Recent reviews by grazr

Can i recommend this game at £33-£50 right now? No. There's not enough content here to warrant the price tag and I mostly bought into the game already because i'm a 40K fan. If you're not a 40K fan then there's not going to be much here for you to enjoy... yet. If you are, then at least you can enjoy the soundtrack and what limited amount of lore and aesthetic is already present. At the very least, at least there's a good volume of decent voice acting/dialogue to keep things fresh.

The game and its servers are still unstable, but at least largely playable compared to release; and although the basics are here and replay-ability is so-so, the developers are consistently breaking their promises to have certain elements of the game complete by their own deadlines. The amount of content released at launch was less than their pledge, then the dates for missing/delayed content like a fully fledged crafting system that were promised at the end of December never materialised as we're already over half way through January and it's still missing. Which isn't promising for the games future (no pun intended).

I do expect that the game will improve over time just like Fatshark's prior titles did, but the devs need to be realistic with the community to increase short term confidence. With each broken promise the devs alienate the community further. Fans will tolerate a 2-3 month damage control road map, but each broken promise becomes a negative talking point that increases player turnover and ruining the play experience further for those that stick around as a lack of players is an issue for a multiplayer game.

The game is pretty straight forward and easy to pick up, which i think is great, if not expected of some of the Warhammer titles that branch off from the traditional live table top experience (Dawn of War, Total War, etc). The game shows elements of established games like XCOM's battle arena's and Darkest Dungeon's dungeon crawling, but in a more simplified form.

There are a couple mechanics however that don't seem very intuitive or developed that are kinda frustrating.

Traditionally, in RPG games, as you work your way up a tech tree or through the item drops, those things become increasingly powerful. In Mechanicus however the power creep is inconsistent. There's no reason to use any other weapon except the Gamma Pistol (an early alternative weapon which does low damage, but ignores armour and so is consistent and reliable DPS on all targets). The more powerful weapons require more ability (cognition) points to use and thus can't be used as often and the final perk in the ranged and melee trees require you to forgo the other type for a very small bonus in the discipline tree you're using (which for the ranged tree doesn't even apply to energy damage for some reason). The utility and DPS you lose just for some small bonus in your preferred combat weapon is not worth the investment so in some cases the last upgrade is better left locked and put into a different tree.

The game offers you the option to tech into an interesting minion build that buffs the "disposable" minions you can bring that help flesh out your unit rosta, but the default tech priests are free and generally more powerful because of their numerous support utilities so once you unlock more tech priests, the minions fall off in terms of usefulness. Leaving this interesting tech tree somewhat lack luster.

The dungeon crawling is also a little skewiff in terms of balance. Dungeon rooms can either be empty (in rare cases), offer "glyph" puzzles, moral choice questions (with 3 answers), host objectives (1 or 2 rooms including combat that complete the dungeon) or be filled with enemies (arbitrary combat).

The glyph rooms are quick and easy enough, especially if you use a cheat sheet, but eventually you'll notice they're not very useful as although they *can* offer up items or currency, mostly they do not offer anything useful (HP/CP when you're already full) and only serve to further awaken the necrons by 2 bars (which happens in all new rooms you enter that aren't empty). So even though you can get these all right with a cheat sheet, i found them better off left alone in order to access more missions over all before the awakening meter fills up.

The moral choice rooms are your quickest and easiest way into acquiring black stone currency, but there's no rhyme or reason as to which is correct. They further the narrative in an interesting way, but much like XCOM, bad choices have a habit of snow balling in your campaign. There is a difficulty option with gives you hints as to what the choices will involve (blackstone, HP, cognition), but you don't know whether these will be good or bad, so i found it better to leave it off because it serves as something of a red herring). The 3 choices you get are often science/curiosity, Faith/ignorance or haste/pragmatism. It's disappointing that these were left completely random and not tied to a particular style of campaign that you want to play.

Later in the game you come across rooms unrelated to the objective that are host to enemies that you will have to combat, however despite being in bold red on the dungeon crawler map indicating a threat, you actually *want* to engage those rooms because they have high potential to reduce necron awakening in your mission.

Overall the game is completely functional and enjoyable, it just has a lot of missed potential and moments of frustration or confusion over things like the whacky power creep or indicators that suggest things they do not do/mean.

I don't like that the recommendation system on here only allows for a binary yes or no answer when i expect for many games on here the truth of the matter is that one's feeling about a game is a lot closer to neutral, but i opted for a no because the issues with this game are largely mechanical which are fundamental to a game experience compared to a movie or book which rely more specifically on story telling alone, where this title is actually very strong.

