Hobbes 最近的評論

Reviewer's note: Yes, I paid for this. My god my credit card hates me now. I'm I'd estimate half way through Act 2, I will be updating with more content on the review I expect as I progress, by the way. TICKERS ARE VILE AND SHOULD DIE HORRIBLY


Not by replacing -all- the soldiers with heroes. But just a few. Not by upending the entire concept of turn order, but by freeing up the concept of action points being slaves to the concept that your shot ends your turn. By adding an action point. By using executions to throw extra action points to the rest of your squad, thus turning the impossible into the do-able. By making execution chains into a thing of beauty.

People who fail the Brumak fight need to -pay attention- the whole idea is to keep the dude turning and maximising damage (first to his guns so he can't shred you) and then to the tanks, and stay out of stomp range. The mobs it tosses your way and even the e-holes are perfectly manageable.

This game has loot boxes, they're on the map, you grab them, open them up (for free) and inside awaits a mass of fun toys to stack passives together along with semi-passive abilities to gradually turn your soldiers into super-soldiers. One addon gives them the ability to seriously disregard overwatch fire. Guess what, put that on a tanky boi and you've just created a rusher who can soak overwatch for you and free up your other units to make merry with murder. Stack damage on the sniper to high heaven and the thing will reward you with first blood shots that can, and will one-shot boomers.


This is XCOM by way of Diablo, you will be gear minmaxing quite a bit, because lo and behold, with 3 armour slots, 4 weapon slots and an array of passives and actives in each of the five classes you can build some -very- unique configurations and put together some really capable soldiers. The heroes dying is an auto-fail, but that's to be expected. The soldiers however -can- die, so much like an ACTUAL XCOM GAME (hello Chimera Squad, no hiding at the back) you can rack up losses of your expendables, and it can be gut wrenching to lose well levelled soldiers.

Soldiers who you can spend an absurd level of time customising. The game spoils you with colour, metal, and even brush options just to ensure your COGs look just the way you want them. You can even dress the whole squad in hot pink. With star patterning.

This game brings out the best, patriotic side in your artist, I guarantee it.


I foresee this being my replacement drug to XCOM and XCOM2, oh, and the RNG isn't total BS for once. So that's nice!

Downside - Two things. The price. Yes, it's expensive as all sin. It will probably come down in price.

Two. Augustus Cole being pre-order. Hopefully he goes on sale along with a few other possible "hero" character DLC's, because the Cole-Train is the most sweary, hilarious guy to bring along for the ride, and makes a perfect replacement for that gruff idiot Sid and his stupid eyepatch.

Give me "GUESS WHO MF" any day of the week.

... so yeah, I kinda like it. Oh, and the graphics are pretty much on par with Gears 5. Doesn't tax my system *much*, but boy does it look pretty.

Verdict : Expensive, but very much recommended.

Written for Balance Patch, if you'd like to see more of their work, follow the link in the italics

Oh, and as a side note, I'm aware people have been having issues with their XBOX sign ins.

If this is an issue for you, switch my thumbs up for a thumbs down immediately. Nobody should have to suffer that kind of bellend level behaviour from a login system to let you play your damned game.

Doom (2016) was a shot of adrenaline, it was fast, it was stylish, it was well presented, it was well balanced. It left everyone wanting more. Doom Eternal gives you all of that, possibly a little too much in specific areas (I'm not a total fan of the flame belcher and fiddly grenade launcher but I get their existence) but on the whole this is the game purified, distilled, and then giving you a slew of ways to build out your slayer for maximum carnage.

Most of the ways will be inherently familiar (praetor tokens for ammo/armour/health, runes for specific abilities, weapon tokens to upgrade and master your guns), a few new additions have been thrown in, cosmetic in the main, along with the addition of hidden cheat code disks which allow you things like infinite extra lives, infinite ammo, silver bullets (instakills staggered enemies) and so on.


Enemies this time start heavy duty out of the gate, there's no ramp up like there was in the first game, here you're -expected- to deal with cacodaemons and spiderbrains right out of the gate, and learning how to exploit their weakspots is important (Critical on difficulties starting at Ultra-Violence and higher). You either get real comfortable lobbing grenades into the mouths of the bad guys and stripping spiders of their turrets, or you can safely expect to have a bad time.

