Recent reviews by FleetCommand

Tomb Raider is a great game. We know that. We wanted this. I wanted this.

Game looks fine. Not super fantastic, but actually looks decent. It doesn't have any resolution options, which is not a plus, but still, it looks way better than the original, and I guess you don't really need to change resolutions here either...

But the controls.. who was thinking that they can pass the playtest with these?

For starters, you can switch between the classic (tank) controls (arrow keys to move, alt to jump, things like this), or to the modern controls (wasd to move, space to jump, and use the mouse to move your camera, etc.). So far looks good (even though I was not sure why the classic is the default). Since you cannot use your mouse to look around in classic mode, the "modern" controls seemed to be the logical choice.. Oh my...

What's so wrong with the modern (mouse) controls?

So I booted up "Lara's house", which acts like a tutorial level, showing you how to jump and move around. The first thing you notice is that there is some mouse acceleration. Not terrible, but there's some. Kind of okay-ish, I think I can live with it. You move forward to the "music room", where the character tells you that if you press the direction keys, she will jump in that direction.. Then comes the first disappointment: you cannot jump backwards. And the direction of the jump versus the camera has some weird relation anyway, so you are not always jumping the direction you're hoping to.

Then you leave the room. There is a corridor.. and the camera just stuck in the doorway, and changes direction if you try to jump, suddently you are looking the opposite way.. it's awful. But it gets worse.. you go down to the main hall. Lara tells you that you can grab the ledges of the boxes. Which you can, indeed. But you cannot let them go in modern controls (unless you do a "roll", or climb up, your character will just stick to it and never let it go).

And then you go further.. there comes the "how to jump while grabbing things" part. Lara tells you that "look, this is too much of a distance for me, I cannot jump this far.. so you need to stand here, jump forward, and then press your button to grab the ledge". And you do not understand why you cannot do that... drumroll... if you use the modern mouse controls, your character jumps half meter longer than with the normal controls. So if you use the normal controls, you need to jump and grab the ledge because you cannot cross it. But if you switch to modern controls, she just jumps it over with no issues...

This was the point where I stopped for the moment and came here...

So you have a mouse acceleration
Cannot jump backwards
Does not even jump the same distance in modern and classic controls
Camera is awful when you are running next to a wall
...

Uhm.. not sure what to say.

If I consider nothing but the gameplay, then Tempest 4000 is a fantastic game with solid gameplay, great music. It would be a pure joy.

Would be.

But seriously... I cannot even run the game on native resolution on a 1440p display. That should not be that fancy. Also, if you want to play this on a keyboard and mouse, then you should either give it up, or go to the keybindings, before you even start the game, pick pen and paper and make note of the keys. Otherwise you won't even be able to quit the game. Or start it. Or do anything. Because it absolutely does not tell you about any of the keyprompts once you start it, and all the keys are WEIRD AS FCK. None of the normal keys work (Space, Enter, Esc, .. ), instead you have some stupid numpad keys, J, M, K or whatever random letters you would never think of.

I could be more patient maybe with this, but this is unacceptable. If it would be able to run at least on the native resolution, then I might give it a chance even with these weird keys. But no.

As a new player, this game is a confusing mess. You have no idea what's happening, what you're supposed to do, or anything.

It looks great, running around, shooting feels great. But oh my.. unless you play this game since launch, you have no idea what's happening.

Do I recommend this game? Yes and No.


The most useful tip I found on Reddit was that I can turn off quest dialog autoplay by unticking the "Auto-play" checkbox in the top left corner. It is really hard to notice, and it makes the experience a lot better.


The English voice acting in the game is horrendous. The subtitles are not matching the dialogs, and they are not even timed properly. The lines are often cut into each other, and the character's mouths are barely moving. This seems to be only due to the awful localization, because - for whatever reason - some dialogs still play in Chinese. For these dialogs, you can observe that the lip movement is actually really great and it is matching with what you hear. The devs made the effort, and it does look convincing, but it lost in translation.


