Recent reviews by Hyperlynx

I'm trying to use this with DCS, wearing a physical kneeboard and with physical MFD rings.

The resolution on the Index cameras is too poor for me to be able to read my kneeboard.

The camera boxes can't be made small enough for me to put them over the edges of my virtual MFDs so that I can see the physical buttons behind, so that I can see what buttons I'm pushing. They either obscure parts of the MFD (which has the label for what the button is), or other important controls that are around the MFD.

Honestly, I liked it. $15AUD is about right.

I thought the Greed, Pride and Sloth missions were quite clever, and fun. The rest are kind of okay. I thought I wasn't going to give a damn about the new suits, but I found myself actually really liking them.

They could have pushed the concept a lot harder, and made it much trippier and weirder (like that Hawke's Bay thing where you're a scarecrow monster in someone else's nightmare), but it's really not too bad. I wonder if the negative reviewers played it when it was much more expensive?

Worth noting that the content warning is nonsense. Nobody is even half naked, and there's no suicide. I think that might be a generic content warning for Hitman 3 as a whole.

I just tried the tutorial, choking out an enemy. It made me reach both my hands up to his neck from behind and then press both triggers.

He instantly starts physics glitching like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crazy, all his bones bouncing to and fro like rubber bands, and when the choke is done he flies off into the sky, taking his disguise with him.

Out. Standing.

Outstanding. Really, really, really good. Ramps up in difficulty, and does not forgive, but getting it right feels absolutely fantastic. When you and your partner have figured out a clear, precise system of communication and you work together as a well-drilled team, under pressure, it's a rush.

Highly, highly recommended!

Glacially slow, and then you starve to death.

Deeply stupid, and extremely broken (even with the community-made patch).

At first this is charming, but by the end of the game it's just tedious, when the enemies have waaaaaaaaaay too much health to be fun. The writing is pretty crap too, though the voice acting is excellent.

Sterile and soulless.

Not being able to opt out of PVP is stupid.

"But it's a game about pirates" is a half-assed, bull**** excuse. It was bull**** when it was trotted out by Blizzard to justify non-consensual PVP in Diablo 2 ("but it's a role-playing game! some people are just role playing as a-holes!") and it's bull**** now.

It's poor game design - it's an entire gameplay mechanic in conflict with the other gameplay mechanics of cooperative PVE quests. Why would you design a game like this? Why would you make all sorts or fun quests and sailing and treasure hunting and fighting ghost ships, and deliberately add in "and other players can and will come in and ruin your fun at any moment"?

You've deliberately designed a game where players are encouraged to prevent other players from experiencing the rest of your game. What was the point in investing all that time and money in creating it, when you also want to prevent players from experiencing it because some other players kill them? Madness!

Extremely frustrating, because the cooperative PVE questing and ship sailing and combat and whatnot are all fun! And there's no bull**** levelling up, you start with all the tools you'll ever have access to, you're just questing for fun and cool outfits. I really love that!

But the game is, really, basically just griefing or getting griefed.

Folks, "but it's pirates!" is a bloody stupid justification when it's also about following treasure maps, getting rescued by mermaids, and fighting ghosties and walking skeletons. It's a fantasy, a fiction. We're not raiding merchant shipping in the Caribbean, here. Ironically, we're not actually doing any piracy here at all.

Anyway, regardless of whether you justify it or not, it's simply not a fun game experience.

I love this! I move my hand up and down to the pitch of things I'm listening to all the time. I think Sousa is the best and funniest music. Hell, I even love ska! This is right up by alley!

But, uh, there's only an hour's worth of songs in here. Yes, okay, I haven't gone and got S rank on all of them, but that's one play through of all of them, not getting below a B, in 55 minutes.

MORE! I DEMAND MORE! This is not enough to sate me!!!

e: I could do without the turning cards into poo and turning poo into cards, though! Gross!

It's... ok.

It's very cute, but it's as lite as roguelite can possibly be. A Fisher Price roguelite. It's as roguelike as Avril Lavigne is punk rock.

The combat is pretty rudimentary if you've played any action rpg ever - just dodge roll through the thingy and then counterattack. Enemies all signal when they're going to attack ("telegraphing") by literally flashing white - you couldn't possibly miss it. But, oddly, there's almost no feedback when you actually take damage, and it took me a while to work out both what the indicator is that you got hit (it's a "ding!" sound). Not knowing when you've taken damage actually makes it harder to learn, because it's harder to tell where your hitbox is, how much dodging protects you for, how big enemy attacks are etc. This could have easily been improved by traditional means such as a red flash around the border.

The colony management aspect is cute, but pretty trivial.

Hammers are just no fun, and aggravating to use.

Gamepad controls can't be rebound, you have to choose between presets (?!??!). Keyboard and mouse can be fully rebound. As with a lot of games, despite the claim that it plays better with a gamepad, it plays far better with keyboard and mouse.

Some things in the game are pretty unbalanced. There's a ritual you can do, if you selected it, which means all your followers give you gold in exchange for a bit of unhappiness. This gives you TONS of money for an insignificant amount of discontent that's easily fixed - once you have this ritual you never have to worry about money again.

While we're talking about rituals, when you're picking the rules for your cult you're always given the choice between two options, and the choice is permanent. Build choices being permanent is rather outdated game design, for good reason: it sucks, you don't know what's a good choice the first time through, and you might want to experiment with another build later on. There's certainly no narrative or balance reason why our omniscient cult leader can't say "actually, I changed my mind, now we're doing THIS instead!"

I don't get why everything has to be a roguelite these days, especially when they're simply bad versions of roguelikes (by definition, roguelikes do not have progression between runs! none! the only progression is you, the player, getting more skilled and familiar with deep, complex systems, and getting to feel the satisfaction of mastering them.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, the "runs" aspect. Honestly, I think this would have been better served with longer dungeons that you could leave at any time, rather than the roguelite trope of "the run only ends when you win or you die". There's hints of that sentiment, because you actually can *unlock* the ability to quit a run early (and alive), and after you've beaten a boss it unlocks the ability to play on in larger maps. Why not just do those from the start? You've already got the gameplay mechanism of needing to balance how long you're away from your followers with "just one more room", you don't actually need the "the only way out is death or victory" mechanic at all.

A combination of an action RPG and colony management is just fine. You don't need to make it be a watered down version of a roguelite. It's not actually serving the game.

It's quite flawed in a bunch of irritating ways, and combat isn't really very satisfying or particularly difficult.

Ok, so why a thumbs up? Because I can't deny that, on the balance, I enjoyed this game. It's not as good as it could be, but it's not bad. The presentation is charming, and while trivial the colony management is nice while it lasts (before you max out the tech tree).