Recent reviews by HalfPastEight

Helldivers 2 is a very fun game held back by a number of early problems. While most of the server capacity issues seem to have been fixed (I can reliably play a game now), the game is still plagued with significant mechanical and structural problems. A few are listed:

- Joining another squad is nearly impossible, it's a 50/50 tossup between not being able to connect at all and being able to connect and dropping in only to see them running in place and unresponsive
- The game crashes frequently at seemingly random times, usually in the middle of a mission
- Most weapons are painfully underpowered and don't have the ability to punch through armor, making it easy to get overwhelmed and destroyed by just a few heavily armored enemies
- Player armor values seem pretty much arbitrary, with little difference between heavy, medium, and light armor
- Progression is an absolute chore. Ship upgrades are purchased with samples which have to be collected from bonus objectives while on mission. These are sometimes hard to find, drop when you die, and you aren't guaranteed to receive any for completing a mission. You can generally get ~20-25 an hour, and the first tiers of upgrades cost 60+, so expect to grind dozens of hours to get your ship upgraded
- Planetary defenses involve doing the exact same mission with the exact same objectives over and over again, with very little variety
- The power scaling between the bugs and the bots is absurd, bugs are vastly easier to deal with through just volume of fire and keeping your distance, while bots are heavily resistant to damage and can pick you off at range. This makes one front (the bug front) vastly more fun to play than the other
- This is compounded by the restrictive weapon system. Most weapons are various flavors of meh, there's no customization or improvement, and unlocking new weapons is unintuitive and clumsy

Helldivers 2 shows a lot of promise, but I can't justify making this a positive review until they put some more polish into the game. As it stands currently it's maybe worth playing if it looks like your jam but be prepared for a lot of frustration.

Happy smiling ball makes the sad voices quiet down.

If all you want is Slime Rancher with better graphics and some new slimes, this is it.
Early Access means the game definitely has an unfinished feel, but with a lot of room for growth and development.
I wouldn't pay $30 for it in its current state though, wait for it to go on sale or wait for it to get fleshed out a little more. $15-20 makes more sense for the amount of content there currently is.

A very promising video game, but I just can't recommend it. The interface is deliberately obtuse, actions take far more steps than is necessary to complete, and the early game is an absolute slog in real time. It never feels like you're truly progressing, and your end goal is little more than just "make more money". You're building up all of this industry with no higher purpose to it.

The final straw came when I spent much of my very limited funds in order to buy materials for a new construction, only to have a bug remove most of them from my ship's inventory in transit. Uninstalled shortly thereafter.

There's a lot of promise here and I hope the developers are able to slim down this game and make progression less of a chore. Otherwise, I don't see much hope for it.

The Starship Troopers shooter we never got. Bonus points for playing Fencer for the full Mobile Infantry experience. Would you like to know more?

Planes, trains, and automobiles. Except that trains are the only ones that don't suck.

A good quick game for filling time, and a surprisingly intricate digital trainset. It's relatively limited in terms of content, but there's plenty of mods (accessible from the menu, even) to fill in the gaps to your satisfaction.

Highly recommend.

I laughed.
I cried.
I wiped out 200,000,000 people by accident because my shot missed and hit my "ally's" city.
It's a good time.

This weapon is more or less useless, it doesn't work as intended most of the time. Give this one a miss, just like it will.

Absolutely essential weapon, highly useful from the first level to the last. Just be careful not to set yourself on fire.

It's alright. Haven't played it much but I do recommend it.

Updated Aug. 2022:

TL;DR: EVE used to be amazing, now it isn't. The devs don't care about the community and seem to be interested in doing the minimum amount of work to keep suckering in new players. It is not worth your time and certainly not worth your money.

The long version:

I love EVE Online. I love the hell out of it. It is easily my favourite game ever made, it's one of the best ever made, and it represents a technical achievement unmatched anywhere else in all of gaming. I have poured thousands of hours into this game, built entire friendships off of it, and been an integral part of many significant events that I get to share with thousands of other players from all across the world. I have gotten immersed in amazing and detailed lore that is truly unique in the sci-fi space.

So why don't I recommend this product? In fact, why will I urge you not to play it?

Because this isn't EVE Online. Sure, it is called EVE Online. It wears the skinsuit well enough. But it isn't EVE. It used to be EVE, but the developers sucked the life and soul out of this game and left a shallow, empty husk in its place. The EVE Online I know and love, that I devoted years of my life to, that I used to evangelize to all of my friends, no longer exists.

EVE never had mass-market appeal, and it was never going to have mass-market appeal. It thrived as a niche MMO for people that loved the hell out of its particular unique experience. I used to tell people, when I was trying to introduce the game to them, "you probably won't like this, but give it a try anyways". That was just the nature of this unique format, the full-loot MMO with always-on PvP and a fully player-driven economy.

In trying to make this game appeal more heavily to the mythical "wider audience", CCP has sucked the fun out of it. They have ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the ingame market heavily to the point where industry, the backbone of the game, is a tedious chore. They have introduced utterly broken methods of income generation that are almost entirely unshackled from the free market, which are tuned in such a way to require an initial investment that is impossible to new players.

They continue to erect barriers to fun, and then they sell you the solution through endless PLEX sales. You can struggle your way forward and scrape by, or pay a few hundred bucks, buy some ISK and some injectors, and skip the grind entirely. In so doing they cheapen the experience of the game, and eliminate the sense of satisfaction that comes with progression.

Over the last three years, very little if anything in the way of substantive content has come from this developer. What little substantive content has been released is so detrimental to the game and to the community that the prevailing opinion among the community is that CCP should just stop trying to add content altogether. Worse, after three years of little but NPE updates CCP inflates the subscription price by 34%, making this the most expensive subscription-based MMO on the market. Frankly, the game in its current state wasn't even worth $15/mo and certainly isn't worth $20/mo.

The community is screaming feedback at the devs, most of it highly constructive. Groups of players with centuries of combined playtime from all areas of the game come together to write lengthy, highly-detailed guides on how to fix the structural issues with this game. There is not a community in existence that cares this much or puts anywhere near this much effort into trying to help fix things. And the developers just do not listen, just do not care. The official forums and unofficial official Reddit are filled with almost nothing but criticism and yet the developers proudly proclaim "we are happy with our relationship with our community".

The game's player count has dropped by 60% in the last five years, especially awful for a game whose content is entirely player-driven. And yet the developers brag that most of their current players joined in the last two years. The obvious observation is a revolving door of new players, who suckered in with wild promises, spend significant amounts of money to skip the grind, and then quit when they realise the reality of the game and get disillusioned by it.

The best thing for this game is for the player count to drop far enough that the developers are finally forced to wake up to the reality that things are not alright, that they can't just keep pretending everything is fine, and that they have to actually start listening to their community. So I ask you, as a veteran of this game: Please don't play it. There are better games out there, a lot of them. Elite: Dangerous, for all its flaws, is still a better experience than EVE. Give it a look. Avorion is another great option, and the monthly cost of hosting your own server is less than a subscription to EVE.

And if you're a developer reading this, know this: I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. I don't think there's anything you can do to recover this game, which is why I and all my corpmates quit and took our combined dozen accounts out of your universe. It's also why a significant number of your third-party developers, your most ardent and loyal supporters, have been quitting lately. If you give us an EVE Classic, run a new server running Apocrypha for the veteran players you think you don't need, that will get myself and all of my friends to resub. But that's about it.

I loved this game. I still love this game. But this product you see before you isn't that game I love. And I fear it never will be again.