The game is visually stunning and pretty much what you'd expect of a modern Star Wars title. Similarly the voice acting is also hitting top marks, including actor names like Tony Amendola who sci-fi fans will most likely recognise as having played Master Bra'Tac in Star Gate: SG1. There's not a whole lot that needs to be said about the various artistic elements besides acknowledging that they were in fact done and done very, very well. But if the visual and audio elements are on point, why haven't I recommended this game? Well, the short answer to that is that it just doesn't play well; and that's the primary thing you want from a story that you "play".

There are certain elements of the gameplay that feel like they should be scripted, but are not, and this leads to significant timing problems for the player('s avatar). Some of this is probably more a case of the game deviating from existing mechanics made industry standard by long running franchise titles like Assassin's Creed or Arkham Asylum and having to break the player into new habits specific to this game. Like how the game doesn't assume a player wants to climb a wall when they approach a climbable wall and jump at it. You have to physically confirm that you want to climb the wall when you land on it with a quasi-quick time event before plummeting to your death. Ironically, this might have made more sense in Assassin's Creed where literally every wall is climbable, but in a game where the wall's are very specifically designed with a time and place to be used it makes much less sense to have the player confirm they want to climb a vine-wall they had to jump a ravine to get to. Admittedly despite how long i spent explaining this, i only died to this once or twice in the entire game, but the point is more of a case of mechanical redundancy which is a running theme of the game. It feels like this game should be free-running and for all the level design and character acrobatics you would think that it was, but it is not.

This logistical problem is exacerbated by the horrendous translation to keyboard and mouse. Thankfully there is a built in controller mod for the PC copy, but if like me you are a sole PC player with no controller this leaves a bad aftertaste in the mouth. A lack of smoothing makes certain mechanics like the various terrain-slides-into-rope-swings an absolute chore to complete because a single nudge of the mouse can send Cal Kestis off 45 degrees into nowhere. I died more to arbitrary mechanical problems like this than any other. It does become mitigated somewhat when you learn force pull to bring certain interactive widgets to you, but that doesn't stop the initial crappiness you had to put up with for the first part of the game. Which brings me on to my next problem.

Parrying. Who on earth approved this system. It is absolutely all over the place. I played Fallen Order on The third hardest difficulty, but the challenge i had with it was that it was far *too* forgiving. Lasers travel so slow that you'll frequently find yourself parrying too soon. Enemies also telegraph their attacks, including the long ranged ones, but they spend so long telegraphing their attacks that it's hard to time the parry depending on your distance from them. Attacks can connect prematurely, or you can walk into the end of an attack animation and ragdoll halfway across the room for grazing an outstretched foot/fist. Enemies have strong attacks that cannot be blocked and these are telegraphed the most obnoxiously, but the specific mechanic to avoid these attacks, the dodge, doesn't quite work as intended. Most heavy attacks are broad sweeping and/or AoE meaning even if you dodge the attack successfully, you actually don't, because the attack had a 180 degree field of effect. The best example i can give of how ridiculous the dodge system is is when you use the "slow time" force ability on someone in the middle of a heavy strike. It slows down abilities and NPC movement speed but doesn't seem to effect their turning... meaning NPC's will continue to stare you down. I slowed time on a Wyyyschokk (giant spider) as it was pulling off a heavy unblockable attack, the intention was to get behind it and strike, except it turned on a dime like a spin top and i couldn't get behind it even though it was frozen in place. I ran circles around it 3 times before the effect wore off and it finally struck. The Phillak (mountain goat) has similar issues. It's codex entry reads that it cannot track the player when aggrivated and will frequently run into walls and rocks, but this isn't true because it will frequently adjust its course quite acutely during a charge.

One final note is that the game doesn't seem to want to let you play it. When you learn a new ability one of the most practical things you can do is not continue on through the game, but intentionally reset the nearby mobs multiple times by resting at a meditation circle to practice the new ability on them, but this jarring to the story telling process. Some abilities like force pull come from a hard barrier in the games progression and these milestone abilities come with flashbacks to training scenarios. This is cool and i think should have been done for all abilities. Because you can force your way through the low stakes combat at the beginning without actually learning the moves properly until the game difficulty ramps up and instead of fighting lame storm troopers you're fighting elite purge troopers who stun lock you to death and you find yourself unable to pull off your combo's because you didn't need them against the previous mobs.

The game is challenging because it's so inconsistent and because of that inconsistency it takes far too long to learn from the vague feedback the game is giving you. Changing the difficulty also does not resolve the mechanical problems in the game. Though it does mitigate the problem somewhat by having enemies do less damage, reducing your overall respawns, the amount of damage they do is not necassarily the problem.

