Recent reviews by LMPGames

While this is a crap-posty game, it has several issues that drag it down.

Controls
The controls in this game are insane, everything is 10 times more complicated than they need to be. You have three to five control schemes for the simple act of pouring something from one container to another. You can only hold one large object at a time. The game doesn't describe the basic of how to play the game in any way.


Game Design
There are many areas where the design for this game ironically goes from "we're being intentionally bad" to being just bad. The way certain vehicles require mixtures of fuel and oil while giving you a control scheme from hell without any way to tell what your mixture is because the UI sucks.

The lack of a proper inventory for small items, the lack of a hotbar system for larger items.


The Good
I like the physics system in this game, if you are on the down slope of a hill, your vehicle will keep moving forward and vise versa. I like the survival concept, even though I think the systems were implemented poorly.

The day night system is cool, though possibly a bit too fast. I also like the early 2000's mapping style vibe the game has.


Overall, I rate this a 5/10. An okay game that with a lot of patching for the player model issues and some clean up and redesign could be salvaged into a decent game.

Endless addiction / 10.

At first seems like an alright game. Seems to be functional and playable. Once you get into the guts of the game and are dealing with the worker system, the bugs start to rear their nasty heads.

Lots of issues within the worker system from the whole system being programmed incorrectly to each work station being able to be bugged out if interrupted in certain ways. When these bugs occur, usually reloading can fix them but there are a lot of them that will corrupt your save file and prevent you from continuing playing.

The game is barely able to be considered "finished", there are a lot of animations missing, the way storm surge is handled is stupid, and ship damage is extreme without much leeway for you to correct your course before getting forced to be towed.

If you buy this, don't expect a fully functioning game and even then don't expect a completed game either. It is technically playable with the right precautions taken such as save scumming and careful planning around certain actions and days.

Still, this game is a buggy mess and a lot of the systems don't make any sense. This is your typical Discovery game where the contracted with the lowest bidding studio. 3/10 from me, playable, but not functional and a lot of crap that you have to deal with. Oh, and the game is dead, the original studio was let go, and no one is maintaining this game anymore. Steam really should remove it.

After a really rocky start, the game was turning around. It is currently mostly playable though there are some bugs that can break the game.

That said there is still a lot to be added to bring it up to the original vision that we were told about in the announcement trailers. With the closure of Intercept, this game is probably dead now. I would not expect any new content, just bug fixes and even if Take 2 tries to continue the game the original team that worked on this game is gone. It won't be the same experience intended.

Don't buy this, as much as it hurts to say it because I love Kerbal. It isn't worth the money and it will never really be finished. I don't know what the modding scene is like in terms of what is supported. Mods might save the game, but they might also not. Instead if you are interesting in this type of game, go buy Kerbal Space Program 1. Just as good, better actually, than this game and it still holds up 14 years later.

Update 3:

Changing my review back to negative. I gave them several months to figure out the country ban issue and it still has not been resolved. I said I would flip this back negative if they hadn't by August and here we are. My review will stay negative until such time that the countries that were banned from the Sony account link fiasco are unbanned.


Update 2: I am changing my review to positive because I believe that the hold up on the 177 banned countries getting unbanned is due to Steam taking the jarate out of Sony and requiring something from them, legally, that will protect them while selling the game in those countries again and not expose themselves to lawsuits. Read that as I think that Steam is getting a legal guarantee that Sony isn't going to enforce account linking.

If these countries aren't restored by August, this review is going back negative.

Update: With Sony backing down on the linking change, I will be switching this to positive as soon as Sony and/or Steam returns access to buy the game from the countries they restricted it in.

TLDR: With the recent decision by Sony to start requiring PSN logins, I am leaving a negative review. The game Is GREAT. !!Do not buy this until Sony backs down!! If they do, I will change my review to + as it should be.

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Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the cult hit Helldivers 1. It is a completely retooled experience from the first game which was an isometric team extraction shooter. HD2 move the franchise into the realm of 3D.
While the premise of the game is somewhat bland at first blush, what makes this game truly exceptional is four things (in order of importance):

1. The Live Service Model
For the last decade we have been seeing gaming slipping further into a mire of targeted money extraction. The cost for many multiplayer games is no longer the listed price, you also need to factor in costs for battle passes, costs for currency purchases, loot box prices, etc. The average cost for a modern MP game is probably somewhere between $160 and $250 with $70-$100 of that being the cost of the game and the remainder a seasonal (game season) cost and a portion of that being a monthly average.

