Recent reviews by DrunkDriver10

I initially wrote a positive review for this game, but I should have waited until finishing it because turns out...I can't finish it! It just so happens that there is a way to soft lock yourself via normal play simply by going to one of the zones in the game. It requires limited-use items to get back and the game makes no mention of this, and if you don't have those, then your game is over. This is completely unforgivable design, and for that reason, I am ditching this pos game and changing my review. I can't believe something so egregious made it into the final game, but here we are. It's a shame because I was actually enjoying it quite a bit up to that point.

This game is immense fun--maybe one of the most fun games I've ever played--but I am giving this a negative review because this product is unplayable without OpenXCom. The version that is sold through Steam is a broken mess. It runs like absolute ♥♥♥♥. it's so laggy as to be virtually unplayable. On the menus, the lag is annoying, but on the combat grid, it becomes completely unviable to play with such a hindrance. Do not buy unless you are also willing to get OpenXCom to fix these issues. Steam should not be selling this product in its current form.

If you ever take a long break from the game or forget how to play, you are screwed because there is no way to reset the campaign tutorials once you've seen them once. They will not show up even if you delete your save and start over.

No grapple hook 0/10

Despite loving FromSoft titles of years past, I find this game to be riddled with combat errors that make it a miserable and unfun experience to play through. The controls are extremely unresponsive and hitboxes are imprecise. If you don't tend to notice these things, then you might have a good time, but I simply cannot have fun when nearly every single fight I engage in is riddled with glaring mathematical errors. It makes dying feel unfair and winning feel unsatisfying.

This game would be trivial if Sekiro actually parried when I pressed parry, dodged when I pressed dodge, and Mikiri countered when I pressed the button for it, but that simply does not happen. If that is not your experience, then congratulations--I sincerely wish I could play your copy of the game because mine is clearly faulty in some way.

Even after killing every single boss, the fights feel just as random and frustrating as the first day I played the game. There have been no improvements even after 70 hrs of gameplay, Any other game that I play, including other FromSoft games, I can go back to the beginning of the game and feel like a master. That is not the case in this game. This is how you know the game is fundamentally flawed to its core.

I recommend it if you are enough of a math nerd to want to explore a 3D hyperbolic (and/or spherical) space. Otherwise, there isn't much to do. It's a bit expensive for what you get, but that's why I only recommend it for a very specific type of person. Just keep your gameplay expectations low and you'll know if this game is for you or not.

I'm a big fan of parkour in games that weren't necessarily designed for it, as well as "reach the top" platformers--Halo, Minecraft, Getting Over It, to name a few examples--so I decided to try out a proper parkour game, and I was....disappointed.

First, there are a lot of things to like about this game: the setting, the plot, the animated cutscenes, and the parkour, when it works. More on that later. However, this game simply has too many things holding it back--things that ultimately led to a frustrating gaming experience that I cannot recommend.

The three biggest strikes against this game are janky and inconsistent parkour, numerous instances of poor/misleading level design, and the manner in which the game handles death and checkpoints.


The jankiness is a threefold problem. First, there are many times where it feels like the game completely drops your inputs and this leads to you sailing over an edge when you definitely jumped in time. Or you will end up running straight into a wall when you also definitely jumped only to have the enemies gain crucial ground on you while you have to reposition and try again. There are dozens of other equally frustrating examples of this.

Second, there are obvious issues with the game's detection of your hitbox/character model in relation to climbable objects. I can't even count how many time I jumped directly into a climbable pipe only to have it not register, and make my character fall her to death. This can happen with any number of obstacle types, so I will not waste time listing every example because it happens so often.

Third, and this is perhaps the worst despite being the least frequent, there is a lot of invisible geometry laying all over the place--invisible objects that will stop you dead in your tracks even though there is NOTHING THERE. Sometimes, it's replicable and you will find the same piece of invisible geometry in the same spot each time. Other times, it seems to go away after your character dies and the game reloads. I remember one very specific instance where I jumped from one crane to another--and this path was REQUIRED by the game I might add; it was not an optional route--and I got bumped far to the left while I was in MID-AIR and there was NOTHING there to cause me to get bumped. I flew off the left-hand side of the crane and fell 20-some odd stories to my death. When I redid the section, the invisible wall was nowhere to be found. I did the exact same jump as before and it worked perfectly. To say that this is aggravating is an understatement, but it's made worse by the ways the game handles death and checkpoints, which I will get to later.


