Recent reviews by DodgerRoger

**** Did not receive this product for free was bought on Amazon, steam review(s) appear to be bugged ****

The worst Fallout game in the series, FO76 should be a great success since it's basically the FO4 game engine only with multiplayer, however the game lacks the soul and story of the previous title and replaces that with premium content in spades. The premium content as you might expect promotes short cuts to progression, gear and base building; only it will cost you a significant amount of real money for stuff that effectively is free in FO4.
If you've played any other MMORPG type games then for the most part you should find it relatively straight forward, in fact it's probably one of the easiest games in the Fallout series, so much so that you might find it lacking in challenge as the Ai controlled enemies are fairly easy to outsmart (stand on a rock to shoot melee mobs, use glitchy cover versus ranged mobs etc...).
I was one of the unlucky few who played this at release when it wasn't available on Steam, at release there was less than half the content that is now in game and after a few sessions and the release of Fallout First (the premium content) I decided that it wasn't the game for me. I've since logged in and leveled up from lvl 24 to lvl 30 and although the zone feels a bit more lively it's still mainly empty, with a lot of the quests revolving around drawn out conversations that don't add much to the experience and waste a lot of time.
The addition of a mobile camp of sorts was a novel idea in order to push the multiplayer experience, though the lack of storage (even in your camp) puts a strain on what you can and cannot keep, obviously you can get additional storage space at a cost (real money).
Overall its a bad game, obviously more fun with friends, but, if you're new to the Fallout series then I'd highly suggest playing the previous titles before considering buying this product.

Edit: After putting in more hours and going over lvl 50 I can say it's not worth any further investment considering the current playability of the game. I'd guess at between 20-30% of quests bug out and give you no indication of where you're supposed to go without relogging back into the game. "Power Armour" and I use that term very loosely as in game it's more of a hinderance than a benefit needing specific perk & stat choices to be useful compared to running around without it, they've also made it so only a few out of the different types of power armour give you a "set" bonus making most of them redundant and promoting the devs favourites. To top that off the gameplay is literally go here kill someone, go there kill someone or go here pick this item up and go there pick this other item up or for even more originality go here and talk to this person and then go there and talk to this person (obviously killing everything along the way). If that sounds boring then you'd be correct, this game is literally for people who have too much money and would rather give it to Bethesda for digital goods than spend it on a developer who isn't just interested in increasing their bank balance.

Mega-jank cash-grab, wait a year for it to be finished and then buy it as it's currently almost unplayable.

I tested the Beta back in May/June and have found that since then the bugs that were present are still there along with many others. The game is wholly unstable with hard crashes (to desktop) occurring every 30 minutes in places with no warning.

Game mechanics are klunky at best with a Necromunda: Underhive Gang feel to useless skills that make combat incredibly tedious and long winded. Weapons that are literally devastating are reduced to pitiful fairy taps that take multiple hits to drop a relatively weak opponent.

Voice acting for the small part it's in game isn't too bad, but too much emphasis has been given to pointless companion conversations compared to the plot/story chats. Main enemies aren't given any voiced lines yet all the companions are voiced for the "romantic" conversations that crop up and block the actual gameplay. It's obvious they've been heavily influenced by how well Baldur's Gate 3 has done and have tried to emulate it (badly) as much as possible.

Lore-wise its a massive jangle of Clichés in order to push forward the story, unfortunately a lot of it falls flat on its face at first glance. Take for example the Navigators "Lidless Stare" something that literally strips the soul from someone or something (or drives them insane), yet this mighty ability in game also affects inanimate objects such as cover... Weapons/abilities/characters are rendered the same and the classes are just pathetic for the most part, psykers have like 2-3 attacking abilities and the Astartes you're given is just a joke with accuracy worse than an Imperial Guardsman.

*Spolier Warning* After reaching Chapter 4 and entering the fight area for Uralon the Cruel (the voiceless) I found that the Astartes I was forced to bring into the fight wasn't able to move across more than half the map due to him being to big to fit around it. I'd guess the Devs stopped playtesting it at Chapter 3...

Overall the Developers should be ashamed at releasing such a mess, if not for the fact I'd pre-ordered it (expecting something great) then I'd ask for my money and time back.

*Early Access Review*

What if Escape from Tarkov was in space and was fun? That's the shortest summary of this game I can imagine. Sure it's a 2D looter shooter that's not as pretty as EFT, but what it lacks in looks it makes up with addictive challenging gameplay that doesn't rely on other players involvement in order to give you a sweet taste of action.

As it's currently in Early Access I'll leave the rest of the review until later as there's apparently plenty more to come!

