Recent reviews by Unforseen Lemonquences™

I have waited 14 years for this and had played Soc to CoP for pretty much the bulk of the early to late 2010s. Here's another decade or so to go!

While the game in is current state is prone to bugs/glitch, it is visually beautiful and soundscape is great. Combat feels tight as it should for a STALKER game and the monsters are far deadlier now than they were on the first triology (even compared to modded overhauls like Road to the North, COMPLETE, Anomaly and Redux).

Can't wait to see what the modders will cook in the coming years (hopefully some unique overhauls similar to Priboi Story, Lost Alpha or Oblivion Lost).

I cannot believe I'm about to do this, but I am giving Space Marine 2 a hesitant Upvote. There are some two deal breakers that I seriously hope Saber Interactive fixes. But before we get into it, there is a fat Horus in the room that i need to address first:

No, its not woke . Shut up about it and go cry to Arch about it. It's not an issue the game critically needs addressing at all.

Yes the spooky SBI did consulted on this game, but honestly I don't really see any detrimental influence so far. As for Ultramarines not looking 100% like a wet dream of an Austrian painter, lets be real. Anyone worth their Warhammer 30/40k salt knows that there is no canonical establishment of Ultramarines all needing to look like they came from the Austrian alps singing Sound of Music. Yes, all space marine take on features after their gene father (Rowboat Girlyman in this case), but Roboute's gene has far as lore goes is pretty stable and has few if any mutations.

All Salamanders look like Pele from SMT because Vulkan gene had a flaw that made everyone black with red eyes. Same goes for some others like Night Lords (scary emo goths) and probably Luna Wolves (bald and angry). Some, like the Raven Guard (sad emo goths) are as a result of their planet's environment (Kiavahr being terrible and Deliverance being a literal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a moon) or like White Scars (Mongolians) who not only Oct 7 his entire planet in about 20 solar years, but also recruited people exclusively from the tribe who took him in.

Some Legions (and by extension first founding chapters) like Iron Hands, Luna Wolves, Dark Angels, Emperor's Children, Imperial Fist and famously Ultramarines recruit anyone from anywhere so long as they are worthy. And because their genes are relatively stable, they do not completely inherent ALL of their Primarch's physical traits. Though you'd obviously find more blonde in say, Emperor's Children and Dark Angels than you would any hair on Luna Wolves.

Not exactly, but you ARE racist AND stupid especially if you didn't know the lore, because from your perspective, why would there be an ethnic limitation in that regard? Get out of here with that you donkey.

Now with that out of the way, some thoughts about the game:

1. If you're a 40k buff, the design, scenery, voice-acting, atmosphere, weapons etc are all exactly what you'd expect Warhammer 40k to feel like.

2. Audio design for the most of it is impeccable.

3. Combat is fluid and mostly satisfying with one caveat (will elaborate in negative).

4. Beautiful graphics, even on my 3070ti at high mids it still looks fantastic.

5. Runs very great on my 3070ti, Ryzen 9 and 32gb DDR5. Though would recommend installing it on a nvme ssd to increase loading speed.

6. Only played about 1.5 hours of the campaign, but the lore so far is fantastic. How they speak, the mannerism of the Astartes, the imperials, the mechanicus etc are all as they should be.

1. ESG. This is the biggest middle finger and a complete deal breaker. Nevermind being forced a stealth installation of ESG onto your system, it ironically PREVENTS you from booting the game unless you go into task manager and DELETE ESG PROCESS. How stupid is that?

2. Second deal breaker for many, the FOV is horrible and there is no way to extend it. The space marine model eats 1/3 of your entire view, which severely reduces your peripheral awareness unless you are constantly looking around.

3. The weapons feel less impactful and heavy than they did in SM1. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if some of the weapon didn't feel so floaty/light (but then again, they are being welded by not just space marines, but Primaris so maybe it gets a pass).

