Recent reviews by Cyberdyne Vulpine

If you bought this game, you could be playing it right now.

I'm writing this review from the perspective of a warlock player with a lot of experience (990 hours) in the game, with build crafting, and with running end-game content (raids, dungeons, grandmasters). I will attempt to cover most of the topics and talking points introduced in the game trailers and pre-release patch notes.

Calus is back, and The Witness is invading Earth! We embark on a interstellar fetch quest for an item everyone seems to think we should already know about (The Veil). During the campaign we arrive on Neptune and the city of Neomuna, meet the Cloudstriders (all two of them) and discover the new Strand subclass.

There is little to be said of the story, as little meaningful actually happens. After essentially no interaction or character development, one of the Cloudstriders sacrifices himself in a later revealed to be meaningless attempt to destroy an artifact that the Witness needed. Later we face Calus and defeat him with no interesting dynamics or character interactions. Literately a one-and-done fight with no story arc. Further along, it is shown that we were unable to stop the Witness who makes some cryptic statements and enters the Traveler.

..and that's it, the story answers no questions, quickly adds three characters and just as quickly removes two of them, and abruptly ends with a "you failed... try again?" cliffhanger. Most of the story development that happens is shown in the trailers.

Neomuna is a bright shining cyberpunk aesthetic city, however on my initial visit, I immediately thought it looked like a game from several years ago. Many low resolution textures and rushed feeling environments abound. It's also notable that this supposedly bustling metropolis is devoid of any signs of life except for enemies that feel copy-pasted from elsewhere in the game and the two cloudstriders.

Frustratingly, many of the world encounters on Neomuna are very high level, and will immediately kill you if you wander too close, which is very easy to do given they occur in commonly traversed areas.

The new mean green subclass is introduced gradually through the campaign missions, but fails to ever feel particularly useful. Strand is fun, but also feels gimmicky - for example levels encourage swinging with ropes to cross gaps that could easily be made with a glide jump. Melee-heavy combat mechanics feel likely to bring you into dangerous insta-kill distance with foes, while damage seems to be lackluster. I feel wary of using this subclass for any serious content at the current iteration, but the pending release of more aspects of strand may improve my views.

The heavily touted new enemy type is immediately introduced and feels like a toned down version of the Vow of the Disciple raid boss. This combined with the fact that the tormentor appears in almost every encounter makes me feel like Bungie was going for quantity over quality here. The mechanic is similar to Vow: Shoot the glowy bits on the shoulders, and then the chest to do damage, and avoid getting too close or you'll be grabbed by an inescapable grab attack.

The high mobility, long range, grab attack, and the fact that the tormentor casts various suppression attacks that slow you and disable player abilities makes this a very annoying enemy that I found myself wanting to Gjallarhorn from as far away as possible.

An annoyance of this update is that the minimum light level has been moved to 1600 (10 over the previous hard upper limit of 1590) which means any pre-season upgrades or grinding are all for naught.
Further, the new cap of 1800 means a lot of time will be spent grinding for progressively higher light levels, and many, many, many upgrade modules will be needed to achieve progression. Many pre-existing activities (eg, Nightfalls) are now gated behind a minimum light level, so the amount of content available to existing players has been reduced.

A fun seeming addition to the game, commendations were mentioned as a way to thank members of your instanced mission for their efforts at the score screen. This is the case, but Bungie's decision to tie commendations to guardian rank progression and seasonal objectives just turns them into something to be farmed instead of any meaningful indicator of a player's helpfulness. Additionally I also found it odd that you are limited in what commendation you can give to a player. For example, of my two fireteam members, I can only give one of them the "Ally" commendation, and only if they didn't receive it from another player that match. This results in all players receiving both of the two available commendations in a fireteam of three, which contributes to any meaningful value of a particular type of commendation.

Ranks were introduced as a new system to differentiate new players from established veterans. This goal seems a little lost however when ranks 1-6 are all trivial objectives that can be completed in a couple hours of play and every guardian I have observed is already rank 6 (despite many not meeting the 1750 light level requirement...). Getting to rank 7 seems much more grindy and has a number of mission requirements that need a high enough light level to complete.
Ranks 8+ have hidden objectives until previous ranks are achieved.

By far my biggest complaint with this season lies with the major changes to the mod system. Most players I have talked to (and I myself) had the expectation that mod/armor energy type requirements were going away, and mods might not be locked to a specific armor type (chest, arms, etc). What actually occurred is a complete re-invention and reduction of the mod system:

Gone are "charged with light" mods, elemental wells, and warmind mods. The new system feels as though the skill ceiling for buildcrafting and mod synergy has been significantly lowered, while little to nothing has been done to improve the skill floor and make mods more accessible to inexperienced players.

The new system uses a "Armor Charge" buff that works similarly to the charged with light buff. Some mods consume stacks of this buff, while others such as Weapon Surge cause it to quickly dissipate. This competition for the same resource means it's unlikely that a player will want to run Grenade Kickstart and Weapon Surge (previously Font of Might) in the same build.
Builds now seem to depend heavily on orbs of power as a single simplified resource, I expect that this may handicap a number of established build strategies.

The ability to save and quickly swap loadouts is a much needed feature that was previously provided by third-party apps such as DIM. Having this as a native, in-game feature is a very nice improvement, however I find it strange that the loadout names and icons that appear when creating a new loadout seem to have no connection to my class. For example, my solar well of radiance warlock's loadout was assigned the name "Strand", and further identical loadouts were created with names "Delta", "Arc", "Alpha", and "Dungeon" while given seemingly random icons such as the Stasis icon. I assume this is a bug that will be fixed in the future.

A major disappointment of this update is that there was no increase to the vault storage despite most guardians being pressed right up against the 600 item cap with lots of item micromanagement required to determine what to keep and what to discard.
No improvements to sorting or item search were added.

I was enthusiastic for this season, but the story feels barely there, and many game changes are reductionist and feel like a slap in the face to established players.

Saints Row IV takes the wacky things that made Sants Row 3 fun and turns them up to 20.

Infinite ran fine on my GTX 1070 laptop, gameplay was decent, environments are fun, and the weapon mods are cool to play with.

My main complaint is that the story is entirely linear, and you can complete the entire campaign on normal difficulty in about 9 hours (including beating the side missions for upgrades).

Linux server, the game

This game is a load of fun and it's filled with humor and references to geek culture.

Awesome tower defense game. Probably the best one I've ever played.
The upgrade system based around combining cards is really unique (in a good way)

Buy this!

Prototype was awesome, Prototype 2 is even better.
Gameplay is largely the same, but new skills have been added, annoyances from Prototype 1 have been fixed, and the game preforms better across the board.

Feels like Tropico 3 with slighty better graphics.
Some of the old annoying 'features' have been thrown out, there are some new buildings, and there are now natural disasters. But aside from that, it's really the same as Tropico 3.

Still fun though.