Recent reviews by Jarl

Awful game, constant disconnect issues when playing with friends, endless pop ups, constantly spammed with irrelevant crap keeping you from playing, story is crap, balance is garbage, and overall this is a crap game, I paid 7 euroes and bought it for a friend, and myself I got it gifted, and somehow for the price of two loafs of bread I still feel cheated. I do not understand how this can be as inferior to Wildlands as it is.

I mean.. free content for a fun little game, what's there not to like?

Free DLC content? How can you not approve?

I don't know what the ♥♥♥♥ this is, but this is not STALKER.. this is like someone skinned your loved one, wears it as a suit, mocks you and your loved one, and expects you to love them. It doesn't feel like stalker, it doesn't play like stalker, it merely imitates stalker.. This feels like some cheap unity engine asset flip trying to copy some more well known game.
I am not disappointed as I expected this, but hey, at least I took the bullet so you don't have to stalker, go reinstall one of the classics and download a good mod, grab some tuschonka beer and vodka for consolation. This ain't it fellers, maybe modders will save it in the future, but as is, it is not worthy of the STALKER title.

Edit: So A-life which is what made the prior titles so unique is not present, it just spawns in enemies point blank on you. There are dumb sounds playing when you hit a headshot like its call of duty. The english voice acting is just awful(at least the Ukrainian voice acting is good). once you get past the SIIRCA the game just completely breaks with bugs, the amount of quests you cannot finish or even start is beyond belief. AI getting stuck in doors making it impossible to enter bases or finish missions, the defense missions being so bugged and whacky it takes 10+ tries and a lot of prays to RNG gods that you get a functional run, the missions failing right after you leave when you've just succeded the mission.
Some of the mutants just being straight up broken bulletsponges and other enemies being braindead and useless.
I've played SoC CS and Pripyat and a boatload of mods including GAMMA Anomaly and others, generally always play and the highest difficulty and enjoy it, in STALKER 2 that is not viable, not because the game is harder, because the balancing is absolutely broken. It is the first game I have ever played where using cheats and console commands to progress with quests due to them being broken, has actually been a thing.
It is absurd just how bad the game is in its current state.
If they fix and implement A-life as it was in the prior titles, IF they rebalance broken things like costs repair quests rewards AI behavior AI health etc, and they iron out the bugs so the game is actually possible to finish without using cheats or console commands to trigger quests, then this game can actually be good. As is, this is a broken and buggy mess, they should have just postponed launch until early 2025.
It is laughable just how badly broken this game is, it's even more broken than my grammar and English.

Edit, did the tedious and painful bossfight, now my character cannot move whenever I load a saved game. I am aim up and down, I can shoot, but nothing else, I cannot step to the side or turn or anything. And this affects now ALL of my savefiles.
This is downright emberassing how bug filled it is with even main quests being completely broken. Absolutely ridiculous.

I want to like it as a fan of Mad Max, Crossout and WH40k, except it is kinda trash, not really fan, Mad Max game is better, Crossout does the PVP and creation aspect better. I see what they went for, I am just not feeling it despite wanting to.

Undercooked, janky, uninteresting. The characters are not interesting in any way, the story isn't interesting either, the gameplay feels like a downgrade from the prior title, and even now so long after release it is buggy.
This game is a serious downgrade from the prior title, while that was by no means amazing story or character wise, what it DID have going for it was fun and engaging gameplay, somehow Dying light 2 feels like it is far from that.
I got it on sale last year and didn't play it before now and I would recommend it even on sale.
Just reinstall Dying Light 1 tbh.

The negative I would say is poor optimization and the issue with camping the landing zones, optimization issues and content being limited is obviously something that comes with Early Access, so that gets a pass.
The positives is the persistent map, the insertion by heli is a cool feature, combat feels good, AI while in need of improvement is aggressive and WILL push you if you are healing or trying to save a teammate.
I think this will be an interesting contender in the extraction shooter market and I am happy to see a competitor to Tarkov, with it's own unique approach to things.
Competition is good to encourage the companies to steadily improve their game and to listen to the feedback of their playerbase.
While neither Tarkov nor Gray zone are perfect games and they both have their issues and unique positive aspects, I would say Gray Zone is a diamond in the rough and I am looking forwards to seeing where the devs take it.

Yes, it is poorly optimized, and that is what is Early Access, people need to understand this, this is how EA should be done, it is a product that is not done that is currently being developed and improved, and you can be a part of that by playing it and providing feedback.

