Recent reviews by Jimmy Lander

I really like the game but the cartography table which is used for map sharing between people breaks your map because it was coded by two-year-olds. It causes your own markers to duplicate and floods your map with old markers overtime until the map becomes so saturated that the markers become useless. And you cannot delete or move any markers.

The problem is this:

Basically your map has two options for what you see:
* personal: shows only your markings and discoveries,
* personal + cartography: shows your personal map as well as everyone else's last records of their maps onto the cartography table

When you record your changes to the cartography table, anyone else can update their map data by reading from the cartography table.

Problems is that anytime people record their map onto the cartography table, they also record back the old version of YOUR map with all its outdated markers and names, even if you've deleted them or moved them and re-recorded this to the table. And once you read the cartography table, not only are those markers restored to your map, but they are restored onto the PERSONAL map (meaning not as part of the toggle-able "cartography table" map). We're 7 people playing on a dedicated servers and this made all our maps ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unusable. For this I am giving a trash review, because it's been 10 months since this issue was first reported and they still haven't fixed it,.

This game just doesn't work. Ignore the huge grind it is, it simply does not work. Major heists crash or freeze and are unfinishable. Objectives fail to load, controls freeze, worst case it outright fails for absolutely no reason or simply crashes or goes to a permanent black loading screen.
Which leads me to the loading times: The loading times are outrageously long and too often a loading screen gets stuck and you enter a state where you are seemingly loading in, but you're actually stuck in the loading screen forever and you have to Alt F4 force exit. Some times the game completely loses its ♥♥♥♥ and you load in a broken state where you're just watching some place in the open world but your character has not spawned (it's just your camera view), you have no hud (not any ui at all), controls don't work and ESC can't be pressed. Another force Alt F4 situations. If for some reason your game works, the loading screens are still ridiculously long and there's too many of them. When a heist mission fails you have to wait 4 minutes for the game to reload your checkpoint.
Absolutely outrageously broken game. It can be fun when it works but it just doesn't. And every lobby, almost no exception, has some modder who insta-kill explodes you in your apartment or just spawns 600 npcs in your house or spawns a flying ship in the sky or a ufo, etc. I honestly don't mind the modders too much but the actual game content and logic is so horribly broken that it is actually literally unplayable at times, especially Doomsday Heist and Diamond Casino are littered with game breaking bugs that have not been addressed properly for YEARS. Stay tf away, half your time will be wasted in loading screens and bugs.

Amazing game, everything feels vibrant and exciting! Atlas Reactor is the perfect game for those who enjoy the feeling of empowerment gained through dominating the battlefield with your strategy. The game utilizes simple and easy to learn mechanics, so the learning curve isn't big once you grasp the core. You can play 4v4 and be a part of a team or play as all 4 by controlling 4 charaters selected by you (sorta turning the game into a chess thing). Additionally there's custom modes. It has a decent player base and a discord server and it's been holding steadily throughout the years with a good flow of updates and support. I definitely think you should give this game a go. It certainly deserves a bigger player base.

I really liked Life Is Strange, as did you probably, but before you buy BtS know that it’s a pretty different experience.

I think the game is good, but after finishing it I didn’t find myself dwelling on it or thinking back about it much. It had a lot less impact than LiS and I think that’s because the entire game feels kind of forced.

Firstly the way Rachel and Chloe become friends is really forced and in addition to me totally disliking Rachel, there was absolutely no chemistry between her and Chloe. In Life Is Strange I was always excited when Max spent time with Chloe and here I kind of felt forced to go with it because I knew that’s how the plot was supposed to be. Their relationship doesn’t feel organic and in my eyes 50% of the time their conversations felt extremely awkward. Rachel’s personality is also pretty shallow to me. She comes of as unstable and pushy most of the game, she’s insensitive towards other people and is generally reckless in her behavior.

The gameplay outside of conversations is nothing special and is pretty generic. You walk around and solve puzzles from time to time, although this time around it’s not as interesting because you lack the ability to time travel. Chloe’s new ability isn’t bad but the conversations that might happen during her quicktime event often times feel awkward and unnecessarily stretched, producing weird responses and really don’t feel natural in some cases.

The relationship between Chloe and Joyce was interesting and it really made me feel compassion for Joyce, but there’s not much happening there. There are a few options that prompt you to “befriend” David but ultimately they’ve made David conflict himself as he constantly switches from “I just want you to accept me as family” to being an enormous jerk. The choices there are mostly hollow.

