Recent reviews by Iosonos

Half-baked release. AI has problems: sometimes getting stuck on terrain, sometimes spawning outside of play area or inside terrain, often times not engaging at all until player approaches on larger arenas. Some other reviews mentioned AI target player solely when they're within sight, however that thankfully doesn't seem to be the case any longer.

They will start to target the player as soon as more than one shot from the player hits, but they do switch off to other targets after a bit of time. That said, if you do decide to act as a spoiler and target an assault just hammering on some poor medium; expect the assault, the medium, and every other opponent alive to start focusing you down until you run away and let cool off. AI switches targets a lot, it doesn't seem to be specifically damage-based but rather most recent hits.

Some maps have seam issues, worst is Caverns of Chaos where the ice ends in a cliff with no texture. Scenario unfortunately doesn't focus on Duncan Fisher much, which is a shame, and is very short. It would've been interesting to play while Duncan was an up-and-comer but he transitions to announcer fairly quickly. The announcers themselves are a nice thought, however their commentary basically use the same queues as enemy chatter ("They blew off a component, I've lost weapons, I must punch out!" etc). It'd be better if they had some more general commentary or maybe stated "fighting seems heaviest on the Northern side of the arena" or something that makes it so you don't hear all of a commenter's dialog within 1 to 2 free-for-alls.

As much as I love Solaris deathmatches and Duncan Fisher, I think the real star of this DLC is the alternative weapons loadouts that can pop onto mechs time to time. Having eg medium lasers swapped out for small pulses is interesting and offers a bit of variety while providing lostech to more mechs later on. This is woefully underused within Solaris matches, however. All Solaris matches I've seen so far (I'm only at rank 6) is using the same new Solaris variants or melee mechs as options. The one place that you should see a ton of standard variants with some modifications is Solaris, but instead I'm seeing the same dozen "special" and "melee" mech variants over and over again.

Can't recommend this right now. Lots of good ideas but poor implementation. I think the devs should go back to MW4:Mercs and play through the missions to figure out *why* people love Duncan Fisher and those missions specifically.

HBS Delivers! A very good Battletech game based on classic tabletop rules with a few liberties taken to help balance the game. Most of which I find are beneficial. The biggest changes come down to following the hard point system from Mechwarrior Online (eg, you can't stuff 20 machineguns into your mech, you're limited to ballistic, energy, missile, or support weapon hardpoints in the different sections of the mech), increasing the number of critical slots in the center torso and legs, and buffing damage for some weapons (ballistic mainly, some energy) while reducing others (predominantly missiles)

Tech level is pre-Helm memory core meaning that most of the fancy toys are "LosTech" and not commonly available. In the base game this boils down to Extended Range (Large only) and Pulse lasers, ER PPCs, Gauss Rifles, and upgrades like better mech variants, double heatsinks, and upgraded gyros and actuators. There's also rare variants of all weapons and equipment which offers improvements like damage or accuracy. All good so far, although I'll mention that most of the LosTech weapons were outperformed by the more common rare variants of their base weapons; predominantly the medium and large lasers. Game was hard and at launch I found myself questioning whether or not to drop on the hardest level missions because even my upgraded mechs could face insurmountable odds. Since then, I believe this has been balanced better and instead of facing (quite commonly) 16-20 enemies on the field you're more likely to max out at 12, outside of certain mission types that stagger large enemy drops.

Each DLC adds more content to the game and I believe each is worth the price. On top of this each DLC release included some more content for the base game as well as previous DLCs.

Flashpoint adds new linear mini-campaigns that offer some variety, and three mechs: the Hatchetman, Crab, and Cyclops. The Hatchetman and Cyclops are the first mechs to offer chassis-unique hardware (the hatchet and B2000 battle computer) which allows for different strategies to be played out. The Crab is fun and a personal favourite, but didn't really offer anything new until it was given its SLDF (Lostech) variant with Heavy Metal's release.

Urban Warfare adds some new Flashpoints (requires previous DLC), new mechs (Raven and Javelin), a couple new enemy vehicles, and a new game mechanic: Electronics Warfare (EW). At launch EW was laughably overpowered as the AI didn't know how to deal with it, however on recent playthroughs they seem much more capable dealing with it. For both good and bad; EW is nice and can help with mitigating damage but I find the loss of heavier weapons make it a bit niche. It's balanced.

