Recent reviews by SFMosquito

Took me about ten tries to kill a giant sod-off half avian, half Canadian Moose-Goose hybrid that just would not take the hint and die no matter how many dozens of times I whacked it around the face with the strongest weapon I could find.

After a days-long battle, the benighted bird finally bit the dust - and all her misbegotten offspring abruptly sprang to life, devoured every single piece of meat that comprised their mother's mortal remains, and transformed into whirlwinds of greased lightning and pain.

10/10, will get revenge-murdered by baby geese again tonight.

I've been trying this game during a Steam Sale when it was available for free, and I'm sorry, I don't think I can stomach it. If you're curious why, then feel free to read the rest of my rant, but be warned; it has a lot to do with dead chickens.

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Coming at this as a long-time AOE fan, having loved 1, 2 and 3, AOE 4 does absolutely nothing for me. It's baby's first Age of Empires, with all the sharp edges sanded off, and all the difficult history dummied out. I tried a few of the campaign missions, and after playing both the Battle of Hastings and the Rebuilding of Moscow, I felt absolutely patronised by the sheer lack of actual danger. It appears to me that it would be nigh impossible to fail these missions, even on a high difficulty, since the game has pre-scripted events and outcomes that it will force to happen, irrespective of your input.

To take a random example, in the first campaign mission, you are supplied with a large army, to go up against another large army. Previous AOE games, and other strategy games, often start with these base-less missions, where you have to carefully budget your limited starting forces, to ensure enough of them survive to complete the final objective. In this game... not so much. Lose all of your soldiers? Don't worry, "reinforcements arrived from the camp". Duke William, your irreplaceable general died? Oh, er, well actually some rando pike-wielding schmuck was able to revive him, so lol don't worry about it. *It is literally impossible to fail half of these missions.*

The voiceover and the narrative is plucked straight from the History Channel's less interesting documentaries, slicing out all the interesting personalities and characters that history usually provides, and speaking in extremely clipped, short sentences that are stripped bare of context. I don't think I remember learning a single interesting detail or factoid in the missions I played or the cinematics I watched. It is a complete letdown compared to the fascinating campaigns, voiceovers and storyboards of Age of Empires 2 and 3. Even Age of Empires 1 managed to glean out more personality, and its story was delivered exclusively by text.

The moment I decided this game was not for me was when the Rus campaign skipped over a siege of Moscow by the Vder and Lithuanian principalities, so that we could get to the exciting next mission; collecting the Khan's taxes. Now call me crazy, but I would have been far more interested in playing a siege scenario against two powerful enemies - that might have presented real danger, real challenge. The things I come to a strategy game to find! But no, instead, I spent the first mission building wooden walls around Moscow, which I was told then got burned down a few years later. So that's fifteen minutes well spent then, eh lads?

Before I finish ranting, I want to spare a few moments for the UI in this game, which has to win the award for being uselessly gorgeous and overdesigned. Finding my idle villagers was a chore, and I have never had so much trouble deleting my spare units in my life. The main menu left me feeling disoriented every time I had the misfortune of passing through it, on my way to a campaign or a skirmish, and while the sound design was interesting enough, I already got sick of the "you are under attack" sound and the battle horns that play *every time two units see each other*. Oh, and for no readily apparent reason, they've decided to create all sorts of nondescript and unmemorable upgrades for units - "hardened" spearmen anyone? Sorry, but this really doesn't sell me on the coolness of the upgrade in quite the same way that upgrading a Phalanx to a Centurion once did, back in the day.

And I would be remiss, if I didn't mention this before signing off: this is a game world which feels completely barren, bereft of life, colour and animation. No birds fly around the map, no small animals wander or scamper around its plasticine hills or its model buildings. Every time I looked at a Norman / English house or town centre, I would burst out laughing at all the chickens dotted around their enclosures, all standing stock still and silent. You know, just like real life chickens I guess. ... I promised you I was going to talk about chickens.

I suppose the software runs decently well and the graphics are okay, but I can say that about Microsoft Word, and I think that it too costs about £40 and provides zero entertainment value.

TL/DR: Don't buy, even on sale, unless you too have a misplaced fascination with dead chickens.

I really want to like this game. I really really want to like this game and give it a positive review, but I can't. See, everything that's supposed to be good about this game is actually just a very thin veneer hiding some deep flaws.

