Recent reviews by Thirsty for Thick Tomboy Thighs

yeah

I'm doing my part!

WHEN YOU COME TO IT
AND YOU CAN'T GO THROUGH IT
AND YOU CAN'T KNOCK IT DOWN
YOU KNOW THAT YOU'VE FOUND
THE WALL
THE WALL
NO MAN ON EARTH CAN MAKE IT FALL

As of the latest update, my game is much, much more stable. Since I've enjoyed the game a ton so far, I'm chaging my review to positive and leaving the original text below.


This game seems to be extremely well-written, and the characters are outstanding. The problem: I can't go more than an hour or two without a hard crash, and those hard crashes commonly lose me 10-20 minutes of gameplay since my last autosave. This is extraordinarily frustrating, and replaying the same damn sections over and over because the game crashes totally shreds my ability to enjoy it. With more patches I hope things will get more stable, but given the current lack of stability I can't possibly recommend it to anyone.

As of about 3 hours in this game is an absolute joy to play. Don't come looking for a perfect souls like combat experience- this game is closer to something like a buttery-smooth and stylish Tony Hawk's Pro Skater than to anything else.


BRC feels like a game with a very specific approach to aesthetics and style- but the game's small, laser-focused scope (movement, points, a little bit of movement-focused combat) means that what's here is really, really, incredibly good. The fact that the mocap dancers, the graffiti artists, and the musicians are all aggressively credited as well is wonderful- it feels like a true collaborative effort in which the creative effort of every contributor is aggressively respected and celebrated. Given how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ arts industries can be about that sort of thing, it's refreshing to see that.

The movement is the core of the game, and it's fluid, forgiving, and absolutely joyous. Simple pieces which are easily stuck together to form long, satisfying combos, with rewarding optional challenges in the form of more out-of-the-way graffiti spots and the robopost dudes. The arenas and maps are just the right size to mess around in, and they're all distinct enough that it's easy to memorize and learn the quirks of an area to build and maintain long, free-form combos. You're encouraged to learn the area and given free rein over it before the final crew battles where you have to earn more points than the AI in a certain period of time, which means you're never forced to learn a map on the fly- you've always already been exploring it for a good long while before having to style hard in it. That said, the game pretty much always trusts you to do whatever you want and learn the mechanics on your own- there's very little obnoxious tutorializing or hand-holding (probably because the movement system is so fluid and sexy-smooth that you don't need it.)

The music, as expected from Team Reptile, is perfectly selected. The original stuff from FUNKY UNCLE is amazing of course, plus a selection of old and new stuff from a variety of funky styles (ASS ASS ASS ASS) keeps things fresh while preserving a perfect atmosphere of fun and flash (or, as the kids today would say, a vibe.) There's an old-school gaming flair to everything- a close up on a low-poly pigeon early on tells you everything you need to know. It seems like this small team made the very wise choice to build a simple, stylish aesthetic profile rather than spend ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of resources on graphical fidelity at the expense of everything else in the video game.

This game is worth your 40$. It's worth your 54$, if you buy the bundle with the soundtrack and the Lethal League characters. Please support games like this, small teams making passion projects which are fluid and fun to play. I'm crossing my fingers for an expansion with more arenas and more music- but what's here is awesome.

I've updated my review to negative at this time. Everything I said in my positive review is still true- but as of the S4 reloaded update, the netcode and performance has been so drastically torched that I cannot reccomend this experience on this platform. This game is like a reverse Cyberpunk 2077, where they started with a decent product and every future patch just breaks it more and more.

Combine this with the UAV bug (a major gameplay bug which has been in the game for 30+ days and hasn't even been acknowledged by the devs) and I can't recommend it. At all. I hope the game gets fixed so I can delete this preamble and reverse my review back to positive again- but I don't think that's likely, given how each successive patch seems to make the game worse and worse on a technical level.




This game is a lot of fun. I want to dig into a lot of stuff other reviewers don't seem to bring up, and throw out some of my experiences with the common criticisms I'm seeing.

TL;DR: The basic, fundamental, underlying gameplay of the base MP is extremely fun, but missing major pieces which I hope will be added in over the next couple of weeks. There are also technical problems which are affecting some people a lot more than others- be prepared to refund and wait for patches if you fall into that boat. Pretty much every other criticism appears to be driven by salty baby boys who are worse at vidya than they think they are.

TL;DR for the TL;DR: I'm having a lot of fun, but you may want to wait for more content to be added and technical issues to be fixed.

First, my 2 big positives:

>Gamefeel
All of the guns in this game feel really, really good to shoot. They're all punchy, meaty, the recoil feels substantial but not unmanagable (assuming you go in and tweak graphics for things like motion blur which tend to be mega distracting.) Moving around the map feels good, the movement options feel fluid and fast, and the MP is incredibly fun, fast and tense.

>Fun
That gamefeel just contributes to a huge sense of fun in the game. If you set yourself up in the good, dynamic objective gamemodes (headquarters for example) and you don't treat your k/d as a measure of your self worth, there's a ton of goofy fun ♥♥♥♥ to do here.

