Recent reviews by Havic

Firstly, Yoshi-P needs to wrangle his localization team because they are very much beginning to lay the groundwork of putting their personal politics into the game. I don't care that this is a controversial statement to make, it needs to be called out and is carrying similar patterns to other media.

Secondly, the storywriting, which was the main draw of FF14, is not good.

I'll address the main problem first: Wuk Lamat. At the onset of the story, it doesn't seem like she'll be a bad character. However, the annoyances really start adding up when she starts receiving undue credit for other people's accomplishments or ideas, undeserved praise for things she has not earned, or the upteenth time when an NPC recognizes she's a princess.

She is the main character of the this expansion, not you. The idea could have been novel - playing the mentor to a young grasshopper trying to become a hero in his or her own right. That is not what we are given here. It is very much in the style of Lyse from Stormblood - in all the ways I didn't enjoy then, either.

That is the first half of the story. Don't get me wrong - there are some nice and interesting moments, this story is not good. Furthermore, we were promised larger roles for some other beloved characters that are again pushed aside for Wuk Lamat.

The second half of the story does not make significant improvements to this. It is very much copying the homework of other expansion packs and does not deliver nearly as skillfully.

This review is not blind hatred for a particular character. I went into this expansion with measured expectations, expecting something on the level of the better parts of Stormblood or A Realm Reborn.

On the whole, it is better than A Realm Reborn simply by virtue of the improvements made over years to the game itself. It is worse than Stormblood at present. Stormblood had Doma and the excellent post-vanilla patch content that truly redeemed it. If Dawntrail does not receive a similar treatment, it will be the worst of the expansions in FF14 as far as its story.

Please return to us, Ishikawa-san. Your writing skill is sorely missed.

This is largely a "first impressions", so take this review with a grain of salt. I supported this game's crowdfund and participated in the alpha and beta, though I will give my honest takes.

WH40k Rogue Trader follows Owlcat's preferred genre of top-down CRPG - moving away from real-time combat to a fully turn-based RPG experience. I was pleasantly surprised to see them announce a cooperative feature, but I cannot comment on it at this time. I will update this review once I have tried it. I was interested in this game as a single-player experience as the previous games from this developer were and I will continue to treat it primarily as a single-player experience.

Firstly, as someone who played some of the 40k RPGs this game is based on - Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, and Only War - it does fairly faithfully adapt the RPG systems though there are some rather considerable liberties taken (likely for the sake of adapting to a video game format). The titular Rogue Trader was originally a jack-of-all-trades class in the RPG that one player would take on. As this is a single-player experience by design, I am pleased with the customization that was worked into the game - even if Tech-Priest is sadly not an option and there is no option for xeno mercenaries like Freebootas beyond the dedicated companions. (I understand why, but the Ork-lover in me is quite sad)

From what I have experienced of the game, it faithfully recreates and embraces the Warhammer 40,000 setting, the rules of its universe, and its variety. (FOR ONCE WE ACTUALLY GET A 40K GAME THAT FEATURES TZEENTCH PROMINENTLY, NOT KHORNE AND NURGLE ALL THE TIME. SOMEONE ACTUALLY HAD THE CHUTZPAH TO BREAK THE MOLD.) Ahem. I also very much appreciate the writers' adamant stance on their characters and the available romance options.

Don't get me wrong. I want to romance the Sister of Battle, too. I'd totally go for a mod for that. However, in its vanilla state, I am pleased that the writers did not feel the need to kowtow in response to Baldurs Gate 3 and Bioware to market this game to the Slaaneshi demograhic. It has amusingly twisted the knickers of many-a-deviant games journalist, and I will always give points when you tick off the right people (the scum of the earth) via sticking to your guns on your characters and your story.

I have heard this game has many bugs and this is sadly all too common. If you did not already purchase this game or did not have plans to get it already, I would wait until this game is patched and fixed up. Owlcat, I love you guys, but you need to work on your QA. I know its considered "industry standard", but I as a consumer still dont consider buggy launches acceptable. I myself have not had too many problems so far, but I am only one person.

