Recent reviews by ArcTheWolf

This right here is yet another classic example of why indie devs will always reign supreme. I will admit at first I was completely against this game because I looked at it yet another Phasmo clone, and in a way it kinda is. But damn does it still stand out on it's own. This right here may very well be my game of the year. It was just so much fun. Seriously get this game, you will not regret it, and that's coming from a guy that can't stand these 4 player go look for spooky ♥♥♥♥ games. This is a cut above the rest, I think it's the roguelike element to it that makes it truly special.

Years ago I wouldn't have. But now absolutely. My experience so far has been nothing short of amazing. Back when the game first came out due to the lack of NPCs and things to really do the only thing people had was loot hording and killing each other. It's amazing how much the mindless killing decreases when you add NPCs, storylines, quest chains, and all around the basic things that make a Fallout game a Fallout game. I had a quest I was doing pretty early on that sent me to an island to get an egg for a guy. Once I got on said island and "You've Discovered Deathclaw Island" popped up and a very angry level 10 Deathclaw showed up I panicked. I tried taking pot shots at it, swimming back across the river and trying to whittle it down. Low and behold 4 random players showed up and assisted me. Pleasantries were exchanged I thanked them for saving my bacon and we went our separate ways. There is honestly a very enjoyable experience to be had now with Fallout 76.

The Final Transmission. The actual ending to the game that was locked behind a $15 paywall. Not off to a great start with that. But oh it will get worse. It starts off strong taping into Jacob's guilt over Max and Elias. This is actually a key element of the story. But The Final Transmission absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥ you on resources in a way you have yet to experience up to this point. As I write this review I am in the final boss, I have no means to health, all I have is ammo, I'm at full health for the start of the fight but no injectors.

I had to load some saves back so that I could just dump the money I did have into ammo for my strongest gun and hope for the best. It was either buy on health injector and have no ammo, or buy ammo and have no health. Now yes I could load even further back and go an hour and a half back and try again to get to this point without getting hit so that I have more resources. But who in their right mind would willingly go an hour and a half back just to then play all the way back to the most anti-climactic ending I've ever seen. I'm at the point where I'm tempted to just look up what happens on YouTube because this ♥♥♥♥ ass boss takes so little damage from my attacks.

Combine that with teleporting away when you go to attack and spamming ranged attacks after doing it. It's just not fun, I got the final boss down to 75% health left and I've just loss the entire will to play the game. This goes down as yet another example of developers having an otherwise great game and story and then jumping out the top floor of the studio and faceplanting on the sidewalk with how abysmally bad of an ending they make. The base game did the same thing with yet another abysmally bad placed checkpoint that absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥ you.

It's because of ♥♥♥♥ like this, an ending locked behind a $15 paywall, the use of Denuvo for what a year and a half that rendered the game damn near unplayable. This is why The Callisto Protocol was not a critical or financial success. Yet another pathetic flop of a game just like all the rest.

So The Callisto Protocol on launch was obviously abysmally bad. Denuvo didn't do it any favors in the optimized experience department at all. Now that Denuvo is gone the game is in a very stable and playable state now. Finally being able to actually play this game now has allowed me to experience a truly wonderful experience. Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last 20 years knows this game is very much a love letter to Dead Space. This game does a fantastic job of building up the tension with lighting and lack of lighting almost as good as the Dead Space Remake did.

The game's combat is mostly melee focused which gives it a uniqueness that sets it apart from Dead Space. The story is a very solid one, the only complaint I have about the story is the fact the last chapter is teased at the end of the game and then locked behind a DLC paywall. Frankly something as important as the ending of the story should never be locked behind DLC. The only true issue I had with the game was the checkpoint system. Autosaving is a good thing in most games but the placement of these checkpoints are beyond bad often put to far before a major fight resulting in you having to apply upgrades and get supplies from a reforge then make your way to the fight then collect stuff at the fight then watch a cutscene starting the fight, then do the fight only to die 10 seconds into the fight if you're in bad shape to then have to do it all over again.

There was a particular fight I had to redo 8 times to finally get it right and the fact I had to spend 90 seconds before each attempt was beyond infuriating and really killed the flow of the game and the fun factor. Because of this abysmally bad placed checkpoints when it came to the final fight I actually had to load a checkpoint from 3 autosaves back because the final fight room legit had a panel you interact with with no indicator this is the final fight to then pull you into a cut scene, lock you in for first phase of fight, then it checkpoints after you finish first phase of fight and because that checkpoing happened when I was one-shot I couldn't even try to heal. The checkpoint locations is my only real complaint about this otherwise amazingly fun game.

What can I say, it's the classic Gun issue. They make an incredibly good looking game that really caters to everything that makes a slasher game good. Beautiful executions, solid gameplay loop, visually pleasing to look at. Then what do they do, oh right they say "We've done our part time to abandon it and hand it off to another studio that didn't actually have anything to do with making the game in the first place". So the obvious thing happens, everyone leaves the game because why stick around with a game that the devs no longer care about. Gun makes their money on sales then just walks away. At least with Friday the 13th they had the excuse of Victor Miller and his lawsuit putting an end to the game.

But this was just them blatantly getting paid and then leaving to start yet another game that I'm sure will be a great looking game that they'll rinse and repeat with just like they did here. This game isn't even a year old and it's completely dead. This game is so dead there's only 3K people playing it on a free weekend no less. So what do I do I sit in a lobby for 15 minutes waiting to get one more player on killer side so we can actually play a match. This was after playing a match where everyone on victims team was level 0 against 3 level 10 killers. Match was over in about 90 seconds. So I wait 15 minutes hoping to try again but alas after the 15 minutes it starts the match starting countdown and then says "Network Error unable to find enough players to play the game" and kicks me back to the main menu. All of this mind you is with crossplay enabled too. I am so glad I didn't buy this game at full price a month ago when I was really thinking about finally getting it. This free weekend has showed me all I need to know about how dead this game really is.