This push for these types of theft (yes, I see it as legalized theft) are to pad revenue numbers for shareholders and have nothing to do with improving game quality or maintenance of the game. It is strictly profit motive.

Helldivers 2 is the first game in what feels like 12 years that has done live-service correctly. The game’s initial cost is lower than the market rate, battle passes (called war bonds) do not expire and are completed by gaining an in-game currency called medals. You get a fair number of these for each mission completed and there are Major and Personal orders (weekly and daily missions) that give large sums of these medals.

You don’t even have to participate in the Major orders to get the rewards, just log in once they are completed by the community.

War bonds are unlocked with Super Credits. You can buy these from the cash shop OR you can just play the game. You can easily get the 1K credits needed to unlock a bond with around 10-15 hours of gameplay assuming you are doing optional objectives that reward you with them in each mission.

Community events are handled in a cool way and have huge impacts on the game. When you complete a Major Order you feel like you have achieved an actual goal and if you fail one the consequences can be harrowing. Even completing an order can have a negative effect down the road that leads to unexpected game events.

HD2 truly has one of the best live-service models in the industry today, hands down it is not even close.


2. War bonds are not pay to win
Huge important point here. War bonds do not contain massively overpowered weapons. In fact, a lot of the War bond weapons kind of suck or are only slightly better than their standard counterparts.

This is a great thing because if someone doesn’t do the premium War bonds, they don’t feel unable to support the team.


3. Emergent Gameplay
The game is controlled by a system called JOEL. This system conducts the galactic war and reacts to the achievements and failures of the players. This leads to the large impact of Major Orders and even on a mission by mission basis things can change.

This is also one of the weaker places for the game as well because spawn rates of certain enemies can become too high making missions almost impossible to finish.


4. Arrowhead’s receptiveness to feedback
Lastly, we have the way in which Arrowhead responds to us players. When they really screw up they, sometimes eventually, acknowledge it and will either provide another series of changes to compensate or will explain why those changes were made (usually to fix something that was bugged that no one knew was, like patrol spawns).

AH has been doing really good work in dealing with the community’s requests, demands, suggestions, and complaints these last three months. They have had fumbles, but have always self-corrected eventually. I don’t see any other live-service dev with that type of record even if it is just short-term as of now.


Honorable mentions:
In-game shenanigans with your teammates will cause hilarious situations. Got knocked over while trying to throw a 500KG? Someone is getting glassed. Not watching as the dropship is coming in? Might get roasted. There have been some wild videos posted from this game, expect to see all of that and more.

The game’s lore and how it presents itself is pitch perfect and all in-game communication with the community by the devs is couched in that parlance for the most part. This leads to more immersion and some cool stuff. Not to mention the memes.


Some of the bad things:
The game is still in the balancing phase and conditions within the game can change depending on a number of situations. This can lead to weird spawn rates for enemies, weapons being over-nerfed or over-buffed and then dialed back, and a host of other issues from crashes to weird bugs.

The game is HEAVILY dependent on a stable player count. If that player count dips drastically for a long period of time, the game is going to suffer a lot because of that. Obviously, AH would eventually step in to make changes, but a feedback cycle would likely spring up until they did. After all, if a bunch of Major Orders are failed in a row crazy stuff can happen.

This is a live-service game, live-service games are subject to a lot of pressures and could be gone within the blink of an eye. You will eventually find yourself owning this game after it has been shut down; even if that takes years or decades to happen.

Helldivers 2 is a 8/10 live-service game. That kind of rating doesn’t happen ever day for a live-service game, it truly is an oddity and especially for this game where the initial marketing was fumbled.

I honestly don't know where to begin with this one. So, let's start at the end of the review I guess... I don't recommend anyone buy this game unless you have the money to burn. This game has many technical issues from a game design and performance aspect.

My overall rating for this game is a 3.5/10.

In terms of the game play, combat is really bad. Enemies slide all over the map while fighting you, there is no soul in how they are programmed. They basically sit in one place until you come into their awareness range and then run straight at you and have a basic attack string that never changes.

If you move out of range, they run up to you and bonk you with the same attacks. The first boss doesn't have any really special attacks, he just walks/slides over to you and slashes you with his sword along with a jump back if you attack him.

