Recent reviews by Bruh

I've been playing Enlisted on and off for ~4 years now. I wasn't there at *the exact instant* the game was playable, but within the ballpark of early adoption.

I really enjoy this game, and I can tell you that it's "worth it" just fine as a F2P player. Honestly, in the here-and-now as of this writing, I could whole-heartedly recommend this game to anyone. You'll get a few dozen hours out of it even if it doesn't "click". The in-game currency is used for almost everything, and you'll get plenty of it by just playing the game normally. You'll get extra XP/Money for matchmaking with the "play any army" checkbox ticked, and that'll speed you along while stacking with any premium time or other bonuses you might have. Costs for EVERYTHING have been slashed recently, so it's easy enough to get your whole team decked out with Medkits and class-specific guns and grenades and such. Even as a long-time player I had a huge buildup of currency I hoarded jealously; I can now easily spend on grenades and sidearms and backpacks and binoculars and all the other odds-and-ends I used to withhold from buying for my soldiers because I "might need the currency later". This recent change also speeds up your XP progression, because you get more from matching the new way and also you spend less on each new item on the tech tree.

Something to know before you get going is that you *do* need to go to the "research" tab right away and set something for your in-game XP to go towards. Good early picks across the board are Anti-Tank weapons, SMGs, and the earliest bolt-action rifle with the "three soldier silhouette" icon on it. This icon notes that you'll get an entire new squad for free, and each type of squad you gain allows you to recruit that class of soldier. As an example AND a tip: the reason to chase the bolt-actions early is because you want to get the Engineer Squad, so that you can get the Engineer class of soldier in that squad and recruit them to be used in any other squad that gets an Engineer slot unlocked. Those guys let you build Respawn Points, Ammo Boxes, Sandbags, and Barbed Wire. Certain squads/unlocks will also let those Engineers build HMG nests, AT Guns, and all sorts of other cool stuff. The difference between teams WITH and WITHOUT these guys can be STAGGERING.

This game can be a ton of fun, and/or very frustrating, depending on who you get matched with and how you work around the AI squad system. It is possible to mow down entire enemy squads and feel like a War Hero, but you have to know that this can happen to you as well. One moment you're running through an empty field, and the next your ENTIRE SQUAD is wiped by a guy sniping you over and over, or an artillery strike, or a tank firing HE shells at you. You can't have your awesome 900-kill invincible Super Tank rampage without completely obliterating someone else's squads. That is, unless you play the Custom/Private Games mode. Your progress and money gain will be exponentially slower, but you can absolutely host some low-stakes AI-blasting fun if you just want to run around and shoot bots in a big map.

Matching is also something I'd want to tell a prospective new player about: You get matched based off of your equipped gear. They call this "BR" in your research and inventory, when looking at any item/vehicle that gets factored in. You will start with BR1 gear, and you will slowly be researching your way into higher-BR stuff until you reach BR5 stuff. This keeps everyone's available weaponry on a roughly-equal level. BR1 guys get matched with BR1-2 guys, BR2 guys get matched with anyone BR1-3, the BR3 guys can go down into BR1-2 matches or up into BR3-5 matches in order to fill lobbies, and the BR4-5 guys only get matched with each other and occasionally fill in with BR3s. So there's the 1-3 and 3-5 queues, where bringing BR3 stuff gets you flexed into whatever's open.

The only bit I'd tell new players to watch out for is to BE MINDFUL when equipping new stuff. Putting ANYTHING that is BR2 on ANY guy in ANY squad will bump you up to BR2 for that army across the board. Likewise for doing a BR3 tank/gun, so make sure you have enough of your stuff to equip EVERYONE at BR2/3/4/5 before you queue up so you're not bringing mostly-low-tier stuff into a higher tier game because NO ONE will know or take pity on you. You WILL NOT penetrate BR5 tanks with your BR1 paper machine. It's *bulletproof*, but NOT tank-shell-proof. You don't have to worry about this SUPER early on because you wont have access that far into the tech tree right away, but getting something BR3 and pushing yourself into later-war games will be ROUGH if you're not expecting it.

