Recent reviews by TZer0

Please move New Game+ to the base game.

Valve.

Please make a new anti-cheat.
Maybe that's something you could even sell to others.

Just do something.

https://save.tf/

We will get to continue managing democracy with our fellow non-PSN account possessing Helldivers.

This game is fine now.

Honestly, don't get this. It has art made by machine learning (AKA. AI art).

It plays fine, it looks fine... at first.

But then it kind of hits you and everything suddenly looks incredibly ugly. It feels like art assets from different packages cobbled together in a way that doesn't work because they clash, only worse because suddenly you see all the weird computer-made flaws.

Absolutely half-baked.

There's so much that could've been said about this game, but all you should know is that it won the "Most Innovative Game"-award because people wanted to meme on Bethesda.

The story is meh, variation bad, and why did they make all temples identical?

Like, I get that for instance LoZ: Breath of the Wild has some samey temples, but at least it had variations, different puzzles.

This game? None. 24 temples and they're all the same with the same bad puzzle.

Why.... why?

You launch the game, your first tool for dealing with enemies (apart from avoiding them) is absolute garbage.

I can deal with the fact that it takes so many punches, but due to how attacks have trouble connecting and that you can't keep hitting enemies that are knocked down, it becomes nigh impossible to hit them. They then get up and.. get a punch in.

Looting 30 containers in a town and not a single melee weapon.

The tutorial consists of "wasd to move", "scroll to change pose (also lets you run)" and "f to deploy parachute". Nothing else.

I managed to glitch the sound out in the first level by placing two (yes, two, 2, a pair) of a tower.

Towers target closest enemy rather than the enemy that is closer to escaping.

Very limited soundtrack.

As much as I'm enjoying it, the developer really needs to work on quality of life for this game in basically every aspect.

The issues below are not ordered in order of importance, but they together drag the game down.

Despite the flaws below, there's no game that is quite like this. I just wish the devs would really focus on QOL so I can say the game is great and unique rather than good and unique.

Also, not sure if the devs should be making Anvil, the game like Foxhole but medieval.

Alting is leaking information or griefing using an account on the other team.

Basically everyone and their cat has now been accused of alrting (myself included - on Reddit!) and while I think some of it may be overblown on both sides right now, it is happening. I don't know what kind of consequences the alting accounts face, but there are some things I feel that some things could've been prevented in a different way. Usually they drive vehicles into water.

For instance, there was an incident where a base got destroyed much more easily because someone added another piece to a bunker, creating a glaring weakness in the defences. This could've been fixed if there was a claim system in the game where alliances or regiments can lay claim to a certain area (and then have the community minus the claimants vote yes/no) after which that alliance is the holder of that area and no one else can build in it unless structures nearby are getting actively destroyed.

I've also found tanks parked in suspicious places.

War 102 update
During the defence of The Baths, Drowned Vale, I had eyes on 6 griefers/alters + several other being reported in other areas.


The UI in this game needs so much work, a lot of this affects new players in particular.

Map - close to the edges of each hex on the map there's two different zones where placing buildings is increasingly costly and makes them decay. It would've been nice if the default map showed this. This can be fixed with a mod. New players also need to take time to recognise mountains on the map. You also can't see certain important player-made structures such as vehicle assembly stations or field modification stations. This is now fixed.

Colours - it would be nice if you could make all enemies on the map appear as red regardless of side. I'm not colour blind, but when you're zoomed out it can be actually a bit tricky to discern blue mixed with other colours from green mixed with other colours. This can also be fixed with a mod, but should really be a game option.

Information - it would be nice if the menus specified limitations. For instance, you can build construction vehicles and cranes using hammers (amongst a host of other things). What the UI doesn't mention is that this has to be done near certain kind of bases or landing ships.
It would be nice if tanks showed in their inventory what kind of ammo it takes (you can see it by getting into the gunner seat).

Inventories - it is difficult to read bunker inventories on the map because things are not colour coded and do not have text. Answering questions like "does this bunker have bandages?" takes more than a couple of seconds because everything is monocolour. There are mods that help this issue.

Gear confusion - unless you run around these things all the time, knowing which upgrade a vehicle assembly station has is difficult. There's five different kinds of assembly materials in the game, all with almost the same icon except for the type determining bit in the upper left corner of each. These could've been more easily distinguished if the UI had some colour or texture difference. Other names would've nice too such as "oiled assembly materials" or "hardened assembly materials".
It would be nice if the ammo type was listed on the icon of weapons - this isn't a problem with your side's gear, but what about looting enemy gear mid combat?


There's a character recovery mechanic in the game (for when you crash/get disconnected), but you flip a coin about whether or not it works every single time. It feels terrible when you spend a long time getting somewhere only to disconnect and not recover when crossing a hex border.

Sometimes vehicles you grab from your private stockpile stop being possible to put back into said stockpile for no apparent reason.

