Recent reviews by Ish

While this game is decent visually, has excellent music, and has a lot of weird, interesting things in it, it doesn't do anything with what is has.

There's a lot of minor complaints I could level with the game but generally I have to say that time should have been taken to figure out what would be enjoyable to play for a mystery, and how to turn that into a basic system that can work for most ideas. If not that, then proper time should have been taken to flesh out each individual mystery and it's consequences on your character's life.
I wanted to see something like, how does a school like theirs function if you can stumble upon a body in a pool, or a locker can bite you? How is the populace responding to their kids going missing, whether by the many dozens of monsters filling the game, or by the player outright killing them? How do people deal with the black sludge coming out of their pipes, or people going crazy from the nightmarish ♥♥♥♥ they're encountering? What are the people doing?
The game doesn't address it. Instead the whole world exists in a state of limbo where no one knows what's happening but has a vague idea things are off, right up until you run out of time and the world ends. It's like being forever stuck right at the beginning of a horror story, despite some cataclysmic ♥♥♥♥ happening in some. There badly needs to be some connection between the player and the characters in the world, and they almost do that with the player's neighbor, but that exists for only one mystery and really only in passing. The world instead feels like a cardboard cutout of horror media.

So much of the game starts interesting, but the follow-through simply isn't there. I get the sense with every mystery that the developer had some ideas, drew them out, left some room to add stuff later, and never went back. At some point after the scissor lady thing he made a new format, but he used it as a crutch to crudely put in enough stuff to make it look like a full game. And yet, the game is still empty. Nothing interconnects. Nothing leads to anything. Nothing has purpose behind it. It's filling space and padding time.

This entire game is a placeholder for a game. It's a tech demo.

One of the best games of all time for sure, love that campaign and love BT.

The game demands far more out of you than it's willing to give.

Pretty good.
I don't enjoy turn-based combat but it felt alright, if quite hard. The writing is pretty alright and the humor when it shows itself is great, and the keeps the pace well through a fair bit of variance throughout.

It should be a good game, it has plenty of good things in it, but the devs clearly never played it outside lower difficulties and certainly haven't played it solo. I would bet my car that they can't beat difficulty 9 as the game demands of us; Always fighting, never stealthing, hiding, running away, or relaxing.


The game clearly pushes you into fights, yet the consensus with anyone actually playing the thing is that running away and trying to be 'stealthy' is the solution, failing that you're to use strategems (air support, artillery support, extra weapons/ammo, defense garbage), yet the game does not have stealth mechanics to support this and the strategems - let alone your primaries and secondaries - are widely worthless and limited.
This game doesn't have stealth, it has a stealth facade as is common for these multi-faceted games; Lay prone at the edge of the map undetected and watch enemy patrols spawn outside of vision to patrol within 20ft of you regardless of terrain, often wrapping around and over impassible obstacles. When you have the better scan range you can watch enemies follow you to keep within that range. I once laid down on a plateau to keep out of sight of three patrols, but surprise surprise these bugs that have never tried, let alone been able to climb these rocks before, magically decide to crawl up the one edge that'll give them an excuse to find me and call a breach.
Like the dozens of games that have pulled this same exact ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ before the developer's hand is most obvious here; You're not supposed to stealth around and you're being punished for trying, you're supposed to bash your face against the unending hordes. That people have been forced by the game to make it work anyway is no sign that it was intended to work, and that options already within the very narrow bounds of their intended gameplay loop are getting knocked down a peg indicates that they're not after the horde slaying experience either; They want a grinding slog of a game so they can offer you some fancy new guns in their cash shop that might solve that problem they've created for you. They've got a formula for milking you, their begrudging cash cow, and they're not going to let you do anything that could break out of that pen.

So what's the combat like? When in combat the game forces you to fight obscenely tanky enemies that can one-shot you swiftly amidst a swarm of smaller enemies that can jump up your ass and lock you down via slowing acid, flinching, or ragdolling. If you manage to escape and break line of sight you can watch the horde track you through walls on the map, following you as you maneuver around them, making it impossible to escape without killing them all. This didn't used to be the case just a week ago, but the most recent patch seems to have made that impossible now as enemies don't ever lose track of you due to terrain, they just keep going until you run out of lives or you wipe them out. You're not allowed to be stealthy, you must kill everything or die.
If you chose to fight, those """random""" patrols will keep spawning and join the fight. Each patrol is capable of spawning it's own reinforcements which include heavy units, the same being true for garrison units. Patrols - and sometimes garrisons - will follow any noise you make, but even being seen seems to draw them toward you too, as well as any damage taken by any unit anywhere automatically gives patrols your location. As such, once you get into one fight you're stuck wading through ~12 to a patrol or 4-5 to a garrison, then another 20+ enemies per breach for the bugs, a tenth of which can be heavies depending on what spawns. I've been caught by a single bug once that, in under a minute managed to bring out 6 chargers at the start of a mission, and despite running around and rocketing two of them, it simply wasn't manageable on a flat ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ featureless moon. This was also prior to the recent patch which made the charger more vulnerable to everything after player complaints. Just so you know it used to be that the only thing that could reliably kill a charger was a rocket to the knee plus some bullets. The 110 rockets, arty, 500kg, and so on all failed to reliably kill chargers or even do damage in my experience, and even landing on top of them would often do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

