Recent reviews by Quackers

Please realise that this is literally one of the only games I've been looking forward to for a very very long time. I was hoping of actually enjoying a game for the first time in months, just for everything I feared to manifest after more than just a few hours of gameplay. Initially I thought the game was phenomenal, the weighty thump of the bolters, the tearing viscera of chainswords, the diverse abilities and a 2010s storyline packed with an explosive finale. I finished the game on the 2nd highest difficult, as reccomended, and wanted to try out more gameplay.

So I decided to play outside of the story mode.

The highest difficulty, Ruthless, shows the true colors of this game. After breezing through the first three difficulties and getting my class to high level, more issues began to arise as I became more intent on progressing my weapons. That's when the most glaring problems began to show; the combat is incredibly clunky with parries and snapshots almost guaranteeing you will be hit by 2-3 other enemies if you take them. The enemies themselves are monotonous to fight against with less AI responsiveness than even Halo Reach had, a game 14 years old. There's only six operation missions in total that most of them range from tedious to straight out not fun (people know the agony of the Heldrake mission while playing as Assault/Vanguard/Bulwark). The assault fails in any degree of melee, despite being for its namesake an "assaulting" class to get into close combat, meanwhile the fully-ranged heavy's best weapon is its close range multi-melta. PvP is a mess with a TTK that feels either like I'm playing HLL/Squad but swaps to Halo Reach but everyone has armor lock in an instant. Trying to play the campaign again shows how much the story was the definition of a one-time experience with much of the plotholes and abandoned storylines showing far more glaringly on the second playthrough. Almost all the weaponry is borderline identical save for the melta which is the only usable weapon in high level Operations, of which you will probably be kicked if you aren't using a melta or playing Bulwark 60%%+ of the time. The lack of mechanical flow in the melee kills any degree of skill-based gameplay with even using core mechanics like parrying and snapshots working against you 90% of the time by opening yourself up to other attacks for a solid 1+ second. In melee you are entirely powerless against any more than 3-4 enemies even if its just gaunts or tzaangors. Of which, even the most minor of enemies take several shots/hits to even stagger them (again, unless you use a melta). Tack all of this onto a subpar overall multiplayer experience with three total maps, 60-90+ second load times on a current-gen PC, an AI that would barely function as a support chatbot on a corporate website, borderline unfair enemy spawns (neurothrope vs melee-centric teams), ranged enemies that you can't even see shooting through entire buildings and walls, and to cap it all off I can't even play as a custom or my favourite chapter without hearing them recite a voice line about Ultramar or the Guilliman every 15 seconds.

It feels like they were rushed to do the bare minimum to call it a "complete" game, but failed to do any quality testing beyond the initial gameplay mechanics. These are all things they can, and I hope certainly will, fix in a few weeks to months of patches, but if you want a complete list of changes I would suggest and that I've seen others propose, you can read them below.

- Add I-Frames to parry/snapshots like executions currently have
- Have melee regenerate small amounts of HP on kill or increase the current healing mechanic in melee dramatically as stimpacks are way too far and few between while having no real way of getting HP back
- Nerf the melta's HP regen while buffing ranged HP regen hit (You can go from 1-100% HP in a single shot of melta vs getting maybe 10-15% of your HP back with a bolter)
- Remove the stagger from the melta (I don't think anyone can argue that having a melta on Ruthless makes the game 10x easier when the enemies can't even swing back and hordes disappear in 1-2 shots)
- Increase practically all bolter damage to actually be a real bolter and annihilate soft targets in 1-2 shots
- Rework Operations Assault entirely - Copy/pasting the current PvP Assault mechanics onto Operations, make the hammer viable with faster swings/heavies, make the fist viable by doing massive single-target damage
- Add more boss-oriented Operations or alternative endings (the final boss fight in the campaign was 10/10 and the Hive Tyrant was pretty good as well)
- More melee weapons that actually feel different. A power axe for anti-elites, eviscerator for anti-horde, and so on.
- More hordes. There's too many times where I feel like I'm fighting a probing force rather than an entire hive invasion fleet.
- Make walls actually solid and ranged enemy attacks not go through them (pretty obvious)

Edited from previously negative review;

Game fixed. It's no Witcher 3, and a lot of features that were promised aren't available, but it's still a very solid RPG.

It's Halo. But on PC.

This game was something that I was very much anticipating throughout the year after it's announcement. I thought it was going to be a massive game, capable of being played for 40+ hours and be still enjoyable afterwards, possibly even playing it with other people in some kind of coop mode or to give something else for the player to do. I beat the game in 10 hours on the second hardest difficulty, and spent another 2 hours literally just trying to find something else to do, but there is nothing.

The main storyline ends and... that's it. You can explore words (which you have to back track through entirely because there's no fast travel), but that only gives you upgrades and cosmetics. Obviously, the upgrades don't help because there's no missions to do and no incentive to use these upgrades except for on the mini-bosses scattered around and the inquisitors that show up every few moments that I end up just force pushing off a ledge. The story is over, and there are NO side missions to keep playing the game and enjoying it. The cosmetics are a joke. You can't even see the changes on your lightsaber unless it's a blade color (which you only unlock more in the final 1/8 of the game). Every other cosmetic is literally a reskin of the ships, droid, or poncho that your character wears and all look horrendously ugly.

For paying $80 CAD for a game that I suspected would be massive and fun to play through again, there really is nothing to play because there's nothing else to do. Unless you're a completionist, this game is literally useless past 10 hours in when you finish the main story, and that was on the second hardest difficulty. I can't even imagine how fast I would've gone through this game had I played on the easiest difficulty.

The story is even pretty good, in all honesty I was surprised at the big plot twist that happens about 3/4 into the game. I was CERTAINLY excited about seeing big papi at the end of the game come and wreck the google-eyed "master". I even found myself laughing at bit at the dialogue and interactions between BD and... I forget his name. I guess that sums up my opinion on the protagonist; he's just not a very memorable character. He's the classic "good jedi hero" that every other SW game is. No dialogue options (which even Titanfall had, despite being a FPS and also made by Respawn) restrict my attachment to the main character.

Long story short, this game isn't worth the price tag. I get it's a AAA title; the graphics are amazing, the fighting is great, but after you finish the campaign there is NOTHING to do, and certainly not worth the full $80 price tag. It's just typical EA fashion to give us a game that's extremely underwhelming in some aspect and overpricing it as a full price game to play just doesn't make sense to me.

Suffer not the Snail.

The Pay to Win.

The Russo-Bias.