Recent reviews by Omeron

Helldivers 2 is a co-op shooter that has a level of cooperation not seen since deep rock galactic. The game itself is the best version of a live service game, its not just delivering stuff to buy regularly, but new free content as well and its done in a story based and engaging way. This approach has its own pros and cons, but its an approach i've rarely seen done this well before. In addition the game has some interesting game mechanics that add to the immersion and energy of the game. There are a lot of good things to praise the game for and its absolutely well worth picking up.

The live service portion of the game deserves praise and any other game should look at this and deep rock galactic for how to do live service games. The way they do it is story related, they add content to the game and issue major orders to push the players to interact with the game a certain way and this allows them to tell a story of success and failure. This drives player engagement in the game rather than the AAA approach of trying to drive engagement with their store. The negative to this approach is that theres no player testing of content before release, so there are a lot of bugs where things may not work correctly for weeks or even months after the content was released. A few examples would be unintended spawns that make certain missions types miserable, fire and gas damage doing no damage, game crashing bugs that make you lose a missions worth of progress, ect. In addition it means that the balance on weapons is always being tweaked so you need to be aware of each patches changes.

The gameplay mechanics are also super interesting. At its core its just a third person shooter, but with the inclusion of strategems and how they are used it becomes a totally different game. Strategems are effectively just activated abilities you pick from at the start of a mission, which wouldnt be all that interesting by itself if thats all it was, but instead to call them in you need a sequence of buttons to activate them. This sequence doesnt seem like much at first, but when you are under attack and need to call one in it feels totally different than just putting in a button. This makes it so much more engaging to use and it gives some weight to the ability rather than just clicking a button on your keyboard.

Overall this game does a great job on what i believe it intended to do. As noted by their sales it appears it exceeded their expectations and is far more popular than anticipated. I held off my review for a few months waiting to see how this was all going to pan out and i felt it was the right time to write my review. This game is certainly one of the best co-op games that has been released and with the sony issue resolved there is no reason to not play it. Given how great my praise is for it, i also need to note the bugs and how long things take to get fixed. The last caveat i would give is that as a co-op shooter its far better with friends. All that said i would give this game a 8 out of 10, if you have people to play it with you will absolutely spend tens or hundreds of hours or spreading democracy.

Ill just get this out of the way at the start, I don't think this was a bad game, i just don't think it was particularly innovative or interesting mechanically over other shooters. The main draw here is that its set in the 40k universe, however that doesn't save it from its flaws. The game tries to spice things up with some extra movement options and the inclusion of calling in your dog, but i felt that neither of those things helped it much. The movement options i felt didn't mesh well with the actual combat and only served as additional exploration tools. Then the dog was always an afterthought that i would use at the start of each combat in a fire and forget manner. Last note is that it was a very short game, including doing some extra missions it only took me 8 hours total and i felt like i had pretty much seen all this game had to offer. So all in all it was an ok shooter, it just didn't do anything particularly fun or unique that would make me want to recommend this to other people. I would give this a 5 out of 10, if warhammer 40k is your jam and that's why you want to play it, go for it, if not, pick a different shooter.

If i were to introduce someone to the mech game genre, this is the series i would point them to. The series took a decade off as the developers made the soulsborne series of games, and this game shows that influence. I was initially worried about the changes to the game, and i do feel that worry was warranted as its both a pro and a con which i will get to later. The most important thing is that despite these changes it still feels like an armored core series after all this time. I played through three times, got all the endings, and beat every level. Overall I enjoyed the game, but its not without its faults.

Some of the more notable mechanical changes are the lock on system, the stagger system, and the addition of the ability to kick. The lock on system is certainly taken from the soulsborne series and is quite a difference from the system they had which made you try to keep the targeting box on the enemy. What this actually means is that for the most part, if you can see the enemy, you are locked onto them, making fcs differences less important as they used to change the lock on speed, range, and angle. The stagger system is taken from seikero, and while i think it does a good job of pushing aggression from players, i also think it forces a certain playstyle and elevates certain weapons over others. This devolves combat to building up a stagger, then blasting the staggered enemies with as much damage as possible, however, what this means is that weapons that have travel time to do damage such as missiles are far less viable against anything that you would want to stagger. Lastly there's a really good change in the addition of a kick, now when you are out of ammo, or your weapons are cooling down, you can still kick enemies, which does ok damage. It gives the option to do damage when in other games you would have to restart when you ran out of ammo while not running a sword. This in my opinion was just a great addition,

Before i can talk about what they did right with the mech assembly and options, I need to address what i consider a major issue with a certain weapon type. Ill start by saying that I've never found missiles to be useful in this game in particular, which is a shame. Missiles tend to be so slow that it ends up being unreliable chip damage, this isn't actually much of a change from prior games, but i feel like the stagger system exasperates it. This issue gets worse the faster an enemy is, as they do a great job of avoiding the missiles. This issue makes the whole class of missile weapons nearly pointless as the enemies you actually want to hit with them can easily avoid them.

