Recent reviews by mconra

Helldivers 2 is one of the finest games I've ever played and is a breath of fresh air with it's non-overbearing monetization, an extremely competitive price, and easily the most innovative take on the live service model we've ever seen.

Having essentially a gigantic community D&D campaign centered around a galactic war is a genius evolution of the original game, and much of the game itself is an incredible 3D conversion of the original Helldivers 1. Content has been flowing at breakneck speed and there is perhaps no other dev I've seen that is so receptive to community feedback.

As promised, I have updated my review and everyone else who gave a negative review due to the proposed changes from Sony should do the same.

*Old Review prior to Playstation's post
*The quiet part is so close to being said out loud that it isn't even funny. Sony can kick rocks, if the game survived without account linking up till now then it'll survive in perpetuity without it. I don't own a playstation and I don't plan to, there's no reason for me or anybody else on steam to make a PSN account.

At bare minimum you need to refund all the people in unsupported countries that you rear ended by selling them a game you were planning on breaking by requiring this feature.

It's unfortunate for those at Arrowhead that have worked so hard on this just to get another black mark on the record due to Sony's greed but it needs to be called out. Do right by those in the Philippines, Russia, the Baltics, and more that you effectively defrauded and I'll consider changing my review. And for arrowhead, you need to throw off the yoke at some point in the future. It's great that Sony supported development and all but this is overwhelmingly a PC game first/console game second and they need to butt out or lose the partnership if they're going to try to sabotage the game like this. Developers leave stifling and abusive publishers all the time and HD2 is exactly the success needed to go work on your own projects instead.

I'm not going to not recommend it since I'm genuinely enjoying the game but much like cyberpunk on launch there's a lot that needs fixing and major room for improvement here. Performance is rocky. Feels about like what I would've expected on my old vega 56 but now I'm on a 6900 xt and it's performing the same. Could be worse but I'd like it to be better. Lots of inbuilt tedium that should just be gotten rid of. Attachments should be able to freely be exchanged between guns, without a workbench, and without materials. The materials were the last straw for me, finally found the freaking bench but I dropped my iron ages ago because the inventory capacity is minuscule and the amount of loot is immense. If you're going to make all the crafting and a large chunk of the progression in the game tied to materials then they really need to weigh less. armor and guns feel fine but materials weigh wayyyyyyy too much and it's disrupting my game play at this point. I'm tempted to just drop it all in a cave and ignore it if it's just going to be a bunch of flavorless sci-fi garbage that weighs down my inventory. If I can't pick up the loot because I have no inventory space then exploring starts to feel pointless and at that point I feel like the game has lost a huge chunk of its content. Remove the tedium, of all the games to get rid of the ridiculously tedious bethesda inventory management this is the one to do so. It adds nothing at all to the game and for me personally it's ruining an otherwise great experience. It got old real fast in skyrim and it should've died there. In this game it's all that much more worse

This is an utter nothing burger of an expansion and I feel like an idiot for buying it considering it's been years without any meaningful updates to what was already a content dessert of an expansion. The odyssey content runs poorly, is buggy, and caused debilitating crashes and performance issues for months. You can't even explore your own ship but you can go explore the utterly empty planets that were there and traversible before in SRVs. Ground missions are shallow, contrived, buggy, and have awful, awful payouts. Do yourself a favor and play a game that has a studio that's actually still actively developing their game, ED became virtual abandonware a while ago and Odyssey was a test to see how many suckers were still willing to pay up for something they already bought.

You know, I'm someone who swore up and down that I'd never enjoy or buy a puzzle game, but here's shipbreaker, which at the end of the day is little more than a puzzle game in zero-G with some of the most satisfying mechanics and wrappings I've ever seen. The soundtrack is beautiful, the ships are a joy to disassemble once you settle into a rhythm, and the whole formula just works as a sci fi game in general. Add in the rather badass and unapologetic analogy to modern day debt culture that practically bakes in a relatable character for your average debt-laden american who's borrowing just to live and you've got an absolute masterpiece of a game. Listen to the full soundtrack version on spotify/apple music, or buy it on steam if you really feel like supporting blackbird for a full experience,

Don't buy it if you want to play multiplayer. A large part of the game is working on your base and being able to go back there to heal and such, and the developers essentially did everything in their power to lock you out of as much of that part of the game as possible if you try to do online multiplayer. This is intended and the developer has no intentions on improving on it that I have seen or heard. I didn't find any of the rest of the game all that special or engaging compared to other zombie games. Animations are also pretty jerky/uncanny, not sure what it is about them but they just all felt off to me. That's excusable for something like 7 days to die, but not something published by Xbox.

