Recent reviews by A Corpse

Bit bewildering at the start, the game doesn't really explain its mechanics, but that's basically part of the story. Press on past the initial confusion and you find an interesting and lore-rich stealth/shooter (and it's largely your choice how to play it, guns blazing or sneak heavy). It has character in spades, and the voice acting is brilliant.

Gameplay wise I wouldn't necessarily call it groundbreaking, but it does build on foundations laid by other games. If you enjoyed the likes of Dishonored, Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Mankind Divided, this should be right up your alley.

It did take some work to get it running well with some odd latency and micropausing, but those look to have been patched out since launch.

The price tag is a bit on the chunky side but if you're on a budget it's definitely worth grabbing when it gets to your pricepoint.

Edited after finishing the game, see the update at the bottom.

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OK so I'm reviewing the game as-is, which is an important distinction since games change wildly sometimes. This is labelled as "released" not "early access" though so if you call your game done, then you have to expect it to be reviewed as such.

First: the good. The atmosphere is incredible. The enemies are terrifying and challenging. The storyline is slowly teased out, almost as if it's not really there, while you figure out what the hell is going on and how it got to be that way.

Playing with one or more friends is recommended but not to make it easier since the enemies scale with the number of players. It's just more fun with someone else on comms.

The game mostly looks great. The enemies are incredibly detailed and when you unlock blueprints you can scope them out with the binoculars and see all the components. The engine isn't the latest but does weather effects well and seems to have an unlimited viewing distance.

But there are some less appealing things.

It does get repetitive. Enemies consist of 4 types, with variants of each. The variants are generally just "Different colour, tougher, more weapons" though. You'll soon figure out which strategies can work and which won't, and it just comes down to picking them apart while trying to avoid the massive amounts of damage they throw. If you're playing on Skirmish, and you don't bother learning the weak spots, you're gonna have a bad time.

The inventory system is bad. Like, really bad. You have 3 weapons and 4 quickslots, and if you need to change an ammo type or throw down an item that isn't in the quickslot, you will die. It takes way too long. I don't know of it's intentional or not but it's frustrating.
And you can't sort, search, or filter! Weapon mods are in a random list. Ammo is in another random list. Equippables in a third. Found a blue handgun silencer? Best spend time manually scrolling through ALL your mods to see if you happen to already have one that's better. Need to fit a medkit to a quickslot, well good luck finding it.

There are bugs, especially in multiplayer. Desynch is rife, where one person sees an enemy but they're not there for the other. Corpses fly off sometimes, straight into the air, never to be seen again. It's possible to get stuck in terrain and features and you have to fast travel to get out. Some lootables can't be collected without absurd amounts of effort (like the medpack on the range hood in almost every house). If you've re-bound your keys, expect them to just randomly not work, after things like fast travel. In some dark places, the gamma goes nuts, causing massive blobs of light that make it practically unplayable. I've even had a few crashes to desktop, bringing an early end to an evening's play.

But after all that it is still a great game. If they could just iron out some of these bugs it'd be an amazing game. At least it looks like the devs are still working on it, rather than firing it out the door and forgetting about it.

Final rating is a thumbs up, but with a caution. I hope you have a decent tolerance for bugs.

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OK, I've now finished the game. In the mean time there have been some updates too. Ammo management is MUCH better, with a simple button to click to switch mags to other ammo types. Many of the other bugs remain but I am confident that the game is at least still being improved.

However... The ending... Wow.

The ending is bad. If you wanna know why, read the next spoiler. There's no boss-battle. There's no massive revelation. There's just a small amount of exposition, and some more info that already works into the picture you've been assembling by playing the game, IE some dying scientist got his consciousness merged with the machines. He then appears to have, I dunno, decided to kill everyone. No reason given.

You then ummm. Blow him up. By placing a bomb against the servers. No decisions. No options. No "good ending/bad ending". Just scripted stuff. Meh.

As for the existance of DLCs, I don't know if they give any more info or not. I haven't bought them. Not sure that I will. I've gotten to the stage where I've killed enough bots, so if the DLCs simply give "more of the same" then I'll pass.

I'll stick with the overall positive review, but if the story stays the way it is then it's a rather disappointed "positive" review.

I've been looking for something to fill the void left by Atomic Bomberman, which was a game we played at LAN games for over a decade. The lack of IPX network in Windows 7 onwards killed that years ago. We've tried multiple different bomberman clones over the years, but this looked like it had potential.

Alas, the input lag when playing multiplayer is unreal. It feels like you're gliding on glue. Maybe the campaign is better but I don't care about that, all I wanted was a frantic, hoarse-from-laughing multiplayer game.

Seems like the search will continue.

(Also, the price is ABSURD. I got this at 75% off and that was barely tolerable. Refunding it though, since it doesn't do the only thing I got it for.)

It's massive. Just... huge. It took me 200 hours to finish the main questline, just letting myself wander from place to place doing side quests and encounters. The story DLCs are generally worthwhile. The other stuff is just fluff really.

The game's not perfect though. You can only get out of water in certain places so sometimes you can literally get trapped in a puddle. Once you enter combat you can't jump, so if you're wanting to move to a place 1 foot higher, you can't. Missions are generally pretty repetive, with "go to marker, kill whatever you find, come back" the standard RPG formula.

