Recent reviews by Cetarii

Risk of Rain 2 is probably one of my favorite games of all time. Unfortunately the DLC and the recent update it brought with it is vastly underwhelming and almost frustrating. It really gives a tell tale sign of the "touch of Gearbox" has done.

DLC
In terms of the DLC, it's ok. But at the same time, it really feels off and bland compared to other content that was already in the game. A lot of the items don't really feel original and at the same time have a hard time blending in. They all seem very similar to each other in terms of mechanics. Some items even feel more detrimental than helpful to a run. Even then, it doesn't innovate buy creating the twists that the void items brought. In terms of content, there's some, but not nearly as much as the SoTV DLC, except the new environments. I will say though, the new environments are excellent alongside the new music from Chris Christodoulou—but this is made worse, since new environments are locked behind pursuing the alternate path. There's only a few new enemies, no new TP bosses, and the new boss fight is mediocre—more annoying than anything, with lighting following you around the boss area and being way to focused on one stat, speed. In terms of survivors, I haven't really played them yet, but from what I can tell, I like the originality of Seeker and [REDACTED], but fall short overall in their ability.

The Update
Now for the worst part. This has to be the worst update the game has seen. Ignore the patch notes, because Gearbox did nothing to "fix stability and bugs." They made it far worse by messing up the code the game shipped with prior.

• Little amount of mods (a big community) work, and the ones that do are generally broken.
  
• I'm not sure why they made this decision, unless it had to do with the console update (which is also completely broken on Xbox), but they ruined The Director by tying to FPS. The lower the FPS, the easier the difficulty scaling is, which ruins the challenge.
  
• Some enemies are also tied to FPS which has made them broken and inconsistent—in addition to ruining the AI of enemies, making them stuck to the environment, aim in directions that make no sense, or just be completely un-phased by you.
  
• A certain common item will make Mithrix invincible in Phase IV.
  
• The UI changes are just meh. On one regard, you have the new scrapper menu, which is nice! But at the same time, the new HP bars make no sense and make it harder to know the amount of damage you are doing and/or are losing.
  
• To top it all off, they put this forced anti-aliasing on, which just blurs the entire image. The list goes on.

Overall, this DLC/update just isn't good in this state. I think it's clear to see that Gearbox pulled a classic AAA move to release a half baked product to capitalize on some hype. Unfortunately, I think they chose the wrong community. If you haven't gotten this DLC yet, please do not buy it and revert to the Devotion Update + SoTV for a working and excellent game. But, if are like me and bought it out of excitement, refund it, I wouldn't even buy this on sale.

Note, the recent content was NOT developed by the original devs from Hopoo. They decided to sell of the IP to Gearbox to pursue other developments.

This game is excellent. Despite having a very simple game and progression structure, it is extremely easy to dump multiple hours in one session on this game. It is sad for me to say that I have dumped 25 hours in this game in the past week or so, it's that addicting—except it's not, it's dedication. Overall, the premise is simple, you are playing poker hands to gain chips and beat the required chip counts of each bind. Better hands give better chips in addition to a higher multiplier (mult). But then the twists come in.

Jokers

Jokers add to the game by giving different abilities. Some add mult, some multiply your mult, add chips to certain poker hands, give you money for free, or even destroy each other for some added benefit. The list goes on.

The Shop

This is only the surface though, in addition you have cards and packs you can buy in the shop:

• Tarot packs (tarot cards) allow you to delete cards from your deck, enhance them to give you additional chips, add/multiply mult, add a seal that gives you additional cards, or give you cash to use in the shop.
  
• Celestial packs (planetary cards) are used to level up each type of poker hand to give you additional base chips and mult.
  
• Standard packs give you regular and enhanced playing cards to add to your deck.
  
• Spectral packs allow you to put seals on cards, change a specific amount of cards to a certain rank/suit, enhance joker cards.
  
• Vouchers allow you to alter the shop so that you can buy playing cards directly, get discounted prices, have certain cards appear more frequently, it goes on.

Decks and Stakes

In addition, there's even more content. You have multiple decks that give you different advantages in-game such as an addition hand or discard, or additional money, or have you start out with particular vouchers. Once you beat the game, it's not over. There's numerous more stakes that only make the game more difficult and more addicting.


