Recent reviews by [SRS]Joyless

I never played Mass Effect when I was younger and when I saw that I could play the trilogy on steam I was excited to try it out.

I love this game, I love this trilogy. I take Carth (kaidan) with me everywhere I can, reliving when he'd shyly tell me about admiral Saul murdering his family. I love starting out as a by the books good guy (paragon) and by the end of the third game hitting a "ends justify the means" renegade. I didn't have sex with my crew because I'm their commanding officer but I did do an exclusive overnight interview with the reporter to keep Alliance morale up.

The EA app requirement sucks though. For the first 72 hours I could hit play and go and it worked perfectly. Now almost randomly the EA app has no idea whats going on when I try to launch this game and it closes ME out. This is mindnumbing.

10/10 game, 7/10 requirement to use EA through a steam purchase.

It's ok.
I don't care about the civ changes to the Persians or the architecture changes. They're nice but it's not what I want to talk about.

This is an ok DLC campaign expansion. You've got three campaigns with five missions each. You've got some nice throwbacks with old AoC characters which I appreciated (even if they're traitorous snakes). Beautiful map designs, great voice-acting. Those areas of this DLC I have absolutely zero issue.

But, you are not going to be challenged at all by the AI in this expansion. I ran through on Hard and by the time this game released to this review a couple days later all three were beaten by attack moving 30-40 cav at a time to the objective.

Maps are resource rich, you will never suffer for gold or stone. Your losses mean nothing and with all the gold laying around you're never going to be punished for throwing your men away. You can quite literally make any unit you want in these campaigns available to you and just tidal wave that one unit every mission in all three campaigns.

AI rarely attacks and when it does it's reminiscent of AoK ai. Minimal waves spread out with anywhere a dozen to two dozen units per wave.

Some missions were nice, and should have been historical missions so they could have been fleshed out, like the 4th Thoros mission (crestfallen waves). You load in tasked with clearing Byzantine docks around Cyprus while dealing with two enemy ais on Cyprus itself. You're given two allies but functionally just one doing anything. In between fending off the AIyou can theoretically raid the civilian inhabitants to get extra resources. Big map, lots of enemies, theoretically it'll be a challenge to defend yourself on land and go on the water to finish the objective..right?

Wrong, AI rarely attacks you or your AI companion. Naval AI occasionally sends fire ships to your docks. It's quite literally make 10-15 galleons and 2-3 dromon and finish the mission in fifteen to twenty minutes. IT started off looking amazing and then felt incomplete as I played through it. This feeling is on every single mission in this DLC.

I don't know what happened with the developers here or if one or two were working on each campaign, but I think it would have been better to just have one or two campaigns that had actual depth versus the three "wide and as deep as a puddle" campaigns that we have currently.

4/10. Buy in a seasonal sale when it's discounted.

You can shoot someone in the head with a 9mm pistol and kill them, and then get shot by a rifle that fires a .308 and walk it off.

Nothing makes sense

10/10

Hello,

I purchased this game on release earlier this year. I have previously played Company of Heroes 2, and other Relic titles.

This game released with two campaigns and multiplayer from the beginning. The two campaigns were a total war-like invasion of Italy campaign, and a sequenced campaign based on Rommel in North Africa. Two great scenes for what should have been great campaigns.

The total war-like campaign was incomplete. Mission triggers would lock up making it unable to progress the campaign in nearly all the mandatory missions. There was a wide option to choose how to advance your forces (should i use bombers to soften the Germans before advancing my armored division, or use my newly created battleships to shore bombard?) but practically they did nothing to make the campaign easier, even on harder difficulties. The AI was incapable of defending settlements to the point you could run multiple divisions through a gauntlet of fire and attrition on the campaign map, take the required settlement, delete the depleted division and just recruit a new one. This has not been improved since launch.

Multiplayer:

On release an absolutely heavy German bias. For whatever reason on launch Relic decided giving the German-Italian faction a unit that could throw its own smoke at zero munitions cost, move faster when running out of smoke, and attack ground with a flamethrower (and the unit had 2 of them). This unit at vet 1 also got a heatseeking AT satchel for light-medium anti armor.

There were several units like this, and after a few months they were patched all the way down into uselessness.

This is a trend that has continued the entire time this game has been out. Paradrop planes being shot down by AA? Relic didn't buff their health, they just made paradrop planes invincible.

From Launch to present Relic has prioritized cosmetic sales. Before any unit buffs or nerfs, long before any attempts at fixing the campaign ai, Relic unveiled their cosmetic store.

The player pop has dropped from 19,397 peak to 2,620 peak in under a year.

