Recent reviews by Acriax

Polished and refined, with great graphics, sound and atmosphere, although very predictable as it follows the design rules of mainstream games almost too slavishly. Open arena-style area with red explosive canisters all around? Yeah, it's gonna go into lockdown and monsters pour in in 3...2...1. A locker room filled with ammo and health? Better believe next room is gonna be a boss battle. A stasis recharge station? Wouldn't you know it, around the next corner is an obstacle you need to use stasis on in order to progress. On and on like that it goes. The game also seems to give you health drops whenever you are low on health so much as to it being predictable. All this handholding really smooths out any suspense and tension and kills the immersion.

However, despite these issues, the game is still held up by its aforementioned qualities along with rather good combat, even if the way the enemies so often spawn in right behind you feels quite cheap. So I'd say it's still worth a play-through.

Apart from the final boss battle, this game was great and well worth the wait! The atmosphere is thick, the graphics are unique, the gunplay is good although the AI could easily be defeated by popping around corners, but when caught off-guard they are menacing on the hardest difficulty. Overall, it was a refreshing playthrough that actually posed a challenge and made you think, in comparison to todays games.

No real development in years, buggy as all hell, works without some random issue maybe 1 out of every 5 times. The UI is horrendous. It's sucking all the joy out of VR to the point I never want to use VR just because it's such a hassle to get things running.

SteamVR.exe has encountered a critical error.

gg no re, valve.

You'll notice a trend that everyone who likes this game likes it because of the franchise attached to it, not because of any qualities of the game itself. No one ever says that the TW:WH games are their favourites because those games have the best gameplay, depth or balance in the series. It's a shame, because I agree, the setting is awesome and in theory this game should be the most awesome game in the world. It's just that CA weren't able to make a very good game in the end. I've been a fan of TW games since Shogun 1, and have played most of them extensively, and I'd say that this is the Battlefield 2042 of the Total War games.

There are many pros and cons to this game but there are already reviews out there, so I'll just bring up the biggest con that weighed the scale in the thumbs down direction the most.

Performance is abysmal for no discernible reason. If you are planning on playing in 4K... don't.

The game looks *marginally* better than TW:WH2 if everything is set to ultra, but it has half the framerate in both battles and campaign. If you lower all the graphical settings to off and low, you can squeeze out a little bit of extra performance but it will look absolutely atrocious.

The most telling sign that something went very wrong in the optimization department is that upon booting the game and entering the main menu in 4K, my RTX 3080 card tops out, being 100% utilized and sounding like a jet engine. Despite this, I struggle to even reach the 120fps my monitor is capable of in the main menu. And this main menu is just a low-res looping video. By comparison, TW: Troy only uses 10% of my GPU in the menu at 4K, and it plays equally buttery smooth in the campaign and battles, and it also looks way better.

One of those games that are amazing in concept but just tedious in practice, as is often the case with 4X games. The UI is so clunky as to be unpleasant to use, and the performance is horrible for the bad graphics that are offered. 90% of the game is sending around your councillors on the same kind of missions over and over and over again. Every time you do so there's hefty amounts of RNG involved, so a playthrough is largely determined by luck. Imagine in X-Com if you didn't have the tactical battles where you could use your wits to win but instead only rolled dice for the success rate of the missions. The amount of strategic options you have is rather thin for a geopolitical sim, and the whole flow of the game feels choppy when every few in-game weeks you are interrupted with having to assign your councillors to new missions. It's an "ugh, not again" moment every time, and a game shouldn't have those as a central mechanic. Something needs to be redesigned then. Thankfully, even the game realizes it's tedious and spaces the assignment phases out more and more as the game progresses, but that whole mechanic should be revamped.

I got to Mars before I realized that it's just going to be more of the same throughout the rest of the campaign and couldn't be bothered to continue on any more. The game is in need of a massive overhaul in gameplay, balance, graphics, performance, UI and space combat, as well as a serving of additional content and events. If it got all that, it could be an amazing game, but as of now it's just a shallow, unpolished husk of what it could be..

