Recent reviews by luei333

Okay, the devs have been getting slammed in the reviews for their server issues, and rightly so. But, they are working through them, and now the game is actually playable, with only the occasional bug (pun not intended).

Right up top, I want to mention the monetization. The game has a battle pass, a rotating store, and microtransactions for in-game currency. The return on what you can get for your dollars is not very good, but not nearly as bad as I've seen in other games. Ten bucks will get you the battle pass, or a couple good armors from the store, which can actually be very helpful. To its credit, they do give you some premium currency as you progress through the levels, and you can earn a potentially infinite amount of it from in-game tasks; you can actually get by without needing to spend any extra money, at all, with minimal grinding. Really, the microtransactions feel extremely unnecessary, and are actually not that predatory. Still, I would much rather the game just NOT have them. I have a bad taste in my mouth for any game that uses a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ battle pass, and even if this game is a not-that-bad implementation of one, it still has one, and it's worse off for it. I'd much rather they just charge more up front, or a flat fee for a DLC, than manipulative ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like they and every other game nowadays have.

Getting into the gameplay, server issues aside, the game is actually a ton of fun. One note, DO NOT expect to play this game solo. It is not at all balanced for single- or even duo-play. It's at its best when you've got a full squad of 4, and it does not do much to tweak the balance down if you've got less than that. But, if you can get a group together, or don't mind playing with randos, it can be a legit great time.

There's not many games out there that can give you the same feeling of being hopelessly outnumbered, but also of having the firepower to fight your way through it. The impacts and explosions are visceral and a lot of work was put into making them PUNCH with each orbital strike or nuclear impact. The deaths (most of the time) feel like they're your fault, rather than the game being cheesy and unfair. There's a good amount of depth to the mechanics, and there's enough variety to keep you playing for a good while.

There are some things that feel like they're misbalanced, but it's hard to tell if they're intentional because the options you start with are cheap and ♥♥♥♥♥♥, or if they just have a few things that need to be nerfed. In particular, once you get the Autocannon at level 10, you can pretty much kill anything. It's a shame, though, since there are a pretty spicy selection of weapons available, but most of them simply do not live up to the same standard, and are not worth taking. Why take a heavy sniper when the autocannon can do all the same stuff, better, for longer?

There are currently two factions, the bugs depicted on all the marketing, and the Automatons. Both factions play extremely differently, and jumping back and forth is almost like playing a different game; a very nice balance for more variety. That said, each faction has only a handful of mission types that you will do with them. Blow up a bug nest, then extract. Help survivors load up into an escape pod while defending them from robots, then extract. Blow up some bug eggs, and a bunch of nests, then extract. It's all enough to keep you playing for a while, but already things can start to feel same-y, only ~20 hours in.

Oh, and one last thing I'll note, the game is AWFUL at tutorializing. There have been multiple times I've dropped into a new mission type, and stood around for 10 minutes not knowing how to progress the mission. The game does not give you very clear instructions on some objectives, and unless you know what you're supposed to do, it can be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ frustrating to sit there with no progress while getting hammered by wave after wave of enemies. And even when you do know what you need to do, if you're not on voice with your squad, some objectives can be absolutely frustrating to coordinate.

All in all, a very solid, fun game. If it didn't have microtransactions and a damn battle pass, it would be one of my new favorites, but alas, at least it's one of the less frustratingly-monetized games to come out in a long time. If you've got some friends, pick it up, and have some fun (and try not to kill each other!).

I've played a few hours as a test to see whether it's worth getting a copy for all my friends, and I gotta say, this game has a lot of potential! I think, with a bit more content and maybe even a bit of mod content, this could be one of the great multiplayer server games. My group doesn't like Early Access stuff in general, so I'll sleep on this game for a bit, but I'll definitely return to it in the future.

I'm a casual fan of colony sim games, but it's always annoying trying to wrestle most games' jobs and priority systems to get what you want done, especially if there's some emergency or task you want to finish. In this game, it's SO NICE having an avatar you directly control and can just do stuff directly. Having the town managing the automation and crafting and inventory sorting for you is a huge weight off the player that is usually a huge hassle in other survival crafting games. Overall, the merging of the genres works incredibly well! I'm only a few hours in, but I think that some deeper options for the colony sim could be added, like planning out buildings that your villagers can auto-build, or having more jobs and options and automation options that you can set up for your cities. Maybe they exist, maybe not, but it doesn't seem like it.

Also, you can explore a massive number of auto-generated islands other than your starting one, to find more villagers, dungeons, biomes, etc. A very neat concept for exploring the world, and you even have the option to set up multiple villages on different islands. However (again, only 3 hours in), I'm not sure I see the point in making more than one village on your starting island. I'm sure you can set up some way to fast travel between islands, but there doesn't seem to be any inter-island economy or trading, so you'd be splitting up your inventory, and for very little gain... Plus, all the time it takes to manually build every building in every village you make....