There's a common theme with this game, it's addicting, and it's deep for the price the devs are asking. 25 hours in so far, and while I've collected most of the cards, I have barely gone through the challenges, all the decks, and all the stakes. While at times, your RNG might be frustrating—especially at the beginning with little content unlocked, there's plenty of times where I can just sit down and enjoy playing poker, or have your monkey brain lit up with dopamine as you hit 100,000 or 1,000,000 chips in one hit.

Aside from gameplay, the older-style pixel graphics look great. It's simple and give the game a unique flavor. I also haven't experienced any bugs—the game runs great both on my PC and my Mac (so I can gamble instead of focusing on my bachelors). The only issue I have is the fact there is only one soundtrack, but it isn't enough for me to really gripe—I can turn on Spotify and listen to my music.

Overall, for the price of $14.99, buy this game. It already is overwhelmingly positive! This is my first time playing a rogue-like deckbuilder, and I am not disappointed. I had a friend who at first thought this game was going to be boring after a couple minutes, and is now DEDICATED, not addicted to playing. If you are one who wants to gamble without the crippling debt or busted kneecaps from loan sharks, this is a great alternative. Overall 9/10.

Once again, Steam's lack of a mixed rating has stricken me to choose either Positive or Negative! But that's okay, let me explain.


As many fellow other players have stated throughout the Steam reviews, the concept Gaijin is pushing with War Thunder, in theory, is a great idea! The sheer amount of vehicles within the game throughout aviation, maritime, tanks, and even helicopters is great leading to wonders into the ideas of historical battles. Unfortunately, the reason I cannot purely recommend the game is due to Gaijin's poor, and continual poor execution of the theory. While I am not an OG player from the 2011-2012 era of the game, my start in 2015 has given me a fair bit of time with the game (while steam shows 670~ish hours, I have played a couple hundred hours on a really old account that did not use Steam as a middleman for the launcher.)

Originally, I came to this game as a result of leaving World of Tanks, a game of somewhat similar, but arcade-y nature that I cannot recommend at all due to Wargaming's incompetence. At the start, I had great fun with the more realistic aspects of the game, with the knockout system, realistic dynamics of shell performance, and wide variety of vehicles from the 4 nations within the game in 2015. The whole concept was considerably fun, and at first I really enjoyed grinding through a couple of trees to see what vehicles were offered. Gaijin listened to the veterans, and did whatever they could to find historical artifacts to give vehicle characteristics. In this time I learned the positives of the game:

• The variety of vehicles, giving insight into the different design doctrines.
  
• The ability to switch from a fun arcade mode Arcade Battles to a "serious" more realistic mode Realistic Battles to even a simulator mode Simulator Battles.
  
• The game can be fun at times with some intense battles.
  
• The potential for content creation with historical context is high.
  
• Most likely the most realistic tank simulator on the market—ALTHOUGH, to a degree. I will catch on that later.
  
• For a 10 year old game, the graphics still hold up well with the Dagor Engine.
  
• Gaijin does an excellent job of optimizing Dagor. You can run this game on a potato with no issues!

Unfortunately, this is where is ends. In my opinion, after the implementation of modern vehicles in 1.71 "New E.R.A", the game and the developers really started to show their true colors. As more modern vehicles started to release, eventually with helicopters too—which had it's own ♥♥♥♥♥♥ spawn-camping controversy, War Thunder become more and more of a pain to play with older vehicles. While I personally did not have the time to reach a single jet, the playing field was destroyed with top tier vehicles destroying WW2-era aircraft with Air-to-Air Missiles and speeds over Mach 1. The addition of APFSDS sabots along with HEAT-FS shells made playing WW2-era vehicles impossible as you could get hit and killed with ease by everything that had the shell. If you spent your life grinding to top tier, the entire battlefield was your playground as you could essentially kill anything with one shot. Vehicles built in the 1970s and 1980s are playing vehicles built in the 1940s and have no problem tearing them apart. The BR (battle rating) system used to rate vehicles in matchmaking is judged by win-rate which on paper, seems good, but in theory is inherently broken and imbalanced. The refusal of Gaijin to decompress BRs past 10.7 has made top-tier unplayable for specific nations.

