Recent reviews by Dreadp1r4te

An interesting concept with extremely flawed delivery. The game seems inspired by a mix of The Cycle or similar open-world random quest PvPvE games, but without the PvP aspect. You run around the map with a team of up to 3 class-based characters with varying abilities that fit them into one of 3 archetypes.

The abilities are decent; one character takes damage and charges up a powerful AoE explosion, while another designates a controllable orbital laser, a la Hammer of Dawn from Gears of War. The cooldowns are decent, meaning you can use your abilities frequently, but unlike the weapons, they cannot be customized or altered.

The weapons are fairly standard, futuristic versions of current weapons. You have SMGs, pump-action shotguns, ARs, carbines, grenade launchers. They all feel pretty clunky and choppy, as they all fire non-hitscan projectiles. This, coupled with the unbearable co-op latency, makes it feel harder than it should to hit a Dino 10 feet away from you with a shotgun. Additionally, the dinos feel truly bullet spongy, as even an impact grenade with fully upgraded damage sometimes fails to kill a lowly raptor with a direct hit. Larger dinos will easily absorb multiple full ammo inventories before dying, unless you hit specific "weak spots" that are invariably placed in areas impossible to shoot under normal circumstances. Some require you to "topple" the dino, exposing its weak belly, while others you simply have to shoot when the dino rears up. Unfortunately, it rarely does this, so you're left with the frustrating prospect of backpedaling, sidestepping, and firing over and over until the dino finally goes down.

Finally, there's the bugs, and this game has a lot. Random crashes mid game play, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Latency causing you to take damage before a dino even attacks. Dinos glitching inside geometry, but preventing objectives from being completed since you can't kill them. And my personal favorite: lost upgrades. Sometimes, upon completing a mission and extracting, you'll note that all your upgrades that you grinded a while for are gone. Just gone. No refund, no returned materials, just plain ol' gone.

All in all, I can't really recommend the game at the moment. It has potential, but it needs some real balance considerations to fix. Keep an eye on it, but maybe wait for a big sale to pick it up.

You know how people tell you to "GIT GUD" when you're struggling with games? This game teaches to you GIT GUD rather quickly. A violent, gore-filled love letter to FPS gamers everywhere, DOOM Eternal will have you reinstalling it months later to relive the glory kills, chainsaw more Imps, and BFG your way to hell (and heaven) and back.

Argo is a tactical FPS powered by and set in the Arma 3 engine/universe. It features tactical stances, (somewhat) realistic gun play, and realistically modelled bullet damage. Unlike it's older cousin, Argo is centered around small to medium sized engagements without vehicles, and limits you to a first person perspective for a hardcore multiplayer experience. It features game modes similar to Battlefield's Conquest mode, in which you must link nodes and hold them to accomplish an objective, as well as attack/defend modes, and an PVE mode where you are tasked with accomplishing various objectives against overwhelming numbers of pinpoint accurate AI.

Good: If you're a fan of Arma 3 gunplay, you won't be disappointed; Argo is built on Arma 3, so the gunplay is identical for the most part. Combat is fun and fast, with a "hardcore" (2-3 bullets to kill) style of experience. This puts an emphasis on cover, positioning, map and audio awareness, and teamwork. Matchmaking is usually fast, but the overall player count is low so there are down times. Set in a beautiful fictitious island remastered from an earlier version of Arma, the landscape offers plenty of visual appeal as well as cover and detail.

Bad: Gear unlocks come slowly, and the AI in PVE modes can be frustrating to deal with as their accuracy is insane, often times spinning 180 degrees to headshot you from several hundred meters away. Movement can feel a tad clunky at times, as Arma 3 wasn't designed for super close combat, so moving in and out of buildings sideways will feel odd while wielding a rifle. Smaller guns are more realistic though, with carbines and SMGs being smoother to move through confined spaces.

Ugly: Gear unlocks come very slowly. I mean very. I've played maybe 30-40 matches and still haven't unlocked any assault rifles. This unfortunately means that you're often times matched against players with categorically better gear than you; you start with a few 5.56 Assault Rifles to choose from, but weapons in Arma 3 range from 9mm all the way up to 12.7mm, with the "default" gear from Arma 3 (not Argo) being 6.5mm. 5.56 is fairly weak in this game, taking sometimes half a mag to kill depending on impact location, but 6.5mm will kill in 2-3 shots, higher calibers killing in one. This simply isn't fun to compete with.

Summary: It's free, so if you've played Arma 2 or 3 and enjoyed it, give it a shot. If you're a newcomer to the series, there are better shooters to try that don't start you severely handicapped to everyone else.

I've waited 30 years for a game like this, so I'm a very critical player when it comes to one of my most beloved franchises, so bear that in mind for this review.

