Recent reviews by Sterling

I've been a fan of Halo since Halo 3 on the Xbox 360, and then lost touch with the franchise after Halo 4 had come out and I moved on to PC Master Race.

Very happy to see Reach (and eventually Halos 1-4) on the PC! Below are the PC specific gripes I've noticed and learned:

1) There is no method to change monitors in the video settings. You must exit the game entirely, and change your "main display" within your OS, and then restart the game, before you can have it on the desired monitor.

2) While the game does enable unlimited FPS, you'll find that there's terrible ghosting/vibrating of objects if you exceed 60 FPS. Due to this, you should keep the game at a limit of 60 FPS, and wait until the issue is resolved, otherwise you'll notice how jagged objects are.

3) For keyboard users, there are no "secondary" keybindings, like you might find in a lot of other games. Solely primary. While this may not be a big deal for some, it has effected me unfortunately.

4) For those simply excited about Halo Reach on the PC, do a little bit of research to learn about the progression system in the game. It's not like the credit system that was in Halo Reach, now it's a linear system that requires "leveling up" to unlock the next thing, and you have no freedom to unlock what you want when you want anymore.

Beyond the above, there's also the concern that there's no explicit timeline for when the other Halo games will be released within this collection.

I recommend this game, and the collection as a whole, to anyone who wants exposure to the Halo storyline prior to Halo Infinite's release (confirmed to also be on the PC), or whoever wants to relive the nostalgia with better graphics/framerate than you were used to "back in the day."

I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game.

Good game, but needs a lot of time and polish.

Having played the game for a few hours, I found the game to be very decent. I've never played SWG, or many of the other old school "hardcore" MMOs that everyone compares this game to, so unfortunately I can't really touch on that. But I have played Darkfall Unholy Wars, and this game reminds me of that, a little bit.

Currently the game's buggy, I managed to stumble upon some bugs myself, reported them, and received developer feedback and confirmation the very next day, where they reassured me that they made the necessary changes and that they appreciated the feedback.

Very neat to have such a communicative developer team, something you rarely see now a days, especially from an indie game.

It has all of the concepts that I look for in a MMO (mobile and enjoyable economy, "hardcore" elements, open world pvp, player created and driven markets, etc.). Very few MMOs have these aspects now a days due to companies wanting to pursue a more dumbed down simplistic "care-bear" themepark experience that may potentially acquire more customers. I am very pleased with purchasing this, and look forward to possessing the benefits upon its release.

Right now the game has lower graphics settings in some areas, and runs poorly on most systems due to it being unoptimized (it only uses one core on my i7-4790k). This has been addressed on their forums MANY times and they've stated that they plan on further upgrading the engine to provide better optimizations and general fluidity in gameplay.

Can't wait until the game's complete.

"MMOFPS" isn't exactly the phrase I'd use to describe this game. When I think of this phrase I think of a FPS game with literally hundreds of players in the battlefield, like Planetside. This game has a maximum of 36 players (18 each team) per match, and compared to a game like Battlefield, that's pretty much nothing.

In a way though, you do sort of interact with everyone in the game, in that if the faction you choose (US or Germany) wins or loses a battle, it reflects as such on the Campaign, or the World Map. The "Wars" between the two factions last for a couple of weeks and whichever side has the highest number of deaths, highest costs, most vehicles destroyed, etc. ends up losing.

You can play as a "General" after you've reached the highest rank with a soldier. This is probably the "MMOiest" aspect of the game, in that you can look at the map and purchase assault teams for each and every battle with Warfunds. This creates a set up such that almost every game is unbalanced. One team might have aircrafts and heavy tanks, while the other team might only have jeeps and recon vehicles. Some may hate this, some may find this "realistic" and enjoy it, I'm personally neutral on it, I see it as good and bad.

The game itself sort of feels like a mix of Battlefield and DayZ. It has big maps, classes to choose from, vehicles to utilize, but also a strong utilization of stealth and environmental awareness. You can literally kill an entire team of players by yourself if you're using the right strategy, weapon, position, etc. It's a pretty hardcore game, and I like the fact that Teamkilling is on 100% of the time.

Like a good amount of FPS games, this game can occasionally suffer from "spawnkilling" on Skirmish type games, griefers do exist, and annoying bugs can occur quite frequently.

Like a good amount of MMO games, this game can suffer from a "Pay to Win" aspect, as if I wanted to I could whip out my Debit Card and purchase every single weapon in the game and every single assault team. But the fact that there's a lot of skill involved in the game, and that almost every item can be acquired through in-game means, the "Pay to Win" aspect is dimmed down a good bit at least.

Overall would recommend this game, it's surprisingly great for an Early Access game, and I can see myself wasting a lot of hours on it.