Recent reviews by BadNetCode

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My wife said playing this game in co-op is like being Marios' hat.

Janky, yet terrifying

The writing and acting for all of the main cast seems great. Side characters are stilted and ridiculous. Particularly Regina, who will call you every time you get close to a gig job (every 5 minutes) and refuse to shut up. These are some of the only dialogues you can't skip through once started.

The 3 origins to choose from don't matter at all, but you probably expected that.

The UI is bad and clearly prioritizes console/gamepad.

If you want to meaningfully alter your graphics settings, you have to edit the files directly.

You cannot alter your character again once the game begins. You cannot get a haircut or change your makeup or anything. Makeup and body mods on the NPCs in the game are wildly more varied than anything you can do in character creation.

You can't make any changes to vehicles or your apartment.

Item scaling is similar to Outer Worlds, or Witcher, in which you find weapons and they're good for about 10 minutes of play before you pick up something better. Unlike the Witcher, crafting good equipment requires you to dump precious stats and perks into a skill tree that isn't good for much else.

Crafting and upgrades require item components, which are primarily acquired through disassembly of guns and junk items, so have fun picking up every ashtray and beer bottle you find on the ground.

Hacking is zero risk, kind of uninteresting, and requires you to have line of sight on the target either directly or through a hacked camera. Because of this, hacking from a distance or from stealth can become a real PITA, as your reticle has to be on top of the object or person you're hacking. I was hoping for a hack menu that displays all hackable entities and hacking threats (see E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy).

In "the city where money can buy you anything" all of the vendors' good equipment is locked behind "Street Cred" which is basically a stat that increases the more that you play cop by busting gangs. Ironically, Street Cred does not increase when you kill NCPD officers.

I enjoy this game but I don't understand it and rarely get past the first area :(

Incredibly true to the original experience, though it omits some of the agonizing/boring parts of the game (some of which have been re-implemented through Steam's Workshop). The changes they did make fit really well and everything is consistent with my understanding of HL lore.

If you want to experience Half-Life for the first time, this is the way to do it.

Spend an hour getting to the end of a quest, then get suicide rammed by a ship full of morons. Everyone loses the loot, nothing is gained by either party. Rinse, repeat, uninstall.

really just kind of a boring slog

Gritty tactical RPG with an open world campaign similar to Mount & Blade.
I love it so far.

I find myself wishing I could just fast forward through this whole game. Clunky, boring, but looks nice. Very shallow gameplay.