Recent reviews by Lacene

Could be better if the devs actually concentrated on the main game rather than shoving god awful minigames in my face every 5 minutes.
No I don't want to play bootleg magic, bootleg starfox, bootleg road rash, bootleg punchout or bootleg mario kart.
I'm probably missing a dozen more minigames from the list.

This is a game from a different time, it plays like something from the PS2, looks like something from the PS3 and has none of the anti consumer baggage of other modern games. It is sad that this alone is worth praising but such is the state of the industry and the racing genre in particular.

This game is very particular on what it offers, unstructured highway racing with traffic that is heavy enough for you to remain aware of it but never enough to actually pose much of a hazard at all. With nothing but long straights and gentle suggestions of curves the game shouldn't be that interesting to drive, especially with it's fairly simplistic handling. Yet the framing of hunting down new rivals and the fact few races last longer than a minute really stops you from dwelling on that fact long enough to notice.

Act one's progression is pretty rough, being overly restrictive in what you can start with and the money to earn a new vehicle takes a bit too long for my taste. One thing to note is the game generally wants you to not return to the garage that often if you can help it. Between long drive bonuses and the win multiplier it is optimal to not go back until the game forces you, or you reach the credit limit and instead use parking areas to refresh your tires and nitrous.

The AI also leaves something to be desired, it's kinda stupid and prone to ramming you into walls quite often as well as car balance being all over the place. Most races will end as a one sided stomp as well as the car the opponent has rarely actually matching to it's performance. But when you do have an opponent who can keep up or is slightly faster than you it does become surprisingly tense and fun despite the reality of you just going in a straight line and barely steering for a minute.

It's fun, rough in a way that is just down to it's fundamental design rather than being EA but still enjoyable. If you actually manage to get invested there's a lot of hours for how comparatively light the content is.

I finally managed to get past my soft locking woes and managed to play through the DLC. My views on Frontline 59 are mixed. This DLC is basically a more condensed form of the main game with all the good and bad parts of that game pushed into extremes.

The difficulty is extreme, hard mode in Wingman was already a lot more difficult than ace difficulty in AC7. Lack of any health regen and no checkpoints will do that.
Yet at the same time the difficulty always felt a lot fairer too, in Wingman you fail a mission because you yourself got shot down. In AC7 you usually failed a mission because of a timer or an NPC getting shot down instead which is a lot more aggravating.
Mercenary mode is even more insane of course, but that needs a full game clear to even unlock, it's fine if that mode is simply unfair.

Wingman also, in general, had a lot fewer crazy set-pieces that actually affected gameplay. Sure being transported to the Fanta-dimension was dramatic but outside of a glitchy hud missions still played more or less the same.

F-59 however has been copying AC's homework a little more closely with a couple of these missions and the result is very much showing why AC now has checkpoints and health regen.
Don't get me wrong, the premise of mission 4 and 6 of the DLC are genuinely fantastic, and the final boss of the DLC is a much better fight mechanically than anything 7 or it's own DLC could offer. I don't want them to change anything about the missions themselves; If there is a sequel, I do hope that they continue the trends they started in the DLC and double down on the lunacy.

But at the same time with the more extreme scenarios the game is much more in need of checkpoints, resupply lines or something in order to maintain the higher action and more dramatic scenarios without it turning into a frustrating slog. Best compromise I can think of would be to keep the current no checkpoint/resupply to Mercenary mode or make it a modifier.

During the tutorial section I was fined twice for traffic collisions before the game had even granted me control of the truck. That is the level of polish you're going to have to expect here.

The game has promise but they've leaned too hard into "iTs A tRuCk In SpAcE gUyS!!1!" angle and made it a pain in the ass to control in a 6 DoF environment. You can only control the pitch of the vehicle and you cannot strafe at all, this is combined with most turning causing your truck to pitch up or down alongside rolling and a stabiliser system that is little more than a mild suggestion. Turning it off and on felt no different, it's that useless. While going point to point this is not much of an issue, aside from feeling like you are staring through a letterbox because our character is apparently 4 foot tall and can barely see over the hood.

