Recent reviews by Cable

I've been playing (and supporting) this game since the earliest playtests, had 40+ hours played... and I will *not* be playing the final release.

Why? Simple. Despite all of the outcry, backlash, and hundreds of comments Embark has received about it, they chose to continue using AI voices in their game. It's disgusting to see a company who, by their own admission, built a recording studio in their own offices continue to use a technology that is so harmful not just to the dozens of voice actors it will eventually put out of work but to the entire games industry as a whole. I'm, frankly, appalled by it and will not be playing this until a change is made.

Another piece of overpriced, out of date content that paywalls important content for players, namely the Stasis subclasses. At least unlike the $20 Forsaken Pack this one actually includes some *real* content. Unfortunately, it's years-old content that any other decent game would give away free or at least include with the newest expansion.

Get this from a key reseller. Do not give Bungie your money.

As with all pieces of DLC, this is an overpriced pile of garbage that should have been given to players for free. As with all pieces of DLC, get this from a key reseller and avoid giving Bungie your money.

Monetizing essentially P2W PvP weapons behind a $20 paywall (with essentially no other content than a mediocre dungeon and a raid everyone has already done) is scummy as ♥♥♥♥. ♥♥♥♥ Bungie, ♥♥♥♥ Sony.

This campaign is offensively designed. The fact that any company is charging $50 for access to something this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, outclassed by campaigns in games 2, 3 decades old is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ absurd.

Bungie deserve none of your money. Buy this ♥♥♥♥ off a key reseller. Do not give them your money.

EDIT: Let's go a bit more in-depth, shall we? Light spoilers below.

What's wrong with this campaign you may ask? Well, for starters, the story is completely nonsensical. Almost every plot thread introduced in this expansion is just pulled out of thin air with no connection to previous plots, taking place in a world that is barely explored and ends on a cliffhanger. If you play Destiny for the story (and for the love of god, why would you? It's a Bungie story, it's a poorly written space opera just like all of their other games) then this is a disappointing purchase to say the least.

What if you're like me and you couldn't care less about the story and are here for the gameplay? Well, you're out of luck- you get a completely asinine 8 mission campaign that has run out of ideas by mission 3. You'll see repeated bosses, repeated segments with the new "strand" power which amounts to essentially a nerf to your base abilities and a grappling hook. Shockingly, Bungie managed to make a *grappling hook* feel BORING. The movement is slow, linear, and on a massive cooldown outside of specific mission segments where they try to prop up this boring subclass with ultra-low cooldown gameplay.

Like Bungie's previous efforts, the difficulty is also completely artificial. Legendary difficulty, the only difficulty worth playing campaigns on, explicitly tells the player that the only changes it makes are adding more shielded/elite enemies (who just have higher health) and increasing the health and damage of all enemies. What does this mean? Well, missions aren't difficult because the AI is smart, or encounters are well-designed, or that there are gimmicks you need to learn- they're difficult because every relatively "strong" enemy will now take over double the amount of shots you'd normally expect, and bosses will be standing there for minutes while you grind away on their HP bars.

The encounter and level design of each campaign mission also repeats itself almost immediately! You'll run into a cool boss with a scythe in the first level, a sort-of interesting fight as he forces you to keep your distance. He's a pretty cool and unique boss for the opening level, and sets the tone pretty well for the expansion!

I'm just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with you, that boss is brought back 3 levels later, except now there's 2 of them! Wow, already out of ideas for boss fights within the first few levels! What about other set pieces? Well, the third level has an escape sequence, clearly riffing off of early Bungie levels like The Maw from Halo: CE and the Warthog run from Halo 3. Except it's short, less than 2 minutes, and has none of the stakes or buildup that either of those have since it's just the conclusion to a single level that's completely disconnected from any sort of stakes. And even *this* is reused IMMEDIATELY in the next level, with a platforming escape sequence instead! Bungie ran out of ideas for level structure within the first HALF of the Lightfall campaign.

What about the fights though, are those fun? Well, if you like long empty corridors followed by symmetrical arenas where enemies spawn infinitely until you perform some arbitrary task or kill a bullet sponge, you'll love Lightfall! Every mission follows the same structure. Walk down a long, empty hallway to your first combat arena. After this, you'll walk down a short hallway while you listen to some incredibly forced dialogue either loredumping, trying to build stakes and failing, or providing some awful jokes until you hit the next small room combat arena. Continue like this until you hit the final combat, which is a bigger arena with a guy who will take 500 shots from a heavy MG to kill. Congrats, you now know the structure of every single mission!