The Rage mechanic is not implemented correctly or is bugged and not only slow down enemies, but also slows your character down as well or bugs out input detection rendering the mechanic useless.

The jumping mechanic doesn't make any sense from a design perspective. There isn't really any reason for it to exist outside of some basic traversal mechanics that should have been done in a modern way and not as if the game was made in the 90's where you were jumping up and down ledges to get around maps.

In several places the jump mechanic actually makes it really hard not to die because of invisible walls that will block you from being able to reach across drop offs and the way the "climbing" aspect of the system works is really badly executed/designed.

The game settings reset when you restart the game so you have to change them each time you start. That is slightly mitigated by the face that the only real settings you have to worry about are VSync, MSAA, and audio levels. None of the other settings really do anything; Graphics Quality doesn't actually change anything other than some lighting and post process effects for example.

The game has really bad performance. On my ryzen 7 3900x/2080TI/64GB ram system I was getting around 45-50fps on medium quality and MSAA x2.

The audio mastering in this game is almost non-existent. I have to turn down the sound effects and music volume multiple times as I progressed through the first two areas because things kept getting louder. The intro cinematic also has an issue with the music getting extremely loud as it progresses.

Sound effects are pretty bad too and don't sound right for what is happening on the screen. The music in general is alright though.

Voice acting can be hit or miss, but you can tell when the devs are doing the vo versus when they hired ona voice actor to voice over certain characters. That said, the writing in the game is pretty bad. I am guess English is not the devs first language and it shows in how badly structured the dialog is.

On top of all of this, the dev's don't seem to be fixing the game anymore. The last update was in July of 2023 and there haven't been any updates or notices on Steam that more updates are forthcoming. You can probably assume this game is abandonware at this point.

This is the first MonHun game I have put any real amount of time into. The first game in the series I played was Tri.

The Good:
There is a crap ton of content. Way more than you normally see in games these days and Iceborn adds even more. There's around 40 to 50 huntable monsters in the base game and a lot of smaller farming creatures. This gives you a lot of variability in hunts and the ability to switch to different targets when you a tired of hunting a certain type of monster.

There are a ton of items to be found, crafted, and unlocked that have specific uses for specific hunts that make the hunts more manageable and require you to prepare for the hunts properly. Generally this is true for hunts at your rank or at the upper end of the next one down (High Rank Pickle will need proper planning even if you are Master Rank for example).

There are also 10 to 12 weapon types which are all very distinct and offer different gameplay styles. Certain hunts are made easier using certain weapon types which encourages players to try out all of them. Each weapon had to be constructed from materials collected from the game world and harvested from huntable monsters. Some of these materials can be hard to obtain, so there is a large amount of grinding introduced; however, the grind is manageable because of the number of possible monsters to hunt.

Overall grind in this game is handled extremely well for a game as grindy as this one. Lots of thought went into the systems to make this possible and shows an above average understanding of proper game design. Introduce multiplayer into the mix and the grinding goes from still somewhat tedious to usually fun which is an amazing achievement.

There are a number of features, such as the Trailriders and the Argosy, that make getting monster materials a bit easier and help to reduce the grind slightly. In addition to this, capturing monsters, using the Hunting Guiide to break breakable parts of monsters, and some other systems allow you to get more parts including a better chance to obtain rarer ones.

One of the best Steam co-op integrations in gaming. Accept a join request from a message and then hit the menu option. Very simple, more AAA studios with Steam co-op support need to do this.


The Meh:
The writing in the game isn't that good and neither is the story. Thankfully the story is pretty irrelevant in this game.

While the grind is one of the better designed aspects of the game there are still some places it could be improved. This applies mainly around gems and the material tree. Iceborn weapons require World base weapons and materials to be made. These weapons should have been placed into their own trees without needing materials from the base game to be made from scratch.

Upgrading from base weapons is fine, but those base weapons should have been the start of the trees. In addition, augments from the base game seem to be removed when upgraded to Iceborn weapons (I haven;'t actually done this yet because I think that is what happens, so take this with a grain of salt).

The cultivation system makes item material grinding a bit easier, but you can only, as far as I currently know, cultivate two item material types at present so you will still need to farm materials in some cases.

Certain item limits don't make much sense (like certain kinds of traps being limited to 1).

Hit boxes and collision meshes sometimes don't make sense. For example, cutting off the tail of a monster sometimes still results in that monster being able to hit you with their tail further away that it seems they should be able to.