The issues begin whenever you have to do any sort of precision control such as hitching up, almost always these will be slightly off the main horizon of the system (or you'll be lower than expected since you need to keep the nose down to even see where you are going). Lining up for these when you can only pivot around your center and not strafe at all means you need ridiculous amounts of space to line everything up since if your truck is not completely perpendicular to what you want to dock with there's a good chance the docking system will just refuse to let you hitch. In the demo the game would twist you into position so long as you were somewhat close but for release they have made this much stricter.

I get that it's supposed to feel like a big rig in space, but being able to do some minor course correction without needing a 45 point turn isn't going to ruin that, the truck is still going to feel heavy and have a ton of inertia. It is after all a STAR truck, not some clapped out Kenworth.

Also the maintenance aspect, I like it. Batteries running out frequently or the truck in general being an unreliable heap that is always breaking does add some nice distractions from just flying down the spaceways (at half the speed limit because you are always stuck behind some slow AI that jackknifes the his truck every 20 yards). But the default prices for your batteries and other consumables is utterly insane. Why the hell are air filters costing over twice my job payout when they barely last? There are settings to adjust these things to be fair but to change them you have to start an entire new save which is pure insanity.

TL;Dr it's undercooked

It's vampire survivors with DRG branding slapped on top and some minor terrain deformation.

The problem is I already have VS, I've had it for a couple years now and DRGS offers very, very, little to an already stale formula. Yes there is mining, being able to tunnel through rock and mine minerals is a nice side objective in addition to the usual kiting activities. But it's not enough.

This bullet heaven or whatever the genre is called nowadays has plenty of games in it and they have all iterated upon VS in some way. Be it including strafing or full on manual shooting and reloading. DRGS has only brought with it the ability to hump the walls to get some extra resources. Yes you can tunnel past a horde in the short term but the "islands" of rock you chew through are never really big enough for this to be a significant strategy. Guns feel bland and ineffective for the genre they are in too, with many having incredibly cumbersome firing patterns and long reloads that feel punishing when you have no control over them. Upgrades likewise feel boring, outside of overclocks all you are getting is simple % stat changes. 15% damage, 10% reload. You don't ever feel strong, merely that you are at best keeping pace. In fact a lot of the overclocks themselves are also just basic modifiers but bigger, very few actually change how you might play the game, a stark contrast from DRG where even balanced overclocks can significantly shake up a weapon.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the fact this game actually has some challenge and I wish we could get swarms as big and omnipresent in DRG itself.

Which really is the crux of what I don't like about this game, it doesn't feel like a DRG spinoff. It feels too much like an inferior version of VS with a superficial gimmick tacked on.
You aren't getting lost in caves, because they are always just small rectangles with a few small islands of digable rock or small impassable pits dotted about.
You aren't doing various mining and industry tasks, all you have is clearing waves until a boss spawns then killing it so you can move to the next rectangular arena. The best you get is mining some morkite occasionally.
You aren't using creative weapons to kill bugs and in fact have no direct control over them at all.

The game feels agonisingly passive in how you play it. You kite bugs, hump walls and choose between 3 basic % buffs to one of your guns every few seconds. I hope eventually they do actually try to make this game be a little more interactive and a lot more like it's big brother as a true spinoff rather than a clone of an already existing game. But I had these same complaints back when the demo came out and practically nothing has changed between that and early access.

Just buy vampire survivors instead, it's cheaper and has more content.

Still not changing my review, Sony shouldn't have tried this in the first place and they likely only backpedaled because Valve gave them a warning for the hassle they caused. Saying "they heard us" on twitter is nothing but a pathetic lie to try and salvage some goodwill.

Imagine mmo tier raids in terms of flashy spectacle but with combat that's actually fun and you don't have to interact with broken, mentally unstable people in order to progress.

