Recent reviews by wyqydsyq

Haven't played GTAV in years, went to try it out again for the Enhanced release to find that Rockstar decided to not allow playing GTAO on Linux. They have the BE anticheat client Linux support enabled for singleplayer, but not multiplayer. So it's not any kind of technical limitation they just don't want Linux users' money.

It's the next step of Arma. Not quite Arma 4 but it's a testbed for Enfusion engine which will be used for Arma 4.

It's pretty much alpha/early access state so has some rough edges but already looks and feels way better than any previous Arma iteration. Graphics and animations are much better. Audio design is S tier. Playercontroller feels slick and natural, comparable to or better than Tarkov.

The vanilla Conflict game mode on it's own is pretty fun, similar team objective gameplay to AAS in Squad but it's much larger scale and a lot more dynamic.

Already has tons of community content. Lots of community servers are running RHS+WCS mod packs which more or less brings the setting/time period from Cold War to present day, so Tarkov enjoyers will be pleased to see all their favourite plate carriers, scopes and attachments etc

A pretty solid foundation and some good innovations on game design/mechanics in the 4x/grand strategy genre.

Currently I cannot recommend it though due to it being extremely buggy and unstable, especially in multiplayer which is the only reason I wanted to play.
As of the latest update I've tried 3 multiplayer matches with friends and they all end up in a corrupted state causing the host to crash <50 turns in. The rest of this review assumes this will be fixed and focuses on game design.

PROS:
Compared to Civ the early game exploration and city-building phase is way better. Having your initial civ pick deferred until the game has already started is a good way to remove any kind of pick screen metagaming and encourages playing reactively to your starting conditions rather than beelining the same meta build every game.

Overall I think the progression systems are well designed, players are deterred from purely focusing on one aspect while still being rewarded for specializing if they can do it while maintaining a good balance.

Territories follow a more Crusader Kings or Total War style province system rather than the common 4x tiles. It can be a bit janky sometimes but overall I think it works well.
One feature from this that is missing though is the ability to integrate/transfer specific tiles between provinces. If I own two adjacent provinces I should be able to set a production task for the owning city to transfer a tile from one province to the other. This gives players a solution to cases where the randomly generated province lines prevents a province from reaching optimal efficiency.

CONS:
The problems start to show when you progress further into the game and start to engage more with the diplomacy and war mechanics. You have little to no control over decisions, the game just arbitrarily decides all the specifics for you.

A good example of the game making arbitrary decisions that should be left up to the player is when you receive a diplomatic offer e.g. a neighboring ruler wants to share map exploration with you, you can opt to "counter" the offer but have zero say in what terms you want to counter with, the game just picks a seemingly random amount of gold to set in the counter-offer. It could be for 40 or 4,000 gold depending on what the game decides it often ends up demanding more than the other player can even afford to pay.

These issues of the game making arbitrary decisions that should be left to the player are prominent through the whole diplomacy and war systems, almost every decision is reduced to a simple yes/no with all of the specific outcomes of that binary choice decided by the game. This ultimately makes these core game systems a rigid on-rails experience where the player has no agency over their own diplomacy, it feels more like you're just taking a backseat and watching the game play out these mechanics for you.

The recent update reworking how wars end was a good step in the right direction - wars are no longer force-ended and players can choose to continue a war (for example maybe you need a few more turns to secure an objective that will give enough war score to make a demand you want) with rising negative impacts on their empire if they take too long to complete it. If similar game design changes to increase player agency can be applied across diplomacy mechanics as a whole I think the game will be in a solid place.

gurkaburgarglewrogargh

"the soundtrack is an absolute banger"


It's like monopoly on crack. Play with your friends and you'll be constantly giggling and cracking up as you screw each other over

basshunter made a whole song about it so it's obviously good

Comparing it to Tarkov since that's obviously the direct competition.

Pros:
+ Works perfectly out-of-the box on Linux via Proton.
+ PvE/Co-op mode included in the box price (no $250 pay2win DLC needed).
+ Huge open world map, nice world design and graphics look better than Tarkov for the most part.
+ Factions system makes it really easy to party up as a solo player, unlike Tarkov where most of the time you'll get TK'd if you try to queue up with randoms.
+ Interactions with doors and windows are a lot nicer than in Tarkov, you can open windows instead of having to smash them, you can partially open doors to peek the next room without fully exposing your body in an open doorframe.

Cons:
- Arm animations and vaulting are both kind of awkward and janky, could use some polish.
- While it runs with playable performance (90fps+) on my fairly high-end system, this is still considerably poor performance as other comparable open-world games usually run at 120fps+ for me. For people with slower systems it's probably borderline unplayable.
- Some windows are indestructible. A lot of windows can be opened to kind of work around this but windows need to be breakable, bullets popping clean holes through them without any shattering just feels weird as hell and immersion-breaking.

With performance/stability improvements and some work on making arm animations and vaulting look/feel a bit more natural, I think this game will eventually be better than Tarkov.

It's still very early access beta state, so if you are wanting a polished experience probably best to wait a few months and check back.

A lot easier to pick up than PoE and a lot deeper as far as builds and mechanics go than D4. The story is nothing amazing though, like it's passable but doesn't really draw you in. The class system allowing you to mix skills from different specializations is pretty cool.

Would recommend for anyone looking for a new ARPG that isn't as complex as PoE or as greedily monetized as D4.

Giving it a downvote though due to bugs (mostly missing textures) in the Linux version that have been reported on the forums since Nov 2023 but remain unfixed.

Fixing these missing textures for the OpenGL/Vulkan Linux versions to make the game playable for Steam Deck/Linux users shouldn't be a huge effort. Please fix and I will change review back to positive

really fun and detailed cold-war era RTS. the 10v10 game mode is pure chaos

Finally a AAA game that looks, feels and plays like a AAA game. This will be GOTY for sure.

A beautiful hybrid of FTL and Space Engineers with an RPG-like career mode