Recent reviews by DrunkDriver10

Would only recommend if you really like the art style, or if you have played most other video games and are scraping the bottom of the barrel for something new. This game isn't really scary, and the "puzzles" aren't interesting or complex enough to qualify it as a puzzle game. It's a game that seems to want to do multiple things, and ends up doing none of them very well. What we get is mostly just a frustrating walking simulator with horrible keyboard/mouse controls. I have a feeling the game would play better on a controller, but only by so much. The character is intentionally weak, clumsy, and hard to control. If playing a weak and pathetic character sounds appealing, then you may enjoy the game. Otherwise, give it a pass. The game does become slightly more interesting near the end, but only barely. It's not enough to justify the annoying nature of the rest of the game. Ultimately, the whole thing just feels kinda pointless and I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of it. I got this game for free during a sale, and it still didn't seem worth it.

Succeeds as a Subnautica DLC -- Fails as a sequel.

This game was originally supposed to just be a DLC. When they decided to make it a full sequel instead, I was excited. I expected numerous improvements over the original, and if not improvements, then at least enough significant changes to warrant being called a sequel. There were neither. This game is both perfectly acceptable as a "more of the same" DLC, but it does not stand on its own two legs.

This game expects you to either remember everything from the first game perfectly, or to have played it very recently. Most sequels start from the top and are willing to teach new players everything they need to know from the start--not the case with this game. Below Zero expects the player to remember a great deal about the plot and gameplay of the first game, and does not bother with any teaching moments whatsoever the way that the first game did. This is the first in a list of reasons that this game still feels like it is a DLC and not a sequel.

The environments and biomes are considerably less interesting than in the first game. There is very little to differentiate between regions in this game--nothing to make each biome special. They all contain more or less the exact same materials, and the visual styles of each biome are nowhere near as striking as in the first game. I guess you could say these biomes are more realistic, but that sorta takes some of the fun out of exploring an alien planet. Lots of the areas, such as the icy waters in the North, feel unfinished. They just slapped a sh*tload of jellyfish in there and called it a day. The terrain is rocky, and there is ice overhead. Not much else. Realistic? Sure. Fun to look at? Not really. Gone are the striking color boundaries between biomes that occurred in the first game. Everything blends together much more easily in Below Zero, much to the detriment of the overall experience.

The plot is also nowhere near as interesting as the first game. In the original, the player starts out in a survival situation, and slowly uncovers a mystery on the planet through scans and intriguing audio logs. It is a very unexpected twist for anyone coming into this game expecting it to be more like Minecraft or something. In this game, they hit you with a plot right up front: Find out what happened to your dead sister. Without any buildup, this is not a very interesting hook. What follows is somehow an even more directionless experience than the first game. The player is bombarded with pointless audio logs from completely insufferable side characters whose constant workplace bickering from beyond the grave contributes nothing to the plot.

Upon discovering the other main character of the game, AL-AN, the player is helped to tons of cringe-inducing high school level pseudo-philosophical dialogue spouted off by the main character. It reminded me of the type of cringe one might find in The Witness or The Talos Principle, but made even worse due to how un-fleshed out it is. As with the preceding examples, the concepts presented in this game are far from original. Anyone who has existed on this planet for more than a couple decades, and who has spent any time at all introspecting, will have likely thought about such things before, and the presentation of the ideas in this game is so lackluster that the ideas feel like an afterthought, thus rendering the entire exercise completely pointless. After a while, you just wish the main character would shut the f*ck up!

The last problem I have with this game is in regards to the gameplay. It is *far* too easy! Turning on hardcore mode wouldn't make a difference either. The tuning of everything is completely off. The developers took all this time to add all these cool and unique upgrades, but then designed the game in a way to render all of them completely useless! You can build something that will help your immensely, and then in a few hours, it will be totally unnecessary. Most of the blueprints in this game end up being useless junk that serves no purpose. I never had to charge a single power cell with the power cell charger. I never even hit 50% power on any vehicle that I owned. I never had to worry about starvation or dehydration--you can subsist off peppers alone in the game without issue. No creature ever destroyed a vehicle of mine. Overall, it felt like creatures barely did any damage compared to the first game. I guess the problems could be summed up like this: all the beneficial effects (eating, drinking, etc) are far too powerful, and none of the detrimental effects (enemy damage, power drain, "dangerous weather" doing nothing, etc) are powerful enough.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is *no* penalty for dying in this game from what I can tell! I died once very early on. I respawned back in my base with full hp, full hydration, full stomach, etc, and I kept every single one of my items. Very late in the game, I decided to try to kill a very large creature using the knife. Any time I died, I just respawned in my seatruck, which was right in the vicinity. Like before, I had more health, less hunger, more hydration, and I lost absolutely nothing. This is so bad that dying on purpose could be used as a totally valid form of fast travel, although I chose not do that. The player quickly becomes invincible early on in the game, and remains that way until the very end.


Now, it might sound like I hate the game at this point, but I don't. I am frustrated that it is an inferior product to the first game, yes, but the stuff that I liked about the first game is mostly still relevant to this one. The gameplay, while too easy, is still really fun. Building a cool base, despite most of it being pointless, is satisfying. The exploration, even though the environments were considerably less awesome, was still a blast. Also, the art direction is still fantastic, and the game is filled with lots of fun, interesting, cute, and terrifying creatures. And lastly, something that I think deserves an entire paragraph on its own....

...the lighting effects! Oh my GOD, they absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one. I don't think it was any different than the first game, but I was equally impressed back then too. As someone with hundreds of real life SCUBA dives under their belt, including deep dives, cavern dives, tropical dives, and cold, murky dives, I am extraordinarily impressed with the lighting in this game. It is so, so realistic. It blows my mind every time. Notable examples include looking up at the surface from underwater (especially at sunrise or sunset), the way that light diffuses off particulate in the water column, sometimes making the use of headlights worse (just like driving in fog), and the way that light and shadows dance off underwater surfaces. It is all extremely realistic and very, very impressive.

Ultimately, I would not recommend this game to someone who hasn't played the original. However, I think anyone who liked the original will still enjoy this game. Despite some problems, it more or less delivers another helping of the content you would expect.

These games are still excellent. Everything done by Bungie is still remarkable. I am able to say that without the slightest bit of nostalgia blinding me since the MCC for PC was my first experience with these games. They definitely hold up, and the replay value is enormous. They are probably the best dollar-per-hour value on the market right now.

Unfortunately, everything having to do with the 343i side of things is rough. To say that this release flounders on the technical side of things is an understatement. There are numerous performance issues that 343i does not seem to have any interest in fixing even over a full year after it was first released on PC. At times, the myriad of tech issues makes this port seem downright amateurish. The few fixes that 343i have implemented have taken far too long to roll out.

These tech issues are very frustrating at times, but thankfully they do not overshadow finally having Halo on PC. The amount of excellent Bungie content in this collection still make it a no brainer recommendation to anyone that has not played Halo before, or who wants to experience it again in the modern era.

The one BIG caveat to my review is that I am writing it with the single player experience in mind. If you are looking to focus on multiplayer or coop campaign, I cannot honestly recommend it. The multiplayer is plagued with a multitude of severe issues leading to a woefully inconsistent and frustrating experience, and 343i seems to have no intent on ever fixing them. Similarly, the coop suffers from unplayable lag and frequent disconnections--an issue that 343i still has not resolved even over a full year after launch. Sometimes, there is input lag over a second long, and other times, the game slows down like you are moving through molasses (despite still getting maximum FPS). More often than not, it is completely unplayable, even with players separated by just a few time zones.

An absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