The game doesn't offer itself up completely to new players, there a number of mechanics that don't get fully explained (IE that certain actions or lack of action will cause respective ramifications, but the extent of those ramifications is never elaborated on, you just have to wait and find out), that will reveal themselves through trial and error so be prepared to have half a dozen bad experiences before you can get to a point where you can manage the mechanics properly (even when reading the help tips); or reduce this play time by spending some time reading the wiki or asking questions on the forums. The unfortunate part about this is that this game is not all that complex so the need to refer to a wiki shouldn't be necessary as an extra sentence or two elaborating on a mechanic in game is not going to be the straw that breaks the camels back for new players.

Once you've played about 3-6 games and/or spent some time reading/discussing the mechanics online you'll have the game down to the point where it becomes pretty straight forward and you can just appreciate the aesthetics. Though there is not much incentive to play the game *too* well as reaching certain goals early will just fast track the end-game event; which you want to delay as much as possible so that you can stockpile resources for the finale.

There are a couple mechanics like this which aren't really intuitive. For example, it's better to let a small amount of people stay homeless and get sick and rest in a warm medical post than it is to build a house for them in an outter ring which is outside the heat zone and have the entire city enter a panic and induce a "promise" event to heat the homes which involves an expensive technology and/or law just because one person is cold at home.

There are now multiple "map" scenario's on offer besides the main story [New Home] which i have yet to experience which all come with similar commentary from the community about weird mechanics that are disappointingly un-thought out and ruin the initial experience. But again, a little trial and error and seeking advice from veteran players who've been through it can resolve these fairly quickly. The "game" scenario's can be marathoned across 2 days or split into smaller sessions across a week and offer a certain amount of replayability; the achievements offer some interesting challenges which actually seem like worthy efforts rather than the usual arbitrary progression markers.

All in all, those small observations about streamlining the experience aside, the game is very enjoyable and pleasant to watch unfold.

Not a lot of players seem to understand the contextual roots of Wolfenstein and that this title is an homage to the Wolfenstein 3D (W3D) game that effectively put FPS on the gaming genre map in 1992. Seemingly hacked off by its ridiculous plot and simplified game play that was actually supposed to be there to reflect the nature of the initial (FPS) game.

There's not a whole lot that really needs to be said about the fundamentals beyond that, the game pretty much achieves exactly what it set out to do and then some. Whilst the narrative isn't anything innovative it carries the core of the game very well and is certainly more than i ever expected it to be considering how basic the plot (or lack-there-of) was for W3D. Maybe it would be prudent to help understand the franchise better to make the inevitable comparison to DOOM which saw much more commercial success 18 months later in 1993. Except instead of Nazi's you're killing demons. Basically the same gaming platform concept.

That being said, the game is not without its valid criticisms. The attempt to appeal to the wider audience by implementing stealth seemed unnecessary and only served to confuse players unfamiliar with the franchise about what the game was supposed to be as well as older franchise fans who knew that stealth game play just wasn't a thing in the franchise and seemed out of place. Ultimately the play style did work alright all be it becoming largely obsolete as you progressed and started seeing more armoured and subsequently immune enemies. You can tell that the style of play wasn't fleshed out or balanced, especially since there was no way to reset any acquired aggro. Although you could eventually stem the tide of the unlimited reinforces if an alarm were to go off by killing a "commander" NPC, if you were to get spotted, the enemies would always know where you were until your clearing of the "arena" and moving onto the next zone. Being able to transition from stealth to run & gun was refreshing from a mechanics point of view, but jarring that it was forced/locked when it did happen.

But really the main issue most players have are with the game engine and its persistent unreliability on AMD gaming chips. Including the Radeon GTX 295 i had when i first bought the game in 2015. The gameplay was a horrendous experience and even now players with AMD GPU's litter the forums asking for help, suffering at the hands of developers and engines that fail to support AMD. I now run an nvidia card and my second play through was a much more pleasant experience. So worth baring that in mind if you're running an AMD GPU and see this in a sale, it may warrant a second thought if you don't fancy hacking your settings to try and get it working at a suitable/satisfactory level.

The entry level requirements for this game just aren't what they used to be where any casual player could enter and have a meaningful experience alongside other players. Now the game and its various servers are dominated by veteran outfits that dictate the flow of the game at everybody else's expense.

With the introduction of A.S.P. (end game upgrades), infantry Implants, construction and outfit specific abilities (the latest being the Bastion orbital vehicle) the devs have continued down a path of dividing veteran players from the general population and the result has been a pathetic capacity to retain players and a decent population. Alienating newer players who suffer on the receiving end of this late game content.