4. Some weapons don't sound as punchy as it should be. The heavy bolter for example was defeaning in SM1 and especially in the Dawn of War games. Other weapons like the bolter pistol needs sound louder and more punchy (you are literally shooting a miniature rocket after all, and a normal unaugmented human can barely fire it without breaking their shoulders. Unless you're a Catachan, then you can fire anything).

5. Titus's first voice actor, Mark Strong, was way better than Clive Standen. Don't get me wrong, Clive does try hard and delivers as best he could, but there's something about Mark's voice that really suits a gruff veteran space marine.


Despite my grievance with some of the more creative decisions like the changing of Titus's voice actor and weapons sound/feel not as heavy as the first game, I understand why they did it. SM2 gameplay and combat is much more fast paced and fluid than SM1 ever was. It might be a solid reason, from a technical perspective to not have everything sounding like Ferrus Manus clapping Fulgrim's cheeks on Istvaan V or having the screen shake like it's Armageddon on a Tuesday. I can live with those decisions, not a deal breaker.

What is and WILL be a serious issue, is the presence of ESG (like seriously Tim Sweeney, you hate Steam so get lost already) and the poor FOV (which can be easily fixed with an update to allow adjustments).

UPDATE!: They actually did it. They made the game fun, reversed all the terrible nerfs and actually let people have fun. Completely recommended now!

Leaving my old review here because people need to remember the terrible state the game used to be in:

While the gameplay loop is genuinely fun, the stability of this game is worse than COD Advanced Warfare at launch. I'm outlining what I believe to be the core main issues of the game many people are experiencing:

Significant connectivity issue that seems to come and go as it please. And it's the only game since atleast COD Black Ops 3, a game released in 2015, that forced me to do port forwarding (and even then it doesn't fully fix the connectivity issue).

CTD, loading loop, soft crashes etc. It happens atleast once per hour randomly. Unbelievable. There's no worse feeling than when playing Impossible or Helldive, Going through a 35+ minute run, after collecting tons of resources (especially super samples) and waiting for extraction, only for the game to ♥♥♥♥ itself and crash you to desktop and you get absolutely nothing. No exp, no medals, no samples, nothing.

I'm running 32gb DDR5, Ryzen 9 and 3070ti. I installed this on the main drive that's running a NVME Samsung 990 Pro 4TB, how is my pc struggling to run this at 1440p at low-med setting on just ultra quality render scale???? Not to mention the insane power draw on the cpu that absolutely dwarfs every other game I've ever played. The optimisation of this game is horrible, not as bad as Cyberpunk on launch, but it's not far behind in terms of terrible optimisation.

I've so many screenshots of gamebreaking bugs in just 31 hours of playing that it cease to become funny. For example, spawning behind the revolving door in the ship is funny the first time around, but after the 13th time requiring you to either restart the game or leave the lobby you're in, stops being funny real quick. Getting stuck on random environments is not too bad when you can just die. What's bad is your sample container being stuck behind an unreachable spot (e.g. under the map) and now you've wasted 30 minutes of the run. But by far the worse bug is not being able to call for reinforcement for either anyone or just a specific person in the team. I have encountered this bug 16 times so far so I presume its a fairly common issue, how is this not fixed yet? Lost a few matches because the game simply refused to reinforce dead players (not to mention getting kicked because people thought I was refusing to spawn them). They need to fix these bugs because they went from funny/cute to frustrating/rage inducing real quick.

Wonky hitboxes, Non-existent hitboxes, arbitrary hitboxes etc etc. Currently one of the best way to kill heavies such as chargers and hulk, is to use Quasar, Anti tank or Recoilless to it's face. But the hitboxes sometimes simply does not register where it lands and it takes damage elsewhere or worse, no damage at all. Same goes for other smaller units when you're just trying to thin them down or shoot incapacitate it but your shots clearly doesn't register all of the hits the game indicates. While sometimes it could be connectivity issues with the host (therefore see first complaint back up), even when I am the host playing solo its still a problem, so this tells me it's the game's registration of hitboxes that's not working properly.

