Recent reviews by Cabusha

The more I play this, the more I love it. Does the new mechlab suck? Yeah, kinda. Are there too many in game currencies to figure out? Yeah, kinda. Are the bugs annoying with keybinds dropping? Yeah. Does the game need some more optimization? Definitely.

BUT IT IS SO MUCH FUN. I've loved Mechwarrior since Mechwarrior 2, and honestly, this is the first game since Mechwarrior 3 that has really given me "the feels." The story is fantastic, the voice acting is good. The cinematics are sweet. The game is GORGEOUS. If you loved MW2 and MW3, this FINALLY is a real successor.

Whether or not it's worth full price to ya, is up to you. It's far from perfect, and definitely needs some polish, but if you love Mechwarrior, well, it's honestly the best one yet.

I've clocked about 200 hours BSG Deadlock, and finished all 6 main campaigns. I quite enjoyed it, and love the atmosphere and music. It really captures the essence and feel of the 2003/2004 show. The DLC is definitely on the spendy side, so I'd wait for a deep sale. But if you're wanting to explore the first Cylon war, this is probably the best way to do so.

Picked this up on sale and don't regret it. A total love letter to the RoboCop franchise, and a classic, fun shooter. If you loved FarCry3:BloodDragon, this is right up your alley!

Oh heck yeah I would recommend Solasta! I've got just shy of 80s hours clocked, and as I unlock new spells and abilities, I still keep finding new interactions I didn't know the Devs coded in. The first 4-5 hours of the main campaign is a bit dry, after that though, the campaign picks up the pace, and the combat is fun pretty much no matter what. The difficulty it highly customizable, be it needing every single spell component to cast, to not caring, to somewhere in the middle. Enemies could be full murder hobos who relentlessly attack your downed foes, or you could detune them to never even crit on ya. Much like true D&D, you can basically House-Rule a ton of the game's features. While it lacks a lot of the famous sub-classes, the majority of the Solasta exclusive sub-classes are fun or interesting, with a couple pretty darned powerful.

Biggest caveat is to truly get the most out of the game, you'll probably want all the DLC because a lot of the newer workshop content requires it. That said, it's a small dev, and they've put a lot of love into this game. Is it the pretties thing every? NOPE, not even close, but it is by far the best adaptation of D&D 5E that I've played (BG3 being the 1000lb Ogre in the corner that's still a work in progress as of this writing).

For reference, I LOVE BG1 and 2, and while I never finished Wrath, I did clock over 200 hours in it. This scratches that "tactical RPG itch" that Pillars (and its sequel) just never really did, for me. Not bad games, but not for me.

Hope this helps!

I've been playing this game (or a version of it) off and on since 1998. It and its sequal BG2 are such good games mechanically, with such a responsive engine, that it's still my favorite implementation of the D&D rules (2nd edition/Advanced in this case) in any PC game. On top of that, the story across these two games are incredible. Yes, the character interactions are a bit weak in this, the first of the Bioware games, but a lot of the ground work that appears later is started here. And better, of all the Infinity Engine games I've played, this one most encapsulates that feeling of wonder and terror that is low-level, old school D&D.

Highly recommend this game.

Not a fan. Too much fan service/pandering foreshadowing BGII. The new voice acting annoyed the hell out of me, and the writing style doesn't fit at all with the original BG1 or BG2 content. It feels like crappy fan fiction. Stick to the originals.

The character portaits in the actual fights are just your normal portraits, fighter, wizard, etc, just with a tiny gobblin icon over it.

That's just lazy. Why include the the new art, but not bother to update the button icons?

Bought this a year ago, and put about 20 hours into the light campaign on the old engine. I enjoyed the tinkering aspect, but to be honest, there's no game here yet. Which is a pitty beause I love the idea of it. It's a great concept! And the joy of tinkering with an engine's displacement, bore/stroke, fuel management, etc, is a joy for gear heads!

Buuuuut a year later and there's been basically no real progress. The Devs have said they are trying to get the alpha out this December with the rudiments of a campaign in the Unreal engine. But, that's 3 years of development JUST to migrate to unreal engine.

That's atrocious development speed. Save your money and wait a couple a year or two and see where the game is. Because it's still snake oil.