Update: I've given this game another chance at 3 different times since this review, but now, 1 year later, it's still in pretty much exactly the same state as it was then. Even the performance and loading times are just as abysmal as I remember them. Just stay away from it, there are way better games to spend your time on out there.

Unplayable, even after 3 months. The only thing that is consistent in the game is that you'll be disconnected after 10-15 minutes. Expect less than 30 players to be active at any given day. Absolutely dead and broken, and a travesty as a tribute to OFP, one of the best games of its time.

Edit: Almost 2 years later and now not a whole lot has changed when it comes to the core of the game, but it's rather stable and playable now. Buggy and janky, but not crashy. The modders are carrying the devs when it comes to the content, and there's a pretty healthy population most of the time now.

My thumb has gone from straight down to just slightly below sideways because of all the jank and poor performance still present. If they get those sorted out, the game would be good at that point.

Edit 2: Okay, it's finally pretty good now. Surprisingly enough, console players saved this franchise.

Update: I've changed it into a positive review since the game has improved since I last reviewed it. It feels a lot more smooth and solid now, even if the matchmaking can take a while still. AI is a lot better even if it's still not good enough as an alternative to players.

It's not perfect, but there's definitely fun to be had... if you're a masochistic type.

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The game concept is an interesting twist on the L4D co-op shooter style of games that has you starting out on the hardest difficulty and only gets harder from there. It requires teamwork, communication, skill and lots of patience. On paper, it's a really good game, however...

I bought into this game with the release of 1.0, since leaving early access tends to be a sign that a game is polished and ready enough to be enjoyed with all it's base content in an overly hassle-free experience, but in this case, that is just not true.

The matchmaking is very poor, if not completely broken. You can't create a lobby, have a friend with you and then matchmake the two remaining slots. It looks like it's supposed to be possible, but it kicks you out and weird things happen. The only way to play with a friend and two randoms is to hit the matchmake button at the same time and hope for the best. Even then, the lobbies tend to be bugged out with some players names not loading in, not displaying as ready, etc. We also got consistently matched with Chinese players that didn't speak English when matchmaking from Western Europe. Honestly, even with how hard this game is, getting into a working game is harder.

You can use bots to fill out the slots too, but they're a death sentence for any run except the easiest one. They don't pick up or use packs, they love to run in your way, and they sometimes get stuck in ladders or stairs. The devs need to make it so that bots teleport to you if you get too far away. In one game, everyone got downed except for 1 bot who had glitched into a wall. He couldn't die and wouldn't revive us. We couldn't even restart to the checkpoint at that point so had to restart the whole run.

There are still plenty of other issues too. Last game just now one player put down some 10 sentry turrets (not sure if whether to cheats or lag) and lagged us all out before he disconnected. And after that our flashlights wouldn't toggle and were angled in the wrong direction. I've talked to other players that mention run-breaking issues with regards to vital quest items glitching out in so early as the second level, and that sort of thing is just inexcusable for a 1.0 release to be honest.

On top of that, the gunplay feels a little bit janky somehow. Like there's a short delay between shots and hits and it's hard to figure out if you actually did any damage or not, and it's hard to judge when you will hit with your melee strikes or what bodypart you will hit (or even should hit, as some enemies continue fighting without their heads) . Closest thing I can liken it to is Vermintide or maybe Star Citizen. It's not bad, but it could be a fair bit better.

I think this game could be great with some more time in the oven. The concept is good, and there's probably plenty of replayability, if only the whole experience would be more polished. Until then, it's not really worth all the headache.

Don't usually write reviews, and it pains me to write a negative one, because this game has some nice parts to it as well, but because of some issues (that the devs may be able to fix) I had a pretty negative experience.

First let's get the good out of the way. The graphics, sound, music and general presentation is just super polished. Characters in particular is almost Overwatch-class. Seems to be a pretty good amount of progression as well. The whole concept, style and humor is also pretty good! The price seemed fair for the amount of content, and I hoped that it would get more players into the game, which is something all new multiplayer games need nowadays.

I won't touch on most of the actual gameplay because I only had the 2 starting heroes an couldn't play much because of the bug I'll explain next.

