Recent reviews by Emperor's Thieving Magpie

Arrowhead studios have dropped the ball completely. One of the last things I enjoyed was using flamethrowers during the terminid missions, that has now been destroyed, meaning there is no fun to be had anymore.

Do not buy the game. This is a bad game with a bad development studio that lies, manipulates and deflects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6XmR6ZlyC4

Too cluttered UI, otherwise the game is great.

You remember those good ol' days when you played Halo 2, 3 and even maybe Reach with your buds? Fighting on big team battle, chasing the scorpion and working together in order to achieve objectives? The slow, methodical gameplay that ended up in intense duels? Where positioning mattered, your ability to read the battlefield and knowledge of power weapon spawn timers gave you a superior advantage?

Don't worry, all of that is gone in Halo Infinite.

1: The maps do not have a consistent spawn pattern for you. You sometimes will end up spawning right behind or in frnt of enemies.
2: They have made BR's light power weapons on the map, meaning that if you go without one, you are practically screwed on any map that has any distances.
3: They have removed all team-spawn vehicles, except the warthog and mongeese. In turn making them drops. Basically making the balance "Whoever happens to be in the area".
4: The plasma pistol, a staple in the game, doesn't stun vehicles as you'd assume.
5: Due to the extreme prevalence of power weapons on tiny maps, with tiny ammo pools, it practically makes it pointless to try and steal enemy power weapon spawns to deny them access to them.

I can go on and on and on, but this is not a Halo. It is a CoD/hero shooter with a Halo skin slapped on top. Hell, they couldn't even return the AR back to its beefy sound - it, once more, sounds like a pea shooter. It has been over 2 decades guys - how can your sound portrayal of a weapon still be so ♥♥♥♥?

Expect a hectic shooter more akin to CoD, where you run around in circles, with no real team cohesion or team-play. If you're an old school Halo lover, this game isn't for you. It is just 90 gigs of nostalgia ruining disappointment. Play the MCC instead.

Geeze, Halo really did peak in Reach...

You know, when a Game Dev tells the SJW bigots to "Shove it up your ass", then you've got my full support. These commie ♥♥♥♥♥ will literally cancel everyone, starve millions and commit the worst genocides the planet has ever seen and at the same time preach how moral they are.

SJW's, please. SHOVE. IT. UP. YOUR. ASS.

This game is the best Autism Project since Dwarf Fortress. You like like making neat rows of productive factories? Then Factorio is for you. However, if you're a bigoted SJW? You won't be missed. LEAVE. YOU. ARE. CANCELLED.

Literally does not work. Managed to get into a single match, where there were 10v1 and after that I just could not enter another server for whatever reason.

This product should, and I mean it, not be sold as it is non-functioning.

Don't buy and if it does interest you, like it did me, wait until all the server issues have been resolved.

Preface:

Terrible Game. Buy Warhammer 40k Space Marines instead, it's older and cheaper but it has: Tons of customization, a campaign, it plays well and does so on older machines. It looks better than Eternal Crusade and it's multiplayer is balanced and refined.

Review:

A game that had a kickstarter and Early Access had no right to be this bad for its release. It's filled with bugs, it's poorly optimized, the models and weapons look like plastic toys. The game is unbalanced and has pretty poor sound design. It's gameplay is utterly attrocious, with rubberbanding, low ticket rates and ultimately stupid design decisions for every faction.

This is, at the best, worth 5 dollars. Not the 50 dollars they're currently asking for at the time of this review. It's poor and its spiritual predecessor, Warhammer 40k: Space Marine did everything this game does and does it better. It also has a campaign! So, go buy that. This game?

It's utter trash. Beyond trash. It's actually a scam.

The developers should be ashamed for this easy cash grab. Well, you managed to steal my money. I hope you steal no other people's money in the future.

Kindly, go ♥♥♥♥ yourselves.

While I'm usually not one for giving up on a game, this one deserved that honor in every regard. A game, which on the surface, looks interesting, unique and frankly deep in its options for creating voxel vehicles fall short a minute into its introduction.

