Recent reviews by SilentBoomer

Lethal Company is a co-op horror game created by Zeekerss, a single developer. This game blends the horrors of being an Amazon employee under increasingly worse working conditions and quotas with the dangers of unknown, deadly space entities. The game involves a simple gameplay loop of looking for scrap to sell to “The Company” while you run, sneak, and sometimes fight to meet that quota. Highly recommend buying this to play with friends, especially when it is a very affordable game (especially when on sale).

For such a cheap price, this game has an insanely large modding community. With a bunch of mods at your disposal, you can add endless amounts of content to explore!

One of the latest updated added to Lethal Company is a rotating challenge seed pool. Each one brings its own unique challenge to play solo or with your friends. This, on top pf modded and solo vanilla play, allow you to best adjust the challenge you are looking for.

One major advantage Lethal Company has over similar games is its charmingly basic graphics and very expertly crafted atmospheric design. The game not only can run on most devices, but Zeekerss did a fantastic job adding plenty of ambient sounds and sound effects to keep you on edge when there is no hostile around. You never know if that vent opening sound is real, or if those sounds in the distance may be a monster coming to end your shift early, or if you are slowly going mad.

If interested, you can find more of my reviews through my curator group, Buyer’s Survival Guide.

As of 5/5/2024 and 8/6/2024, this review has been updated to reflect the current state of the game.

Helldivers 2 is an online, third-person, squad-based shooter created by Arrowhead Game Studios. In Helldivers 2, you will fight for freedom and Managed democracy across the galaxy against humanity’s foes. In what was a refreshingly positive twist, this live service game started as an extremely pro-consumer with incredibly involved and transparent developers.

As of today, Helldivers 2 has lost a vast majority of its playerbase due to continued controversies and mismanagement by Arrowhead Studio. This includes:
- Actively lying and omitting the fact the game would require forced PSN account linking despite selling it everywhere, even when those countries cannot access PSN or make an account.
- Constant, baffling nerfs and tweaks without play input despite promises they would stop doing this and focus on better balancing future content. (Ex: making it so flamethrowers cannot work through chainlink fences)
- Despite promising players that they would strive to better playtest new additions to the game to avoid past issues of newly added content breaking the game, no improvement has occurred.
- Hyping up their new big content update, Arrowhead held a livestream on 8/6/2024. This stream not only was pre-recorded, but chat was locked down so you could only post at most two messages throughout the entire stream. There was no community/player involvement, and the Q&A was very softball, borderline useless information for players.

I would personally recommend to avoid this game like the plague at this point. While once an amazing game I praised, Arrowhead Studio and Sony have continued to show they don’t care about the community and will gladly do their own thing at the cost of player enjoyment.


Earlier this year, several months after release, a new requirement was added to the game that requires you to link your Steam account to a PlayStation Network account in order to play the game. Not only was this dropped without warning long after many purchased the game, but this change leaves many countries unable to play the game due to PSN not being covered in those countries.
As of 5/5/2024, Sony announced this would no longer be occurring. Hopefully this will not happen again, but it did break a lot of trust in Arrowhead Studios many players had.

Since the release of Helldivers 2, there has been reoccurring issues with Arrowhead Studio and their staff having employees go rogue and insult, slander, and/or mock players, fans, or other game developers. At first this was not a studio issue, but this has happened three times with community management staff, and is not exclusive to that department of the team. While they demote and make changes after this happens, Arrowhead must act before this compounds with the PSN controversy that threatens to destroy all goodwill that the developers had.

Arrowhead started as remarkably transparent and open with the community. For example, on launch, the servers were quickly overwhelmed as the team did not expect the mass amount of support and eagerness it received. With little room for much more players than they could host, the team openly communicated and apologized for this, even suggesting to many others to hold off purchasing the game until they got more server space (which they provided updates on and solved relatively quickly).

Past this trial however, the team became less and less honest and genuine over time. While still being mostly honest and admitting shortcomings, Arrowhead has spiraled downwards into making continued promises to do better and work on making beneficial changes for players while doubling, tripling, etc. down on continuing their bad practices.

