Recent reviews by eeKay

So I *was* enjoying this game a lot.
But apparently the developers have been breaking the game a lot lately?
Today I was playing and my game crashed. Then every time I tried to launch it, it crashed again.
I'd heard reverting to an old version of the game through the beta branch system made the game run again for some people, so I tried that.
Unfortunately, the old version didn't like my save file.
What should a game do when the save file is weird? Probably not permanently delete ALL your save files including older versions, right?
Well, apparently Gloomhaven Digital if, on loading the main menu, thinks the save file is 'corrupt', it then practically deletes it by moving EVERYTHING to a "corrupted saves" folder and changing the format so it can no longer be used. It doesn't ask you if you want to do this, it just does it.
Now, even when I revert my game to the regular branch my save is gone.
Like 80 hours of gameplay in campaign mode just gone.
Don't buy this game.

Very satisfying, fast paced, highly skill-based combat. Great story. Awesome soundtrack. Beautiful art. This is already one of my favourite games ever, and I think I've played about 100 hours in my first few weeks owning it.

Got this game a week ago and sunk 30 hours ago, so it must be at least decent.
Probably not great single player, but it's quite fun co-op.

I very highly recommend this game!

It's a truly unique game, and very well designed.

It can be a little tough starting out, but it's not dwarf fortress. The mechanics are simple, but the game has so many features and interactions between them that there's a lot of depth. The fact that your colonists are mostly automated lets you sit back and make decisions rather than micro-managing.

The randomized events, map generation, and different biomes give the game a lot of replayability. I actually have about 100 hours more than steam says, because I had the game before it was on steam.

Make sure to look into mods after you've learned the game! This game has amazing mod support, and there are dozens, maybe hundreds of good quality mods out there. Steam workshop makes it really easy to search and find them too.

The best RPG I've played in a long time. The art is beautiful. The combat is challenging and tense. The world is mysterious and intriguing.
The only flaws are that the game doesn't tell you what you're supposed to do at the start (you're left to explore and figure it out), which can be a little confusing, and the controls are clunky with keyboard+mouse, you pretty much need a gamepad.

Robocraft is actually extremely fun . . . sometimes.
The idea of the game is great, and there are a lot of fun mechanics. The developers release updates at faster pace than I've seen in almost any game ever, which is sort of a good thing.

Except that so many of their updates seem so poorly thought out or untested. Don't get me wrong, Robocraft is improving as a game over time, but every update is two steps forward, one step back. Each update will release cool new features, and completely breaks something else. The next will fix the previous issue, but break another part of the game.

Currently, the biggest issue is probably the matchmaking. Your robot can be placed in a match with robots with hugely better parts. It completely ruins the game to spend hours carefully designing your bot, and months honing your piloting skills, only to have it get wrecked by a box on wheels because the box on wheels has guns that deal twice as much damage.

I regularly get matched with robots that have over 10 times the ranking rating of mine.

Matchmaking is not the only issue either, other issues include:
- Lack of voice chat, making communication and strategy with the team nearly impossible.
- Some very, very flawed map design.
- The medic tools heal faster than most guns can deal damage (unless at short range), which does not make for fun gameplay.
- The platoon system (which allows you to play with friends) is glitchy and has been for over a year, which is a long time compared to the very frequent updates this game gets. It is starting to feel like the developers don't care that trying to play with friends can be a huge pain.
- The main game mode, battle arena, has some weird mechanics that make for a very strange and not very interesting meta-game.
- Robots take too long to kill, especially in the early game.
- Respawn times are too short (<10 seconds) early on in a match, although they do reach more reasonable times after a while.
- Players frequently abandon the game. To be fair, sometime it's not their fault and their game crashed. This often makes matches uneven (like a 6 v 8). The game tries to balance this by reducing the smaller team's respawn times, but reduced respawn times don't help the smaller team, they just make it take longer for them to lose.

If anyone doesn't understand or agree with something I said in this review I can try to explain in more detail. Some of the issues are hard to explain in simple point form because it's more like a net of complex problems that exacerbate each other.

Despite the long list of issues, Robocraft is very fun when the matchmaking places you in a fair match. None of the other issues completely ruin a match like the terrible matchmaking can. This review will remain negative until players are being put into fair fights.
If the matchmaking is fixed (and another game-breaking issue isn't introduced) in the next update and I forget to update this review, message me or leave a comment and I will.

