Recent reviews by A Corpse

A satisfying first person storyline shooter. Took me 29 hours at a leisurely pace to complete, despite having to re-do some things due to crashes. Yes, it still crashes, too often. There's various threads on the forums about things people have tried to fix it but there doesn't seem to be any one cause. For me, it crashed probably 8-10 times throughout the game, several times even when paused.

There's no manual save system, only checkpoints, and there's no real way to know when a checkpoint has happened or how far back you'll end up if you crash, choose to quit, or want to redo a section.

There seems to only be one song in the entire game. Every gang HQ, every party, every riot, every edgy store plays it. It's not a bad track but wow does it get repetetive.

In the end though, still a thumbs up from me. Especially at the current price (90% off).

AC

At it's core, it's a 6v6 objective shooter. Think Overwatch, but with gundam (sorry, "strikers"). There's also a 3-person squad Battle Royale extraction shooter with 20 teams, PvE objectives, and 5 single-team extraction points. There's a third mode (Ace Arena?) but that's locked so far behind levels that I haven't gotten to it yet even after 40 hours of playing.

The BR mode has a meta right now (beam autocannons, which everyone expects to get nerfed), but that's only because you can bolt any weapon onto your striker that you want. The 6v6 mode uses striker-specific weapons, but it's extremely forgiving of play styles and there's not a single mech I never see. Wanna go heavy defensive or offensive, slog around largely on the ground but wielding a gigantic arsenal of shields and guns? Take Tricera or Stego. Wanna get right in people's face with melee? Welkin or Alysnes. Wanna be mobile and snipe? Aquila or Narukami. Wanna control the skies? Skyraider or Falcon. More of a support player? Pinaka or Luminae. Try them all, especially if there's one you think is overpowered, because that's how you find out how to counter them. "Know your enemy" is still relevant.

Some of the negative reviews raise legitimate issues (too many bots, awkward gating to progression) but many others seem to be focusing on unwarranted extrapolation. There is no monetisation yet, so anyone screaming about pay-to-win is just guessing that it *might* be bad, based on the fact that it's free-to-play and will have a progression-boosting battlepass. I plan to be entirely free-to-play on launch myself.

Also I can't help but mention the character creator. And I mean the pilot, not the striker. You rarely see the pilot (only getting in or ejecting from the striker, or on getting VIP in a match) but the level of detail in the editor is incredible. Make yourself a greek god or supermodel, or a circus freak. Go nuts.

By all means, check out some reviews, and see if the gripes raised in them would bug you, but if the thought of fast-paced three-dimensional mech combat appeals, there is zero harm in giving the game a look, now, or when it launches.

OK this game has been through the wringer. Hyped up launch with all the issues that come with that, massive review-bomb for extremely stupid publisher decision, and a slow recovery afterwards with some hard work being put in by the devs. In the end, it's a recommend from me. The gameplay is chaotic fun, the technical issues are mostly under control, and the developers are continuing to deliver both new content and responding to player feedback when it comes to balancing.

It's not perfect, but what game is? If you're in two minds, make sure to read a range of reviews, and see if the negative marks being handed out are relevant to you.

Bit bewildering at the start, the game doesn't really explain its mechanics, but that's basically part of the story. Press on past the initial confusion and you find an interesting and lore-rich stealth/shooter (and it's largely your choice how to play it, guns blazing or sneak heavy). It has character in spades, and the voice acting is brilliant.

Gameplay wise I wouldn't necessarily call it groundbreaking, but it does build on foundations laid by other games. If you enjoyed the likes of Dishonored, Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Mankind Divided, this should be right up your alley.

It did take some work to get it running well with some odd latency and micropausing, but those look to have been patched out since launch.

The price tag is a bit on the chunky side but if you're on a budget it's definitely worth grabbing when it gets to your pricepoint.

Edited after finishing the game, see the update at the bottom.

_____________

OK so I'm reviewing the game as-is, which is an important distinction since games change wildly sometimes. This is labelled as "released" not "early access" though so if you call your game done, then you have to expect it to be reviewed as such.

First: the good. The atmosphere is incredible. The enemies are terrifying and challenging. The storyline is slowly teased out, almost as if it's not really there, while you figure out what the hell is going on and how it got to be that way.

Playing with one or more friends is recommended but not to make it easier since the enemies scale with the number of players. It's just more fun with someone else on comms.

The game mostly looks great. The enemies are incredibly detailed and when you unlock blueprints you can scope them out with the binoculars and see all the components. The engine isn't the latest but does weather effects well and seems to have an unlimited viewing distance.

But there are some less appealing things.

It does get repetitive. Enemies consist of 4 types, with variants of each. The variants are generally just "Different colour, tougher, more weapons" though. You'll soon figure out which strategies can work and which won't, and it just comes down to picking them apart while trying to avoid the massive amounts of damage they throw. If you're playing on Skirmish, and you don't bother learning the weak spots, you're gonna have a bad time.

