Recent reviews by Vanguard

Don't get it for this single reason:

Too many fights force you into the open (via objectives) and then hit you with a combo of melee and snipers.

If the game flows it is otherwise fantastic, but being forced into melee combat and being hit by snipers constanly midswing is really getting onto my nerves. ALT+F4 rage moment

Otherwise a solid recommendation, even if I am clearly lacking in skill for this game.

Just not my cup o tea. It might be a good game, but I have a hard time with the amount of constraints and mechanics being thrown around and many of the puzzles feel clunky.

Robocop - Good vs Evil, the corrupt vs. the incorruptible, man vs. machine.

Robocop since its inception always was a simple story about strong motifs - Greed and betrayal, duty and morality, identity and morals, violence in service of nefarious motivations or in defense of innocence, and maybe even some sense of redemption in all the utter madness of gang and cooperate warfare.

This game capitalizes on the franchises' strong points in terms of narrative and in some ways the shortcomings of the game in many of its aspects makes you appreciate it more.

Do not play this game if you expect complicated shooting mechanics or well designed or balanced upgrades, a plethora of gunplay or complicated dialogues with meaningful choices.

This game is about cheesy one-liners delivered by Robocop, about smashing evil in the face and raining destruction on OCP's property and the bad guys.

Many passages in the game will feel like a throwback into the 80ies - for the good and the bad that entails.

Anyway - thanks for your cooperation.

If you like Action RPGs this one should be on your shopping list.

Expect to pay for at least some money for this F2P title (once it is released) for convenience features, such as the currency stash tabs, etc, but it is fair enough since the title is worth some money. Cosmetics in game are rather pricey, so make sure you really want to buy those.

- Nice graphics, good telegraphing of enemy attacks.
- As expected from the first title, lot of build depth and options to play around with.
- Choices in skills, gear and passives feel meaningful and impactful.
- Bosses feel awesome to fight against and mostly fair - sometimes you will beat your head against a wall in learning them but mostly it is ok.
- The world feels dark and gritty, some levels are extremely nicely designed, looking forward to experience more of this game.

Cons:
- Some visual clutters especially with multiplayer games
- The honor system during an exaltation run (? your prestige class on top of your passives) feels unbalanced for some specs, melee definitely having a harder time.
- Expect to spend a lot of time on sorting your items, disenchanting, discombobulating, selling, etc. in order to grind the million microcurrencies and lesser items in game ( orbs, relics, charms, skill gems, support gems, etc. ) - while it is part of the build complexity, it can sometimes feel annoyingly complicated.
- Finding really good items in game feels extremely hard, so you HAVE to play the microgame of getting the various currencies for enchanting. If you hate inventory management, you will suffer a bit, but it's mostly manageable. Just wish I felt less "forced" to run all my loot into town all the time.

While I cannot say anything about the endgame, this game feels right. Bring your friends and have a good time. :)

I find the UI infuriatingly bad and its functions are badly, if at all, explained. Functions like automatically moving shadow clones to new fighting trainings didn't seem to work properly for me and felt not properly implemented.

Also "idling" is a strong misnomer, as you have to assign everything (pet training, shadow clone training, monster fighting, god fighting, adventurer fighting, adventurer crafting... lazy bastard doesn't even go fight on his own after crafting has finished.)

So if you think of it as a cookie clicker kind of management sim, it's probably not bad, but you probably also want to immediately pay a lot of money to get some "god power" and unlock all the comfort features. There might be a lot of automation in there which makes managing the dozens of activities in this game achievable.

Not my kind of game.

Pretty fun game to spend an hour on.

Songs of Syx is a city-builder with a few rogue-lite elements as rewards for additional playthroughs. The titles can be achieved and make successive playthroughs easier/allow for alternative strategies but are not the focus of the game.

The main aspect of the game is to figure out how to satisfy the need of your population, which consists of any amount of races you choose from. To do so you need to research, create buildings and production chains, wage war, and develop the map in various industrious ways. Playing to the strength of the individual races, while avoiding their obvious pitfalls is key here. All the while there are dozens of sub menus and mechanics to help or hinder you along the way. It will take several hours and a few failed attempts at your first colonies to get the hang of the game.

- Music: Fitting for the mood. Stellar soundtrack.
- Atmosphere: Captures a fantasy town with it's variety of technologies and building chains very well. The way you are allowed to put together the form and shape of your city is intriguing and fulfilling.
- Logistics are challenging: If you do like logistic / city builder games, then you should definitely get it. The production chains are interconnected in some of the best and worst ways, forcing you to be on your toes permanently. I feel the tools the game gives you in order to succeed are good enough already, but I am sure the game will evolve even further from here.

- You dislike the feel of a slightly unfinished game. Wait for it to exit early access.
- You dislike city builder games, but even then you should take a look at the demo for this game to see if there's something for you here.

