Recent reviews by Anakin Solo

84/100
I am harsh in my ratings - I rate no game 10/10

Disclaimer: Sins of a Solar Empire was the first game that I personally bought, rather than just playing ones my siblings already owned. It occupies a special place in my gaming career, which makes me admittedly biased.

Pros:
This is everything a sequel should be, in my opinion. It retains essentially everything the first game had, but polishes up every aspect of the game and then adds on suitable and synergistic mechanics to flesh out the game. SoaSE is and was dated - an early entry from a younger studio in 2008. It struggled performance wise, even on high end equipment, and its capabilities were clearly hamstrung by the engine.
SoaSE II solves literally every problem I had with SoaSE.
Graphically, there is dispute and debate over the final product. Early SoaSE II art was more chunky, bright and cartoony, which was a sharp divergence form the grittier and darker tones of SoaSE. Stardock heard this, however, and toned back quite a bit. Personally, I feel like the resulting visuals are a logical result of taking the original designs and updating them to modern capacity graphics. Yes, there are changes, but having spent hundreds of hours looking at these ships, I recognize them all and they still feel right.
Gameplay is tight and it feels very similar. This is not a negative, because SoaSE had pretty aces gameplay. Stardock didn't need to reinvent the wheel, so they did not. Each ship still feels like the original, the moment-to-moment management feels about the same and battles run as expected.
Capital Ship loadouts. This is, to me, the real hallmark of SoaSE II. In SoaSE, capital ships could level up and you could choose which skills to max first, but realistically, there wasn't much nuance to a capship. Each one basically had an 'optimal' path and really, when the game ran on long enough, you'd end up maxing all the skills anyway as they hit level 10.
SoaSE II improves on this in the best possible way. Exp and skill levels are still there, but they have added a 'subsystem' or 'item' kind of mechanic to capships. Not only can you now equip your capitals with actual consumable items like shield boosters, but you can customize each capship like you did starbases in SoaSE. The result? A lot of flexibility, actually! Just for an example - I built a Radiance battleship as a dps monster, focusing on psi power and a subsystem that lowered weapon reload based on psi. Another Radiance I specced into defense as much as possible as well as skill duration, then maxed out its forced aggro skill. A tank battleship, essentially.
Similar to capships, Planets now have similar slot formations as well. Planets in SoaSE were pretty basic - you just maxed out each upgrade and moved on to the next. Now, with limited slots and a bunch of planetary 'buildings' you can min-max and specialize planets way beyond what was previously possible, while also still being simple enough that managing an entire empire doesn't turn into a Stellaris-level task. For instance - I was running low on credit income and I colonized a planet with beneifical modifiers to crystal mining output. Well, I could plunk down a facility that converted all crystal to credits, then two more that would multiply that income - and now that planet became my second highest credit income source.
Audio and SFX - Stardock, in keeping with the rest of the design of this game, also did not reinvent the wheel for the audio. The classic voicelines return, each ship calling out just as they did sixteen years ago. New voice lines add more flavor and character to ships, while sticking still with the same feel. SFX wise, the sounds are crisper and cleaner, while still recognizable and classic.

