Recent reviews by TheKittenMilord

Gets better every update! Real mechanical improvements, not just fluff like so many HOI or EU updates!

This was something special, despite all the flaws. Playing this game for the first couple hours was like beating my head against a brick wall, until the red bricks started to fall to reveal a tense, atmospheric fps with fun, tough combat, great music and interesting, if spotty lore. I wish I lived in the universe where they delayed this game until it was as good as it is now on launch and my heart hurts knowing this game will now never have the chance to get even better still.

Halo Infinite retains a lot of what made Halo a classic franchise with enough updates to make it very fun and playable set next to its contemporary f2p rivals Destiny 2 and Call of Duty Warzone. The reason why I'm loathe to recommend it above either of those is the extremely greedy microtransactions system, which ranks up there alongside titans like Genshin Impact in terms of how little you actually get for your money and also just how buggy the multiplayer is rn, with crashes galore, which may be fine for a typical beta, but when you're charging people money at this point already, it's just inexcusable. The Campaign isn't out at the time of this review, so I obviously can't speak to the quality of that, but unless this is the best Halo Campaign of all time and double the length of any Campaign in the past, I think it's incredibly cheeky they're charging a full $60 just for the Campaign alone. I can't imagine that being worthy it to almost anybody. They need to drop the price of the Campaign, drastically cut how much the microtransactions cost, at that point it would be more than worthy of a recommendation.

A good game to play if you want to hate yourself.

Mars: War Logs is such a difficult game to review. On the one hand, I loved it with every fibre of my being, I was constantly reminded of when I was 11 or 12 years old playing KOTOR for the seventeeth time, the awe of playing a game that really, genuinely lived up to the promise of what a game could be, another world, a world that felt as real, or more so, than my own. The graphics are about on par with KOTOR, now that I think about it. But despite such promise, this game is not KOTOR. It is unpolished, hard to look at, and ends far too soon. The setting is probably the best part, a Mars torn by war over her most precious resource, water and split between humans and mutants used by the humans as slaves. We start the game a prisoner of war, and this prison camp is perhaps the most interesting area of the game, where we have to fight former allies and befriend former enemies in order to escape.

Shortly after escaping, we arrive in a generic sci-fi lite city, whose corridors are no less restricting than those of the prison camp we so recently extricated ourselves from. This reveals a major shortcoming of the game, which is the level design, made up of corridor after corridor of cookie cutter enemies, and the game never comes close to achieving the scale the story needed. Another problem affecting the game is the voice acting, which though it has supposedly been upgraded from its launch state, is still in a dearly sore state, with voice actor's deliveries ranging from flat to... flatter. One sometimes wonders if the voice actor's hired were actually fluent in the language spoken. And this is especially dissapointing because of how much dialogue there is in the game, you can easily spend around a third or so of the game listening to your companions or other NPC's and it can be grating to listen to sometimes. This is especially dissapointing because the written dialogue really isn't terrible so much as it is unsubtle, and at some points, at least before the dreadful third act, even good. While we're on the subject of story, it might be pertinent to mention that there are several companions you have the option to "romance", with all of these pairing being strictly heterosexual, and in addition, two of these companions are hidden behind specific story paths. All this really amounts to is some extra dialogue, and eventually, a "sex scene" between you and your partner.

Combat is another area where the game lacks quite a bit, with heavily Witcher inspired hacking and slashing dominated by the tactical nuance of hitting a button over and over, and occasionaly hitting another button to break things up. Most enemies only need running up to and hitting over and over while the occasional enemy requires that you flank them and hit them, over and over. The only challenge comes in the early game, when you don't have a gun, and you can be easily overwhelmed by enemies ganging up on you. But after getting a gun, the game becomes a cakewalk, with the action devolving to a couple seconds of clicking and then an eternal sleep.

Or not. The game early on introduces, a.... weird game mechanic, wherein after you mercilessly pummel and shoot your enemies, they don't actually die but merely fall unconscious and you have the choice to either drain their veins for extra currency and incur a penalty to your morality, or leave them flailing there, presumably to later get up and go home crying to their mommies. The morality system is a minor part of the game overall, with going evil giving you a general combat bonus and staying a goody two-shoes eventually leading to merchants giving you a massive discount, not that you'll ever really need it.

I'll be honest, this review has probably seemed fairly negative, and for good reason, but the game has such ambition, is such a unique experience, that if you remember KOTOR, or well... KOTOR fondly, I really think you should give it a shot, sale price or no. I can't imagine very many others liking it as well as I did, but hey, most of the other reviews seem positive right, so who knows?