Recent reviews by Callie

Server transfer tickets costing $20 is kind of ridiculous coupled with the fact you can't transfer or otherwise use your character's name after creating a character and using the name once. Deleting the character permanently removes said name from existence forever and you can't even get it if you pay money to get a rename scroll. Then there's the fact they release free server transfer tickets that expire quickly only to coax people to going to certain servers while other servers remain locked for most of the period; so by the time people in some circles know which server they all want to be on it's unlikely they'll all be able to get on the same server anyways making the entire thing pointless.

If this is how they intend to continue to manage this game it'll die within a month or two so definitely don't recommend wasting your time on it and for anyone who already has wasted their time on it... yikes. But what do you really expect from NCSoft, most of their games have been very poorly managed for the past 20 years, I wouldn't expect miraculous improvement.

Mind you the game itself seems pretty solid, got halfway through the story or so and a lot of the content could definitely be fun. But when a game is so poorly managed of course people are gonna bail, leave negative reviews because they don't like how something's been handled, never touch the game again because they aren't okay throwing $20+ in just to play with friends when systems could've been designed or managed significantly better with no real justifiable reason to say otherwise. And not really give the game a "full" chance because the game is listed as free to play but insists you give them money right off the bat if you happened to only realize what server people were playing on after the fact.

If you want a good MMO to play with PvP and a fun combat system just go play Albion Online. It's been around for a while, it's tried, it's true, great guild vs guild content and really no reason to not play it other than you don't like how it looks... which... cry more I guess?

Will change to positive when I can use "Callie" as a name

As a warning for everyone if you haven't read the other reviews in game currency does NOT seem to be working as of yet. When this will be fixed who knows though considering it's likely cutting directly into their revenue I have to imagine they're gonna work on it as fast as possible.

Enjoying it as much as in the playtests, seeing the extra character centered story bits and stuff has been nice, grapple feels a bit better than it did in the first play test. Finished the first area with no problems at all and assembled the first character they get you to assemble (Bunny) without issue.

Cons: 1. Nexon. Everyone knows Nexon sucks; though The Finals definitely gave me a lot of hope for this game.
2. Mouth movement in many cutscenes isn't great, this may just be because I'm playing in English though and they may not have put any effort into making characters lips sync with English lines (which is kind of fair)

Pros: 1. It's free. You can't really go wrong paying $0 to try or play a game.
2. Good progression based gameplay. You get Warframe's character building, weapon customization systems and some other obviously Warframe inspired things like how you can colour some outfits (though I haven't figured out how to actually get said outfits yet if it's paid don't hurt me please qq)
3. A pretty nice environment to play in, Clearly inspired by Destiny's worlds though a bit smaller and with a much better map layout between different regions (or Destiny's planet equivalent).

All around I'd say it's good, just hope they don't screw it up too much because..... Nexon. The Finals does give me some hope though.

Garbage game for garbage people. Do NOT buy.

At it's core it's designed pretty well actually, you might even enjoy it for the first hour or two and if you play with friends regularly it can definitely be enjoyable longer even.

That being said, the game sucks giant donkey d. Opening card packs to try and get something you actually want is a horrible and abusive relationship that either you'll do crying or just hate every second of. The game frequently gives missions to help you get the in game money to open said packs but the missions are often filled with 1 or MULTIPLE sets of "Win 1v1" and "Win 2v2" where if for some godforsaken reason you do try to play this game you're going to be spending several hours of your time losing matches over and over until you by some miracle encounter a person who walks directly up to you, crouches, and lets you win off of them.

The game isn't hard, it's explicitly unfair. Part of this is definitely because the game is completely dead. You may be in queue for upwards of 5 minutes waiting for some other godforsaken idiot to join you in the 2v2 queue. The 1v1 queue is often much better usually only taking 1-2 minutes to find a match, though you're almost guaranteed to fight the same person every time, even if you refused to rematch and even if they have every card not only unlocked but maxed out completely and are playing the most obnoxious deck possible to build.

