Recent reviews by Mystical Llama

The PSN requirement is wildly disappointing.

Not only am I not interested in PSN *at all* and find this to be an incredibly suspicious and underhanded move to pull months after a very rocky launch, it actively makes it impossible for tens or even hundreds of thousands of people globally who legitimately bought the game, and supported this developer through that same rocky launch with staunch loyalty and patience, to play it anymore without violating Sony TOS.

This is betrayal, and fraud. Sony will have to do a lot to earn back my respect and my business. Arrowhead needs to push back, hard, or they'll end up the same in my esteem. You wanna play the "This was the publisher, not us" card? Then prove it. 'Cause this is not okay.

Giving this a positive review since the game feels amazing. I've played this for 25 hours after launch, I've enjoyed it so much. So easily worth the promotional $32 I spent. Art and style are fantastic, game is fairly stable (despite some of the other reviews I've seen, I've only had one CTD which was likely my own fault for alt-tabbing during a loading screen), and overall the effects look very clean.

BUT

I skipped the story after the first four missions since I had little to no investment in the plot and went straight to building my own Gang. So far, I'm glad I did.

AI direction at higher levels seems to have improved massively. I see fewer enemies chucking grenades at their own feet. However, it still needs work. When the AI is working, the enemies feel clever and adept at staging runs for objectives in order to leave with the loot. But if you get a few good rounds where you dumpster your opponents and take their weapons, the remaining operations in the set become way too easy as the AI doesn't seem to know how to handle unarmed fighters effectively. Great since it makes taking out your opponents feel meaningful, but bad since it still feels the AI is lacking.

Content feels like a good start, but ultimately a little shallow. I've gotten my gang up to around rank 8 on every character, and I've maxed out my available active/passive abilities on my core crew. But I can only get so many Lascannons version III - V before the equipment starts to feel a touch stale. There is functionally no difference between a Chain Sword, a Power Sword, and a regular Sword. A regular sword overall does more damage, a powersword has 20% more armor penetration (but roughly 10% less damage) and a chainsword has a very small bleed effect (but also, 10% less damage) but the latter two have a reload requirement. Effectively making a regular sword vastly more AP efficient while sacrificing practically nothing. I could see more equipment specific abilities allowing you to specialize your people more deeply, or greater requirements for using specific equipment of higher potency. Like, put an intelligence requirement on using power weapons to sap EXP away from Brawlers, and make power weapons deal higher melee penetration or greater damage. Make them correspondingly rare and more expensive to fit the lore. Might also consider weapon modifications to keep things a bit more fresh. Perhaps this changes somewhere after the fourth operational level, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Match flow is just... outright bad. Once you get used to the individual hotkeys it moves at a steady pace, but the amount of time that is wasted while selecting a new fighter is just way too damned high. There are three transition screens between every "Round", with up to five "Rounds" in a turn. And watching the AI soft-lock the game repeatedly while running into obstacles gets very tiresome.

I also feel the game is a touch too easy since you can see the entire map, and melee is ridiculously OP. You can run farther on a turn than most weapons can shoot, so getting up next to your opponent and twin-striking them to death is pretty simple. I don't mind being able to see the entire map, but maybe add in some camo options to make ranged combat a touch more meaningful. I could also see reducing visibility but increasing the range of weapons to make sniper ambushes possible, or just slow everyone down so they can't sprint all the way across the map in a single round. Melee doesn't need to be nerfed so much as Ranged combat needs to be buffed to make things feel more deadly. There is no good ranged equivalent to Stun.

Overall, this feels like a great start. It's a good platform to build on, and if the Dev improves the AI and match flow, you'll have a solid re-playable strategy game which is more than worth the money and could host numerous DLCs. But it needs some TLC before DLC.