Recent reviews by BeanyUndead

It is one thing to not offer a game in some nations. It is another entirely to offer a game in specific countries and then, because some Sony executive wants to manipulate his shares in the stock-market, deny those specific countries service after purchase. Yes, Sony relaxed its grip and now we don't need a Play Station account to play. But, countries that don't support PS accounts are still banned from both purchase and access. I am not going to support devs who support a publisher that is literally ripping-off hundreds of people based on their nation of origin. It's despicable. Yes, I am in a nation that supports PSN. No, I am not going to engage a 'got mine, don't care' attitude. I am not playing Helldivers 2 nor will I change the review until these ... individuals who can be described using plenty of pejoratives ... rollback ALL the changes that were forced by Sony and allow all nations with STEAM access to have access again.

This is an exceptional war game. Most people would be forgiven for assuming that The Great War: Western Front was destined to be either repetitive or disrespectfully historically inaccurate. To be historically accurate it would have to be repetitive, as this is the reputation of the actual First World War, but if such repetition were sacrificed to the Gods of hyperactive modern gaming audiences (like was done in Battlefield I), it would disrespect the actual sacrifices made by those who actually fought in the war. This game however keeps the strategic repetitiveness of World War I, while keeping the player on their toes during tactical battles. The AI is extremely good at exploiting weaknesses in trench-lines and formations and is competent at using technological development to overcome defences the player believed to be 'perfect'.

Perhaps the most amazing element of this game however is its capacity to make you feel guilty for managing an effective defence. Watching literally hundreds of enemy soldiers getting cut down by your machine-guns and mortars while your entrenched men fire volley after volley of rifle fire into their lines is bad enough, but then witnessing the handful of men that survived dragging themselves over the first line of barbed-wire as you drop hundreds of 155mm shells onto their position can be heartbreaking. It is a game that truly encapsulates the slaughter that embodied the Great War. It has so far given me almost 20 hours of engaging game-play and I have not finished the Triple Entente Campaign quite yet. I've still got the Triple Alliance Campaign to go, not to mention historical battles and scenarios.

The Usual Story: A 16 mile march done in record time, then the devs sat down for a rest 100 meters from the finish line. WTAF.
- Multiplayer does not include the Campaign. Utter lunacy. They've got multiplayer for individual battles, so the more complicated elements of the net-code are sorted. They've got a turn-based campaign with non-simultaneous moves, so the conversion of this system to multiplayer now the net-code and server client architecture is complete would be an issue of weeks. So where is the multiplayer campaign? It's like the devs ran up a sixteen mile hill and stopped 100 meters from the finish-line. This should be added.
- Political pressure to attack. It is possible to play a game of The Great War without ever attacking. I have lost thousands while the enemy has lost millions. This however would be viewed as cowardice by the governments of the day, especially the nobility. This should be added.
- Corpses, blood, and disease. The bodies of fallen soldiers disappear about 10 seconds after death. There is no blood. There are no swarms of flies. There is no disease in the trenches. I know leaving bodies on the screen would result in performance loss but give the players a slider in the options menu. Regardless, the devs should find a way of representing this. This should be added.
- Tanks. These are improperly represented in the game and remove the World War I feel when they arrive. Firstly, all attacks have them following their development, which can occur quite early, which is both detrimental to the game experience and horribly inaccurate. I've destroyed 33 German tanks so far in my game and its only just ticked over to 1918. That is quite impressive considering that the Germans only ever developed 18 tanks during the entire war. While the Allies did have substantially more, they had a limited impact on most battles, which is not the case in this game, with tanks often causing entire flanks to collapse simply because they can't be destroyed by anything other than elite grenadier infantry or protracted rifle fire. Secondly, the tanks are too fast and effective. They move like greyhounds across no-mans-land, seldom break down, seldom get stuck in the mud and the most glaring error of all - they can stop and easily get going again. Their engines were never that good. This should be changed to represent how it actually was.
- Weather. This is an unusual omission. The greatest enemy of the average solider on the Western Front was not actually the soldiers on the other side of no-man's-land. It was trench-attrition as the result of weather. The game has weather but no real effects are felt during the game. Trenches don't flood, soldier's don't freeze during winter, there's no starvation or trench-foot. This needs to be added.

FINAL: A truly great single player experience that is worth the money. However, the devs, while clearly talented, are strange people. They do all the hard-stuff to make the experience great, but then inexplicably leave the easy stuff so as to avoid their game being fantastic. Maybe the issues listed above will be fixed in a patch? Who knows. But, never-the-less, a great game. Not fantastic, even though it so easily could be, but great.