Equally, the rinky-dink pistol has been retired, with your starting weapon now being the shotgun, again, a significant step up indicating that yes, the firepower has moved on a step or two. Said shotgun gets a sticky grenade launcher and full-auto mode as the two mod options (full-auto being a significant upgrade from the burst fire it previously had), and whilst you don't have a mass of shells in your pocket, full auto mode will absolutely -wreck- heavy duty demons in short order.


Ammo on the ground is slimmer, in the main because you now have a rechargable chainsaw that means fodder enemies are your primary ammo supply, after about 30 kills with the thing (thus mastering it) the recharge to the first pip is pretty quick, meaning you can keep your ammo topped off for your weapons fairly easily. The other two pips can only be recharged with gas cans, but having three pips means you can nix a heavy enemy with the chainsaw in a pinch.

Your melee now is relegated to a stagger option or if your blood punch is charged, a means of stripping armour and killing weaker enemies for health. This gives the game a very specific rhythm you must quickly grasp if you are to prosper, kill the big or dangerous demons with the -correct- gun, then chainsaw the little things to refill ammo. Blood punch small demons if you need a health refill, or blood punch armoured demons to make their armour explode.

You also have a few extra tools - Flame belch sets demons on fire, whilst they are on fire, shooting them makes armour shards drop out of them like big green demony pinatas, and a grenade/ice grenade, the former of which you'll be using in the main as it staggers anything it makes contact with, thus buying you precious breathing room whilst you finish / kill other, more immediate threats.


On a system that can max the settings, the game once again showcases what ID can bring to the PC. This game will make your speakers rumble in ways that'll loosen your bowels, it'll feed you music that'll cause your bones to shake, the graphics will make you go "How is this even possible?", and the level design is -huge-, with sprawling open areas mixed with arenas, winding little mazes and nooks and crannies packed full of secrets including music tracks you can play in your base hub, toys that fill up your personal quarters, and cheat codes which you can use at will (the only thing they lock out is slayer areas).

Downsides?

The game wants Bethesda.net to unlock all the goodies, that's annoying as sin. You need Twitch Prime for the Doomicorn, that's *criminal* considering that the Doomicorn is the only -legitimate- way to play as the Slayer in the campaign. The platforming bits are fiddly, and the new wallclimb mechanic isn't totally ideal, having to use flame belch to refill armour can be a bit of a pain at times, relying on scripted bunches of fodder to hang together rather than just tossing a few more armour drops in the right places. But these are lesser issues in a game which is by and large, magnificent.

JUST GIVE EVERYONE THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DOOMICORN.


It's Doom. It's all the Doom. It's the Doomiest Doom that Doomed the Dooms that could Doom.

It's Death Metal Videogaming made real. It's set the volume to 11 and it's playing ID's best tracks, as one big loud concert for you. If you don't like the music, kindly leave and let the rest of us get our eardrums wrecked as we enjoy another mindblowing performance by the masters of Death Metal Videogaming.

Verdict: DOOM

NOTE : Denuvo shennanigans have been resolved. But this game has lost the Essential tag as a direct result of said idiocy. Let this be a lesson. You do not get to keep your Essential rating from the Tiger purely because you got it on the 1.0 release.

If you decide to balls things up and introduce a kernel mode driver as a patch and then through public backlash decide to remove that kernel mode driver, that only shows you're able to reverse course, not that you (AND MISTER CARMACK YOU OF ALL PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW THIS) understand why Kernel Mode anti-cheat is a bad idea.

This game is still very recommended, but keep Bethesda on their toes. For they are fleabags.

The curse of DoubleFine looms large over this one. Oh god I wish it were not so. There's a lot to love in the core of this game and a lot of the ideas are -almost- complete and -almost- excellent.

But the game feels very unfinished. The game feels like it's missing a whole layer. Something that should round the game off. The game feels like it's missing a year of development time. The whole thing has a sense of "That's it?" around it. There's no escaping it.

You get the feeling more and more as you get out past the initial awesomeness of being able to build your own floating habitat and the neat (but shallow) tricks like alien infestations (which can be entirely locked down). Illnesses (which can wipe your ship in record time unless you have a sick bay in which case, NO PROBLEM), and random ship encounters which are always hostile, and if you have shields, fine, if not, you just get spammed with invaders.


There's no intricacy. That's the issue. Everything is very flat. You either win or lose. There's no in between here. If you have the correct tool-set for a situation, you're going to breeze it. If you don't, you have two options, run, or die horribly. There's no scrappy victories here, there's no neutral events where you can gain information about the world background in general, there's no lore as such. You're here, you have to find a planet to populate, that's it. The only lore comes from scattered diary entries you MIGHT find in your travels and the end game text as you settle a planet.