Bungie had every opportunity to add some interesting segments to their levels. Witch Queen wasn't particularly interesting in the level or encounter design department, but it offered so, so, so much more than Lightfall did. Couple this with a complete lack of meaningful PvP content, a tiny, uninteresting zone that's tonally disconnected from the rest of the game to explore, and a new way of grinding boring and repetitive missions to earn marginal gear upgrades. The game known for absurdly long and repetitive grinding introduced even more grinding and made you pay for it!

If you're not already a Destiny 2 player, avoid this expansion. Come back in a year when Bungie might fix their issues (they won't, but people will pretend they did because the expansion will be marginally better than this one). Play a different, better PvE FPS game. Buy 13 months of game pass for 37 dollars using the Gold conversion trick, saving $13 from this purchase, and go play Redfall in 2 months. Spend your money on literally anything other than this expansion. If you're already a D2 player, I'm sorry you're stuck on this neverending grift from Bungie, wringing your wallet out of every nickel and dime with absurd prices for content that would have been subpar in 2003, let alone 2023.

In short, this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Buy literally anything else. Spend your money wisely.

It's like PUBG with more quirks. Most negative reviews at the time of writing are mouthbreathers complaining about the cosmetic store, which is a complete nonfactor in your enjoyment (and at the time of writing 3 days after release, already massively overhauled based on player feedback). Is it unbalanced? Yes. Is it clunky? Yes. Is it still an amazingly fun game? Yes.

This is, in essence, a more polished osu!mania client with a very similar grading system and engine. It's a pretty standard 4k/7k VSRG with a lot of customization and a pretty damn good (if high difficulty on average) ranked song library with built-in song downloading. I think it's very fun, perhaps not as good as Etterna (especially if you're like me and you hate release timing) but being able to quickly download stuff in-game is amazingly convenient.

It's better than Valorant, I'll tell ya that much.

I mostly play surf/bhop/kz at this point but it's the best CS game right now for beginners and veterans alike. Highly recommended.

Realm Royale is a battle royale that tried to hop on the trend a few years back and, due to executive meddling and not understanding what made them successful in the first place, immediately died about a week after launch. Realm Royale Reforged is essentially a return to that initial release and while it does capture a lot of what made the original version of Realm Royale fun, it also immediately exposes the issues with relaunching a game that has been mostly dead for a few years.

First, let's get this out of the way: the class system is kinda cool. There are 4 classes which each get a set of 2 weapons specific to their class and a set of abilities unique to them as well. You start with your class movement ability and can find others by looting them or crafting them in the forge. It's a unique take on the class-based/hero shooter-esque BR which actually creates fundamental differences across the board for each class rather than simply providing them with a set of static abilities. Each class can select from 4 class specific abilities or a set of generic abilities to round out their loadout, which leads to good playstyle diversity... in theory.

See, there's a massive balancing problem with most classes which leads to everyone playing them the same exact way. Playing assassin? You're running decoy and sniper rifle. Playing hunter? You have a longbow and wallhack flare. Playing mage? You're running the fireball staff and fireball spell. Playing brute? You're losing the game. In the end, the most effective classes are by far the Mage with a heavy hitting class weapon and spells and the hunter with an absurdly powerful precision weapon and ability to gather more information than other classes. Playing assassin and brute is a great way to guarantee yourself an early exit from the lobby.

Beyond the class balancing issues, there's another big issue with loot distribution. Loot is kept in chests that dot the battlefield, primarily inside buildings. However, rather than a system that is fairly balanced (1-2 chests per building) it's *completely random* what kind of chests, if any, a given building will have! I've had multiple games where I drop first into a POI, run through every room in two buildings, get absolutely no loot, then get killed by a guy who dropped into a small house late with multiple chests in it who now is stacked out. There's little to no rhyme or reason to the loot distribution, especially since players can open each chest themselves. Rather than creating a system where every player gets access to a smaller amount of loot, they created a system where some lucky players get access to a large amount of loot off spawn which makes fighting early game very annoying to do. Considering there are few, if any, small unlabeled loot areas in a given circle, it's not really tenable to drop outside of major POIs which leads to issues.

The other major knock on Realm Royale Reforged is the lack of any SBMM. It's your first game? Congrats, roll on the wheel of arbitrarity to see if you get a game that consists of 60+ bots and a handful of humans or if you're dropped into a lobby with the dozen or so streamers that have been playing this game the entire time since it dropped. Are you queueing in a duo into squads? Don't worry, you won't have to wonder if you're going to get lucky: you aren't. You're going to get a 10 year old with a crunchy mic who keeps leaning on his push to talk key and instantly dies and leaves the game. Bring a full squad if you want but be prepared to get absolutely run into the ground even if you bring players who know how to play BR games at a high level because this game has some busted ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tech.