The game follows the "tell not show" way in storytelling in quest dialogs, similarly to what you would do in a tabletop RPG. For example you are talking to someone and he walks away. The way it's presented is that you have the dialog, and then, in paretheses, it just says "he walks away". He is not actually walking away, the game just tells you that he's walking away, touching your forearm, etc. Seems to be a strange choice because they could have animated these, but once you accept this, it is actually fine. Also, it allows to show your inner thoughts with relative ease.

The dialogs are often pretty fun. I also like that when some NPC is saying strange things which I do not understand, my character's response is just three dots and standing there like "wtf". I can relate.

The story seems to be alright, and you can pick up a LOT of notes to read if you are into it. A few things makes hard to understand what is going on for non-Chinese players. First of all, the translation is just not good. Also, the names are not localized, and if you are not used to it, the Chinese names sound really similar, and it's really hard to track who is who, and by the time you realize this, you already lost the plot.

There are really nice touches though. For example when you try to cure a child's nightmares and it turns out to be a dungeon. Similarly, you learn that there is a clan whose members are mutated due to an influence of some demonic forces, and then there's a dungeon where you go back in time, cosplay as a clan member, and learn how it happened.


You can take companions with you to your dungeons. At first I was really happy to see this.

However, they are not leveling with you. Meaning, that when I got them, I was around level 20, with similar item level, and around 2000 HP. The companions were in ilevel 160, and they had fifteen times more HP than me, so when running low level dungeons with them, they were killing everything without me having to really do anything.


You are not leveling the traditional MMO 1-60 way. Here the levels are grouped to three different "sets". You start as a "Beginner", which is your first 36 level. You level up from 1 to 36 the traditional way by doing quests, fighting, etc. Then you get a class quest at your central hub which will allow you to trancend from "Beginner" to "Student". At that point you stop getting levels by gathering XP. You can level up further by completing the PvE "tutorial" quests the game offers you. Which are actually not tutorial quests, they are actual story quests, just for whatever reason they are called "tutorial". So by completing these quests, you rank up from Student 1 to 9, and then - by doing the class quest offered to you - you reach Sage 1, which is the current max level in the game.


Obviously the game has flaws. Most of them are due to the localization. But it offers quite a lot. It looks great, the music is really good, the art is really good. You can gather things, craft things, you can get your own house for relatively cheap and then you can customize it the way you want. The movement feels fantastic. You can doublejump, triplejump like gravity was nothing. I really enjoyed just running and jumping around. For some reason being able to dash through the air in high speed is just really satisfying.

I also encountered positive player interactions. I was randomly invited to a team where the players were just putting down a public bath in the middle of the square, and we went in and was splashing water on each other. Or I joined a raid, but it turned out that we cannot gather enough people to actually run the raid, so we decided to run a dungeon. It was fun.

However, a big red warning sign was when I was kicked out of a dungeon for watching a cutscene. I was running a dungeon a few times, but always skipped the cutscene. However, the other day I picked up the quest which actually guided me to that specific dungeon. As I was on the quest, I decided that now it is the time to actually watch that cutscene because it was part of the storyline. But by the time it finished, I was kicked out. This was a pretty negative encounter, because I just wanted to actually experience what the game had to offer, and I was kicked out of the group for it.

What is even worse is that I brought this up on the game's official Discord and most of the people was that "you should watch the cutscenes separately, you were wasting their time". No, I should not. That's why they are there, at that specific part of the dungeon, and if they do not have 80 seconds to wait (I checked it on Youtube afterwards, it was actually 80 sec), then they do not deserve new players to flow into the game. They spend 30-45 minutes to run a dungeon (from queue to finish), and they do not have 80 seconds to wait for a teammate.

It was not just me, because the next day we got to the same dungeon in the roulette and I was paying attention what's happening, and we had another player who was not me and he was watching the cutscene, and they votekicked him out. When I pointed out on the chat that it's an 80 seconds cutscene and we should have waited they told me "we waited more". No, you didn't.

Partly it is the game's fault because it's not indicating if you are just afking or watching a cutscene. But at the same time it's not, because everyone knows that at that specific part there is a cutscene, yet they kick out everyone without a second thought. For a lot of players, this is a quit moment, because they get a queue punishment and they have to redo the whole thing again, when it's not even their fault. And the elitists are just like "we don't want to wait two minutes because our time is precious", but they are happy to stand 10-25 minutes in queue. And at this rate they scare away anyone who wants to give this - otherwise good - game a try and they will wake up one day and there will be noone to queue with.