Remember when Vermintide 1 came out and people were hyped with good reason when VT2 was announced? Yet in both instances there were a "few" issues on release and it took some time for them to be fixed?

Well Fatshark certainly didn't remember as Darktide has all of the problems that VT 1 & 2 had, yet also removes most of what brought us back to the game time and time again? (characters & story) It might be 40k, but it's the blandest 40k you'll ever see as Fatshark went the generic route for character design & plot. Arguably there is no plot or urgency put on the player as the missions you're given are all generic and unlike VT 1 & 2 there is no story to work through - just go here and do something or kill someone.

What's worse is the game is now what I'd call playable, a year ago on release the main thing that Fatshark made sure was working was the premium store; the gameplay didn't matter only the pennies from the players...

As an avid 40k fan it's a disappointment, more so considering they made "toughness" into a bullet proof forcefield rather than give the Guard "armour" or even some form of shield/forcefield (from the TTG). In fact the armour you do get is purely for cosmetic purposes and does nothing else (see premium shop above).

Gameplay: 5/10
Audio: 7/10
Story/plot: 1/10
Longevity: 2/10
Overall: 4/10

Probably the best turn based RPG type game to be released as yet, currently just about to finish my 2nd playthrough and looking to do at least another one or two - not including any co-op. It's not the easiest game to master, but if its all working properly it truly is a wonder to behold.

I've only ran across a couple of bugs so far, the biggest issue being optimization; though all things considered it also looks and sounds great.

I'm looking forwards to further updates and the possibility of DLC/Expansions, overall I'd give this game an 8/10 - once the bugs are fixed then it'll be a 9/10!

Top notch development and gameplay, Highfleet mixes gameplay styles from several different genres to create something that might look simple, is in fact complex enough to challenge most brains. The simplest comparison would be: Asteroids + Missile Command + FTL + Battleship + Chess = Highfleet (though that doesn't include the PTSD you get from the "glitch low/high" nor the ship customization which also has it's own test mode).

Currently on about 265 hours and have completed the main campaign at least twice on each difficulty. Looking forwards to future developments/Expansions/DLC as just like Ssethtzeentach I want more!

Simple addictive fun!

A long time ago someone once told me "Crusader kings is the prettiest Excel spreadsheet ever!" skip forwards about 12 years and we have Stellaris+++++++++++++++!

Honestly, if you ever wondered what Crusader Kings in space would look like, Paradox have you covered! (literally, no pun intended, it's not a joke - it's what they did with Stellaris). This game has a lot of variety, unfortunately though that seems to be lost on the developers as they've tried to add in almost too much (late game this is especially noticeable) and the game can seem to be confused with itself at times. In terms of the variety, there are many races to choose from that can be tailored to suit your whims; however, don't expect it to be logical nor straightforward in execution. For all of Stellaris' grandeur it gets let down by what I can only describe as laziness on the developers part, for example: copy/pasting event text for all races, which gives various errors when physical and physiological problems are mentioned along with the choices you're "allowed" to make for the events as they arrive. These issues add up to a stale and souless affair which suck the flavour you put into the creation of your race initially and turn things quite grey on anything but the first couple of attempts or runs through a full game. At this point I've played almost 500 hours and fully done at least 2 full runs through the game and had many online MP sessions that led nowhere due to stability/desync issues. My most recent completion run took just over 100 hours, which felt more like administration (a job) after about the half way point with me spending most of my time monitoring planets that I'd conquered rather than watching the combat that was still happening with my forces.

A good example of how the developers keep tripping over themselves with choices is in the race creation screens; one of the most important, if not THE MOST IMPORTANT part of your race creation is the Origin of the race - this can lock out traits and certain other racial dynamics/choices that you make before you're supposed to choose your Origin. This means you can have all the previous choices made only to then have to go back and re-choose them according to the Origin you chose - this is as it has always been in Stellaris and is apparently working as intended. (Checked recently and this is still the case)

Other issues include enemy fleets suddenly becoming "immune" to damage unless you reload the previous save, which is especially good if you're playing the Ironman mode (Steam achievements only work with Ironman mode). Another classic issue I had on my most recent playthrough was the galatic community condemning my faction for having Tyanikki (or whatever they're called) in my systems when none were present, which allowed them to all declare war on my faction if they wished. How or even why you need a "cassius bell" to even propose war is another classic mistake with most factions (including aliens) needing it in order to commence war on another faction. This is possibly addressed in the Overlords DLC, which was probably released after I stopped buying into Paradoxs' infinite DLC development strategy.

