Recent reviews by FinCthulhu

Game is good.

If you liked Vermintide 2, this is it, but 40k. Pretty good!

Also, no scoreboards!

Boss of the company pleased women have less rights now and do not have bodily autonomy. ♥♥♥♥ him and ♥♥♥♥ this game. AVOID.

Take note troglodytes, this is what it means to lose rights; not being able to say racist or homophobic things is not a loss of a right.

UPDATE: Guy got sacked or stepped down. Good, but review will remain negative until it becomes clear whether he stays with the company in a reduced capacity to profit from the game.

What a shame, this game has the feel of Necromunda down exceedingly well, but the game is just not done yet. Indeed, the version number seems to be 0.58 according to the main menu.

Janky is the best word to describe what it feels to play; enemies constantly respawn and usually do so right behind you in secondary missions, or just appear from the ether right in front of you. While the shooting works pretty well, there's a few issues: namely those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Orlock shields that are impervious to bolter shells. Gibs are also very underwhelming. Everyone turns into a bald man when they blow up, which is very confusing when you blow up an Escher or Goliath ganger.

If you're looking to buy this, wait. Maybe Streumon will do an enchanced edition later down the line, maybe they'll fix this one. Work on the jank, add more missions, more enemy types in addition to Eschers, Goliaths, and Orlocks. How about some reedy Delaque weirdos? Or fancy pants Van Saars?

Also why are Chaos and Genestealer cults identifying themselves as cults on their bounties? That's beyond bizarre!

The spin-off Gears was meant for, and it works. Uses the tried-and-true XCOM EU formula, with soldier customization and classes, but does enough to not to be a straight clone, with gridless movement, 3 action points to spend, and Gears staples like executions, chainsaws, and bayonet charges — something the mainline series has tried to bury under trite animation glitching and exploits with shotguns for two games now — that add benefits to your squad when used.

The story is the standard Gears fare, gruff soldier types want to shoot evil mole people, but being a prequel and set in the first year of the Locust War, you get to see the cool COG architecture from the first games from a whole new perspective.

Where it does lack and what it doesn't borrow from XCOM, even Chimera Squad that launched just a week earlier, is a strategic layer. There is no tight-rope act to keep your convoy of ragtag soldiers and Stranded going, no doom tracker until head honcho moleman Ukkon's evil plans come to fruition. I know the title of the game isn't Gears Tactics with some Strategy, but that's one thing I'd like to see for a potential sequel. And I do hope there's more Gears Tactics in the future, the series just works so well in the genre.

But for now, TC, get the main characters in Gears 5. No, not in ten years in Operation 5, but right now.

The game itself is pretty great. Not having played a Gears game since 3, it's (somewhat) good to be back. Pretty cool campaign although it suffers from the open world-y bits that are just low effort padding, but once you get back into proper, more linear Gears-like levels, it's good. Near the end though, a choice pops up that will make two key characters inconsequential later on in the story, regardless of your choice.

PvP multiplayer is solid when it all works, although my heart weeps I can't spawn with my trusty comrade, the Retro Lancer, in TDM. Maps feel a bit smaller than I remember, with a lot more blind corners. Some issues with getting thrown into wrong data centres with massive pings in ranked so beware.

The PvE modes, well, there's a few issues. Escape is decent, but it seriously needs a mode where you go through a procedurally generated level with length and difficulty selected at the beginning. Otherwise, it's pretty fun for a while. Horde though, oh boy.
Whose idea was it to make Horde a hero based mode? On the surface it's the classic Horde mode, but now each character is their own class with a unique weapon set, different build options, and "ultimate" abilities with character specific levels and upgrades tied to said level. And there can only be one of each so if you wanted to play Marcus but someone else picked him first, well, have fun playing as another, possibly unranked, character. This hero system is also the reason why there are so few characters in the base game, even though quite a few appear in the campaign mode; the Coalition has to create a class for each new character which is why there are so few.

The game's biggest issue, and the reason I can't recommend anyone buy this game instead of getting it through the Xbox PC pass is the monetization. Overpriced cosmetics that can't be earned through play, insane grinding, random drops padded with useless items like blood splats or tag marks, XP boosters, it's the common plagues of modern premium priced big budget games. When you are expected to pay 10+ dollars for one skin with no reasonable way of earning said skins through play, the monetization is the thing that curbstomps this otherwise good game into a pulpy mush. Now, the Coalition has stated that new characters will not be paywalled, but it'd me remiss of me not to bring up a suspicion that's going on in the community, and this goes back to the hero system. While all new characters, as they do affect gameplay in some modes, won't be locked behind MTXs, there is no guarantee all the characters will be "new." Some may be skins for existing ones instead. For example, the Carmines. Imagine you unlock A.Carmine through whatever grind you are forced to do, but if you wanted to play B.Carmine, you would have to take out your wallet.

So, because of the disease of microtransactions, I can't recommend anyone to actually buy the game. If you absolutely must play it, get the Xbox PC pass, it's peanuts compared to the price they're asking on here and you get exactly the same game with no removal or easing of the mobile/F2P elements of its monetization.

Review may be amended depending on how the game develops, but I'm not holding my breath.

Amendment #1: The Coalition released 4 new characters to grind for... or buy for 5 bucks each. Most of these characters are already present in the game in some form or other, so in essence, you could end up paying up to 20$ extra for something you already have on your hard drive. The grind for these characters is insane: to unlock just one, you must do 40 versus rounds, 50 Horde waves, 18 Escape chapters, gain 60k XP, but with a pretty sensible unique challenge per character.

More worryingly, depending on how slow the Coalition makes these already in the game characters available (Clayton Carmine, Baird, Cole etc.) it could be quite some time before they need to either port something from 4, or create something new, and even then you would be expected to pay the 5 bucks to unlock them.

Going in the wrong direction with this. Will have to see how this develops further...

A worthy remake and an amazing game in its own right. GOTY 2019, no contest.

And to those of you who modded Mr X out, gid gud scrubs.

They made the already shallow "Bethesda game" formula even more so with over simplified gameplay elements, dialogue with less choices and even less substance, and pointless settlement building. Still manages to be entertaining enough to work as a time sink.

Can't recommend it as it stands and with no mods to spice things up, give it a pass and wait for the inevitable GOTY version for 10 eurobucks.

One of the few games that hooked me so. Then they added the van that ruined the fun for me and my crew. After we stopped playing because of it, I skimmed through every changelog to try and see if the van had been nerfed or set to only appear on Death Wish. I wanted to get back into the game I liked. All that ended when they added microtransactions.

Alas, in honest retrospect: everyone, myself included, who bought DLC share some of the blame. Microtransactions are nothing more than the logical next step. This is business, it's about making money.

And we proved all too willing to part with ours.

Xenonauts is the game for you if you want to experience the original X-Com without all the fidgeting with DOSBox and/or other such malarkey. It's not an exact 1/1, but pretty damn close with something of its own to bring to the table. Interception is now much more in-depth than in any other incarnation of this format.