This game is a mixed bag when it comes to level design. There are lots of really great sections and lots of not so great sections. The biggest issues I have when it comes to the level design is when the game is intentionally misleading, like they are trying to get you killed on purpose so that you have to redo a section. The game frequently presents you with multiple routes and multiple things that look like routes only for them to be dead ends. When you are being chased by NPCs with guns, you don't always have the luxury of time, so you must make quick decisions about where to go, and this can often lead to a leap of faith resulting in your death, or trapping yourself in a dead-end hallway with nowhere to go. It's very clear that these design choices were deliberate, and I despised it every single time.

There were also many level design issues that seem to have been overlooked by the developers. Instances where your player is able to grab onto things they really shouldn't be able to grab--but not in the "Oh look, easy skip!" sort of way. More in the "This object you can grab onto actually interferes with the intended path" sort of way.

There are also lots of places where climbable platforms are placed at obnoxious heights or distances that are slightly too close for comfort--close enough that you can neither perform a short jump and clamber onto them, nor a regular jump else you risk sailing over the top of them. What should be a fun and fluid parkour section turns into a nightmare of compensation for poorly-placed bars and platforms.


Alright, this right here is the worst of it. All the problems I have already listed are exacerbated tenfold by how the game handles death and checkpoints. Here's the big issue: death in Mirror's Edge is not handled fluidly. First, checkpoints are spaced too far apart in most sections. Second, the loading time between deaths takes waaaaaay too long. Due to the plethora of issues already mentioned, the player will die a lot while they figure out where to go if it is their first time playing Mirror's Edge. Each time they do, they are forced to potentially redo quite a lot of content AND wait a long time in order to do it. THIS SIGNIFICANTLY IMPACTS THE FLOW OF THE GAME. I cannot underemphasize how big of a problem this is, especially for a game that is trying to be a fast-paced action parkour game.

In my ideal version of Mirror's Edge, checkpoints would happen far more frequently, and when the player died, they would not need to wait for a damned loading screen. They would respawn almost instantly, and the music (which is quite good actually) wouldn't even skip a beat. The fact that on each death, the player has to wait and redo lots of content seriously guts the momentum in critical moments of the game's story. Escape sequences that should be action-packed, intense, and engaging instead turn into annoying slogs. This is the reason why I believe this game is a negative experience at its core.


Believe it or not, there is honestly so much more I could say about this game, both positive and negative, but this review is long enough. There are a few other checkpoint-related issues as well as some performance related problems like alt-tab causing game crashes, but again, this review is plenty long. I spent the majority of this review talking about the things that really diminished the experience of this game for me because it was so frustrating that this game could have been so much better. There was still plenty I enjoyed, but unfortunately these negatives just dragged the rest of the game down too much.

I respect the amount of work that went into this overhaul. It is extremely impressive. They introduce a lot of neat mechanics including something called the Prep Round, where both teams of combatants are heavily incentivized by way of a -50% ACC debuff to spend the entire first round of combat using buff and debuff abilities. You can try to score some lucky hits through the lowered ACC, but it's not likely to happen. While I find the prep round to be an interesting idea, I do not think it plays well in practice. It serves only to slow the pace of the game down to a grinding halt, and I do not find it fun at all.

Based on the amount of care these modders put into this project, I'm sure that there are plenty of quirks and trinkets that one can obtain later on that might allow your heroes to be more effective on the first round of combat, but I don't think I have the patience to play long enough to find out. I'd be very interested in playing a version of this mod without the prep round, but for now, I think I'm gonna set this one aside.

This game is a giant steaming pile of horse sh*t

Main problems:
- The controls are unintuitive and terrible, and there isn't an option to change them to your liking
- No direction (seriously, the game doesn't even tell you the objective)
- Boring music, art, assets
- Poorly designed difficulty curve
- No sense of progression
- Obnoxious and unnecessary day/night cycle that distracts from solving the puzzles
- Developer was too lazy to even bother with a barebones plot
- The price is laughably high even on sale

I was hesitant to buy this game for years because of the ridiculous price point. However, being a huge fan of puzzle games, I ultimately bought it for 70% off (which still felt like too much based on what I had seen) because of the overwhelmingly positive reviews. I was correct in my assumption. This game is not worth it at $8, let alone $30. There is every indication that this developer was lazy and simply did not give a sh*t. Perhaps the puzzles are well designed, but since this is a video game, you need to have more than that. There is an art to game development that is sorely lost on this dev. Perhaps one day I will elaborate further and make this a full review, but frankly, I don't feel like it's even worth my time. The bullet points will have to suffice.

I'm not very far into the game at the time of writing this review, but so far I am loving it. Mechanicus is essentially a simplified, less frustrating version of XCOM 2. My only other 40k experience is with Dawn of War, but it's fun seeing a lot of familiar units from that game also in this one. The atmosphere of this game is excellent, enhanced by some truly exquisite sound design. Addicting tactical gameplay and an incredible OST have so far kept me coming back for more.