The modules on your ship are equally very flat, you have two "Life support" modules for Biosphere and Power, you have some recreation modules that passively increase healing for the crew, and then some functional modules for upgrading stuff. Oh sure you can spritz your ship up with security doors, shields, hyperdrives and so on, but everything feels so flat and there's so little actually tied together.

All of your upgrades are derived either from immediate gains by scanning planetary sites or from collecting samples from aliens. There's no tech tree -at all- (so y'know, logical ideas like having an R&D module to research a sick bay don't exist), and what upgrades you get are very much in the hands of RNGesus.


The guns are the worst. They're laughable. Aiming them simply triggers a proximity based lock on (no Aim down sight), and firing them feels absolutely horrific. For a game where a lot of your time is spent shooting bugs, spiders and worms, this is offputting to say the least. They could have, at the very least, made the gunplay a little more engaging. Even the use of grenade launchers doesn't improve this very much.

AND THAT'S NOT EVEN GETTING INTO THE CRIME THAT IS A HIGH RPM SPAS-12. WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA. WHO IN YOUR DEV TEAM THOUGHT THAT LUNACY MADE ANY SENSE AT ALL.

Oh, and no reloads, at all. Because clearly you can fit 180 rounds into a shotgun, yet a plasma battle rifle is semi auto. Logic, this game has none of it.


The central concept is sound, and moment to moment gameplay can be really good. But the game needs work. It needs another year. This should still be early access with a view to one more major patch and a handful of minor patches (mostly focused around giving the AI some depth, and putting more systems in place for running the ship and giving the overall game some more meat).

As it stands, it's fun for a while, but then you realise that it's where No Mans Sky was at launch. A good idea, but oh so shallow. I fear that unlike No Mans Sky, this will not get turned into a beautiful butterfly.

Verdict: Sale only

Written for Balance Patch, if you'd like to see more of their work, follow the link in the italics

Armoured Core is slower, more deliberate. The pacing and thorough anime styling of this game puts this firmly in the zippy, needs decent reactions and has you flying about like a mosquito on crack approach. This is much closer to things like Virtual On back in the Saturn Era or Namco Bandai's foray into the more Arcade approach with ACE COMBAT 6. What it is, is excellent, there's a lot to like here (and a few things to dislike, like the fact the DLC that got released with the game will run you nearly the cost of the game itself, and because this game does deal heavily in appearances, that does suck a bit).

You are an Outer, a human who's been blended with Femto (which sounds like an antacid) giving you unique properties and abilities to control Arsenals (that's this games term for mechs), who can zip around the battlefield like mosquitoes on coke and unleash barrages of firepower that would put your average Texan to shame. The weapons start off fairly modest but before long you'll be using shoulder mounted cannons that can obliterate opposing arsenals in a handful of shots, and laser rifles that look like they would be better served being mounted on orbital platforms, as opposed to being held in a single mech hand.


... and the story is enough to make you cringe so hard you'll want to fold in half. There's points where you think there's an inkling of a good story, but no, this is bad, and not in the "bad but good" way that Idea Factory handles Neptunia and ends up with lots of KAWAIIIIII =^_^= moments (oh god, I typed that, I feel dirty), but bad in the sense of "someone came up with this, someone was paid money to come up with this?"

Thankfully you can skip the vast majority of it, along with the characters, most of which are ones you can live with but there's a few, a few that are walking caricatures that make me grind my teeth as I clench up whenever they're on the screen. One is clearly trying to emulate a cartoon version of the Hulk but ends up being a terrible version of some roid rage sunday morning cartoon bro-smasher. The other is the ditzy Harley-Quinn wannabe who has daddy issues and just wants to smash things for the lols. If these two were any more obvious and two dimensional I could fold them up and make origami animals from them.

My Danboard collection has more personality than those two clowns and they're inanimate pieces of plastic.

-exhale- Okay. Let's put the horribad story aside.


Downed mechs can (and need to) be accessed to loot parts, weapons and equipment, doing so allows you to research further upgrades at the factory which then can be bought repeatedly at the shop (this brings me to bugbear number one, some of the more basic parts need looting repeatedly rather than being unlocked at rank up, WOULD IT REALLY KILL THE GAME TO PUT BASIC ARMOUR AND WEAPON PIECES IN THE STORE AS YOU LOOT THEM?.

