Recent reviews by SolomonKhane

First, I'd like to preface to everyone, this is NOT in anyway related to the Arkham series. Not in gameplay, nor story.

Now with that out of the way lets start with one subject that bothers a lot of people nowadays. DEI.
This game does have DEI in it, but not in a way that I think woke people would want. A lot of the criminals are women for some reason, which would be normal for the league of shadows but not every mob. And there are a few pride flags hidden around the place. The one in the belfry is on the top floor, an area you'll go to only for certain optional story segments, and a few references of pride parades in emails, that most people will not read. So on the DEI part of the game I'd say they just did the bare minimum to get their paycheck without affecting the game or story.

Gameplay: This isn't Arkham, as I said earlier. It does not have a slingshot combat system with an emphasis on countering attacks. It is more akin to a Spiderman game. You have your melee light/heavy attacks where heavy attacks end combos, And you have a light and heavy ranged attack where heavy has no combo but act as an AoE that can hit multiple enemies and dodging enemies. Other than that you can aim your ranged and dodge in a character specific manner.
Every character has their own skill sets that differentiate the way they play.
Nightwing is an acrobat so he jumps from target to target very quickly, having a special abilities promote this playstyle, such as an ability to pounce on an enemy, bounce and then grapple towards the next enemy.
Red-hood has a ranged playstyle, with greater aimed shot damage, better attack rate with range and abilities that allow him to unload his guns on anyone infront of him.
Batgirl is a more balanced fighter, using both her melee and ranged to great effect, using her grapple to bring enemies closer to her and having a variety of special abilities that do no focus on any single asspect of gameplay.
Robin is best at AoE and stealth, using his bo-staff to hit multiple enemies at once and quickly disappearing from combat. Being the only one who can stealth knockout large enemies and use perches to tie enemies up, Robin is amazing when stealth is your favorite aspect.

Talking of stealth... Since each character has a different playstyle, stealth may feel a bit off for certain characters. Everyone can sneak around, silently take down smaller opponents from any direction, be it from behind, hanging above them, below them or even while mid air or rushing them down quickly before they can alert anyone. But some characters aren't that great at it. Mainly being Red-hood. He is a lot clumsier, and can make you feel like something is really off with the stealth.
For example, every character can aim their ranged attack to attract an enemy to a certain location, but Red-hood uses guns which doesn't make much sense that the enemies will be attracted to the point of impact instead of the source of the gunshot. But hey, it still works...
And both Robin and Batgirl have special abilities for stealth that Nightwing and Red-hood don't have which increases the off feeling for stealth while playing them.
Overall, both the combat and stealth are quite satisfying and fun.

Story: The story of the game is servicable. it starts off with an awesome cutscene of batman fighting Ra's Al Ghoul, ending with the death of both and the call to action to our 4 heroes. The game is filled with beautifully made and choreographed cutscenes that are specific to the host player's character, meaning that the story can unfold with 4 variations. The story is still the same, but the attention to detail in the interactions between different characters and the different characters of the main cast is great to see, and IMO is sorely needed in other games that include multiple playable pre-made characters.
Other than that, the story falls to mediocraty due to the supporting cast.

Loot and progression: Now we're getting into one of the biggest controversy around this game. This game was planned to be a "games as a service" type game, and so it include loot and a rudamentry crafting system. And at first glance this system seems like it's important. That it may force you to play a single character and not allow you to enjoy everyone else, or that it will require grinding between story sections. But no, it's actually not that important. Levels are shared for all four heroes, and after every mission you get specific loot for all four characters that is usually better than what you can craft. It does affect end-game, where when you do "Heroic assault" This game's dungeon system, you will only get rewards for the specific character you played. Other than that, getting loot is easy, resources are plentiful, and other than a bit a of a drop in power for a few moments after selecting a different character, you come back really quickly.
The downside of this system is that it makes the difficulty of the game spike up and down really drastically.
The game uses a gearscore system, called power, that doesn't really tell you how good your gear is, but simply give an arbitrary number. A 300 power weapon can be weaker than a 100 power weapon, it all depends on the other stats. But the rest of the game follows the power system and adjusts according to that, so you may find yourself with over 1000 power but doing little damage, or the opposite, having 500 power but one-shotting everyone.
Also, enemies have their health and to a lesser degree, their damage, tied to their tier. Regular shooter can be one shot while a veteran may need a bit of a pounding. You'd expect that the level next to their health be a more accurate indicator of their power, but not really. Stealth, on the other hand, really balances things out since everyone KO's instantly to stealth, and grapple attacks do so much damage that they either insta KO or remove over half of any enemy's health-bar.