Speaking of grind, this aspect is so bad, after around 800 hours, I have reached Rank 6 of American Ground Forces ONLY, Rank 3 of German Ground Forces, and Rank 3 of British RAF. I STILL have not reached an MBT such as the M1 Abrams, and this is with a considerable amount of money put into premium time. The grind in the game is absolutely horrid, and is designed explicitly to be frustrating so you pour your wallet into premium time like I did. To even remotely get a single top tier MBT without spending money is like a second job. It will take you hours upon hours of likely frustration to achieve it. In addition to this, you have to spend even more hours of your time grinding to make the vehicles good since stock vehicles are 90 percent of the time playing horrendous to say the least. As long as Gaijin continues to add top tier vehicles, the grind will only become evermore worse to cope with. Don't get me started on how terrible the events are.

The bugs and balance of the game are ridiculous. There are bugs within the game that have been present since I first join War Thunder. The biggest and most frustrating? Ghost shells. I cannot tell how many times I have had a game ruined because the shell will travel right through a tank, yet do absolutely nothing. This is not an internet issue, this is a server bug, you can literally look it up on YouTube! Speaking of internet, the dedicated server Gaijin uses is horrid. Constant packet loss, ping spikes to 999 with Ethernet, its sometimes unplayable. Most of the time, something will be patched, which in-cause, makes something else break. Balance in the game is not very good anymore. At specific BRs, certain factions completely dominate, and trust me when I say it is frustrating. You will be driving when out-of-nowhere, a vehicle traveling a max speed, with a stabilizer, and night vision kills you, yet you cannot see them at all. Map design only makes it worse when there is an open field and two game modes. Repair costs of some nations are crazy high, making a loss of income—EVEN with a great game without premium.

Lastly, I'd like to talk about the worst aspect of War Thunder as a whole. Gaijin. I originally had the respect of the devs when I first started, but now I have completely lost respect. Over the course of the past 3-4 years, Gaijin has shifted to become a textbook greedy game developer. They refuse to listen to the community's concerns, they actively silence any forms of critique on their forums, they continually repeat the same mistakes that the community does not want, such as "grindfest" type events—Operation S.U.M.M.E.R is a great example to look at, and they continually implement overpowered, pay-to-win vehicles for extravagant prices (50-60 Dollars for ONE vehicle!) I understand the game is free, and development is not free, but as many, MANY other games have demonstrated, there are fairer, more efficient ways to make money from a free-to-play game. I mean War Thunder has every microtransaction in the book. Premium vehicles, premium time, premium currency, DLC campaigns, lootboxes, skins / decorations, and STILL a battle pass! Gaijin effectively no longer cares about it's community, and I'm sure it never did. I refuse now to spend money on this game, and I regret every cent I invested now that I look back.

Nevertheless, Gaijin has turned scummy, and I hate to see a game with great potential be ruined by that.

I thank all that have taken the time to look and read through my review. I understand the negative connotation the review has, and you all are probably thinking, "he surely seems for negative than mixed." The reason I stay mixed is that the game can still be fun. If you want a historical World War 1 and 2 vehicle combat game, I definitely recommend for the first hundred or so hours, especially with the aviation tree. But after those first hundred or so, I recommend to get out before it gets addicting—you will save your sanity.

Due to the game being best played without spoilers, I am going to try to make this short and simple without revealing the game itself. The game itself is fairly simple, but the story behind the game itself is quite complex. When you first play the game, it seems as if it was an innocent Dating Simulator, which seems right for the first act. If you are not into this sort of stuff, the first act might seem boring, as it takes around 2-3 hours to get through.

This seems like so until the end of the first act. From here, the Psychological Horror element of the game starts to take place. The game starts to become more and more "corrupt" as freaky things start to occur within the club. Very, very bold text will take over certain parts of the text and the game itself will become "broken". Glitches and distortions will take over the game until you finish it. The game itself utilizes a twist on the "Visual Novel" and almost creeps me out. The game messes with its own files, creates more, and even has secrets hidden inside the files. The game takes a wild turn from the player manipulating the AI, to the AI manipulating you.

In the end, the game even requires you to mess with the files to progress forward, making the game "Break the Forth Wall" even further. You eventually learn the dark secrets within the club itself, with the game eventually deleting itself in the end. The game even has some easter eggs when messing with certain files anyways. Even when you have finished the game, there are even more easter eggs inside the game files, and even theories that lead up to a supposed game coming in 2018 from Team Salvato.


I myself am not very intersted in Anime, and mostly have mixed feelings about it, but I for sure enjoyed it playing the game. Playing DDLC without listening to any spoilers makes for a better experience. Dan and Team Salvato made an excellent game, which makes me wonder how this is even free to begin with. I find myself playing the game all over again just to dive even deeper into the mysteries behind the characters.

