Recent reviews by b-rom

Solid game, well made. If you like the idea of troubleshooting mechanical or electronic systems with increasingly obscure instruction manuals under various levels of pressure, this one is worth picking up.

Also, you can pet the cat.

I grabbed this on a whim on a steam sale, and was it ever worth it. This game would be worth it at full price. I absolutely love the primary game mechanic. It's basically playing a TAS. You enter in a series of moves and then watch to see how well they play out, then you tweak what didn't work until you can accomplish what you want to accomplish. The idle aspect is very clever too, in that each time you perform an action you gain familiarity which reduces the cost to complete that action. So you can build a loop that you just barely scrape by and then play something else while it loops in the background. When you come back your character is a master at the actions taken in that loop. The final compliment I'll give this game is the story lore. There's a little bit of colour for colour's sake there, but for the most part every bit of story lore is important. Everything points to something you need to do, hints at a course of action or just hints at the next area to explore.

Very well done developers. I'm super impressed.

Way better than Call of Duty 4.

Well, I bought Trials Rising on sale and it sure is a Trials game. For a good while the game didn't work, but eventually I found a solution (cmd /c "set OPENSSL_ia32cap=:~0x20000000 && %command%" for those who know). Now that's broken too. So Ubisoft connect runs and the Trials executable just shuts down again. RedLynx needs to get out of the Ubisoft failure vortex. I think that executives who love to buy up companies and ruin them need to face consequences. Bring back old school RedLynx please and drop the Ubisoft garbage.

What about you?

Mobile infantry sir.

Good for you! Mobile infantry made me the man I am today!

This game is an experience. The most British humour you can get I suppose.

Ok, so for gameplay. You hit things until the story progresses. Yup, that's the gameplay. Don't worry, "the story progresses" hides depths.

So if all you've ever seen of British humour is Monty Python's Holy Grail, you're in for a bit of a ride.

I'm still early in the game, so I feel like I'll have more to say as time goes on. My early impression is that I'm loving the game but the learning curve is brutal. This is not a relaxing sit in your truck and haul goods through the stars kind of game. Maybe once I've had time to get the hang of it, but wow it's unforgiving.

There's a bunch of highly necessary equipment that your truck needs to stay running. Power cells, air filters and circuit breakers. They all deplete over time and don't recharge. Compared to the rewards for completing jobs, they're quite expensive, and some of them don't last very long. You can sell all of them, but they don't hold their value. And they're all active right from the start of the game.

The game directs you to a manual in the glove compartment immediately upon starting. I've read the whole thing, and I recommend everybody does the same. However, there are a number of things that I think should be clarified. Easy changes, because it's just text. Well, I suppose they then need to translate it to 50 different languages.

First, make a list of all the critical systems and how to keep them running. Explicitly state that they are all consumable, nothing recharges it needs to be replaced when it depletes. Second, explain exactly where all of them are. I went for quite a while with cargo bouncing around the inside of my cab before I finally found where the gravity control system power equipment is. I also didn't realise there was a second set of air filters until I passed out (again).

Now, I have to say that I have been enjoying figuring all this out. It wasn't unfun. But it does get frustrating to have my bank hit negative again after finishing a lengthy story job because the air filter that I needed to change was more than the job payout.

Here's my suggestion. Difficulty levels. I think this would be easy to implement.
- Casual relaxed mode: depletion rates have a 0 multiplier (0.25 for fuel), so power cells and air filters will never run out, they're just a trade commodity.
- Easy mode: depletion rates have a 0.5 multiplier, so they take twice as long to exhaust.
- Medium mode: depletion rates have a 0.75 multiplier
- Realistic "trying to make it as a freelance trucker in a nasty economy" mode: depletion rates have a 1.0 multiplier.
- Mean "we want you to fail and be miserable" mode: depletion rates have a 2.0 multiplier

So, other than the very unforgiving learning curve, this game is great. I've been having a blast. Learning to control the truck took a bit of time, but once I started to get the hang of it I've been running successful deliveries and having a great time. The vistas are absolutely gorgeous. I've discovered that I enjoy country when it's being sung about space trucks. It has a trading system that is familiar to anybody who has played a space trading game before. Commodity type X is worth more in this system than that system. Buy some low and sell them high. These commodities are illegal in these systems, be careful if you have some in your cab. I haven't gotten into the customisation part of the game yet because I can barely afford to keep my truck out of impound, but the default look is great, so I can only imagine the possibilities.

