Recent reviews by JakeEly

The game that introduced me to the BattleTech universe. It has its flaws, as all games do... but it cant be understated how truly well this game was made.

The pacing at the beginning is fantastic for a new player with how it introduces you to mechanics and slowly opens up the game and gives you more freedom as you start to get a good grasp on how things work, but it gives you enough freedom to dip your toes into customisation early.

The game is challenging enough to keep you engaged throughout for a first playthrough i think, and offers enough difficulty options that you can replay it a good amount before you feel the need to dive into mods to enhance the difficulty, and theres so much customisation to also facilitate that customisation.

the sandbox elements are compelling enough to make career mode a different kind of fun compared to the somewhat more structured campaign (which also very much has good sandbox elements)

The worst part about this game is its DLC. Whilst all of the content within the DLC's are high quality, there's not nearly enough there to justify the price and really should've all been part of the base game, i'd say if you thoroughly enjoy the experience still pick them up on a sale as they do enhance the game experience a good amount, just not enough to justify paying for the game over again and then some. But thats a side effect of being under paradox i guess, and in that regard its distincly less scummy than most paradox published games.

The soundtrack is pheonomenal and whilst the story isnt stellar, its compelling enough to keep you focused on the objective and has a few truly fantastic missions which do a great job of emphasising the moral grey area of mercenary work, whilst the true main villain is largely just kind of an evil power hungry maniac, the other notable enemeis are all complex and empathetic... after i finished the game part of me felt guilty for my actions throughout the game, which is great.

voice acting isnt universal, but what is there is generally of a pretty high quality, but be prepared for some long un-voiced text walls, the writing is also mostly pretty good though and some of the events whilst lengthy are well worth a read, some are pretty cool others genuinely funny and some just give a nice glimpse into the setting, with them mostly also coming with some benefit or consequence.

from a 1st playthrough perspective, possibly one of the best games ive played in terms of just insanely consistent quality. there was basically no point in my first playthrough where i was getting bored, the game does a good job of giving you something new to play with as you're just starting to get comfortable with the last thing you got.


modding opens up the game into something entirely new and, if you're willing to accept a little bit of instability and performance concerns, something so far beyond what the vanilla game offers that you genuinely cant fathom it being free.

roguetech in particular is astonishing, if a little overwhelming to those who are newcomers to the franchise... its truly insane what modders have accomplished with this game and the fact that the community for the game is still pretty healthy 7 years later is undoubtedly in large part to their efforts.

TL;DR: Its not perfect, but its consistently great. The soundtrack is on a whole other level and has no right to be this disgustingly good.

Right now i cant recommend the game, despite the fact that ive been having a blast.

ultimately i think there are too many issues to endorse the game, it runs horrifically poorly, has many many bugs, the AI is rather janky and just generally the gameplay loop is unrefined.

HOWEVER, this game has shown incredible promise, so i will definitely recommend wishlisting the game and checking on it in the coming months / year.

These devs are clearly passionate, and from what ive seen they seem techinically competent enough to make their dream game a reality. None of the issues ive seen thus far are indicative of sloppy workmanship, it just feels like an unpolished unfinished title, once improvements start rolling out, im sure this game will hit just right.

the biggest gripe a lot of people have is the water system, i also dislike it... its a bad system, at its absolute best its a system you rarely have to interact with because getting water in active play is laughably easy, and at its absolute worst it needlessly gatekeeps people who have real world obligations that may take them away from their pc for weeks or months at a time.

But the devs have said they are planning to change the system in some way, how it will be changed is to be determined but im confident these guys know what they're doing.

Game was sold to private equity firm. Its dead. Do not disturb the corpse.

Its a shame that steam still sells this on the store quite honestly, a game full of promises that will never be fulfilled being sold at twice the price of its predecessor that has double the content...

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Great game. Learned a lot about irish history from the pureblooded irish american whose great grandfather migrated over.

truly the best irish bloke ive ever met. i knew he was irish before he even told me... thats how irish he was.