Traversal and Open-world: Gotham is a beautiful city, it has shanty-town like slums, colorful streets with neon signs everywhere lighting up the smog and fog of the city. It has beautiful old sections lined with cobblestone and brick buildings, along the more modern streets with their clean and slick deisgnes. There's art in every corner of this city. Activities in the city are quite normal for open-world games these days. You got random crimes going on around. They can be mugging, attempts to break into buildings, beating up cops, etc. And there's the pre-maditated crimes, which can be more engaging. Bank robberies, Kidnapping, gang wars, etc. Other than that you get the regular activities. Collectibles and races, which we'll get into later.
The rest of Gotham might seem a bit dead. Certain areas are more densely populated than others, but you don't tend to see large groups of people or cars. But this can be explained with the high rate of criminality in Gotham. When passing civilians, some will be in awe of seeing you, most will be apathetic, while others will either shame you or get away from you hinting to the fact that they are likely criminals themselves. Which makes Gotham a dangerous place to walk around at night.

Now, how do you traverse Gotham city? Every one of the Bat-family has accesses to their own Motorcycle (batcycle) which can be speedy enough to go around, but after a completing a few early game challanges you can unlock a character specific movement system. Batgirl gets to glide like Batman speeding downwards and converting speed to upwards lift when needed. Robin gets to teleport short distances (I say short, but it's about 300 meters per jump). Nightwing gets a Jet Glider that allows him to fly at a constant rate. While Red-hood gets a mystical jump that allows him to jump on magic platforms in the air, prolonging the distance he can jump. Other than that, every character gets their own grapple to zip around the city, and small arenas.


Overall, the game is quite good

First I would like to make it clear, most of the down-votes the game has are due to server capacity issues. It's true the servers are at capacity during peak activity hours. That should not make the game less recommendable, you should simply be mindful of that fact. The server issue will be resolved and all we are left with is the game itself. Let's just remember that this game is by an indie studio, the Sony logo at the start doesn't mean that Sony owns them. They are a studio of around 100 employees from Stockholm Sweden. They made Magicka and Gauntlet, both published by Paradox interactive. Then they made Helldivers 1, published by Sony. They stuck with Sony to publish Helldivers 2. With that out of the way, let's get to the review itself.

This game is a masterpiece of co-op, 3rd person shooting, objective gameplay and dynamic challenges.
Unlike a lot of games, it doesn't use dirty tricks to make the game harder, it won't have bullet spongy enemies that you're used to killing in 1-2 shots in lower difficulties. Even the hulking boss-like enemies have weak points that will drop them easily. The challenge of this game is proper co-operation, coordination with your team and management of the combat zone.
While it is clearly made for co-op, don't be afraid of playing solo, because you'll miss out on a whole new way of playing the game that might be very hard, but also very rewarding.
The game has a unique way of handling it's weapons. Instead of having the player simply aim their cursor in the middle of the screen to a target the player has to aim the gun's barrel at the enemy. So far it sounds normal, and as if nothing really changes, but no. You see, the barrel of the gun doesn't move as fast as the camera does, your character has to handle the gun's weight and so the barrel lags behind the camera, the amount of that lag depends on the weapon's weight and barrel length. Longer bigger guns are slower to aim, while pistols are practically instant. To account for that you have a secondary cursor that indicates what the barrel is actually pointed at. similar to how Fortnight indicates that you're aiming at a wall instead of your target. If you want to use bigger guns with faster aiming you can of course crouch to improve aim or even go prone to improve it even further while also ducking below projectiles or explosions.

Since we are prone, you should know that Helldivers, as their name suggest they dive, but not in the ocean, they suck at swimming, they dive into combat. In tough situations you may dive into a prone position, allowing you to dodge attacks and even reduce the damage you might get from an explosion. Just be careful not to dive head strong into a horde of melee enemies like the Terminids. Or if you dive away from an explosion, hope you don't get flung so far there's no chance you'll survive the fall.

But, if you do die, don't worry, one of your friends can request a backup to replace your previous KIA character using a *Stratagem*, calling a Helldiver from the looming battle ship in the skies. Just try to land on the enemy rather than on your brothers in arms. Stratagems are also used to call down supplies, tactical equipment, orbital strikes, aerial attacks and even sentry turrets. Just remember to steer clear of the landing zone.