However, as you do the store gradually fills up with your potential arsenal of goodies and there -is- a massive arsenal. Both in terms of armour and in terms of weaponry, with a wide variety of options to fit all playstyles. You can go from slow and tanky with big heavy weapons that have slow re-fire rates right up to going quick and melee focussed and turn into a mecha-ninja.

Tuning, adapting and customising your Arsenal to your own personal taste can become a time consuming and rewarding task, with the payout for getting your setup "just so" being that the game willingly accommodates you as you rampage through level after level, showering you with more goodies and more parts as you go along.

Better yet, you can physically upgrade your Avatar, your Outer, so that you can take benefits onto the field, both for the pilot directly and in terms of translatable benefits for any Arsenal you pilot. Some of these upgrades will even physically alter your pilot, so you can end up somewhat looking like an extra from Cyberpunk as you become part human, part Arsenal, being an extension of the mech.

The gameplay is well worth the time and effort, and finding that sweet spot that fits you is a satisfying feeling. The enemies range from cannon fodder right up to huge, screen filling monstrosities, complete with breakable weak points that further serve to work with your playstyles, encouraging you to constantly upgrade and adapt.


Yes, but if someone puts together a montage of all the cutscenes. Imma cut a scene of them, being cut, in slow, bloody scenes. I swear, the cringe is real. The pain, even more so.

Verdict: Highly recommended, but for the love of god, press X to skip the story scenes

Written for Balance Patch, if you'd like to see more of their work, follow the link in the italics

This is a rare beast. Meet an example of Early Access done correctly. The game started off somewhat basic but with a good core concept. A cyberpunk version of Legend of Grimrock but with Turn Based Combat and with stellar music and graphics. That concept then got refined and added to over several months with the introduction of narcotics, with better hacking, with the ability to delve into a mini cyberspace layer, with a timed campaign where you need to complete your objectives within a fixed number of weeks (thankfully Endless mode was retained for people like me who just like farming and blowing stuff up).

Polish was layered on, bugs were fixed and new classes were added until eventually the 1.0 version stands before us now. With a solid tutorial and intro that drops you into the game and gives you a thorough idea of how the game works, but not quite so hand-holdy that you feel like you're being spoon fed everything.

The game still expects you to do some legwork and learn how to minmax your team, there's still some QoL refinements that could be worked on, but by and large where we've got to now is worlds ahead of where we began. This is a very full blooded dungeon crawler with brilliant surroundings, enemies that will punish you if you get too cocky, and a suite of upgrades that force you to often make tradeoffs as to what kind of build you'll be gunning (literally) for with your teams.


Your missions start out in the overworld city level (EDIT: You can optionally skip this now at least in endless mode, but I'd really recommend you do not), where your meat and veg is discovery of transit that takes you to your mission zone as well as accessing randomly generated vendors and dealing with, or avoiding street thugs who act as attrition encounters (as well as sources of credits, tech, and mods).

Once through them you enter your target mission zone via elevator, and enter one of several brilliantly detailed and featured areas, the graphics here are genuinely high quality, and the enemies are well designed and in keeping with the theme. Praise really does need to be heaped on the art design team, the level geometry is some of the best I've seen in a dungeon crawler, you're not going to get bored of these environments even after several hours farming the same places over and over.

The music, similarly, works well, and the menus in the corp screens where you manage your merry little band of misfits along with the combat beats are solid, well delivered and make sure you're always "in the environment", whilst the sound effects themselves vary a bit in quality this is forgivable on account of the soundtrack being -really- good. Again, it's not something you're going to get tired of even after extensive farming runs.


There's a -few- but we're into "Nice to haves", things which probably were limited by the constraints of Early Access. Being able to insert more than one DNA mutation into new clones at an exponentially increasing cost would be useful, since some mutations are strictly more useful and others more situational.

Cyberhacking in combat still needs too many clicks right now, this could be rectified by adding them as additional skills as a second row in the combat skill palette. The Research tree could be cleaned up (It's still very much about passive gains, many of which could be rolled into more important nodes), and one or two of the classes could do with some extra love.

That's about it. Everything else is great. Oh, and possibly the ability to have permanent upgrades for the drone. But that one has been on my dream wish list ever since we could tinker with the thing.


Do you like dungeon crawlers? If so, this one is an easy win. At this price point, you'd be nuts not to get involved.
Do you like the idea of a cyberpunk dungeon crawler? Ditto.
This game set out with a very definite design goal. It's pretty much -nailed- that and done quite a bit more on top. For an Early Access triumph, I'm quite happy to see that it turned out pretty much as hoped.