The core gameplay and gameplay loop is decent enough, if you've played Xcom you will be familiar with the concept, some aspects need finetuning like infection and scaling etc, my main gripe is the childlike and girlbossy inquisitor which is rather cringey, WH40k has plenty of impressive clever and strong women done in a variety of tasteful ways, the women here? Feels like it is written by some wannabe-a-man manhating feminist with a few contradictions in their heads about what they want to achieve, a strong woman? A mannish woman? Yet also a childlike in looks woman? The mechanicus character was far more interesting and nuanced and fit much better with the lore, if anything the mechanicus character could be even more autistic. But a petulant bratty inquisitor that looks like a child with a childish art style? Being a fan of wh40k for decades that just ruins it for me, a bratty noble? Sure, inquisitor? Ehh.
Oh and the random blue lights covering the ship? No.. just no.
40k is going to lose itself by going for the fabled ''wide audience'' it will please no one and eventually kill itself.
My main gripes come with lore, immersion and art style choices all being much to childish, it is jarring and ruins immersion into the setting of trying to purge a chaotic infection.

Edit: On steam and the official forums of the game there is now extreme censorship and people are being banned left and right and post are being removed. It appears no critique of the game is allowed whatsoever, this kind of behavior shows you who not to give your money too.
And a further development is that people have dug through the game files and discovered that the game was supposed to take a very different direction, but at the end of the development cycle they were given a new direction and forced to take the lead from someone I am not allowed to mention by name as then the review will be censored for targetted harrassment.
Long story short is that there is a woman with brightly colored hair(you know the type) that came in an functioned as the overlord and forced changes on the games story.
As time passes I am sure more information will come out, I would give names or link reviews or videos talking about these things more in depth, but that would lead to the review getting banned.
DO NOT BUY.



Sadly a clear downgrade from the prior titles in the franchise, too many plot devices, things do not make sense, things are perfectly convenient, you do not have the feeling of every ship every loss being a irreplaceable harm to your group, etc etc etc ad infinitum. And of course there is the DEI BS, the diversity is overboard in this one, again to the point where if you have a functioning brain it does not make sense, if such an amount of people were POC, then either the remainder are racist segregations or they would also fit the DEI bill by being equally diverse, that is simply how genetics works.
Cataclysm was great, 1&2 were great, Deserts of Kharak was a departure from the prior games, but still quite fun and still stuck with the story and feeling. So far, this feels like ♥♥♥♥.
Most missions are straight up lacklustre copies of actually interesting and fun missions in the prior titles, there is no feeling of loss, no feeling of success, no pressure, no regret other than buying the game itself.
Everything is just a pale disappointing copy of what came before.
I strongly advice against buying this, if you must, then sail the seven seas, or get it at a site named allkeyshop for a massive discount, but for the love of Hiigara, do not buy this at full price.

Edit:Just realized.. Sweet baby inc had their hands in this pie.. I guess that has quite a bit to do with why it is garbage. A racist bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥.

Edit: completed the campaign and played a bit in the other modes, campaign is absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, mechanically speaking the game is OK, pathfinding is kind of dumb, as is the logic of different kinds of ships, there needs to be a better prioritization of which enemies which ships attack, making a battlegroup where you have fighters screening your larger ships or bombers, you have the armored heavier ships tanking the main part of incoming fire, frigates etc focusing on either larger or smaller targets depending on the specialization and so on. You can manually do this by assigning groups and micro commands, it definitely should be a bit streamlined, it is a fine line between having good control of your fleet vs microing too much.
Another point is your ships do not feel like they counter each other properly, when you get to a certain point you just blob and zerg rush.
It seems most of the issues comes from one purple haired feminist that made the game radically depart from what was intended, you can search online and you will see who I mean, she has a past working for radical political news sites, being a feminist, hating men etc etc.
Not worth it.

Of the 3d games in the series this is the only good one, an excellent game absolutely worth playing, Fallout 3 makes no sense lorewise as the main objective has no reason whatsoever, you can clean radiation and contamination out of water with sand gravel and charcoal and some boiling of water, Fallout 4 tries to be and FPS and an RPG and it does neither, it's lore is even worse and the gameplay is garbage as well as the story.
Meanwhile this beaut right here is an excellent game, gameplay is good, story is great, options and choices are on point. An absolute Fallout classic.