Recent reviews by Hoooldini

< :: Another victory for the RIGHT side of history... :: >

Mess with the crabbo, get the stabbo 🔪

I now wish to DDL-Cease to exist

i am now depressed
thanks omocat

It caught me off guard just how much this game has to offer. I thought it would be a good EA game that would show promise in a few months. But really it feels like a well made game already. I've been cracked out on this game for the past 20 hours and I'm only just starting to enter the third zone. I never would have guessed there was this much on offer. The combat and general gameplay is really well designed, and I can't find any cracks that push me away. Give it a try, it might impress you too.

I'm only writing this for the Steam Awards

I thought I knew fear, then I discovered that the horniness of man had led it into the darkest precipices of our own psyches.

It's a great horror game, 10/10

It's a bit of a strange game. It's more hardcore than most dogfighting games I've plated, but I don't think it's quite on the level as a pure flight simulator. I actually think it finds a good middle ground between those two things, but it takes some getting used to.

I think that the controls need some work, as the defaults aren't the most intuitive to work with. PC controls aren't very good at all, and it seems that the best way to play this game is with a controller. I don't have HOTAS so I can't comment on that. The PC controls, namely the mouse controls for orienting the ship, need to be closer to something like warthunder. You have to manually return your mouse to the deadzone every time you want your ship to stop rotating, and it doesn't control well.

Some people are saying this game is designed for VR, and that isn't the case. I really wanted virtual HOTAS for the game, but you don't use your VR controllers at all during the game. The best way to play this game in VR is with a controller, or maybe with HOTAS. People are also talking about a lack of TrackIR support, which I can fully understand as it would be really helpful in a game like this.

The gameplay is a bit lacking in content right now. It doesn't take long to experience the whole thing. It's easy to lose interest once you realize there's nothing left around the corner. I like the maps and the game modes that are currently in the game, but there should be planetary assaults as well. The game takes place in the New Republic era, but I would be so down for some good old fashion rebels vs empire. Things like the Battle of Scarif, Endor, and Hoth would be really cool. Right now though, it's either dogfighting or fleet battles in space. It's pretty difficult at first too because flying in space is disorienting for newer players due to the fact that there's no good reference point.

Gameplay wise, the 5v5s are a pretty good format for this kind of game. Maybe larger games would be cool for a less competitive mode, but there's no way to make this game a 40v40 game or anything without the gameplay suffering from the chaos. There's too much management to do, and you don't have the awareness of flying in third person. The only thing I don't like is how tanky the bombers are. Bomber cheese is pretty real in the game. Primary fighters like Ties and X-Wings also struggle pretty heavily. Instead of being the jack of all trades, master of none; they're the worst of at any role and can't really compete in any of them. Primary fighters are hardly used at all. Many of the customizations for the starfighters are also pretty mediocre, but the defaults are pretty good all across the board. A lot of the options should be rebalanced to be more viable.

Competitive for this game is also pretty lame. Not because the format sucks, or the meta is bad. It's just that the game places you at the minimum possible Skill Rating no matter how well you do in placements. And it only gives you about 40 points per win as well. At that rate, it would take 88 wins in a row to reach galactic ace. Games last around 40 minutes, and at that rate you're getting a point a minute for your SR. If you had a great win percentage, say, a 66% win rate, you'd have to play 264 games to get to galactic ace. It's going to be a grind, especially since your win rate won't always be that good.

All that said, I still really enjoy the game. A lot of the mechanics are really good. Some people are experiencing some errors that are preventing them from playing the game, but I haven't experienced one yet. Once I got going, I had a hard time peeling myself away. It's not a great game yet, but it has the potential to be one. If the developers keep supporting the game, it's going to do some great things. You might want to wait a little bit to make sure the game is going in the right direction before picking it up, but pick it up for sure if it's the type of thing that interests you.

I put a lot of time in this game, and had a lot of moments that were pretty great. Going on insane kill streaks, meeting interesting strangers that you'll only know for one life, and making stories just from the wild events that can happen out of pure chance are the highlights of the game. But this game is dragged pretty far down by bad design choices that you'll spend the vast majority of your time fighting.

This game really doesn't want you to have fun until you've put around an hour into your life. I think the devs think that the payoff is greater if they dangle the fun stuff away from you for a while. You'll spend a long time just looking for your first can of food, something to open it with, and then a water fountain to get up to a decent level of food and water before you can leave your first town. Then you spend the rest of the hour getting your first gun, some ammo, and enough supplies to last a little while. But by the end of that hour, you're still an under geared ♥♥♥♥ kicker. If you take a fight, you'll either get a come up, or a respawn that forces you to do it all over again. Most people just go looting for more.

The issue is that when you get to the point that you have supplies, military clothes, a good gun, and spare ammo, you'll have to do an hour walk to get back to areas with more people in them before you get into a fight. In total, you're looking at 4 hours for a looting cycle without any guarantee that you'll get into a fight. Even worse, at this point there's nothing else to do to progress your character. So you either have to make those 4 hours worth it by having an insane life (which you probably won't) or you'll die and get sent back to the beginning. This is just bad pacing. It's especially bad because the game doesn't do anything to give you more to do past this gameplay loop. You have to make those goals up yourself if you want to do something else. But this isn't the only bad thing about that game.

By far the zombies are the worst thing about the game. The stealth mechanics are garbage, so you'll either have to kill the zombies or trap them in buildings. They also behave like meth addicts with the way they run around. The game also actively spawns more in if shots go off, even if they weren't there before. They're not fun to fight, and they ruin gunfights by forcing whoever attracts their attention (which isn't always the shooter) to take their attention away from the fight to deal with them. By far the most actively annoying part of the game, but that isn't all.

Combat in this game is weighed down by clunky controls and some poor design choices. The devs make a lot of improvements in this regard, but it still isn't amazing. Inputs are not very responsive, and the controls are mapped fairly poorly. For example, tapping R will chamber a bullet (not load a magazine), but only after you pressed it once already. Holding R is how you reload magazines that you have in your inventory. Guns are always lowered, so you have to hold down right click to raise the gun, but then you have to hold down SHIFT as well in order to ironsight. It's more complicated than it needs to be, and its not intuitive. Footstep sounds in this game are basically silent for players, but are very loud coming from zombies. Your own footsteps are loud too. However, loading bullets into a magazine can be heard from 50m away from inside a building, same with reloading a gun. It's just completely jank.

There's more I could talk about, but that hits the biggest issues I have with the game. I can't recommend it. You might be able to have some fun, but know that the vast majority of the time is spent not doing those cool things you see in highlights.

I came to this game expecting a weird, artsy walking simulator made by Kojima. What I ended up playing was a game that ended up making me actually feel things I didn't know a game could. I felt genuine fear, tension and panic that modern "horror" games didn't give me. Not only that but fighting and the stealth mechanics actually had depth. And somehow, despite the fact that I will never see another player, the game managed to make me care about the other porters playing the game for themselves.

Don't waste time and get caught up in the package delivery aspects of the game, you don't need to. Skip the fluff and go right for the meat of the game. It's more than just a walking simulator.