This game, despite having a few major flaws, it still pretty fun for a while. I wanted to write an informative negative review about something other than complaining about the DLC or controls, which is what almost all the other negative reviews are about.

In my opinion, there are three major things wrong with this game:
This is by far the biggest problem with Helldivers.

On the higher difficulties, mission success is very, very reliant on remaining mostly undetected. The map has wandering scouts, who call for backup if they are not killed within about 2 seconds of being alerted. Their sight range is about half a screen length, so they can sound the alarm within 2 seconds of appearing on the edge of your screen. This itself is not a problem, but . . .

In multiplayer, all characters are locked on the screen and can not move the camera independently. However, the scouts' alert range remains the same. The result is that the scouts can sound the alarm from off-screen, unless the players are traveling in a tight group in the center of the screen, practically shoulder to shoulder, which is very hard to do unless you're playing with friends who are good at co-operating. This makes the multiplayer awkward and frustrating at times.

Because the game revolves so much around not getting detected, players must stop and press TAB to open the map every few seconds to try see the approaching scouts on the map before they appear on screen. Some players bring lots of ammo (or a weapon that doesn't consume ammo) and shoot them off-screen. This kind of gameplay gets very, very stale within a few hours, yet it's what you'll be spending 90% of your time doing if you play on the highest difficulty.

As a result of all this, it's much easier to play the game alone, so your character is center-screen and scouts can never catch you by surprise. You'll still be opening the map every 5 seconds, to make sure you're not facing the wrong direction when they come. Playing alone gets boring. A game that encourages playing alone has problems.

This could be mostly fixed by making each players camera move independently, or completely changing the alert mechanics, preferably the latter.

On top of all this, once you do start soloing, or playing with a group that's decent at killing scouts, the game becomes way too easy. No one should be able to consistently solo the hardest difficulty within their first 20 hours on a game, yet after about 20 hours of play, soloing the hardest difficulty was so easy to me that it became boring. I may have been able to do it even earlier had I thought to attempt it.

This is more of a problem for newer players, because you do get used to the awkward controls eventually, but it makes the first few hours of play much less enjoyable than they would be otherwise. Also, because the scouts sound the alarm very quickly, being able to shoot them as fast as possible is very important, and the awkward controls add a very not-fun layer of difficulty to this. Awkward controls shouldn't be used to add difficulty to a game, unless it's in a hilarous and fun way such as Magicka's spell casting system.

With mouse and keyboard, the awkwardness comes from the fact that the cross-hair does not show up on the screen while the player is not aiming down their sights (which greatly slows your move speed). The cross-hair also resets to the middle of your screen (or a few feet in front of your character, if you use that option) every time you stop aiming down sights. The result is cumbersome and unintuitive aiming controls that frequently make you lose track of your cross-hair. It also forces you to pick up and move your mouse a lot. The white cross-hair is also difficult to see in some maps.
A lot of players are suggesting that the cross-hair be always visible, which would certainly help, and it sounds like the developers are considering it.

On a gamepad, it's simply difficult to know where you're aiming, and difficult to aim precisely. Often you'll see gamepad players fire a couple rounds just to see where they're aiming, then adjust their aim on target and fire again, effectively using their first few bullets as a laser pointer. Of course, you can run with the laser pointer perk all the time (and many gamepad users do this) but this limits your loadout significantly. Aiming feels so much better with the laser pointer perk (and so bad without it) that I think it should be there by default and not take up your perk slot.

There are a few items in the DLC packs that are very helpful, although it's still very possible to manage without them. I dislike when games sell important items as DLC.
The items I'm referring to are the UAV drone, All Terrain Boots, and Exo-51 Lumberer Exosuit. Most of the other DLC items are not game changing, and many of them are hardly ever used.

At this point, I've probably made this game sound pretty bad. Helldivers was still pretty fun for the first 30 hours or so, but the lack of difficulty and poor stealth mechanics make the game get stale much faster than I would have liked. With some changes, I could easily see myself playing Helldivers for hundreds of hours and rating it as one of my favourite games.

Really fun for the first (and maybe second) playthrough, but gets really old after that. Still one of the best zombie games ever.

Anyone who played the previous civ games will probably hate this game at first, but it gets better as you play it more. The combat is WAY better, because units no longer stack, ranged units have actual range, the tiles are hexagons and the movement makes more sense. Overall, Civ 4 is probably still better though, but this is a nice change.

The best RPG I've played in a long time. Everything about the game is perfect, except that it's too short.