Recent reviews by Gryphon

Changed to a positive review following Sony backing off on the account requirements! Hooray! Managed democracy etc! A good, fun game that shows all those other lame mainstream releases how to be fun, and always online, but actually do good things with it.

But, uh, do proceed with caution. They went back because people got mad, not because they changed their minds on their own. Watch out for that.

I can't recommend this game with the suspect AI the way it is right now. I held out hope that it would improve with the 1.0 update, but I think it may have actually gotten even worse. Or at least, the changes to the other parts of the game make it even more noticeable. In addition, all of the levels are now locked behind progression, so unlike in the old version of the game where you could jump into any mission depending on what you wanted, you're going to have play them in order. Mission too hard? Exhausted? Not fun? Tired of the layout? Tough. Play that mission, or you're not getting the next level.

I don't even have a problem with hard levels! A bunch of veterans with assault rifles and body armour taking on a swat team? The swat team should be horrified! That's great! But why is that level five?! Why is a bunch of gang members taking over a post office HARDER THAN THAT?! Making good AI for a police-based shooter like this doesn't mean a horde of AIs that Arizona ranger quickdraw all over you the moment you poke around a corner. It means people acting panicked. Sketchy. Hiding away. (I've encountered zero enemies hiding anywhere at any point playing this game without mods) Shouting! Blind firing! Running around! Using less-lethal weapons to avoid violence! That's where the difficulty should be. Not god tier aim. Not 12v5 battles. A bunch of drug addicts should fight different to a bunch of gang members should fight different to a bunch of religious militia nutjobs should fight different to a small team of private security dudes. They all play pretty much the same at time of writing. I just feel like I'm playing a worse version of insurgency sandstorm. Why even bother with the police/SWAT skin if you end up making a game that's just another unfinished tactical shooter?

The devs don't seem to have any interest in resolving this either. These problems have existed for years, since before I even bought the game. If my description turns you away, please, save your money and get some other tactical shooter. Or just play SWAT 4 again. That game actually does seem to get it.

It's generally a bad idea to turn something into a subscription service when there's already free apps doing the same thing you are. Nobody wants a subscription to this. Get some other Stereo video player, this one isn't worth your time.

My favourite Sturmovik game out right now.

But it's not for everybody. Lots of people can't get enough of multiplayer, and this game probably isn't for them. If you prefer SP, this game is entirely better than GB. The AI is smart and challenging to fight, the editor is easy to use and understand if you've used the editor in older Il2 games (Though it's finnicky sometimes), the game looks pretty to boot and has clickable cockpits on every plane. One downside is the lack of a dynamic campaign, much to my dismay, but there is a scripted one if you're into that kinda thing. (It used to have a dynamic campaign and apparently some people have got that working again but it's not a regular feature anymore.)

And get this: Planes. It comes with planes! That you don't have to pay £30 for! You buy the game and you can fly whatever you want! Well, mostly. In usual Il2 style some of the larger uncommon planes don't have cockpits and you can't fly those, but I digress. Hurricane, Spitfire, Bf-109, 110, He-111, Ju-87 + 88, Blenheim, Beaufighter and the venerable Tiger Moth are all flyable with full interiors and clickable buttons.

Also, with the Desert Wings: Tobruk DLC coming out "This Summer" (Hopefully), you'll have more planes and maps to use and apparently lots of fixes and improvements. It's currently on sale for £5, and that's criminally inexpensive for what it contains.

I have had no technical issues with this game since Team Fusion took over and patched it up, other than the occasional crash on some smaller MP maps.

To conclude, if you like singleplayer and classic sturmovik with challenging AI opponents, get this. If you prefer multiplayer, or really, really desperately need a dynamic campaign then try somewhere else.

