Recent reviews by Nostrvm

Don't be fooled by the name.

It will leave a bad taste.

Nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired.

Yet another instance of a DLC surpassing the base game. Playing as Hel comes with a trade-off which worked in my favor. Because I never really used the abilities in the base game, trading away 3 of them (you keep surge AKA distance attack) for increased mobility in the form of longer jumps and dashes was a treat.

Also, I'm so down bad for undead cyborg goth mommy.

Not a power but a movement fantasy. Important distinction to make. In a nutshell, Hotline Miami meets Mirror's Edge meets Katana Zero. Also soundtrack slaps. My only gripe with the game is that I'd lock into the gameplay loop and space out every time so I could hardly pay attention to the incessant yapping between the 4 characters, which lays out the plot and gives insight into the lore and worldbuilding around you. Not that I needed to, I had a blast anyway.

And I'm also down bad for Hel. Like bad bad.

Had to wait over 8 years to finally be able to play this game. Was I as excited to play it as when it was first announced? No. Am I pleasantly surprised by how good it turned out to be? Yes indeed. Did I bother to help The Minutemen with their ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ settlements, let alone (God forbid) start one of my own? Nu-uh. Did I agree to stay by the side of the son the spooks at The Institute took from me and help him? Nah, I sided with the Brotherhood. Was I mildly peeved at not being able to convice Danse into not having to execute his tin ass? Some. Did I feel bad about melting all those good hearted fellows in The Railroad into a pile of smoldering ash? In the house of God, no less? Plenty. Was I glad to bring back Liberty Prime and hear all those megabased anti-communist quotes again, being a victim of communism myself, while he tore The Institute a new one? Delighted. Would I do it again? You're ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ right.

By and large the biggest triumph in Rockstar's line-up of successes. At this point I believe that their formula for creating such authentic, immersive, detailed and lived-in open worlds consists of making them feel like developing them took much longer- hell, like they have existed for much, much longer than the time it took to create them. This game took 8 years to make yet the world they created feels like it has been existing for over 40 years. The day other developers manage to wrap their heads around this concept and philosophy will be the day they might give Rockstar Games a run for their money. Until then, it's uncontested.

I feel bad for all the people that consider themselves huge Alien (1979) fans yet they're too terrified to even poke this game with a ten foot pole: And they should be. As a very seasoned and avid fan of horror games this one raises the bar across the board and comes off as, for me, the Apex horror experience.

If the first sentence of the previous paragraph speaks to you: Don't miss out on this.

I'm so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pissed at Arrowhead. I just bought this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game right before the update that was supposed to REVIVE IT not DRIVE IT INTO THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GROUND came out. What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ travesty. (Old negative review from when I bought the game a few days before Escalation of Freedom came out)

Edit: Changing my review to positive. After playing the game, I started to understand where all the nerfs were coming from and ngl I kinda feel bad for Arrowhead.. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against fun. But I think their idea of fun for this game was, well, to honor its name. Helldivers . As in you dive into Hell . And it's not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be brutally hard and unforgiving, barely complete 1 or 2 objectives (if at all) while constantly being overrun, constantly dying, constantly running out of time.. and I think that because the game at launch failed to get that message across, the community pretty much hijacked the game from them and want it to turn into a power fantasy. And this recent update is them pretty much giving up on what was probably their original vision. And what's even more heartbreaking: if they didn't this game was probably going to die from so much bad PR, when the biggest culprit wasn't even them but Sony.

So why am I changing this review to positive then? Because they did what they had to do to prevent this incredibly fun game from eventually dying a painful death.

As a huge fan of anything Great War related and NOT a very big fan of some aspects of the survival horror genre: this game is GENIUS. A masterclass in survival horror game design being perfectly adapted to a historical setting.

A masterclass in premise, setting, story, characters, graphics, sound design and voice acting. It's high up there with SOMA among the best horror games I've played. Sadly, the same cannot be said about the game's design.

I suppose the uninitiated will find the eldritch cosmic body horror plenty scary, particularly if it's executed to this level of polish, but that in and of itself might not cut it out for the most seasoned of us. Certainly not me.

Even on my first playthrough it was painfully obvious in which areas I was currently passing through would feature a monster I had to hide from, avoid, evade, ultimately escape from... and that's it. So many missed opportunities to have us complete difficult tasks and repairs in this massive crumbling oil rig while being hunted and grip us with so much tension and terror. Instead, the scant times we do have to pull a lever/close a valve/flick a switch with a monster in the vicinity is inside these little pockets of safety, far from any monster's reach. And don't get me started on the extremely short and linear chase sequences.


Ultimately, this game could have been so much scarier, but only ended up feeling a tech demo showing me how pretty Unreal Engine 5 is for the 40th time in an hour. Also came with a neat little feature: every time I died the framerate would get chopped to bits and I'd be forced to QTD and launch the game again to fix it. No amount of fiddling with the video settings would get it under control.

Really, really wanted to get scared by this game. Ended up only getting sad... because of the heart-breaking, soul-crushing ending