Arrowhead surprised the community by recently announcing that the game now requires a PSN link to your Steam account to play. This was not mentioned beforehand, and goes against the transparent, honest history the studio has had at the start. This was confirmed to be pushed by Sony, but also was known by Arrowhead several months in advance to the release of the game. While not all blame lies on Arrowhead for this controversy, they have not learned from their mistake and continue to make false promises and poor decisions that negatively affect player and community enjoyment on the game

One major difference between Helldivers 2 and other live services is that not only is Arrowhead open and transparent with the community, but they actually play a major role in player experiences from the overall war effort down to individual missions. Much like a Game Master in various tabletop games, Arrowhead works to craft an engaging, unique experience in individual missions and in how Major Order campaigns are affected by the community’s actions. A lucky few players are even gifted with rare gifts during a mission from devs, allowing players to come across new vehicles and enemies before they are fully realized by the community. It all blends together to craft a unique blend of storytelling and rumor mills as some helldivers start spreading the news about what they encountered.

A staple in live service games, battlepasses and cosmetic shops are also somewhat present in this game. However, Helldivers 2 provides players with ample ways to collect the premium currency of Super Credits as they play. Most cosmetics, are actually earned by medals through the passes, which can be obtained without the usual insane grinds other live services would require. You can always pay to unlock these passes by buying Super Credits, but it does Arrowhead has not built the game into forcing you to do so, and currently most content in the game is unlocked through the free pass or through upgrading your ship or purchasing stratagems through your ship’s menu. These do not require Super Credits, but other currencies or resources amply provided through gameplay and major/minor order completions.

If interested, you can find more of my reviews through my curator group, Buyer’s Survival Guide.

Destiny 2 is an action MMO, first person shooter created by Bungie, originally published under Blizzard/Activision. The game has evolved over many years of content, now having become a free to play live service model with paid seasonal passes and DLC content. Under Activision, the game pushed heavily on microtransactions, anti quality-of-life features, and lackluster DLC such as Curse of Osiris. After leaving Activision, Bungie made changes that greatly repaired community trust, only to turn back to heavy focuses on microtransactions and now seasonal passes. A lot of the game has since been removed, including the original campaign. I do not recommend this game anymore.

After several years of content, the file size for the game was getting huge. Bungie’s solution? They would begin sunsetting and removing content from the game. This move was done especially during the start/middle of the seasonal content focus, removing multiple DLCs from the game people paid full price for. On top of this, loads of gear people earned throughout the years would no longer be covered, rendering them useless as the level creep kept climbing.
This problem is only exasperated due to the seasonal content unnecessarily bloating the game’s data to be deleted when the next annual pass begins. Seasonal content does not stay around, and is a waste of your money and kills the story as you have to actively play the game since before sunsetting/vaulting DLCs to the present to fully grasp the evilving story.

One of the latest scandals Bungie had gotten into was selling a beginner’s starter pack that included mostly worthless gear for an unusually steep cost for the items included. This bundle was quickly removed after massive community backlash, and was not made to actively help new players who bought it.

With game content not guaranteed to stick around or be supported long term, Destiny 2 has developed a heavy fear of missing out (FOMO) culture. This culture is utilized to incentivize buying seasonal passes and paid currency, as the paid currency shop circulates between paid only items regularly. In order to truly play and collect everything, you need to play insane amounts of time across characters, or pay lots of money for everything. Some content is also only available during certain holiday seasons, utilizing FOMO to get you to play more during these events to try and unlock both old and new content before it’s unavailable again.
Microtransactions are not just for cosmetics either, as with the introduction of a transmog cosmetic system, the materials required are limited per season per character, regardless of how much you would be able to grind for them. The solution? Buy these materials in the store. You also can buy other resources used throughout the game, all of which have gotten harder and harder to keep from running dry with the season content and constant need to level up and buy new gear.

As the game continued to delve deeper into FOMO tactics and paid, temporary seasonal content, Bungie mostly stopped supporting new content for PvP gamemodes such as Gambit, Trials of Osiris, and Crucible. Eventually, Bungie released a statement saying they did not plan to release any more content for these gamemodes. This like many other campaigns, missions, and more, would meet the shared fate of being thrown away or neglected in favor of seasonal content and for their Marathon project recently announced.

If interested, you can find more of my reviews through my curator group, Buyer’s Survival Guide.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is party-based RPG developed by Larian Studios, set within the Faerun Dungeons & Dragons universe. Larian created a true masterpiece, taking their time to create a responsive, flexible tabletop like RPG that melds the best of video game and D&D mechanics. There have not been any shady industry practices, and Larian treats their community with both respect and transparency. I highly recommend this story-rich RPG, even if you have no experience with D&D.