The combat definitely has some odd quirks. Psykers are okay, but I have not so far been particularly thrilled by their abilities compared to a straight-up martial character. I have enjoyed the companions I have met and seen so far from other footage, but I'm glad that I have the option for mercenaries still. My Emperor-fearing-devout Commissar character would probably have shot the Psyker companion out of reflex as soon as she was rambling incoherently.

On the whole, though, this game seems to have been made with love rather than cynicism, and that is absolutely something that I want to encourage in an increasingly awful industry. It absolutely has warts - and some of those warts will be dealbreakers for some. I highly recommend watching videos and researching this game first. However, if you are a 40k fan, a CRPG fan, or you have been craving a bit more of a "grimdark future" kind of roleplay setting, I think you will find something to like in this game.

The Emperor Protects.

Edit: I have now given the Cooperative mode a try. On the whole, I have enjoyed the cooperative mode, though I have some serious critiques. Firstly, the other players should be able to share a view with the host when they are creating a mercenary for their friends to use. Secondly, we had some issues with semi-frequent disconnects and dysncing. Thirdly, if one of the players bumbles into a combat, the others players might be all the way across the map and unable to join them. I think a feature to teleport the other characters to the fight solely for co-op mode may be beneficial simply to add some quality of life.

CA threatens its dedicated fans while getting gubment funding.

Stonks goes down. Brrrrt.

How about you fix some bugs in your game? TWH2 worked great after it was fixed up. WH3 has consistently been worse than the previous game with the sole exception of Chaos Dwarfs. Also quit nerfing singleplayer for the sake of your niche multiplayer audience, who also have their own problems with buggy multiplayer. I put over 1000 hours into TWH2. 3 was a mistake.

--- Hogwarts Legacy Review ---

Hogwarts Legacy is an open world RPG set in the universe of Harry Potter, though taking place centuries before the main book series by JK Rowling. In the late 1800s, the player is a witch or wizard who has been accepted to Hogwarts as a 5th year student - an oddity from the usual, since you are essentially starting school at 16. Your tutor, Professor Fig, is transporting you to Hogwarts to be sorted into your house and begin classes until a dragon attacks the carriage. Fleeing from the dragon, you are plunged into a web of mystery surrounding a strange, centuries-old magic that somehow connects to an ongoing war between wizards and goblins.

And prom is tomorrow!

--Presentation--

I am not a big graphics guy so I can't really comment much nor do I look very closely at textures or the quality of audio. I can only tell you what stands out from a normie perspective.

In terms of level design, Hogwarts Legacy is exceptionally well done. The Hogwarts castle and surrounding countryside are lovingly crafted according to the movies and books of Harry Potter and include a lot of fun little touches and easter eggs that show the developers' care for the setting and their craft. The game is incredibly immersive and you may often find yourself just exploring for the sake of it - which I will get back to in the Gameplay section. From the common rooms to the Great Hall to the town of Hogsmede and the Forbidden Forest - this is Hogwarts and it feels like Hogwarts. Excellently done on this part.

Audio was generally pretty good. Spells sounded fitting and powerful. The voice acting was largely acceptable with only a couple performances sounding a bit wooden or irritating.

Visuals were a bit of a mix. The world itself looks very good and well-crafted. However, I experienced a fair deal of UI and texture failings with an NVIDIA GEforce RTX 2070. A good example is that the glowing aura of my house symbol in the adventure guide menu would turn into a background of technicolor green or the loading symbol would become a complete mess rather than display properly. These issues were not very prevalent when I first started playing, but they became more frequent and noticeable as I racked up hours in the game.

Performance-wise, Hogwarts Legacy suffers from a lot of stuttering and framerate drops - particularly in cutscenes and very crowded areas. My Intel i7-9759H CPU@2.6GHz processor can usually handle even very hefty or demanding games like Darktide at maximum graphics quality with no issues and apparently the framerate drops are a common enough issue that there are multiple guides on the internet to try and alleviate it. When it isn't having these issues, the game works mostly well enough.

