Recent reviews by benisu

Very weak recommend, and only because I love the Borderlands series.

I really wanted to like this game more than I did, but the absymal PC optimization made it really hard. Overall very buggy game (pathfinding often does not work, missions would get stuck) that would crash every ~1 hour (and every cutscene, almost without fail), but the core looter shooter game loop is still fun enough to keep me wanting to play more.

Main mission line is okay - story is very meh, and fights were generally pretty easy and uninspired, even on hard mode. Nothing really felt at stake, and I felt like I was just playing the mission to progress, not because I wanted to know more about what's going to happen.

Side missions - there are just too many of them. I started out trying to complete all of them (as well as bounties whenever possible) but quickly realized that this is way too much effort for me. Each side mission requires ~3 tasks that each require running around several kilometers. Pretty tedious.

Legendaries - I take a lot of issue with how legendaries feel really, really weak this game. In previous Borderlands games, I was always excited to get a Legendary because of how powerful it was, but in this game, they just feel like very gimmicky, hard to use items that are very rarely powerful.

Overall, if I wasn't already a Borderlands fan, I wouldn't have enjoyed this game. Definitely don't recommend this as a first Borderlands, but would still recommend to a series fan. Just make sure you have a decked out PC first...

9.5/10 extremely well written, great art and pacing. fun mechanics with optional challenges. docking 0.5 points for minor bugs, but otherwise perfect experience

9/10 really solid game - good graphics, great music, and very fun gameplay including just-right pacing (runs are ~1 hour across all acts), impactful upgrades, strong synergies, and satisfying (both audiovisually and game-impact) abilities

only complaint is some issues around lag/sync when playing with friends in other countries

Played for ~2 hours and decided to refund. The game doesn't really present any challenge, and while there are many, many options and things to level up, none of them feel too meaningful since I'm going to one-shot enemies either way. Maybe this game just isn't for me.

7.5/10

Meets and slightly exceeds my expectations from the Hazelight team. I'm impressed by the sheer volume of duo-player mechanics they were able to come up with, and some of the later sequences had some fun plays on what it means to be split screen as well, which I enjoyed. None of the levels felt too challenging, but the game overall didn't feel exceedingly easy either. So a pretty good challenge overall, leaning on the easier side.

Art was pretty good but not spectacular, music and sound design was good (no complaints), and story was pretty mid (very predictable story, with some pretty cringe moments). But overall, gameplay makes up for most of this.

9/10 this game blew my mind a couple of times, though the last 1/3 of the game was a bit drawn out imo

As of April 2025, this game feels like The Sims 4 with better graphics but fewer (and in some sense, worse) mechanics. It feels like there is not much to do yet. I'd be curious to see what KRAFTON does with the game throughout Early Access, but as of now, I'd rather continue playing the Sims.

7/10

Fantastic audiovisual experience, so would definitely recommend this to those seeking that.

But the story is a bit too nebulous to me - what could have been an impactful story about grief/loss felt to me more like an overarching melancholic atmosphere that at times overstayed its welcome. I think you definitely need a degree of patience to enjoy this game to its fullest, which I think I lacked a bit, so the game to me felt longer than it needed to be.

If narrative works can be split into prose and poetry, I think this game fits more into the poetry bucket. It shows rather than tells, and the player gets only as much out of it as they are willing to put into it.

The quintessential roguelike deckbuilder.

Fun game at first, but gets repetitive really quick thanks to underwhelming level design.

Music and art are good.

Weapons and crafting systems are cool, but the variety of items, materials, and weapons is seriously lacking, especially how all guns and cannons have the exact same firing animation and sound. Kinda boring and seemingly half-assed there.

The combat system sucks too, in my opinion. It's just not that fun and unnecessarily complicated. The toggling between combat mode and normal/harvesting mode is unnecessary and often causes me to misuse things. This problem is made even worse by Lenny's messages that really disorient you. Other than that, the combat is a bit primitive, especally with the level design.

Basically, the game seems seriously underdeveloped, almost to the point of a flash game, but even so it's somehow enjoyable for a while. However, not worth the price.

And finally, for the biggest problem of this whole game: LENNY.
Alright, there's just so much wrong with this guy, programming-wise and story-wise. Programming-wise, Lenny is bugged. His dialogues sometimes bug out and make him speak gibberish, which is just weird. Apart from that, again, his messages can only be dismissed outside of combat mode, which makes fighting unnessarily disorienting, and causes me to die a lot without me even knowing what's happening. Story-wise, who the hell is this guy? We're just sent in the game with this random blue kid directing us. We don't know who he is until we find him in the ship, hidden away in his own room, which turns out to be the cadet headquarters. What if you're not allianced with the cadets when you create your character? It doesn't matter. Lenny's still there to "help" you out. Which side is he actually on? Seems to me like his only goal is to kill you via messages.

This game has potential, but it's just not there yet.