Recent reviews by Sexual Yoda Gaming

HELLDIVERS 2 is a four player cooperative 3rd person shooter set in a satirical universe that sees the players in the role of the titular Helldiver, a special-operations soldier fighting for Super Earth in a galactic war against two distinct enemy factions, the Automatons, and the Terminids. The Super Earth you fight for is a jingoistic ultra-nationalist society, claiming to be fighting to preserve "managed democracy", a system in which a computer determines how Super Earth citizens vote. Characters will shout things like "FREEDOM!" and "FOR DEMOCRACY" as they mow down hordes of Terminids which conveniently decompose into oil.

You'll fight this war using a variety of weapons and off-map call-ins called stratagems. You take four stratagems with you on a mission and call them in dynamically by entering a series of inputs, and then throwing a beacon upon which the stratagem lands. These can vary from teammates to weapons, turrets, mechs, orbital strikes, airstrikes, etc. and is the primary means players are meant to rely on to destroy the overwhelming numbers of enemies. The gunplay feels snappy and responsive, and you get some movement options mostly in the form of a dive. You'll also find options for a wide variety of primary and secondary weapons, and grenades, which range in usefulness from excellent to borderline unusable.

Balancing has been a large source of vitriol for many in the community, largely unwarranted in my opinion but not without some fair points as well. Sometimes a weapon will become too meta and the developers will, in turn, nerf it. Other weapons find themselves not effective at all, and sit gathering dust in players' armories. Some of these weapons will receive buffs in patches, and others go ignored. Just know that the stats of weapons and stratagems are ever changing, but you don't need to use meta weapons to complete even the hardest difficulty missions in the game so long as your team communicates and diversifies your loadouts.

Difficulty in HELLDIVERS 2 ranges from one to ten, and you'll select this when you start an operation. An operation is a series of three missions that will be fought on a planet of your choosing from a galactic map. Successfully completing all three missions will contribute a positive score to a planet's "Liberation Value" which will see the planet fall into Super Earth control once it reaches 100%. Fail a mission and you fail the operation, contributing a negative score to the Liberation Value. To guide you along which planets to choose, the developers employ a "game-master" who creates orders for players to follow and fulfill. Think of these like shared quests between all players, you don't have to follow them, but if they are completed every player gets a reward. Completing an operation is as easy or hard as the difficulty you choose, plus planetary and operational modifiers. On lower difficulties, expect to see weaker enemies, and less of them. On higher difficulties, expect to be overwhelmed and constantly engaged. Missions themselves are timed affairs, usually forty minutes, which see the players dropping in from orbit onto a usually large map and pursuing a number of objectives, determined by difficulty, before being evacuated. Patrols of enemies rove the map and will call reinforcements if they spot the players and are not quickly eliminated.

The enemies come from two factions, the Automatons and the Terminids. The Automatons consist of robot soldiers and armored machines of war, which march against the players from heavily defended factory bases and outposts. They field of variety of infantry and vehicles, many of which are heavily armored and sporting some serious firepower. Long range units will pin players down with heavy suppressing fire while melee units and mechs close in for the kill. On the other hand, the Terminids are made up of giant insect-like creatures entirely lacking any form of technology. They gather in massive swarms of mostly weak mooks, peppered with large and seriously carapaced bugs that charge into the players leaving you always on the run.

Unfortunately, HELLDIVERS 2 is an extremely buggy game. You'll find yourself stuck in loading screens, crashing to desktop, swimming in the ground, clipping through terrain, and much more. You will likely experience some sort of bug of varying severity in most of your play sessions. The developers have spent a lot of time trying to address these bugs, and things like crashing to desktop have gotten much more rare. However, new patches while also bringing content, frequently introduce a whole new slew of bugs to contend with. This is something that can impact the experience severely, although your mileage may vary here.