There are places where you can walk straight through a mountain.

Climbing is a mess because it relies on the geometry rather than developer-defined areas where you can vault. This makes it incredibly inconsistent where you can sometimes get up rocks, sometimes not and the remnants of destroyed bunkers are sometimes impossible to climb out of despite being literally 40 cm high.

I've dismounted an AT gun and that has launched it forward (into enemy AT).

Just being near a moving tank will often kill you even if you'd be realistically bumped by it rather than crushed. Other times, vehicles (in particular half-tracks) can dance on top of infantry not killing them.

You can't cancel using a wrench.

You can't claim border bases unless you have no claimed areas in the hex. This leads to both sides purposefully not capturing areas to prevent border bases being available.

Friendly fire mechanics are not great. Say you steal an enemy vehicle and you try to get away, during the escape someone gets a sticky on you and you're now moving at 0.1 m/s through enemy territory, unable to go up hills. You can no longer reliably destroy that vehicle even if you had the means to do so because if you do too much damage to it, you might get flagged for team damage and get locked out from using weapons for 20 minutes.

As a partisan, the damage you do indirectly by dropping (recently stolen) enemy vehicles in front of enemy garrisons or into water is not counted nor are the resources you destroy counted. This makes gaining commends to give others as a partisan difficult.

You can't see who the last person (if friendly) to touch a vehicle was. As of war 102, you can now see who touched it, but not which side that person is on. You can still effectively check that by trying to squad lock the vehicle (which will not work if an enemy took it)

Sometimes squad locks on vehicles expire even while you're in the vehicle, meaning that when you get out you may have a situation where you both can't get in, nor use a wrench to unlock the vehicle, but the enemy can. Additionally, even if you're in the squad that has access to a given vehicle through a squad lock, it must be your currently active squad for the vehicle to be accessible. This is fixed, but you can sometimes end up locked out by making a vehicle public while locked even if it is your lock.

I've been booted out of the game several times and completely unable to return to my position. Usually that should be possible. This is often an issue when Valve does maintenance on their servers.

Honestly, just give us a health bar in vehicles already with the thresholds for being damaged etc. marked. Some tanks can be repaired from inside and as long as the repairing person has materials, they can tell the rest of the crew the damage state, run out and I don't think you can anymore.

Also, why can 12.7 mm damage some buildings, but not 20 mm shots (that can actually destroy tanks)?

This game desperately needs an in-game view of resources and their sources as well as vehicles and how to make them.


Yes. Which is why I really, really want these things fixed. I'll be happy if I don't see a single piece of new content for a very long time if they just polish up the game and fix the above issues.

The game right now has a really steep learning curve that needs fixing and basically the only way to play it in an enjoyable way is to join a regiment.

First of all, I'd like to praise the good aspects of the game.

Voice acting, visual style (generally, including UI), and movement mechanics (minus walking up hills, base speed could've been 50% higher) are mostly good. Music is mostly fine except for one spot.

Now... why a negative review?

The game is in my opinion suffering from a few not quite fully executed ideas or implementations.
Here's a list of examples as well as general complaints I have about the game:

• At one point you get the ability to run on water, this is used barely at all after the initial introduction of the ability. This is a rare example where I would say the game is definitively too short (completed in 2.6 hours).
  
• The selling point of "when you die, the valley dies around you" roughly translates to "some trees die, you can pay two-three energy to revive enough of the valley to the point where your death doesn't matter".
  
• I only ever used the ability to take actually living life once - by accident, spoiler: I don't count the eggs.
  
• I would've preferred fewer sounds. I didn't need a new quest sound. In fact, I'm not sure if I needed a stated quest at all. This should've been an option that by default is off and the player should be asked if this is needed.
  
• Combat is incredibly simplistic. I know this isn't a combat game, but it really isn't interesting at all in that regard - except for the boss fight. I would've preferred that a little bit of what you get in the boss fight gets sprinkled more throughout.
  
• Story spoiler Kind of silly when you do something bad and then at once get told in an audio log that this shouldn't be done or when you defeat the final baddie that you just somehow end up exactly where you need to be. Just very... convenient, would've been nice if there was a "oh, would you look at that, the consequences of my actions"-moment.
  
• The audio glitched out a little bit at times. I had a moment where I basically couldn't hear anything as all sound sources were almost muted (filtered?) while fighting two enemies.
  
• The story is otherwise okay. Just a standard tale of how some people are so greedy that they will keep claiming ingenuity in the face of them dying to the thing they were working on.

I find that these are not acceptable issues for a game at 103 NOK (10.4 USD/9.58 EUR at the time of writing).

Do get this expansion, but consider turning it off the first time you play if you're relatively new to the game (you're new to the game if you have yet to launch a single rocket).

The new features that makes the game more difficult is that you need to start managing rocket interiors and a lot of research is way more difficult to complete for new players.