I was told writing a review for this game would help development of the upcoming armoured front, so here I go:

The controls are good. I don't find the game that disorienting, but I'm quite used to VR and have also turned off all the smoothing features.
I should also stress, this game is free and while a little bit buggy or inaccurate at times, it's still good for a bit of entertainment and a solid base for future expansion.
But the gear shifting is difficult to do without looking, and I think I'm in need of an explanation of how the throttle, clutch and brake work with a control scheme that only involves two triggers.
It's hard to explain my problem with it but the best example is this:
Put the vehicle facing down a hill and brake with the left(?) trigger.
The car stops.
Put the vehicle into reverse, press right trigger.
Car goes downhill with engine revving at full power - doesn't stall, doesn't even seem to really slow down compared to being in a different gear.
(My experience in real life would suggest the vehicle would stall in this situation, which leads me to believe it's because the clutch is handled automatically, but it's just a little confusing at first.)
Not something I'd normally complain about but if we're leading up to a tank sim here, I feel it's important to get a good base.
Maybe some more feedback or expanded explanations over what these controls actually do behind the scenes? It would be good to explain the systems a bit if they differ from how things would normally operate.

Also, it would be nice to be able to grab the steering wheel with both hands, but that's a minor thing.

Overall, a good fun free game that can easily kill a couple of minutes in a pleasantly atmospheric environment, with minor issues that don't get in the way of gameplay but should probably be tackled for the sake of making a semi-serious simulator game later on down the line.

Edit: I've sent a picture to the discord that I hope explains this better. Now would be a good time to add to this review that the developer is friendly and very active on the game's discord channel!

The best difficulty settings I've ever seen in a game.
Now, there's good bits and bad bits about this game, it's fun, but the level scoring is wonky (I find casualties to be partly luck-based, which means lots of replays if you're score chasing.) The game struggles to explain its more complex decisions sometimes and certain features aren't explained properly. (What does the "comms difficulty" thing actually do?) overall I think the good bits outweigh the bad, but that's not really why I'm writing this. I'm sure plenty of people can explain things better than I.

What I love about this game is the difficulty settings. Hear me out -
Most games have, like four difficulty settings. Called things like "Coward, you suck" "you forgot to change from default" "hard lite" and "the one that lets you brag on the internet". These difficulty settings add an extra zero to enemy health per option and remove healing items, or some garbage like that.

Radio Commander does not do this. There are difficulty settings, but the three default ones can be ignored, in favour of the custom options.

Have you looked at this game and thought, "Man, I'd love to play this, but I don't want to mess with all those little tokens. That sounds lame." Well, there's an option you can change that puts the tokens in the right place every time a unit mentions it's position. You don't need to juggle tokens if you don't want.
If units getting tired annoys you, turn it off. People can run around forever now, so there's no waiting for people to get their breath back if that's a thing you think is stupid.
Turn on simple fights if the battles are too confusing.

Or, if you're a sadist, make it so units occasionally say the wrong position, or get lost entirely. Make it so messages sometimes don't send. Make it so that wounded soldiers die if helicopters don't get to them, then make it so the helicopters don't replenish units that are have wounded men in the first place.

I LOVE this system, I really do.

The game doesn't judge you or make you play it a certain way. If you want to blunder through the campaign, with your soldiers getting lost, giving wrong coordinates and having broken radios, go for it! If you just want to play a quirky game about Vietnam and the people involved (partly reminded of firewatch, for some reason) without wanting to pull your hair out, that's also fine!
I really wish more games worked like how this game works, just by making it so that some parts of the game can be played around with a bit in the options. It makes it so much more enjoyable for people turned away by hard-as-nails type affairs, and makes it so people who want a stupidly hard game can get it.
Best difficulty settings 2019.

This game isn't FTL. And that's okay. Really.
Let me start with the best bit:

Games are winnable now!
Okay, they were technically winnable in FTL, but really, how many times did you even reach the final battle in that game? Even on "Easy" I found it really challenging and I don't think I ever actually won the game. ITB, on the other hand actually has some really nice difficulty scaling - three difficulties and two to four islands. I actually "beat" the game on my second attempt - although it was on easy and I went to the boss island the moment I could, after beating two previous islands and deciding to go for it ASAP. And that is a great thing! It doesn't feel like I'm constantly hitting a brick wall, and now I'm a lot more free to explore other mech squads, beat other island and maybe crank the difficulty up (big maybe, good grief this game can go hard on you if you tell it too.) You can enjoy the whole game however you like, from violently punishing to just sort of a bit rough, and as somebody wants to see the whole game without needing to spend days learning all the minutiae, this is a great addition.