Rust... it used to be my favourite game, but for some reason face punch just couldn't leave well enough alone... i cant say definitively that rust is a bad game, but that's mainly because i have not managed to play more than a few hours in many years, because this is no longer the game that i fell in love with.

rust has evolved and changed over the years to something that hardly resembles what it started as... and that is one major reason that i stopped playing, but the other is the community... the community has become so incredibly toxic that the main foundation that made me fall in love with this game is completely gone, and that is, meeting new interesting people, forming bonds and alliances, helping each other out and of course having sporting rivalry...

now, any decent communication is rare, and even when you are having a friendly conversation there's still a 50 percent chance that they are simply trying to build trust in order to betray you... and where was once sporting rivalry is now decidedly un-sporting. Now rivalry's devolve into people hurling slurs and insults at one another, incessant door camping and other ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that serves to make conflict more tedious than fun.

the landscape of rust has changed so much over the years. personally its almost entirely for the worst, but i know there are many that disagree... for me i just find the game nowadays to be mind-numbing boring. ive played my fair share of bad games, even duumped dozens if not hundreds of hours into them just to see if there really is anything deeper. With rust in recent years however i cannot put more than an hour or two into the game before i succumb to the utterly crippling boredom.

from ludicrous base design to the extreme clan meta all alongside the insanely fast paced nature of the game forcing anyone who wants to play the game without sinking all of their free time into it to seek out modified servers with extended wipe periods and increased loot tables, which only compounds on the afore mentioned issues, there really is nothing that draws me into the current state of the game.

this feels like the never-ending cycle of rust, a game that is often losing and picking up new players as the game evolves and changes. for me rust legacy will always be what i consider to be the true "rust" experience, but i have friends who also stopped playing at various points never to return... whilst i do struggle to put any time into this game these days, i am somewhat curious to see how the game may evolve and change in the future, i assume it will stray further and further away from what i first played, but it will be interesting to see none the less.

♥♥♥♥ game, dont buy. Seriously.

this game has great potential, but as of right now i cant really recommend it. there are moments in this game where im having fun, but sadly those moments arent as frequent as the frustration i get whilst playing this game, in a way that makes me question why anyone would think it would be a good idea to make the game the way it is.

The First and Main problem i'd like to bring up is the travelling. its horrible, your character in the beginning is rather squishy and remains this way for pretty much the entirety of my current playtime. im not horrendously far in but ive upgraded my armour a good few times by this point and im still quite squishy, which is fine and what i expect. the problem however is that bases are immensely sparse, the first 2 bases are seperated by about 1.5km of space, and the 2nd and the 3rd base are probably about twice as far away from eachother, this means that while being squishy, needing materials and trying to traverse the anomalies death couldp otentially bring a near 2 kilometer journey back if lets say you're in the dump, which is about equidistant from the stalker base "the garages" and "the bar" i shouldnt need to explain why this makes the game incredibly frustrating when death can bring a roughly 10-15 minute sprint, and on this sprint there are a number of anomalies, potential players, guard outposts etc that could block your way forcing you to once again rearm your weapon and medicine.

at the point of writing ive died 3 consecutive times to various sources in the zone whilst trying to just do some quests in the dump and that alone has caused me about 30-40 minutes of traversal times with 0 progress and i realise at this moment that im just frustrated with this game. it could be great but too many things are wrong with the travelling system. the movement is somewhat janky and doesnt feel fun and so to have to spend so much of the game engaging with it at threat of heavy penalisation for mis-stepping really just sucks. not to mention such a long journey makes armour plates unlikely to survive meaning you have to piss away roubles on spare plates and extra meds and ammo.

lets talk about another reason why this system sucks. Bartering. lest you make the mistake of moving on from your first base to your second without first buying every single pre-requisite gun, lets hope you realise that mistake early because for some crackpot reason most later guns require pre-requisites that can only be acquired from the previous zones and thus only directly purchased from there. meaning, lets imagine for a moment that you are enjoying SMG's and so you pick up the stuff required for an UZI down in the first zone, keep using the UZI find its quite fun and take it to the next base. upon entering that base you see a cool AKS-74 you'd like to try out... well imagine your dismay at realising that the only way to get that AKS-74 is by first grabbing a worn out aks74u from the first base. so now you have to travel all the way back to the first zone and then back to the 2nd base, a 3KM round trip JUST to try out a new weapon... baffling why anyone thought this was a good idea, i mean i can only imagine the horror of finding this out when in the 3rd base area. having to travel around 10KM there and back at this point JUST to try out a new gun.

a complete lack of any sort of fast travel system (sort of) baffles me in ways i cant even imagine, its like this developer thinks people LOVE to run around for an hour before they can actually do anything worthwhile, i'd say so far ive spent more time running around pointlessly than i have actually doing things i want to. need aluminium? well best get hiking over a kilometer to the area with aluminum! hope you dont die on the way! want to get some rusty metal? well even further!

the tedium around the travelling system is bottomless, and it sucks because this game has amazing potential. but i dont even know how they'd fix it? my main thought was having primary and secondary base types. there are already sort of these anyway, for example in the first area you have the main base which allows you to use your storage use traders etc, then near the end of the first area and the start of the 2nd, at a rough half way point there is a mini base where there is a trader selling basic ammo and a safe zone, my idea would be to also allow these zones to double as spawnpoints, as the travelling initially isnt the big problem, its having to backtrack upon dying. having these little outposts that you can respawn at would alleviate almost all of my problems with this game, ensuring that i never have to run THAT far after a death.