In an effort to try and appease existing veterans to stick around the devs have been introducing more content specifically for them at the expense of newer players. A player without battle Rank 100+ A.S.P. upgrades, implants, vehicle upgrades or access to outfit/construction abilities is just a bug on the windshield for other players that really shouldn't dictate the play as much as they do now, certainly not in such an unfair capacity if this game is to ever have any kind of continued longevity. Some examples of this unfairness include abilities like being able to equip two primary weapons rather than a secondary sidearm, which has further compounding impact with class upgrades like the Infiltrators powerful Stalker cloak which ordinarily limits you to a mere sidearm but can now be played with significantly greater potential.

Add to that the relatively recent force move to DX11 that has performance bottlenecked the game for many players that could previously get much better performance on older machines. This game has the unfortunate engine symptom of locking ones weapons rate of fire to their computers frame rate, should it [RoF] be higher than the frame rate. Previously where i played the game on high i now have to play it on low and still get latency issues that limit my output and this leads to very frustrating infantry dual experiences on top of the existing battle against late game content.

I cannot with good conscience recommend this game to isolated newer players or even either veteran players below BR 80 and/or those who previously played on servers that now have lesser veteran outfit presence than the other factions. Such as NC on Cobalt whose lack of veteran outfits leads them to consistently get farmed. Even if previously i have personally had many good hundreds if not thousands of hours in this game and would have recommended this game at that time; and with the increased population due to pandemic lockdown keeping people online i have to recommend the game in its current state and not what it used to be years ago even in spite of its many other improvements to the base game play.

The game, a city builder, serves primarily as a traffic simulator. How ever even though it takes a rather casual and forgiving approach to money management compared to say SimCity, it is still not without its flaws that increase the challenge if somewhat arbitrarily; and given how the main element of the game is in fact traffic management the tools with which you are given to manage it are severely lacking. Even though operating mods has always felt like a cheat to playing the vanilla game, if the game itself is a cheat then sometimes relying on mods to expand upon the base game is the only viable way to play. With this in mind my recommendation comes with a disclaimer that the game is most enjoyable when utilising a number of community appraised mods that improve the overall experience that the vanilla release offers. This includes mods such as Traffic Manager and the various "anarchy" mods (prop anarchy, building anarchy, road anarchy, etc) that give you increased control to manipulate the environment more appropriately.

Rather than list of the various kinks the game has one at a time, they're not so obnoxious that they can't just be left for the player to discover as the game is incredibly well documented and this information is easily available. Not to mention the community is generally still active to answer any questions.

I haven't played this game in a while, but out of all the games i miss and consider under-rated when i consider playing a game of something after playing a lot of something else, i miss and want to return to this one the most.

The balance has always generally been good, with subtle variations in the aliens being strong early game due to their manouverability and the marines strong late game due to their firepower, i've still found the game very satisfying and playable. Those subtle variations said, the game has never been more balanced and i consider those issues largely addressed as well as they can be.

I enjoyed this game for the short period that i played it in pre-release (not that i can tell i ever had the cool, unique skin you're rewarded for doing so ever being properly equipped when chosen). But one thing to be aware of is there is a relatively high skill ceiling that makes the game quite competitive due to the fact it's very fast pace, quite punishing of mistakes made and rewards fast reaction times and accuracy (the latter one there being a slightly more important skillset for marines).

Playing marines is certainly a lot more easier than playing the aliens, probably largely due to the familiar gameplay. This does result in the marine team filling up faster than the alien one. You might find yourself having played a lot of games as the alien and wanting to swap, but find it difficult to find a slot on the marine team.

Not a whole lot i can really say about the tactical aspect of the game. I do enjoy commanding both teams, though it can be a pain finding a good one when you want to be a player. The alien commander is a little easier on account of being to operate almost indepentently of the players since the structures tend to build themselves if only slowly, whilst the marine commander absolutely relies on his marines for this.

Use of personal requisition is more difficult as marines as an alien player can perform well with even the basic tier 1 class and can happily sit ontop of a pool of requisition waiting to be used. Whilst the marines will want to invest in consumables and upgrades throughout the game meaning if they die they likely wont have that pool of resources to immediately replace their loadout. Some consolation does come in the form of being able to re-acquire your weapon from the map within a certain time period, but that does also come with the potential for being ambushed.

TL;DR It's balanced, it's fun, it's different if not a tad competitive compared to its peer shooter titles.