Now we can get to the mech assembly, which is great. There are a lot of parts to choose from, a lot of things to optimize, and a lot of very different options for you to work with. This is the part of the game that I enjoy the most, and its all there, it works, and i enjoyed experimenting with different setups. That said, the stagger mechanic pidgeon holes you into a particular playstyle, if you are not capable of consistent staggers, you will struggle. This makes all builds desire to quickly build up the stagger meter, and have some high direct damage follow up, which encourages weapons that hit consistently to keep the stagger bar going, and then some burst weapon that is fast enough to hit them before they recover from the stagger. As noted earlier this pretty much says missiles are out, and there are a lot of missile back weapons, which is a shame.

In my first playthrough i experimented with a lot of different setups and eventually settled into a singular build that was able to handle ng+ and ng++ with ease, from this point i rarely died and every mission was very easy. The game is supposed to encourage you to build for the situation, but I never had to alter it or rethink it due to the way that i built it to take advantage of the stagger mechanic. Most of the difficulty of the game is the enemy bosses and AC's and the stagger mechanic counters both of those turning most difficult fights into staggering enemies and nuking them with fast hard hitting weapons. So once you have that there's little need to adjust your build or playstyle as that's what the game pushes for in all the difficult encounters,

As I said, I did enjoy this game, but its not without its faults. It's good enough that ill keep working on S ranking all the missions for achievement completion, but that's just me. I feel most people will likely just play through once and not do the extra playthroughs. The game itself is fleshed out, movement feels great, assembly works how you would expect, and would be a great introduction to mech games. Its my personal opinion that the stagger mechanic holds this game back as the best strategy seems to just be exploiting it, so anything that doesn't facilitate that will just make the game more difficult. This game feels easier than the prior entries in the series, which is both good and bad, as it encourages more people to give it a try, however it could benefit from a hard mode or difficult optional missions. Overall I'm going to give it an 8 out of 10 as its very enjoyable, but the stagger mechanic limits viable build options reducing replayability.

As much as I enjoyed this game, I cant recommend this game to people. This game was made during the pandemic and it shows. There are so many different things wrong with how this plays that I feel like some play testing would have caught a lot of the problems this game exhibits. This game tried several new things with the borderlands looter shooter formula and some worked and some did not. As I said, this game I initially enjoyed, but borderlands endgame revolves around farming bosses to get certain items to make a build and play on a harder difficulty thats where the flaws show the worst.

In order to talk about what the game did wrong we need to talk about the parts that worked first. This game is set in a world of magic, so grenades have been changed to spells and it works so well. With grenades working so well, its important to get spells that work with your build. In addition, the class trees worked well for customizing your character and it let you mix and match what you liked out of two classes. These were the two major changes that i think worked well, but their inclusion also exasperates the problems with this game. New rolls were added to accomidate these changes such as ability, all, and spell categories, each with straight damage, cooldown, crit chance, ect added drastically to the pool items could roll from.

The endgame, which is where everyone is headed at some point and where builds come together, is where by far the majority of issues are. The game includes some collectathons which feel mandatory and almost all of them need to be done per character, making trying different characters a complete pain in the butt. The next problem has to do with the addition of generic class mods, the addition of stats supporting spells, and adding more slots for rng on most equipment. These problems are a direct extension of the good changes they made above, but as i said, could have been found and resolved if they had tested these changes during the development of the game. All of these result in requiring every playthrough to be a completionist playthrough just to actually starting farming your gear, and once you do theres an order of magnatude more rng to deal with before you can get reasonable gear to support your build.