Okay, so the bad stuff. Playing with the Oculus Touch Controllers, I had an issue where I simply couldn't turn around at all. This is not something I've experienced in any other game, and from reading the reviews some people obviously could play fine on Oculus. Anyway, just beware. The game was more or less unplayable for me.

Secondly, playing just after the game showed up on the steam Recent list, I'd assume there to be more active players, but I had to wait for about a minute to matchmake for my first game. That'd not be so much of an issue in a normal game where you can easily alt-tab out and wait, but here in VR, it's pretty excruciatingly boring to just stand and stare at a menu with looping music and nothing to do and no indication as to how close you are to finding a match. I had no idea if I would be standing there for 10 minutes or more. There should be an indication of how many players are online or an average wait time text. A better way would be to let players pick a character and spawn into a solo practice range while they're matchmaking. That way they could try out the various powerups and learn how they work so as not to get absolutely smacked in their first game if matched to someone who has played before.

Also, while the gameplay is pretty good, the gamemode now at launch is just a classic deathmatch with no twist on it. I'd love to have seen some more teamwork and objective-based gameplay, because 1 on 1 deathmatch gets stale pretty quick. Then there was also no in-game VOIP or other way to communicate, and I feel that is a big let-down for a VR-game. You can't greet, congratulate or taunt the player you play against, and that other player is then de-humanised into just a character to shoot at instead of an actual person to compete with. Playing something like Rec Room's paintball, most of the fun comes from just hearing the giggling groans of your opponent when you sneak up on them and shoot them in the back. Just comparing the two, I'd honestly rather play Rec Room than this, even if I could turn correctly in this, and even though I don't like the teleportation movement in Rec Room, because it just is better at leveraging the power of interactions between players in a VR environment.

Then there was also no exit button in the menu and the game failed to shut down properly when closing it from the Oculus menu. So there's that too.

Devs obviously spent a lot of time on the graphics, animations and polishing stage, but not long enough on the core design of the game and what or what not to do in making a VR game. Hoping it will grow into the Team Fortress 2 of VR, but I have my doubts that players will stick around long enough for that to happen if this is all it offers.

The game was over just as I thought it would start.

The opening sequence was well made. That was the best part of this game.

Maybe 1-2 hours of gameplay. No replayability, not much in terms of horror. Useless lean-function. No puzzles other than picking up things and using them 10 seconds later in really obvious places, or climbing on top of things. If their target audience is 5-years old I imagine it could be a scary and adequately challenging game. To anyone else, it is a borefest. Follow the linear path through the various areas and try not to be bothered by all the reused props in the environments. Easily dodge the few poorly made antagonists. Yawn as nothing scary happens. Finish the game. Uninstall and never play again.

NOT worth 20 eur. Go see a movie with a friend instead. More fun per second per money in that. Godzilla was pretty good.

Quite honestly one of the best games I have played and I wish there were more games like it out there. Even coming back 10 years later to it it still feels fresh, fun and unique. The graphics are still good enough and the gameplay feels fair and smooth as silk.

The game is a FPS for all the player but the two commanders who play the game like an RTS. The two sides, Frontiersmen and Kharaa are extremely asymmetric but rather well balanced for being played so differently.

The maps are both stylistically and technically gorgeous and are very well designed with layouts that are a good mix of main corridors, setpiece rooms, side passages and well-placed objective locations.

The weapons and alien classes are varied too and offer much to learn and a high skill ceiling. Since you lose the lifeform you are or the weapon you hold whenever you die, the more powerful weapons and lifeforms come with increased tension to balance things out nicely. It's all just very well thought out, and the gameplay has only improved since the launch of the game with community updates still coming out rather regularly. Some of the patches have completely overhauled major parts of the game, like replacing many of the abilities of the alien team, which is interesting to see that the developers have the guts to try things like that.

The biggest (and maybe the only) gripe I have with the game right now as of writing this review in 2022 is that the player count is on the low side and that that most of the people who still play are the ones who are extremely dedicated to the game and thus are very skilled. I'd say that most are quite friendly but there might be a few that take the game too seriously when somebody on the team makes a mistake, which is a shame. Everyone can see ones rank (based largely on playtime) next to the name so there's no reason to not be nice to the rookies.