Overall though, these are minor concerns in an otherwise great game. The GOTY edition is amazing value and you'll get many hours of playtime out of it even if you don't try to complete every side quest.

This game, sheesh.

Look, it has its issues. It's under continuous development. Bugs show up, are squashed and replaced with newer, more aggravating bugs. Long-standing ones (like steam achievements not working, for some people, sometimes) aggravate. The new player experience is bewildering (so I'm told).

But the content is amazing. The environments gorgeous. The combat is visceral and satisfying. And somehow they keep coming up with new warframes, new weapons, new events.

And it's free to play! That's not just lip-service either. The premium currency is tradeable, so if you've got some tolerance for grind you literally never have to spend a cent.

Give it a go, you've got nothing to lose, except time.

I'm giving this a positive, but not by much. It's a VERY lazy mobile port. So many improvements could have been made that were not even attempted. You move dwellers with the left mouse, and you also move around your vault with left mouse, meaning accidentally dragging and dropping a dweller in a crowded vault when all you're trying to do is scroll around is a guaranteed frustration. Would have been so simple to use the right mouse to move around instead. Selecting a dweller when they're leaping around a room is also tricky, since half the time it'll select the room (and zoom in on it). It auto-zooms to events, and locks there for a second, so if you're wanting to prepare for that event (yeah I KNOW deathclaws are coming, can I prep the first room please?)

In-game documentation is adequate but not more.

On the plus side, it's free and the paid aspects are easier to live without than in normal F2P games. The premium currency Nuka Cola Quantum can be earned fairly easily in-game (especially if you rescue Bottle & Cappy).

A casual, relaxing game which will steal your whole night if you let it. "Just one more day" quickly turns into "Ohgod I have to work tomorrow. Wait, I mean today. Why did I do this?!?"

Well, the core mechanics are fun. It's well-paced, and the in-game system for upgrades sets it apart from the obvious comparisons to Overwatch. Character development at the moment is minimal but the potential is there, and the lore can always be filled in later.

However, the game is suffering badly from cheaters. It's based on UE3 which is full of holes and they have no anti-cheat built in. Player reports are never responded to either via ticket or the in-game system, and you'll see the same cheaters day after day. Hi-Rez basically ignore it when people bring these issues to their attention and this is not helping. When you get tired of this your only choices are to start cheating as well, or leave. Aimbots, nospread hacks, wallhacks, even chargeup times for ultimates are all compromised.

Updated Jan 2017: OK so I see they've added EAC, Easy AntiCheat. It's... Well it's worse than not having any anticheat at all. It's a resource hog, it's a privacy violation, and it's not even that effective at combating cheaters. Are they actively trying to sabotage their own game now? Look at the recent reviews, mostly negative. Dang. So much potential, wasted.

The matchmaking is also terrible, preferring to get people into any match rather than trying to balance out skill levels. This results in horrible balances where most of your games will be a four-nill pummelling one way or the other. Good fights are few and far between.

If they sort these issues out then I might change my review, but until then I have to give it a thumbs down.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified isn't everything it could have been, but it's not as bad as many have made it out to be.
Taking the events in the game as standalone rather than a precursor to any of the other games helps.

Where the game does shine is the freedom of choice you get compared to many other storyline/campaign rail shooters. It is however only towards the end of the game where gameplay choices start to open up. To get to that stage you have to deal with some repetitive gunplay and some mediocre controls. For example, the sprint/cover key is the same key, and cover seems to "stick" so you can't simply walk away from it. What ends up happening is when you intend to sprint past an obstacle you instead slam right into cover behind it, and then spend several seconds trying to get away from it. Many other games have done this a lot better.

Your squadmates also have some serious dependency issues. They stick to your tail like glue, so when you try to flank an enemy while your squad has their attention, they instead give up their cover positions to chase you around. If you don't give them any direct orders for a few moments they tend to complain about it by saying "We need orders!". They do at least return fire without being told to.

There is no research, new weapons are simply given to you as you progress. Given that at the start you're told that alien weapons self-destruct when their owner dies I was expecting a situation where you had to incapacitate an enemy and "capture" their weapon in order to get access to it and research it. This may have been the plan at some stage but it's been shelved. Now new weapons are strategically placed in certain spots in missions, and afterwards normal enemies drop them as well. The hardest choice you'll have to make is what weapons you want to start a mission with but there are so many around in a stage that you can easily switch to something else if you find ammo is short for the type you're carrying.

There are two-ish skill trees for each of four classes. It's not really a tree as such but really just two lanes you can switch between whenever you want. Agents under your command tend to be rather generic so you never really form any kind of attachment to them.

Overall I'm going to give it a thumbs up. Not worth full price but definitely worth a look on sale or if you were able to get it from the recent Humble 2k bundle.

Happy gaming.

AC

Frantic hack & slash with elements for furious buttonmashers and timing combo/countercombo players. Hilarious matchups (EG Pirates Vs Ninjas in Deadliest Warrior addon), insane bloodbath maps, and throughout it all, those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ archers. relive the glory days of games where life is cheap and death means nothing.