The rng in this game is the biggest problem to this game and is by far my biggest reason for not recommending it for people. The addition of new potential stats and extra slots those stats can be on due to the class generalization changes mean that even just wanting a good rolled item means getting the legendary item to drop, then trying to get that items stats decently rolled, which is darn near impossible when you need to roll 3 to 5 stats an item, and each of those stats has dozens of possibilities and you are looking for a specific set of them in order to have it viable for your build really made it an rng hell. If the item drops and it doesnt have any stat you want then you have to keep farming in hopes of that item even dropping. In the event that you do actually get your desired drop with a stat or two you like, the end game introduces another layer of rng, the chaos level. Now you need to farm everything all over again but now that item with a small chance of having the stats you want now also needs to drop with an chaos modifier which is higher rng based on how high in the chaos chambers you are. Its a complete grindfest with little hope of getting the gear you want and even less hope of getting it to drop multiple times as you progress through the chaos chamber leveling. When the top tier of chaos modifier was released it was only 1% chance, so a 1 in 100 chance that your required legendary(or legendaries) for your build upon actually dropping, and then dropping enough to have good enough stats, would actually be a viable end game upgrade. Its just far too much rng, most people do not have the time or paitence to spend hundreds of hours farming per character, and thats where the game lost me. I'm all for farming in a looter shooter, but when it changes from getting an item to drop a few times and taking the best one for your build to needing that item to drop hundreds of times to get something remotely good that starts to feel hopeless for completing a build.

Lastly theres the actual end game content which is sadly lacking. Unlike other borderlands installments you dont really farm bosses, you end up just doing whats called a chaos chamber. Initially these are kinda fun, but after a few the novelty wares off... but theres no better way to farm gear so you are stuck doing them. This concept would probably be better if it wasnt directly tied to rng hell. In addition the game lacks the borderlands traditional raid type bosses so its just farming story bosses and farming chaos chambers in the hopes of any usable loot.

My enjoyment of this game ended when i started farming the endgame. I felt the story was nothing special, but entertaining in its own way. If you wanted play through the story because you felt you wanted a looter shooter type game and you have already played the other borderlands games then this is a fun game to play through. However if you plan to do the endgame content you will find yourself in a joyless unending grind that will devour your soul and all enjoyment you had for the game. If this review ignored the endgame I would probably give it a 6 out of 10, but accounting for the endgame I give this game a 3 out of 10, theres loot grinding, and then theres whatever hell this is.

A spiritual successor to symphony of the night. As far as a metroidvania goes, this game is great, it does exactly what it needs to do. This game pretty much is as it appears and is absolutally worth playing as a metroidvania. I would give this a 8 out of 10.

This is a roguelite where you make slow progression to eventually escape hell. This is a lot of fun, the different weapon playstyles keep things fresh for the most part. A few things certainly seem stronger than others, but overall you can make anything work. The initial gameplay is great, but eventually you just feel like you want the story to finish up which is i think the problem with this game, that the game overstays its welcome a bit, i 100%'ed the game and its not because i was farming all the extra trinkets, but rather that i was trying to trigger the last parts of the story. I would give this game a 7 out of 10.

This is a continuation to the prior game, if you liked it then you will like this too. That said i think this sequal isnt quite as good as the first one. Theres not a lot to say, its more of the same thing, and not a lot of innovating from the first game. I would give it a 6 out of 10.

A survival game with a story. Ive played through the forest multiple times with different people, and what i think the game does well is caves. Caves are where you will be spending a lot of your time, and the darkness and things moving in the darkness striking a primal fear within you. Getting the vibes of underground caves sets the mood of the game so well. Above ground you build bases and traps to have a safe place to stay, but its not where the game actually is. That said its easy to get stuck in a loop where you are under constant attack since they attack you and die on your traps, then because a bunch of them died the escapees bring more enemies the next night leading to a cycle of being unable to leave your based at night. That said, the story is very environmental until the end of the game where i would say 80% of the story is. Overall the story is really interesting once you have enough pieces to understand it. I would give this a 7 out of 10.

This is a soulslike clone in so many ways, but thats not a bad thing. This game took a more direct approach to the storytelling by telling the story through the memories your character picks up. The story overall was pretty interesting and is certainly easy to follow unlike soulslike games. The combat was about right, though some enemies i felt were a bit unfair with their timings. This said, the blood codes were an interesting approach to classes and the weapons were pretty interesting as well. Overall its a different enough game, it deviated enough from the souls series to differentiate itself. I would give it a 7 out of 10, its different, but you still know what kind of game you are getting into.

This is a very story based game about the supernatural. It had an engaging story throughout the entire game and was absolutely worth a playthrough. Every new power, new enemy, new weapon, was fun to get to know. Its not a perfect game by any means, but it was a lot of fun. I was surprised how I never god bored with the gameplay and all the supernatural things going on really kept me wondering what was next. I dont usually bring this up, but the game looked great, and added to the supernatural vibe the game was going for. I would give this game an 8 out of 10.