Recent reviews by fntn

Really fun game, especially with friends and a little coordination/communication.

Obvious terminid puns aside, Helldivers 2 has a lot of bugs, but none of them are particularly game-breaking and usually culminate in frustration at worst. The developers release regular patches, alongside feature updates, which help to mitigate the worst of them. Communication from Arrowhead is top notch, and the community (particularly on PC) are largely positive and friendly, similar to Deep Rock Galactic.

There's little reason not to pick this up in my opinion, especially now that the PSN account debacle is out of the way.

Blood West is bags of fun and easily worth your money if you're a fan of the genre. It's surprisingly well-balanced and you can tell that a lot of thought has gone into the game and its various mechanics. I look forward to playing it again when the additional maps are released. I would also suggest checking out Elderborn, the devs' other game; it doesn't have much in common with Blood West, but it's a tonne of fun too.

Trying to play this game is like trying to fly a fighter jet with only your a​r​s​e​h​o​l​e. You can't rebind any controls, or even view the controls in game, thus your only real option is to go to the website and presumably attempt to memorise the four pages of controls listed there if you want to use hotkeys and play at anything other than the easiest difficulty. The developer states that the bindings are easy to remember, as they often match the command you want alphabetically i.e. "A" for attack. I found this to be especially true when firing my vlamethrower and constructing befences.

Part of me wonders if the game might be half decent underneath these problems, but I certainly don't want to dedicate any more of my time to finding out.

I've never really played a true ARPG until Grim Dawn, but I would recommend it to anybody who is looking at this page and thinking they might enjoy it. You basically build a character, explore the world, find better equipment, level up and repeat the process through a variety of different areas. Exploration feels meaningful and worthwhile and the levelling and skill systems are not too hard to get to grips with. Difficulty is very forgiving on normal and I can't see most players struggling with it, but it really ramps up on the higher settings for people looking for an extra challenge. The game looks visually good and performs very well too. I have had zero crashes in single player, but it is a bit more unstable when playing multiplayer and both myself and my partner have experienced a handful each over around twenty hours of gameplay.

One of the most noticeable things for me personally about this game is how well designed it is overall; there are a myriad of features that improve quality-of-life whilst playing, like being able to craft items at the blacksmith whilst they're sat in your storage chest (rather than having to be directly in your inventory) and being able to place a return portal to hop in and out of exploring whenever you need to. It feels like it has been rigorously tested and refined from this perspective and "labouring" is kept to a minimum, so you spend more time actually playing the game and enjoying yourself. It's almost like the opposite of an unskippable cutscene.

If you're a fan of the genre, looking to try an ARPG for the first time or if you just want to blow everybody up with magic and collect loot from their charred remains, pick up Grim Dawn. If you're still unsure, it gets heavily discounted in sales. I only own one of the DLCs (Ashes of Malmouth) and I haven't played it's campaign yet, but it's much more akin to an old-school "expansion pack", where you'd get a tonne of content (weapons, enemies, maps etc.) for the same price as a reskin of your character's shoes in most other modern games.

Subnautica is definitely worth your time if you are into open-world/survival/sandbox-style games, and remains one of the better offerings for 3D interpretations of these game mechanics in my opinion. It has a relatively unique blend of linear and open-world gameplay, utilising a story-led approach in combination with player-dictated pacing. The game is mostly free of anything resembling a "mission list" and generally encourages open-ended exploration of the world instead. It does have some objective markers to guide you to certain points of interest. These exist more at the start of the game than at the end, so one can only assume that their presence exists more to help new players establish themselves in the game world, which will probably help to make it a little more forgiving to players who are used to the "hold your hand" route seen by most large modern titles.

Performance is a little janky at times, perhaps expected from the Unity engine overall, but I faced no significant issues at any stage. There is a lot of pop-in with assets in this game and the draw distance feels like it's about arm's reach at times, but it doesn't really subtract too much from the overall experience. I would recommend to any new or current players who may be reading this to force anisotropic filtering for your GPU, as for whatever reason this game doesn't have an option to enable it innately, and the filtering is pretty terrible to look at by default. A GTX 1060 and appropriate CPU should have no issue running this at 60FPS/1080p for the most part, although expect some drops to 40/45FPS in certain areas.

I would say that Subnautica's most dominant trait is probably its foreboding atmosphere and sense of immersion. The world itself feels well-crafted and there is a good amount of attention to detail overall. The musical compositions that accompany the individual biomes help to make them feel specialised and unique; beginner areas are dulcet and welcoming, but later-game stages are foreboding and ominous. There is a great sense of being a tiny part of a much bigger world with this game which few others encapsulate as well.