Verdict: Highly recommended, especially to fans of Dungeon Crawlers who fancy a change of pace

Written for Balance Patch, if you'd like to see more of their work, follow the link in the italics

I love this game, I really do. I've played this thing obsessively since it's official launch (I've owned it since it hit right back in alpha early access but it didn't feel too cohesive then). The endgame is much like Diablo 3's adventure mode but this one has much more purpose that ties it together. The scope for endgame builds is far more wide ranging than D3's, and I would put it on a par with Path of Exile or Grim Dawn for the sheer scale of potential build options once you pass L50, let alone get towards the endgame cap of L90. I'm barely getting hints of the sheer variety of options and even now I'm able to put together builds that theme around things like lightning, stasis, holy damage and come up with all kinds of nifty tricks.

This is a recommendation that comes with a slew of "but" clauses.


Firstly, you're going to need a powerful rig to run this game at maximum pretty. You can probably run it on low on something that was built within the last few years but if you want to see the game in its full glory, you're going to want an 8th generation or later i7, or a higher end Ryzen chip, and you're going to want a 2080 or 2080Ti (Sorry AMD GPU peeps, the graphics horsepower this game wants is absurd, and you boys simply don't have that right now).

32GB RAM and an SSD won't go amiss either. Yeah, we're talking the kind of specs that normally sound like absolute overkill for most games, but here these come in at just about "Recommended for the optimal experience", I don't even think that's an optimisation problem, that's simply because the game is so full of environmental detail, and so full of graphical candy (Crysis engine, what do you expect) that it's a poster child for the excesses of the PC master race gaming era. This is a shameless throwback to a time when PC games were built with zero consideration for consoles, and were just configured to use as much power as a computer could throw at it.

... So people with more modest systems are going to have... issues I fear.

Second, it's buggy still. Buggy in ways that a final release shouldn't be. It crashes without fail when I quit out of the game, it crashes about half the time when I alt tab. The initial load times even on an SSD are chuggy, I can go and make a coffee in the time it takes everything to fully load in and settle down (unless I like the idea of gameplay stutter).

Finally, there's elements of the game that need a balance pass. Underlings are generally too easy to sweep through regardless of the build you run (they could do with a marginal buff) but the elites and champions and the end of act bosses are generally overtuned and could do with anything between a slight nerf to a significant one (I'm looking at you, end of expedition room bosses with your BS one shot mechanics and end of Act 3 boss which is the one point I ended up using Story mode because that was just utter nonsense on normal).


So there's work to be done. There's definite optimisation work needed too. But then you have the positives, this game can be run fully offline, and with segregated characters for offline mode, so you don't need to be tied to Wolcen's servers to enjoy a solo experience. There's the path of fates, a PoE style passive tree that has to be seen to be believed.

The skill system which takes bits of Diablo 3's skill system but then frees it from the silly restrictions and allows you to "point buy" the perks you want. The fact skills are linked to weapons rather than classes allowing you to mix and match the skills you desire based on your weapon loadout, which has it's DNA in things like Guild Wars 2.

The Champion of Stormfall mode takes the endgame and shapes it into something much more directed, giving it purpose and a reason to continue grinding and pushing for the level cap, this alone makes it worth working on the endgame, to develop the city. The only shame here is that it's not visually represented in the city itself (yet), that could potentially be something we see added in down the line.


Wolcen represents something that's a bit of a relic in a sense. A legitimate full power PC title that as an ARPG isn't afraid to really throw everything in terms of the graphical shiny forward and really put demands on the system, but the payoff is a genuinely beautiful game with some amazing level design and fights that'll stay with you some time after you close the game.

I've avoided mentioning the Campaign because spoilers, but suffice to say, it's not bad. It's a bit hammy, the story is pretty much what you'd expect from a high fantasy diablo-style game, but there's enough worldbuilding here that it hangs together and there's good enough explanation for your abilities and what you become over the course of the game. I suspect Diablo Immortals will not get the same level of care.

Verdict: Highly recommended, if you've the system to handle it.

Written for Balance Patch, if you'd like to see more of their work, follow the link in the italics

Project Highrise is very much the spiritual successor to Sim Tower. There's some differences in terms of what it asks you to manage (instead of resolving human traffic snarls it will have you deal with much more subtle problems such as noise, smells and foot traffic from a comfort perspective), and the game layers on the complexity by using prestige as opposed to a simple stars system, along with a whole slew of new and interesting mechanics, but fundamentally, it's Sim Tower.

