Recent reviews by Saitama

if you (stupidly) thought this was going to be elden ring but a more condensed and streamlined experience with roguelike mechanics, you'd only be half right

the nightlord bosses that cap off your 35-40 min runs, all suck, they either fly in the air for most of the fight so melee is useless, jump around like they have moon boots on or run away so often that in any of these cases, you're doing nothing and/or chasing the boss more than actually fighting it, their attacks? poor attack animations mean ♥♥♥♥♥♥ telegraphs for when they'll ACTUALLY hit you (not to mention being hit by the back swing of their attack if you're behind them being utterly insane) and how figuring out HOW to dodge something let alone WHEN and in WHAT WAY in 90% of the challenge, not anything interesting like parry windows, attacking a certain way or with a certain weapon or even just having an interesting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fight

god sake look at any popular indie game with boss fights and they have objectively more fun and engaging fights, not "get hit once and get wombo combod cause the boss decided you dont get to play the video game"

the rest of the game is ok, the sense of progression throughout the day and between day 1 and 2 is kinda meh. all the upgrades like damage negation crit damage, certain element damage n stuff all feels like fluff when it doesn't make a tangible difference from fight to fight, ooh you're katana went from 100 damage to 140 damage yeah I dont actually feel that at all, most fodder enemies take 2-4 hit from most weapons to kill (not counting the extremes of daggers with fast but low damage and big weapon with slow but big damage) and most "tanky" enemies can take the whole team to bring down quickly.

non-nightlord bosses are fine, ones from other fromsoft games show up and ones from elden ring, obviously, show up so I really can't comment much on them, they're there, they exist, they're nothing notable

i'm attempting to refund purely on the fact that nightlords cap off an otherwise meh or ok or even good run, with a utterly terrible fight with, as I mentioned above, aweful combat in as many aspects and they could physically muster

you love elden ring? sure buy it, didn't like elden ring or thought this was going to solve it's many problems? yeah nah they're worse here so sure be baited into wasting money on a company that really loves making aweful games for some reason when they should be making more games like armored core 6

fundamentally dont know what I'm doing wrong, no matter what I do, where I position myself, what abilities I use theres always someone sniping me, someone hiding in a corner waiting to kill me before I can even react to being damaged, vehicles roam completely freely cause nobody picks the anti-vehicle weapons and when you do they seemingly know your exact zipcode, favorite color and blood type the SECOND you lock onto them cause they'll whip around and blast you or just use smoke and disable your lock on, using the stinger on heli's does nothing since they all have the pilot skills to be able to drop out of sight and EVEN IF YOU GET THE LOCK they just use flares and ♥♥♥♥ you anyway

what the ♥♥♥♥ is this game?!?!? how do you even do anything?!?!? I barely get a single kill and get called monkey brained for not going to the flags, like bro I'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ trying to but theres tanks everywhere nobody can kill, heli's nobody can kill, snipers that dome you from 300m out and the shadows are seemingly out to get you aswell

is this game supposed to be 90% walking to points, lying dead on the ground and respawn screens cause thats all I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ saw

this isn't a case of me being new to a game and not knowing whats going on, it's a case of what the ♥♥♥♥ am I even supposed to do to get anything done? I can't even figure out how to play the damn game even if I know the controls and what abilities do and what the objectives are

feels like landfall tried to do too much with this genre, the obstacles, often terrible generation, strange items and story I couldn't skip faster make a often ok, sometimes fun, usually very frusterating game where you can never really get into the flow of bouncing from hill to hill gaining more and more momentum, the levels are fairly short but they make up a fairly long run before you get to the boss, which of the 3 shards (maps basically) I've done, 2 of them had the same boss with 1 additional attack

theres challange rooms which are less of a challenge and more like a kick in the balls if you were expecting to be able to well...play the game, huge spike walls that block 80% of the path and often mean theres a very small sliver of the map you can get through which is NOT going to give you more speed since you'll just be flopping around just trying to find a hill to ramp off smoothly (they dont exist in these levels) or theres the lava one which is entirely luck based since if you get alot of air at the wrong time and there isn't a hill you can ramp off to avoid the fluctuation of the lava, get ♥♥♥♥♥♥

the items are also quite strange, you have ones like "on close call (barely missing an obstacle) gain 3% energy" energy which you use to get a *little* bit of speed from your surf hover board thing (which is 1 of 4 active items apparently, no idea if you can have multiple or what the others do or even how you unlock them) or "gain 6 seconds of boost, 6 second cooldown" meaning you get whatever boost gives you, every 6 seconds for 6 seconds, except yeah these terms aren't explained anywhere as far as I can tell, gain health and energy are self explanatory but boost isn't, best I've figured out is you get more speed when on the ground?

I've enjoyed some moments of it, when I get a good level and can really get the momentum going it is fun but exo one did this better with a far cooler premise than....whatever is going on in this, honestly even clustertruck was more fun than this since atleast that was pure chaos, for the most part though it's been fairly meh to frusterating, give it a few updates or wait for a sale. or just go get exo one instead honestly

world is boring, nothing really interesting to see outside of the obligatory tall ancient towers that act as dungeon puzzles, early game (1-3 hours) is a chore of gathering scrap to be able to make basic armor, ranged and magic damage sucks early on, magic especially since spells are limited until you find a "eternal" version which lets you use that spell infinitely but even then mana is so limited you can only cast a few before you have to wait for it to recharge which isn't good enough to use it throughout a fight, just using your melee weapon will be quicker and easier, making NPCs have alot of the core progression, items and buildables is just weird, you have stations that slowly auto craft certain things and then the NPCs basically act as different crafting tiers and types, farmer for farmable dirt, seedbed (which isn't what you plant seeds it, it's what slowly auto crafts seeds) blacksmith for scrap/basic metal gear, hunter for ranged gear, alchemist for some potions and magic gear for some reason?