This has been a somewhat rambly review so far and i apologise for that. I want to move on to a seondary more minor gripe, and that is the anomalies. the anomalies in this game are.... oversaturated to say the least. in the second area the forest is absolutely teeming with vortex anomalies and blackhole anomalies, to the point where it feels like there's one every 50 feet. this consolidates the issues with travel. such a rediculous saturation of anomalies coupled with huge travel distances almost guarantees the occasional slip up causing you to be just sent straight back to your last base camp because you didnt stay completely eagle-eyed whilst running 2killomters and finally got caught in one of those near transparrent black holes that just instantly grab you and kill you. I understand this game is inspired by stalker, a game i hold in MUCH regard. the difference being that thats a save/reload game. not a fluid MMO where death leads to you being thrown back such lengthy distances, and even then THIS game the one with MORE stakes for dying still has a much HIGHER amount of anomaly saturation. it makes little to no sense from a balance perspective and i suspect its to drum up business to the store maybe? perhaps the dev thought "if i put anomalies every 50 feet and resource zones kilometers away from the nearest base perhaps people will be disillusioned with even trying to farm and just buy resources outright?" which i guess is solid thinking but i think its more likely to just drive people away.

ultimately this game has GREAT potential but squanders almost all of it in my opinion, i keep finding myself playing the game because im bored and its potential is great and ive wanted something like this for so long, but find myself quickly closing out of it when i realise what i need to do and how far i need to go and how unlikely it is that its going to be even partially pleasant.

This game is an absolute treat to play, the potential here reminds me of an early rimworld, not in a gameplay sense as there are only very minor resemblences in that sense but it just feels oddly reminiscent to playing early builds of rimworld, when the game lacked so much of what makes it so enjoyable today but was still a game i lost myself in for hundreds of hours.

This game clearly isnt finished and yet it feels so much more polished and fun than anything ive played in a long time. Right now ill be honest, the content in this game isnt the deepest and yet i could still see myself playing it for hundreds of hours just losing myself in the ship build menu.

honestly i can't recommend this game more, the soundtrack is phenomenal, the gameplay is simple and yet addictive and whilst there's limited choices of parts you can still build some pretty amazingly unique designs.

First of all let me say. DO NOT LISTEN TO THE CURRENT RECENT NEGATIVE REVIEWS. people are simply frustrated and lashing out at the developers for making NEEDED changes to the games balance. previously the game was horribly unbalanced , now the game is far more balanced and the progression feels far more interesting and fun. The complaints you are going to see from people in the recent reviews WILL NOT reflect how NEW players like yourselves are going to experience this game. they had overpowered tech and it was taken away from them, they're rightfully frustrated at potentially hundreds of hours of work being lost, but it was still necessary. I've been playing the game since it launched, there are many like myself who acknowledge this update sucks for us veterans but NEEDED to happen, and im enjoying the game more than i ever have.

now lets get into the meat of the review...

This game is one of few games that i would say has something for almost anyone, and not only that but in a way that doesnt feel watery or hollow (for the most part) theres something there for all types of gamers, whether you seek the trhill of a good challenge in permadeath, a chillaxed base building experience mixed with some light exploration? travellers who want to discover tropical paradises or nightmarish hellscapes that few dare to tread. you can have fun with friends or on your own... you can fight to survive or simply thrive in luxury. whether you're an obsessive collector or a hardened pirate there is a place for you within this vast universe.

i know this sounds like a cheesy opening to a trailer but it really is true. i am amazed by how much these developers have won over my heart after the rocky launch, i was one of the many unfortunate souls to pre order this game and be burned by its release... but after 6 long years the developers are STILL pushing out amazing updates regularly. No game ive ever played has shown so much proof that the developers truly LOVE their game and their community. They could've easily started charging for some of these changes over the last year, as some of this content is truly above and beyond anything i ever thought we would have within this game. The community is currently unfortunately experiencing some turmoil that is honestly shocking. dont let the minority of the playerbase fool you, this game is still FANTASTIC. and you will find our community is welcoming and always willing to help new players. whilst there is strife in the community right now, most of the time it is one of the greatest communities in gaming and im hoping this conflict will simply create a stronger community in the end.

As a small note, thank you HelloGames for restoring my faith in developers and proving that not all mistakes are malicious and that there are still developers out there that care to create new amazing content without adding Micro-transactions and lazy DLC's in the process. i hope you continue to support this game for years to come, but know that if at any point they stop what we're left with is still a phenomenal game that i could play for years to come.