Again, this game has huge potential, and I'm sure any gripes I have will be addressed in future updates or added with mods once the game is out of early access. I'll definitely be checking back in on this one from time to time, I do not regret the purchase. Godspeed, devs!

I love this game. It's simple, and fun, and short, and everyone should play it. The core message really hit me, too, the final scene is so good!

I've played this game for hundreds of hours and 5+ years, and put well over $100 into it, but I really can't recommend it. Its core concept is solid, and it's fun to play for a while, but it very quickly wears itself out, and in 6 years of the game's life, the dev has never changed anything up to improve it or keep it fresh. We're still repairing the same generators, throwing the same pallets, and winding up on the same hooks, over and over and over again. And, worst of all, the game expects you to do it all over, and over, and OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

I've played a ton of this game, and had a lot of good times, but I've had almost just as many bad times. Whether it's a killer that's just NOT fun to play against, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ perks and builds, or extremely toxic players (which you'll encounter constantly), I almost always leave a play session with a sour taste in my mouth. Nowadays, I pretty much only boot it up when a friend wants to play, because listening to their screams and taunts as the killer chases them down can be extremely fun... if the game lets us have any.

This game has so much potential, and I keep waiting for the update that drops and adds new, interesting mechanics, or paves over some of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ parts of the game, but that update never comes, and it likely never will at this point. They're entirely focused on just making new killers, new content, new DLC, new microtransactions... Every time a new DLC pack comes out, it might bring back a stable of interested players, but it'll bleed them off just as quick once they experience the new tiny bit of content, before it blurs into the same ♥♥♥♥ they've done a thousand times already.

The game is seriously the same EXACT thing as it was when it released; no new objectives have ever been added, it's all just repairing generators and opening doors. No new stealth or chase mechanics, there's still only lockers and windows and pallets. No new items, still just medkits, flashlights, toolboxes, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ maps and keys. There's no special modes or limited-time modifiers or anything. They could have added so much to this game, they could have made it GREAT, something truly special and worth your time, but it's just a big disappointment; just maintaining status quo so they can sell you new dlc after new dlc (and now, cosmetics and a battle pass too!).

Let's talk about the killers for a sec. Their roster is pretty huge now, with a ton of options for how you can kill or be killed, honestly it's kind of impressive, and does help to keep things fresh. Problem is, every killer has to boil down to the same gameplay patterns, which means they will always have to chase you, hit you, down you, hook you, rinse and repeat, and it keeps a lot of killers from reaching any real potential. Every match ends up being pretty samey, only a little bit different based on who's holding the knife this round. Even stealth-focused killers like Ghostface and the Pig (which feel silly taking the time to drag people to a very public hook) boil down to the same pattern as hardened killers like the Tyrant and Pyramid Head (which feel silly slowing down the murder to gingerly hook the survivors). And there is NO guarantee of balance from one killer to the next; some are fun to play around and make for a good match most of the time, and some almost make me leave when I realize who I'm up against, cuz I know the game won't be fun, no matter what I do.

And that's one point I'd like to pick out: fun. Games are supposed to be fun (at least, games like this). But there are so many mechanics in this game that either are not fun all on their own, or that encourage players to play in ways that make the game not fun for most of the people playing. In ALL of the years the game has been out, they still can't fix killers face-camping a hook, or tunneling one survivor. Not to mention, the only way to play at a high level is to learn how to "pallet loop", a mechanic so incredibly unfun for every player, I personally refuse to do it. The devs seems to have just embraced these things that lead to toxic behavior and uninteresting and anti-fun gameplay, and I hate them for that.

One of the things that pisses me off most about this game, though, is the progression system. Each match, you earn blood points, which you can spend to level up a character, and when they're max level, you can "prestige" them to unlock their unique perks for every other character to be able to use. It's by combining these unique perks that the game allows you to shake up the formula at all and keep anything fresh. But they make this process so unbelievably tedious and grindy that it infuriates me to no end. It was fine when there were only 4, or 8, or so characters, but NOW? There's DOZENS. And unlocking every perk for even one single character takes literally HUNDREDS of hours (and every DLC adds on a couple dozen more hours to that). I've been playing for 400+ hours, and I STILL don't have one character with every perk choice available. I'd LOVE to have a bunch of different characters I play, each with their own playstyle and perk loadout based on their flavor and how I like to play them, but I STILL can't do that at all. Every character has to level up and unlock every perk on their own tree, so you are beholden to the whims of their ♥♥♥♥♥♥ bloodweb as to what you can do with a character. I hate this system, and the update they just did for it is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ drop in the bucket; there's NO reason to have that same progression system from day 1, after they've added 10x the amount of content. I hate it.

siiiiigh, I'm almost done ranting, I've got a lot of pent up frustration for this game, BUT it's mostly because I know what it COULD be! I see the potential, I have fun games still, and yet.... This game could be so, so much more than it is, but the dev team behind it doesn't seem to care. After the 6-year anniversary event, I've finally given up any hope that this game will redeem itself again.

