Recent reviews by tay

Sometimes I think I'm truly pathetic, but it ALWAYS makes me feel better to remember the BHVR dev team exists

約束された勝利の剣エクスカリバー——！

Got gifted this game and whilst I thought this would be another flavour of the month type of game that seems to be becoming a trend as of late, this game was certainly a lot more deep than that. I don't know if its the scale, or the length of expeditions but I found myself genuinely immersed in climbing the mountain with my friends. When I started I was joyful and optimistic, when I started getting injured I did my best to keep up without feeling like a burden on this person who depended on me, and I him, but eventually when we both died it felt like a true sombre end to a multi hour climb.

Now I imagine there's much more to the game, if you're interested in playing optimally it feels like there's a lot of depth in item decision making and pathing that could take you many many hours to master, but what I got out of the game was a very new and interesting way to bond with my friends. Would recommend, and even if I'd have paid full price I'd have felt for how cheap the base price of the game is it was money well spent.

I love Helldivers 2, but I can't recommend it in it's current state. The atmosphere, worldbuilding, and feeling of being part of an elite military branch is really sold to you, and the design of the enemy factions are sublime. Its audio design stands out to me, too.. The soundtrack and sound effects do a great job of heightening the atmosphere. Unfortunately, I play games to master them, and I feel like the buggy nature of the game ruins any feeling of improving my tactical and mechanical skills. Deaths often feel unfair and not like a mistake on my part. Bugs/design issues I can think of on the top of my head include (not exhaustive)...
- Explosions knocking you back through walls and terrain.
- Damage inconsistently causing knockback, and knockback causing huge "impact" damage that can one-shot you depending on random slope or terrain factors.
- Additionally, you cannot heal when being ragdolled due to knockback.
- Stealth being unreliable — enemies can call reinforcements even when unalerted and far away, and they can do so long after engagements have started, which prolongs fights.
- Enemy hulk corpses have massive hitboxes that block your shots, but not enemies'.
- Enemies don't pathfind around factory strider or hulk corpses, and they will often get stuck in them and shoot you through them.
- Some dead corpses can be bugged and a point on their body will be stretched into infinity, which is super distracting.
- Ally body parts can go invisible, removing their player marker and making them easy to accidental friendly fire.
- Stratagems bouncing off seemingly random pieces of terrain to then land in places you don't want them to be.
- Stratagem menu or sprinting being completely impossible mid mission or from the start of a mission, which can cost you an operation (quite rare, only happens about once every thirty times I open the game).
- And finally, the randomness of the amount of difficult enemy spawns. I sometimes play missions that have a relatively large amount of natural heavy spawns over others, or missions where I have a lot of factory striders spawn from bot drops. I wouldn't be sure how to make enemy spawns feel more fair or enemy reinforcement "aggression" being more deterministic without giving the player too much power, and I don't at all have a problem of randomness being in games period, but this serves to further the feeling of playing where I feel like my agency is removed from me and I simply have moments where I feel screwed over.
Furthermore, I find the progression to be pure mindless grinding, and supercredits in particular are very hard to come by, which pressures you into buying microtransactions. Personally, I don't even think microtransactions should exist in a game that base costs £34 without any dlc included.
I want to recommend this game. I enjoy playing it. I'm happy the devs continue to add cool content and weapons, along with occasional bugfixes. But until the devs fix the foundational issues of buggy gameplay and having mission success feel less out of my control than I would like, this feels to me less like a satisfying hoarde shooter and more like a frustrating endurance test. Your success should never hinge on whether the physics engine flips a coin in your favor.
Just buy Deep Rock atm. Arrowhead ily.

Good art, good music, lots of content. I had a short playthrough that went up until the midgame around a year ago, and I'm glad I came back to play the game all the way through, because it's been a blast. Managing your colony while also progressing the story is very engrossing. I think the game design of having critters in dungeon rooms you can kill without scaring others away is genius, because it rewards you in the colony part of the game for mastery of the dungeon-crawling part. I find the character design of the NPCs cute, and the attachments you grow toward your cultists make for some good organic storytelling. I'm also a big fan of the accessibility features in the game for those who need them.

There are flaws I have with the game, however. I think I only noticed so many because, with how much I enjoyed this game, my standards were set quite high, so please know that what follows is meant as suggestions for improvement rather than simple criticism.

I find that the descriptions for certain fleeces (the Diseased Heart and Glass Cannon, mostly) and many doctrines (the worst offenders, in my opinion, being both options in Tier IV Sustenance) are missing so much detail about what they really do that, if you're playing for the first time and don't want to waste resources or make a wrong choice, you might want to consider simply reading the wiki before deciding. Additionally, once most of the food is automated, a lot of the later tech feels redundant. Everything to do with the sin or hatching systems, the kitchen, the demonic summoning circle, the compost bin, the harvest totem, the missionary, the tabernacle, and the offering statue all seem like wastes of resources or time when other tech or simply looting dungeons gives you more and better resources. Many of these buildings are late-game, so once you have a steady supply of basic resources and are only a couple of hours away from finishing the game, I can only assume you would choose to use these buildings for fun.