The inventory system is bad. Like, really bad. You have 3 weapons and 4 quickslots, and if you need to change an ammo type or throw down an item that isn't in the quickslot, you will die. It takes way too long. I don't know of it's intentional or not but it's frustrating.
And you can't sort, search, or filter! Weapon mods are in a random list. Ammo is in another random list. Equippables in a third. Found a blue handgun silencer? Best spend time manually scrolling through ALL your mods to see if you happen to already have one that's better. Need to fit a medkit to a quickslot, well good luck finding it.

There are bugs, especially in multiplayer. Desynch is rife, where one person sees an enemy but they're not there for the other. Corpses fly off sometimes, straight into the air, never to be seen again. It's possible to get stuck in terrain and features and you have to fast travel to get out. Some lootables can't be collected without absurd amounts of effort (like the medpack on the range hood in almost every house). If you've re-bound your keys, expect them to just randomly not work, after things like fast travel. In some dark places, the gamma goes nuts, causing massive blobs of light that make it practically unplayable. I've even had a few crashes to desktop, bringing an early end to an evening's play.

But after all that it is still a great game. If they could just iron out some of these bugs it'd be an amazing game. At least it looks like the devs are still working on it, rather than firing it out the door and forgetting about it.

Final rating is a thumbs up, but with a caution. I hope you have a decent tolerance for bugs.

____________

OK, I've now finished the game. In the mean time there have been some updates too. Ammo management is MUCH better, with a simple button to click to switch mags to other ammo types. Many of the other bugs remain but I am confident that the game is at least still being improved.

However... The ending... Wow.

The ending is bad. If you wanna know why, read the next spoiler. There's no boss-battle. There's no massive revelation. There's just a small amount of exposition, and some more info that already works into the picture you've been assembling by playing the game, IE some dying scientist got his consciousness merged with the machines. He then appears to have, I dunno, decided to kill everyone. No reason given.

You then ummm. Blow him up. By placing a bomb against the servers. No decisions. No options. No "good ending/bad ending". Just scripted stuff. Meh.

As for the existance of DLCs, I don't know if they give any more info or not. I haven't bought them. Not sure that I will. I've gotten to the stage where I've killed enough bots, so if the DLCs simply give "more of the same" then I'll pass.

I'll stick with the overall positive review, but if the story stays the way it is then it's a rather disappointed "positive" review.

I've been looking for something to fill the void left by Atomic Bomberman, which was a game we played at LAN games for over a decade. The lack of IPX network in Windows 7 onwards killed that years ago. We've tried multiple different bomberman clones over the years, but this looked like it had potential.

Alas, the input lag when playing multiplayer is unreal. It feels like you're gliding on glue. Maybe the campaign is better but I don't care about that, all I wanted was a frantic, hoarse-from-laughing multiplayer game.

Seems like the search will continue.

(Also, the price is ABSURD. I got this at 75% off and that was barely tolerable. Refunding it though, since it doesn't do the only thing I got it for.)

It's massive. Just... huge. It took me 200 hours to finish the main questline, just letting myself wander from place to place doing side quests and encounters. The story DLCs are generally worthwhile. The other stuff is just fluff really.

The game's not perfect though. You can only get out of water in certain places so sometimes you can literally get trapped in a puddle. Once you enter combat you can't jump, so if you're wanting to move to a place 1 foot higher, you can't. Missions are generally pretty repetive, with "go to marker, kill whatever you find, come back" the standard RPG formula.

Overall though, these are minor concerns in an otherwise great game. The GOTY edition is amazing value and you'll get many hours of playtime out of it even if you don't try to complete every side quest.

This game, sheesh.

Look, it has its issues. It's under continuous development. Bugs show up, are squashed and replaced with newer, more aggravating bugs. Long-standing ones (like steam achievements not working, for some people, sometimes) aggravate. The new player experience is bewildering (so I'm told).

But the content is amazing. The environments gorgeous. The combat is visceral and satisfying. And somehow they keep coming up with new warframes, new weapons, new events.

And it's free to play! That's not just lip-service either. The premium currency is tradeable, so if you've got some tolerance for grind you literally never have to spend a cent.

Give it a go, you've got nothing to lose, except time.

I'm giving this a positive, but not by much. It's a VERY lazy mobile port. So many improvements could have been made that were not even attempted. You move dwellers with the left mouse, and you also move around your vault with left mouse, meaning accidentally dragging and dropping a dweller in a crowded vault when all you're trying to do is scroll around is a guaranteed frustration. Would have been so simple to use the right mouse to move around instead. Selecting a dweller when they're leaping around a room is also tricky, since half the time it'll select the room (and zoom in on it). It auto-zooms to events, and locks there for a second, so if you're wanting to prepare for that event (yeah I KNOW deathclaws are coming, can I prep the first room please?)

In-game documentation is adequate but not more.

On the plus side, it's free and the paid aspects are easier to live without than in normal F2P games. The premium currency Nuka Cola Quantum can be earned fairly easily in-game (especially if you rescue Bottle & Cappy).

A casual, relaxing game which will steal your whole night if you let it. "Just one more day" quickly turns into "Ohgod I have to work tomorrow. Wait, I mean today. Why did I do this?!?"