Oh, and since it should be stated, the monetization has gotten out of control. You pay for the base game, and you pay for every DLC (or pay to unlock every character in-game), and on top of that they sell cosmetics for crazy-high prices. Like $10+ for a single outfit for one character, in a game with 30+ characters. And on top of ALL of that, they have a battle pass, too. Which, by the way, you earn progress on INCREDIBLY slowly. Even when I was playing a ton of the game for the anniversary event, I didn't even get to level 40, out of a max possible 70; not even halfway to getting all the content I paid for. They expect you to play an insane amount of this game for the battle pass, it's terrible. These devs have only grown more greedy and complacent over the years.

Please, devs, prove me wrong. Fix the game. Make it better. I want to love it, I really do.

This game is basically a worse Overwatch. And Overwatch itself used to be a much better game, but this isn't even as good as current-day Overwatch.

This game wants so much to be Overwatch, but there are some fundamental designs that make it fall so short. First, the concept of roles does not exist in this game, but certain characters are very much tailored to the "tank" or "healer" playstyle. However, none of these characters have powerful enough abilities to be worth anything. The tank characters can't create any space, and the healers just cannot keep up with the damage flying around.

Let's take a sec to talk about that, the damage. This game has SO MUCH burst damage flying around from pretty much every character. Everyone's time to live is dismally small. Even on some of the beefier characters, you'll die in seconds (or less) every time you come under fire. And even if you can back out around cover, it can be very difficult to heal up to full health again; every character gets a fairly strong regeneration effect when you've been out of combat for a while, but the delay on this effect feels huge, and it doesn't activate if YOU're the one that initiates the combat, meaning, if you shoot someone, you stop healing. Couple that with a tiny number of ineffective healers, and the game just devolves into throwing yourself into the meat grinder over and over. (Or, find a well-placed health pack that will heal you pretty much completely on a tiny cooldown and camp the spot!)

There's also a down-but-not-out mechanic for every character, meaning that when you get hit to 0 health, you have ~5 seconds where an ally can come up to you and revive you. And, when you do get revived, you come back at FULL health. That means, it can be more important to finish off a dying enemy than to shoot one that's actually shooting at you. The way this mechanic works is baffling, frankly. It just makes it even more difficult to break a group of enemies off of a point once they swarm it. And, since tanks can't create space to push into a point, it becomes a mechanic where the team in the lead tends to stay ahead.

Another thing that baffles me is that they gave every character a sprint and dash mechanic. Even the biggest, tankiest boi can dash around the stage constantly. And they gave some characters the ability to dash multiple times in a row. Trying to shoot a gundam who's dashing all over the room, then out into a hallway before you can pin them down is an incredibly frustrating experience. Just trying to aim these too-precise weapons on these too-large maps with these too-small and too-fast enemies just feels awful.

I'm almost done ranting about this game, but I want to make a special note about the map design: it's atrocious. I don't say that lightly, but these are some of the worst maps I've ever played in a shooter, many of them being either long, narrow choke points where the one sniper character is king, or tiny, multi-level ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with no sight lines at all, with very little in-between. It's been a long time since I've hated map designs as much as I do fully half or more of the ones in this game.

Overall, I have mostly negative things to say about this game, unfortunately. I also know nothing at all about Gundam, so I have no nostalgia for anything here (but, why are we fighting over a bunch of giant planet-side bases? I thought most of Gundam took place in space battles, which would be much cooler...). It seems like a property ripe with opportunity for hero designs, and the gundams themselves and their abilities seem cool and authentic to the series, but some of the core design decisions make it just a slog to play, and it makes these giant, expensive, crazy-strong robots feel extremely small and weak, like they're churned out on an assembly line and hundreds are destroyed in every fight...

I love this game and I don't know why.

Be sure and look up all the controls, there's a bunch of stuff you wouldn't think of.

!! For any controller players, look into the Community Controller Layouts for this game! They let you use both sticks to move and aim separately, and it fixes at least one of my problems with the game !!

All in all, a pretty solid hero-based soccer game. There are some things I'd change, and some characters will get balanced over time, but it's already pretty good. It's free to play, give it a try.

