Recent reviews by DarkStar

A genre-defining hack and slash with smooth graphics, tight controls, over-the-top cutscenes and tons of unlockables for replayability. A masterpiece under every aspect.

On of the few games that are actually worth suffering through.

Interesting and good looking at first, becomes plain and repetitive very soon.

The good:
- Multiple ways to build your character. You can mix up skills and experiment many ways to clear mobs of enemies.
- Vast and detailed world to explore. Overworld areas and dungeons are handcrafted and perfectly convey the feeling of decay and hoplessness at the heart of the game's story.
- Lots of items to enhance the equipments you wear. While other games have already done this, Grim Dawn gives them a significant role with both stat changes and abilities.

The bad:
- Many areas are copy-pasted ad nauseam with very little variety. It's quantity over quality when it comes to level design and mob placement.
- All boss/elite enemies feel the same, with few attack patterns. It's either "summon minions", "nuke" or "projectiles all around" or a combination of the three. Not to mention they have insane amounts of health at normal difficulty and they can easily kill you in a couple of hits so you'll be putting all those potions to good use.

The ugly:
- No good loot at all. After killing hard bosses you get a bunch of regular magic items, a rare item and an epic item if you lit a candle to the Blessed Virgin Mary beforehand. Nevertheless, the loot becomes outclassed very soon by lower-grade equipment in a matter of hours, making equipping yourself a trivial chore.

The game is more about learning where the traps are hidden rather than getting past them.

If you want skillfull platforming and trap dodging, Super Meat Boy is a way better option.

Rake up big scores then go out with a bang with a metal disc through your head.

Fun top-down Ocean's Eleven simulator where nothing is left to chance.
Although guards and civilians are dense and forgetful you'll have a hard time bypassing sensors, dogs, turrets and other death-dealing devices public buildings shouldn't have.
Very good and forgiving difficulty curve although you'll need some brute force (C4 and guns) to wipe out obstacles in the last levels; especially if you're playing solo.
Over the time you'll learn how to fine-tune your steps to avoid detection, pick pockets in front of guards and tripping alarms on purpose to make the cops go crazy.
Great for couch co-op but the graphics are so tiny and detailed you'll want to push your couch a little closer to the TV.

This game does some things right and some things wrong.
Off the top of my head, the gunplay is really solid. Firing rates, reload times and weapon damage are very well balanced. Unfortunately, the fun stops here. If Dirty Bomb was a team deathmatch fps and nothing more I would be ok with this, but it's not. It's an objective-based game and this requires completely different gunplay. As it is, most of the classes are very fragile and use some sort of rapid-fire gun like assault rifles, smg and so on. As a result, you'll probably die in just a split second of continuous fire even from long range. Few classes have that extra armor to help them survive but ultimately it doesn't make enough of a difference when you take the reduced mobility into account.
This low life expectancy seriously moves the objectives to the background because players are often more concerned about their life than the objective, or team support, and the firefights quickly turn into a spam of air strikes without any strategic value whatsoever. Secondary objectives are also few and non-existant for certain maps so most people don't really care.
About the classes, the fact that all of them either have a rifle, a shotgun or a smg as primary weapon doesn't really help to make them stand out much. It would have been better if every class had a distinctive weapon on top of their abilities.
The business model is as follows: you'll start with 2 characters, a decent damage dealer and a medic. 3 characters are available for free and change every week so at least you'll see more variety on the field. Characters range from 30000 to 50000 game currency and that takes an awful lot of time to unlock them. You can obviously buy them with real money and that will cost you $10 per class, with some costing $6, with a total cost of $120 (and possibly more) if you'd like to have the complete game.
Once again, game expertise is identified not by frags, but by droppable/craftable/buyable cards which improve some aspects of a single character when you equip them, which makes this game somewhat p2w tachnically speaking but the advantage you get from a bronze card (the best in terms of gameplay improvements) is marginal.
The game currently features 5 maps with mixed bomb, deliver and escort objectives. The level design still needs work and the few maps available will make way to boredom not long after playing.
Grapically, the game is beautiful and most of the classes are well characterized. Despite most of them having the same slender build you'll be able to tell them apart from afar easily.