The rhythm-based puzzling aspect is simultaneously the most interesting part of the game and also the most infuriating element beyond the first handful of levels. When you clear a row, it sends a randomly-generated row of "empty" junk blocks to the other side. When you push the rows of blocks offscreen (similar to losing in tetris) that side loses a life.

In the first few levels, there's some playing around with different rhythms beyond 4/4, or new block types being introduced. I enjoyed a few of these, for example the levels with double-wide blocks available on the 1st and 5th beats. Where things fell apart was when the game started doing half- and quarter-beats, which it can't keep up with. You'd get Whole -> Whole -> Quarter > Quarter > Quarter > Quarter, and repeat, but the game struggles to place whether you're hitting the current block or the previous when the intervals get that close. It frequently refuses to place a block at all, or it double-places blocks (so instead of hitting column 3+4 like you wanted, now you have 4+5). Obviously, this wreaks havoc on your ability to actually clear rows and can quickly turn into a loss off of a single errant block.

Compounding this further, there are levels where double-wide or double-tall blocks *replace* regular single blocks on certain columns. In one level, double-talls replace 1+4 columns, so on those beats you have no choice but to place blocks that (more often than not) stick up into the next "level". This can cause you to spiral into a loss through no fault of your own; the only saving grace of these levels is that the AI is handicapped in exactly the same way and thus is no better at dealing with the RNG junk rows than you are.

From a design perspective, and drawing inspiration from Tetris, I think RNG junk rows is *kind of* the way to go with a "puzzle battle" mechanic like this. Conceptually, at least. There are two problems that arise from this choice: the junk rows can quickly form several-row-deep "pits" that *necessarily* slow down even a perfect computer or perfect player. The beat requires waiting at exactly the same pace as your opponent, so while they're dropping a single block directly into empty "slots" of their rows (and thus sending even more junk to your side), you might be stuck with 2-4 empty spaces in a single column that require you to place that many blocks in a row in order to reach the "top" slot you need to fill. Junk rows also come in from the bottom, so if you place a block at the bottom of a 3-deep pit and then you get a Junk row sent to you, you now have a 3-deep pit and then *more* rows you can't reach below that. If "pits" happen to the AI, you take one of their hearts for free. If it happens to you (which can happen several times in a row, especially on later levels when there are more empty slots in the "junk" rows), you're just screwed. You drop a block down the pit, and then you wait 5 beats. Drop a block, wait a whole cycle. You're just at the mercy of the RNG at that point. Barring any mistakes, missed beats, or the game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, there's a certain minimum number of cycles you're just *stuck* waiting, no matter what.

The final levels are all of this game's worst elements cranked up to the maximum. There's a damn good reason that the game allows you to quit out of any level with two right-clicks. They just didn't bother to refine the concept whatsoever. You're expected to just keep mashing the restart button until you get an RNG seed that doesn't ♥♥♥♥ you over. The AI doesn't have to be very good (and it's not), it just needs to drop blocks every so often in order to finish off rows. Whether it gets overwhelmed because your rows lined up perfectly, or destroys you with cold precision is entirely up to chance. Luck is a necessity for the second-to-last, because it alternates between 1-6 and Double -> 3,4 -> Double rendering some lines impossible until you wait *TWO* cycles.

The music is *okay*, but by necessity of the mechanics it's made up entirely of repeating 6/12 note stanzas.

The art's fine, but there are 10 girls spread across all the levels. They go through the first 6, repeat, and then the final levels are 4 rapid-fire "bosses". I stopped paying attention to the text about halfway through because every exchange was the exact same. When you're done, you have a gallery with the exact same stills from the gameplay.

It's still interesting from a Game Design standpoint, but if you're in it for the gallery you'll be disappointed.

Noticing Stuff Simulator 2023

It is, in fact, a waste of time <3

Man, I would have been SO mad if I'd paid $60 for this. SKIP IT.