Positives:
The characters are all pretty stylish and unique (from each other, at least; it's a very anime-inspired style, though, so there are a lot of common tropes in the cast). And, they each feel pretty different to play, in a very good way. Even with only a couple hours of play, I can tell that there are a lot of ways that you can build skills for this game, and a lot of characters have a ton of potential to capitalize on high-skill play, but it's simple enough that it's not at all hard to get into (unlike something like Rocket League).

It's very easy to boot up, find a game, and play for just a bit, no need to commit an hour or more of your time if you don't want to. The game runs very well, is very responsive, and doesn't waste your time with pre- or post-match timers. If you want to go from game to game, it's very snappy, and I appreciate the hell out of that.

Negatives:
The UI leaves a lot to be desired; they try to keep it minimalist and sleek, but the way it ends up is that there are a ton of important menus hidden in every corner of the screen, behind other menus, and you really have to hunt down how to do some stuff in the menus (it took me like 15 minutes to figure out how to make loadouts for my characters, and even after finding it, the menu itself is a PAIN to use) (also, you literally can't see how much currency you have while in the store menu, you have to back out to the top menu to see that). The controls in-game are much better, but I feel like they're not quite hitting their peak potential, with M+K or controller (I want a controller layout where I can aim my shots with the right stick while moving with the left, dangit! I so often hit it in the wrong direction while using controller, and managing the exact position of my cursor with M+K is tedious at best, but at least I can aim!).

Some of the game feels weird, from the outset. You have a cooldown on your main kick button, so if someone hits the ball immediately after you do, your hit is completely cancelled out and the ball slips right past you; especially as a goalie, this feels like a very odd way to play. The maps are so small that the only real way to play is to rush the goalie, and try to hit the ball right after they do and slip it right under their legs. Also due to the small size of the arenas, you often end up with 3-4 players in the same spot, and keeping track of what the hell is happening when everyone's throwing around abilities is very difficult.

In terms of monetization, it's a free-to-play game, so of course it relies on microtransactions to stay afloat. However, currently, at launch, there are scant few options for things to buy; some characters don't even have a second skin, and the rest is stickers/emotes, and that's about it. I'm kind of worried that the game needs more -enticing- monetization options to make players want to support it. The tutorial missions give you a good amount of freemium currency, enough to buy a couple characters that interest you, aside from the starting four, but after that, it seems like earning currency might slow down a LOT, and getting more characters might take a long time (unless you pay real cash, of course).

The game also has a battle pass, because that's the new poison plaguing the industry, so be aware of that.

Overall:
Like I said at the top, it's a solid little game, give it a try because why not? Most of the gripes and issues I have with it can be fixed over time, if the devs keep working on it. With how short the matches are, and how flooded the market it wants to be in already is, I wish the developer a lot of luck in keeping it afloat. Give them just a bit of your time, try it out, consider buying a skin or 2 if you like it.

This is a fantastic little game. An incredible Metroidvania with inspiration from Souls-like games, it has incredibly tight controls, beautiful art, great music... Basically, I can't think of anything bad to say about this game, and it's very quickly become one of my favorite games of all time. Add on to that, the developers have released, what, 4 distinct content updates to the game, all for free.

Suffice to say, you should probably buy this game and give it a try. If you like Souls-likes, you'll love the difficult fights and tight combat. If you like metroidvanias, you'll love exploring the vast, intricate, detailed world.

BTW, favorite fight in the game is definitely the Sisters of Battle.

This game is GREAT, even in its current, content-light state. I really hope it stays popular and relevant enough for the devs to make more content and balance changes and all that, because they deserve to continue to succeed with this gem, and I just want MORE content from this. As-is, it's a bit easy to figure out how to just win every time and never die, and I expect they'll make it even more spooky eventually.

Also, it's GREAT with friends, hearing them scream and all that as the ghost chases them is just so much fun.

I have a love/HATE relationship with this game. There are so many things that irk me about the game, but the core gameplay is Bungie shooting, and it feels so good and fun. But there are so many issues and it's so imbalanced, and there's SO MUCH grinding! With the new expansion, they essentially reset everyone's level to level 1 again, and made even people who've spent hundreds of hours (like myself) start the grind all over again. I got two-shot by a Dreg, one of the weakest enemies in the game. It's kind of emasculating. I rather hate it.

I'm not a fan of the new expansion, or the MASSIVE vaulting of content that it brought. As a free player, there's basically no reason to start playing the game now. Almost all of the free-to-play content is gone. And the expansions are VERY expensive for how much (read: little) content you get for them.

Bottom line: if you love Halo (Reach and earlier) and just care about shooting and having fun, sure, try it. Otherwise, it's really not worth getting into now, with the new expansion. You won't have a good time at all :/