Now, as you've seen in the screenshots and trailers above, this game is graphically gorgeous. But the graphics aren't just for show, which they do put out a great show at that, they are also used to affect you on your missions. Some planets might have lush rain forests, but the rain will hinder your sight. Others missions might send you to great deserts, where you can see far away threats, but sometimes the deserts have sand storms that can make you practically blind to ambushes. But don't worry, some enemies, like the Automatons for example, have ranged weapons and they need to see you to shoot at you, so if you can barely see them, they can barely see you. Which can make it a strategical time to send an orbital strike on their factories.

Overall, if you want a game that challenges you and your friends without any nasty difficulty gimmicks, a game that has good and immersive gameplay, great graphics, a game where you are more likely to laugh at your own death than get enraged at it, a game that respects your time and allows you to enjoy it in it's entirety without pushing you to grind and unlock the same weapons with slightly better stats but instead gives you different weapons that are good for different situation making every piece of equipment you have viable. A game that allows you to spread managed democracy in a battleship named "The fist of family values" or any other ridicules name you'd want, Than come on board and enlist to join the... HELLDIVERS!

Join now, and help humanity spread Freedom, Liberty and Democracy to the rest of the known universe!

I bought this game years ago, it was a different product then...
It was a campy fighting game in the style of the older fighting games I liked as a kid with a lot of fan-service and jazz.

Now, though, while the game is still a fighting game, it still got jazz, the fan-service is getting slowly deleted, the stories of characters in their campaign modes are constantly being rewritten to fit a censorship loving overlord's opinions and even the pre-purchase/donation goal and deluxe edition rewards have either been remade and censored or entirely deleted.

I cannot recommend such a product by such horrendous developers/publishers. And it has nothing to do with the fan-service. One day you buy a product just to see it transform into something different the next. Now change doesn't have to be bad, but when you use your hard earned money for a product you expect to get said product.

I can't give a full review of this game just yet since the main reason I cannot reccomend this game at the time of writing is bugs, bugs galore. Texture pop-ins are bad, but when entire map assests don't load, causing you to either fall from the world, have ridiculus fights over the abyss itself or even have cutscense where the geometry either pops in or simply isn't there. Not to mention the texture stretches that I experienced. A texture on one of the ships literarly blocked out everything and I couldn't see where I was going. Had to reload the game just to find myself floating above nothing for a moment until the collision kicked in and then I walked on air between paper thin walls. These bugs might not affect everyone, but if it affected me it probably affects other people aswell. I say wait for the bugs to get patched out, and don't be like me. Don't buy buggy games.

Great game with challenging combat system that is really fair once you stop for a moment to understand it.
Just don't spam. It won't end well...

To begin with, I do recommed the game, but only for people who love anime and are overall inlove with japanese media and games.


Nier: Automata is a combination of a 3d action hack n' slash with a twin stick shooter a bit of side scrolling platforming and a touch of bullet hell on top.
It is set in a dystopian earth, thousands of years in the future, where alien machines roam, and man made androids are fighting to reclaim the earth for mankind.

Nier: Automata was released in febuary 23, 2017, but sadly it's graphics can't compare with other titles from 2017 or even titles from earlier. It's character design is styled after animes and it looks very nice, but once you get a close up on any character you might see it has quite a low polly count and low resolution, even on the highest settings.
The world itself has about 6 environments, all quite different and sufficiantly unique, but quite empty as well.
In the main area of the game, the ruined city, you will find grassy parks, gigantic overgrown trees, collapsed high-roads and a lot of abandoned buildings. But sadly The grassy parks are mostly textures with only a few patches of grass, the buildings are completely empty and the textures are low resolution, while sometimes you'll find spots with nice lightings to save the poor level design, more often than not it will just pinpoint the problems with a spotlight. Also, it was riddled with graphical issues, pop-ins, and random lights everywhere.

The gameplay of Nier: Automata is quite unique. It is as I said in the beginning, a complete mashup of multiple genres that may not seem to combine well, but Nier nailed it.
You start off the game at a bullet-hell section, flying a mech-suit, shooting machines that come from the top and sides in an interesting fashion, shooting at you large slow moving projectiles just like any bullet hell would.
Suddenly, while still in the same section, you transform into you're "Mobility Form" and now, out of nowhere, you're playing a twin stick shooter. The same enemies but a different perspective.
After that bullet hell section, you are thrown into a wall with a cutscene into a new perspective, and now you're playing a 3rd person hack n' slash game.
The game does this a lot. Switching you from top-down view, to side view, to an isometric view and into a 3rd person view, with neat transitions, some simply flow, others change after a cutscene that places your view neatly in the right position for the section.

