Recent reviews by kass

It's great apart from pockets of ranked community members who believe every mistake or misplay is a "throw".

Update: I'm noticing it takes a really long time to get a ranked game these days. I wish the game was more active.

For fans of the top-down shooter, this is a refinement of mechanics found in Hotline Miami. The rogue-inspired progression leans towards building skill as opposed to unlocking new tools, but you are rewarded for investing your progress into new abilities when you persist.

Games like Football Manager 2024 leave me wishing there was a 'meh' category for recommendations.

The core gameplay loop is great, but SI know and have been exploiting this in order to release the same buggy game year on year with new paint and database updates.

Credit where credit is due: the match engine is the best it has ever looked. Player animations are smooth and natural, with matches feeling inherently exciting and watchable. If this is your make or break feature, dive in. Peel back the curtain and you start to notice serious issues, though.

There's a certain frantic and madcap character to the engine's offensive qualities. In October of my first season, I beat Spurs (3-1), Man Utd (7-1), West Ham (7-0), Bournemouth (4-0), and Burnley (7-0). The only disappointment was a (2-2) draw away at Newcastle. In short, you can wrack up dizzying wins in this year's FM, and with frequency. Such riotous explosions of goals are fun, but not exactly realistic. On the other hand, defence feels like a roulette of nightmares. Just when a league title seems to be yours, you'll concede to marked players from vastly inferior teams against the run of play and morale in the 96th minute. A lot. Clearly, someone needs to 'git gud' here - the question is, is it me or the match engine?

Injuries are also baffling. My newly purchased, supposedly world class goalkeeper was injured 4 times in separate incidents in a single calendar year. This led to a combined 14 weeks on the sidelines. All of these injuries occurred during matches, twice during Top 4 title race matches (versus Man Utd, Man City). Broken Hand, Fractured Wrist, Bruised Shoulder, Fractured Lower Arm. The cause of each of these injuries? Catching the ball. Meanwhile, players who are literally duct-taped together will petulantly demand to keep playing big matches with high intensity tactics, creating injury spirals.

Speaking of player interactions, these are also bonkers. My star striker with two Golden Boots in the previous seasons was called up to an international tournament and therefore missed several weeks at the club. They won the tournament and were celebrated as the continent's best striker. After returning, said striker was burnt out and needed to be rested for a couple of matches. The player responded by threatening to leave the club for 'not getting enough game time'. Then they suddenly forgot how to score goals, as supporters in the Social Feed noted, because they were 'unhappy'.

It's incidents like these that raise the rather taboo spectre that FM's AI is sometimes actively working against the human player, as opposed to just simulating some facsimile of a real season of professional football. The jury's out on that, but with top-flight football being difficult enough to compete in, it's frustrating to have to slalom around nonsensical AI behaviour too.

Logical aberrations aside, performance is good. I haven't experienced a single crash but I've run into my fair share of touchline tablet substitution bugs, and even some grammar issues in in-game dialog. It's a mature product at this point though, and it should run decently on all types of hardware.

My observations might make it seem like I hate the game, but really it's quite a nuanced affair. With a game like this, reviews tend to fall into two camps. Those who review the current game as a whole, or those who are looking at the game as the aggregate sum of changes from the predecessor(s). In the first instance, I'd give FM24 a thumbs up - it's a good game and I expect to play many more hours. In the second instance, I am much less enthusiastic. I haven't played FM since FM21, and I still feel there's not enough change here to warrant a full price purchase. This combined with the incomplete J League licensing (despite deceptively being touted as a headline feature), and legacy bugs leave me with no choice but to leave negative feedback. I'm open to revisiting my review if the promised patches change things sufficiently.

You know, a lot of gaming focuses on simulated combat and warfare - because it's attention grabbing and, in a decontextualised environment, fun.

That's all good and well, but it truly takes masterful game design to create games that let you engage in these fantasy environments, while grounding you in reflection on what war actually means, and in many cases, how un-fun real war is.

By that measure, This War of Mine slots along classics such as the Metal Gear Solid franchise, in giving you a game which has great gameplay and a memorable storyline, but also enough to chew on philosophically and ethically as you play.

Highly recommended.

Stunningly attractive.
Disarmingly simple.
Devastatingly addictive.

Aiming to rapidly depart your current social circle? I recommend you ensconce yourself in a room and spend aproximately 48 straight hours practicing this game, until you're relatively proficient at all the maps. Then invite your pals, and watch your friendships rapidly disentigrate as you throroughly butcher those inexperienced b*stards.

Kanye is in the soundtrack. Not that I'm biased or anything...

I like to pick up apples and examine them for defects in this game.

This is precisely the opposite of what made Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead fun.

I got called a degenerate in my first game. Truly a gaming community to rival CoD.