Recent reviews by redshirt_49

It's fun but it can get boring once you figure out the gameplay loop for any given difficulty.
It does have a true sandbox mode though where you can tweak every possible aspect of the game to your liking, from zombie intelligence and movement speed to loot distribution and even the weather cycles.

Building a zombie proof shelter isn't all that hard though, even on harder difficulty modes. Once you've got that figured out you pretty much never have a reason to leave your base.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☑ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

I have mixed feelings about this game.

On the one hand it massively improved upon the one aspect its predecessor nearly failed on. That being the story. Dying Light 1's story was generic to the point of being nearly awful, scooting by only on the main character's back (and Jade).

But on the other hand, literally everything else was better in the first game.

-The parkour feels janky and "floaty" if that makes sense
-Melee and ranged combat has been noticeably dumbed down. Hit detection is laughably generous. Aim for the sky, get a headshot.
-If you thought weapon durability was an annoying mechanic in the first game, you'll hate it even more in this one.
-The physics engine seems to have been downgraded.
-The survivor sense got a graphical downgrade.
-You can't see the incredibly satisfying slow-mo kills with x-ray vision anymore.
-The amount of gore and limbs flying has been greatly reduced.
-Several game mechanics were removed entirely.
-The character levelling system is...pretty basic. Legendary levels and skills were removed enitrely.

I dunno, there's probably more I'm not thinking of right now but at almost every point in this game I went "Man, this was so much better in DL1".

The severed zombie heads move their eyes and jaws. 10/10 detail.
I have a very nice shelf. I collect named NPCs undead heads there. They watch me while I sleep.

This game will eradicate your faith in humanity.
You will come to realize that people are stupid and you will go insane.

This game just isn't finished. It feels like a game that was about 60-70% completed when execs decided it needed to be released this instant. So the developers made it as playable as possible within that timeframe pushed the launch button and hoped for the best.

Part of the physics engine are obviously unfinished.
Parts of the story were obviously trimmed away, with plot threads setup in Act 1 and 2 going nowhere by the game's finale. Similarly, the finale itself feels like it came about 10 missions earlier than it should have, itself being a short 10-minute mission that while visually cool has little sense of finality to it, aside from the Smasher fight.

The PC controls have strange input lag issues that lag down the entire game the longer you play, strangely enough plugging in a controller makes this go away.
The driving model is unfinished, every car feels like a tank. Pedestrian and vehicle AI is basically non-existant. Hell, it was probably better in GTA3.

The skill system and damage calculations are screwed up in ways I can't truly comprehend. It seems that every time I save and reload the game the game comes to massively different conclusions about how much damage I should be doing and taking. The more skills you pick up, the worse this issue becomes and the game rolls some dice to determine how much damage shall be dealt this session.

Animations get wonky, NPCs disappear during cutscenes, start T-posing, dialogue lags for uncomfortably long stretches of time. It goes on and on. If I listed all the bugs I discovered in this game during my playthrough I'd be here all day and break the character limit 15 times over.

Now, I will say that the game looks pretty snazzy and all the characters within it stand out positively. There is little wonky voice acting (aside from Male!V kind of missing the mark on emotional tone here and there, honsetly Fem!V is a much better experience that I'd wholeheartedly recommend) and overpresent characters whose personalities make you cringe, it's all good on that front.
Side quests are interesting and varied and break away from the RPG-tried-and-true fetch quest hurricane, that even CDPR's previous title (The Witcher 3) was not shy to abuse and reuse a million times over. Not so here, exploring the side quests is something I wholeheartedly recommend, as I found more enjoyment there than the rather incredibly short main storyline (if you don't bother with the sidequests you can be done in about 4 hours). Several of the side quest chains also tie into the story's ending and unlock additional epliogues to explore.

In the end, I'd say this game was released at least a year before it was truly ready. It looks, feels and plays like it's in its alpha stage and that's unfortunate because there is a LOT of potential here. But it's bogged down with poor performance, trimmed down story and an engine that's barely holding together at the seams.

If you're currently looking for a rock-solid experience in the Cyberpunk genre, I'd direct you to Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided instead, which makes much better use of its' setting to integrate cyberware and gameplay and Cyberpunk 2077 obviously looked at these titles for inspiration when crafting its own setting.
If you aren't shy about ancient graphics and visuals I'd point to the original Deus Ex first and foremost.