So let's start with what Sim Tower, and by extension this game is - You're the manager of a fledgling Tower (and potential Skyscraper) with a starting fund and your job is to entice renters to the building by providing facilities and amenities and generally making your building a place to work, and enjoy breaks, shop or even live in. To this end there are several routes to success, you can build your tower as an apartment block, with residents starting off in studio flats and working all the way up to two floor fancy pads that require all the latest and greatest. You can even run student housing if you so fancy and provide them with bars and poetry houses for them to throw down their latest works.

Alternatively you can go the commercial route, and set up an office building, providing space for insurance companies, accounting firms, tax prep firms, video game developers, and so on, all requiring an ecosystem that slowly grows out to support them such as courier services to handle their packages, copy services to distribute memos, bottled water services to keep their water coolers stocked.

Last and by no means least you can go the hotelier route, this imposes some extra challenge as your revenues are collected on checkout as opposed to nightly, but also brings the benefit that you can pack more rooms into smaller spaces and also gain the attractive options of things like casinos, event halls, and convention centres, allowing you to book performances and turning your tower into the place to be. You can blend all three approaches as well, making a mega-tower that serves all needs.


The base game is ... good. Bordering on very good. But with all the DLC in the Architect's edition it's an entirely different matter. The game transforms into a wonderfully deep, richly complex game that requires you to think carefully about your tower design and to put effort in if you want to maximise your profit on the higher difficulties.

The sheer freedom to plan your own route to profitability and the fact you can go down three completely different yet equally viable tower routes speaks volumes as to just how well balanced the game is. In support of these three arms is the food and shopping areas, which just as critically have their own needs and wants, and it's eminently possible to build a large mall that sucks in visitors and makes a healthy profit as a sideline.

This game gives you room to decide if you just want to make big towers or push yourself and see if you can make your fiscal prudence skills work, on the top difficulty level you will be thoroughly tested and whilst it's possible to get to safe profit margins, it's never a walkover. The difficulty below that is the one I'd recommend for day to day play, it's tough but fair, and once you get past a specific point the challenge transitions more to controlling growth and satisfaction.

What I would say however is that you do need to get this game -with- all the DLC's right from the get go. Getting the base game alone does this game an injustice. These days happily the whole bundle is on sale on discount from time to time so if you're budget conscious, wait for a sale and grab it then. Personally, I feel the full bundle is worth the price of admission, it's a *great* game as a whole.

Verdict : Highly Recommended - But get the COMPLETE version. Not the base game alone

No. Really. Everyone has reviewed this game to death. Everyone. Everyone reviews this game to death when a new expansion comes out, when a new season comes out. You can't even have a new exotic come out without half of youtube gathering around in what can only be described as the worlds most impressive sausage party since that one time in Boot Camp...

Want to know what's happening right now as I write this particular review? All the major streamers and youtubers are working with a reddit group building a massive complicated map out of hexagons. Trying to work out what kind of riddle Bungie has placed within the infinite corridors of time, a place where if the lore is correct, Osiris forks millions of versions of himself to explore all the possible outcomes of various scenarios. We're merely scraping the very tip of this particular iceberg.

This is the kind of in game puzzle lunacy that very few games can put together. Possibly only some of the Alice and Smith craziness comes close. World of Warcraft? Nah. ESO? Not on your life. FFXIV? Not likely. Not like this. This is where you have people who now have pencils sticking out of their hair screaming "HEXES ALL THE WAY DOWN BRUH!" due to not sleeping for 36 hours trying to make sense of all this.

So this community is passionate, the game is so well trodden that by now there's well rehearsed guides out for a raid within 24h of launch and by a week there's a community of Sherpas, charitable souls who are willing to teach the raid to newbies, and by a month LFG discords are doing speedruns of the place.

That said, the raids never get strictly easy, even the old ones, it's very possible to scuff them (Last Wish in particular remains a great place for rusty players to trip up - myself included), but the game strikes a good balance between providing accessibility to new players and people who are more casually inclined (A close friend of mine I've been guiding and working with to slowly build up the confidence for nightfalls and some of the older raids has had the time of their life), and just as easily it caters to people with no social life who just have to grind for that god roll gun (HI! I WANT MY FEEDING FRENZY SLASH KILL CLIP COLD FRONT STILL YOU GITS).