The Bad:
Monster size scaling can make otherwise normal fights impossible (large Black Diablos for example). Size has too big of an impact on some stats. On the other side, smaller monsters are too easy to kill. Size scaling refers to the size of a monster compared to an average version of that monster, the size varies from hunt to hunt. This is a good system overall, there were some oversights that make it annoying.

Astra's design is bad. Things are not laid out in a natural manner, the hub is really bad and looks low effort compared to Seliana's.

Can't set the rank of expeditions (as far as I know). Expeditions allow you to free hunt/gather materials; materials and monsters will respawn (good feature). The problem is that they are always scaled to your Hunter Rank and you can't change it so if you wanted to just troll around in low-rank Ancient Woods and beat the ♥♥♥♥ out of angry Barnies (Anjanaths) for low rank parts, you can't. You would have to do quests for that which are time and enemy limited.


Overall Monster Hunter World is an amazing game with well thought-out systems and game design. While the stuff that doesn't matter, like the story, is pretty weak, the important systems and features are well designed and offer quality of life features around grinding that put almost all other games to shame.

MHW gets a 9/10 from me and is a must play for any gamer that enjoys simulation adventure games.

I wanted to like this game. Been a hardcore BGS support since Daggerfall (though 76 was trash). I just can't, for the sake of integrity, recommend this game to anyone for any price; maybe if it is free or on 90% sale.

The Good
Ship building is honestly one of the only good qualities about this game. It is very robust and you can make quite a lot of stuff with it.

The other "good" thing, if you are an old-head BGS player, is that all of the Bethesda-jank we have come to know over the years is all here and then some. The meme potential is off of the charts.


The Meh
Starfield is a quintessential example of executive designed games. Games not designed by people that know what they are doing, but by some suit that hasn't touched a game in their lives. They don't look at player experience as value, they look at how many things are in the game and attribute value to that. Saying "our game has 1000 planets" is not a win, it is an admission that there is a lack of focus.

Now, for Bethesda games, that shouldn't be an issue. Hell, that was basically Skyrim though the story was present, made sense, was thoughtfully congruent, and was an actual story worth experiencing. Starfield isn't that. It isn't even really a Bethesda game in my opinion. It feels like a game made by a university tech research team attempting to push boundaries in game sciences.

The story in Starfield isn't a focues narrative in any sense. It makes no sense, in totality, the way it progresses. It is not well thought out and relies on the worst grinding I have ever seen in a singleplayer game. Grinding is fine, as long as it serves a purpose and is designed to be somewhat dissimilar each time you do the action; Monster Hunter World is a great example of a game with massive grind potential but where the grind is actually interesting and sometimes fun.

What we have in Starfield is a grind that is not only not fun, it is tedious, and you are doing the exact same things each time. There is no real reason to continue playing the game passed the first time you beat the story even thought Bethesda tried to inject rouge-lite mechanics into the game (very stupid idea).

The characters and writing are also very bland and uninspired; unusual for a Bethesda game, though not unheard of. What is though, is that it isn't just a couple of NPCs here and there, it is literally all of them. The dialog sounds robotic, the voice acting director did not do their job, and the writing staff failed to put any kind of soul into the characters. M`aiq is a more interesting character than most of the main characters in Starfield.

Art design is inconsistent and poorly carried out. A lot of areas seem to have the "Hollywood" grunge filter that some seem to think that people believe make media more realistic. All it does is washout all of the colors and art and leave you with a mess that the players then have to go in and fix with mods or graphics settings.

NPCs are not reactive to anything. You can go into a city and fire off a weapon and no one does anything. Even Skyrim had this feature, albeit not as advanced as stuff we see these days like with CP2077. How are we supposed to immerse ourselves in the world when the world doesn't immerse itself in us?

The Bad
Oh boy, where to start. First and foremost, Bethesda. I don't know what has happened to them, ever since 76 the company has been changing into a jaded sorry excuse for the powerhouse it once was. Everything about their response to the release and everything that has happened since feels arrogant, ignorant of the state of their own game, and worst of all, flippant.

Bethesda even has dedicated staff here in the review section attempt to gaslight us. No honest and respectable company does this. I don't know what happened, but something is very wrong.