Fights are enjoyable, movement is great, story is good. The art is gorgeous and the music is really great. So the game is enjoyable despite its flaws (like English voice acting).

The optimization is not the best, so the framerate can drop quite a lot in dungeons when everyone's casting. However, there's an option to turn other players' spell effect lower, which helps (also, there is an option to turn off screen shaking on spell hit, which also improves the experience a lot).

Because the EU playerbase is not really high, it might prove difficult to find premade groups for raids, or for dungeons from older content.

My biggest issue was the way how players are kicked out during cutscenes from dungeons. I am quite positive that the majority of the playerbase are nice people. But when the concurrent players fluctuate between 200 and 600 players worldwide, then it is perfectly enough to have a few dozen of idiots to ruin it for the others.

If you are not concerned about this, or you can find an alliance (guild) with some active players, then the game really worth a try.

If you have not purchased this game yet, then don't. Another Epic Store Exclusive ♥♥♥♥♥.

Step 1: You want to play this game
Step 2: You start the game from Steam. Launcher appears.
Step 3: Game patches for 30 minutes
Step 4: By the time it finishes patching, you are bored and close the launcher
Step 5: A few weeks later you want to play the game again.
Step 6: Go to Step 2.

It is THAT bad, or worse. But even if you start the game, it will not become any better. The only reason I still launch it from time to time is to see if there's any actual thing to do when you reach max level. But probably I will never find it out, as most of my "playtime" is just playing the launcher, leaving my computer running while it's patching and then forgetting that I wanted to do something here.

Have you ever wanted to be a delivery driver in a futuristic neon-filled city where the rain is always pouring? Not really? Me neither. But this is what you are going to do in this game, and the fact is that I really liked it.


You play as Rania, a delivery driver for the private carrier company called Cloudpunk in a dystopian city. There are no fighting scenes, quick time events, shooting in this game. For most of the time, you are driving around with some stuff to carry from one point to another and make deliveries. And while doing so, you will be involved with a nicely developing story. As the time went on, I realized that I do not really want to stop playing because I was really interested what's going to happen next.


Despite the guided main story line, the city itself is an open world, you can drive wherever you would like to in your HOVA, which is your own flying car from The Fifth Element. You can only get off at designated parking areas, and then you can walk around, pick up stuff and interact with strange and interesting creatures of this futuristic city. Apart from the main quests, you can do a lot of optional stuff as well, and they worth it.

They really worth it, because all the characters you meet with are interesting and they are fully voiced. Great voice acting for great dialogs.


The graphics is fantastic. If you look close enough, you will quite notice that everything is build of voxels (large 3D pixels), but all the lights, neon flashing things, advertisements, trains, ... they all form a true whole, a living city. The art is really consistent, nothing feels off. I enjoyed just driving around and look around a lot.

The soundtrack and the voice acting is also top-notch, they match perfectly the city where everything is bad and the Sun never comes up (probably it will, at one point, but we are in a night shift, so...).

I had only two smaller issues with the game overall:
At first it was not really obvious what is the stuff I need and what is the stuff I can sell safely. Because of this I managed to sell some things which I needed later. It was not a big deal as a few minutes later I could loot what I wanted, but after that I have decided to keep a few of everything with me.
The other was that when you first get off your HOVA, you get some strange sidescroller-like view, but the game immediately tells you how to switch to third person camera. Once I have done that, I had no issues with the controls.


If you like a story-driven relaxing experience which is set in the future, this is your game. I can absolutely recommend this with a warm heart.

Buy it.

One of the best games I played. Not this year. Ever. Beautiful music, beautiful graphics, touching story.

Game includes Hungarian localization for the menu, but they forgot to ever test it, so the characters required to display the menu are simply missing. Oh and you cannot change the game language anywhere. Perfect first impression. Never gonna start this again.

Just ♥♥♥♥ you, Epic and your anti-consumer practices.