Yet the entirely disgusting menu appearance, along with the tutorial that barely explains any of the concepts or mechanics of the game, to then ask you to go through and look at youtube video's to get a hold of the game. (Note to developer: Play Factorio, that game is quite a lot more advanced than this but it was able to make a tutorials that are engaging, challenging without the actual need of cups of frustration.)

I'm not even mentioning the awkward controls, the absolute ♥♥♥♥ building functions, the wobbling and confusing UI, disgustingly ugly textures along with other horrible design choices that makes this extremely hostile towards new players.

Do you want to relax and build? Don't buy this game.

Once more, when you want your players to watch youtube video's to get to know the basics of the game such as firing the weapons on a ship, you've done ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up.

DarkMaus, it wears its inspiration on its sleeve (Dark Souls) and does so proudly, with a comfortable, easy to learn and deep identity of its own. Broadly speaking, should you play this game? Yes, yes you should. Even if you're someone who's not interested in Dark Souls and its ilk, this is an amazing top down 2d rpg, well worth the asking price.

It's bleak and dark aesthetics suit well with the atmosphere its developer tried to create. You're instantly put into a strange world with realistic rules. It's free flowing tutorial allows a new player to easily flow into the gameplay, while challenging them. Even as a Dark Souls veteran (Over a thousand hours of gaming in the games respectively.) I felt that there was challenge, fair challenge.

The map allows and encourages exploration at the risk of losing your EXP (Marrow), with interesting enemies all teaching you something new in how you should approach combat. Even if you start hitting a wall of difficulty, the ghost mechanic, whereby you get the aid of a ghost NPC that lowers the difficulty by attacking the enemies, something that is entirely optional and modifiable if you so choose to use this mechanic to aid you, allowing great difficulty tweaking for the player themselves. Something that even Dark Souls would be proud of.

The characters you meet along the way exploring this desolate world are engaging, I cannot tell you much more without spoiling, so you'd have to experience it for yourself.

There are some areas where you're left wanting however. Take for example the clumsy inventory, which can make it somewhat uncomfortable to traverse. Another one of these places is the sound design, while the game is very minimalistic in its color and assets, which helps the mood of the game, there are some areas where the lack of background noise makes it seem much too quiet and not in an eerie sense. At least, that is my subjective viewpoint of the sound design.

+ Deep combat mechanics
+ Welcoming to veterans and new players alike
+ Branching weapon/skill/custimization early on
+ Exploration is rewarded
+ Interesting NPC's
+ Ease of entry
+ Fair Challenge

- Clumsy Inventory
-/+ Minimalist Sound Design

9/10

The great feeling of finally beating the boss you've been trying to kill for over 10 times, doing so with wit, skill and some experience from all those previous deaths. To pile up your own corpses to finally reach as high as the bar of difficulty that a boss requires. And interesting combat system that is responsive, fair and most of the time entertaining to partake in. Blocks, parries, rolls, magic, archery, basically all you want from a medieval fantasy world.

The story is barely non existant, as well as it should be as you're not there for the story. Your accomplishments come from overcoming hurdles, not learing about the character development of various people in the game. You get a few tid bits from there and there, enjoying what little they give you without taking away from the focus, the game is difficult.

The combat is most of the time fair, however a lot of cheap moves from bosses and other difficult mobs make it sometimes frustrating when a insta kill move come out of nowhere, dying because you've not faced that enemy just yet. Assuming, requiring you to die to learn a certain move set by a certain mob is unfair in its combat system and that is what my main complaint about the game is... To my taste, it's something that is rather cheeky, an attempt to keep the "You will die" idea up by forcing it onto you.

The game is a single player focused game, and please, if you buy this as I recommend, then do not engage in the multi-player pvp. It is rather atrocious, the delay between the host and the invader are quite long, often seconds which leads to you getting backstabbed in the front, getting hit by a slash that is 3 feet away and so forth. Forgetting that, the frustrating behavior of the Dark Souls 2 community is childish and elitist. You will not meet not a single person who have not mim/maxxed their character, looked up builds from the internet and copy pasted their 'own' creations from someone else. Stick to the single player and you will skip yourself a lot of pain inducing rage that comes with the bad latency, poor behavior and non-creative &½@-buckets.