As for Starfield, this game was a disaster from start to finish. It fails critical, fundamentally basic and simple game design principles, and doesn't feel like the game they described as something that was "25 years in the making". I myself have been working on a project for just about that length of time and I can honestly say there is no way they were work shopping this game for more than 5-8 years. The proof is in how lackluster everything about the game feels; the game world is half-baked, there are only actually 10-15 planets in the game, and there is almost no innovation at all.

Combat is very clunky with many collision meshes blocking off things like railings that you should be able to shoot though. There is a distinct lack of weapon variety and everything boils down to a handful of variants on the few weapon types in the game. They tried to Skyrim Fallout without realizing that it doesn't work, it should have been obvious to any gameplay designer it was a bad idea.

Enemies suffer the same issue. You rarely fight anything unique and then you do it's just a copy of another enemy's model with a different name strapped to it. I would expect this level of laziness from a first-game dev studio, not a triple AAA studio that has been in the industry for decades.

Travel and movement throughout the game is not only slow, but annoying and irritating. Once more, this is something that Bethesda had nailed down in Elder Scrolls and Fallout. How did the movement systems in this game regress to this state? It does not make any sense. Loading screens all over the place, clunky menu interactions to initiate travel, restricted movement in space, the lack of any map in-game (and don't you go calling that blue plane a map; I don't know what that is but it isn't a map). All of these things were fine in past Bethesda games, what the hell happened?

Then the greatest sin of this game. Exploration sucks. This is the bread and butter of Bethesda games and has been for 20 years. How on God's green earth did this get screwed up so badly in this game? Did Bethesda outsource Starfield to some armature dev team? How does a team that makes games with living, infinitely explorable worlds create the kind of crap we have in Starfield?

I land on a planet, see a point of interest 850 meters away, some kind of mining site. I go there, find some pirates and have a resonably good time killing them and looting the stuff from the corpses. I turn around and scan and see another POI 1.4K meters off, a cave. I go over there. I go in the cave and all I find is one resource point to mine. There isn't anything else in the cave. This cave is 2.25KM from my ship, I have to walk to it on foot with almost nothing to do in between except scan a few things.

This is amateur game design. If you have to travel a long distance from a location and the mode of travel needed is not quick and there is little to do, that point of interest needs to be interesting and worth the time to have gone there. This is a basic game design principle; don't waste the player's time.

Everything about this game screams that it wasn't made by Bethesda. It doesn't even meet the basic requirements to be considered a AAA game (just the amount of money spent, if that is accurate). I don't know who made this game, but it they failed to make a decent game in every aspect of the term.

This is ignoring the PC performance issues and Todd's brain dead response of "Oh, just upgrade your old stuff". No, you didn't even have the professionalism to include DLSS support on release. Gamers had to turn to a paid mod to implement some kind of support for it and even then the game was still badly performant on good hardware. I wonder if they even tested on PC or just stuck to XBox QA/testing.

In case all of that has not gotten the message across, I don't recommend this game. If you are interested in getting it, wait for a deep discount otherwise hold off. This game isn't worth the retail price, the effort put into the game doesn't justify it. Maybe I would price it at around $35 once they fix all of the major performance issues.

Where to even start. I don't have any idea how this game has a Mostly Positive review score. Did the last update break everything?

The game is almost non-functional. I can't harvest materials from rocks without the rocks being deleted from the map before resources drop. Sometimes walking into partially mined rocks crashes the game.

A lot of the controls don't make any sense. Why can't I just pick stuff up off of the ground while holding a tool? Resources should automatically be added into your inventory, I shouldn't have to put a tool down to pick up the resource and then place it into my inventory.

Why can't I rotate things in building mode? This is a standard feature of this genre, where is it?

The campaign mode is trash. The voice acting direction is horrible and the event pacing is illogical. Why does the tutorial section at the start end after tutorial 2, why do we have to go down to floor 0 to talk to some guy when we have space age technology; do we not have radio communication?

The writing is really bad and a lot of it feels like it was generated by Chat GPT or translated to English from some other language by Google Translate.

Model collisions are broken, I almost got stuck under the debris during the crouching tutorial.

This game should not even be released yet; it isn't ready for Early Access. They should not even be making new game systems when the core mechanics are this broken.

Stay away from this game for a couple of years. It might be playable by then if the devs don't abandon it (I am betting that is what happens).

Pure rouge-lite like addiction. Highly recommended, but be ready to spend way more time than you intend to playing this game.

10/10 game