Recent reviews by sloppenheimer

They made a racing game you WANT to play!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW???????

If you get all sorts of tingly feelings from parrying enemies in the soulsborne genre of games, this game pretty much centers its entire combat system around an even more fleshed out version of that with directional parries, enemies that require multiple parries to stun, and even upgrades to your character that further reward you for parrying with health, damage bonuses, and energy. Sure, you can also dodge attacks and some attacks are unblockable and must be dodged, but it's clear this was more an afterthought.

The recommendation is easy, if you like soulslikes, you will like this game. The only disappointing part is the story falling flat near the end. The game does not care if you did all the sidequests, the good ending/bad ending is decided entirely by a text box choice after you beat the final boss.

Plays like previous Armored Core games with a targeting reticle, no lock-on with automatic tracking here, at least not by default. The combat is totally fine if a little janky, feedback to hits is sometimes a tad limited so weapons feel a little weak even if they shred through enemies like butter. There's a large amount of replayability here since it's pretty much impossible to collect all the armor and weapon parts the game has to offer within your first playthrough. Granted, most missions are fairly generic go to X shoot Y amount of enemies. It gets better near the end. This game was not developed by FromSoft after all, who have perfected mecha combat through the Armored Core franchise. This is very much derivative of their work and clearly not as polished as they would make it. However, do not let this discourage you. There is still a lot of fun to be had here with tons of build variety.

The story is confusing. A lot of things happen behind the scenes and the pacing can go from zero to one hundred before you've finished processing it all. The characters don't help much in this part if you make the mistake of playing with the English voices. Do yourself a favor and switch to Japanese, enjoy the line delivery as an anime. If you do you may also be pleasantly surprised to see most of the Japanese voice actors have also performed in the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, including Tōru Furuya and Shūichi Ikeda of Amuro Ray and Char Aznable fame, who even play similar roles within the story. A lot of story beats can trace their roots back to Gundam as well with Newtype-ism themes. after all this game was made in part with Bandai Namco support.

Full price this game is sadly not recommendable, and the DLCs on top of that feel a bit egregious. When purchased on sale its value shines more readily, and is easy to recommend to anybody looking for a mecha action rpg.

Valve's neglect of this game reflects upon their general attitudes of being a storefront and product development company first and foremost, their game development is mostly a thing of the past. Whether it's TF2, CS, DOTA, or any other games Valve has released in the past, the Valve of today does not represent the Valve that made those games the industry staples they once were. Of the playercount you see this game have today, only about 10-15K are actual real players, all the rest are bot accounts either farming trade items or cheat bots that just shut down entire servers. There is still fun to be had, but it's not gonna be easy to find.

Combat feels shallow and clunky, with your dodge and guards having to be frame-perfect even though enemy attacks can pop out of nowhere, even with the big boss fights. difficulty spikes kinda weirdly, and the progression system is also really poorly thought out. You'll be replaying the same missions sometimes up to 5 times to collect puzzle pieces for suits. Why? Just feels like lazy padding out of playtime. Grinding out the same missions repeatedly is just not enjoyable. On top of that, upgrading your suits to actually be functional requires a large amount of resources so swapping suits isn't just a matter of unlocking them and playing, you have to then grind out materials to level up that suit to make it usable in higher level missions. Same with your partners, if you unlock them early they stay low level and die very quickly if you decide to play with them again in later levels. I played this to completion purely because I wanted to play *a* Gundam game and without a Playstation and living where I do, this and G Generation Cross Rays are my only two options. I'm sorry, but unless you're desperate or a crazy Gundam fan that just wants to see mobile suits in a game, there's no real way to recommend this. Pick it up for like 10 bucks when it's on sale and you'll at the very least get time for your money.

Incredibly overhyped.

There's some fun to be had sometimes kinda but most of this game is a massive grindfest that is either literally impossible because the weapons you have can not do even a single point of damage to the enemies you're facing or you do happen to have the correct weapon in hand in which case the game is trivially easy. There's no clever tactics, either you did bring the square peg for the square hole or you're ♥♥♥♥ out of luck. There is no real sense of difficulty and scaling here, moreso just making the higher difficulties as annoying to play as possible with enemies that either instakill you or stunlock you forever through ragdolls until you die.