-- Gameplay --

Hogwarts Legacy appears to be focused on one major element: Exploration. While there are quests, combats, and other objectives, the majority of the game revolves around your adventuring guide - a big book of collectibles and challenges that is just begging for someone like the Completionist to try and search every nook and cranny to find them all. Many of the side quests and unlocking more spells and content require you to participate in these exploration activities to a small extent to whet your appetite. Where this game has flaws in story and characters, it focuses on giving you a wide variety of other activities to pursue.

In other words - this game was made for screwing around. There is so much put into the Room of Requirement from decoration to handling and breeding beasts to crafting potions and upgrading gear. Its rather unfortunate that I didn't have much interest in using the Room for much more than mass brewing health potions, as a lot of attention was given to the system of decorating it like it were a player home.

The majority of the ways in which you interact with the world are through your various spells - whether it's using Wingardium Leviosa to lift and move around objects, Revelio to find hidden objects, or your varous damaging spells for combat - most everything revolves around your spells.

This game was very clearly designed for a console controller as you can only usually equip 4 spells at a time and must manually swap them out as needed. However, you can use talent points from levelling up to unlock up to 3 more sets of 4 spells each which you can cycle through quickly to alleviate a bit of that hassle. As a PC-based MMO gamer, it could be a bit annoying at times to not have more spells on hand while in the frenzy of a massive battle.

Combat is simple at its fundamentals. Point your wand at things and shoot various colors of magic to make the bad guy dead. Dodge and block attacks. There are a few major "colors" of spell variety that tend towards different categories of effects. Yellow spells like Glacio or Levioso are control charms meant to lock down enemies and keep them stunned so you can hit them and they can't hit you. Red spells typically do damage of some description. Purple spells will fling enemies around or move around objects in puzzles. Grey spells are typically utility focused. And finally, the green spells are the evil dark magic spells which are hilariously broken. Your spells can be upgraded through gear and talent points you earn as well as upgrades for your gear.

Enemy spellcasters will often shield themselves with one of these colors, meaning you need to hit them with a spell of the corresponding category to break it and damage them normally. Enemy attacks will usually trigger ether a yellow or red aura over your head - indicating if it can be blocked or needs to be dodged respectively.

The Dark magic spells, however, instantly break any shield and do exactly as they describe in the books. Crucio stuns an enemy as they are wracked with pain. Imperio controls an enemy to make them fight for you for a while (this works on any enemy, even trolls and bosses). Avada Kedavrah instantly kills anything but has a long recharge time. With talents, you get the most broken combo in the game. Cast crucio on a target, slap them a few times to spread the debuff around, then instantly kill everything in the room. It's insanely good and it's something I'll talk about in Story.

You also get two extra abilities based around the "Ancient Magic" in the story. You get a super move bar that fills up as you perform combos and lets you do massive amounts of damage when used. The other ability lets you whip around objects in the environment - even enemy weapons that are dropped or thrown at you - and toss them at the enemy. There are also items such as various plants and potions to improve your combat capabilities.


Combat is pretty fun overall, but it has some downsides. You are often vastly outnumbered in most fights, and between the many spells, shields, and effects you are juggling, it can be very easy to get blindsided with an attack that eats up three quarters of your health bar. Sometimes a spell will lock you into an animation and you'll get unavoidably hit by an attack. It's best to carry a lot of health potions so you can muscle through these situations when they occur. The final boss battle in partcular had me burning through all of my health potions because of bad luck with animations and timing. Overall, though, you will usually have the tools to deal with any situation provided you are not hilariously outgunned. The game offers stealth as an option to sneak around enemies, but without investment it is usually not very rewarding. Do yourself a favor and invest at least one point to get the talent that lets you sprint while stealthing. You'll thank me later.

- Continued in the comments section.

The tagline feature for this DLC is useless. The AI, even on the easiest difficulty, is determined to screw you over even when they willingly agree to be vassalized. They all actively try to ruin relations with you, refuse to cooperate with any slightly disadvantageous decision you make in managing them, and you frankly have no control over what they do.