The main part of the gameplay though, is the hack n' slash. To be honest, while it is fun for a while, it can become a chore quite quick due to it being simplistic, only having up-to 5 combos per weapon, and some of those combos are so much stronger than anything else that you might as well use the same attack over and over again.
The game features an upgrade system where you use computer chips that enhances your abilities, most of them just give you passive abilities, such as life-drain, faster dodge, etc. A few give you a special passive ability that procs after a certain action, such as the Overclock chip, that allows you to slow down time to a halt while you still move at a normal pace.
The other sections of the game are quite basic and seem to only be a distraction from the hack n' slash bits.
Overall, it's a nice concept, but lacking in every aspect of it.

Nier: Automata is set in an apocalyptic earth caused by alien machines, after mankind were driven off to the moon, and only their androids were left to fight off the machine menace.
The androids themselves are comprised of beautiful, blindfolded, women dressed as sexy house-maids holding swords, spears, and other sharp things, but no guns, those are specific to their robot companions, the pods.
The other type of androids are the S - Scanner type androids, that look like petite choire boys, that are also blindfolded.
The enemies, on the other hand, are simple robots with rusty ball heads and bodies comprised of rusty metals in different shapes, mostly looking like a pile of junk on legs... or fans...

The story surrounds the androids 2B and 9S, on their mission to destroy all "machine lifeforms".
They are both very human in their reactions to everything that goes around, while 2B is more resserved with her feelings, 9S is a lot more emotional about everything and a lot more energetice at that.
While on their mission they find secrets about the machines and their own organization that slowly changes the way they look at the machines, their organization and their mission at large, slowly turning 2B into a more emotionally attached person.

Overall the game was pleasant enough to a point. That point was the second false ending.
The game is littered with false endings. The first one was clever enough. You thought you were done, the game got over the credits, and then you were placed right back on the main menu to have the option of continuing the game, as if to keep on playing after the end to finish off side quests. But then you get right back into the beginning of the game, but now you are playing as 9S instead of 2B.
That was clever, but it was done 2 more times after that. It was so annoying that I didn't even assume I truly finished the game after I have due to that being a reacurring thing here.
The game calls every false ending an ending, claiming to have 26 endings, though only having 3 actual endings that all come down to a single choice at the very end of the game.
The other endings are just cheap jokes, like eating a fish and dying from it. Roll the credits, you achieved ending [S]tupid for being dumb enough to eat a poisionous fish. (not the real name of the ending)

My biggest gripe with the game though, was the inconsistencies.
You are playing as an android, but your character and every other android's damage is considered a wound, bleeding and sneering in pain, even though they're androids, machines made to look like humans. They even say that they might have damaged wires. (in their leg might I add, which probobly only has pnumatics and not circuitry)
The androids concider the machine "lifeforms" as very much different than them, though they are both machines.
And really? Machine Lifeforms?! It's either a machine, or a lifeform (animals), can't be both unless it's a robotnic type of robot controlled by birds or something like that. But no, the game doesn't tell you anything of the sort, they are just machines.
To be honest, the story of this game is very much an anime style story, with anime style inconsistencies, that I myself really dislike, but I know it is considered amazing in the eyes of anime fans, so I might as well get to the point system now...

• Graphics: 5/10 - low resolution, and mostly empty, but serves its purpose.
  
• Gameplay: 7/10 - Interesting combination, but simplified.
  
• Story and setting: 7/10 - Better if you like animes.

If you like the game very much and mostly dissagree with me, I still hope you enjoyed the level of effort I put into making this review, and I hope I did it with the least amount of negative bias. and that I was helpful and informative.

An innovotive combination of games like team fortress and Dark Messiah.
You play as either Knight, Vanguard, Archer, or a Man-at-arms of your army, fighting in either a mission based conquest or a match to the death between two factions or against all who might oppose you. The game features an innovotive combat system where you can strike with your weapon to one of 3 direction, vertical, lung, or a slash, using these three moves in the right time and place will make for an experiance based combat that would yeild a long fight against your opponent like those you see in the movies. Recommended for those who like medieval action movies, or brutal combat.