Cons:
AI art. The elephant in the room, and one I have a much milder take on. The AI generation was used for research icons and nothing else, as far as I'm aware. This is...honestly quite reasonable to me. Research icons are miniscule and essentially exist as flavor, with no real greater impact. However, my issue is more one of consistency. SoaSE had very connected icons with consistent flavor to them, while the AI generated icons of SoaSE II do not. It makes navigating the research window a bit of a hassle and the tiers of particular research don't really feel like they're connected. It's not a massive problem, but it's one that, frankly, should be easy to fix.
AI intelligence. This is not unique to SoaSE II or any other video game, but the computer opponents are not smart at all. They have poor decision making, commit to unwinnable battles, retreat inexplicably and sometimes just...stop doing anything at all. SoaSE had similar problems and I understand that effective and intelligence hostile AI is a big undertaking, but it does diminish some of the enjoyment of a victory when you know it's because the AI is just really, really bad at the game.
Balance. Admittedly, I have not played much, and I'll be keeping a close eye as time goes on, but right now, the Advent feel incredibly overtuned. I should like this, as an Advent main, but their global psi skills are hilariously powerful and there's some incredible synergies within their fleet that I am not sure the TEC or Vasari can match. In theory, in the rock-paper-scissors of SoaSE II, the Vasari should be a dangerous counter to the Advent, but I completely dumpstered the Vasari multiple times, despite having near-parity fleets. Some battles had almost 0 losses.
Steam Achivements. Okay, this is petty and it doesn't actually calculate into my score. But dammit, I want achievements!
Underbaked factions. I love the idea of the enclave/lesser factions. It breathes life into the galaxy and the unique effects each one provides are fun and interesting. That said, this feature is clearly underbaked. There are only five factions and each one has no variation in what is offered. They do essentially nothing besides being a sink for the otherwise pointless 'influence' resource, which is laughably easy to come by with a bit of research and a few planetary buildings. There is the core of a great system here, but it needs serious iteration to reach that potential. There needs to be randomized rewards and relics from factions, there needs to be more than five, and they need to have deeper diplomatic interactions.
The Eradica Titan. As an Advent main, they massacred my boy. Not only is the model so much simpler and less elegant, ornate and unique as in SoaSE, but the SFX for Chastic Burst was BUTCHERED. BUTCHERED! Justice for the Eradica, bring back the space mecha angel.
Less galaxy options. SoaSE allowed for quite a bit of customization for each game. You could select AI difficulty, AI focus type, you could alter a bunch of variables like ship speed, research speed, income speeds, fleet sizes, etc. SoaSE II lacks almost all those options, making it very, very hard to tune games to your desire. Stardock really needs to bring these options back.

Sins of a Solar Empire II is a worthy successor to SoaSE, elevating the original game to new heights with improved graphics, performance and brand-new mechanics that seamlessly slot into the framework that was already nearly perfect sixteen years ago. While SoaSE II definitely has room to grow and is missing both quality-of-life features from the previous title as well as teething problems of balance and customization, there is clearly a strong and deep foundation to build off of for years to come. With the announcement of a Campaign mode and a coming 4th race, I am hopeful that Stardock will support this game for years to come and help it to realize its fullest potential.

8/10 - 85/100
I am harsh on my ratings - I rate no game as 10/10.

Pros:
The style is undeniable. A lot of games can get a same-ish feeling, but Remnant always manages to stand out in enemy design, world design and art direction. Like From Ashes, Remnant II brings a myriad of vastly different worlds to play through, each bringing their own genre and theme that makes replaying legitimately easy and fun to do.
Piggybacking from style, I really cannot understate the variety in the game. N'Erud is a haunting, empty and HR Giger/Alien inspired scifi mystery. Yaesha is a sundrenched and humid fantasy jungle world. Lossomn is the most striking - a severe duality of Bloodborne-esque Victorian urban sprawl and eerie, ethereally beautiful Fae palace.
Each world is a treat to explore with how different they are.

Story lines. Each world has, by default, 2 stories that can roll in each new campaign or adventure mode. On top of the dungeon selection, this means it will take several playthroughs to experience all of each world. Each DLC also adds onto that, bringing the totals up to 3/3/2(soon to be 3). You get different story bosses, different loot, different encounters and even different starting locations. Combine that with how each storyline has at least two branching paths, Remnant strongly rewards replaying in a very tangible way.

Gameplay. As a Soulslite, Remnant is challenging, even on the lower difficulties. It punishes mistakes, it rewards practice. I admit - I am not a Soulslike fan. Remant's strength in gameplay is that at no point, even on the hardest difficulties, does any encounter feel '♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥'. Even wiping on a boss a dozen times in a row doesn't prompt frustration or irritation, but rather 'Damn, I was so close, but I'm getting it'. None of the bosses feel like they're overtuned or overdesigned, none of them have mechanics that strike a vibe of being unfair. Even the craziest, most hectic fights in the game are clear, telegraphed and understandable and generally easy to understand, to learn, but hard to master.
It is consistently a good feeling to clear bosses and dungeons.
Mob enemies are almost always the same way - there are only one or two that I have a particular grudge for, mostly because of triple or quadruple attack patterns that are a spanker to get the timing right on. Remnant manages to have enemies for each world that fill the same roles, but don't feel like a palette swap. Not the easiest to do!