The Good: You can live out your Captain fantasies, or just pretend to be Zapp Brannigan, as you and your stalwart (and often inept) crew go gallavanting across the heavens in the USS Aegis or classic USS Enterprise from the Original series. Face off against Klingons and environmental hazards, rescue people, blow them up, whatever strikes your fancy. When the crew works together, it's an amazing feeling as each station is integral to completing your mission. Visit historic ST universe locations (the Delphic Expanse was the setting in the second half of Enterprise) and spot an easter egg: the dreaded Doomsday Machine. Command, Fly, Shoot, or Repair your way to victory with 4 distinct roles as you seek out a new home for the Vulcans following the events of 2009's Star Trek.

The Bad: For a next-gen title by a AAA (sometimes) producer, the graphics and audio are fairly disappointing. While not everyone has powerful rigs to run VR with high detail, the lack there of in this game is more than a little disappointing, as the Aegis is a fairly undetailed model without any special effects (like bussard glow or warp exhaust glow) and the warp effects/sound look very repetitve, boring, and don't really inspire the same awe witnessed in the 2009 ST reboot by JJ and sequels. The main campaign is woefully short, just 5 episodic missions, each only lasting about an hour, and while the game features a random mission generator, they're hardly random: the only variation is location, number of enemies, number of environmental hazards, and whether or not a star is about to go nova.

The Ugly: There's only 4 stations, and only the bridge and ready room are visitable on your ship. A science and comms station would have been even more immersive, requiring players to translate Klingon or clean up distorted distress calls, or science to scan planets/debris/etc. for mission plot or to gain an edge in combat. Engineering could have been fleshed out by actually having the engineer... I dunno, in engineering, maybe having to jump around to various consoles/equipment to keep it repaired. Finally, there's only 1 enemy type: Klingons, and the occasional pirates. There are generic "anomalies" all over the place, anywhere from harmless to sensor dampening to "melts your hull." Speaking of hull melting, the Aegis is made of paper, and has the firepower of a wet noodle flung at medium velocity after being cooked al dente. Transferring power to phasers does nothing to remedy this, only serving to improve their range. Despite seeing the Enterprise (an older ship, at this point in the timeline) belt out blistering firepower, the Aegis is limited to firing short bursts from only a single phaser bank, and only two torpedoes on a very long reload. This leads to some very frustrating engagements, as even 1 Klingon ship can overpower you if you're not on your best behavior. While lorewise the Federation/Starfleet was never a military faction, their ships did not lack firepower; in TNG on numerous occasions the crew laughed at the notion of a Klingon ship attacking the Enterprise D. Additionally, the events in 2009's ST should have made for a more "defensive" Starfleet, as indicated in the sequel where Section 31 secretly developed the Vengeance. There's also no "ST" like resolution with the Klingons... it's always a firefight or running away, or sneaking about stealthily (something Gene Roddenberry said the Federation did not do). You can't hail the Klingons and ask for permission to pass through this neutral space, nor can you hail a damaged freighter and ask if they need help.

Ultimately, the game is fun, but only for a short time. It's not a game you can easily show your friends, because it depends on other random players on the internet (unless you have your own dedicated crew) and the limited variety in missions, poor graphics and audio, and terrible balancing make the inital shine of the game wear off in short order.

I'll leave it to you to decide if it's worth 50 bucks, but in my eyes... get it on sale if you're gonna buy it.

Guns of Icarus is a game with a very cool premise but very bad execution; you play the role of either a gunner, engineer, or captain on a steampunk airship in a post-apocalyptic world, battling other airships in multiplayer modes like Skyball, Deathmatch, and other regurgitated online FPS modes. You and your crew of 4 must work together to keep your airship aloft and shoot down enemies, as your captain pilots it around the battlefield.

Airships are comprised of several key components; a main engine, 2 turning engines, a balloon pump, armor, an assortment of guns, and the hull. All except the hull can be repaired and buffed from the deck of the airship, while the hull serves as your overall HP; if the hull hits 0, you go boom. The armor protects the hull entirely as long as it is intact, so maintaining it is critical.

While the game is definitely fun and awe-inspiring for the first few moments, it quickly loses its splender about the 3rd game you get matched with level 30-40 players on the enemy team who all know what they're doing and are using the meta ships. Regardless how much effort you put it into each fight, the game hinges on knowing what to do and when to do it as well as good communication between the crew. While the game does have a decent in-game comms solution, there's no guarantee your crew (if you're lucky enough to get one) will respond, or even follow orders, and that's assuming they have some idea what they're doing. The high-level players, on the other hand, will all congregrate with their other high-level friends, and would rather seal-club you into the ground rather than help new players join the game... which is a bit sad considering it only has 200 people online on a Saturday afternoon-evening.

All in all, the game has potential, but poor matchmaking and sealclubbing ruin it.

Interesting premise of a game; more or less a MOBA in space. Unfortunately, the Devs are completely unwilling to fix what are obviously overpowered ship types (namely, the Ghost, an attack-type ship that can cloak, deploy a perfect decoy, and has a debuff that allows it to one-shot most anything smaller than the two tanky ships) which pretty much ruins the game for any other class of ship aside from those two. Decent graphics, mediocre gameplay, and a creative use for the Unreal Engine do not a good game make.