Recent reviews by Captain Drillbit

This game made me binge drink.

I clapped when Jumbo Josh showed up!

Machine Girl popped off here fr, the game's good too

Edit 11/17/23: Game is cool now I guess

Halo Infinite's gameplay is superb. 343 has finally, on their fourth release in the franchise, made a game that feels like a natural evolution from CE, 2, and 3. The game looks beautiful and has amazing gameplay with a high skill ceiling that still feels like a Halo game at its core, unlike Halo 5. And yet, despite all of this, I can't recommend Halo Infinite in its current state.

Almost every single feature in this game outside of the gameplay is so openly antagonistic to players that you'd think Activision has a publishing credit.

Customization is great, visually. Armor looks great, and the coating system allows for patterns on armor you wouldn't find in previous games. Every single other aspect of customization is horrid. The armor available to players for free is next to none, with almost every piece of customization being locked behind a 10 USD battle pass or the cash shop, with prices ranging from 5 to 20 USD. Players start the game with the Mark VII armor core, but the armor pieces available to players just starting out doesn't even include the Mark VII helmet. Instead, the Mark VII helmet, which in any other Halo game would be unlocked by default, is locked behind level 90 or so of the battle pass.

Is there armor customization available to players for free? Yes! Is it locked behind a grind that would take multiple hours at best? Yes! More on this later.

The recent Fracture: Tenrai event points a magnifying glass at everything wrong with this system. When you unlock the Yoroi armor core, you get a single armor coating with it for free. The basic suite of solid color armor coatings that the Mark VII core has by default? Locked, with no way to unlock the majority of them at present. Those that are available are in the cash shop. The samurai armor that was heavily advertised in the leadup to the game? Locked, with no way to unlock it AND without appearing in the event progression reward list, meaning that it's a cash shop exclusive armor.

Surely this system can't be as bad as it seems, right? The battle pass is only 10 USD!

Imagine I put the Halo 3 screenshot of Master Chief saying "Worse" here.

Each level of the battle pass requires 1000 XP. You get 50 XP per match you complete. That's it. No bonuses for playing the objective, earning medals, or anything else. The person who goes 37 and 3 in a slayer match gets the same amount of post-match XP as the person going 0 and 15. To compound these issues, many of the weekly challenges require a specific game mode to progress. Things like playing, or winning, games of a certain mode, killing flag carriers in CTF, etc. Not too big of an issue, except there is no way to queue for a particular game mode. You queue for Arena or Big Team Battle. You have no control over the mode beyond that. Have you ever wanted to sit through 15 matches of BTB Slayer and CTF just to finally play a single match of Stockpile for a weekly challenge that gives 200 XP? No? Me neither, and yet, this is the battle pass system 343 has given us.

Now, you can, in theory, max out your battle pass without doing a single weekly challenge, if you're willing to sit through 2000 matches. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, there is a bonus incentive to complete all of your weekly challenges every week. Each week, completing all of your weekly challenges grants you a special capstone challenge that, upon completion, grants you whatever the free armor customization item of the week is. So far, we've gotten a gold visor and a gray and orange armor coating, both for the free Mark VII armor core. The issues with this system, namely the lack of control over being able to complete a large portion of the possible challenges in any reasonable time frame, make this much more of an ordeal than it should be for a single piece of armor customization. There is also potential for FOMO with this system. As of now, we have no clue what happens to these rewards after their week has passed. These rewards are the same for everybody, so if they are on a set rotation, what do people who have already earned these items get, if anything? If these aren't on a set rotation, will they ever come back to be earnable for free, or will they be forever lost to the sands of "You had to be there"?

Halo is one of my favorite franchises of all time. These are games I genuinely love. It's so incredibly frustrating to see 343 finally, a decade after acquiring the series, get the gameplay right, but get everything else so horribly wrong. I know the counter argument to all of this is simply "they're just cosmetic items", "they don't affect gameplay", etc. However, one of the biggest draws to this series from Halo 3 onward is being able to make your Spartan unique by working towards unlocking different armor pieces. Now, the only feasible way to unlock any sort of customization is to swipe a credit card. Sense of pride and accomplishment, right?

If they ever fix these issues, I genuinely believe Halo Infinite could be a contender for best game in the franchise. Until these issues are addressed and fixed, however, this is not a game I can recommend. But even then, how much credit can I give 343 for fixing issues that should've never made it to release?

