Recent reviews by Salamander

For a game that so thoroughly jacks itself off to completion over its own difficulty (the game literally opens with a passive aggressive content warning about how "some people may find [the game] too difficult" and calls its easiest and non-completion locked hardest difficulty "noob" and "old school" respectively) it sure does have a lack of meaningful challenge. It took me all of about two and a half hours to beat the game. Have I died a lot? Sure, but it was never what I would consider meaningfully hard. The game does the funny thing where, when it says "difficult" it actually means "enemies who can kill you in two hits will occasionally just spawn behind you and tax you for half your health." Combine that with the rarity of large health pickups and it often feels less like the game is genuinely challenging you and more that you're fighting a war of attrition. A war of attrition that ends almost as quickly as it begins.

It's hard to take the game seriously when it so consistently tries to grab you round the shoulder and go "remember when games used to be about the gameplay?" while also having less than a single afternoon's worth of gameplay. What gameplay is there is incredibly fun and I appreciate any boomer shooter that has proper bunnyhopping in it but it also takes its tagline a bit too hyper-literally. It doesn't do anything to meaningfully shake up or change the 90s shooter formula. The game's weapons include melee, shotgun, super shotgun, nailgun, rocket launcher. That's right, the game directly copies the weapon loadout of Doom 2 but without the BFG or the plasma rifle. This game has less weapon variety than Doom 2, a game that will soon be 30 years old. Considering how saturated the boomer shooter genre is with interesting games that genuinely do things to innovate rather than simply iterate (Ultrakill, DUSK, HROT, Amid Evil, Project Warlock, just to name a few) a boomer shooter that clings *this* close to conventions and also can't stop being super self-congratulatory over it just doesn't have much to offer in comparison to any number of other games in the genre.

What this game needs is a sequel, or an expansion pack, or something. The game's tagline is '90s FPS, 30 years later. A more accurate tagline would be '90s FPS, 30 years too late. There's just not enough here, not enough meat on the bones, and what meat is on the bones feels suspiciously recycled from previous generation's carcasses. Soylent green is made of Doom Clones.

I gave this game a negative review as an act of boycotting against the rollout of required PSN. Sony has since retracted this and the patch will not be going through. Because of this, I am changing this review to a positive.

Helldivers 2 is one of the best co-op PvE horde shooters I have ever played, and I say that as someone who's collectively dumped thousands of hours into the genre. It's the only good example of the 'games-as-a-service' business model because it has completely done away with FOMO and overpriced cosmetic bundles. The microtransactions are *actually* micro in this game.

And it goes beyond saying that the community is amazing, we were able to go on strike and collectively bargain our way into getting a patch rolled back, in order to save the game we all love from the depredation of its corporate overlords. If you see this, get helldiving. Immediately.

Writing this review while waiting out a 30 minute ban because the game keeps crashing mid match. As soon as I'm able to actually play the game, I'll change my score to positive, because this is frankly a really great game and adds the sort of skill expression that Overwatch needed. I don't think it's going to kill Overwatch, if only because Blizzard is doing that themselves, but I could see this fulfilling a reliable niche within the hero shooter genre once people can actually play it

I say this as a Floor 8 May scrub who's had to play nothing but Testaments all day, I can already tell that this is gonna be one of her worst matchups.
5S and 5HS counter-hit dolphin pretty much anywhere on screen. Godlike midrange oppression, basically forces you to resort entirely to air approaches because of how dominant they are on the ground. Their block strings are filled with both overheads and lows, keeping you constantly guessing in defensive situations. If this is how DLC characters for Strive are on launch, I can't wait to see how the game will evolve through patches, though I worry that older characters will soon get left behind because of how much simpler their toolkits are.

I am a nerd for strategy games, and Civ 5 is, in my opinion, one of the best in the genre. With the Gods and Kings expansion. Oh and Brave New World. Yeah, sadly this is one of those strategy games. Y'know, the kind where you basically need to own both of the major expansions in order to get the full experience? Civ 5 without them is still an amazing, but very barebones 4X strategy game.

Once you DO have the two major expansions, you have one of the most frictionless yet in-depth strategy games on the market today. In my opinion you have no reason not to get it, it'll give you endless amounts of incredible fun and in multiplayer you can nuke ur friends like c'mon.