So, let's talk about Star Wars: Squadrons.

It aims to be a multiplayer space-sim shooter with a competitive angle. Also has a single player mode.

Single-player mode has fun missions and solid mechanics and also serves as an effective tutorial to all the different ship classes and modifications as the game progresses.
In terms of pure gameplay, the singleplayer is an absolute blast.

The story itself though? It's pretty cookie-cutter.
The stakes are incredibly low, basically what amounts to a minor skirmish in the grand scheme of things and the achievements of one side are generally rendered null and void come next faction switch. Both sides come out of it achieving nothing, ending up where we were at from the start and patting themselves on the back for it.
The main character is NOT the player character, you're just along for the ride.
The game's only moment of character development and tension is undone in the last mission without so much as a handwave for how that was even possible.
The story just feel as if it was written by a first year writing student.

Enough about the singleplayer though, chances are most MP players won't even touch it, except for the unique ship skins you unlock for completing it.

So, the multiplayer aspect of this? AKA the main selling point?
There are two game modes. Two. In a supposedly AAA MP title.
You have Team Deathmatch and the Fleet Battles mode, which is basically like Team Deathmatch but you also have to blow up capital ships.
Now from a gameplay perspective, all of this is fine. All the ships work fine as they are, the balancing could use some work but overall the mechanics all work as intended. Each class excels at what they were meant to, the power balancing mechanics (ripped such as it is straight out of the X-Wing series in its' entirety, not that this is a bad thing but it's certainly not innovative) are an easy-to-learn, difficult to master type of deal.

The bugs though. Dear lord the bugs.
I'm not going to touch the VR bugs, or the FPS bugs or the joystick bugs, the maneuvaribility bugs on high senstivity mouse settings or any of that jazz. It's been talked about plenty before.

No, the most infuriating thing for me has been the connection issues and the broken and lazy matchmaking system.

Half the time you try to connect the game may randomly decide to kick you from the game for either a connection error or a "timed out loading map" error. This is annoying for you, because you just wasted 5 minutes of your time staring at loading screens and doubly so for the other people in that match because now their match will not be counted for XP or rank adjustments.
And if you DO connect there's a good chance the match will start when it shouldn't, with 4 people on one team and 5 on the other. The match is unfair from the start but will still be counted towards your score. You can't leave unless you feel like being penalized. Enjoy spending the next 15 minutes getting curbstomped or shooting fish in a barrel as your opponents are demoralized and unmotivated from the start.
Also, the game matchmakes based on nothing at all. It just dumps whatever players are queueing together with little regard to where they're from. Naturally, desync is the result as everyone's pings vary wildly depending on where they are in the world.
These are pretty major and inexcusable flaws in what purports to be a multiplayer title commanding a 40$ price.

The game needs more gamemodes, desperately.
The game needs to have its' matchmaking system overhauled, desperately.

I can look at this game and say honestly I had more fun in the asymmetric starfighter game mode in Battlefront 2(2017). Do you want this said about your space-sim Star Wars title? You probably shouldn't, but there it is.

Also, why the hell does the game not save my pilot customisations? They are reset every time I close and restart the game. MADDENING!

Well, when all of this is fixed, I'll update the review. My issues with the game aren't mechanical, but its' bugs galore, broken matchmaking, broken ranks and boring story all leave a bad taste in my mouth. The game is fun but bogged down by issues that should have been addressed by now, but haven't.

Delightful!

It's a good thing I'm a certified psychopath, or else this game might have really upset me!

10/10 would play again!

Ah, I guess YMMV for normal people though.

Ah the nostalgia of the original BrainBread. Used to play that a bunch when I was young.

In short, this game is pretty unpolished but this does not diminish its fun factor.
Cooperative gamemodes or straight up deathmatch, whatever tickles your fancy, it is here.

Wanna be a Zombie-killing badass? Go ahead. Wanna be a brain-eating Zombie? You can do that too.
Can't decide? That's okay, you can be both.

This game may be in alpha but has already surpassed its predecessor in many levels.

Deathmatch is still a bit wonky and might need its weapons and hitboxes adjusted and rebalanced. Any CS player with half-decent headshot aim will easily dominate thanks to the relative ease of hitting headshots in this game.

Filthy modders cheating in money, shame shame shame. It's not fair to other players to gain so much money so fast!

Buy shark cards instead! So you can use our "free" DLC!

Hardihar.

Play VC instead.