Recent reviews by Bright176

It is utterly dishonest to call this an "Airborne Expansion"

Firstly, the progression is frustrating- Over an hour and a half in you wouldn't have even unlocked wings. The game kicks you in the balls by giving you balloons early on as if they're any kind of substitute for an plane. It wouldn't be overstating things to say I was absolutely fu**ing flabbergasted when the first mission it gives you is to build a car with a passenger seat to move a guy 10 meters from a rock he's standing on to a building well within walking distance. Why is it giving me this kind of tutorial, this is a DLC? I thought. because that's what this must be right? a quick basic tutorial going over the basic fundamentals of the game, I'll be making planes in a minute or two? No, in fact this was a tutorial for the DLC itself, because for a LONG time the only thing you're gonna be making is a car with a passenger seat. occasionally spicing things up by throwing a balloon on there.

The power core system - So the power core system makes sense, it prevents you from making super advanced vehicles (and I want to be clear here, by vehicles I mean cars because that's all you'll fu**ing be making in this "airborne expansion") right off the bat! But the power core system in this is infuriatingly limiting, especially as in the beginning you're limited to balloons to make flying machines which are ludicrously slow. A few more engines is the least Flashbulb could do to make this miserable trek across the sky in my fu**ing hot air balloon a little bit less frustrating. All the while feeling like a lost soul sailing across the river Acheron knowing full well I'm gonna be condemned to Tartarus when I'm subjected to making another car in this airborne DLC. A racing mission none the less, chasing a pirate speeder on land. I digress, weapons also use power cores. in this airborne DLC you'd think the biggest downside to weapons would be that they're heavy and mess with your aerodynamics, but no! They'll eat all your power cores so now if you want to arm your hot air balloon you'll have to reduce to an even more painful snails pace. In addition the land mission are also speed based because Flashblub have been sent on an unholy mission to ruin the lives of innocent people. This means you'll have to slow your CAR down by taking away engines to add weapons.

The mission are all fetch quests of the worst possible calibre - So, remember those passenger seats I write about? Well, I hate to break it to you but you're gonna be seeing a lot of those. In the early game most mission will be adding passenger seats to you car or (if you're lucky) hot air balloon, going to a place (which will take you forever in your slow hot air balloon), picking up birds and returning them to where you got the missions. Flashbulb is truly on the cutting edge of sophisticated and compelling mission design, as show in this DLC where they reinvent the fetch quest with less steps. I'd have rather they reinvent the medieval thumb screw and subject me to that than another slow, hot air balloon ride to pick up some fu**cking bird only to bring them back to where the mission started.

Suffice it to say I didn't enjoy this. In this games defence I didn't get very far into it, but I was just so deeply offended by the fact that I payed money for an airborne DLC, like actual real money, it asked me to build a car and deprived me an any kind of aeroplane parts for over and hour and a half at least! If you want this DLC specifically to make aeroplanes DO NOT GET IT.

Xcom is an utter master class in turn-based tactical squad command and has become a genre in and of itself.

Where the game shines:
1)The story is generally interesting and has been mostly copied 1-to-1 in almost all other games made within the genre. I'll go into more detail on the story toward the end with spoilers
2) mechanics are smooth and deeply enjoyable
3) customisation option cause you to form bonds with those under your command.
4) interesting base building elements mean you can play slightly differently every time!
5) maintaining public order is of importance! If the people start to panic your mysterious benefactor may loose faith in the project and pull support
6) Difficulty is enjoyable and well scaled with time!
7) game environments are unique and well designed! From open rural areas to the hearts of cities or even inside UFOs!
8) the Game concept is fantastic and perfectly well executed. You're a commander looking down on your people, during your turn you issue commands. Move here! Shoot this! Keep a look out and shoot anything that moves (called overwatch)! The map is shrouded in a fog of war, if your people can't see it, you can't see it!
9) it has an interesting mechanic where you have to scramble aircraft of your own to intercept and crash hostile UFOs. You then have to mobilise your team to kill the UFOs occupants and claim the tech for the project.
10) multiple objectives! In some missions you have to:
- Just kill all the hostiles
- in some you have to protect and evacuate civilians from a war zone. The aliens may engage in terrorism in an attempt to break humanities spirit (because if recent history is anything to go by that always works so well on humans *sarcastic eye roll*)
- Protect and escort people of interest back to HQ
- Capture grounded UFOs and their tech. Its similar to just killing hostiles but you have to be careful not to damage the valuable tech you plan to capture
- side quests: taking an alien back to base alive for further testing

Where the game falls short:
1) as joked about by other reviews, 99% accuracy isn't as certain as it may seem! It sometimes feels like you get unlucky more than just chance should allow.
2) There are a variety of awesome environments to play in but the UFO assaults specifically can get kind of tedious. This is causes by two factors:
- There are only 7 UFOs and they are same every single time and their layout is just generally predictable.
- the UFO's layout means you sometimes have to search for the bad guys more than I'd really like
3) while corrected in Xcom 2, Xcom 1 is missing some vital customisation options for its soldiers. Most notably, nationality and gender. It could be argued this is realistic, but I'd really prefer as much control over customising my people as reasonably possible.