The Master Chief Collection is a collection of some of the best FPS games ever made. One small problem, the description is lying. The description says that there's six games, when actually there's only two in multiplayer. Better hope you like Halo 3 and Reach, because those are the only two games that anyone actually plays in multiplayer. It's a good thing those two games are some of the most well-crafted multiplayer experiences ever, but there's also more problems.

343 has been adding new cosmetic options to Halo 3 and Reach over the last few battlepasses, and they all suck. 343 showed they had a decent understanding of the Halo art style with Halo Infinite, but these new cosmetics (which are plagued by blurry textures and low-poly models) look like they're straight out of the collection of helmets 343 thought were too bad to put into Halo 5. They're art style breaking and, even worse, lame as hell.

But even with all that, I have to recommend this game. No matter how much 343 bungles the multiplayer aspect of the game, you still have six legendary campaigns to go through on four difficulties with a huge amount of replayability. Also each game is literally only 10 dollars, so you can just get the games you like if you're already an experienced fan of the Halo series.

To say that this game is "unfinished" is a misnomer. It's less that the game is unfinished, and more that the game had a lot of cut story content and a rough development cycle. Which pretty much every finished game has. There is no such thing as a game development cycle that goes perfectly smoothly. Kojima himself has said that the game is finished. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean the story ends any less abruptly. The game is divided into two chapters, and each one feels like it ends with an obvious fakeout ending. At the end of Chapter 1, you know the game isn't actually over. At the end of Chapter 2, you can't believe the game is actually over.

The gameplay is first-in-class for the MGS series, going back to the stealth sandbox nature of 3, except even more expanded, with a massive open world for you to experiment with to your heart's content. However, I can't really give it extra points for that, because the stealth isn't at all mandatory. The game has the best stealth gameplay of the entire series, but suiting up in several metric tons of kevlar and riding around in a miniaturized Metal Gear with a minigun that never needs to reload isn't just a viable strategy, it is the best and most straightforward strategy. And when this franchise's iconic tagline has always been "TACTICAL ESPIONAGE ACTION" then I feel like disproportionately rewarding you for going monkey brain mode and just whipping out a gat is worth docking points for.

I can't recommend this game, but only just barely. If you're a fan of the MGS series, this is an easy purchase. But also the game is seven years old now, so if you ARE a fan of the MGS series, you likely already own it.

It's hard to write a review for a game like R6 Siege because by its nature, the meta of the game is constantly evolving and changing. But here's my take: R6 Siege is an amazing game held back by the current nature of the meta. Right now, all defenders are loaded with tons of deployables. Motion detectors, Jager ADS, barbed wire, Mute jammers, Aruni walls, Wamai magnets, I could keep going, especially since the new Defender they just added also has a deployable gadget.

If anything, the roles have kind of been reversed. Attackers have to spend a ton of time clearing every room in order to make sure they get every deployable, which gives defenders the leeway to go on the aggressive, because attackers cannot rush in the current state of the game. The game, as it exists right now, is slow and methodical and stale. Every round plays out the exact same, when it felt like the opposite just two or three years ago. I'll always remember the good times I've had with this game, but for now? I'm good.

XCOM 2 is what I like to call the ramen noodle packet of gaming. I bought this game on a winter sale six whole years ago. Back then, I was very poor, and had less than a hundred dollars a month to spend on video games, so I always gravitated toward games that give me a lot of bang for my buck. XCOM 2 is the epitome of that, making it the ramen noodle packet of gaming. Ramen noodles are cheap, you can get more of them basically anywhere, and they're a solid core food that provides a lot of room for modularity to make it even better, which in this case represents XCOM 2's insane modding scene.

If you're a broke college student, you can live basically entirely off of ramen noodles. And if you're a broke college student, you can get the game on sale for super cheap and have hundreds of hours worth of super modular strategic entertainment that'll last you until you get your Master's.

Tabletop Simulator is a very simple, but effective game. It is, at it's core, a physics sandbox that you can import models into. I've personally mostly used Tabletop Simulator as a cheap and easy way to play Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar without having to invest a huge amount of money or play with people I wouldn't be able to in real life. But this is also an invaluable resource to aspiring tabletop game designers like myself for playtesting and game development.

If your D&D, wargaming, or just general board game nights with friends have been cancelled due to the pandemic (which is still going on as of the time of writing this review btw IF UR READING THIS IN THE FUTURE, PLS TELL ME IT'S OVER) this game is an easy purchase, with no caveats or asterisks. It's essentially perfect for what it tries to be.