GTFO strips away all the modern nonsense from most AAA gaming and pours heart and soul into what truly matters - the experience. "Nightmarish Atmosphere" doesn't even begin to cover it. Progression is purely up to you - will you learn and try new tactics? Or will you repeatedly try the same thing and wonder why you're still getting massacred? There's no grind, no my stats vs their stats like WoW and MHW, and I honestly have to say I prefer it that way. The game is simple enough to not require tutorials of any kind, yet complex enough to challenge your intuition. I'd love to see the story fleshed out a bit, having it hidden in terminals and such throughout the missions would be a great idea imo. This is, after all, early access and with all the work that went into everything else I can't complain too much. There is no matchmaking... and honestly if there was matchmaking, I'd expect it to make the experience worse. The only thing worse than a sleeping horde of fungus zombies is Leroy Jenkins the Second rushing in guns blazing to wake them all up. It'd be a development loop for the already small team... MM would lead to calls for a report/ban/kick system, etc. The opportunities for trolling in this game are many and numerous, you're better off finding a group of friends you trust to take it seriously than you are relying on 3 random people to not screw you over at any given moment, this is a game that punishes mistakes, brutally. You'll be making enough on your own without someone else actively trying to mess up. Maybe an in-game clan system would be a better idea, or perhaps a link to the public discord should be included in the main menu. This is not a lazy dev team as others have said, and the stylistic choices they've made make for a new and refreshing experience. I honestly can't wait to see where it goes from here.

Wow. Where the hell do I start? On the absolutely stunning ship designs? The eerily elegant Umbral Wraiths themselves? Or the fact that I voted for each and every one of those things on G2G(Amplitude rocks, prove me wrong)? No, let's start with how incredibly satisfying it is to have your enemies not be able to even see your home system while you repeatedly hack the hell out of theirs causing absolute chaos in their empire while plotting your ultimate attack by placing sleepers and sanctuaries all over their systems. And did I mention you're making like 3-4 pops a turn? And each of them makes you better at hacking? Maybe the UC aren't for everybody, maybe you prefer the Cravers who zerg everyone into submission, or the Lumeris who backstab and trade their way to the top. Me? I'll be sitting totally cloaked in a random-a** black hole laughing and cranking up Thunderstruck by ACDC as my cloaked siege fleets spawn on top of your capital and you have no clue that they're even there until I unleash them and collapse your entire empire within the space of 5 turns or less(which is how long your fleets and planet defenses are paralyzed from aforesaid hacking). The UC early game snowballs so unbelievably hard it's not even funny(who am I kidding? I was laughing my a** off). If you enjoy the build tall strategy but still want to win by dramatic conquest instead of a quiet wonder or tech victory, the Umbral Choir is the faction for you. Hacking is so well-implemented, just make sure you leave tutorials on because you WILL be lost without them. And pirates are B******. They'll have anti-cloak 3 before you can even blink, and are better at interfering with hacks than even normal empires, so eliminate as many pirate dens as possible and replace them with sanctuaries ASAP. Haven't tested if being friends with them helps or not, I just get tired of paying them after awhile and purge them instead. Against human players the best idea is to not be annoying until you've reached the peak of your power, cause if you're annoying they'll rush anti-cloaking and hunt you down, and you'll quickly realize just how dangerous it is to function with only a single system.

IMPORTANT IF YOU OWN AN RX VEGA SERIES CARD
Wow. And I thought No Man's Sky was going to be the most horribly optimized game I bought this year. Game runs at a stuttering 30 fps under max gpu load if I'm lucky, and can't run any cinematic scenes unless all graphics are turned to low. My PC isn't some half-baked laptop either -- i7-6800K with an RX Vega 56. Even with all graphics settings turned up, the game still looks pretty mediocre, at least in the only opening scene I've been able to access without the game hard crashing my PC upon hitting a cinematic. I've found similar experiences but none of their fixes seem to work, and after an hour of screwing with this I'm done with it. The game was released in 2013..... How the hell can't it run on 2017 hardware?

UPDATE: I've gotten it to work by turning off all Amibient Occlusion/Antialiasing, and running in Windows 8 compatibility(who ever thought Windows 8 would be useful for anything?) So I'll change it to a begruding reccomendation... RX Vega owners beware! Kudos to Ubisoft for caring and replying to a grievance with one of their most beloved titles. If I enjoy this title, I'll definitely be going for the next (By the way, which game actually is next in the series?)

As a civ 4+5 player I have fairly high standards for 4x games, and after the abomination known as Civ 6 was released I searched for a new title. This game was absolutely perfect. It's quite honestly what I was hoping for from Beyond Earth, and for far less money due to expansions being free. The graphics are flawless on my MB Pro, and space battles are an absolute work of art. The ground battles however? Rather underwhelming to see jumpy digitized soldiers after 3D dreadnoughts tear each other to pieces in front of a neutron star. 9.5/10 (game rarely crashes, ground battles could be better)

Truly amazing game, you explore the galaxy in a ship you can customize as one of several races. Limitless planets to explore with varying biomes and creatures to capture and battle. I did enjoy the older game somewhat better, the newer version is a bit easier than I'd like but there's lots of great workshop mods so you can have the best of both worlds.

10/10 "would play 500 hours more"