I've clocked ~184 hours into Battletech now, both Stock and heavily modded, and I love this game. It's an excellent adaptation of the Classic Battletech (CBT) tabletop game, and while not 100% identical, it brings the "feel" of the table to the PC. The mechs are beutiful, melee combat never gets old, and coring out a spider with an AC20 always feels good.

Ballance wasn't perfect at launch, but the patches are bringing the weapons closer to where they should be. Performance has improved, and the game is solid for stability. Only 2 hangs that I recall.

The game is very Mod friendly, with simple JSON edits allowing you to tweak and tune most of the game's settings or equipment. The modding community has really taken off, with huge changes such as open universe maps, different weapons, GUI changes, etc. As the game receives official expansions, it's only going to improve.

If you love CBT, this is the closest you'll find short of MEGAMEK, and it's a heck of a lot easier to work with. LOVE IT!

I've been playing MWO since closed beta, Summer 2012. Four years is a loooong time to be playing any one game, but it's kept me and my crew together. If you want heavy firepower wielding mechs, this is pretty much the best game in town. Less twitchy than other FPS titles so better for older players.

The Good:

Art and Design of the mechs. By far this is the best that battlemechs have ever looked in a video game. Just go look at MW4 and cringe. While a few of the redesigns were a bit of a miss (looking at you WarHammer), the major are unbelievably good (Atlas, Catapult, Cataphract, Summoner) etc. Even o es that never looked that good to being with (Jager mech, Stalker).

Gameplay is solid. The arm+torso movement for aiming is simple brilliant and this is the best mechs have ever handled. Assaults (except Kodiak...) feel heavy and methodical. While something as small as the Locust feels insanely fast and nimble.

Mech customization is damn near infinite. Not very chassis can do what you want, but there's a mech or variant somewhere that CAN. Build variety and the near endless way to build a mech is solid.

Negatives:

Harsh to new players. Much like Eve, opening this game up the first time is less of a learning curve and more of a vertical WALL. There is finally a new player tutorial for driving a mech, but still absolutely nothing for the mechlab. That said, the community is very helpful, and there are many community run Team speak servers avail with people glad and willing to show players the ropes.

Tiny community. MechWarrior just isn't that big anymore. While huge during the 90s, it's very much a niche product today. After 11 or so Pacific, you'll start seeing familiar faces every drop or two. Just not a big enough pool to build matches.

Big fish in little ponds. This game has a "Pilot Skill Rating.". (PSR) Basically it's an XP bar that fills to move you up in tiers. Play really poor early on and you'll probably start at Tier 5, and over time you'll move up. Big issue is it is HEAVILY biased to move players up, so you'll hit tier 3 pretty quick. After that you're just food for the Tier 1 elite crowd. They tend to be the players that support the game the most financially buying the pre-order mech packs, so to keep them entertained the game is geared to throw easy targets at them. Unless you run with a crew that WANT to be the best and focus fire and build to the meta, you're going to be rolled a lot at higher tiers.

My crew is a very casual group that play because we love big stompy robots and want to play something that supports 2 to 12 of us at a time. But because the PSR is biased so heavily, most of us are tier 1 or 2, but we're NOT that caliber of players. We've just played enough it shoves us against MS, 228, KCOM, etc. So we get rolled. Small community though so MM is designed to put as many people into the same port as quickly as possible.

Limited game modes. You've got Assault (kill everything or capture their base), Conquest (kill everything and capture enough bases), and Skirmish (kill everything). There's none of the real objective based gameplay that MechWarrior is known for. There was an attempt with community warfare for two years, but it's largely died off because of poor design and developer miss steps.

Glacial development. The last real issue is development is at a snail's pace. The core gameplay really hasn't changed since Alpha. They do have mech creation down to a science, but actual Ballance changes or adjustments are once yearly, at best, with huge imbalances receiving no attention for months at a time.

Overall what you see is what you get with MechWarrior Online. I don't see it changing much in the next two years, but for solid Team Death Match with Robots, it's pretty much unbeatable. Just don't go in expecting the Battletech or MechWarrior heritage for objective based gameplay or more. It's not here