On lower difficulties all the objections made in favor of the game apply as weapons and strategems are capable of killing off all enemies. On higher difficulties the enemies spawn in too great a number to deal with using the given primaries, secondaries, and even strategems, but this is combined with restrictions such as reduced strategems and increased strategem call-in time, nevermind that they're not capable of blocking bugs from spawning in the first place (unlike the automatons) and patrols can spawn within 100ft of you so long as you're not looking. Finally, heavies spawn in greater numbers at higher levels, and all heavies can outrun you aside from maybe the tank which can seem to hit you from anywhere anyway, so long as it's proc'd.

Currently I think the only faction worth fighting is the automatons; Grunts can be easily headshot with most weapons but best with the dmr, the armored units have either obvious weak-points or hard counters, and most of the arsenal you get is capable of handling them very effectively (e.g. Spear for easy factory kills, autocanon and rockets for most armor weakpoints and dropships, primaries for everything else).
The bugs have one thing and that thing is rush you down and ♥♥♥♥ your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and there is no counter to that but to run, as such the gameplay devolves into a jogging simulator. Don't bother with the bugs, it isn't even close to what Starship Troopers Extermination managed.


These are just the main criticisms I have for this game but there are many more, such as the small range of mission types, the godawful defense mission this game is wholly unsuited for yet pushes constantly, the failure of armor to do anything of value, the premium currency crap, the shield that doesn't block melee, the impotent lasers that "don't have to worry about ammo," the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sentries and mines, and on and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on.
But the biggest thing is the audacity of the developers; By not only ignoring the critiques from their playerbase and pretending instead that the problems lie anywhere but at their own feet, but to insult them repeatedly and put in changes that make the problems worse they've proved they don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about you or their game, they care about money and they know they already got yours.
"Helldivers 2's developer is asking the community for ideas to help with the problem of hosts kicking teammates who don’t equip "meta" loadouts."
This problem was caused by the devs giving players ♥♥♥♥ weapons and ♥♥♥♥ AP against enemies primarily covered in ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of armor spawned in mass quantities. If they want that problem to go away, they need weapons that are actually worth a damn or reduced quantities. It's obvious, no one wants a butterknife in a gun fight but that's how most the weapons feel at higher difficulties, and at lower ones they're still trash, you just don't have enough enemies to deal with to complain about it. This problem is entirely of their own making, yet it's framed as something the playerbase has caused instead because they don't have to give a ♥♥♥♥ how they act when there's money to be pilfered from the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ still defending them.


Edit: Sony apparently works with the WEF, current controversy makes sense now, just another company to avoid I guess. Remember, if anyone else has a say in your thing, - be that your game, your projects, your home, your properties, or your life - you don't own it. If someone tries to say they get a say over that which you own, it is your responsibility to enforce your claim, else you necessarily forfeit the right to it.
Don't be a pleb.

It's not even hard, it's just tedious.

Boring and does not respect your time.

Taking damage often results in an injury which causes damage over time for certain actions - to include opening your inventory or looking at loot - unless you have a character that can partially ignore that. Most injuries can cause infection, which can cause damage over time. Most damage types have their own damage over time such as fire and acid, and which can be spread around. If you make a mistake and happen to take any of these conditions without the means to correct them, your run will end in a handful of turns.
Consequently the name of the game is don't get hit, and it's very easy to not get hit if you manage the movement correctly, even when the game spawns 8 guys around the elevator entrance. You don't really have action, you just click which things need to die, pick up loot you can't carry, and move to the next room.

I know there's more to the game later, I only got it after seeing Sseth's video after all, but ♥♥♥♥ me this game is boring to play before that point because there is zero flexibility on the part of the game. You either play hyper-conservatively or you waste 20m+ on a failed run. Food strongly feeds into this conservatism, and in most of my runs the most effective unit wasn't the one with some extra resistances, faster reloads or immunity to injury with a cooldown despite how helpful that is, it was the one girl that had a -60% food requirement; She needed so little food I stopped carrying any for her, she can subsist through an entire floor on a few kills.