not to mention the insanely frustrating run backs from dying in the shroud (which kills you instantly if you run out of shroud time) like for example I just had to do 7 run backs to the same area cause of how little you can see and the weird lava-not-lava that RAPIDLY depletes your shroud time, combine those two and you get cliffs you can't see and can't get back up that dont directly damage you but instead kill you within seconds by depleting your shroud time
the "hard" difficulty just meaning the enemies do 50% more damage, meaning they take more stamina to block attacks and 1-2 shot you early on, it's artificial and frustration based difficulty rather than anything actually challenging, combat is either boring or you're dead, not helped by the snails pace leveling when it's very easy to find enemies 4+ levels above you only a couple minutes from on level enemies, even just being 1-3 levels above you means it's a raid boss that tanks 2-4x as many hits as it's on level version

it's just all around frustrating, boring and tedious

campaign is really fun, a good balance of challenge even on the 2nd or 4 difficulties

the operations mode (mission left 4 dead style PvE) is....weird... 6 classes but I just dont even want to try more than half of them, the heavy lacks a melee weapon, not a problem, but you can't parry, dodge or melee while in ADS of your heavy weapon, why? it's so dumb, ♥♥♥♥♥ with your muscle memory AND ♥♥♥♥♥ up your timing, want to react to a stalker about to grab you? can't, you have to come out of ADS (which is on middle mouse on KB&M by standard btw) and THEN you can dodge, want to parry the elite right infront of you? same story

the other class I kinda like is the vanguard, you get the grapple in and is clearly designed to be parrying and dodging while taking out the elites specifically, I can't really point why he doesn't feel great to play but the other characters I dont even like on paper having never tried them in a full mission, I've done their trials and quite a few times to really get a feel for them

assaults jump pack is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥ weird, why do you flying into the air vertically in the campaign but you get like 2 inches of air in operations? why? forget about trying to jump pack to a level above you that you know enemies are on cause it's hard enough to jump the gap in one of the trials thats about the same height as your maximum jump height

bulwark is kinda interesting with a banner that restores armor in a pretty big area around it, you lose your primary weapon but you get this shield instead that you can block and bash with, maybe it does do more than I think but the shield bash feels like it do so little damage that it's virtually pointless, like better off spamming parries pointless

the very first class (not the first one you unlock, that's not a thing, just the first in the row) has the ability to "scan" a group of enemies and make them take a bit more damage, with access to 90% of the weapons that aren't exclusive to certain classes like the snipers and power fist, it has the weapons I like using, great! but it has a really boring ability thats basically a grenade with extra steps, only it has the slight upside of scanning the stalker enemy making it visible, cool I guess?

for whatever reason heavy is the ONLY one I substantially like and even then it comes with the major flaw I mentioned of not being able to react to your enemies, all the other classes either have weapons I dont like (sniper mainly) a ability or playstyle I dont like or has the weapons I do like but a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring ability/playstyle

I honestly have no idea why it is the way it is, cause the way it is, is not for me, if you wanna get it just for the 12ish hour campaign, go ahead, it's quite fun but I feel discouraged from playing the operations mode for the above reasons, if they make it so you can dodge/parry/melee while in heavy's ADS then I'll be a heavy main, but until then I'm done with space marine 2 I guess

if you just wanna scratch the itch of survivor, tower defense and mining in one game then it works, it's not great and is barely even worth the price but it's not terrible

wish I could give a neutral rating instead of yes or no

if you were expecting a chinese god of war, this is not that
if you were expecting well telegraphed attack animations, this is not that
if you were expecting the cutscene camera to hang on absolutely nothing every few seconds and to constantly move as much as possible, this is not that
if you were expecting responsive attacks and dodges, this is not that

however if you WEREN'T expecting a warframe like ability system, souls like campfires, respawn mechanics and map design, with bosses that force you to run them again and again and again just to figure out it's attacks, this IS that!

it's a chinese souls like, not what I was expecting from the trailers, not what I wanted and not what I spent 2 days installing it for. why do people actually like this game?

guns feel underwhelming to shoot, graphics are ok, stealth is the most boring rendition of "crouch around for 20 minutes 1 tapping everything" I've ever played. you wanna have a stealth playstyle? yeah good luck dealing with the robots at all, ai teammates are useless outside of team shotting, map is the usual 5x the size 10x the outposts, pick ups, points of interests ect ect. even disabling the leveling and trying to make it a more hardcore shooter it just feels like crap (unsurprising since the game obviously wasn't designed without the looter shoot aspect in mind)

genuinely just play something else if you want a stealthy team based shooter or even just play helldivers if you want a significantly better game in every single aspect

I'm only 2 hours in and this is already leagues above anything I've experiences in my 20 hours in DRG survivor

amazing depth, tons of abilties, tons of characters and weapons, will update with a more full review once I unlock the 2nd part of the passive tree

a fantastic game with a amazing soundtrack and radio list that will make you hum along everytime, "enemy" design that is overall great, with maybe a few being a bit weird, I got to the ending in just under 25 hours but I didn't b line straight through, I took my time and enjoyed it, theres still tons of upgrades in the tech tree for me to get so I will very likely come back once some of my other games run out. the fun of tuning your car for 15 mins, making sure you got the equipment you need and changing various parts depending on what lies ahead of you according to the route planner, doing that run and coming back has yet to get old, coming back to the autoshop is always a relief. in short, I highly recommend this to anyone with even the slightest interest, theres a absolute ton of gameplay and accessibility options too so you can tune the difficulty to exact how you want, keep inventory, enemy damage, car damage, auto refill when you return home ect ect
utterly fantastic game that I'm surprised didn't get more attention. particularly for it's soundtrack