EDIT: January 18th, 2022

I feel the need to update this review with the changes that 343 has introduced since the game launched.

The Fracture: Tenrai event was overhauled, with the advertised samurai armor being added to the free event pass, with assurance that they will do a better job of communicating what items will be free for future events. Overall solid change.

Additionally, the Winter Contingency event in December as well as the current Cyber Showdown and upcoming Tactical Ops events provide ways for players to obtain armor and weapon cosmetics for free, with some of the highlights being shoulder pads and leg pouches from Winter Contingency, a neon mohawk and visor from Cyber Showdown, and the MK V Zeta helmet, a chest armor, a hand armor, and leg pouches from the upcoming Tactical Ops event (if the datamines are to be believed).

Battle pass XP was also overhauled, with challenges deemed to be too difficult being removed as well as boosting XP gain from playing your first 6 matches of the day. Now, you can get 1 battle pass level per day just by playing 6 matches. This can be further boosted by completing challenges during said matches. Overall solid change.

Weekly challenge rewards are still largely not great, though 343 has said that this is something they're looking at for the future.

Perhaps the largest change was today's shop pricing update. Bundles that would've previously been 2,000 credits (20 USD) under the pricing model we had before were slashed to 1,000 and 1,200 credits, a price cut of around 50 percent. Additionally, 343 has stated that they are working on overhauling daily bundles as well as allowing players to purchase individual items from bundles. These are great changes, and ones that will hopefully persist into the future.

There's still plenty of work for 343 to do, however. The game's servers have issues with desync and hit registration that can make the game feel icky to play. While the event rewards are great, there are still precious few permanently available free cosmetics for players to earn, as well as no overall career progression system like what previous games had. We are making progress, however, with a lot of great changes already implemented with more in the pipeline. We're not quite at a point where I can recommend Halo Infinite yet because of the aforementioned issues, though we should be there by the time season 2 releases around May.

Really makes you wish developers were given time to launch finished products instead of needing to spend months playing catch-up.

When the

I love this game.

The story is fantastic. Kazuma Kiryu is a great character and Goro Majima is an excellent one. Their stories begin separately, with Kiryu's focusing on Kamurocho and Majima's on Sotenbori, but things happen and their stories become intertwined. My one complaint about the main story is that the circumstances that cause their stories to overlap feel overly convenient, especially towards the end of the game.

Kamurocho and Sotenbori are excellent locales. They're dense, immersive, and filled to the brim with charming and wacky substories, fun minigames, and secrets. Please for the love of god don't go for 100 percent completion if you value your sanity.

Finally, there's the combat. While good, it's the part of the game I have the most complaints about. In particular, the Heat Gauge is risk-reward in a bad way. The Heat Gauge is similar to DMC's style meter, where landing, dodging, and sometimes blocking attacks builds it up whereas taking hits or going too long without landing a hit cause it to deplete. The Heat Gauge does two things. The first is allow you to consume it to use Heat Moves, which are powerful attacks accompanied by a short animation. These are very over the top and incredibly satisfying to use. This, on its own, is fine. However, the problem lies in the second thing the Heat Gauge does. The Heat Gauge, on top of allowing you to perform Heat Moves, also determines your attack speed, with higher levels on the Heat Gauge giving you faster attack speed. I found this to be a problem, as using your Heat Moves or taking damage causes you to attack slower, which can make building up your Heat Gauge again frustrating, especially in later parts of the game. I found myself sticking to one or two styles out of the four that each character has, as the slower styles feel awful to use at lower Heat Gauge levels.

Looking at Yakuza 0 as a whole, my gripes are relatively minor. There's a lot to love, between the characters, combat, well done main story, wacky side stories, enjoyable minigames, and excellent soundtrack. At $20 dollars full price, often going on sale for less, as well as being available through Xbox Game Pass both on PC and console at the time of writing this, there's no reason not to play this.

This is the Devil May Cry of first person shooters

I'm addicted to The Grind and this game is my dealer.

Most fun I've had while breaking the law
10/10 would raid the White House again

This is, without a doubt, one of the best Sonic games to date. It perfectly captures the spirit of the Genesis games that propelled Sonic into the spotlight while still adding more mechanics and bringing more ideas to life without missing a beat. My only complaint is that it's very short.

9.5/10 would go fast again