It's armored core, on PC, in the current year, with controls that don't require a contortionist to master.
Frankly the fact the game exists at all is a miracle. I think most people were expecting From to just churn out constant fantasy hack and slash slop until the end of time.

It's by no means perfect even by AC standards, the parts list is honestly pretty small and mech building is streamlined especially in terms of internals and support gear.
The game is built very heavily around forcing you into close range with very few weapons having a range beyond around 180 meters. Even if you do hit beyond the weapon's effective range it will always ricochet off unless it's against the most trash tier of fodder enemies. Missiles are the only true long range option in the game, no sniper cannons.
The ACS stagger system often called derisively the Sekiro bar also can be overly dominating. While most AC games have had stagger and armour break generally you needed to hit by a single attack strong enough to overwhelm your AC's stability. Here it is instead built up by cumulative hits and once it is maxed out you are stunned for a moment and then take increased damage, how much by dictated by the individual weapon's stats. Honestly? It's not that bad and you can beat the game without making your build revolve around it, and it benefits you more than the AI. Though it is undeniable that if you fully lean into stagger punish you can get some real cheesy quick kills but they aren't that easy to pull off.
Melee also has a much more significant presence in this game, melee weapons are powerful but again they do need you to commit a lot more than you might think if you just watch a speed kill on youtube.

The biggest weakness of the game however is the OST, there's a couple good songs but so much of it lacks impact.

I won't comment on PVP because I've never been a fan of it, but I do know that the game's netcode can be charitably called archaic.

In terms of missions there is a bigger focus on setpiece bosses, yes they can be hard but for the most part this is a build issue. MTs and rival ACs don't really force you to have an effective loadout, bosses will do that. I'm far from good at games, and I've never played a soulslike in my life but even I managed to beat them all. Not cleanly or in a particularly honourable way, but you're a merc not a knight so don't be afraid of strapping too many missiles to your AC and playing keep-away while pelting them constantly. It werks.

I want more though, more leg types that aren't bipeds. More missions to use all the cool stuff you get after beating the game three times and hunting for the combat logs. I hated hunting for those. A randomised campaign like Project wingman's conquest mode would have been a wonderful addition to the game.

Hopefully it gets DLC and we don't have to wait a decade for a sequel.

Imagine releasing a game in the year 2022 and not even allowing you to rebind the controller inputs, only keyboard.

Amur 2 electric boogaloo.

Bridges you can't repair.
Landslides you can't clear.
But don't you worry there are other landslides and bridges you can still fix... that are functionally useless because they lead to nowhere.
A lot of tasks can only be accepted/cleared from one side meaning you often need to clear several other contracts just to get to it, all to unlock a watch tower or something else (did they forget we've had radar for a year?)
Roads that suddenly terminate in a river deeper than the Mariana trench crossable only by ice thinner than a e-girls's skin.

Amur felt hard, excessively so a lot of the time, but generally there was this constant feeling of progress and after the rough start once you got access to new garages things eased up. You also had a heck of a reward to work for. It had a lot of annoying contrivances of unfixable infrastructure (and this is always nothing but awful game design and whichever dev keeps doing it needs to be smacked around the face) but it also generally respected the short and dangerous vs slow and safe approach. There were still utterly stupid hazards like half toppled invincible trees that would snag your truck with physics but these were rare-ish.

Maine does not do either of these things, there is no grand setpeice you are working towards, once you fix all the stuff on the map get all the roads and bridges (that you are allowed to fix) running it's just "gj, get lost now". Nor does it offer a slow and safe vs fast but hard route. Both are slow and dangerous, it's just what looks like the safer route has hidden landmines scattered across it. Overall it is slightly easier than Amur but dials up the annoying hazards even higher to compensate.

The 2 new trucks are alright I guess. The forester is the best logger in the game but logging has never been particularly enjoyable and never will be so long as every job requires doing the same trip six times. Snowrunner is a slow paced game but it shouldn't also be grindy on top.