There are other criticisms of the game, such as how useless some strategems are (e.g.naplam strikes), how prone doesn't always work as intended (prones when you need to leap and leap when you just need to prone) or how some weapons are completely useless (looking at you Sickle), scopes being almost useless, but I don't wanna get into that because it's something that will change over time and those are just down personal preferences. But they have to fix the atrocious technical problems I've pointed out. I don't know how much more frustration I can take before I quit playing this game entirely, which is a shame because when it works, it's genuinely very fun.

With all of that said, I'll admittedly continue to play this game, but I don't see myself playing for long as long as they do not fix the core issues plauging this game. And I'll leave this negative review up until they address all of the most glaring technical issues.

In the mean time, I will be playing Deep Rock Galactic where the game actually works just fine, the players are chill and nice, the gameplay loop is just as entertaining if not better in places and my PC doesn't choke just trying to run it despite being beefy by 2024's standard.

Played this game since launch, only to realised a little while ago that I stopped liking the game many years ago and was only playing due to habits and sunk cost fallacy (due to money/time invested).

Thanks Ubisoft for killing their servers past 5+ days. Uou've helped me do what I couldn't for years, stop playing this trash.

The fact that RDR2 won Steam's Labour of Love 2024 over Deep Rock Galactic is proof that not everyone should be allowed to vote.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Today they patched Taskpals and two things to note:

1. They MADE IT WORSE. If your broadcast is turned on and you start using taskpals, IT BLACKS OUT your entire monitor until you turn taskpals off or restart your pc.

2. They claimed there's an option to turn off taskpals running on Steam 24/7 while its turned on (like Wallpaper Engine), but IT STILL SHOWS THAT IT'S RUNNING ON STEAM 24/7.

At this point I'm inclined to believe the developer is disingenuous because it's a problem they are refusing to fix since they want people to see other people using Taskpals on Steam, as a cheap lousy way to get clicks to their app. The ironic thing is that this "Feature" is what putting off so many people, including myself, from using taskpals and from recommending it to other people even if the base product is free.

DO NOT USE TASKPALS UNTIL THEY FIX BOTH ISSUES.

--------------------------


I can no longer recommend this in good faith as it's clear the developer isn't interested in fixing this given that they just release a New Year dlc.


The problem with Taskpals is that it doesn't run like Wallpaper Engine, ergo it will hog up your Steam's in-game status and your game time. Therefore, You will always appear as "in-game: Taskpals" and your "in-game" time will be just be Taskpals as long as it's running. If you should this 24/7 as intended, your game time statistics will be extremely dominated by Taskpals (e.g. Steam profile annual summary, past 2 weeks total game time, sort game by most played etc etc) and people can't request to watch your game as the request will only direct to Taskpals. From experience so far, Taskpals tend to crash my in-game overlay. The games I am will not crash, but I won't be able to use the overlay until after I restart the game (very very annoying and an actual dealbreaker). It's also weird that Taskpals is classified as a "game" rather than "software" like Wallpaper Engine.

This absolutely needs to be fixed urgently, people have been asking for years now. For now, I will not be buying any DLC until this is changed.

Completely broken. There are too many hard crash bugs from out of memory error 12 to IDXGISwapChain. I gave up trying to fix it. This cannot be played on anything beyond a Window 8 and 20 series GPU. It will just fail no matter what you do.

Still needs another couple centuries of polishing.

Before going into further details, I just would like to put it out there that I have a strong bias in favor of this title because I'm a huge Warhammer 40k buff. I can tell you everything about something as mainstream as the Horus Heresy timeline to something obscure like the politics that lead to O'Shovah self imposed exile and why did the resurrected rubric marines accompanying Ahriman attacked him and his daemonic allies rather than the Ynnari entourage he was chasing.
With that said, I'll try to be as impartial as I can.