While not perfect at launch, Larian Studios has continued to support the game by not only fixing bugs, but adding new features and additions to the gameplay and story. Entire new ending content has been added over time, along with quality of life changes like the ability to see the inventories of your companions at camp. Larian has consistently patched and communicated with players before, during, and after the game’s launch, including that they plan to step away from Bauldurs Gate 3, considering it a complete game with no plans for DLC.

One major praise for Baldur’s Gate 3 is that they took great care to support many, many possible dialogue options, choices, and strategies that a player may come up with. Whether it be a one off Clerical encounter by speaking with a dead body, or even being able to bypass an entire process to break into a tower by clever usage of leverage and teleportation; Larian truly allows the player to get creative, in or out of combat and dialogue.

If interested, you can find more of my reviews through my curator group, Buyer’s Survival Guide.

A true revival of the Doom franchise that takes what made the originals so great and adds to it, resulting in a truly innovative Boomer Shooter that immerses you in the visual fantasy of getting to rip and tear your way through the enemies of mankind and hell itself.

Warframe is a free-to-play Hack-and-Slash that provides countless hours of entertainment with its fast paced mobility focused combat. The developers have spent years working and improving the game, and their faithful development shows, even putting most other free-to-play games to shame with their very fair and consumer friendly practices, much unlike other popular companies these days. While large updates and story may be slow or delayed at times, they are very much worth the wait. I would recommend anyone try this game if they are looking for a great free hack-and-slash game.

While I originally was very harsh on this edition of Skyrim, I have looked back on it and found that I had been a bit too harsh in my original judgments as that the game improved since it's release. To cover the basic pros and cons of Skyrim Special Edition:

Pros:
- Better ability to run since its no longer running on x32.
- Consistent modding support and endless possibilities for new gameplay through said support.
- Modding for SSE has far surpassed what used to be possible in the original version of SSE (To the point where Skyrim modded can now amply compete with other more modern fantasy games).
- Much needed potential boost and some minor visual enhancements.

Cons:
- Creation Club updates constantly breaking modded games (Can be worked around by not updating and mod support has greatly helped mitigate this).
- Bethesda jammed far too many low quality or sloppily implemented paid mods into CC for it to have been worth implementing. However, they also have a good amount of decent mods for their price, with a great amount even being free through anniversary edition, or as limited time freebies.
- Bethesda did not do the best job optimizing the game, but this has easily been fixed due to community mod support.

To conclude, while in itself SSE/Anniversary Edition is nothing too special, it greatly increases what is possible for the game, extending its livelihood for years to come and allowing modders to better create endless possibilities of content for the game.

Transmissions: Element 120 is one of the best Half Life 2 mods I have ever gotten to play. The story is short but incredibly sweet, with great new mechanics that add a new twist to the gravity gun. The maps and scenery look stunning, and I highly recommend anyone try this if they are a fan of the Half Life series. First game or mod I'm ever willing to give my first 10/10.

Half Life C.A.G.E.D. is a simple and sweet Half Life mod that puts you in a prison break scenario. The puzzles are engaging, the levels are well designed, and the music is fairly good, though a little repetitive, and the game plays fairly well. Some complain the game is way to hard, but I found as long as you dont rush through everything and are willing to do some minor trial and error at one or two areas, you will quickly be able to pick up on a working playstyle for you. Lastly, it's of course a free mod, so there isn't much reason not to try it if your a fan of the gamaeplay from Half Life. If I had to rate this game, I would give it a solid 7/10, as it is definitely worth playing a few times.

Recently tried replaying this game in hopes that I may actually like the game. Unfortunately it made my thoughts on the game even more justified. The difficulty in single player is almost absurb, with a large skill gap between easy mode and the next difficulty (seriously, I got about 4 levels of no enemies spawning, even sometimes during the teleporter waiting phases on easy, and then was completely overwhelmed within minutes on the next difficulty). The game is a bit better with friends as long as its stable, but that only lasts until you learn that there is a chance your save file may become corrupt, meaning your unable to save and stuck in a new game state. I've tried the many suggestions given to me through looking up help on this bug, but unfortunately nothing had worked.

I know my experiences aren't the same compared to others, but while i was almost starting to enjoy the game, the corrupt save bug completely ruined any chance that I and any others who encountered this same problem would ever end up liking this game. Its been a very rocky and buggy adventure, but atlas I think I may just call it quits with this game.