HELLDIVERS 2 is also frequently updated with new content in the form of warbonds, the game's progression system. You get one big one for free and the others can be bough for ten dollars worth of premium currency. Of note is that this premium currency can be earned in the game, so you don't have to spend real money to get content at any point. I'd say it takes me roughly twenty-five to thirty hours to scrounge up enough to buy a warbond. Warbonds themselves are like a battlepass, once you unlock one you advance through the tiers by buying things with medals, which are earned from every mission you play and given to all players for completing orders. You get quite a lot of these so they aren't a significant grind. The other forms of progression are for your stratagems and these are samples and requisition slips. Requisition slips are used to unlock new stratagems and samples are used to upgrade those stratagems. Both of these you get only from playing missions. The samples add a fun dynamic as you must extract from the mission with them and you drop them when you die, so you'll be making daring runs to try and get these back before you evacuate. That does make them the biggest grind in the game, as the upgrades are very expensive. All of your currency with the exception of Super Credits, the premium currency, is capped and personally I find this frustrating. You will not be able to stockpile huge amounts of samples or requisition slips for future content updates. Again, this is only really irritating for samples because they are slower to get than the other currencies.

HELLDIVERS 2 is a uniquely engaging satirical war romp best enjoyed with three friends, and only occasionally spoiled by frustrating bugs. It is more than deserving of your time, money, and vote.

Gears 5 is the best game in the series, it's a smart and logical evolution of both gameplay and narrative formulas, in a way that is true to the past titles. Gears 5 is able to build on the characters from the previous trilogy, and evolve the likable new cast from Gears 4 in a touching, bitter, and mature story. All without forgoing the bombast that makes the Gears series what it is.

Mechanically, the game plays as Gears always has, a back-and-forth tug of war 3rd person cover shooter. The cover based shooting combined with large health pools forces players and enemies into a stalemate that demands aggression if you want to effectively dispatch foes. Flanking is a must, the enemy will certainly do it to you if you sit idle for too long. The new trilogy expands the gameplay from the old by adding welcome additions to the classic formula, such as aggressive cover vaulting that can set an enemy up for execution if performed well. If you've played the old games, the combat is simply an evolution of those, and the new additions are missed when replaying the old titles.

Story wise, Gears has always been about anti-war messaging, a critique of fascist governments and warhawks, that tactfully maintains respect for individual soldiers. The militaristic COG government is ultimately responsible for creating the locust, and destroying the world with the hammer of dawn super weapon. And yet in Gears 4 we see that same government rising from the ashes. The climax of Gears 5 takes place in a new city built by the new COG directly on top of the ruins of the city we start Gears of War 1 fighting in, the city destroyed when the COG used the hammer of dawn against it, and their own people, to fight the locust. This is the cycle of violence and destruction that our characters spend the entirety of Gears 5 trying to replicate, and the player gets caught up in it too, with revenge as justification. Gears 5 is beautifully written, and the story here is a perfect culmination of everything the other games have building. The desert act of the game does struggle with pacing, and is slow compared to other acts.

This game is well worth your time and money. It is the best game in the series, and The Coalition have really proved themselves to be worthy of carrying the Gears mantle, far more so that 343 for Halo. If you like Gears, play this game. If you like shooters and action, play this game. If you have never played a Gears game, you will be missing out on a lot of the wider narrative beats, and might find it harder to understand many of the old characters and nostalgia beats. Still, I'd recommend this game but know you aren't getting the most out of it.

A really unique game probably best described as real-time XCOM meets Darkest Dungeon. Atmosphere is excellent and it's clear the developers really care about the source material. You'll be sending your squad on expeditions across a couple handfulls of large, well-designed maps meant to be cleared to over several expeditions. The gameplay is tense, and everything can go from all clear to all ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in about 10 seconds. Even on normal, you'll have to think on your feet and plan your moves, it's a good challenge. Between missions you'll perform upkeep for your team, which includes sending them to therapy for the horrible traumas theyve picked up on their missions. There are currently quite a few annoying bugs, the worst of which for me has been getting stuck in weapon select menus and having to reload a save. As far as actual gameplay, the biggest thing going against the game here is a disappointing lack of enemy variety. This game is an easy recommend, and easily the best tactical strategy game to be released since XCOM 2. I do hope in the future the devs will add more enemy variety, and a more replayable mode than the main campaign, maybe something with dynamic missions.