On paper, this should be a game I'd die for. It's got dinosaurs, it's got mechs, you could theoretically play it PvE... However none of that coalesces into a whole I'm willing to spend time playing. Not for free, and CERTAINLY not for "AAA" game price. The best XP rates are locked behind playing "random" matchmaking between PvE and PvP modes, the customization is non-existent unless you engage with the Overwatch/Fortnite/[insert Live Service Game here]-style shop mechanics, and the gameplay itself is... fine. It feels less like a game carried on the intrinsic fun of gameplay and more like a Minimum Viable Product shipped as a vehicle for the store. But then, the store is so bare-bones and M.V.P. itself that it feels tacked-on and careless. Am I "grinding" the game for terrible cosmetics dealt out via loot boxes, or am I playing dolly-dress up in the hangar so that I can show off in the trite 3rd person shooter? Capcom doesn't know the answer to that design question, and definitely doesn't care. They're the ones with -at the very least- hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in this project. If they don't care, why should I?

I could barely finish the tutorial sequence, there was just no flow and so little driving me forward. Setting up my player avatar was both slow and lacking in options. Then getting introduced to the controls had like 3 cutscenes of my silent protagonist pantomiming at the camera followed by a very on-rails explanation of how to click on things. I got told once how to activate abilities, but not what they do or why I'd use them over simply holding down the 'fire' button. The ability selected for demonstration, and the enemies chosen as targets didn't seem like a sensible pairing, either. I know it's a weird complaint, but it's indicative of the lack of attention paid to the assembly of the game. For reference: you get this big railgun on your back, and that's the swappable ability they chose to demonstrate. The enemies selected are flying Pteranodons. They're very clearly chaff-style high-volume targets, easily killable with most suits' primary fire. Thus, using your huge railgun ability on them raises a number of issues: For one, it feels like using a battleship cannon to scare away seagulls. They'd have died anyway, so the ability use feels like "Overkill". The ability is a straight-line piercing projectile and the enemies are a cluster of highly mobile targets. It's not a good tactical use of your chosen weapon against this situation. If they split up, or hover around in clusters, your railgun won't hit everyone and you'll be waiting on a cooldown to try again. You don't want to use a precision weapon here, you want something like an airburst AOE attack or a shotgun/flak-style projectile weapon. You *could* make the case that precision weapons allow you to pick them off one-at-a-time from a distance, but you'd want to use a weapon or ability with lots of follow-up shots or fast recharge. Finally, I'm also at a loss as to how much damage the railgun actually deals. Chaff enemies can be killed by theoretically anything, so the fact that this weapon instant-kills them doesn't tell me much. I tried it out later on a larger target, and dealt X% damage to it. That can be very hard to quantify and especially so when this is a chaotic team-based horde shooter. Is it worth bringing the big cool railgun? I don't know. You can kill a big procession of bunched-up raptors (a situation the tutorial assembles for you elsewhere but DOES NOT combine with the Railgun explanation), but I can't tell you if its utility overall or its damage-dealing potential makes it any better or worse than the mobility tool or "health pack" items you could swap it for. They aren't teaching me a sensible use for this ability, so why demonstrate it at all? It checks the box in the Game Dev checklist that says "you must show a player how to do a thing", so they gave me something to use my ability on and told me which button to press. The only problem is that I'm not learning WHY I'd want to use this in a real combat situation, so the only useful information passed along is the button mapping.

This kind of mindlessness is present EVERYWHERE in this title. The UI is functional, but conforms to every convention that comes to mind when I say "sci-fi HUD". The characters you meet are stock stereotypes, which again is fine in a vacuum (and even preferable/beloved in some instances, such as in the context of Street Fighter/Monster Hunter). The objectives of every mission are THE oldest and most established shooter tropes: Push the Thing, Stand in the Area, Shoot All the Bad Guys Until They Stop Spawning. The spaces you explore are... I guess *technically* varied, but they don't really make a lot of sense. You're not defending hastily-evacuated city streets, it's all simulated recreations (or you're sent back in time to specific battles that all seem to take place on a single island at various points during an emergency, it can be hard to tell because you're likely not meant to think about it too much). So you might be "On The Docks" in one mission, shooting through warehouses and piers, and in another you might be in a "city block" map. Maybe if you sink more time in, you'll play the missions that play in the "digital dimension" or deep in the jungle or whatever, but it's all just set dressing for the "lanes" and "arenas" you'll be fighting through. It all just rolls off of your mind, you might as well be playing the 'Grey Box' renderings of these spaces.

