Recent reviews by grolis and vomit

This game is STUPID, but that's what makes it fun!

By far the biggest issue with this game is that it doesn't have online multiplayer, only local. Battling AI is pretty fun, but the real way to play the game is to try and abuse the physics simulation by dropping crates full of bombs on enemy dropships, and the AI doesn't really do that.

Also a surprisingly enjoyable, if a bit repetetive soundtrack

This game is worth playing just to hear the amazing soundtrack!

The idea of being able to plan your attack, decide on which equipment you want to take and then execute it, risking the equipment costs is fantastic. And with different game modes, findable artifacts and unlockable suits the game has a lot of replay potential.

I do, however, have a complaint about this game - this game does not support Steam Cloud. So, if you find an artifact and unlock a new suit - this will not carry over to the next game installation, you will have to start over despite already having the achievement for the artifact. It gets exceptionally frustrating because some game modes are locked behind completion of other gamemodes.

Can't wait for Gunhead, and I sure hope Ryan Roth and Ryan Henwood make the soundtrack for that one!

On the minimal settings preset (which is labeled as "High") with literally the best AMD GPU on the market right now, the game averages... 4 FPS

Oh, wait, it's sponsored by NVIDIA, I wonder why...


This is what happens when NVIDIA has a board meeting to discuss the issue of midrange lastgen cards being able to run basically every game. How are we going to sell new cards? Oh I know, let's create a piece of steaming ♥♥♥♥ "remix" of a game that people love that runs so badly that it will REQUIRE our new cards! Genius! And let's make sure to nerf performance on AMD cards as well.

Beautiful map with canyons and mountaints to fly through, large cities, large open fields and a lot of airbases to land at. It looks much better than in the screenshots, these screenshots are from 2017!

Most importantly to me - it performs very well (as "well" as DCS can perform) while looking very different from the stock Caucasus map. If you want to play multiplayer - you'll be better off getting more popular multiplayer maps, but if you don't care about MP - it's a must have, especially, if you want to fly close to the ground in your jets!

I have played through the game on "Normal" difficulty, because I was afraid it would be like System Shock 2, where it constantly infinitely spawns enemies, and I would be way too stressed to enjoy the game.

If you have a similar fear - don't fret, because it turns out this game is not time-pressured (with the obvious exception being some missions/story stuff, where there's an explicit timer on the screen). You can explore everything at your own pace, you can save or kill any human you find in the game, and the story that follows reflects your actions! In fact I deeply regretted playing on "Normal", because as I approached the middle of the game the challenge was basically gone, as I became a superhuman being capable of wiping the floor with the toughest enemies in the game. So. I definitely recommend playing a difficulty higher than you think you want to, because the game becomes much easier later if you don't.

The story was perfect, but I was especially pleasantly surprised by how story-rich and atmospheric the side missions were! I do have a gripe with how sometimes there's too much handholding when it comes to things like safe codes and side missions, with popups saying that you learned a password appearing before you even had a chance to read the email for yourself and discover the password within.

My two biggest pieces of criticism of this game would be around popups and tutorials being annoying and unnecessary at times, and with how NPCs often glitch their dialogue and start talking over each other, or their dialogue being cancelled before you had a chance to listen.

This mod perfectly captured the feel of Episode 2 and everything I loved about it! It looks amazing, has all the gameplay elements of the original, has custom animations and acting, and in general is extremely well made!

It's also a pretty interesting mod gameplay-wise, with a bit of an unusual weapon progression and AI noding.

Unfortunately, it's pretty short and seemingly abandoned, so it looks like it won't be continued.

Still, highly recommend if you want a breath of Episode 2, this is definitely it!

Yet another piece of shovelware garbage that flooded steam recently

If you played Cryptark, this game shows quite a bit of similarities. Planning your route around ships, deciding what to hit and what to leave, deciding which ship to dock with, etc. Apart from the obvious first person perspective, here are some differences that make this game a bit more enjoyable:

- Stealth is an option, with several items that shine if you go quiet
- Permanent progression, every successful ship raid brings you permanent resources that you use to build upgrades
- You have a lot more choice of which ships you want to raid, you are never forced to go on a specific ship

With interesting enemy and weapon design, simple, humourous and entertaining "story", good sound design and FANTASTIC comic-style visuals this game is certainly worth getting.

That said, this game does have a few (somewhat minor) issues:
- The ships are generated from preset rooms, and, unfortunately, there are very few variations of each room type, so you will very soon start seeing the same rooms. Personally, this doesn't detract from the enjoyability and each ship layout is still different, but more different room layouts would be nice
- The game has a very weird and annoying mechanic where if you run out of ammo in your clip, the game FORCES you to reload the weapon before you can switch. It's not nearly enough to ruin the experience, but can be quite annoying
- The enemies in the game are great, but there isn't a lot of them unfortunately. Later you encounter upgraded types of the enemies you saw before, but, with the exception of one, they are just the exact same enemy with more health. Even a tiny change (like the upgraded tourists leaving radiation) for upgraded enemy types besides just increased health would make them much more interesting


If you decide to try this game, I highly recommend starting on "hard" right away. The game punishes you for dying very lightly, and you can always bring the difficulty down if you feel like it.

I'm sure a lot of people have already said everything there is to say about performance issues, bugs, terrible design choices, etc. So instead I am going to focus on something that is rather controversial, that I have convinced myself is wrong, but only reinforced after my experience with this DLC:

They should never have worked on this expansion. Nothing about this feels like Elite:Dangerous.