Then there are people who cheat. You may not notice it at first thinking "oh it's just something I don't understand yet" or "well maybe I didn't see them play that card so it's actually my fault" but I assure you, it is not. That person moving absurdly fast jumping right on top of you with the katana 3 rounds in a row, using double jump 3 rounds in a row, having absurd speed that you can't even outrun after using the card that literally is supposed to make you move faster while they play the character that just spawns with a katana every game? They're cheating. You don't see them play those cards because they aren't playing those cards. It doesn't matter that you silenced them at the start of the match and they couldn't have possibly played those cards, it doesn't matter that every card shows up and that one very clearly didn't show up, because they are using cheats and when you have a maximum of 6 people in the queue system at a time and have to fight them over and over regardless of declining rematches every time and them being 8 ranks higher than you you're going to look back at this review and say "yeah, I probably should've listened to them."

Yes, the challenges could be fixed by simply removing the ones that require you to get wins or doing what a lot of other games have done and making it a "get 2 wins or play 4 matches" kind of thing. Yes, the player base could probably be fixed with some decent advertising. Yes, the matchmaking could be fixed if they put in rank and/or skill based matchmaking after getting the game population up a bit. Is any of this ever going to happen though? An almost guaranteed no.
Although if you already have the game and want to get your challenges met you can technically just queue up in a private match with 1-3 of your friends that totally play this game and get the quests done off of them. I could see people going to this game's discussions just to request people to farm.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go play a much easier game, Dota 2.

Some pretty big issues with the game for now. Almost 3 days since release and certain things just really prevent the game from being fun at times.

Some quality control issues some people have had with getting super low frames on relatively modern cards like the 3050 and many people just straight up crashing with relative frequency (not all the time from what I've seen and heard but enough that it definitely affects game enjoyment). Honestly though that's not a big one to me, just sad to see that some friends can't experience this as well due to these things.

Mostly though the problems are with the online. Joining friends directly is usually fine but the autojoin feature is almost impossible to actually use. It works maybe 10% of the time (only 20-30 sample size) and every other time it just says that it failed to communicate to the other ship or something. I've noticed it seems not to just go down a list but instead connect you to the same ship over and over again which could be a major reason why this happens. Likely due to the list not updating well it tries to connect multiple people to a ship which fills up then since the ship is full it can't connect other players but since it doesn't refresh it'll just keep trying to connect you to the same ship anyways which will entirely make people see the autojoin feature as something entirely useless.

On top of this there are some relatively major bugs when actually in game. I've been propelled under the map multiple times, usually ending up back on the surface but still something you shouldn't see. I and many of my friends have experienced a spectating bug where when you die and are spectating teammates it forces you back to your (dead) body and won't let you swap between teammates to view them actually doing things which really pulls away from the entertainment value. The biggest bug I've seen so far is also in the gameplay where I was in a mission with 2 other people (randoms) and one of them could not be spawned back in through reinforcing. Eventually when I died I also couldn't be respawned back in and when the last person died..... only they respawned. Very confusing, no idea how this could bug out like that but as it happened to me I'm sure it's happened to others.

Also on release there was a bug where after completing the training if you tried to customize your character the game would crash, from what I've seen I'd estimate around 30% of the players couldn't actually launch the game successfully again after this crash though I'm pretty sure it's been fixed now (I might be wrong).

Now that I've gotten all the bugs out of the way time to talk about the actual game! Coming from the first Helldivers I was really hoping to see more vehicles and mechs and stuff to use but really... even without it... I LOVE THIS GAME! This game is amazing, they definitely put a lot of thought and effort into it and TBH as soon as they fix maybe not even all the bugs I've listed but like... 2 or 3 of them... I'd be VERY happy to change this to a recommended.

TL;DR Lots of bugs, most of which are minor, a couple more major ones, expect low frames or crashing even on top of the line PCs. But I absolutely love it, I'll be playing it a ton in spite of any bugs like this. Coming from the first Helldivers this a great successor and I'll be changing my review to a positive once some of these bugs are fixed!

Worst $200 or so I spent on a series. It's okay until you realize that the autobattle says your 18 unit army is going to lose against 6 units then try to go in to the battle and actually fight it just to have 4 of your units standing around doing nothing but sucking each other's genitals while 1 single person battles it out with the person you told all 4 of the units to fight.

