Recent reviews by Wyatt Derp

Fun, fast paced, cooperative gameplay. Excellent with friends. Democracy needs YOU to help defend it, Helldiver!

An incredible return for Armored Core.

If you're like me and enjoy high-fantasy type RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Divinity, but also have a love of history, specifically Roman, then you're probably going to enjoy Expeditions: Rome.

For what feels like the first time to me, it's great to see Rome portrayed in an RPG style of game. I never realized this was an itch that I needed scratched, and in return for that I'm more than willing to overlook the, so far minor, historical inaccuracies such as Greek Fire being used so early in history or the loose understanding of Roman Citizenship.

So far I'm loving this game, well worth your salarium.

The shallow campaign is clearly just meant to be a tutorial for the game to get you into the multiplayer, but more on that later. The tutorialcampaign spans several missions from both sides of the conflict, doing it's best to make you feel like an involved member of a squadron. Unfortunately multiple issues make it kind of difficult to immerse yourself fully.
First, in missions where you have to follow an individual their speed tries to match yours. While this is kinda nice, allowing you to follow at your own pace, it often left me confused as I was coming up to a follow-target at full speed then slowing down to match their speed, and they would speed off ahead of me before slowing down.
I've heard talk that players using flight sticks have to deal with a 20% deadzone that cannot be removed. To be honest I haven't noticed this issue, my stick seems to respond well. Thrustmaster T-Flight Hotas X for those wondering.
The characters in the campaign are shallow and underdeveloped. All of the character development is crammed into strange feeling monologues wherein they just kind of talk at you. There's no real feeling behind what they say.
The immersion for the Imperials is just frankly not there. The Imperials are a group of bigoted alien-hating nazi-facsimiles who want to rule the galaxy with an iron fist but in this game their star squadron consists of two women with anger issues, an edgy boi who never takes his helmet off, and the squadron lead who could have been a fairly well written character if it weren't for the fact that they just force in a single comment about him being gay for absolutely no reason. There's no romance subplot with him. There's nothing in the story that draws on his sexuality. He just randomly comments one time about how his "husband would like that" when talking about retirement. My best friend is gay but this just feels like forced inclusion to get those "diversity points."
The rebels squadron features a Trandoshan who speaks perfect Galactic Basic, the stereotypical "I'm in your feels" character who spends the entire campaign trying to give the player some emotional ground to stand on but it's so thinly laid that it just collapses anyway, a strange non-binary Alien who tries too hard to act like a parental figure, and then another character who was so forgettable I've actually already blanked them from memory. One friend of mine beat the entire campaign in 3 hours by skipping all the dialogue with every character because, and I quote, "after the first interaction I didn't respect them enough as characters to try."

The story of the tutorialcampaign is okay. It wasn't exactly spectacular.
***SPOILER ALERT***
You spend the entirety of the tutorialcampaign both defending and attacking (depending on the side you're playing) the Rebels new battleship. The back-and-forth created by this conflict was actually quite fun. It was interested switching from being heavily invested in the defense of an asset to being heavily invested in the destruction of that same asset. However, due to a handful of poor story choices I ended up feeling cheated. ***MAJOR SPOILER ALERT***
Towards the end of the tutorialcampaign while playing as the Imperials you must take down the Imperial defector who kicks off basically the whole plot. When you destroy him there's a big cinematic ordeal where he crashes his starfighter into another ship in a blazing inferno of death and glory - this is the climax of the Imperial squadron, their shining moment in the game, where they actually achieve one of their goals and the Rebels are left scrambling wondering what they will do now without him. The next mission you play as the Rebels and while flying around the ship that the aforementioned defector crashed into....he just flies out. Perfectly unharmed. His X-Wing looks like one of four engines had a failure, but considering the fact that he CRASHED INTO A BATTLESHIP I would expect him to, at the very least, be missing several vital components from his X-Wing, if not just, you know, BE DEAD. The dev's decision to miraculously revive this character is supposed to come across as a beautiful, victorious moment that brings hope back to the Rebels. All it did for me was make me feel like the entire "boss fight" with him was a waste of time, and that once again the new Star Wars is so reluctant to have one of their own characters die. They'll happily murder off characters from the Original Trilogy but refuse to remove plot-armor from almost any of their own creations, even when a death serves the story better.
***END SPOILER*
At this point you may be thinking, "Well that doesn't sound great, but certainly the multiplayer makes up for it!"
Every time I've tried to queue for a match in a squadron my game times out, or it crashes during the match. When I go into matchmaking solo I play with no issues. So a game developed almost exclusively for co-op has issues when trying to co-op with your friends. When I get dropped out of a match, for whatever reason, there's a button you can hit to "rejoin match." When playing in a squadron the rejoin match button simply does not work. When playing solo, it works sometimes. Either way, I've ended up with multiple "abandonment" penalties for "abandoning" matches I was DC'd from that the game itself wouldn't let me reconnect to.
The Fleet Battles Tutorial that the main menu says you'll get a reward for playing is broken. After completing a certain objective you just stop getting objectives. Even if you continue playing and bring the Star Destroyer to 1HP the tutorial just continues endlessly and aimlessly, and the Star Destroyer never dies.
The AI in the Fleet Battles Against AI mode are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ absurd. They hardly miss, they fly perfectly, they gangbang and spawn camp you, and before you even realize what's happening you've either won or lost the match.
The PVP Fleet Battles mode is basically the same. The match progresses while player squadrons duke it out and eventually someone loses their capital ship. The matchmaking seems to be rather poor as I've had multiple matches where my team sweeps the victory, but even more matches where we get annihilated seemingly faster than should be possible.
The only other multiplayer mode is 5v5 dogfights, which are enjoyable if you have a good squadron. However, as stated above, good luck getting a full squadron of friends without any one of them having an issue staying in the match.
That's just me harping on the bad ♥♥♥♥ that I've noticed though. Despite my multiple paragraphs of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I'm enjoying the game for the most part. It's just that sometimes, especially in multiplayer, I have to exercise an absurd amount of patience.

Who doesn't like shooting nazis in the nuts?
Game runs great, gameplay is great, check out the previous games too!

EA didn't ♥♥♥♥ this one up.

No, seriously.

Verdun is a long, bloody slog through the trenches of WW1 and every moment is gritty and satisfying.

The combat in Ryse has a visceral, heavy feel to it that makes you keep coming back for more and more and more. I didn't even realize I could upgrade my character in the single player campaign until I'd beat it already so by the time I made it to the end I was a master at not being hit and had every single execution you could unlock. Once you finish the campaign, step into the Colliseum for some co-op slaughterfests! 9/10 super fun game!