Edited to add: The fact there's $90 worth of DLC is just another disgusting part about this game. How do you have $90 worth of DLC in the first year of release yet you abandon the game and the player base is non-existent. But hey they'll still gladly accept people who pay $40 for the game and then $90 for the DLC for a game people can't even play half the time because of how low the player base is. Seriously don't waste any of your money on this game.

So yes we all know the multiplayer servers are absolute garbage. I don't know what they were even thinking if they were even thinking at all when it came to the number of servers they had up for this game. There was no doubt that there was going to be massive numbers of players playing this collection and most of them would be wanting to go straight into the multiplayer as that is where the most fun is to be had.

That being said my experience so far in the campaigns of BF1 within this collection have been nothing but fun. The fact that all I had to do was plug my controller in to play and I'm right back in the year 2004 playing on console enjoying what I loved most about these games since when I was a teen I didn't have the ability to play online. While it is a shame that the multiplayer is in an abysmally bad state at the moment (I am assuming they intend to address this issue relatively quickly) the game itself is visually pleasing and mechanically sound (again speaking only from what I have experienced so far). If you loved these games when they first came out I see no reason to not recommend them as it is only logical to play these amazing classics with some better visuals.

Sure you could just mod the original Steam releases but if you really just want to install and play without having to do anything more than install and have an updated appearance this is the best way to go. Another thing people are overlooking is that these are running on 64-bit CPUs and actually able to make use of the power 64-bit CPUs have. The original Steam releases could not make use of the additional computing power provided by 64-bit CPUs. So despite the multiplayer not working on launch I'm still gonna have to recommend this one because my experience thus far has been nothing but fun.

I've edited this review numerous times as new problems crop up, I've edited so many times that I'm simply going to delete my review and redo it fresh. This review will never change unless significant improvements to fix this game happen. What started out as an amazingly fun experience has just steadily declined into pure sadness for what this game could have truly been. From nerfing weapons that people enjoy rather than buffing weaker ones to make them more enticing to the piss-poor state of stability. I should not crash 13 out 18 missions on extraction or launch. It is a roll of the dice every time you drop in or get on the extraction ship whether or not you're going to make it to where you're going. You crash a lot more on extraction than deployment. What's worse is that when you crash on that final mission of an operation everyone crashes and all the work you put into doing that operation doesn't get counted towards the war effort. You also don't get to keep the things you had at the time so if you had a bunch of super-credits you collected on the mission you've lost those too.

One of my friends has a conspiracy theory that they are intentionally leaving it in this state to make it harder for people to farm super-credits so they will be put in a situation where if they want to try the new weapons slated to come out on the 11th they'll have to just go and buy super-credits. If they release this new War Bond on the 11th and that same update doesn't include a fix to all the crashing on extraction I will have truly lost all faith in Arrowhead to be accountable, I will no longer have any trust in them to do right by their customers. This crashing on extraction and launch has been a problem since the last update they did that supposedly fixed a bunch of crashing, and while I don't crash on mission nearly as much as I did before I would rather crash on mission and just rejoin said mission than crash on extraction and lose everything that I worked for.

You would think with all the Sony money that Arrowhead has as a Sony studio that more effort would go into fixing all these issues. Usually ports of Sony games to PC goes very well, only a few examples of abysmally bad PC ports (namely The Last of Us and God of War) but even those were fixed pretty quickly. But even with that track record Helldivers 2 is doing it backwards, what started out with a really good launch has just gotten more and more broken with each update. It's just completely pathetic at this point. There is no excuse for how the game has fallen this much since release. Anyways there's my review, a review that once was positive because I had an amazing experience the first week with things going really good, that has slowly soured and drained me of any drive to play it anymore.

Hopefully they fix this soon, because at this rate if this continues I may end up finding myself having to agree with the dying game morons. Game's not dead yet but if this trend continues it will die, because the state the game in is simply not a healthy game. People will only take a buggy mess of a game for so long. Look at Payday 3 that game had 69K people at launch, now it's down to 400 on a Friday night. The same will happen to Helldivers 2 if they don't fix this game now.

There is nothing worse than when a developer releases an HD collection to get people to buy old games a second time and not giving it a modernized saving system. I'll be damned if I'm going to start the entire level over every single time I die now because I ran out of yellow orbs. There simply is no means to easily get yellow orbs so I'm essentially just completely stuck in the 3rd mission now because of this beyond abysmally bad saving system. That's not even touching on how archaically bad the controls are. Seriously don't waste your money on this one, I've had it for years, don't even remember when I bought it but I will definitely be just running this until all it's cards drop so I can sell them since that's the only value this collection has.

And now that the charm has worn off and I've realized how ♥♥♥♥ this game actually is I'll update my review to reflect the actual state of the game. Those first 2 hours was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fluke. This game is actual ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Gotta say what I've seen so far is already really amazing. A simple sidescroller with a rich story to be enjoyed. If you're looking for a solid hard-boiled detective experience this game has you covered. I'm only in act 2 so far and I'm sure there's a lot more to this game than what I've seen so far. I love how some of the conversations go, you can slip into a serious no jokes allowed detective or you can be a light-hearted dingus who's just there to laugh, there are ways to navigate the conversations that will satisfy any play style mentality.