Although... Make sure to remember,

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I had high expectations, but were immediately quelled by the company who has made this game. I've been on board with this game since it's announcement in September of 2016, and yet, 3 years later, the game is the same as it was in beta. I may only have around 50 hours, but that's all you need to understand what this game really is. Just hit look at the updates and DLC section to understand what I mean.

This game has the gimmick of "authentic simulation", "beautiful graphics", and "immersion." In some aspects, yes, the game does provide those. Graphics are a significant upgrade over the dated graphics used in Train Simulator 20XX, the amount of interactivity is great compared to other sims I have tried. Certain systems such as the American communications-based train control (CBTC), ACSES and German LZB, PZB, SiFa work alright depending on route. But the more and more I've played the game, the more and more I realize how broken these aspects of the game are. Basic game mechanics and systems, even with NEW DLCs are broken. Some examples include SiFA and PZB systems, where there are signs or audible alerts missing, which are needed or else the locomotives go into emergency braking; pedestrians getting stuck on doors and walking onto tracks. I could go on and on. This doesn't include the pure fact how routes that came out with the base game (originally CSX: Heavy Haul) and later GWE and Rapid Transit are completely abandoned, with bugs unfixed that have been in the game since BETA. This only continues as more DLC are released, leaving the older routes to be unfixed and abandoned. It really sometimes seems that there is a true lack of QA for any content released.

Optimization is horrid. I run a RTX 2070 and a 3700x and rarely stay above 60 FPS. While optimization has gotten better since launch, I still get constant lag spikes, many dips below 30 FPS, and constant sound glitching—ruining the immersion. In honesty, I wouldn't call what Dovetail has done as optimization. In all reality, devs haven't optimized and rather just made the game look worse. Trees pop within viewing distance, track details pop within 100 meters of view, and routes just feel lifeless. No ambience and no people. It's like you are the only person on Earth. And to top it all off, this is on ultra settings. Wanna amp up the detail and fix the garbage render distance? Gotta make a .cfg and do it myself. Wanna turn up the sound since the game is so quiet? Gotta fix the config, because at 200 percent volume, I still cannot hear the sound of the locomotive.

It would be an embarrassment to the sim community to call this a "simulation." This "sim" has no feel to it. No cab sway, no bumps from older rail, no feeling of power or braking. Hell, the throttle system is broken. It runs more like different levels of cruise control with different speed settings. The environment has no dynamics. Yes, there are weather options and a day night cycle but what else? The only dynamics I see are trees moving in the wind, and with no affect if a train passes by.

To finish this review, let me state the ideas developers promised 3 years ago, and yet still are non-existent. There is no SDK, therefore no way for content creators to develop content along with any form of editor that has continually been talked about with devs only giving their famous response of "Soon™". There is still no multiplayer. The problem I described above with the "cruise-control type throttle" hasn't been fixed despite a thread being opened well over 2 years ago. Let me save the biggest for last. The name of the game itself. This game is not Train Sim "World." It is Train Sim "3 Countries."

As another reviewer "The Viking" and myself will agree, this game is not a "sim", it's a cash grab game filled with broken promises and mechanics, made by a developer who is known for caring more about what is in your money, than what you paid for.

3 Years Ago, I first joined Steam. The first ever game I bought was TS:2012. The second one ever was this one. Oh man I've had hours of fun with this game. I think this was the best F2P game you could get. Its so simple too. Now, lets get on to the game itself.
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Team Fortress 2 is a simple FPS game that can give you hours of fun. You can choose between 9 classes, each with their own distinct and unique personalities. There are many gamemodes to choose from, and there are tons, and tons of community made gamemodes, like Slender Fortress 2 and Prop Hunt. The most fun one in my book is Deathrun. There are tons of maps and even more by the community.
The biggest thing about the game is character customization. You can add taunts, hats, shirts, glasses, pants, and many more. There even is the feature of the Steam Market, where you can buy taunts, hats, shirts, etc. Its also kinda the same with weapons, as you can go to the internet and download skins for the weapons, if you dont like how it currently looks ingame.
Overall, Team Fortress 2 is another great Valve game using the Source engine. It gives hours of fun, with support and updates once a month. If you are sick of Call of Duty, Battlefield, or Medal of Honor, come play this cheesy, hilarious, addicting game that will keep you playing 24/7.