Recent reviews by Streaky Haddock

Very helpful and engaged community, with quite a few players and new coming in every day which I don't think I've seen with many MUDs. I didn't get slammed with an essay's worth of tutorials from the start, though it's not an easy game. I wouldn't call it punishing though, either. You can avoid pitfalls and the newbie experience scales well. Some things to note: Nomads = Warriors. You want to be a big race to get the most out of them. Ranger is always suggested because its very well rounded and can solo well. Magical Background = Riftwalker is the best newbie one since its another all-rounder that can have an entity protect them from being stabbed. Though an entity isnt as good as an actual player. Even a newbie 'tank' (read: nomad) can absorb better than most even mid-level entities. I dont know much about evil religious (though disciple/tzarrak is recommended as another newbie guild path) but good religious background has the tarmalen guild (read: class) that is a healer. Even brand new newbie tarms are quickly adopted by more experienced players because even a newbie healer makes ab ig difference to rest time. Civilised has a few pitfalls but sabres I hear is an acceptable (though a little more complex than other common newbie guilds) first guild for a new player.
You can recreate your character with no penalty while you remain under level 40 and your character is younger than 10 days.
Partying is very handy. There are people who only play solo, but you'll notice a huge increase to survivability even as a nomad just by pairing with another player. Even if that player is a fellow lowbie tank.
Give it a shot. You can get the non-steam client for free or connect through a regular mud client.

Short but sweet. Charming and simple in presentation. Cheap to purchase and light on my laptop. It's a hidden object/where's wally sort of game with some light humour and rather oblique but unobtrusive pop culture references. Absolutely worth picking up if you want to distract yourself. It lasted me two days, but smarter and more observant people could perhaps complete it in one.

I'm 44 hours in and I've reached EGO level 50, and maxed all four base classes. I bought the classes in the starter pack because it would have taken waaaay longer to unlock them naturally. I've seen the maps, got half-way through the main quest but I don't really see any cause to continue.

There's a likeable game in here. The gunplay isn't exceptional but for a free roam MMO made in the early 2010's the fact that it feels like gunplay is pretty impressive in of itself. At no point did I feel like I was engaging in some WoW-esque mechanisms with guns and hitmarkers laid over the top.
I like the outfit and shield system. Instead of looking patchwork and ♥♥♥♥♥♥, you get some pretty neat looking outfits... if you buy the starter pack. You can unlock the hats for the base classes by doing the early game achievements, but the outfits that go WITH the hats (with the exception of the assault class, which is the outfit you start with) are only obtainable by paying for the (£14.99 at time of posting) starter pack.

Without the starter pack, you're realistically only going to be playing about two classes. The one you start with, and the one you get from a rep payout early quest but you don't seem to get again later. For the love of all that's holy, don't make Guardian one of those classes. It doesn't have exceptional survivability compared to the other classes, has a tiny barrier that is rendered ineffective by latency.

The music is nice. It was made in the early 2010's so this was when dubstep was at the height of fashion. So many of the tracks are absolutely WUBTASTIC and run the gamut from 'mediocre but unobtrusive' to 'LET'S DROP THE BASS OF BADASS'. Unfortunately the latter tends to be reserved for san francisco sieges and boss battles.
The sound design overall though is kinda lacking. It's not offensive or poor, but... guns lack any kind of OOMPH to them. Ballistic assault rifles sound the same as eachother, energy weapons sound the same as eachother. I'm prettyy sure assault rifles and pistols share the same sounds. LMGs all sound the same as eachother, etc.

Vehicles feel sluggish but useable, things improve when you unlock the mid tier runners and rollers but then you're hit by how fragile they are. They can take bullets just fine, but if you hit one or two mobs at full speed, your car will be utterly totalled. This is frustrating in a game where crab-sized mobs frequently scuttle across roads in a game with severe latency and pop-in issues.

Oh yes, latency. Granted, things have been getting better each week but it's less 'this game is better' and more 'this game is more tolerable than it was'. The servers are brought down frequently for latency/server fixes to make things run better, but it's something they haven't been able to remove completely. This is a bad thing to occur at launch, I played during the weekend open beta, but quite frankly they should have made that open beta last several months and used that open beta to quash these hideous latency problems THEN instead of leaving a tragic first impression.

My experience with the game has been one of strain and exhaustion, really. The combination of zoomed in over-the-shoulder gameplay 70% of the time, in addition to the flashes of being exploded a lot, as well as trying to peer through some rather brutal screen-encapsulating muzzle flash whilst trying to look through the translucent, animated texture of a guardian's teeny tiny barrier has caused some noticeable eye fatigue. Its not a problem I often experience in games, but this sure is one of them.