- Weapon sounds and feels like they do (mostly except for 3 weapons). Their shots carry alot of impact and things die when you expect them to.
- Auditory-visual feedback when you hit/kill something is great.
- Great focus on the "scums" of Imperial society, rather than the usual Imperial Navy, Space Marines, Eldar, Tau etc etc stuff. Some neat callouts to the lore aswell like seeing wanted posters of Cypher and npc talking about entities that are obiviously imperial assassins.
- Great variety of weapons avaliable.
- Character and mastiff progression is fun, nothing fancy like Mass Effect, but they're similar to Rage 2.
- Movement is superb (except for sliding). It combines the wallrunning mechanics of Titanfall 2 and Doom 2016's run and gun fast paced aggressive combat style. You can wallrun, airdash, double jump, grab ledges and slide pretty much from the start.
- Finally an actually decent W40K FPS title.
- The lore basis here is mostly intune with what to expect as a W40K fan. Some inconsistencies yes, but overall its a very good attempt and interpretation of the lore.

- Soundtrack is servicable. Nothing special but they're clearly trying to emulate Mick Gordon's heavy metal/industrial Doom soundtrack
- The weapon sounds on the stubber, autogun and especially heavy bolter could use more work. The stubber sounds weak but its incredibly strong as oppose to the autogun where its overly loud but its super weak. The heavy bolter does not sound heavy or impactful enough (play Dawn of War 2 and W40k Space Marines by Relic for comparison for a good heavy bolter sound).
- There are some very painful lore inaccuracies that's hard for a w40k buff to ignore. For example, Necromunda is far from the largest Hive World with Minea, Ichar IV and Armageddon having far more population than Necromunda's own 100 billion est. Necromunda itself is not a Hive City, it is the name of the planet and yet the characters constantly refer to Necromunda as the hive city they're in (they're likely in Hive Trazior based on what I've seen). I think most egregiously of all, you can accept contracts from Genestealer Cult, which is hilarious because no sane Necromunda citizen, not even chaos warped ones, would ever willingly assist a Genestealer Cult even if they get paid to do so. And it's funny that the Genestealer Cult literally calls themselves Genestealer Cult, rather than trying to be subtle about it. But why you ask? Well, Necromunda has had a Genestealer infestation lore wise, and said infestation led to the devestation of the planet's second most prosperous Hive City, Hive Secundus. The infestation was so massive that it got not only the Adeptus Arbites, PDF and Imperial Guard to get involved, but also the Space Marines (Imperial Fist as it is one of their recruiting world), all 3 main Inquisition Ordo and Sisters of Battle. The entire planet faced such scrutiny that virtually everyone on Necromunda know what a Tyranid is.
- Mission Hub area is pretty much similar to something like Anthem or Destiny 2. You can buy/sell, upgrade, talk to npc and select missions from this staging area and then automatically load into mission areas. Nothing special, but could've been more fleshed out given how they spoke so much about it.
- Voice acting quality is very hit or miss. Sometimes they deliver lines with great performance. Other times, the very same voice actor/actress, can deliver really shallow ones (almost like they are literally just reading off the script).
- Melee takedowns are janky. They're functionally identical to Doom's where you gain hp for doing a melee takedown. However the animation often appear awkward (sometimes bugs out completely and you just stab the air) and the animation takes anywhere between 1-6 seconds to complete as like Doom, they have variety depending on the direction and angle you execute the takedown. It's only 50/50 because like Doom, you're invulnerable while the animation is carrying out.
- Visually, the game looks and runs great. There's a generous number of stuff you can adjust, although I recommend not downscaling the game below the default 100% as the downscaling here is incredibly aggressive. There are however parts where they could've used more texture work and there's a very subtle blur effect that I cannot turn off. It's like having DLSS 1.0 on or performance DLSS 2.0 on Metro Exodus Enchanced. A little annoying but your eyes get used to it
- The Mastiff is really weak even when fully upgraded. Only useful to highlight enemies as when you summon the mastiff, all enemies in the area are highlighted in red.

