Recent reviews by Handsome Ralph

Are you an Aliens fan? Did you enjoy XCOM 1 and 2? How about Shadow Tactics or Desperadoes 3? Then you should absolutely play this game.

Nightdive has done it again.

An exceptionally well done remaster. Very excited to play through this all over again after my play through of the first three levels. It's like I'm nine years old and it's Christmas morning all over again, except this installed a heck of a lot faster.

Playing this in flawless widescreen the second it finished installing without having to tinker with mods or config files is an added bonus. They've really done a great job up-scaling the textures, maxing out the framerate, and improving the lighting effects. The remastered cinematics aren't for everyone but I personally like them quite a bit. The Vault is a nice little bonus too.


Can't wait to see what comes next from Nightdive. JKII or Shadows of the Empire perhaps?

Bought this because it was on sale and I enjoyed playing it enough on my PS5 that I figured playing it on PC would be fun as well. And I think it certainly would be, if it weren't for the repeated crashes and other issues (HDR washout, frames randomly dropping). I only have about an hour of playtime, and I crashed four times. I thought the other reviews were possibly being a little hyperbolic about the crashes, but turns out, they were not.

Perhaps one day Ubisoft will patch this enough that random crashes are no longer an issue, but until then, don't waste your money.

Hands down one of my top 3 titles for VR. I love MSFS and DCS, but neither game lends itself well to VR flying. I also don't have the space or money to drop on numerous MFDs or instrument panels for my desktop, so having something like this is a godsend. I think just not having to constantly tweak HOTAS configurations for each individual airframe alone is massive reason this game is more accessible than DCS. Or as someone else put it "DCS Lite/DCS for people who go outside".

Works great on my Oculus 2 with Virtual Desktop.

Solid DLC for a solid game. There is a bit of a learning curve in learning how to fly this, which should be expected with any rotary aircraft After an hour or so, you should be able to do most basic movements without spinning into the ground. Turning on SAS to full helps tremendously.

Now anxiously awaiting the EW aircraft DLC.

Was well worth the wait. Hell, they even made Xen fun. Really just a great trip down memory lane with a lot of improvements and new bits.

Only downside is, this has me craving a new Half Life game. One day, maybe...

UPDATE: After playing for a few more hours after my initial review, I'd say this is more mixed than positive at this point.


PROS:

-Mission structure is pretty solid, and the core RTS gameplay is pretty good without trying to do too much. Very reminiscent of earlier RTS games like Command and Conquer or Age of Empires.

-The Devs captured the feel of the Verhoeven movie perfectly, and the art style is very well done and extremely on point.

-Units are more varied than you'd expect, and every unit seemingly fills it's own little niche.

-The story is surprisingly good for an RTS. It's not going to win any awards, but it's good enough and does a good job of expanding the universe we saw in the film without getting too outlandish with it.

CONS:

-Lack of camera rotation can be a huge pain. You will find yourself fighting in cities in later parts of the game, which the buildings will often obstruct your view of your units and enemy units, which being able to rotate the camera would easily improve the experience.

-Pathfinding can be really bad sometimes. Having a group of units just stop dead cold because another unit selected with them beat them to a fight, and then proceeding to do nothing while that unit gets wiped out is incredibly annoying. You'll also have occasional moments where units will proceed to not fire for whatever reason unless you position them just right. This admittedly only happened a handful of times, but when it did, it was extremely annoying to deal with.

-Clearing hives. This makes sense as the game starts out, but as time goes on, it's not really clear what one needs to do to effectively clear a hive aside from endlessly sending units into it, and even then, that doesn't always seem to work. It'll show that your army is higher strength than the hive, but for whatever reason, your army will not clear the hive, and will be suspectable to outside attacks the entire time. What makes this annoying is that the game is very stingy with resources, so you can't exactly send in a large number of units to both clear the hive, with another group of units covering the units in the hive.

-In addition, whenever you find bug tunnels or other out branches of a hive, you're unable to effectively close most of them until the main hive has been cleared. Instead, you have to fight whatever spawns out of them, and then hope you time it right so that they don't spawn a mass of units on top of or behind you as you're in the middle of trying to clear the main hive. That's not strategic or fun.

-No real base building to speak of. This is fine for the most part, but when you do "base build" your economy is rather limited, and it goes from what could be a fun exercise in resource management to frustration real fast.

-Speaking of resource management. There's really no reason why you're so resource limited aside from the devs trying to spike the difficulty. That or, it's a way to limit the number of units on screen due to graphical limitations.

Overall, I still like the game, but this feels like it's an early access title based on the Devs soliciting feedback on what to possibly add in the future, as well as the lack of any achievements, skirmish or MP modes that may or may not show up depending on how the game sells and is received.

Awesome followup to the base game. Short and sweet (I beat it in a day) but the missions here are fantastic and a real joy to play through. The story is pretty enjoyable too. Would love to see more standalone expansions like this.

A really solid game that mixes elements of stealth, RTS, and puzzle game play. If you enjoy the Hitman series, you'll absolutely love this. The missions are very well done and will often give you numerous paths to complete your objectives but occasionally only one or two paths will be available to move forward.

Worth buying on sale at this point for sure, but to say some of the game play feels dated would be a massive understatement. It's enjoyable enough so long as you don't let some of the more tedious parts drag you down and you don't let yourself get sidetracked by some of the really grindy parts of the game (Ridler's puzzles and the challenge modes sadly enough). Think of it more as an extended story pack between Arkham City and Arkham Knight more than anything else and you'll likely enjoy your time with it. Also worth mentioning that the Cold Cold Heart DLC is pretty short and sweet and well worth checking out as well.