The other bit that's not really "good" or "bad" just sort of "different":
There's a lot less RNG. Lots of people say this is great and I'm almost totally in agreement - if you loose, a lot of the time, it's on you for not seeing the third box in that dude's attack pattern or letting too many enemies into the level. Similarly, if you play your turns right, you can pretty consistently ace earlier levels (on easy, mind you) and landing cool combos and figuring out strategies that you can be almost certain on working is a good feeling that this game has above FTL.
But this is the hard part
this also means the game can screw you with no hope of winning. With less RNG, if you get a bad map, with enemies in the right positions you just have to deal with it. For instance, for my first playthrough, I got all the way to the final level but ultimately failed when the alien bugs got into some tricky positions that I couldn't hit in time. I realised this a turn or two before they actually landed the final blow and I just sort of had to suck it up.
So the relative lack of RNG is sort of a double edged sword in that regard. Less random pointless deaths, but also less amazing comebacks from disaster like you can get in FTL.
(I should add though, the RNG isn't all gone, and it's often on your side - Building "resist" chances and loot are the two main bits that come to mind, and still allow for cool bits, even if they're a little less common)

Music and atmosphere is great too, but that's a given, really, isn't it?

So yeah, it's good. Annoyed I waited this long frankly, and I advise anybody on the fence to cough up the eleven pound ninety-nine pence to give it a try, too.

Man. This game. Recent community uproar has been enough to push me over the edge and throw my thoughts out here. This has been knocking around in my head for a while, and with the wave of negative reviews and people giving up on this game, I might as well throw in.

This game doesn't respect you. Your time, your entertainment, your mood. Nothing. To this game, you're the product. That's why it's free. Everything about this game is specifically engineered to pull as much time and money out of you as possible. It's not fun. Heck, even veteran war thunder players talk about how much they hate war thunder, WHILE PLAYING IT. It's addictive. Like any addict, you know your habit is trash but you keep doing it anyway.

It makes it so tragic that the game is this big collection of detailed models and ...some... fairly detailed systems. It's missing a lot of features that stop it from being a good representation of these vehicles and battles (a whole other topic - look, please don't base your views on tank design or general battle strategy on war thunder, it's humiliating for everyone involved), but there's still enough detail here that there could have been a really amazing, very expensive full product out here.

Instead, it's all channeled into this free to play psychologically manipulative piece of junk game. A tragic waste of person-hours and who knows how much money that this thing hoovers up.

Fortunately there are better products out there that should scratch roughly the same areas. If you're considering going back to war thunder (because, let's be honest, if you're reading this you've probably already played it a bit) I STRONGLY advice against it. Buy a tank sim (steel beasts, ghpc, steel fury) or a flight sim (IL-2 CLOD, GB or 1946 depending on your tastes, or DCS for modern stuff) and get angry about the engine rpm speed not matching historical averages, or a livery using the wrong shade of blue, rather than being angry because a scum-pile of a free to play game is trying to bait you into playing eighteen more matches.

In my old review for blood dragon I complained about the Uplay launcher faff that prevented me from playing this game.

The faff is still there. Not going to lie, every time you open the pause menu the game complains that it can't connect to the servers. And I'm still mad that it ate a CD key.

The game itself, however, has probably become my favourite far cry game since then. It's a little short, but that works well - it never feels like there's too much to do. There's also a small selection of weapons and enemies. But it's all assembled so well that those aren't things really worth complaining about. Normally far cry games get boring as you play them and completing them (let alone 100%ing them) becomes a bit of a chore, but blood dragon has just enough stuff going that I've 100%ed it and just started to get bored near the end.

Also, it feels like playing a kinda bad straight-to-video movie. Which is a perfect fit. Why do all the enemies have motorcycle helmets on and drive around in 4x4s with light strips on them? Because that's the budget. It's perfect. I love it. And while the dialogue and story are (deliberately!) straight-to-video, the action scenes are flawless. Except for that bit where I shot an arrow right into the handrail next to me then got eaten by a giant glowy lizard. That could've used some work, but that's my bad.

Some more main-line missions, weapons and animations wouldn't hurt though. The assault rifle reload is awesome the first time, and its' still awesome the 1000th time, but you do sort of wish there were more to pull from. Anyway, here's hoping for a second blood dragon game. Any time now.

Annny time now.

It's ok.