Heavy Metal is where things start to go wild. Many new mechs have been added, along with some variants for previous DLCs and base game (for free). All of the new mechs have some unique equipment added, and some (namely Warhammer, Marauder, Annihilator) are just laughably better than anything else on the field because of this. The Marauder increases called shot chance for all locations (including head) for itself while giving a flat 10% damage reduction to your lance. Together this means you take reduced damage from enemies (critical for heavier lances) while also being given a 95% chance of one-shotting any enemy mech each turn if you're running the right loadout. Once you get the Marauder expect it to remain in your lance indefinitely. The Annihilator and Warhammer only give 20% increased damage for a specific weapon category (Anni is ballistic, WHM is energy). This is a bit more situational as each chassis has pros and cons, but overall they offer some of the best damage out there especially when using Snub PPCs and LBX autocannons.

That gets into the new weapons for Heavy Metal: we now have access to Ultra Autocannons (all sizes), LBX (all sizes, shotgun pellets-only), all ER and pulse lasers that were missing, Snub PPCs, and the new COIL laser weaponry which are supposed to offer something akin to Bombast lasers from table top. This is... well, this is past LosTech. If you follow the lore, you'd know that only certain versions of the above weapons were available during the Star League era and as such even during the technological Renaissance that came after the Helm memory core was found most of these didn't exist. This is advanced-tech that wouldn't be seen until after the Clans' arrival in the Inner Sphere, and to top it off most of the weapons have rarer variants that make them more powerful. Now I highly enjoy the new weapons, and the lore-reasons for why these are available is good. The problem is down to balance.

With Heavy Metal, balance is now out for weapons. Previous to this the best damage dealers were medium lasers, large lasers, and missiles, with missiles and ballistics generally being better for stability damage (eg, knock over opponents to focus parts instead of ripping them apart). Missiles were a good medium ground that with the right rare variants could do specialize in more damage or more stability damage. With Heavy Metal, ballistics reign in all fields, with only the Snub PPC offering an alternative. Energy is still useful because they weigh less, but the old ballistics (outside Gauss) don't have much of a reason to exist any longer. The new ER and Pulse weapons are much improved but I still find the base versions more useful outside, generally. I'm largely okay with this except the new ballistics are both too common (compared to LosTech) and too cheap. A single high-end ERLarge laser can cost me over 1.8 million c-bills while a top of the line UAC5 or LB10x would cost around $700,000. Couple that with their availability and you will find yourself going ballistic-heavy once you hit mid-game. Once you get a couple Ballistic units set up you'll find that the game becomes much easier as most of your opponents will not scale to the new power curve. They're still largely using old tech that will be out-performed by your advanced load outs. This is somewhat expected as you will normally be playing 3 vs 1 at higher levels, however I find that even then I rarely take internal damage unless I've made a mistake.

Heavy Metal is still worth the price even if it does decrease the difficulty by quite a bit. The new weapons are a blast to play with, and I think they could be balanced by adding in opponents that utilize the new weapons themselves outside of Flashpoints. Namely, I could see the addition of a couple notable Merc companies (previously existing or not) that can be the OpFor on standard missions. Maybe make these missions pay out more and allow their mechs/equipment to drop; maybe even make some surprise consecutive drops like a procedurally generated Flashpoint. This would give a good opponent to face mid to late game while you're starting to build your beast lance. Also, as is, the new weapons DO NOT drop as salvage which sucks. This should be one of the benefits of facing the new vehicles that do carry them.

Overall, Battletech has been well worth the money and the time that I've sunk into it.

SSeth's video should be the tagline: Kenshi is a game where you can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do. As long as all the things you want to do are extremely illegal, morally dubious, and outright sadistic.

10/10

Well, what's there to say about the game Steam lists as the single largest time-sink in my library?

It's good.

With any suspense now ruined, let's continue with the review. X3AP is a game that has a 12 year legacy behind it, itself nominally the expansion to X3:Reunion released in 2005. It's "Yet Another Elite Clone" (the 1984 grandaddy that defined the Space Sim we all know and love today), part of a series that had done at the time what no other Space Sim could: it faithfully expanded upon the core gameplay and scope of space sims.