The ending consists of a build-up leading to nothing. I won’t spoil it of course but I personally didn’t like itз . The most notable thing to mention would be that the vibe of the game doesn’t feel the same because despite using the same mechanics it just doesn’t succeed in Convincing you of the believability of its story. Additionally it creates a lot of plot holes. I’d recommend it if you just want to get back into the universe of Arcadia Bay, but be warned that it won’t feel the same.

Honestly I wouldn't listen much to the negative reviews, people are getting too petty in my eyes. But here is all the objective truth so you don't read biased reviews:

Section 1: Storyline
- Incredibly goofy/silly/ridiculous plot and development
- Decent voice acting and amusing/annoying dialogue between characters (depending if you like Hurk or not)
- The reaction you'd get after finishing the DLC is something like "What the hell did I just play lol" or "This was ridiculously epic"

Section 2: Gameplay
- The gameplay generally feels familiar enough to the core game but also varied in terms of how you engage and fight enemies.
- With this expansion you get beam weapons, weapons that shoot exploding orbs, gauss cannons and tazer rifles, etc. The weapon handling also feels different than the way it feels in the main game, and weapons are definitely not reskins of original weapons.
- The combat can get repetitive as the most common enemy variations tend to just differ in their health pools, but there are objectively 5 main distinct new enemy types introduced (with the addition of some main game enemies) so for me personally it didn't feel that way.

Section 3: Visuals and Terrain
- The visuals are immersive and beautiful as always.
- There is a day/night cycle.
- The map is somewhat varied, there are 3 distinct variations in terrain: dunes, rocky cliffs and the border area where the terrain starts climbing up in a stairlike manner.

About the duration of the DLC, you can play it in one go, but it's definitely not short (and by that I mean it's not an hour or two long experience.) There's visibly effort put into it and the end product is a fun and enjoyable spin-off involving Nick Rye and Hurk JR.

As with all of Sanctum 2's dlc, this one adds even more brilliant and equally as fascinating maps with so much effort and passion put into the visual design, accompanied by a more challenging and refreshing set of map layouts. The maps are as always beautifully crafted, and the new weapons, towers, enemies and perks are really fun and creative! It goes without saying that I'm recommending it and I hope you'll have as much fun as I do playing it!

Can't host a server

Gonna start by saying this is among my top 3 favorite games. As good as it is though, in my opinion the vanilla game needs some amount of modding to get it to that sweet spot, by which I mean a mix of quality of life, visual and utility mods.

Quick pros and cons

Pros:
- A lot of stuff to do
- Great for exploration
- Wonderful skill tree, weapon and armor customization, etc
- Heaven for building camps, outposts, home bases, etc (look into mods though). If you plan to get into building, google "supply lines" because it's a very good mechanic Bethesda doesn't show you for some reason.
- Interesting factions and lore

Cons:
- Story picks up slow
- Inventory management is insanely bad and item sorting/naming is against you. If you're a hoarder you'd have to either install a inventory redo mod or custom rename your armors/weapons.
- Weird, sometimes game-breaking bugs. You'd probably have to invest time into debugging and reading forum threads from time to time. It doesn't happen that often but it will happen eventually.

About mods

In order to properly up the experience without going overboard I'd totally recommend starting with Darker Nights + Terrifier (sound effect swap for ghouls). I use Vortex mod manager because it's the quickest and easiest way to get your mods up and running. You ought to also grab Better Junk Fences (it makes building fences easier and less restrictive).

For building you can grab:
- OCDecorator (let's you place any item in the game statically, for example cups, cans, any small objects which you'd usually only be able to place as normal items that can be pushed around and scattered)
- Homemaker (adds a ton of stuff, note that you'd have to also install a patch linked in the comments because there's a bug that causes crashes). Fora first playthrough I'd maybe not recommend it because it adds some stuff that are pretty large or unrealistic.
- Dino's Decorations (item arrangements presets). This one is really simple and great. It adds stuff like a fridge full of cola or a beer crate as a single item. You wouldn't be able to arrange something like this normally.
- Do It Yourshelf (shelves with customizable clutter).

There's a bunch of sorting mods and ui do-overs that help bring order into your inventory, definitely worth looking into. However things get messy if you install some of those inventory management mods mid-playthough because items already existing in the world will not be affected.

You should also check out the 'enb' graphics engine and presets for it if you're looking to set a specific visual tone to your playthrough. This will be something to look into on your second or third playthrough though, because it's basically a 3d graphic modification software that alters the visuals of the game and you should definitely experience the first play-through with the vanilla design (which I quite like).