What I mean to point out is that it's hard to know or care about the stakes of the action, because these aren't the streets of anywhere in particular. You're not saving New York or Tokyo or Hong Kong or Amsterdam. I *genuinely* can't tell if you're even in The Real World *at all* during gameplay. You might be simulated entirely, or you might be time-traveled to a real place at a previous time. It's impossible to know, and that *would* be fun as a narrative bit, if it weren't for the fact that all the action I saw revolved around a completely isolated and made-up island. Everyone on it, every building there, it was all built FAR from regular human civilization with the express purpose of building, researching, and sustaining their own version of SkyNet. So we might be fighting before, during or after the moment that the AI 'went rogue'. We might be caught in its endless Wargames for some kind of test, for no reason, or for some legitimate purpose that the AI has simply "gameified" as a way to push human subjects to work their hardest averting some end-of-the-world scenario that the AI is genuinely trying to prevent. Who knows? The devs probably don't, and I'd be lying if I said they presented any of this well enough to care. You're never *really* going to find out; this is a live-service game that's going to sit in limbo for as long as Capcom deems them profitable and then the servers are going to shut down. The likelihood that any of the narrative questions matter beyond set dressing is slim already, and even slimmer that they can, will, or already have worked on any wrap-up content that ties up the game's story with a neat bow at the end. You'll play the intro to get acquainted, everyone sits in the static status-quo of "keep killing dinosaurs until something happens, I guess", and then the servers will go down. All we'd have to show for it is thousands upon thousands of hours wasted "grinding" matches, thousands of dollars spent on cosmetics that vanished into the ether and a mediocre story told badly.

I'll waste my time elsewhere.

I've played my fair share of fighting games, but this one really feels like the apex of the genre to-date. I wasn't a Street Fighter fan before I started playing this title. I could name many of the popular characters, I could recognize some memes, but I had accepted that learning ANY of the characters in any SF title was just not a goal that was on my radar.

What sold me on this one is the World Tour single-player campaign. This is the high-water-mark for fighting game "story modes"; not for a super deep and compelling narrative (it's fine) but for the way it's a long-form stealth tutorial for mastering the game in a FUN way. You go around meeting all the main characters, learning their movesets and special moves, and then mix-and-matching them into a "custom" moveset for your avatar. I was always excited to see that some random side-quest I was doing suddenly led me to a tucked-away main character whose moves I could pillage on my world-wide quest to be the best. You get a little snippet of character interaction that shows what that person's all about and how they fight, maybe a little training montage happens, and then you get a whole new way of fighting and a couple starter "special moves" to throw into your favorite fighting style.

It's such a small distinction, but the pervading themes of mentorship and personal growth really elevate the feeling of creating "your custom character" from "oh, here's my skin over a copy of Ryu" to "I learned X from so-and-so, and Y from whomever, and now I blend their styles into something wholly my own that's stronger than either style alone". At first it seems ham-fisted to have the player on a quest to discover... "what does 'Strength' mean?", but then over the course of the campaign it becomes clear that this is the perfect question to have every main character answer. Every "Master" has a different philosophy and perspective to complement their fighting style. Through talking to them, texting them, doing little side-quests for them, and talking/fighting with their other pupils, I naturally came to learn about and respect each character. I might not gel with every fighter's combat style, but I definitely walk away from each one with a better understanding of who they are, what they do, and what sort of gameplay they offer to players who 'main' them.

I came to the game for the low-stakes beat-'em-up gameplay in the single player and the "modern" control style that simplifies some of the more brain-twisting combos. What I didn't expect was how well the Custom Character system and the "Side Hustles" prepare you for *actually* pulling off the classic Street Fighter combos for real. With a little bit of practice, I was pulling off combos like Manon's ballet grab with just regular inputs instead of using the "quick" combo system for those attacks. That freed those slots up for much more complex inputs I wasn't as confident in, until I get a little better and can pull those off a bit more consistently. There are also a series of side missions throughout the game that teach players all about the ins and outs of consistently blocking, breaking blocks with targeted attacks and throws, and the Drive system that adds another layer of strategy on top of the direct attacks and super attacks.