Before Elite: Dangerous, the X series was considered the spiritual successor to Elite, and X3AP stands as the final product from years of refinement. X3AP is far from a perfect game; its quirky with flat race and character design, simple narrative and mission systems, and plays better as a sandbox "universe" than it does as the story-driven experience it toys with. The UI is functional but clunky and opaque without practice. Its learning curve is more of a mountain, however the game's designed to be picked up piecemeal without forcing all of the meta and control systems down your throat at start. It crashes, somewhat often, and many of the useful time-saving features (like in-space save) have to be earned. Music can be glitchy; I've had it improperly download the music files on clean installs before and have found out recently these files might be the cause of some of my crashes. Auto-pilot will end up killing you more often than missiles if you use it, and combat's fun but somewhat simplistic.

Sounds like a solid 6-7 "meh" of a game, right? Except that it isn't. At the time X3 came out, it was a visually stunning game that pushed the benchmarks of PCs and user expectations. Its dynamic world system created actual working trade where destroying a transport could affect the economy of a sector, either raising prices for the needed items or causing its weapons or munitions production to stop. GoD (The Global Decison Engine... I know, we call it GoD anyways) would remove factories that were no longer in use and add new ones as required creating a unique playthrough every time. It also creates military patrols for the different races in order to protect areas that come under attack and pirates to disrupt trade. There's even times when "war" happens, with two race militaries facing off in large skirmishes within sectors (this is different from AP's War Sectors, although it's pretty rare to see). And the universe is always running, even for the sectors you aren't in, the game calculates the lives of near a hundred sectors filled with ships and factories. Profit and death continues, regardless of what you do.

Add to this a vibrant world where there's no "tier" system of ships, and all races offer competitive fleets to choose from that follow unique fleet doctrine (eg, Split field fast and aggressive ships, Teladi defensive and slow) while also giving players a chance to OWN their own fleets and factories and command their own battleships. It's expansive, it's literally a game greater than the sum of its parts. And AP has only honed this by adding new features (namely the war zones, some ship upgrades, and the stock market), some re-balancing and overall improving the experience to make it a solid 2011 game. It's a game with few peers if any (I haven't played Eve).

If it sounds too complicated or in depth for you, I don't blame you. It can take more than 40 hours of playtime to hit "mid-game" of a playthrough. There's a great modding community which can expand on the game's playability endlessly. The game's script engine is readily accessible if you want to try adding in new features.

If you think you're up to the challenge, I highly recommend this game to you, if only until the release of the 2016 "next gen" Space sims.

If you're reading this and No Man's Sky, Star Citizen, and Limit Theory are already released? I'd recommend watching their LPs and getting those games first (assuming they're good). Afterwards, get this. X3AP is a milestone in the Space Sim genre. And it might still remain the best example of a first-person fleet-strategy-action-economy-simulation game we'll get for a long time. It's worth the money, at least until Egosoft releases its proper successor.

Free game I know, but as the creator seems to be charging for future releases (first release being the teaser), I'll rate it as if I had paid for it.

The writing's amateurish and requires proof-reading. Some of this I'll attribute to the creators being Italian; the issue might be the translation only. Characters as a whole feel as if they're built slim; they lack a unique voice to the point I had trouble telling the characters' dialogue apart. The traits also seem misapplied. Our protagonist is a hacker who doesn't play a role in a hack other than walking around. Her A.I. companion does all the digital work, yet fails to spot an obvious missing link in a database join. And in order to make certain a scene happens the mysterious guy she meets turns out to be a stalker if the right choice is made, before the point he would have any motivation to do so.

There's funny dialogue, some of which are spoiled by translation issues, and there's rudimentary scene-setting moments. The character growth I saw mentioned in a couple reviews, and the reason I'm trying it out, isn't there. In a half hour's worth of reading, about 3-4 days pass plus indeterminable time while Bunny's unconcious. The "growth" between the protagonist and maybe love interest is boiled down to about half an hour of conversation split between a few days. She goes from scared of him to wary of him to trusting within a five minute conversation.

Beyond writing:
This teaser only has 2-3 choices in total. Basic mechanics are fine. The artwork is probably the best reason to play the game, and I expect is the main reason for many good reviews. Setting is a bit glitchy if you have any knowledge of IT; the setting as a whole could've used more setting up.

My Conclusion:
From what has already been shown, I don't hold much hope for the following titles. Don't recommend. But hey, it's free. So give it a shot for yourself.