Like really? The game devs have never heard of having spear units encircle someone and constantly stab over and over until the person's dead? This isn't even the most basic military tactic it's really even less than that just a basic tactic for killing anything and developed primarily for hunting. I don't care if the person has 2000 hitpoints, if their health only goes down by 20 whenever 1 person attacks and no one else does anything to attack him then why in the hell do you allow me to send 4 units after that 1 person?

I'm so fed up with garbage game developers like this who put next to no effort into games and expect us all just to bend to whatever weird made up rules they decide to put into the game. A military? A strategy game? This is nothing like either of those things. This is just another piece of garbage where people tell you to click on a button and if you click on the wrong button then by their arbitrary rules you now lose. No thought, no strategy, nothing involved but bending to the exact specifications you're told to bend to.

Buyer beware, reviews are flooded with people who have long supported the Total War and/or the Warhammer series and are completely blinded by that.

This game costs a ridiculous amount of money to really get into and on top of that it's completely unfriendly to anyone trying to get into it. Selecting a starting "race" "faction" or even just the specific character is like playing slots at a casino, you could be alright but odds are you're just going to get absolute garbage. For some characters or even whole factions this is actually how it's supposed to be, to give players a challenge if they want to choose that but with no indication or warning for any of these you're just rolling a die and hoping you get a chance to even play the game to begin with.

On top of the previous flaws the advisor in the game is absolutely worthless. The advisor tries to tell you all about the backstory of the character you picked but doesn't say anything about what you should try doing to start or warning you from attacking the 1 single enemy they place right next to you because you're guaranteed to lose against that 1 single enemy despite anyone coming from literally anywhere thinking "Well, they gave me 1 enemy to attack at the start, I guess I should attack it."

TL;DR If you aren't going in to this game with some kind of financial backing and a trained professional there to guide you through every step of the game you'll probably end up hating this game and yourself for suffering through this horrible experience.

EAC in a social game that had great support for amazing mods that fix things that the dev team won't even take the time to look at means a hard no from me. Fix the game, make it better, then once you have at least the basics down like a menu that moves to your head location instead of sitting way up in the sky when you're laying down, proper tracking, and maybe a couple options to support some things that people want then sure, try to get rid of the mod community if you really hate them that much. But don't use EAC, add proper security features to the game, EAC is notoriously a bad solution and will cause problems.

From what I can tell this latest update completely ruined the game for me. Before the update I had most of the characters at level 40 which gives you the teachables for each of their 3 perks so other characters can learn them through the blood web. Now, you get all 3 perks from a character unlocked for every other character just by prestiging them (getting 50 levels) but only at level 1, in order to get level 3 for the perks you need to prestige them twice more for a total of 150 levels..... that's 110 levels more in order to unlock level 3 perks on all your characters and it's just absolutely ridiculous. For the experienced players that already had every DLC bought and all the characters unlocked this just means they'll need to do the 150 levels on all new DLC characters that are released but for us lowly mortals with less than 500-1000 hours played before this update we now need to get 110-150 levels on every single character, including the DLC ones that we may or may not own.

Unless they revert large portions of this update I really can't recommend this game to anyone. If you buy this game, which is already mostly filled with people who have played it for years and are far more experienced than you are, not only will you have to deal with the harsh learning curve, the crazy amount of DLC that you're strongly encouraged to buy just to have access to all the game content, and grinding out millions upon millions of blood points just to get to level 40 but now you need to do more than triple that just to get level 3 perks on the characters you actually care about playing.

It's like multiplayer Don't Starve if Don't Starve was centered on where you spawn and had better combat and less resource gauges and the crafting system was from individual town people not yourself/crafting structures and didn't have free building and you already had a city set up and if you had to defend an objective the whole time.

Pretty much it's not that much like Don't Starve but it's still such a fun game and I love the world exploration so much that I try to run to every shrine right at the start of the game.

Maybe it's like Don't Starve crossed with Sanctum 2? Naw that doesn't make sense either. Oh well it's still hella fun and I'm excited to clear this season completely and see what the next season is about. Might be a little too easy to clear all the achievements compared to how easy it is to clear the season rewards but you also earn stuff from clearing the achievements so I guess it's fine? Maybe? That probably doesn't make sense.