This game has taught me a number of things. First off, I can drive with a steering wheel and pedals with only one hand successfully. Secondly, I can drive with a blood-alcohol level over 0.08 successfully. Thirdly, I can drive with a blood alcohol level over 0.08, with only one hand, with a minigun or uzi or rubber chicken in my right hand, successfully.

Warning, if your driving wheel has a grip surface, you will experience abrasions (on your driving hand). Just FYI.




For those of you with VR and Driving wheel setup: This game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rules.

** I wrote this review, then seven days later Overkill released a significant update. It adds two classic heists, Murky Station and Cook Off (Now called Turbid Station and, uh, Cook Off). It also changes some mechanics and includes a lot of fixes. So far the biggest impact I've found on my review is that in loud the bots aren't made of as squishy material. I didn't need to do any bot-babysitting when playing Cook Off, but I was only playing on Hard and I didn't stick around all that long, only cooking four bags, so that opinion might be under cooked.**

Just to preface all of this, while I like playing with friends when our schedules coincide, I usually play solo because I don't need random strangers in my life any more than I've already got.

Much ink has been spilt about the always-on aspect and the lack of a solo mode. I don't really have anything more to add. It's still a thing, and I haven't noticed it improving my game in any way. I mean the five minute wait to matchmake with myself is a great opportunity to get a drink, which I won't get during the game since I can't pause.

I tend to spend most of my time in stealth. I can't help it, I feel like there's something in me that says "why do in loud what you can do in stealth?" and so I just restart any heist I trip the alarm on until I get all the loot bags out with nobody noticing. I like a lot of the changes to the stealth. I love how much you can do without masking up, I love how much more precise you can be managing civilians. I appreciate the guards lack of eyes on the back of their heads but also their habit of getting bored and fidgeting around in place.

That said, there's some weird changes that seem specifically targeted at solo-mains like myself, such as the dye packs in the first bank. I guess I can't complain too loud about that, just try to find the correct computer in the Big Bank in PD2 by yourself. I also have mixed feelings about the moving bodies mechanics. I like the removal of body bags, but dropping bodies feels very off. You can't stuff them places, or try to do much anything with them, they just fall straight down at your feet. If you back up to a wall you can get their head stuck in the geometry which is good for a chuckle at times.

They've also made the game seem linear. PD2 had Crime.net and it added a non-linear, sporadic, aspect to the heists. You could kind of tell the earlier heists from the later, but they didn't have an order (I mean there was that Story Mode menu, but who ever looked in there?). PD3, they have a very defined and deliberate order. That then makes it feel like they should progress in difficulty. But I can clean out the Sharke bank on Overkill with only a little bit of difficulty, and I have yet to get all loot on the Dirty Ice heist on even Very Hard by myself.

I've come to find the loud mostly disappointing. Loud heists in PD2 were fun. I had this lovely triple SMG anarchist build where I could zoom around the map on DW brrrrping anybody who got in my way, and the bots were there to get me up if I stuck my head into the view of a sniper. In PD3 the loud action has had both the pace and the body count scaled way down. And, as far as I'm concerned, the fun has been scaled down with it. I mean it's not awful, it's just not fun. The battle of attrition against a non-renewing amour/health pool encourages caution, not chaos. Also the bots go down now. All the time. In fact playing in loud tends to see me spending more thought-energy on deciding to play babysit-the-bots or wait-for-the-bots-to-get-back-from-custody. One nader or one dozer and there go all the bots again. They also don't pick each other up, so that's one more tick on the babysit-the-bots play mode. So yeah, I tend to not bother much with loud.

The final word for me is that there is fun to be had here. I've enjoyed my time with PD3. I don't think it's as good as PD2 though, but maybe that's how it goes. Maybe PD2 was a lightning in a bottle scenario and hoping that would happen twice was just wishful thinking on our part.

Yup, I'm a potato. My PC isn't, it's a tiny god, but me? I'm just a potato.