Recent reviews by Hamwise

- recommended with caveats - TL;DR it's hard AF and a bit unbalanced in early access but the core gameplay is good -

I have beaten XCOM and XCOM 2 multiple times on the highest difficulty with ironman mode. I play underrail on dominating for fun and still whoop the final boss in 2 turns. I like hard games, and Quasimorph is hard AF. Obscenely so at times. This game will abuse and frustrate you. I have a love hate relationship with it. I've uninstalled it more than once, but I also have more than 100 hours in at this point.

I don't want to say it is too hard exactly, more like it is unbalanced. It's still in early access so this is to be expected. As the various factions in game grow in "power" the number and quality of enemy troops on missions rapidly increases. As other reviews note it's not uncommon to come up against 200+ enemies per floor when fighting powerful factions. I've reached the point where I'm either going up against a faction so weak I am almost guaranteed to win unless I do something stupid, or factions so strong I am almost guaranteed to lose. Neither is particularly fun, so when the game should be ramping up and becoming more interesting, it starts to get bogged down with balance issues.

There's also some occasional unintuitive BS cheese to ruin your day, for example just earlier today:
* I stepped out of the line of sight of a flamethrower turret, behind a wall, and it just fired blind through the doorway and set the whole room on fire, bringing my run to a frustrating and unexpected end. Is it a bug? Who knows. 100% brutal.
* After spending an hour blasting through a single floor (powerful faction, ~150 guys), and squeaking through a series of incredibly close calls that was easily one of my best performances in the game ever, I took the elevator to floor 2, stepped up to the door to the next room, and died. There was a mine on _the other side of the door_ that killed me as soon as I stepped up to the _closed_ door. 100% undetectable. It's not like you can go around shooting every door instead of opening it, you'll run out of ammo or your gun will break.

I can only really recommend this right now if you enjoy games that make you hate them a little bit. It's still getting updates and the devs clearly care about the game, so I think it will continue improving. The last update (0.9) added a lot of cool stuff.

A final note - in addition to difficulty presets (e.g. Easy & Normal) you can also customize the difficulty, adjusting enemy resists, damage, action points, mission rewards, etc. There is a fair degree of granularity but it doesn't provide tools to solve all of the balance issues.

a dumbed down supreme commander lacking any character or charm

It's def a bethesda title - 9 crashes to desktop in 12 hours of gameplay but I expected this and mash the quicksave button accordingly. Someday a fan patch will fix most of them. That's just how Bethesda do.

But the dialog. Oh my god the dialog. It's like it was all written by drunk accounting interns on their last day and the voice actors pregamed with valium. It's like Melvar's fanfic. The immersion shatters every time an NPC opens their mouth. It's so cringe.

I would describe the first 12 hours as "forced exposition and washed out color palettes".

The only reason Paradox makes games is to sell you DLC. If they can't figure out how make more DLC fit in the game they rewrite the rules and jam it in anyway. Usually in a way that is harmful to the base game if you don't shell out for the DLC.

It's fun, and I got my moneys worth with 80+ hours played, but it is hella unfinished. The game is absolutely riddled with hooks for features they never got around to implementing. It feels very much like an early access game but the devs "released" it so I doubt that will ever change.

In a dark room 3 feet from a headcrab zombie, gun runs dry, grab a fresh magazine from the backpack to reload, try to jam it into the empty that is still in the gun, spaz about ejecting the spent mag from the gun, drop the full one I'm holding, stumble backwards, grab another mag from the backpack, shove it into the gun, try to shoot, didn't ♥♥♥♥ the gun, s*** s*** s***, ♥♥♥♥ the gun, blast the zombie point blank.
11/10 would panic again

The gameplay and storytelling elements that made System Shock 2 and Deus Ex great really shine in Prey. A worthy entry to the genre. 10/10 would play again.

I played it, then immediately replayed it. An engaging story, interesting characters, and a good atmosphere make this a solid story driven adventure.

If your idea of the pinnacle of gamemaking is Call of Honor: Modern Battlefields of Duty DUB Edition, maybe give it a pass. You will spend a lot of time walking around, having conversations, exploring, discovering spooky ♥♥♥♥, and not murdering folk.