Xcom is amazing! There are so many games like it these days but honestly you just can't beat true Xcom! Would very highly recommend it to any who enjoys tactical or strategy games. Xcom so consistently hits the mark and in my view is still an amazing game to this day! Its no wounder it has given birth to a great sequel and a whole genre of near identical games lovingly made proudly in its shadow.

A deep introduction into the story:
*** Beware of major spoilers for the first 3 quarters of the game ***
Xeno-scum attack Earth, our home, and your job is to make sure either we are victories or that by the time the dust settles their victory tastes as bitter as defeat. As you engage the hostiles you collect their kit and most interestingly the bodies of those you take down in battle. This is where it gets really interesting! Calling upon the greatest minds of the generation you reverse engineer their tech to serve your own purposes, kitting your soldiers out with the latest in Xeno killing weapons and conduct autopsies on the bodies. They seem to quite clearly share human genetic material. Perhaps all life in the universe is in someway terrestrial in nature? Evidence of a great creator like written about in religious texts maybe? perhaps there is just something intrinsic about all life the causes them to follow an near identical genetic path? ... Or *shudders to think* these lifeforms have been made using your fellow man? What do they want? Why are they here? As you fight on more you get hints of a strange power. Psionics! These beings have some sort of biological or technological power unlike anything we've seen before! We must harness it, control it, weld it if we hope to win this. You set up a research project to augment your own people to use this power. Changing them into something slightly different. maybe slightly less human? A devils advocate in your rag tag team of brilliant minds can't help but ponder "Are we on the same path as them? Were they once just like us? were they confronted with this power like we were and craved harnessing it for themselves? If we continue to follow this path will we become just like our oppressors?". Maybe if things were different you'd hear those warning out, but desperate times call for desperate measures, if this is a mistake we'll have to cross that bridge when we get there...

While the boffins at Meta inc and ByteDance push the cutting edge of 3d gaming into the next gen by creating a whole new world of 3D gaming the brilliant geniuses at Survios studios have reinvented the meta in the world of VR game development by implementing their new innovation, 2d flat screens in 3d environments. Its a small detail but every loading screen and even the at the start of the game when you see the company logo just stinks of missed opportunity. The intro to the game (when you're loading into the menu) is fairly cool, with the company logo moving towards you in a sea of particles but its just a cutscene on a curved flat 2d plane. Its sigh inducing.

I write this with over 11,000 in virtual reality, the fundamental building blocks of this game are so out of data it makes it hard to play. For those of us who have moved over to using virtual desktop be warned that if you take your headset off that when the game audio switches to your PC speakers it won't switch back to your headset again. The games movement systems is designed for teleportation and, while it can be switched to walk, the walking system is slippy and generally unwieldy. I believe its possible to activate some sort of stick turn (allowing you to turn with use of the joystick rather than only by rotating yourself within your IRL environment), but it wouldn't appear on my iteration of the game. I'd like to make it clear this is not due to a lack of thoroughness on my part. I know an option to do this exist and I know from other players where it is located but somehow, some way, presumably due to my headset of choice (a Quest 2 connected to a PC via virtual desktop) the option is not in my menu ... but your guess is as good as mine on the cause, honestly.

I cannot in truth comment on the game play. The game had several debilitating technical issue which culminate in game simply outputting a support ticket when I try to load it before me even getting to the game play. I'll try again at some point to actually get into a round of this and add an addendum to this review but for the time being I'd recommend against playing this if you've become too reliant the modern comforts of VR gaming, like smooth turn... or if you've become too reliant the modern comforts of gaming in general, like responsive controls and functioning software.

This game is like Hotline Miami but from the perspective of the police! Its a really awesome tactical top-down shooter, with a heavy emphasis on the tactical. You have a variety of tools at your disposal and you have to sweep buildings, arresting or killing everyone inside - you are technically supposed to arrest, ideally. You can beat the game by playing like its an American Police simulator and just runnin' and gunnin' but on standard difficulty thats virtually impossible, you are expected to use tactical equipment to breach rooms, stun enemies and get the upper-hand. I found the gameplay really addicting and enjoyable.

You have a partner named Nick who can be controlled by a friend in multiplayer or an AI who you can give orders to. by pressing right mouse button you can command him to interact with the environment on your behalf, use equipment on his person and change how he behaves. He can be passive, which means he'll only fire to save your life or in self-defence. I was surprised at how often he would have my back, killing armed enemies who were out of view before they could kill me. If you have a more aggressive play style you can ask him to follow your lead and be aggressive. In this mode he'll shoot anyone he sees on sight. I enjoyed this mechanic, although he would sometimes kill civilians with crossfire and sometimes, although rarely, he would stupidly put himself in harms way, which was annoying if you were going for a high score as him getting hurt or dying would deduct points. Like I said, this was quite rare in my experience, I found the AI to be very reliable and cooperative.