Many times while stumbling my way through this obvious beta release I have thought: "Wait a minute, what game am I playing? Is this really Elite?". However, nothing has evoked this feeling more than trying out a combat zone:

1) This is the only place in E:D where death has ZERO PENALTY. You somehow magically respawn battlefield-style. This goes against everything that makes Elite "Dangerous".
2) This is the only place in E:D that has an EXPLICIT LOADING SCREEN when you leave. Goodbye seamless planet-to-space transition I guess.
3) This is the only place in E:D where ships have NO AI. They are simply scripted to fly in, drop troops off, fly off. There is zero interaction you can have with them, they are just part of the spawn animation, not real ships.
4) This is the only place in E:D that you cannot enter or leave on your own. You HAVE to order a stupid dropship, otherwise the combat zone WILL NOT WORK IN THE SAME WAY. How braindead do you have to be to make NOT using a ship a requirement in a game ABOUT SPACESHIPS?

Where are the combat ships in these zones? Where are the SRVs? Am I supposed to forget LITERALLY EVERYTHING E:D has been about up to this point? If so, I might as well just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ play Call of Duty or something.

Not to mention, the combat is HORRIBLE. Take Planetside 2, with its slightly janky gunplay and shields, remove EVERYTHING that makes Planetside 2 fun (no vehicles, no massive map, no PvP, no squads, no classes, no nothing), multiply the jank by 2 and then add some more, and you get combat in Odyssey. Oh, and keep the grind too, but instead of "Grind or Pay to Progress" in a FREE TO PLAY game, this is "Pay for the game, Pay for the expansion, AND GRIND"

Why was this abomination made? To compete with Star Citizen? Why? The reason why this game was good was because instead of trying to be a game about everything and not ever getting finished, this was a game about just spaceships that was done. Now that this game is almost as broken as Star Citizen, might as well play that instead.

This is a joke. I think I might be finally done with E:D.

TLDR at the end.

It really hurts to say this, but I am incredibly disappointed with this game. Not only is it not a worthy sequel, it is much worse than the original. Despite being a carefully crafted game with a lot of work put in it, there are several absolutely fatal flaws that take away everything I loved about the original.

By far the biggest issue with this game is that, despite being called "Subnautica", more than half the places you need to explore are on land. I really can't understand how it wasn't immediately obvious to the developers that this is a bad, terrible idea that destroys everything that the original game was about. Instead of descending 2200+ meters deep into underwater caverns, you climb on an iceberg and just... walk. There are a few "deep" caves, but they don't even go HALF as deep as the original game, and, for the most part, there's barely anything interesting in there. In the original game you had to craft depth upgrades to go deeper to learn more about the story, with the game culminating at the deepest point. Here it's easily possible to beat the game without making a single depth upgrade. Oh, and not only is half the map taken up by land, the map is also SMALLER than in the original Subnautica!

In the original game, everytime you found a piece of Architect tech, you were given more and more lore, more insight into what the precursor race was working on and what had happened. Here, it's replaced with a generic, bland description of what the device you scanned does (which bears absolutely zero connection to the story whatsoever) and a boring "every X things you scan you get a blueprint" system.

Another interesting phenomenon I have observed is that this game apparently thinks that resources are extremely rare and valuable. Too often I see an interesting looking pathway, sometimes requiring special equipment like the robo-pengling, the cutting laser or the jump module for the snowfox , only for it to lead to... a stash of gold/diamond/magnetite/silver and sometimes even just QARTZ OR TITANIUM. Apparently the map designers didn't know that resources in this game RESPAWN. I am supposed to feel happy that I found gold, but I don't - why should I, if at any time I can click a button in the scanner room and it will show me dozens of gold ore spots near my base, which I will never run out of BECAUSE THEY RESPAWN. Instead I feel disappointment, I expected blueprints, new sights, or at least some interesting lore, but all I get are some rocks that I could have gotten back at my base. Most of the time I can't even take these rocks with me, because, of course, MOST OF THE EXPLORATION IS ON LAND, which means that the seatruck is not with me.

The original game had one of my favourite vehicles in any videogame - the cyclops. You had to explore the world to find pieces of this massive submarine, and unlike all the other blueprints in the game, this one consisted of several parts scattered around the world. When you finally got it you felt truly powerful, now having a portable fortress with you, with interesting and unique mechanics, such as loading the decoys manually, turning the engine on and off, selecting engine speed, a horn, onboard fires you had to extinguish, the ability to build.... I was so excited to find out what the developers have in store in the next game.

Well, turns out they simply don't. There is nothing even remotely as awesome as the cyclops in this game. I guess they thought that TECHNICALLY the seatruck could do most of the "important" things the cyclops was for. Yet NONE of the features I listed above are present. And to me, THOSE were the "important" features, how it FELT to have a personal gigantic submarine. All plays into the idea that this game isn't about exploring the deep sea unlike the original...

There are several improvements and quality-of-life additions over the previous game, but those are the things that take a developer a few weeks at most to finish, they could have added them to the original game instead.

Unlike many other reviewers, I actually enjoyed the voiced protagonist, and even the presence of an alive NPC, to some extent

At the time of the review, I have played 45 hours of the game. The first 10 I was excited. Then the excitement gradually turned into disappointment as I kept trying to convince myself that there must be more to it, I must be missing an obvious entrance to an enormous underwater cave system... After spending 3 hours in a row moving around a worm-infested iceberg on a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ hoverscooter in almost zero visibility trying to find where the frozen leviathan the game keeps talking about is I got so frustrated that I closed the game and wrote this review. I will return to this game in a few days when it's released, and I'm still planning on beating, but it's highly unlikely that my opinion will change.

TLDR:
Most of the story is ON LAND (wtf?)
SMALLER map
MUCH SHALLOWER caves
MUCH MORE BORING pda entries
NO CYCLOPS REPLACEMENT
MOST interesting-looking places turn out to be just stashes of BASIC RESOURCES you could get anywhere else

You will get the subnautica feel, but don't expect it to last more than a few hours before turning into disappointment.