Recent reviews by Count Vonn

270 hours played and I'm still playing this co-op with friends. Personally, this is my 2024 GOTY. That nod would've gone to Helldivers 2 except Sony and Arrowhead dropped the ball. By way of contrast, Focus and Saber are doing it right. No PSN account shenanigans, no battlepasses, no nerf/buff whiplash. SM2 is just a solid action shooter with an attentive developer that doesn't tend to overcorrect.

TL;DR: A fantastic co-op shooter, best experienced with a regular group who are all on comms.

I don't usually feel compelled to write Steam reviews for the games I enjoy, but in the case of Helldivers 2 I have to make an exception. I'm playing with a regular group of 4, and as we push into higher difficulties we're continually surprised by the depth of design in this game. In the lower difficulties we'd roll into an objective site, kill everything, complete the objective, wash rinse and repeat until we extract. And it's fun! The shooting feels tight, the weapons are satisfying, the call-ins are super satisfying. The finger DDR you need to perform call-ins is a very clever design choice. It makes them just challenging enough to use in combat that they don't suck all the tension out of the game. If these was all the game had to offer then it'd be good game, but there's so much more in here.

I thought friendly fire would be frustrating and un-fun, but it has actually created some of the funniest highlight moments. Like the time one of my teammates accidentally stuck another with a supply drop beacon. The beacon'd teammate tried to chase the offender but actually chased the wrong guy, so one bad-luck supply beacon throw ended up killing *two* innocent bystanders. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.

There's some real genius in this game's design, where the choices the designers made can come together to produce some surprising outcomes. For instance:
* every teammate can call in airstrikes
* friendly fire is always on, including for airstrikes
* diving prone reduces the amount of damage you take from explosions, including friendly fire explosions

Those three design choices combine to create some amazing gameplay moments. Like when there's a miscommunication and one of your teammates calls in a strike danger-close on top of you. You sprint like mad and try to time your dive with the moment the airstrike hits. The rounds hit, you get rag-dolled across the landscape... but you live! Or maybe you get gibbed instead, but then someone calls in reinforcements and you manage to steer your drop pod into a Bile Titan to kill it. Fantastic stuff.

Some may complain about the live service nature of the game, but H2 feels like the rare case where the live service actually adds to the game's value instead of just being a means to extract additional revenue from players:
* The campaign map is dynamic, and players can impact it. When the game first launched it was all about the bugs, then a week in the bots invaded. The devs have outright stated that the expectation was that no planet defense missions were expected to succeed vs. the bots, but players successfully held Malevelon Creek and changed the expected narrative. The campaign map also shows you how many helldivers (actual players) are active in each system, and every mission you complete increments the progress on that planet by a tiny amount. It really does make me feel like I'm part of a wider campaign and a larger narrative, and personally I've encountered very few games that could do that. It don't think it would be possible to do this without the live service aspect of the game.
* The battle pass system is currently tuned such that you can get all the rewards through playing, if that's what you want to do. You can find small amounts of Super Credits on the battlefield, and exchange mission completion medals for SCs in the free battle pass. Between the two, I was able to unlock the premium battlepass for no additional cash. There's a separate armor shop with rotating choices, but so far the armor choices have been cosmetic variations on armors you can get in the base or premium battle passes, so it's purely optional. I don't love battle passes and cash shops, but I can happily tolerate them when they don't feel mandatory or pay-to-win. For me personally, the monetization system in H2 is easily tolerable.

The initial launch phase had some rough spots, mostly due to the game selling many more copies than expected. The devs have done a commendable job expanding capacity and scaling systems to support up to 1 million concurrent players. Balance changes have already started coming out, and new content has started to drop. The original iteration of this review had balance issues and possible content droughts as potential negatives, but the devs have started addressing both far sooner than I expected. It gives me a good deal of confidence that the game is in good hands and I'll be playing this for quite some time to come.

Now for a few negatives:
* I'm playing with a regular group of 4 and that colors my whole impression of the game. I've played a very small number of games with randoms, and I could see that being a less positive experience.
* While a few balance changes have come out, there are still some rough edges that need polishing. There are some weapons that feel undertuned or have bugs that make them feel not viable. There's currently a profusion of heavy enemy spawns at higher difficulties that feel like they could be overtuned.

Personally, I think H2 is a fantastic game and I'd be willing to recommend it to almost anyone. It's early in 2024, but H2 is the immediate front-runner for my Game of the Year pick.

Currently playing through Pool of Radiance, and I plan to go through the whole set in order of release. So far game difficulty is high, inventory and spell management is tedious, the graphics are beyond dated, the interface is awful... and I absolutely love it.

This is a great collection if you're nostalgic for these classic Gold Box games. The inclusion of PDF copies of the hint books was a very pleasant surprise, as were the many quality of life features that have been added. The companion map window, the character overview display above the DosBox window, and the buttons to auto-heal and auto-rememorize spells... all great stuff. The publisher could have thrown the base games in stock DosBox wrappers and sold them as-is, so I have to give them credit for going the extra mile to improve the play experience.

I did have a couple issues that required some tinkering to overcome:
- Getting the game window functional took some fiddling. With the default settings the game would launch to a black screen. Switching the settings to Custom with a fixed window size and OpenGL rendering resolved the issue.
- I've got a tenkeyless keyboard, so no physical number pad. That's an issue for these games because the number pad is the primary method of moving characters and selecting targets in combat, with 1-3-7-9 used for diagonal movement. The arrow keys work fine for navigating the game world and up-down-left-right in combat, but often you need to move or attack diagonally. Home, End, Page Up and Page Down can be used for diagonals but I found those much less intuitive. I downloaded a virtual number pad called Numpad Emulator, which works fine with the game and is handy for those diagonals.

It's an early access game. There are some bugs. But the core gameplay is really solid and there's something about it that keeps me coming back. I'm really looking forward to experiencing what they add from here.

Not gonna lie, I cried at the end.