The best, most immersive game I have played in years. Tactical depth, real moral choices, amazing battles supplemented by extremely satisfying explosion effects and sounds and a surprisingly great story. The list goes on. It can best be described as a industrial-punk rocket-fleet management game with FTL-Like strategy elements, and a unique side-scrolling tactical combat system, all of which are sprinkled with overtones of Dune, Mad Max and the Second Boer War. Then, considering all this, add in nuclear weapons, a Neo-Imperial Russian-Afghanistani pseudo culture and a messianic parable, and you've got HighFleet. Seriously, this game is worth the money. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I am actually really enjoying this game, far more than I thought I would. In fact, the only thing I have been disappointed in is the vehicle combat which has obviously been automated for the consoles (you know, the weak machines holding back the industry). The character's are interesting, at least for an open-world zombie shooter and the game is challenging, if you play on survival 1 (don't play survival 2 - it makes it so people can survive head-shots - takes all the tactics out of the game). The world feels visceral and wet, the weapons have impact and the organic exploration is full of unexpected surprises.

So, I'm having a good time with it. It is good.

An absolutely fantastic game. So much fun. There is something extremely satisfying about the whole experience, from brewing your own space-mead, to customising your characters, to completing assignments, to upgrading your gear, to dropping Aliens-style onto infested asteroids, to exploring alien caves, to the sounds when your axe hits gold, to the banter between the dwarfs, to the variance in mission types, to the frantic combat, to strategies involved in character mixing, to...look, I could continue for another thousand words, but the greatest complement I can give this amazing game is this: I am stopping writing this review here because I want to get back to playing Deep Rock Galactic. Buy it. It is amazing.

This game is a buggy, glitchy, messy masterpiece. I really love it. I have not encountered a single bug (yet) which has not been solved by a quick reload. The story is, while somewhat predictable at times, compelling and its odd narrative structure (like playing the opening credits and title after the conclusion of Act 1) does give the whole affair an air of nuanced uncertainty. The open world is full of activities and tasks all of which are communicated fairly well, and the player's interactions with 'the main quest line' is supported by patient build-up to action. I recommend this game. It has provided me with my money's worth of engaging fun and I'm not even 1/3 the way through it. The low reviews on metacritic mostly come from the fact that the devs had to downscale everything for the consoles and could not accomplish the task effectively. Basically, the game is too demanding for console hardware; yet another example of how pandering to the dated and hardware deficient console market is frequently the bane of good games. Imagine, just imagine, if they had spent the last six months improving the game for PC rather than literally stripping it down for the consoles at the behest of Sony and Microsoft. Sigh. Anyway, great game on PC if not a bit unpolished at the moment.

A great game that will only get better with mods. I was a big fan of the original Warband, and this game is a step forward in graphics and game-play. Buy it. Buy it now.

This is a wonderfully atmospheric and amazing looking game. The devs should be proud. But its unbalanced. Yes, I am about to say its too hard but at the same time I do not necessarily advocate a difficulty decrease. You see, the difficulty is so high that levels become boring. My friends and I tried the starting level more than thirty-five times and just got overwhelmed. We tried different strategies, different weapons and consulted a massive variety of online walk-throughs and guides; they helped but no so much that we could actually finish a level. So, difficulty is good (go Dark Souls) but the levels lack variety between playthroughs so they get boring. The level variation needs to be improved if you want us bashing our heads against such a steep difficulty curve. Can't recommend at the moment but give it some time. I'll be watching and will change this review the moment it stops being boring. To be clear, I love difficult games. However, games that require such precision among team-mates to counter such massive difficulty rather than personal skill get boring quickly. I hate giving this game a thumbs-down so will be looking to see where it goes with great interest.

This is one of my favourite games of all time. I cannot recommend it enough. The drama and adventure are brilliant and every playthrough offers different challenges and moral choices. With regards to the latter, every decision you make has a moral perspective and it is done organically; no ‘ethic points’ or other arbitrary ways of dictating how good or bad you are – just your actions and their consequences. It is brilliant. Base building is great, the legacy system is great, character levelling is great. This game is simply great. I like to play it on Nightmare because that is where the read survival aspects of the game exist but even the difficulty levels themselves are worthy of praise as they allow you to make the game what you want; a vicious zombie survival sim or a fun scavenger sim; it is seriously an amazing game. Buy it and support this dev.
At the time of writing this review, SOD2 has mixed reviews, averaging around 68%. This is highly perplexing. There are games out there, so shallow and neophytic, that have highly positive reviews, yet this amazing game has mixed reviews? That makes no sense to me. I read some of the negative reviews and they all seem to be saying things like ‘I hate the frequency of zombies, infections, infestations, plague-hearts and mobs’. Basically, these people seem to be against ‘content’. They are looking for an idle game of some description requiring minimal effort. I say this game is amazing because of its rich and engaging content, where you can’t always accomplish every quest and sometimes things get overwhelming…in the apocalypse. It’s a game rich in personal stories and real procedural drama. I seriously don’t understand people who are against such things in games.
Thumbs up all the way.

A great game for those who want an experience in which you get to systematically take apart a drug-cartel by doing extremely similar missions in different environments using a variety of self-designed tactics. Anyone who says that this is a bad game because it's all 'busy work' and lacks a meaningful story should go and play a game designed for such things. Instead, this game lets you engage in independent cover-ops in a massive and beautifully crafted sandbox complete with reactive enemies and 'organically' generated moral problems. I highly recommend this game to people who have the imagination to pretend that they are a independent spec-ops team behind enemy lines; for those people, a rich and rewarding time awaits.