I'd call Destiny the greatest 7/10 in existence. Destiny 2 is probably the greatest 8/10 in existence. It's still nowhere near the kind of game that blows people away, but it can very easily lull you into that flow of shoot, loot, repeat that just skims hours away, and you can still feel like you've made progress even when you hit the gear cap because generally unless you're someone like Datto, there's usually something else to do.

It's not a game that -tells- you what to do and where to go, you have to set your own goals and then work from there, once you're done with the Story Content what you get out of this game hinges on what you feel like putting in. It's perfectly possible to play through the Red War (FOR FREE NO LESS) and come away thinking "That was nice", put the game down and have done.

If however you want a looter shooter that you can dip into either once a day for an hour or for several hours, and the game consistently rewards your commitment, then this does the job. More to the point it does the job somewhat better than Warframe does -at this point- (Warframe, I love you, but you're a mess, you need to fix yourself).

Yes, the Eververse is going to be a pervasive problem (I know that the art department are distinct from other teams, but I get the sense some of their best work is going to Eververse and could go into challenging quests), and I feel that once you clear the Season Pass max they should be offering what is now the equivalent of Bright Engrams every third or fourth level, as opposed to every fifth (seriously, this feels too stingy once you get over the top of the mountain). There's some rewards IN the Season Pass that really don't belong (Like Glimmer, Legendary Shards and Bright Dust), but the Season Pass itself is decent value.


Destiny 2 is by no means perfect. The Crucible needs -desperate- attention. Gambit is also in need of serious love. If next season doesn't offer a new raid I suspect there will be riots as well (Running Garden of Salvation is getting old), there also needs to be new ideas aside from "Let's make new Menageries" for the seasonal content. The idea of the infinite paths maze -should- clue Bungie into some new ideas involving branching path dungeons which lead to different bosses (and by extension, different loot). Implementing that could prove challenging.

That said, my 600 hours should stand testament that this game has managed to supplant World of Warcraft as my drug of choice.

Make of that what you will.

Verdict : Recommended

Hades is essentially a cross between Bastion and Transistor with a new coat of paint, some randomisation in how you get your upgrades, and some randomisation in the encounters (unlike in the previous two where the encounters were mostly hand crafted). That's it.

What? What more do you want me to say? The graphics are as ever top notch, the atmosphere is pitch perfect, with a version of Hades that neatly straddles the line between being comedic and ever so slightly dark, with Hades himself almost feeling like the weary administrator of Hell who seems to be the only one doing any real work whilst the gods are busy having fun in Olympus. The soundtrack is second to none, the narrative is rich, funny, and really brings out the personalities of the gods as you meet them, the voice acting is once again right on the money.

The game-play from a mechanical standpoint? It works. It's not going to blow your socks off, think Transistor but a little bit more snappy and a little less thoughtful (no active pause option here, and it's a bit more reaction based), building that optimal deck in your sword is replaced with on the fly decision making as gods offer you a choice of buffs from which you can build out your killing machine, and as you repeat play the game you'll unlock weapon types that significantly affect your baseline abilities (think of weapon picks as "classes" and you'll have a much easier time of it).


The last three games from Supergiant were complete releases, more to the point each of them were unique both in the story they told and had mechanics that actually took things in new directions to some extent (In Pyre's case, the game ripped open the envelope, then set it on fire), it didn't *need* early access, it came out of the gate strong, and was perhaps one of my picks for game of the year. The Storytelling was _so_ good and the game was _so_ unique that you could forgive the fact that the moment to moment gameplay was... kinda strange... but it worked.

So here's my problem. Hades doesn't really do anything that I've not seen before in other Roguelikes, it's not Dungeon of the Endless for example, it's not Dungeons of Dredmor, it's a combination of two of Supergiant's best hits and given a new, demonic coat of paint and a bit of a fiddle here and there. This could have spent some more time in the oven and then just come out as a finished game and everyone would be happy (sortof, there's the small matter of Epic exclusivity but more on that in a second).

This was sold as an Epic Exclusive EA game, where it sat for over a year, and now it's here on Steam, once again in Early Access, and for the life of me I cannot figure out what is so special about it that holds it up from going 1.0, this isn't a Klei game where there's a lot of intricate mechanics that need to be tested and balanced, it's not like say, Pyre (where I could easily understand had that gone Early Access), a lot of what's going on in this game is well documented and understood elsewhere.


So what, polish? Content? Sure, the content isn't done, it's been added to over the year but then that makes it seem like a case of SpaceBase DF-9 where you release a tech demo and then expect consumers to fund the game whilst you build it out. I'm at a loss in understanding where this game needs the Early Access moniker.