It's a fun concept, executed by one of the most incompetent developers I've seen yet, published by a game studio that's run by people with severe brain damage.

Recommending this game on potential alone here, the little content that is available right now is so juicy I'm desperate for more. There are obvious issues, mainly with the AI being kinda (very) jank and frames being very poor, as well as the game stuttering when you're about to get shot which of all times is probably the worst moment for a game like this to stutter. If the focus is put on fixing those issues first and then adding shiny new toys like maps, cosmetics, and guns, this could easily be one of the greatest games i've ever played.

Somehow, this fast-paced movement shooter with low health and tough enemies is one of the most relaxing experiences you can have.

I mean... Duh, of course I'm recommending it. It's a CDPR RPG, of course it's good. Characters are fun and lovable, dialogue is well written and well acted, story is intricate, your choices matter, the world is beautiful and filled with things for you to do.

The game is a LOT of fun, but it certainly has a couple (read: a lot) of bugs and improvements that need to be made to things like the traffic and NPC AI, as well as many stability patches to make the game run more smoothly, but we know that those will come.

If you have very low-end hardware in your PC or trying to play this on last-gen consoles, at the time of writing this, 12th of December 2020, you will not have a good time. To everybody else, enjoy!

This will be a recommendation with a lot of caveats.

Here's what you will undoubtedly like: The overall feel of the game is excellent. Environments are very well done, combat feels amazing, animations are stylish and detailed, even the story and lore is all very well done despite being such a short game. If you're somebody that likes cyberpunk like myself, you'll love most things about how this game looks, feels, and sounds, because the music and sound effects are all also fitting and punchy. Combat may be brutal since you die in one hit, but every kill you do get feels great. Think of it like Hotline Miami in that aspect. Something minor that I do appreciate immensely is that the exact millisecond you die you can mash R and be right at your last checkpoint again. No convoluted death screen, no loading time, you're just right back in the action. This will make the hundreds of deaths you will have across the game feel like less of a setback.

Now, here come the issues with the game... See my playtime? You can scratch off maybe an hour, maybe more, that were spent repeatedly dying to the variety of jumping puzzles scattered throughout the game. I mean, the first boss is just one big jumping puzzle, as is the final level, and at no point was it enjoyable. It was just a matter of trial and error, brute-forcing over and over again until I eventually made it through. The movement mechanics may be good, but they're not good enough to make these levels anything more than tedious. It always felt like you just couldn't jump high enough, just not far enough, not being able to see your character's legs also doesn't help, and all the good times I had in the previous levels got massively overshadowed by these two. Overall the game needed way more combat arenas, and way less traversing empty (but beautiful) environments. This may look like a massive complaint, but in the end it only made up about 10% of the actual game. The other 90% was top notch.

Speaking of tedious, a couple of the enemies feel very bad to fight. First there's the metal gear walker lookin' thing. Even after finishing the game I do not know how to reliably avoid this enemy's attacks. Then there's the shielded enemy. Good idea, forced me to get creative with my approaches, but the arch of his shield is just way too wide. even if I was behind him I sometimes still get knocked back when i try to attack. And then there's the exploding enemies. In a game about flying around and slashing things with a sword (and only a sword), having an enemy that you can not slash with your sword is one of the worst ideas ever. Thank God they die when you kill all other enemies on the map, otherwise they would have been truly insufferable. The ninja dudes also should just die immediately when you parry them instead of requiring another swing, it's kinda pointless since after parrying them the only way they possibly won't die is if you purposely just walk away, this is just a minor complain though.

Critiques regarding the environment, first off, the rails needed a larger hitbox. It will happen too many times that you jump at one of those things and get so close you can lick it yet you won't grab it, causing you to fall to your death. The walls could also do with a smoothing over, the combat arenas are supposed to be sandboxes, not a preset handful of paths and if you deviate from it you'll get stuck on a piece of terrain and die, or you'll bump your head on something and stop dead in your tracks.

Despite all of my complaints though, The majority of the time I spent with this game was short but oh so sweet, and I very much look forward to perhaps a sequel with some of the issues ironed out, and everything that made this game good improved even further.