid- a gentle caress on its reinforced steel body would result in it bursting into tears in a nervous breakdown.

The game bugs out on me occasionally (Which QA should've picked up on), like the time when I fell through the map in Car Shop driving a L̶a̶m̶b̶o̶r̶g̶h̶i̶n̶i̶ Falcogini after flipping one too many times. I spawned back in the shop with my hands outstretched grasping an invisible wheel, stuck. All my buddies could do was to hop impotently up and down like a clown-faced bunny at the escape point until my bad case of drunk driving proved terminal.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=524545683
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=524545216

To be fair, these are age-old screenshots which bugs that have been long fixed, but bugs do pop up from time to time, especially in new updates.

Speaking of bugs, there are some that have yet to be ironed out, and there has been a few promised freebie content from last year that has yet to see landfall. They must've been coding the game by engraving 1s and 0s on granite slabs or something, meanwhile paid DLC gets announced semi-monthly. While shady practices by the studio has been well documented by the community, I have yet to see the team address them directly, if at all.

With the new update, it's even shadier, and I honestly can't recommend this game with all these microtransactions, until the team urgently addresses this. As many other reviews have already mentioned, it was promised that the game would be free of microtransactions. This is a game you would want to skip due to questionable monetization practices by Starbreeze.

Overall, it's fun. Who doesn't love a little mindless, team-oriented slaughter of police officers and sometimes civilians who have families, with children, and- OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE? I'M A MONSTER.

Ears twitch in-game
11/10