Backdrop and atmosphere

The tone is pretty bleak. The colorful sky and mysterious soundtrack give it a hopeful look, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of 2287 is a creepy place. Giant-mosquito infested tunnels, neighborhoods wiped clean and taken over by super mutants (people turned hulk-looking man-eating abominations thanks to a human engineered virus), raider outposts, radroach infested apartments, entire towns filled with flesh-eating ghouls, open fields where enlarged scorpions/moles await in ambush in the ground, and so on. And if that wasn't enough, wander way off the beaten path and you'd eventually encounter Institute synths on a scavenging mission, synths being bipedal humanoid robots harvesting resources for a mysterious organization that operates from the shadows. Dubbed 'The Commonwealth's Boogeyman', the so-called Institute is infamous for abducting and straight out replacing people in the dead of night with synthetic copies of them, mimicking their behavior in order to infiltrate settlements.

The Open World

The map itself could be broken down into 5 distinguishable areas:
- The Foothills (Rural and industrial areas - the borders of the Commonwealth, often providing great scenery overlooking Boston)
- Boston (Dense urban areas where death lies in ambush at every turn. Ghoul filled apartment complexes, raider alleys, radroach filled ditches, super mutant strongholds, it's all there waiting for you to take the wrong turn.)
- The Shoreline (Beaches, castles, islands and a lot of giant crabs)
- The Glowing Sea (Ground zero for a nuclear warhead, The Glowing Sea is an inhospitable environment where towns have been blasted nearly beyond recognition, and any sort of resources turned to dust. The cherry on top the cake - the massive crater that the detonation left)
- The Swamp (Gloomy and wet, the swamp acts as a buffer between the Boston area and the Glowing Sea, providing little incentive for visitors)

Settlement building

Settlement building is a Fallout 4 feature which has you unlock various settlement locations around the map. Settlements are a network of friendly camps that you can build up however you like. You'd usually place down a bunch of workbenches, plant some crops, install a water purifier, setup some defenses such as auto-turrets, build a house or two if you feel like it, and from that point on it will serve as your safe space in a certain area of the map. Settlements however get attacked in true post-apocalyptic fashion.

A solid mechanic, but the content provided by the vanilla game is lacking (mainly the build menu does not provide small items like cups, pots, books, etc). Definitely check out mods.

Weapons

Varied and highly customizable, weapons truly shine in this game. You can change ammo-type, you can turn pistols into rifles or shotguns. It's amazing.

Armor and clothing
Armor and clothing is quite nice, especially armors like The Raider armor set that has 6 different appearances. The problem is with inventory management however, you might want to create a naming convention for your stuff for inventory purposes. Something the game doesn't tell you is that some armors have 3 different attributes - Light, Sturdy and Heavy. Those are natural attributes that are not determined by your upgrades (so basically treat them as separate armor sets)

Companions

Occasionally you'd meet characters who'd become available to be your companions, which essentially means they'll follow you around, comment on your choices, the environment or just anything really. They also have their unique likes and dislikes, which in turn raise or lower their liking of you. Depending on how close they become to you, they'll unlock quests, perks or a romance option.

This game gave the start to the gaming industry we know today with its advanced facial animations, its physics engine, 3D Skybox and all the other overwhelming for its time features, including the graphics which to this day don't look bad at all. This game has given me purpose in life - literally. It's the amazing atmospheric ambience, the stunning sound engineering, the ingenius level design and the dark themes accompanied by subtle and intuitive storytelling that have inspired me to become a game developer. It's this extremely grim world and attention to detail that forms the horrifying yet beautiful feeling and experience of playing this game. From humanity's slavery, the often depressing graffiti, and abandoned canal tunnels filled with rotting corpses of escapees now zombified, screaming in pain with what little conscience they have left as their mutated bodies are forcibly controlled by parasites, to the massive inter-dimensional empire draining Earth's resources until a point where the planet could no longer sustain life, Half-Life 2 is a trully remarkable experience and a gamer's must-play, a game that is deserving of all the praise it has gotten and keeps getting nearly 15 years after its release.

This game is really worth it. The core gameplay is stunningly fun and challenging. Coffee Stain Studios are MASTERS in creating futuristic games and the weapons in this games are all so unique, different and amazing and they're probably the thing I enjoy the most. You can add layers of difficulty to spice it up, play with friends or solo and there are gamemodes like sandbox and others.

The map design is truly enchanting. The skybox is beautiful. The whole feeling of the world is greatly immersive and feels alive. Maps can vary from spore infected labs to forests and bogs, bizarre caves and even mountains.

The characters all have distinct personalities and fighting styles and all look badass. The enemies are also very abundant in type and species.

II think the universe of Sanctum 2 (Loek III in particular) stand to be the setting of a great open-world mmo/rpg game. I strongly recommend buying this game and if you ever need help, I'm always happy to help a fellow Core Guardian. Welcome to the team.