As with most 4X type games, resource gathering is probably the most important factor you need to consider when building your empire, again Stellaris covers most with decent choices - apart from expansion which relies on a couple of fictional resources called influence and unity. Which is Paradox's way of slowing down player expansion and some other obscure empire choices that generally don't make much sense if you think about it for more than a minute. The easiest way to get around said resources is to use a mod that basically gives you an infinite amount/+1000 per month.

The lag mentioned at the end game stage is quite simply horrendous, the game will freeze for long periods of time (a minute plus running on SSD) if you play on the larger maps and this gets worse for multiplayer with it affecting overall stability too.

Artwork and overall aesthetic is good for the game with a really good soundtrack as well, unfortunately it's let down by relatively generic Sci-fi plots and events that you've probably seen before in other similar games. In fact on more recent playthroughs I've noticed that the devs are actively ripping off other sci-fi games/stories in order to try to add more to this game, though obviously they don't credit who they're ripping off 'cos that would imply a lack of creativity on their part.

All that being said you can pick up several other Sci-fi 4x type games on Steam for the price you'd pay for Stellaris and all of its' DLC. You might say it's a tad overpriced when compared with other titles that are "complete" on release without the massive amount of DLC that Stellaris/Paradox games comes with (now up to about £310 w/o discount!). You might expect a certain amount of DLC with a 4X type game like this, but, Paradox make it excessive; then they twist the thumb screws more by putting basic elements of the game behind paywalls (colonising water planets, making leaders more useful, race packs etc...). What makes their practise worse is the game still contains bugs from previous updates that are less important to the developers than adding DLC, which in a game like Stellaris means you can waste hundreds of hours due to a simple coding error - the only fault that you committed was to buy the product in the first place.

I know personally that this isn't my favourite out of the genre - Stardrive 2 still holds that title, the space combat alone makes it feel as though you're not in the back seat of the car being driven by someone else into a forest at night without headlights.

Following on from the previous two Warhammer Total War titles comes the third installment; unlike many other developers who release half-developed content with more bugs than players, Creative Assembly have once again released another quality product and learned from the previous releases (including Three Kingdoms).

Currently I've completed the Prologue and played through both the Kislev and Ogre Kingdoms campaigns up until the third checkpoint. The game has ran well during my time in game, there may have been some frame losses, but, overall it wasn't noticeable and out of the 60 hours I've played so far the program has crashed twice whilst streaming at the same time (again a rarity for new games these days).

Although lacking the global domination map/game mode there's plenty of things to look at from the release including:

A new story to investigate along with the brilliant cinematics!
8 New factions - including the long awaited Ogre Kingdoms and Daemon hosts!
Up to 8 player campaigns (with either sequential turns or simultaneous)!
A Prologue campaign to teach you the basics (effectively a tutorial, also tells you the introduction to the story).
New maps and sieges, gone are the old village fights with no defences, welcome in the new Three Kingdoms type sieges (way more challenging and interesting fights compared to the old type).
Did I mention the Ogre Kingdoms? They're awesome!

Overall this is a must for any Warhammer fanatic and for those who enjoyed the previous two titles. personally I think this series has gone some way to making Games Workshop realize their mistake with killing off the Old world of Warhammer.

Having played this game when it first came out and then again at least a couple of times over the intervening years I can say hand-on-heart that this game is going nowhere fast, initially my appraisal for the game was that it showed a lot of potential; though considering that was 5 years ago and the game still isn't finished should go some way to showing that the potential has been wasted.

The game initially had 3 modes, one offline single player mode and two online modes (PVP/PVE), though whether they've kept in the PVP I'm unsure, more so since they've shrank the starting map down to approximately 1/4 the size it was originally and this would make PVP a mess to say the least.

Graphically the game looks very good for the most part and the survival aspects are relatively realistic, it all looks good until you're able to take a good look at the fauna that you'll encounter - which seems to get worse with every update and move like they've got jelly for bones.

The crafting and leveling system has been reworked, I actually like the change they made to the system, even though now it feels like you're shooting in the dark when you're trying to find out what you need to craft next as that will possibly unlock more things you can make. There are some very odd developer choices made in the crafting part of the game, where sometimes you need to refine the ore to use it and other times it's perfectly fine to use raw ore to create technologically advanced structures (which in my opinion makes no sense at all).

The actual story element of the game is unfinished, at the time of writing I'd guess that currently you've got less than a third of the tale in game and that as far as I know hasn't changed since it's initial release 5 years ago.

Currently there are 4 planets/moons you can visit out of the 10 that's supposed to be in game, from what I can tell the other planets/moons have also had their map sizes reduced as well (you can easily see the borders on the flight down to the surface). Planetary transfer is clunky at best and isn't a smooth transition.

Apparently the game is due for some "real" development in the future as the Developers have announced relatively recently (last December?), that however remains to be seen.