Alright, here are some of my experiences with the big issues guys are having:

>SBMM
SBMM? More like DBAP. At no point in my gameplay so far has SBMM "ruined" my experience. On the contrary, I prefer hard-fought close games with people of a similar skill level, because I'm not a ♥♥♥♥♥. SBMM preserves the experience for a wider range of players, lets them stick with the MP for longer, and keeps the game alive for longer. Your K/D is not a measure of your self-worth. If you only do well in lobbies full of lower skilled players, then you are admitting that you are bad at video games.

>Technical Issues
These were limited to graphical and animation bugs in menus in MP for me. I understand a lot of people are experiencing crashes, but I did not have that experience. 3440x1440 monitor running a solid 60fps out of a GTX1080 with only a few minor graphical tweaks tells me that the optimization is solid, and those bugs just need to be patched out. If you are having crashes, that's why Gaben and God got together and wrote steam's refund policy.

>Balance
It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cawadoody, the game isn't going to be balanced. Nothing in here is akimbo 1880s bad, although that ironsighted marksman rifle with the super short barrel sure is frustrating to play against at the moment.

>It's not enough content for 70$!
The first season hasn't even launched yet. While it's really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to hold back so much COD content ( Waiting for Hardcore modes suck mega ass) there's nothing stopping you from watching COD twitter and waiting for those features to be added before buying the game. If you really want X number of maps or Y mode before buying the game, wait and watch.

>TTK
It's Call of Duty Multiplayer. The TTK is on par with Call of Duty Multiplayer for the past 10-15 years. It's very similar to Modern Warfare 2019 in terms of TTK IMO. If that's too fast for you, this might not be your bag, baby.


Haven't played the campaign or warzone or whatever the co-op is and probably never will.

guy fieri archvile

A really, really perfect example of how prioritizing core gameplay and sound design is a great idea for smaller teams who don't have the budget for whatever new grafikal technology dudes in the marketing departments of giant publishers are jerking each other off about. It's a ton of fun, and it's managed to be profitable and sustainable with only cosmetic DLC and no scummy lootbox BS. I hope and pray that there are dozens of little teams with great ideas viewing the success of DRG as a template for them to follow, because if there is, the future of PC gaming is very very bright.

An additional note: outside of Haz 5 and elite deep dives, this game has a great community. Toxicity is fairly rare in my experience casually playing Haz 4 and below, and the playerbase on the more relaxed difficulty settings tends to take themselves less seriously than in other MP games.

I can strongly endorse buying this game, full price or sale. Rock and stone.

this is what chaosgate would be like if it was good

I really, really wanted to like this game, as a person who really enjoys XCOM and thought Mechanicus was absolutely brilliant. After my 90 minute trial run, I just can't recommend it to anyone, and I don't think I ever will be able to recommend it. This has nothing to do with any of the pre-order stuff, or the twitch intergration, or Denuvo, or whatever. I'm going to list the disconnected problems I have with the game and hope this forms some kind of cohesive criticism.

Edit: For context, I have about 250 hours in XCOM 2, about 150 hours in XCOM:EU/EW, and between Switch and Steam about 40 hours in Mechanicus. I'm certainly no "perfect campaign on legendary ironman" level turn-based strategy guy, but I've been around for a little while and I like to think I have enough experience to get into the meat of why some of this stuff ain't working for me.

1. Heavy focus on hordes of melee enemies with very little means of crowd control. The only crowd control ability you have is the frag grenade, and you only get one per mission. This is a contrast to something like XCOM or Mechanicus, where the focus is on fewer, more powerful enemies (because your main attacks are single target.)

2. Absolutely butt-ugly visual design. Good god, this game looks like a mess- the epitome of more money than sense in visuals. Everything is garishly overdone, and not in a fun 40k way. The cutscenes are shot and blocked in such a self-serious way that it oddly becomes even more comical, and the jarring contrast between the overly detailed models and the extraordinarily stiff animation is just bizarre to look at.

3. Lack of clarity in UI design. I'm not talking about the fuzzy edges of the UI- I don't really care about that. I mean that there's so much fluff around everything that it becomes difficult to find the actual stats you want. What capabilities am I developing by selecting upgrade A over B? Which upgrades do I even have unlocked at any given time? In this kind of game, you need to quickly see and understand who has what type of capabilities and when they can deploy them. A crowded UI is not conducive to that.

4. General lack of speed, lack of sense of urgency. This is a game where we're going to watch the same animations many, many times by the nature of the gameplay- simplify and speed up your animations. We don't need 40-50 frames of a space marine kicking in a door with a giant particle effect- it's gonna look cool the first time and feel really slow the next hundred times.

5. General inability to visually distinguish between your units on the ground. My units have different classes which give them different capabilities, but those capabilities don't stand out visually on the battlefield. My medic and my melee specialist look identical- this might be canon to 40k, but if you're respecting the canon at the expense of the core gameplay you should be writing a book instead of making a game.

In short, this is an incredibly detailed coat of paint, polished to a mirror sheen, applied to a car which drives like ♥♥♥♥. Mechanicus probably cost 10% of this game's budget to make and it's far, far more fun to play. Probably the best example I've seen in a long time of a hyperfocus on "next gen grafix" kneecapping the ability of a studio to build actual tight design under the hood.

In short: If you haven't played Mechanicus, and you want a turn based 40k game that's actually really good, play that. If you want a bunch of cool looking action figures to smash together while some cool particle effects blow across the horribly overdesigned battlefields while the camera zooms in on a dude going into overwatch for the 10,00th time, knock yourself out.