In my last run I'd gone through with hardly any damage, but the level had gone on so long and so few enemies had dropped food I was running low. I'd chosen to use the faster reloads guy (Which barely had any impact on gameplay) because I felt I should at least use the other characters. Because the last 8 guys had no food, and the previous 20 guys had minimal food but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of bandages, splints, and shotgun ammo, I decided to cannibalize a guy. This poisons you, but I had two antidotes and a few of these wet-wipe looking things, both of which cure that. I ate two pieces of meat and had a -2 [poisoned] status, so I took the antidote, moved because the game doesn't refresh the status immediately, and saw it hadn't changed. I used another, then those wipes, and nothing happened. I checked the health menu and it turns out I had nothing that could cure the infection "injury" to my stomach which was causing the damage.
The run back to the elevator was much too far for me to survive despite having two medkits to work with, so I had to just walk to death because there simply wasn't anything I could do about it. 30m or so wasted on an easy run. I don't even care that I lost all my ♥♥♥♥ as it's very easy to gather gear and make it through these missions, it's purely how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time consuming it is for how little gameplay there is. It's literally just juggling a minuscule inventory space to the tune of a timer, and the "combat" is a total afterthought.


# Addendum
Decided to play it again recently and I came up with a minimal list of changes to address my issues:
1. Increase enemy accuracy/reduce dodge chance.
2. Increase player health, probably triple it or equivalent.
3. Correct all the false and misleading UI bugs. (Movement AP values incorrect, visual healthbar is unhelpful till too late, unclear what counts under 'cures poisoning'/'cures poisoning injury' as described above, water not showing burn clear when it works, etc.)
(And for personal preference, 4. Delete the food requirement)

Currently the game is easy despite the many 'git gud' claims plebs throw around the comments due to how infrequently the player gets hit, the only 'hard' part of the game is foresight. Knowing how much food, ammo, medicaments, and booze are required to avoid status kills and Quasi-spam, having enough inventory space for same, and pulling the right sequence of actions from the aether to avoid OHKs. It feels like walking on the edge of a pier without a guardrail; You're in no danger of falling off on your own, all you're doing is walking, and then some kid runs by and dropkicks your ass off the side. The extreme risk produced by OHKs/high-lethality status effects do not make a game hard, only tedious, as the only counter is to play hyper-conservatively i.e. boringly. A hard game is one that wears you down, wringing you dry of options until you're a withered stump of a man.

My suggested changes will allow the player to turn into the pincushion they really should be as a one man merc army. You'll take damage consistently but have a large buffer which allows you to mitigate and experience all the status effects put into the game, giving a reason to lug around all those medicaments. Having a manageable buffer against average enemies will make the Quasi's stand out by giving you a barely unmanageable buffer.

There's other things I'd suggest but without these I don't feel it's worth going into. Apparently there's a patch coming that'll add some stuff, we'll see how that goes.

Game has not fundamentally improved since launch despite the new vehicles, guns, and maps. It's the same ♥♥♥♥-tier grind fest that every """free""" to play game ever was.

Gear is level gated, enemies don't seem to drop anything but ammo anywhere outside the tutorial, and enemies are bullet sponges. I guess if you're absolutely desperate for more Stalker it's ok but it's always going to feel like jank ♥♥♥♥. Nothing else is really worth commenting on.

If you want an RE/SH-like this is a worthwhile play.
The puzzles are definitely on par with games of that era and their presentation is always gorgeous. Story isn't straightforward so if you enjoy piecing it together yourself you may enjoy that as well. I wouldn't say it's scary however, it tries to play it like silent hill but it never managed to work for me, leaning more on loud sounds than creeping dread.


My two main problems with the game were excessive keys and the small inventory.
There are way too many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ keys. At one point I used a key to get a key which took me to another key, and one of those had a second key in the same room. I know old Resident Evil had lots of puzzles and key items but even if you played without items I believe you'd still fill up from keys alone. It had me questioning the point of gathering all these random knick-knacks; I know I'm trying to go down somewhere and find someone but the actual barrier to progress is often not shown until you're part way through the map making me feel less like a problem solver and more like a kleptomaniac.

The inventory is 6 slots max with RE5-style logic; A shoulder-mounted flashlight and an eyeball camera both take up inventory space even when equipped. There are 5 such special items which waste space but if instead they filled a unique equip slot I believe some of the frustration of this inventory would have been alleviated and their purpose would be made more clear; You're not meant to carry repair pads AND auto-injectors, just one or the other. I could never predict when I'd need the flashlight or just how dangerous the rooms would be, forcing me regularly to go back and forth and sort my inventory.

I understand they're trying to keep you feeling on the edge of running out - and it even works - but you'll often walk into rooms with 3-5 items and in some cases two of those are keys. If you're trying to engage with the systems the game has your inventory will typically look like this:

1. A healing stack
   
2. An equipment item (Flashlight, required at times)
   
3. A weapon
   
4. Some extra ammo (Only one stack allowed per type, usually 2 loads)
   
5. Empty
   
6. Empty
   
   With so many items laying around, reviving enemies, limited permanent kills, and even sudden boss battles, backtracking is guaranteed. While the items and weapons are optional you'll ignore the majority of items and gameplay doing this, turning Signalis into a spooky puzzle game.