There is a story to the game but its a little cliché and generally quite sub-par, I personally found it uninteresting - I would say more but I don't want to spoil it for those who are interested

The campaign is great, with interesting levels and a nice degree of difficulty. The game also has a great 'custom level' mode which lets you specify exactly how many enemies will be on any map you select, if the map will have packages of evidence or a bomb to defuse - which I talk more about in a moment. The game comes with awesome workshop compatibility, giving you access to a plethora of user created maps for the game. I tried a few and they're surprisingly well designed and made for a great experience if you run out of or just want to take a break from the campaign missions. Some levels have a bomb which you needed to defuse, which added another layer of difficulty as the bomb was timed. The criminals will give you the code sometimes if you arrested them, which in my view acts as a punishment for people who like to kill on sight. If you don't have the code you can defuse the bomb by cutting wires but I haven't tried this sadly. i've always used the code because I prefer to play as pacifist as possible.

I would highly recommend!

This game is the perfect escape from lockdown. I’ve been playing the game for 3 or 4 months now and I LOVE IT. I’ve met some of the nicest and most caring people in the world since I started playing. I’ve found the social aspect of the game extremally relaxing so If you find talking to people stressful, I wouldn’t let that discourage you from playing.

Some of the worlds are utterly stunning and I can tell that they were made by devoted and talented individuals. I, myself, have uploaded a custom avatar to the game and although Unity is a little difficult at first there are some very helpful tutorials on Youtube and the VRChat team have made it extremely easy to upload your avatars once you’ve finished. I haven’t tried to make a custom world yet, however I’ve heard that Udon, the code language that VRChat uses, is extremally awkward and inconvenient. Udon has been described by a friend of mine as ‘just awful’ and ‘absolutely terrible’. Udon is generally hated by the community but in my opinion, it is even more of a testament to the community that people continue to make utterly extraordinary creations despite working with a program they hate and is notoriously awkward to use.

Optimization, Optimization, Optimization; that is the biggest thing this game needs! The game often suffers from crippling lag for no obvious reasons. Trolls use extremally laggy avatars at best and at worst they use ‘crasher avatars’ that are designed to crash other players. Worlds with over 20 players are unreliable and laggy. worlds with over 40 players are totally unbearable and if you suffer from motion sickness the lag can be debilitating as your vision freezes and jumps around.

To conclude – I'd give this game 8/10. I love the game deeply but there are many flaws and I sometimes feel like the dev team aren’t as devoted to VRChat as its community. As stated previously, the optimization is utterly appalling, especially when compared to competitors like ChilloutVR. There is room for improvement, but I love this game and plan to stay with it for a very long time.

I really didn’t enjoy this game. Even though my PC should be able to run this game perfectly fine (according to the recommend system requirements on the store page) when I did anything the frame rate dropped significantly. The menu was absolutely awful, it was impossible to select anything, and god forbid I try to change category. The game asks that you move your hands (VR controllers) through the menu 'like moving a hand through water', as the dev put it, but It was totally unresponsive to this and even when I tried to use the joysticks to navigate the menu it still didn't seem to respond reliable. even slightly uncooperative controls can ruin a game - a controller that doesn't work only 10% of the time, is still useless - but the menu was uncooperative more than 50% of the time. Following in this game's tradition of painfully unresponsive controls, it was weird and difficult to move around my creation. When I rotated the world, it would settle at one angle but then click into a totally different angle when I let go, this was a flaw shared by the building, items, people, etc. Luckily, I could turn the snap ‘feature’ off when placing props but when placing roads, the ground, building and particularly large objects it’s it essential to creating a nice and symmetrical city. I found many other problems and every one was related to the controls or menu.

Additional notes:

Strangely, the building didn’t seem to snap to the pavement which meant I had to spend quite a bit of time lining up the doors to the path.

For some reason, the bridge doesn’t snap to water, making it hard to use the bridge over the sea, rivers, etc … I’m sure I don’t have to explain how ridicules it is that the bridge isn’t programmed to work with water.

Somethings were sorted into weird categories; this was especially annoying as it took 10 minuets to go from one category to another because of awkward menu. For example, the trees could be found under the railway category, because nothing says trains like a perennial plant that produces oxygen from co2 and survives off photosynthesis; yep, those two things are pretty much synonymous!



It’s a shame because I was so excited to play this game and I can see why it would be fun, but the frame rate problems, controls and awkward menu made the game unenjoyable and frustrating, if not unplayable. I hope that the developers fix the game, or a new studio makes something similar because I can see a lot of protentional in this idea and would really enjoy playing this game if it didn’t have unusable menus or controls that seem to intentionally work against you. I would rate this a 3/10, the game looks nice and the concept it brilliant but at the moment I can’t enjoy it.

A true masterpiece and exactly what this genre needs! I couldn't recommend this game more to anyone who has an interest in RTS games like Age of Empires, Command and conquer or supreme commander. This game is unquestionably and criminally underrated. I've only played about 30 hours of Cossacks 3 but if anything happened to it id kill everyone in the world and then myself. id give this game a 11/10.

lots of game play. hours of fun

I can play all day