Also this DLC is overpriced. Wait until a sale and/or another patch assuming they don't ruin the game more than they already have.

EVE was once a legendary game. I was young when the Goons vs BoB war was raging. News articles and entire books have been written about it from observations of its player-driven economy, wars, and industry.

That was the game that was. That is not the game that is now.

CCP has no idea how to design a game anymore. They now only know three things:
1. How to nerf
2. How to monetize
3. How to ignore the feedback of the elected player representative council.

Do you like industry and mining? CCP will nerf it to the ground and then try to sell you badly-kitted mining ships. They pull it back, but they poorly hide their intent to do it again.

Do you like PVE? Virtually worthless outside of nullsec. Have fun being fodder for suicide gankers when they get bored from all the miners leaving since their chosen career has been nerfed to oblivion.

Do you like PVP? That's all the game has to offer in mainly three flavors - wormhole fleets, ganking, and big bloc alliances. Except CCP keeps nerfing industry and income, so eventually you might find yourself starved for cash or for powerful late-game ships.

Lo and behold your corporate overlords will descend from on high and offer you the shiny new billion-ty plex pack complete with supercarrier (amateurly fit of course because the developers obviously don't play their own game).

Don't believe me? Keep watching. I'll happily eat my words if CCP manages to clean up their act and start designing a game again rather than a gatcha game with pewpew spaceships tacked on.

Don't waste your time. The developers don't respect it.

Bungie malding if you don't use Windows. Want to kneel to succy succy the big floppy masta Microsoft and corpobucks.

Get bent.

Before I start - Is this a good game? Yes. Do I recommend trying it? Yes. So, why do I put a thumbs down? It's complicated. I love this game, but I hate it because I love it. As simply best as I can put it, this game is really good - but it was abandoned by Focus Home Interactive and Tindalos before it could really come something truly great.

I have about 25 hours logged into BFGA 1. It's not much compared to some people, but I tend to hop around. I played some of the campaign but most of my time was in the skirmish mode playing as my favorite faction, the Orks. I bought this game closer to launch and was eagerly anticipating the new factions - mainly the Adeptus Mechanicus, which is my favorite faction in the 40k setting (Imperial Guard and Orks being tied for my second favorite).

I was initially turned off because of the removal of customization options for each individual ship. The ability to customize each ship in your growing fleet to specialize in different roles and give them each personality was one of my favorite parts of the first game. I really enjoyed giving each ship a name and a designated role in my fleet - sometimes even something super gimmicky.

However, I came back to this game after years because of MandaloreGaming's review. The bitter taste from the loss of customization had been cleaned out with time and I can enjoy the game for what it does have - a crap ton of factions, a solid campaign(s), entertaining gameplay, and atmosphere. I really enjoy the game, but my best comparison is like a disappointing child. You want to love them and even see their good qualities, but they will frequently remind you of all their baggage and punch you in the gut.


Fleets start on opposite sides of the map with different objectives - some better than others. (Escort is bad and should have stayed in the early 2000s, Annihilation is good because it's a simple tactical brawl. Data retrieval needs to die.). Each ship simulates different operating parts, has different loadouts, abilities, and specializations.

Each race has aspects that they emphasize or are weak at: The Eldar are speedy and quick, but squishy. The Imperial Navy is tough and a good all-rounder but a bit slow and lacking in long ranged. The Tyranids have very poor ranged capabilities but are good at sneaking up, boarding, and literally nomming on the enemy ship by ramming it or using tentacles. Each race did feel unique and distinct enough to me to approve of. The closest complaint I might have is that Admech and Imperial Navy are a bit too similar, but the Admech's weapon choices, aesthetic and abilities are different enough that I can readily tell the two factions apart based on their tactics and visuals.