Now in order to get additional sales they are releasing an expansion for 17 dollars that includes a couple multiplayer maps, battle-groups that are more likely than not broken and won't see patches until well into the new year (if their track record is anything to show for it), and more cosmetics.

Do not buy this game. Don't buy it for 60 dollars, don't buy it for 48 dollars, don't buy it for 20 dollars. You will be disappointed.

In short:

Every balance patch is centered around mainline hearts of iron streamers. Major dlcs and nation reworks are directly lifted from overhaul mods.

In the last year or so it's swapped from a ww2 simulator to a supply simulator. If you can bomb the other players railways and logistics then the war is won. If you get bombed then it doesn't matter how good your templates are as they'll start hemorrhaging supplies immediately.

So god help you if you get red air for a second. That second is all a player needs to absolutely destroy any and all logistics you have. You might as well GG out the moment it happens since your war supplies of rifles and tanks are about to disappear over the next few weeks.

You'd think the AI would be mentioned in that, but unsurprisingly the AI has no idea how to design templates. You could literally just slap a bunch of mgs on a plane and call it a day with the AI.

Tank designer:

The tank designer is pointless since everyone just uses the meta. It only changes when Paradox slightly buffs or nerfs unit org or piercing but before long everyone is immediately back to using the two or three templates depending on what nation they are playing.

Air Designer:
Same goes for air, except you're locked in with what the role of the plane is. Want to strap a ton of mgs onto a strat bomber? Oh well you're making a strat bomber so you cant. rinse repeat across all planes.

Naval designer:

It's weird that all these designers were brought in to remove template meta but they really just reinforced it. Anyway, nothing really to say about the naval designer, it's equally like the air/tank designer in that it may not as well exist since you're just going to follow a meta.

unironically if you're not the UK, US or Japan you can just ignore the navy outright.

focus trees:

they're a mess. Some are great, some are for people with undiscovered depression (Switzerland).

Multiplayer:

It's eh. Twitch has maintained it being ♥♥♥♥. You've either got twitch streamers hiding under fake names to get into noob lobbies(which defeats the point but they need that video title "watch me join this NOOB game and DO THIS as (insert country here)" or you've got wannabe twitch streamers throwing games by trying some random strategy they've come up with that obviously won't work and then two hours later you get to sit there and think "why do i play multiplayer we all just waited two hours of our lives knowing this half-baked idea wouldn't work".

I regret spending a thousand hours in this game.

I played Rust way back in the day in what became affectionately known as Legacy, and what Rust nowadays was known as Experimental. It was a constant work in progress with many new updates (usual weapon/harvesting balances to new content). I would say that for the better part of its existence it has been a good game, and it still kind of is, it just isn't the "same".

Now, I'm not being whimsical..its just a matter of time needed to being invested in the game in order to enjoy a majority of the content within. The last time I played somewhat consistently was up to when Helis were added and the time crunch to both stay active and monitor your territory (from trap base to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to compound) and the resources required to both upkeep and gather gear (and im sorry a server cannot survive with the prominent "hur dur only newbs farm" mentality *hint: because then there'd be no gear) just became too much.

Rust as it has been for the last couple years has become a game that requires you to treat it like a second job. If I need an app to let me know at work that I'm about to be raided, and that when I get home from work I have to work several more hours on a game just to maintain being able to *experience* the content within.. it's just too much.

It can't be appeased by thinking of it as a consistent world set since most servers have been and will stay on two-four week wipe cycles. This is because the one group that will play the game like a second job will absolutely dominate and kill server population within a week (because why get new base and gear to get raided by people that can put in eight hours a day when you and your friends can do one or two).

I know it sounds ranty and really specific, but it has been my biggest issue with the game. It just isn't fun anymore because as an adult now I have more important time commitments.

As far as the top negative review(as far as mining) is, I personally haven't had that issue.

As far as the game;

For something very simplistic, it is actually a nice little game to spend a few hours playing. The devs did their research and the start lines/Russian ai advance towards key objectives and the time-lines pretty much check out. I did fail at sinking the Moskva tho (but at least it started smoking), but for the most part currently holding the North and the South to South-east.

It's clear that some love went into this, and of course their support for the Ukrainian Defense as evident as the main menu.


I have from time to time experienced some game-play issues. Sometimes when I'm tasked to ambush a BTR column after firing the first shot from say the at4 (or whatever) even after reloading it'll bug out and "shoulder" the weapon. I don't have this issue if I just hip-fire it, and to be honest, hip-firing and hoping is better than getting killed in action and letting the orcs gain another foot of soil.

9/10 recommend.

i like eating people then hearing their life story

its ok