Is it fun? Yeah, in small bursts. Is it a game that's worth playing? Ehhh... not really. If you played on launch and want to experience that first week gameplay all over again, give it a shot! If you didn't play on launch, it's probably not worth your time just like every Hi-Rez game. Don't be shocked when this game is dead and left to rot again in a month or two just like Global Agenda and Tribes before it.

Neon White is, in essence, as close as you can get to a perfect game as humanly possible.

I'm gonna get this out of the way first because it's the only knock on the game to any extent at all: yes, the writing is kinda cringe. I didn't have a problem with it, but after looking through almost 20 pages of reviews every single negative review but one fixated on the *dialogue* over everything else; granted, that was a total of 4 reviews out of hundreds, but still. If you are too much of a stick in the mud to deal with some admittedly fairly cringe-y, early-2000s anime dub style writing then maybe you should learn to hit the "skip dialogue" button and just enjoy the game for what it is.

The core gameplay loop of Neon White is an addicting moment-to-moment challenge of finding the fastest and most efficient way to kill every enemy in a gigantic level using Soul Cards. What are Soul Cards? Essentially, they function as traditional FPS weapons (pistols, shotguns, rocket launchers, etc.) but have a unique effect when you discard them, throwing away a charge of the weapon in exchange for a movement ability that will help you traverse the level or kill enemies. The game shines once you get through the first few worlds where you're still learning the basic cards and you start to be presented with open-ended challenges that can be completed in multiple different ways.

The secondary gameplay loop then becomes trying to improve your times more and more to unlock new levels. Each level has 5 tiers of times: bronze, silver, gold, ace, and the "developer" time. The game doesn't gate you too hard; you'll only need to get gold on a few levels per tier in order to unlock the next tier of levels. If you've got any bit of speedrunning DNA in you, though, you won't be satisfied until you've unlocked that final secret tier of times on every level like me. The drive to improve and discover new shortcuts beyond what the game shows you after you've unlocked the silver medal keeps you playing for hours trying to squeeze tenths, hundredths, or even thousandths of a second off your times.

Extra unlockables like side stories and the level rush mode (where you complete sets of levels all in a row) keep you coming back to older levels over and over again, and the extremely difficult single-life "hell rush" mode that forces you to complete the entire game without dying is a capstone to an incredible experience. There's so much to do and global and friends list leaderboards have kept me coming back for weeks trying to maintain my top scores throughout the game.

This hasn't even touched on the extremely clean visuals, the fantastic voice acting performances from Steve Blum and the ensemble cast, the absurdly good soundtrack from Machine Girl that spans almost 2 and a half hours of original music, or even the slick UI present throughout the game. The presentation is incredible and only adds to what is one of the singular most addicting gameplay loops in recent memory, rivaled only by similar arcade-style games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Neon White is an addicting, pulse-pounding, eye-catching spectacle of a game that everyone should try at least once in their lives. At its incredibly low price, too, you'd have to make a hell of an excuse to not give it a go.

EDIT: Updating to say vote this for GOTY.

PUBG is, in essence, the original stand-alone battle royale game. It is clunky, difficult to learn, features some of the most punishing gameplay of any BR game, mil-sim style controls, and a somewhat dwindling playerbase in NA.

And yet, it's still easily one of the best BRs on the market. Each of the 9 maps in PUBG feels distinctive, with multiple interesting POIs to play around. The guns all feel very distinct from one another, with unique recoil patterns and behavior; attachments on top of these change the dynamic of each weapon significantly. Vehicles feel weighty to drive and force you (in the case of things like the motorbikes) to drive carefully, unlike games with similar vehicles (looking at you, Fortnite).

Yeah, the game runs kinda like ♥♥♥♥. The optimizations over the years have helped but it's certainly held back a bit by the sheer scale of the maps which range from around the size of another BR game like Fortnite or Apex to the size of an Ubisoft/Rockstar open world game. And yeah, the controls are very clunky, deriving primarily from Arma II where this game's predecessor mod existed. But that only ads to the charm of the game, where players move slowly and deliberately and positioning and pre-planning take precedence to the moment to moment action of other top BR titles.

The only true negative for PUBG is its use of BattlEye anti-cheat, an utterly ineffective and easy to bypass system that has allowed more cheaters through than other games with stronger, custom anti-cheat measures like Warzone's Ricochet. Overall, though, the occasional cheater is worth getting to experience the fun this game still has years after its initial launch. Now that it's free to play, there's no excuse for not giving it a shot.