Economy and leveling. The selection of weapons in the game is stellar. Each one feels like it brings something new to the table and I usually find myself trying out each new one I find for a least a little bit. I have my favorites, absolutely, but the little quirks and character Remnant has for each gun and blade means I'm content to try more and maybe find a new favorite or two.
The upgrading economy feels fair. Resources can be tight, but it never feels hopeless or overwhelming, and with the variety of world generation, a quick farming loop through one world doesn't feel like a chore. It scales well through the game, so that you never feel like you're in a drought, while eventually hitting the point in the late game that you feel comfortable enough to splurge more.
The traits and perks allow for a lot of good buildcrafting, with a pretty generous amount of points to spend across them. Making each archetype's unique trait universal after maxing that archetype was an inspired choice, because being able to mix and match around traits to other archetypes definitely gives more depth to builds.
I never felt pressed on xp - there's items that boost XP gain and unlike in some games, where I'll stunt my build a little to cram in that boost, Remnant didn't make me feel that way. XP gain felt fair and generally rapid enough that there was never a 'plateau' moment.

Armor. A lot of sets and the decision to shift from more heavily statted armor into less variation of stat to allow for more cosmetic swapping wasn't bad, but it does make the game feel a little emaciated in that corner. That said - there's a LOT of armors and a lot of pretty good variation in the looks. You've got the grungy post-apocalyptic, but you also have beautiful fantasy and sleek scifi.

Cons:
Remnant 2 now has a fantastic build management system! Con removed!

Armor. The downside to armors is that very few are found in the world itself. Most are just bought from vendors, which is disappointing. This is a more personal complaint of mine, but I like looting and finding things, rather than just buying them. I wish more armor sets were out there in the world to be found.

Melee and hip fire. Another personal complaint, but I kind of hate the lack of hipfire. I understand this is a conscious choice the developers made, but it's frustrating. Maybe it's because I'm so used to it being in every single other game I play, but it does make going back and forth a hassle to refresh my muscle memory as I go to hipfire in Remnant again. The melee is less of an issue, because at least you can rebind your melee from being the 'automatically close to an enemy, now you melee' to a keybound and forced melee. The former feels extremely weird and unnatural. I also have some complaints on charged melee, because there's some interactions with charged melee and sprinting that isn't outlined in the game that you have to learn by trial and error.

Summary:
All in all, a very fun game with solid difficulty that never feels frustrating. A great blend of genres and styles, with a wide variety of weapons and modifiers and traits to craft your own preferred builds and solid replayability due to the world and story structure. Marred by some missteps, like the lack of very basic quality of life in inventory management but manages to make those negatives minor and an irritation rather than an impediment.
Strongly recommended with friends!

Pros:
+It's a Bungie game. The gunplay is impeccable and the controls are among the most polished of any dev. What else is new.
+It's a really interesting universe. The writers for the grimoire and lore cards are, generally, very talented and inventive
+The three classes have distinct feeling and differences to each other, for solid identities
+Seasonal content has been getting *better* over the past three seasons (written as of Season of the Lost) in terms of quality and polish, but this has been a very long process.

Cons:
-The in-game narrative is generally very generic and boring
-After 6 years, 2 titles and a dozen expansions, Bungie still does not have a clear vision for what they want their game to be
-If you enjoy something, it WILL be removed at some point
-They deleted half the game in the interest of 'keeping the size lower' but almost all the assets still remain in-game in other maps.
-Did I mention that Bungie still has no vision for what they want to do with the game?
-They have no consistent vision for what they want to do with the game
-It seriously changes every three months
-The microtransaction and cash store aspect has only continually ballooned from D1 and consistently devours development time from actual, paid expansions
-Did I mention they deleted half the game?
-There is one mechanic, and that is to pick up a ball and throw it or, if things are REALLY crazy, to dunk it.
-PVP is both an afterthought and a stifling influence on the entire game. It is not balanced and cannot be balanced, but over-reactions from Bungie have murdered countless skills and weapons in the name of chasing the unattainable

July 2022 Edit
Well, it's been quite some time and several expansions since my review.
It hasn't changed.

+The writing has improved a fair bit. It still lackluster in places - Bungie really likes to rely on putting very interesting and important character development moments and scenes in the text-only lorebooks, while skimping a great deal on in-game cutscenes, much to the detriment of the actually quite good characters.
+The Subclass reworks have been, mostly, a success. Void feels like it's in a very good place, and Solar, while having some issues, especially for Warlocks, has been a net positive.

