Recent reviews by Borka

One of the games I return to on and off to play a few rounds, cranking up the volume and typically have a good time even as I keep not being any good at it.

Excellent production values. Probably the best audio design and performance in the genre, with excellent gun and explosion sounds, voice-overs with lots of effort put in to act in accordance to situation, great sounds even down to the details such as discarded magazines dropping the ground. Gameplay-wise balances an arcade-y shooter with close quarters military simulation that makes for quick enough rounds, fast action but still have a fair chunk of grittyness to its look and feel.

Playing other shooters after playing this one often feels constricted, as the game got a very smart system for threat callouts, a well-working slide mechanic and overall good balance between mobility, map sizes and weapon handling. Just the small detail of being able to choose between a regular reload and discarding a used magazine to save a tiny amount of reload time in a pressed situation is something I'd want in every shooter now.

Some of the smartest additions in the game comes from the VOIP being team and proximity at the same time, so enemies can hear call-outs in team VOIP if close enough. Adds a lot of life and fun to the game as banter between teams - and to my surprise there's surprisingly little antagonism between players.

There's some problems with team cosmetics slightly overlapping as design philosophies gets muddled slightly over time, causing some team identification issues at times. Performance I wish were a bit better, it took a fair chunk of high-end hardware to really get the looks and performance I wanted. Matchmaking auto-balance could also use some adjustment. During sales when new players join I often see one team with freshmen and the other team having an average of hundreds if not close to thousands of hours based on game rank.

Some of the cosmetics are also rolling out looking very tacky. But are largely saved from disrupting the game much hidden behind a paywall. Apart from that, my experience with the developers is positive. Very little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and the game gets new content at a healthy pace a few times a year with paid cosmetics being the only paid side content.

I recommend it, one of the highlights of the genre at the time being.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I'm torn about the game.

The presentation is a huge departure from the duds that was Halo 4 and 5, with significantly improved sense of how to work everything from visuals, map design and soundscape and audio balance. But maintains some of the poor Deviantart-esque writing, especially when it comes to the incredibly boring antagonists and the insufferable new Cortana character. The opening is especially strong to me, with good timing and engaging overall build-up. Where much of the cheesyness and artificial nostalgia harping makes the second half of the game a lot more dull.

Gameplay is what holds the game together, with satisfying gunplay and great freedom of movement given the new grapple-hook. Swinging around the map is intuitive, easy to control and just works. Some guns are a bit lackluster or are somewhat confused as to their intended role. The new freedom of movement I find makes vehicles almost pointless, especially given the vehicle behavior that make them viable only on pathways since smallest rubble stops them dead in their tracks.

The open world also didn't work for me. It has too much of a sterile arcade feel to it. Like playing an MMORPG, with all its busywork, but single-player. Go to point X, free the Marines or kill miniboss, get resource to eventually get new vehicles and weapons available. Do that 20-30 times and you quickly realize the open world was mostly a way to pad out game time in between story elements. What makes me sad is also the missed opportunity to make the Marines properly enjoyable to save through making them energetic and animated like in Halo CE. Instead we are given nameless NPC's with very limited range of animations, none of the attention to details from CE (such as budging when Warthog makes a fall or hard sway, getting weapons ready when player shoots, hit animations) make it into Infinite.

From what I understand the business model for Infinite, and also given its name, there'll be content updates and tweaks down the line that change the game up to some degree. Which will most likely make the open world feel more varied.

In essence I feel the asking price of 60€ for the campaign in its form right now is too steep given its fairly feature-poor condition. No split-screen on PC, no co-op campaign altogether before its scheduled release in May 2022. Multiplayer is free-to-play, which also means no Firefight or any other co-op modes included in the campaign release.

To sum it up in short:
Very good initial presentation and overall well produced.
Good music overall, even if Marty O'Donnells classic tracks still carries the musical identity of the game.
Good overall sound design.
Good gun- and overall gameplay.

Kind of dull overall story.
Vehicles kind of pointless, apart from carrying the rather unengaging Marine NPCs around.

New Cortana character is insufferable, very annoying and unnecessarily dings the experience.
The antagonists are very boring and their long-winded, poorly written monologues had me often tempted to skip cutscenes.
Asking price too tall at the moment before co-op and other features are included.

A decent game on console, but a clunky, slop of a port to PC. With its online services, such as the unlockable unit upgrades and persistent online campaigns, not a feature anymore the multiplayer experience is reduced to almost nothing but the bare minimum.

Fairly simple game balance, with only so much unit overlap, makes the game fairly intuitive to get into. Good presentation, great dynamic music and good overall effort into unit voices.

