Recent reviews by redwolfmoon99

It's finally harvesting season again!

New update actually means I can run it without my computer catching fire

Character creation is decent enough that I managed to make a reasonable facsimile of Hulk Hogan. Now he roams the land suplexing monsters and bringing Hulkamania wherever he goes.

It's a testament to the quality of XCOM 2 that despite performance hiccups on a mid-range PC I have been unable to put it down. Quite simply the game is brilliant. It looks gorgeous, it plays very well, and it is one hell of a challenge. If you liked the original XCOM games and Enemy Unknown, then you simply have to buy this.

It's at once radically different and reassuringly familiar, improving what needed to be improved and refining what needed to be refined without losing the core appeal of the series. XCOM has once again proven itself to be the strategy king. A superb sequel that improves on every aspect of the already excellent originals, and offers one of the most absorbing and unpredictable strategy experiences.

I haven't started playing yet, but I knew the servers would crash. It isn't a big deal though because this type of ♥♥♥♥ happens, and it's the launch of a new IP. I mean, you can't say that "they should have had it right from the start" because it's hard to make sure there's a stable launch when 6M+ people are trying to play the game. The servers can't take that much stress in such a small period of time. Give it some time, get some damn sleep, and The Division will be ready for you later on in the day.

Just chill, people.

As a longtime enthusiast of the Stalker series, I naturally wanted to check this game out as soon as I could. Right now, there's only PvP (Team Deathmatch, Research, Battery Retrieval) available, with other modes like Freeplay PvE and co-op modes planned for the future. The matches take place in the sort of bleak environments you'd expect: scarred landscapes with crumbling rock walls, ruined buildings, abandoned vehicles, and overgrown vegetation.

The game looks pretty good. The character models are fairly plain and the animations aren't particularly well done, but I like the look and atmosphere of the world itself. None of it really feels too much like a Stalker game, except for the anomalous areas of the map, which are extremely hazardous to blunder into and made me wish I could stop the match, shoulder my rifle, get out an artifact detector, and hunt for a Night Star or a Moonlight or a Mama's Beads.

As for combat, the guns are loud and startling and bullets quickly shred you to pieces. It's the sort of quick-death scenario that should inspire slow and careful advances through the map and tactical cooperation with other players on your team, but honestly, right now, everyone seems content to just run at top speed all over the map and shoot each other in the face. The maps themselves aren't designed particularly well for Team Deathmatch, though. If one team pushes in far enough, they'll basically swarm the other end and just spawnkill everyone, and the match timers feel a bit too long.

What also concerns me a bit is that it seems to be entirely matchmaking driven. I don’t want matchmaking, I want server browser. There’s an option to join games as part of a squad, which helps with getting friends into the game, but I still want more freedom and more options. I get that a lot of games run their own servers and want to control things to make the experience smoother, but I’d really like the trend of relieving players of control and choice to turn back. In this case I also assume the level-based systems make it so that high level characters will mince the newbies, but it still does work against making me want to stay.

All in all this is a broad, ambitious start. What this is not, however, is the part of Survarium which is actually interesting. Because the truth is that I have played many, many competent and pretty multiplayer FPS games in recent months/years. I’ve enjoyed them, of course, but I haven’t stuck around for most. Some of them have been Free-to-play, and others not. Survarium lies somewhere between Warface and the Tripwire games in both its delivery and its execution, which means that it’s relatively unusual, but also looking at competition from both crowds. As a straight up multiplayer FPS (which is all it is as of now), it’s not going to stand out from the many extraordinarily well-featured FPS games we now have available to us. The level-based stats improvement and unlock system are a pretty familiar thing nowadays, so screwing around in inventory world (and having to make sure you're well dressed and armed for your fight) comes as no surprise.

That said, perhaps the sheer desire for this kind of world and setting, as well as the seemingly limitless enthusiasm of East European markets for brutal hardcore FPS games, will see it through. I hope so, because it’s a game I want to see grow and mature.

In conclusion, it’s promising. And I say promising not because I expect this PvP part of the game to become a shining gem, but rather that it might be indicative of the quality of the as-yet-unseen Freeplay and Co-op game modes which Vostok have said will arrive at a later date. That quality could potentially be enormously high. I just hope that they’ve done this the right way around. Surely it was wise to create a proof of concept their tech and combat mechanics in a straightforward game mode like this, but I hope that it doesn’t find itself foundering in competitive waters before it gets to the stuff that genuinely makes the Survarium world an exciting prospect.

I try not to compare this to Stalker too much, but if Vostok’s first game does emerge as an online successor to the Stalker games, then they will have achieved much. Stalker, of course, had a decent multiplayer component too, but it was never that part of the game which truly captured our imaginations.

Its silly humour and friendly servers make it one of the best FPS I've ever played. Now that it's Free-2-Play, you have absoutely no reason to not play it.