Recent reviews by Badger

EDIT: A LOT has changed in the past eight months for the MCC, including Reach, so I've changed my review to reflect that. Unlocks are a bit more fair and speedy now, performance has been greatly improved for all games (especially Reach, which still has some audio issues but thankfully they're more minor now and far more playable), m+keyboard aim assist has been added to some degree, and overall a lot of my complaints about the game from many months ago have now been addressed. There is still a fair amount wrong with the Collection, but overall I'd say it's worth the purchase if you really liked these Halo games on console and want them on PC.

Like I said, there are still problems - CE Anniversary is a hot mess (why do the old graphics run far worse than the new ones), Halo 2 Anniversary is less of a hot mess but the Anniversary multiplayer is horrible in ways that are more conceptual than technical, and there is no server browser or really effective means of joining custom games without an invite, but overall the collection is far more worth it in my books now.

I am leaving my old review up for posterity. If things continue to change, be they positive or negative, I will update this review again.

***

I really wish I didn't have to write this review.

Right now, Reach is a serious mess on PC. Audio issues are the biggest ones so far. Crackling, popping, bad sound mixing, everything. It makes the best-sounding Halo game sound like absolute garbage, worse than a $5 asset flip. I'm stunned they allowed Reach out in this state.

Also, the painfully slow speed that unlocks are dripfed to players (why do we even need to spend time and grind to unlock 10+ year old assets), lack of aim assist for mouse+keyboard players to help them stay competitive with controller players, and other issues minor and major, such as a very confusing purchasing scheme, make me really disappointed in 343 right now. I hope at least some of these issues are dealt with in the very near future, because playing Halo Reach's campaign without music is pain incarnate.

the best of the Yakuza trilogy available on Steam right now. This game has it all - in depth minigames, a great story, and a satisfying and cathartic combat system. 100% reccomend. It's also a great in-point for newcomers into the Yakuza/Ryu ga Gotoku series, as a prequel and as a standalone game.

One of the best strategy games I've played, and then there's all the many, many mods available for it.

You can slap people with fish. You can throw fish to distract people or throw fish to hit people in the head. You can wander around a Parisian chateau openly carrying a fish and nobody will think of you any less for it. This game perfectly simulates the experience of carrying a fish for self defense and occasional offense.

Vegas 2 is the best worst game I have ever played. It's emblematic of late 2000s shooter design - console focused, cover-based shooting, a campaign that exists to be a selling point on the back of the box, a wide variety of 8v8 multiplayer modes, and a horde mode - and yet it does enough things well that it rises above the tidal wave of modern-day shooters of that time period, even it's contemporaries of Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter.

Customization is fun, and in-depth enough to ensure that you'll be constantly pushing forward to unlock new stuff. The weapon selection is balanced and allows you to pick whatever weapon you choose and still succeed. The maps in all game modes are very smartly designed, and look great, too - the devs clearly went to great lengths to make every location feel like it had an actual purpose when it wasn't filled with terrorists to shoot. The sound design is clear, percussive, and joyful to listen to. The cover-based shooting is far more flexible than you would think, and you can pull off some real tactical ♥♥♥♥.

That being said, this game is hard, and in some ways it does this in clever ways - better armed, better equipped enemies, larger enemy groups, etc. - and other times it showers you in instadeath snipers and instadeath SPAS 12 dudes. The cover based shooting is flexible, but it's also the most dated mechanic in this game, lacking nuances such as being able to move between pieces of cover or being able to vault over chest-high cover pieces. And there are clear concessions towards console game design - low FOV, finicky game servers, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Punkbuster, etc. The final boss of the story doesn't challenge any of the lessons the player has learned about how to play the game, and is instead an incredibly tedious and goofy fight against an attack helicopter that spams low-damage shots at you.

However, the good outweighs the bad, and even some of the bad has some charm. The ending of this game is hilariously tone-deaf, no doubt perhaps being one of the things that would inspire Spec Ops: the Line's impeccable parody of late-2000s FPS/3PS.

Overall, if you're looking for a really cool tactical shooter and GoG scares you so you can't get SWAT 4, this should most certainly tide you over quite well.

Review is back to positive again. NWI please start listening to your community on a regular basis instead of needing us to ♥♥♥♥♥ at you endlessly to undo negative changes.

Insurgency: Sandstorm eschews the slow-paced combat of most of it's milsim ilk and instead goes for a focused and fast-paced, though still very tactical, game. Movement speed feels much, much faster than both it's predecessor and other games of it's kind, and while it doesn't let you do Mirror's Edge tier parkour (in fact you can't even do a pullup) you are far more mobile in this game than you would be in something like ARMA. Even in the newer hardcore ruleset, there is still an emphasis on flexible and mobile combat. Time to kill is extremely high, and weapon choice is more preference than anything else.

The game is fun as hell and I really enjoy it. There are some things I dislike, though. Firstly, progression is painfully slow. It takes about 2-5 15-60 minute matches to get a single level up, and your rewards are pitiful - a single cosmetic item (and not all cosmetic items can drop as loot, either) and a pitifully small amount of customization points. Though it's nice that you don't need to spend money to circumvent the grind, it's still a terribly painful grind. What doesn't help are experience and progression bugs that prevent you from recieving level up rewards when you level up, which has happened to me on numerous occasions.

Secondly, this game is still very buggy, even if it's much better than it was when I first wrote my review. Some are minor visual annoyances, others are potentially gamebreaking. I won't go into a huge amount of detail, but I have suffered a great deal of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ from this game's bugs, and NWI is not as fast with the hotfixes as one would hope for them to be.

I hope this game goes great places. Even on a slow day it still manages to pull in respectable player numbers, and I hope it keeps it up with fresh new content.

I think I actually kind of unironically like this VN for more than the porn. Especially liked the Lex path (which I have to do again dammit to see if their pronouns change based on your dialogue choices with them) and the Skye path (which tbf was just really freakin' cute if a blatant nerd fantasy). If this game is going to have, erm, continued development to speak, I would like to see more natural scene adjustments for biologically female player characters. For science. And stuff. It takes something pretty out there to get me to leave a review, and this dev team seems small but hardworking, so props to the lot of them.

They literally made the best Battle Royale game out right now as a complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in two months time. Playerunknown and Riot Games should be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ashamed of themselves.

A true classic, an irreplaceable necessity in every Steam library, a game so legendarily good and endlessly replayable that it remains one of the most-played games on this platform.

It crashes on startup. Haven't even played a minute of it. All of the fixes in the forums don't work.

Avoid it like the plague.