The game puts various "milestone" blockers into your path, to limit the available immigrants. At first I disliked it strongly, but I can see why they exist. It serves to prevent you from making your village unmanageable by creating too many resource shortages. Learning them and how to progress slowly is a huge part of the game in my mind. In general unlocking the new technologies in order of cheapness / in a way they make sense makes you usually progress smoother. Do not be afraid to sometimes just let a year pass to stabilize your food production.

For your first few games, try to get the easily achievable titles, by spamming farms and pastures, etc. - it will make sequential playthroughs much more smooth.

Do not be afraid to just place a building down if you need it, when you need it. Nothing will ever be perfect and deconstructing in this game is pretty fast and almost cost-free.

8/10 - needs some love, especially the military needs a lot of work, I think. Many mechanics are not explained and need experimentation, which for me is actually a bonus. Letting me figure things out in this game feels great.

Not recommending this game is treachery and undemocratic.

Is what I said before Sony pulled through on their mandatory PSN registration.

This is how liberty dies...

is what I would have said, if Sony went through with the requirements, but apparently they asked their laywers again and they like to not get fined AGAIN Millions of dollars.

So, HD2? Good game. Sony? Your usual publisher nonsense.

I want to love per Aspera so much.

At the first glance this looks like a decent logistic puzzler.

The longer you play it, the more the absolutely infuriating, lazy implemented design gets to you.

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- Logistic is absoluty broken. I have watched so many materials which preferred to be delivered via the slowest road instead of the hyperloop network... I have watched so many materials which instead to the factory next to a mine which needed an item from the mine was instead served by a far away warehouse, instead of from the mine... I have watched in AGONY the absolutely horrific deconstruction system in action which forces you to micromanage even the most simple deconstruction actions.

- No proper prediction of the rising water level. Combined with absolutely slow deconstruction of buildings, this will lead to a frustrating construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of your water pumps, ports, shipyards. Atrocious!

- Did I mention the poorly implemented logistics? There is not a button or command to tell your network to drain a mine as soon as it has any output. Instead you have to rely on an absolutely arcane and obscure ruleset that deals with ratios and when to pull what next from the store or a mine any given mine.

- The ports act as a warehouse. So imagine, without realizing it, that your warehouse sitting RIGHT ON THE SHORES, next to the rising waterlevels, with hundreds, nay, thousands of items, being flooded. Just why?
Why not simply implement a new harbour/Quay which does not have a warehouse? Just why? This game can be pain.

At the first playthrough it is bearable. At any subsequent playthrough it feels there are way too many artificial limiters in the game, such as research being super slow, congested networks with barely any means around it and believe me: I tried decentralizing my base etc,

This results in you being AFK and letting the game running at 16X speed for a lot of time.

- Combat: Oh my god. Clearly, it was designed to be in, but no one had the time, enthusiasm or spirit to implement it in an enjoyable way. This feature should have been cut, including the entire military research tree.

Lacking... severely lacking in enabling you to properly manage your base.

- Go play the Sandbox campaign and skip the story. The narrative in this game is atrocious and AMI (you/the protagonist AI) is the most lobotomized character in the history of written characters, right next to Subnautica 2's protagonist. For a "smart" AI, it poses questions that are absolutely trivial and do not reflect the psychological development of an intelligent mind. Also the "dialogue options" being presented seemingly do not match up with the spoken lines afterwards. VERY frustrating. In addition there is a lack of options you actively can chose / participate in OR actively refuse, such as attacking the other colony, making it a terrible choice. A much more linear story would have benefited this game and the scope of it just fails this game in the narrative department

I dislike it, with the few exceptions.

4-5/10 - go get it on a sale and play factorio instead. The entire game, even years after release, feels unfinished. The developer clearly lacks experience with games of this type, seeing as there is a clear lack of options to satisfy the needs of a logistics challenge gamer.

On the positive side: If you mute this game and play much better fitting soundtracks, the game ALMOST does a good job of capturing the feeling of colonizing Mars. And Doctor Foster's voice actor? Oh my god. I am not gay, but his voice alone makes me struggle with my sexuality.

I would still take a look at per aspera 2, but the first entry is rather a learning experience.

Currently at 200 matches played, roughly 50 of those won.

So I am a subpar player, that only wins one in four. Which is fine, I admit I am not the best and I play with friends who are even a bit worse or a bit better.

After losing 8 matches in a row due to Lights headshotting me with a Machinepistol halfway across the map, Mediums perfectly hitting every headshot in close encounters with a revolver or just being sawed to death by heavies and their lewis gun I guess its time to call it quits.

I want to recommend the game because it is fun when things come together, but I cannot in the current state of things. I will probably still come back to the game from time to time, simply to look for that dopamine hit when the game is fair and you only die to cheesy-stuff instead of outright cheats.

Update: Spent 3 hours today trying to get the daily contract "win a match". Not a single win. This game is fair and balanced.