-This is still, sadly, a minimum viable product. Bungie is not a smol indie studio. They are an incredibly successfull AAA company, that, frankly, rakes in cash. They are at the moment TRIPLE DIPPING the monetization of Destiny 2, yet they still cannot take the time nor effort to put in what might be called 'polish.'
I don't mean in terms of 'there's bugs, or unfinished things', but in terms of what you'd expect from a game that the studio *cared* about

Destiny 2 still remains, basically, the same formulas, the same mechanics, the same events, recycled over and over. While Witch Queen was a strong improvement in level design, bringing to mind Halo at times, even, it still lacked any great oomph. Nothing was unique. Never was there was a setpiece made just for the campaign. Never were there mechanics or maps made just for the campaign. Always, always, you knew what you see would be recycled once, twice, ten, a hundred times. In seasonal activities, in raids, in patrols.

Consider Journey's End, in Halo 3. When you crest the ridge and the music hits and then - shockingly - TWO scarabs fall from the sky. The mission turns into a pitched, massive battle between tanks, aircraft, infantry vehicles, and these two massive walkers. It's chaos, it's amazing, and it's endlessly memorable. Or in Halo CE, landing on the beach in The Silent Cartographer, aping Normandy except on an alien halo ring, taking a beach alongside marines.

Destiny still doesn't have those moments. Campaign missions still feel like patrols or strikes. Pick up some orb, bank it here. Collect a few drops, activate a plate. Kill an orange bar.

The biggest negative I feel, for Destiny, which has maintained for it's lifetime and I think will likely remain forever, is that Bungie has never really felt like they're *excited* about this game. The Campaign always feels like it's an obligation, like it's there because oh, well, we have to have it. The pvp feels like it exists because, well, it's a modern game, so of course there has to be competative multiplayer. Gambit exists because well, three is a rounder number for core playlists than two.

There is no *polish*. There is no oomph, no passion, no *energy* behind the development.

Among the other problems, and even the strengths, that is why I can never recommend Destiny 2. You always know what you're going to get. I'm sure come Lightfall we'll be fighting waves of scorn to stand on a plate, to spawn an orange bar, to bank an orb to finish the next mission. And then we'll do the same in the seasonal activity.

Hang dong, beat up people, hunt crocodiles, kidnap baby tigers, turn anyone and everything into food...what's not to love?

Well, probably the memory issues that means you should just take five minutes to go get a sandwich and a drink when loading a single player game because it'll be unplayably jerky and twitchy until everything finally loads in.

Or the fact that the AI cheats like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and appears to have no stamina like you do. Or that your thrall allies can barely be controlled or commanded, so they turn into blood hungry psychopaths that result in you having to butcher half of a city.

Or that this game is extremely heavily weighted toward online play so for a single player experience you have to really mess with the values for it to not be a grind worthy of a Korean mmo.

Or that the building controls require using mods to not want to kill yourself with how twitchy and restrictive they are

But also...you get to hang dong, run around beating up people, eating everything you can see like a lunatic with pika and building giant forts to lord over all your peasants with.

It's got promise. It's pretty fun. It's not perfect. It could do with a lot of iteration and overhauls.

But it's worth the money if you can grab it during a sale, and you've got an itch for a survival sandbox.

At least it's not early access.

You've played Mass Effect. You've played Gears of War. You've played all of those dime-a-dozen, run-to-convenient-chest-high-walls and squat down and pop out and shoot and hide again because you're about as tough as a wet paper bag.

That is not this game. You are an eight-foot-tall, armed and armored to the teeth Angel of the Emperor named Captain Titus. You are an undeniable freight train of destruction. Your enemies? They cower behind cover. You? You SMASH that cover, grab the orks by the neck, and rip them in half with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sword that is also a massive chainsaw. You do not hide, you do not hesitate, you charge in like an angry god and you murder. everything. in a fantastic baptism of gore and fire.

That is what this game is. It is nonstop insanity, it is staggeringly beautiful, bloody, deadly, and immense. You feel like a one-ton-in-armor supersoldier. You feel the sheer power of every gun. Every sword, or axe, or titanic thunder hammer. You feel like a Space Marine.