The Classes dont really feel distinct from one another and aren't satisfying to play. A lot of the perks are 'increase X by 7%' or 'reload 45% of clip when rolling' with a cooldown. Abilities are often things like 'increase damage of guns' or 'heal self/others' or putting down a tiny thing with that's delicate wth a short time (like the healing bot or guardian shield). There aren't really any 'wow moments' where you feel like you're doing anything exceptional or interesting or challenging. You kinda just squint through your muzzle flash while strafing until you have to reload.

The game would be improved if the classes played interestingly. Like if you could do really cool or exceptional stuff reasonably frequently. If there were more enemies with less damage hit points so you could go into a place and just kill things left and right whilst still having to take cover and adapt to situations while using abilities.
As it is, the core gameplay loop is sameish and tedious and doesn't sustain without consistent reward, variation or whatever.

So what variation is there? There are sieges which are cool but rare, arkfalls which are very sameish (go to a place, kill things at smaller hotspots and then a huge hotspot) but can feel cool due to the huge amounts of players all pelting a thing. However arkfall rewards are locked behind a chest that requires A KEY TO OPEN. A key you get by doing a reputation grind (you get 10 rep for a faction per daily quest, 50 for weekly. Rep caps are usually something like 100-200) once a day but arkfalls are constant, so you can only do one a day unless you want to PAY MONEY FOR THE KEY.

I meant to type a paragraph but i'm still here and i'm getting tired. So I'm just going to finish.
Microtransaction model is anti-consumer. I'm not even getting onto salvage packs (which you use to upgrade weapons) which are a slot machine if of themselves. Outfits are expensive, they have twitch giveaways which aren't giveaways but lotteries so even if you tune into their creator streams you aren't guaranteed the twitch drop.

The game could be improved by diverse and interesting weapons, classes that are actually fun to play as opposed to feeling kinda the same and gunplay that satisfies as opposed to merely works.
Microtransaction model is greedy and they're offering pre-orders for the engineer and crusader classes which haven't been announced yet near as I can tell, and they already had a pre-order for the demolitionist class which isn't out yet but should be coming soon.

It feels like it SHOULD be a good game, but has just been terribly mismanaged by its devs. A fundamental revamp could maybe sort the game out, but.. this was it. This was their revamp. I didn't play the first defiance, but it doesn't seem like the gameplay differs at all in any signccificant way.

Shame, I liked the TV series.

This game appears to be dead. I booted it up for the first time today to find myself flat-out unable to connect to the three servers and a notification saying the 'project was on hold'. Last official posts on their forum and on steam ceased about 2016.
So unless there's a news post after this review that says 'hey we're back!' then consider this game dead.

I love this game. I've been playing it for a year and a half and have about 1055 hours in it. I didn't take much interest in it at first, since it was 'space ninjas with guns' and I'm not big on stealth gameplay, i'm not huge on anime or anything so the ninja thing didn't grab me, and I was seriously turned off four player co-op after the extremely hostile environment of payday 1 & 2.
However, after recommendation from a friend, I gave it a try; and I haven't stopped. Its early content & missions have aged poorly and aren't really representative of the later game experience, but it's never brutal and the monetisation model isn't constantly in my face and is quite fair, in my experience.

It has room for improvement, certainly; but once you have a few frames you like, have traded/bought plat for extra weapon/frame slots and have a good groove going, it's tremendously satisfying and fun and the gameplay is very enjoyable. It's fast-paced without being stressful and blindingly chaotic.

That said, though, it's core gameplay loop IS killing things to grind for resources/reputation/blueprints. Whereas later content is far more forgiving (PoE and Plague Star grinding now compared to release is a huge change, not to mention the old method of farming primes compared to the present version) if you aren't into that core loop, then this may not be the game for you.

My mains: Oberon Prime, Excalibur Umbra, Nekros Prime, Titania, Harrow.

If you like characters and story, absolutely get this game. Beautiful visuals, music and animation.

Do some Crimes.

absolutely worth it.

Very fun for the first world, but you start completely over on the second world with no previous progression held over. Second world could still be fun as you can make a much better base and manage dwarves better with the knowledge you're cementing from the first world. However once you've done that you have no reason to play beyond the second world. Could be much better if the worlds offer vastly different or you retained some levels or recipes from your previous world. Comparisons to Dwarf Fortress don't feel quite right as the Dwarves don't really have personalities or stats, and their power is determined by their gear pretty much and the skill books you give them. Still, I'd recommend it since it's cheap and I was seriously engaged for about a week.

Really not much to this game at the moment. I'd check back in a year or two.