The game is great, but I have questions over how the Developers have handled this. The game feels -safe- coming from the people who brought us Transistor and Pyre, and it's in Early Access despite this.

Do I recommend it... yes, but I'm hesitant, more than I should be given the pedigree of Supergiant.

It doesn't help that the fact they went Epic Exclusive over this one has left me feeling very salty.

Verdict: Wait for them to finish the damn game, then buy it.

TLDR: Both this and Code Vein are worthy purchases, albeit for very different reasons, which game is your cup of tea will depend heavily on personal preference, I'll go into that below.

The Surge 2 follows up as a direct sequel to the original, and storywise assumes that you modified the payload that goes up into space with the USB stick that you get from the good doctor about midway through the first game. This has the net result of preventing the worst of the Utopia launch, namely killing everyone very quickly, but also results in the nanites picking up elements of the boss you fight at the very end of the first game. I'm trying to avoid too many named spoilers but covering this element of the story is important because it sets the stage for the world you enter in the second game.

This time around, instead of playing as Warren, you get to create your own character, with a choice of background (which has a minor narrative impact), and you can set your gender, customise your looks, and much like any souls game, set everything up to your liking, before you're thrust into the game proper. Enter pandemonium, you start off in a prison hospital where everything is currently falling apart, with rioting in the cell blocks, and something very big and ugly ripping the structure and guards a new one.


Map design in the second game is best described as knotty, the number of shortcuts and loopbacks in each given area is impressive, and you're never far away from a path back to a medbay to bank your tech scrap, or field an upgrade to your power core. This does come at the tradeoff that the maps are more dense, instead of being expansive horizontally, they compensate in being more intricate and expansive vertically, in some places this works exceptionally well such as downtown Jericho, in Port Nixon however it ends up making the area feel somewhat bland and lacking in identity (the port really could have done with being more sweeping).

This map design gets remixed at the half way stage once you defeat a specific boss, and the story essentially moves forward in a very permanent way, this refreshes the maps and prevents things from getting boring, but then opens up one of my more definite criticisms of the game.

The nanite enemies make a very unwelcome return, and in force, and boy do they annoy the timber out of you. In the first game they were gimmicky, the gimmick here seems to have gone for the most part, replaced instead by absurdly fast, sweeping blow mobs that can, even with heavy armour, four or five shot you. You're going to want to invest in armour upgrades in a big way once the midway point kicks in, and ensure your weapons are up to scratch, because the difficulty jumps significantly.


The Surge 2 has made several very welcome improvements, the drone now works using an ammo pool that can be refilled by killing enemies, and extra ammo can be banked at a medbay (in fact you end up drowning in the stuff even if you drain the clip of the drone regularly), the much maligned weapon skill grind has gone, which given the sheer variety of weapon types has climbed significantly, again, is really welcome.

Implants are now all treated as hot swap types, so you can experiment with different build types, also welcome (though the seeming lack of exo-rig upgrades to this point is annoying, the first game allowed for 16 implants max, this looks to top at 12). I've not *finished* the game, so if there is an exo-rig upgrade for more implants, let me know.

Less welcome is the directional parry system, which adds a needless bit of fiddling to what is a simple concept, if you block at the exact right moment, you should be rewarded, now instead you have to use the right stick to match the direction of the attack at the right time whilst holding the block button. This is fiddly and with some enemies, a real pain as their attack patterns are too unpredictable to make this work properly. The original parry system worked -fine-, this feels like adding a third wheel to the bicycle.

The other complaint is that whilst you can now upgrade implants that provide injections such as heals, you cannot upgrade other implants, this seems like a massive oversight, because that would allow you to fine tune your build. Perhaps they can fix this particular issue, because being able to upgrade one set of implants but not another feels really arbitrary.


If you loved The Surge, this is a no brainer. If you love soulslikes, this is a no brainer. The combat is very much of the Dark Souls vein, albeit with a voice of it's own and enough added on top to feel interesting (the original game is still one of my top recommendations for people looking for a change from Dark Souls itself), if you're fresh to the Souls genre as a whole, I'd *slightly* recommend starting with the original, and then moving up to this one once you've mastered the original. It'll make the learning curve a lot easier. But that really is personal preference.

Oh, and obviously, if you like your souls with Anime, Code Vein is also there for you. But that review is elsewhere.

Verdict: Essential, naturally