Expeditions: Rome is a great game, with tough choices, and compelling combat. As an RPG, you'll find a lot of weight to your decisions here, with choices that matter beginning with gender and following throughout the entirety of the story. Combat is standard turn-based fare, no re-inventing the wheel here, but what's there is well executed, and I enjoyed the combat throughout. The game's biggest shortfalls are the strategy layer, and quality of life issues. The strategy layer is frankly quite boring, roaming the world and commanding armies is not exciting, and feels more like a tacked on mini-game than a core gameplay pillar. Quality of life issues are here in the form of spending too long walking around, and sometimes spending far too long waiting for the opponent to take their turn. That being said, Expeditions: Rome is much more than the sum of its parts, it's a compelling narrative experience, with a solid story, well-written and interesting companions, and quality turn-based combat. I recommend this to any fan of RPGs or turn-based strategy games.

Difficult learning curve, but extremely rewarding gameplay. While it may not yet be feature complete, the game is well polished and I have run into very few bugs. Reccomended for fans of roguelikes, and those wanting a tense, difficult dungeon crawler.

About the same quality as a Blackberry game aside from the fact it doesn't function.

Sega is well known for making PC ports so awful your eyes fall out of your skull and creep into the deepest, darkest, depths of your basement, leaving a puddle of tears in their wake. So it is with great happiness, when I say that Sega has made a very good port here. Controller support, V-Sync, great resolution options, the whole shabang. The only thing lacking here portwise is the inability to use the mouse in the menu screens, which you will quickly get used to; the other problem is that cutscene quality is not changed from the PS3 version, fortunately the unique artstyle makes the game look rather nice even during those. Now as for the game itself, it's a turnbased tactical thirdperson shooter hybrid and boy does it work well. Move your soldiers about one at a time with your limited pool of command points, which are higher depending on your unit selection as some units provide cp bonuses when on the field. This game features permadeath for soldiers in your company who are not main characters, and each of these character has certain traits and a small bit of backstory to make their death oh so sad. I would recommend that any strategy fan pick up this game because there is nothing else quite like on the market, and this is something that you should definitely experience.

This game is basically Bran Flakes. Bland and uninteresting

This game was a gem. This game was a must have, with fantastic combat that was deep and engaging. Sure it had bugs, a lot of them, but it's an indie game, if we give them time they'll sort it out, right? Dead ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wrong. If you had asked me when this game first released, I would have told you it was a must have, that it was my favorite game. Now, this is a waste of your time and of your money. This game has become plagued with DLC, sure, they're only skins so it's not a big deal, or it wouldn't be a big deal if Torn Banner actually gave two ♥♥♥♥♥ about the community. Since they don't, this game is still plagued with bugs, bugs that Torn Banner refuses to fix because they're too busy making DLC. The barbarian skins that were released today are the last ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ straw. $8 per skin for a single class, and $2 a pop for the four new weapon skins! To buy all the skins is $40, fourty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dollars. That's more than the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game; you would think that with all the DLC TB would release some bug fixes, but no, they don't give half of a sack of ♥♥♥♥ about their fans. There's also no point in even playing this game if you don't know how to drag. People will tell you dragging is a tactic but it isn't, it's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that eliminates the need of any skill whatsoever. It makes it difficult to block with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spinning all over the place, slowing down or speeding up their swings at will. It's pretty common to see an instakill weapon swing coming at you with more speed than a dagger. Does Torn Banner care about this? No, the motehr♥♥♥♥ers actually encourage it and call it a tactic. Not because it is, but because TB is too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ busy wallowing in their piles of money. Don't waste your breath on this game, but Mount & Blade Warband instead.