As I get better, it's less about relying on the Drive Parry (a kind of "super block" powered by your Special Attack meter that's a bit more risk/reward because your meter drains heavily the longer you use it and if you let go without parrying there's a long opening afterwards) and the Drive Impact (an attack that can 'eat' and counter incoming attacks, but can itself be countered by another Drive Impact or be grabbed/thrown out of), and more about using it thoughtfully at key moments. I got taught by a side mission that using it when the opponent is up against the edge of the screen ALWAYS wall-splats even if they block, so it's a good idea to do that to enemies I've driven up against the wall OR it's something to watch out for if I'm the one stuck "in the corner".

And all of this is still BEFORE getting into the Arcade mode that takes you through the character's backstories (closer to what other games do with their "story mode"), or the EXTENSIVE series of tutorials, character guides, and practice tools. It's not that you're buried under a mountain of documentation; instead you're given a bunch of different ways of learning in the way that suits you best. THAT is what SF6 does better than ALL its contemporaries. Some games have ONE tutorial with their most generic character and then you have to extrapolate to the other characters or go learn their unique mechanics individually. Some have a text info-dump buried in a sub-menu. A few of the better ones will give you a guided walkthrough or some blurbs that lay out the meta-strategy of "how to play X character" beyond "press punch and kick a lot and maybe do the Super Move when your meter is full". This game gives you a single player adventure where you learn hands-on by DOING, a more standard lesson-by-lesson course on grasping the mechanics in the Arcade mode, a Practice mode where you can learn under controlled conditions, and a comprehensive set of text guides you can access if that's your way of learning or you just need a refresher on something.

This is the game that every Fighting Game Designer needs to play and take notes from, when it comes to teaching players how to engage with your fighting game.

If EA's gonna launch a game completely riddled with performance issues and charge $80-90 for a sub-par experience, then I'm going to leave a bad review. The game Respawn made is good, it probably just needed a little more time in the QA department. No complaints on the content, I've enjoyed what I've seen of Star Wars while I played. It's just that what I played was half crash and half slideshow. I can see a good game in between all the issues, but there ARE issues.

I'm probably not gonna come back and update the review. Patch it or not, you can't undo my terrible first impression. The workers got paid their pittance while they were making it; let negative ratings affect EA's share prices and people waiting for sales cut into the publisher profits in a way the jerks responsible for this mess will actually care about.

A fun little game about happy fishing AND NOTHING ELSE.

no, I would not recommend this game

When I say "It's alright, I guess", that's exactly what I mean. No more, no less. DO NOT buy this game at full price; I picked my copy up at the Ultimate Edition for under $25. Even THAT is on the upper end of what I think this game is worth, I went "extra" to get all the DLC and goodies because I set my expectations very low and just wanted ALL the content in the Milsim Dress-Up Sandbox. I think it's cheaper directly through Ubisoft's ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game store (and this DOES use their launcher so you're stuck with it either way), and for someone who has even LESS attachment to the previous title(s) you probably don't need anything but the base game. The DLC is probably fine, but you don't know if you'll even get to it, and the cosmetics/extras aren't really so interesting or must-have that you'd ever miss them. For a non-fan trying it for the first time, just get the regular edition wherever it's cheapest or grab the ultimate on super-super discount. ALSO IF YOU HAVE A FRIEND THAT HAS THIS GAME ASK THEM ABOUT THEIR TRIAL CODES, THEY CAN SEND YOU A THING THAT LETS YOU PLAY THE FULL GAME FOR FREE WITH THEM. If you're buying this to play with your friends, only have the most interested person buy a copy and they can send full-game invites to the rest of you, you don't need 4 copies.

If you're remembering the launch, or the way things worked in the first year or so, the game IS better than that state it was in. The short version of how it used to be: it had gear levels and you would invest resources gathered from missions and open world stuff into making your weapons/gear better. While that kind of worked for some games like The Division, I don't have to tell you that people bristled at it (putting things lightly) in this franchise based on tactical squad-based stealth/action simulation-lite. I skipped buying it then, both on the high price point and the terrible design choices. I regret nothing about that choice.