It is difficult not to recommend this game, and I feel most people would probably enjoy it. It isn't quite as casual as it looks, but it's far from what I'd deem a difficult game either. I'd suggest it wouldn't be your thing if you are looking for an action-packed game where you are shooting from start to finish, but if you are looking for a more atmosphere-orientated experience with base-building and exploration mechanics, look no further.

7D2D is an open-world zombie survival game that I would ultimately recommend to fans of the genre, but the game definitely has some caveats worth discussing if you're thinking about a potential purchase.

Firstly, the core gameplay loop is great for the large part. The game itself is highly customisable with plenty of available options. It's easy to set it up to your preferences, especially if you consider modding too. In-game building is well-developed and offers a lot of freedom and flexibility. Melee and gunplay is adequate, but nothing special; both could be improved significantly overall, and I hope this is part of the development roadmap for taking the game to release status.

For me personally, the largest issue with this game is its unpredictable performance. Don't buy this title thinking that if you have a top-end system, you are going to get seamless performance; it doesn't matter how many thousands of pounds you shell over to Jensen Huang, you are going to get frame drops, and you might experience stuttering, crashes and other anomalies too. This is simply down to the fact that many sections of the codebase are unoptimised, and you can't simply launch power alone at an inefficient implementation and expect results.

To be clear, I don't expect the game to be fully optimised at this stage ("premature optimisation is the root of all evil", as any good programmer knows), but there are three stand-out issues which, in my opinion, should've had more development hours dedicated to them.

Firstly, the shadow performance is abysmal. Certain regions at certain times of day can drop 20-30fps, even with the shadows set to low. You can turn the shadows off to circumvent this, but then the whole game has a flat overbright look that can genuinely look worse than a title from twenty years ago.

Secondly, the pathing algorithm is terrible. This is unfortunately much more impactful than the shadow issue, as more zombies directly equates to more slowdown, which isn't ideal for a horde-based survival game.

Thirdly, large urbanised areas struggle with significant frame drops. This is a shame, as cities are good fun to explore and loot. I have seen a few sources state that this will be rectified in the next alpha, but I can't confirm or deny that, and the issue is currently still present.

Despite these factors though, this game is one of my most-played on Steam and the hours will only continue to rise. 7D2D is a shining example of why gameplay is king, and for all of its flaws and lack of polish, it's an immensely fun experience which only gets better with friends in co-op.

This game takes a lot of hate ("RIP TWI 2K16" etc.), but a significant proportion of the people reviewing have hundreds to thousands of hours clocked and are usually retaliating to a patched change that they dislike. When the resistances patch was released, most of the community revolted and rightfully so; it was terrible. I think the key thing that people are misisng here is that TWI are now actively engaged with the community and are putting work in to resolve issues. I've been pissed off at them myself before; the resistances patch mentioned prior, poor community outreach, implementing things such as the versus mode (which I'm sure some people want, but most of us don't care about) and microtransactions before bug fixing/completing perks, releasing the EA version and stating the price would be fixed, then dropping it in a flash sale a fortnight later etc. TWI have not really done the best job of implementing this title into the community, but the key thing players who don't own this should take from this review is that they seem to have learnt a valuable lesson about ostracising their player base.

At it's core, Killing Floor 2 is a pretty fun game. No, it isn't finished and yes, it does have it's problems, but none of this subtracts from the original statement. Shoot zombies in slow-motion, watch bits fly off around the map, enjoy the gorgeously-detailed firearms.

A much-needed reboot for a genre of gaming currently plagued by mediocrity. Interesting, varied and incredibly fun selection of weapons, well-integrated into the gameplay. Superb mechanics, such as glory killing your enemies with melee finishes that are not only visually impressive, well-animated and visceral, but force you to leave the relative safety of cover to recover health; a far cry from the current consensus of "hide behind a box until you're back at full health" that seems to plague the FPS genre. This, amongst carefully-placed enemy locations, stunning graphics and performance, intricate and varied level design (incorporating fluid vertical mechanics) and, perhaps most importantly, the ejection of the needless bloat that has become a hallmark of practically all modern games, leaves a perfect example of an FPS done right.

You won't be pressing F to pay respects, but if this example of a solid, well-thought out first-person shooter starts a trend, hopefully we'll soon be paying our respects to the garbage most modern studios are currently churning out.

10/10