Star Drive 2 attempts to improve upon the original by stream lining many of the tediuos aspects of the first and bring the juiciest parts to the fore, such as automating planetary invasions and trade, something that became obnoxiously boring in SD1's late game; and for the most part it has achieved this. Trading is practically automatic as long as you have the freighters available, but you cannot command said freighters, so they frequently wander into hostile threats (environmental encounters such as pirate or crystal fleets, but also faction blockades) with no way of preventing them from doing so (as you could manually in SD1). So your entire freighter fleet will smash itself into these threats until entirely exhuasted or the threat is removed. At least these fleets no longer require maintanence or their own custom builds.

The AI's difficulty appears reliant on its handicaps rather than actual complex decision making. As a player you have a set of rules you need to abide by, which the AI apparently does not. Which effectively makes the campaigns cheap and unsatisfying:

The AI frequently ignores your borders and settles within them even though if you were to do the same it'd require a declaration of war. Additionally the AI frequently ignores starbases even though again, for you to pass through AI controlled space would require a declaration of war. Which removes practically half the tactical decision making you could apply on the tactical map, such as controlling choke points between nebula's or specific hex's with wormholes in them via use of starbases. Additionally, this lack of respect for territory affords the AI to pre-emptively strike from within your own territory.

The AI's overzealous efficiency even on easy mode causes it to pull ahead technologically, economically and militarily, making the game incredibly difficult to learn what mistakes are actually being made by the player and how to correct them as these issues often snowball and often before you even notice a problem has arised.

It is generally accepted by the community that cheese is not a viable tactic (as it once was in SD1) as any conflict is too expensive for the player. Not only will you unlikely have the tech to send a fleet into deep space, but fluctuations in military strength has immediate repercussians from all enemy factions who will either begin to bully, if not outright just invade you, resulting in immediate game over; and the accepted status quo of the AI always being ahead in tech leads to the (ironically) incredibly tedious gameplay of "just surviving" until the late game when you can catch up to the technological cap and finally fight on equal footing with the other factions.

It must be said though that the community is generally very supportive and has excellent advice to give out so you can learn the elusive curve the game has.

Balance in general is also quite bad. Whilst i'm willing to give a certain amount of leeway to developers producing assymetrical strategy games, which are inherently difficult to balance, some elements just don't really bare thinking about and its any wonder how some of these got past paper planning, let alone pre and post testing. Some racial traits are just ridiculously powerful for their points cost, Subterranian is an obvious one and aquatic to a lesser extent are very strong, relatively cheap traits that can essentially double your economic output over other races for little to no penalty. This results in the same races dominating every game.

Lastly, due to the introduction of the CP (command point) system that affectively applies a population cap to your fleet, it inhibits half the influence you ever had over the other factions diplomatically as you can never effectively intimidate with your fleet as it is essentially always the same size (if not smaller).

The game has some glaringly obvious issues that seem to be fairly simple to fix. Make the AI less obnoxiously relentless, make the AI conform to the same rules as the player, address basic balance issues such as OP racial traits, address "all" the races being obnoxiously hostile despite the hints that they have "personalities". None of which seem particularly dramatic in terms of work load to achieve.

A seriously addictive game that despite a fundimental "rinse and repeat" nature to its gameplay, has some excellent replayability to it, reinforced by the RPG mechanics running in the background that allows you to level several class perks a maximum of 6 times each. Granting several rewards as you go, such as damage resistances, speed and carry weight bonuses, etc. Your typical RPG affair.

Admittedly the levelling system is a massive grind for some classes, commando was a notorious pain due to excessive target goals, but this does appear to have been addressed by the developers since I first bought the game. This is obviously good for new players. I just thought it bared mentioning the last level or two are exponentially tougher to get if you care about that kind of thing.

The game continues to be updated, for free, with maps, skins and guns; which is fantastic. Servers are almost always friendly and welcome mature players who like a drink and casual play. This is often even so far as mentioned in the server MOTD's. I consider this game to have been the single best entertainment investment i have ever made, granted i purchased it in a sale for about £3.50 the amount of hours i have gotten out of it for those pennies speaks for itself.

The simpleness just works, the querky Brit sound bites are classic (and even refreshing as a 20 something British gamer); and even though the game is getting on and it's sequal is in early access now it still has a strong community and is satisfying to play.

A brilliant, simple, arcade like "zombie" horde mode FPS that if anything is convinient to have around for the fact it is so easy to pick up and put down at one's leisure (one can customise server browser filters including preferences to game lengths of 4, 7 and 10 waves)).

10/10 in the context of its age and niche. It's no next gen triple A, but it delivers.