The "fix" came way later in the form of "Immersive Mode". It removes the leveling, makes a bunch of tweaks to what you can/can't do and reduces how many "fix-it" items you can carry. This flattens out the difficulty of enemies between different areas (and to a degree, player power/growth), but allows the game to be much more about HOW you apply the tools you have to each base/mission because weaponry is very deadly and works much more consistently. All told, the years of changes and fixes have transformed this game into something approximating a much prettier version of Wildlands. If you liked that game (as I did, for a big open world time-waster), then you'll probably find the CURRENT version of the game to be a step up graphically with a new sandbox and some fun customization to mess around with. This game actually does "Difficulty" extremely well IMO, because you can toggle pretty much *everything*. It goes above and beyond what most games do with their graphical/interface/difficulty options, and lets you tailor this game towards a realistic-ish mil-sim or an arcade-style shooter at your discretion. If you don't want UI blips for guns/ammo/pickups, turn them off. Turn on/off the shaders that show interactible objects, if those anger you for some reason. You can play with objective/mission waypoints like any other Open World Game, or toggle them off to instead get a batch of "clues" that tell you that your objective is "In this area; south of X river; and west of Y landmark". It's still so on-the-nose that you'll always know where to set your manual waypoint and which base the thing you're looking for is in, but somehow just tiny changes like that make you FEEL smarter and more immersed by giving you a trivial little task to analyze the clues and self-direct to your objectives rather than just following a little icon around. It's still accessible if you want/need it, but using the clue system really elevated my experience in a way that translates very poorly to written review. These choices only apply to you, so you can be playing a really hard-core stealth-based game with no HUD while your friend joining you in Co-op has incoming damage minimized and regenerating health to be your invincible guns-blazing backup anytime stealth goes wrong. It's actually really cool from a technical/design perspective, it's just the saddest case of "too little, too late" I've ever seen from this company that specializes in project mis-management.

If you're not taking the game too seriously in terms of looking for high-quality writing or narrative stakes, but instead treat this as an opportunity to do a silly little "tactical LARP" as your favorite super-self-serious Military Guy Team, then I think you'll have an okay time with this. I know I am. Right now I'm trying to re-create my favorite characters from Metal Gear Solid and Call of Duty and then wander around the map clearing bases and collecting the 60-or-so weapons and bazillions of tacticool attachments/clothes options. It's not deep, the story isn't particularly rich, and the tactical battles are closer to the middling jank of Wildlands than the peaks of old Ghost Recon, but I'm not having a *bad* time. The only thing I'd tell people to watch out for is all the grizzled 3+ year veterans telling you that you MUST play on Extreme or else it's Baby Mode. This game doesn't give you 1000 toggle switches for you to subject yourself to One-Hit-Kills in missions not designed for that style of gameplay, off the assertion of some Random Internet Guy that nothing's hard enough for him. Learn from my first two play-sessions, faster than I did, that you should tailor the settings to what YOU want from the experience. If you want to have back-and-forth shootouts and you LITERALLY JUST STARTED THE GAME, give Normal enemy difficulty a try for a while and scale back on stuff like the Injury system (which basically breaks your arms and legs every time you lose a chunk of your health bar, which is every 1-2 shots if you're playing on max enemy difficulty). There are settings I like for Pure Stealth gameplay (like high enemy awareness/damage at max enemy settings), but those don't work well when I'm trying to level up the Assault class that's all about high-intensity combat and explosions. Likewise, they kind of *expected* you to be going by level ratings when you play the main story missions/campaign, so DO NOT waste your first few hours chasing the "Brothers in Arms" storyline on max difficulty right away. Yes, you CAN sneak up and kill the main boss bad guy during the prologue tutorial mission *NOW* that the level restriction is lifted, but that doesn't mean that you should TRY during your first hour of your first play through to do so, nor should you attempt the available-from-the-start Final Boss Battle where they lock you in a room with him, 5 high-skill soldiers, and his invincible bullet-deflecting drone shield system before you've even unlocked the most basic guns/attachments. It wasn't an auspicious start, but once I *realized* that was what was happening, I went somewhere else and did a bunch of other missions and side quests and had a much better time. That's just kind of the dangers of a later-in-the-game's-life fundamental rework of how combat/gameplay is structured; you end up also trimming out all the little "Danger-Skull" level tags from certain missions and enemies. I like the unpredictability generally, but I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't mention the possibility of biting off that particular chunk of content too early/with the settings cranked too high for your enjoyment.