- Sliding is pure crap. Don't bother. It doesn't just slow you down over time like normal games with sliding mechanics would, it stops your running speed dead in its track and slows you to a crawl for the whole duration and it's hard to shoot yet alone aim horizontally while sliding.
- Side mission map variety is disappointing. They're just main missions areas but sections of it. Would've been nice to see more map variety or these side missions having their own maps.
- While there is a large variety of weapons to obtain, it's a huge disappointment. Why? Because not only does each weapon type not have different stats like they do in other looter games like say Dying Light, Dead Island, Van Helsing or Borderlands, the rarity tier is also meaningless. Gold weapons are exactly the same as common ones. Their stats is based entirely on their attachments, which you can easily buy from the vendor. And on the note of attachments, there's like only a handful of different attachment in each category which mostly same-ish stat changes. For example, there are 9 muzzle attachment for the stubber. 3 of which boost acc, another 3 boost stability and another 3 are silencers. Between each 3, they're exactly the same save for aesthetics differences. There are armor, trinket and weapon damage modifiers aswell, and for those rarity does work as intended because orange ones tend to have better stats than lower rarity tier. However for armor, you can only swap out the underbody armor. No helmets, bracers, leggings etc etc. Just an underbody armor and you can't even add trinkets or addons like in many other modern looter games.
- while audiotary-visual feedback for when you are shooting someone is great, audiotary-visual feedback for when you yourself get hit is horrible. I died so many times because I either didn't realise my HP was that low or because I didn't know someone was spraying me from behind.
- There are some CTD bugs that triggers the longer you play. I have no idea what caused them. I think the FOV slider is bugged aswell because I don't see a difference between min and max settings.

Despite all its lack of polish and flaws, I still recommend this game to anyone who's a huge W40K fan because it's still a great experience overall. For anyone who isn't specifically a W40K fan however, I recommend you get it when its on atleast 60% sale, because without that W40K paintjob, the game itself is nothing special and I don't think non-W40K fans would appreciate paying this at full price. I hope the devs add more content, more meaning to weapon tiers, armor customization and map variety because I do honestly think they have something special here. They just need to polish the game up a little and add more content over the coming months/years.

Well worth the money and it's amazingly priced. It is, genuinely everything it was (minus the bugs so far) about a decade ago. Solid as ever with that sweet old school progression unlocks for everything (which is a shame that I had to praise the game for not locking cosmetics behind MTX but rather organic player progression).

The graphics will be a mixed bag for people out there (they didn't did a complete graphical overhaul like the COD MW Remastered treatment), but IMO they do hold up pretty well given the age.

Just Halo: Reach in and I'm already loving it. Kudos on Microsoft on not only bringing this to Steam, but also keeping this remastered release true to what it's supposed to be; a remastering and re-releasing of a cult classic onto a new platform with some minor quality-of-life improvements that does not needlessly "modernise" the gameplay for current industry standards.

Honestly, devs out there looking to remaster some of their older titles (looking at you Activision) need to take some notes on how Microsoft does it.

This is literally every Halo fan wildest dreams coming true, and I have waited over 13 years for this very moment. They told me I was crazy to imagine Halo ever coming to PC, and that after 2 it was just another console exclusive for eternity and although it took over 13 years, I'm glad it came to be eventually.

Definitely recommended to any FPS and/or Halo fans out there. Even at full price for the collection.


Just some tips: Turn off vysnc and mouse acceleration. You'll thank me later.

Edit: There IS one very minor complaint: On your first boot into the game, you have to sign into an Xbox Live account which doesn't cost you anything, and it's free to sign up for. But it's just a minor one time hassle and I generally do not like needing to deal with multiple logins. But as I have mentioned, it is a very very very minor complaint.