Recent reviews by The Ninth Buddha

All I'm gonna say is that the final fight made me feel true fear and terror.
Better than the first. Now my number 1 SciFi universe!

This is one of those games that really pulls you in and immerses you in the world, and what its like to be the main character. The story was so captivating and incredible, invoking a good mix of mystery, bewilderment, awe, and even horror/terror. This is a story that you can only truly experience once (like subnautica, firewatch, etc) as the mystery will never feel the same. Its a phenomenal game, and probably one of my favourite SciFi universes. 10/10 would recommend.

I hate to do this, because it's an amazing game, with amazing devs, but Sony (the publisher) is trying incredibly hard to assassinate the playerbase and their support for this game.

As of now, they've banned players from 180 countries who had purchased the game and played for months, prior to this change. Given that PSN account linking is no longer required (as of our last protest), and thus impossible to violate Sony TOS, maintaining this ban makes zero sense.

This review will remain negative until Sony backs down on these changes. Depending on how this goes, I may also be seriously averted to purchasing any Sony-associated games in the future.

This community does not leave helldivers behind. Either we dive together or not at all!

I've always had extremely mixed feelings about this game. This game is incredibly challenging to new players especially when playing solo. It is incredibly grindy and requires dozens-to-hundreds of hours to grind out a large reserve of supplies for every crafting need. Despite this, I grew attached to the game by just how fun/cool, and immersive I thought the gameplay and in-game universe was. I began in late 2013, gathered a hundred hours, then fell away from the game, came back, gathered another hundred hours, fell away, and so on so forth until late 2015/early 2016. I frequently fell away from this game because of how painstakingly difficult it was to farm resources, and eventually came to realize...each time... that there was no point. there was no reason as to why I was grinding all of these resources. I was grinding for the sake of grinding. Grinding to get better gear, so that I could grind better gear. But no greater purpose, no endgame. That was until the New War.

by 2016, I long figured out the mechanics, and finally traversed the learning curve. The in-game lore had me gripped to this game for good. When the New War was teased my play-time accumulation increased from 100 hours/bi-annual to 300 hours bi-anually. In 2020 I think I accumulated double my overall playtime in a span of 6 months. I no longer felt as if I was grinding for no reason. I was grinding to prep for the New War. I took one last break ~1 year, my longest yet. And finally returned for the event I was waiting YEARS for.

The new war was at first a fantastic quest, I loved almost everything about it. But after about a week of slowly realizing my disappointment it was clear to me for so many different reasons why I felt betrayed.

There were clearly sections of game play that felt underdeveloped such as any and all railjack/necromech missions, but after the first act, and finishing the opening scene of act 2 (drifter) I was lying and blinding myself to my inner-awareness that I was increasingly disappointed. I mean, the gameplay was great, the story gripping, but I honestly feel as if the developers at DE got lazy after the first act. The New War was teased to be a culmination of the on-going conflict, with a desperate solar alliance to repel the sentients, and the opening act executed that near perfectly. (near, because the tenno/teshin gameplay there was really short and drawn out respectively. Naturally, in the second act you assume you're playing as a freedom fighter, and resistance member trying to regain Sol, but you quickly learn you are the only uncaptured human and just so happen to be related to the tenno. You never get to play as the actual tenno during the new war. Just this one character. No more war, no resistance force fighting desperately to prevail. Just the tenno-related person fighting in what can only be summed up as "conflict" over saving/fighting space-mom Lotus and no actual war.

There were so many exciting theories and speculations on what this war could instantiate. A new open world? could the fighting be brought to a whole new solar system such as Tau?. Will every node in the origin system have two gameplay options (i.e., normal corpus/grinneer prewar missions, and second current/post sentient incursion missions). We got none of that. We got a new theme for the solar map, but none of these tilesets (except for about 5) were accessible. We got reskinned grineer/corpus enemies, and 3 new sentient bosses. But besides that you never actually get to fight any sentients. THERE WAS NO WAR?!??! it was just typical gameplay with reskinned enemies and new lore about the tenno. None of the teased trailers were representative of the actual gameplay whatsoever. This is extremely disrespectful to the playerbase that has supported this game despite every unresolved and frustrating aspect that community has been complaining about for years. (i.e., EXTREMELY Scammy Market, AoE metas. super grindy, no endgame, poor archwing, poor railjack, poor player weapon variety, a handful of tedious mission types, steep learning curve, not even acknowledging solid player recommendations, such as revamping, focus, syndicates, conclave/lunaro, or adding similar trading systems to reflect third party software). This was supposed to be their way of fulfilling an unspoken bargain. Either fix all these issues and satisify the players, or deliver the most ambitious quest ever and we all turn a blind eye to their on-going incompetencies.

Hype is most certainly the mind-killer, but that wasn't our fault. It was yours DE. You marketed this update, you advertised and hyped up this quest for years, YOU told the playerbase repeatedly to grind out the latest content to prepare for the new war, and we didn't even get to use it. The endgame you built up was meaningless, there wasn't even a grunt of mention by the NPCS as to the events of the new war, no lasting gameplay content, no new mission types. In the end, the entire reason we grinded this game was for the sake of grinding. This isn't the first time you've mismarketed quests, but this isn't really the same, you teased the new war for YEARS, you built up the coming events TO BE A WAR, in the second dream, sacrifice, and preclude to war quests. Now that you're preparing content for the duviri and Man in the Wall narrative arcs I know whats coming. You can't do this to me again, I won't let you do this to me again.

I've uninstalled this game and hope that I never EVER take so much as a glance at it again.

This game is a fun, energetic, (scary if your new), and overall great time if you play with your friends. I highly reccommend playing in a queue with at least one friend [as a survivor], because solo queing has the tendency to invoke feelings of annoyance and dissapointment in your teammates.

Super fun game, I've constantly found myself saying "Okay I'm gonna go to bed right after this, *looks at clock* 11:59pm* 5 minutes later *looks at clock again, 2:30am*