Recent reviews by Crowd

The immersion and gameplay is brilliant. Genuinely feels like you've gone back to the late 90s to early 2000s. Can't wait to see the final product!

10/10 for a shooter.

Also a great stress relief.

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Not a bad thing but it was the reason I never bothered playing this game for almost 3yrs. This is coming from someone who's played every game in the franchise since Forza Motorsport 4. (Also had to buy Horizon 4 about three times for stupid reasons, so I wasn't in the happiest mood seeing a favourite franchise just reskin the map to be in Mexico for 5).

If I put aside all that was wrong with it to begin with, including a lot of cars removed or locked behind some stupid 'seasonal' live event, It's not the worst experience I've had. Just mute the voices and music and run something like Spotify in the background.

FH3 was peak in my opinion.
FH4 is still a brilliant game, although I've played it for over 3000hrs at this point. Being completely burned out is an understatement. The BS started halfway through 4's life cycle too. If anything I'm British, so I should be the most biased towards that game being good!

I'm also sick of the way they're continuing the franchise now. But that's a whole other topic.

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'Good' if you want to turn your brain off and drive. Hours of content. Years of improvements finally implemented and more (although sometimes not the best). I have respect for everyone working at PG making this utterly gorgeous environment and the evolved gameplay mechanics.

'Bad' if I based my review on prior games in the series.
Because it didn't used to be 'everything, everywhere all at once' as the idea. Certain features had time to be fleshed out and improved on. Meaningful changes and addons from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 in the series felt genuine and full of ideas.

...But FH5 just told us from the start that the map looked pretty (I swear there's so many copy/paste reviews saying that)... and we had about 5 new cars... Okay? Worth the £120 for the Day One Ultimate Edition I guess?

A genuine selling point for me was you could FINALLY mute the music entirely. FH4 had a stupid feature (likely for licenses) that only lowered the music slider to "1" rather than "0". You were also stuck listening to one of the 5 preset songs that were forced onto every.... *******..... loading screen if you decided to turn the radio off in-game... THAT music was only mute-able if you turned down all your SFX volume...
That was sold to me like a *new feature* in FH5... when in actuality it was just a standard AND SANE feature in every other title. Reminds me of Apple inventing problems then creating solutions.

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The new Motorsport is a great example (like this) of "What the ****, this is what I get with £120+ preorder???"
Then again, most people don't care or don't realise it because all these titles are free with Game Pass.

GT7 has genuinely tempted me in the past years of switching sides. But I respect Playground Games for not submitting to microtransactions as badly as Polyphony did - whether that was Sony's decision or not.

In that respect, I'm perfectly fine for the franchise to be in the Game Pass library, but it doesn't give it an excuse to get lazier with ideas and development. Maybe I'm getting too old, but where's the spark gone for new game releases?

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I'm just worried it'll become like every AAA studio: No more risks.
I still respect Playground for making a good game.


We just need more friendly competition from other studios that isn't half-arsed so everyone starts to give a **** about the selling points. I also don't want to feel scammed anymore buying new racing games.

Short but sweet.
Brilliant for a game based in the Roman era.
The simple but arcade-y controls end up making you feel extremely badass either way (good character development etc etc).
That alongside Crytek creating a very good line between a historically accurate Roman Empire and works of fiction/fantasy for the story.

The story was spoiled a long time ago for me, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised and awed at times once I got involved in the characters.

Either way it was a pick-up-and-play game to begin with, since it was a very flourished launch title for Xbox One. That doesn't mean it's bad by any means since Crytek put in mad optimisation work, with graphics that still hold up today.

(rant)
A shame that over a decade later and not many other good historical/beautiful Roman-era games have popped up. Having grown up mildly interested in the Roman Empire, there's plentiful amounts of information for a dev team to be inspired by, Although I guess it isn't the 'safe' option for money.

Assassin's Creed and Total War now seem to be the only big AAA IP's with historical research and detail put in (although I wouldn't bet on Ubisoft to be accurate, rather it be an excuse for more microtransactions). But even *they* have barely scratched the surface of Romans.

Coming from someone who loved the old Rome: Total War games, I guess the waves of Roman-esque media has just died off, unlike WW1, WW2, Cold War, and other modern conflicts.
(end of rant)

9/10,
very good short Roman game, wish there were more with similar polish

SWEET LIBERTY, MY LEG!!!!!!!

Took me almost 70hrs to complete one playthrough, but I was still left with plenty of content and a sense of replayability - and an itch to buy the DLCs.

Ended up using mods by the time I got to my second playthrough. 100% recommend using some just to fix bugs that STILL AREN'T PATCHED AFTER 8 YEARS...
Installation is pleasantly easy once you create a 'Mods' folder in the main directory and just dump everything there (also easy to delete if you ♥♥♥♥ up, saves having to re-verify or re-install the whole game).

Almost 100hrs now and I still don't understand Gwent.

11/10 would virtual sex again.

Really fun beat-em-up with cute fluffy animals.
Waited 3 years after playing the beta and this is honestly one of the funniest experiences you can have.
I honestly didn't know about some of the stuff people are complaining about, nor do I care much... Unless I wanted to host a local party with friends/family.

Even though you can have custom games with bots, I get why that could be an issue - since the game description was obviously changed last-minute before release.

Matchmaking issues (and no Oceanic servers apparently) I can understand as it's just been released. I can guarantee from the sheer amount of people talking about it that (HOPEFULLY) they'll fix those issues.

Other than that the amount of polish done to this game is honestly incredible, compared to almost every other company with that same 3yr time frame: The UI has been improved; the new gameplay mechanics; the new maps; even the fact that you can give yourself a nickname ON TOP of your gamertag that other people see instead in online matches!
Lots of very cool and funny things that kept me entertained, whilst already knowing it'd be a funny experience anyway.

Take USA's defence budget

x1,000

add anime filtering

= Unspeakable war crimes.

The grind, money, and time was not worth it.

Demonic JCB Simulator 1989.

11/10 would ♥♥♥♥ myself again