But the game on PC is close to unplayable. Camera is locked to individual units, there's no free camera and you need a specific unit to get the vital map display making the game a chore, as the game is constantly fighting you. These camera controls (or restrictions, more apt) were introduced to simplify the game for consoles, where the camera typically works fine, but the game on PC doesn't even natively support Xbox controllers - which is amazing, and telling how little thought Ubisoft put into this port.

Unless there's mods out there fixing these hopeless issues I recommend staying clear of this game on PC. Get it on cheap on Xbox instead.

The game has aged like milk in the hot sun. The fixed roughly 55-degrees field of view provide the perfect dizzying tunnel-vision to accompany this blurry grey-brown mess. Multiplayer is riddled with cheaters and custom lobbies as a great bonus to the already since-release hopelessly bad gun balance. Campaign is a snooze with five guys popping up behind every cover ever 10 metres of progress and campaign is written so poorly it's enough to give anyone unfortunate enough pondering about it brain bleed.

If you grew up with the game I can see some people seeing past the crippling flaws. But for anyone thinking of getting in to the (barren, empty and with puke on the floor) party 12 years late: don't.

Sucks something fierce. It has aged like a glass of milk and it was never any good from the get-go.
Multiplayer is a broken mess, matchmaking ain't working, hackers all over.
Don't buy it.

This game is a sad, confusing dud. Everything in the presentation; the art direction, sounds and even menus tell a tale of a product the developers had no confidence in. A side project in between making Wargame and its expansions. And it remains true to the design of the game. It's an unholy cocktail of taking Wargame, tightening up the perspective some, adding some base building and posing as if it's a successor to Act of War while ignoring the recognizable style and atmosphere that made the first game so engaging.

Base building is cluttered and uninteresting, the economy needlessly complicated, user interface amongst the worst I've seen in the genre - and it just isn't fun or engaging. From the first minute picking the game up it feels like it's fighting you with its clunkyness, unresponsive microscopic units and even the homogenous non-telling command icons makes even scanning for abilities or unit commands a chore. How this can happen from a RTS-heavy developer such as Eugen is beyond me.

The original Act of War had a bunch of issues, but its design was simple but effective. And given more economic muscles being published by Atari it had a proper good soundtrack, nice sound design and voices - and quirky Command & Conquer-esque live action cutscenes. And tidy overall visuals and presentation. Despite being over 15 years old the game is still properly playable and has aged well.

Act of Aggression takes the sound design in particular to poverty-level with muted voices that sounds like they were generated by a text-to-speech program and the music screams royality-free music whose tone doesn't fit the game one bit.

This is yet another hopeless dud in the genre up to par with the legendary spectacles such as Command & Conquer 4 and Dawn of War III. Skip it. It's not worth any money even during the Steam discounts where pocket lint buys you the game.

The game is essentially another Command & Conquer 4. Unfocused, boring and instantly abandoned by gamers and developers alike. I got the game through a free bundle promo. The game isn't worth any money - it's not even bad enough to make fun of. It's a sad display of a totally wasted effort. Anyone could see this failure coming as soon as they unveiled the first gameplay footage. Not even during the E3/Game Conference(s) did they make any effort to describe any gameplay elements beyond the marketing buzzwords; "large scale" and "epic". While in reality the game is a large scale fiasco and an epic fail.

Good riddance, Relic.

Impossible to play online since the free game handouts. European multiplayer swarmed with Chinese players who despite racking up thousands of hours of gametype doesn't understand the basics of the game.

I've been playing this game for almost three years now and while it has had its ups and downs it's slowly settling in becoming stable, well-balanced and recieving rather frequent and good updates,

I don't know how to review this game in a coherent way over Steam as the review section is mostly used for one-liners or jokes. But to sum up quickly:

Excellent shooter if you're playing organized with a friend or more, alternatively actively try and find some in-game guys to play with. Playing alone can be tedious, as it puts so much more pressure on your performance and there's no guarantee anyone will be around to help you.

Game also hosts proximity VOIP which adds to spontanous teamplay and local communication alot.

Guns are fairly tightly balanced and getting better all the time, there's no pay-to-win element as the only upgrades that are straight up character upgrades [like carrying more ammo or getting faster shield recharge] cannot be bought for money and all custom weapons are side-grades - default weapons are the default and are solid at all ranges and all tasks but excel in none.

Lots of customization that lets you and your outfit get a distinct look which adds alot to the immersion down the line when you start recognizing friends and enemies in the MMO world.

So; if you're a single-player that doesn't feel like playing organized with others then this game might not be for you. For people who enjoyed the old Battlefield games then this game ought to be a natural step in the right direction.

The new publisher also seems to take the game in a healthy direction with pretty good updates, good amount of communication and no real signs of reducing the steady package that is Planetside 2 into a Warface-P2W cashgrab.