The game is not very balanced at all - and I have heard horror stories of multiplayer being stuffed with exceptional amounts of cheese. This wouldn't bother me too much, but most of the factions are skirmish or multiplayer exclusive, so unless you want to play AI then you're likely to encounter plenty of Gorgonzola against other players. Some races are more equal than others - the poor Tyranids probably have the worst of all.

The good news is that in Singleplayer this doesn't matter all too much. Eldar are annoying as crap to kill because the AI can micromanage better than you can, but the AI is also pretty single-minded on objectives and has very predictable tactics. As someone who has put 1000+ hours into Total Warhammer 2, predictable and stupid AI isn't a huge hurdle for me but I can imagine someone wanting a greater challenge.

Campaign is very customizable in difficulty and sports a 4x board similar to Empire at War without the awful land battles and having pre-built buildings on planets that you can upgrade to provide higher bonuses. The storyline gives you missions to complete within a certain time frame that I usually found pretty manageable if you effectively manage your resources. The writing is pretty decent (and if I'm not mistaken, Matt Ward was apparently one of the lead writers, which was surprising since this story isn't trash).

I'm not a big graphics and sound expert, but I can tell good graphics and sound when I see it. This game does not disappoint on that front. It fits flawlessly into the realm of Warhammer 40k. The weapons and ship collisions are weighty and both look and sound appropriately devastating. Each ship clearly has a good deal of love and attention to detail from the art team and the backgrounds are really pretty to look at.

The only race I would say falls a bit short is the Necrons. Their weapons don't do a ton of damage in the game as it is, but it's not helped by their sounds. It often times sounds like their weapons are tickling the enemy with electricity rather than atomizing the enemy's hulls with the horrifying Gauss and lightning weaponry the Necrons are known for.


This is the heart-breaker for me and the single reason I cannot give this game the thumbs up I would like to. Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 suffers from a plethora of bugs, crashes to main menu, crashes to desktop, and general instability that can make it incredibly frustrating to play if not completely unplayable.

A major contributing factor to this is Easy Anti-Cheat. The game requires you to remain online for its campaign and the Anti-Cheat is so broken that you can be kicked from your campaign within five minutes of loading it up because the game somehow suspects you of cheating. I have had countless times of being kicked to main menu in singleplayer and co-op campaigns and was only able to get a fix by disabling it via Steam launch command. Even then, I still have instability issues. This system is toxic to your gaming experience and I urge anyone who buys it to immediately look up how to disable it before launching it for the first time. You'll thank me later.

This does not address all issues, however. There are still plenty of crashes to desktop - especially if you alt tab while in windowed mode during a loading screen. I have had Lance batteries somehow turn into blank squares that read "Weapon Not Found_01_01" on my ships' stat card. I'm sure many people could report a multitude of other bugs and glitches present in this game as of 1/4/2021 - going on 2 years after release.

Here is the biggest problem: As far as I am aware, this game is no longer being supported by its developers. After releasing the Chaos campaign pack and a few big patches, there has been no word or news from Tindalos since May 28th, 2020. All of these bugs will continue to exist unless/until the modding community creates an unofficial patch for the game (which would prevent you from playing multiplayer because of aforementioned Easy Anti-Cheat, go figure).

This game was supposedly slated to receive further campaigns (Namely an Eldar campaign) and potentially even a sandbox mega-campaign in the vein of Mortal Empires for Total Warhammer 2. Whether this was true or not, it appears that this game will be receiving none of these things. If your favorite faction happens not to be Imperials, Necrons, Tyranids, or Chaos(with DLC), then you are out of luck.

This is the biggest reason and takeaway that I cannot give this game an official recommend. With some bug fixing and removal of EAC, this would be a great game. With further content and love like No Man's Sky received over time, it could be a must-have classic. My magic genie lamp wish would be for Tindalos to come back, give the game some needed love and add the campaigns for the other races - I'd even be willing to pay for them as DLC if they had effort put into them. As it stands, I cannot express in words the disappointment in Tindalos' decision to leave it in its current state. Not even Mandalore could bring them back.

Tl;DR - Good, but unstable. I love it. Abandoned. I hate loving it.