Firstly, the "storytelling", is paper-thin. (Pun not entirely intended). Everything is heavily randomised and so it's quite difficult to get invested if you're playing a campaign through for the second time, for example. And while the randomised names and orders of events are passable, they never actually get you invested because they never really go anywhere. A character picks a gem out of a cursed statue they stumble across in a dungeon. They are now cursed (blessed) to slowly turn into a really tough and edgy rock person. Yay? I guess? What are the benefits? An extra move that does less than your average sword. Wow. What if I want to cure them? You can't. Okay, so does this lead to a really sad scene at the end when they become fully immobilised, doomed to stand forever as a piece of ornate statuary in the middle of the wilderness, abandoned by tearful companions? Nah. It's okay, but it's JUST okay. Consider me "whelmed".

Secondly, the combat. Let me get this out of the way: it is not deep. There are various systems to discover, sure, but mastery over them doesn't actually achieve much. Most of the outcomes are decided by dice rolls, and if you're playing on a higher difficulty, you WILL get squished no matter how you approach it. The second campaign is just a slaughterhouse for rookie parties, for example - and once you've lost one party member, the misfortune tends to snowball until you're constantly running back to home base to recruit more meat for the grinder. Meanwhile, the enemies are boring. Any variation between different types of enemies exists purely on paper. I never really feel like I'm seeing the distinction between different types of enemies, or even between the different factions.

There are no personalities, no stand-out characters, and the mooks have no story attached to them. You walk through an abandoned warehouse - three Morthagi appear, woot woot. Why is the warehouse there? Pfft. Why are the Morthagi there? Who knows. Why do they hate you? Who cares.

Thirdly, the writing, that people go nuts about. I presume that most people writing reviews on Steam have never read a book, and their standard for narrative literature is set by fanfiction websites. Because that's the standard here. The prose in this game is *painfully* pretentious. Overcomplicated vocabulary and unwieldy portmanteau words are jammed into the descriptions completely arbitrarily, making them an absolute chore to read. There is a special kind of bad which you can only achieve with great effort and skill, misapplied by having the wrong priorities. This is the kind of writing you get when perfectly clever people are more interested in showing off than communicating ideas to the reader, or setting a mood.

Okay, but surely there are some redeeming features. The music? Yeah it's alright, but it gets pretty damned repetitive the fifteenth time you hear the same pizzicato track. The visuals? Yeah, I'll accept them, but it does start to wear on me just how few different faces, hairstyles and body types there are. There's very little to distinguish one character from another. The setting? Honestly, the "Yondering Lands" or whatever the crud they're called feel extremely threadbare. There's no sense of a shared history or a consistent lore. There's a couple of gods that are referred to here or there, but no sense that this world is distinct from any others. Most D&D campaigns at least belong to a world that feels like it exists independently of your heroes. Here, the only continuity you have is between campaigns where you might stumble across little references to previous parties. I guess that's neat, but it really doesn't make up for the shortfall of having a world that's believable or that feels "lived-in".

Oh, and for one final whine, I am really sick and tired of RNG. The difficulty in this game is fake. If you get bad rolls, it will crush you, and there's nothing you can do about it. In D&D, a good dungeonmaster will make sure that a sequence of bad rolls leads to something interesting happening - it doesn't necessarily mean you'll be squashed into oblivion. In this game? You just get caught in an endless loop of despair as rookie parties get eviscerated, sent back to recruit more allies, who then go on to also get eviscerated.

Honestly? Skip this game. Spare yourself. Play some actual D&D instead. Or hell, read a book.

The only good reason to not have played this game is if you are dead.

So, you've played through this game now, right?
Mhm.

Is it good?
Not particularly.

Wow, um. That's direct. Can you elaborate?
It's bad - it's not just buggy. There's more wrong with this game than bugs. There's a whole raft of features it was expected to contain which it doesn't. Dynamic encounters don't exist. "Assaults in Progress" exist for all time until you feel like clearing them, and they don't spawn ever again. Romance options are extremely thin on the ground, consisting of just ONE for each gender / sexuality combination, plus hookers you can pay to sleep with. Yee ha.

Roleplaying is minimal. Most dialogue options you can unlock by having high attributes are irrelevant and have no impact on the outcome. Stealth gameplay is janky at best, unviable most of the time. The game pushes you into multiple encounters where enemies already know where you are, so if like me you specced into Stealth, too bad so sad.

The problem with this paucity of features is that all of them were integral to the sales pitch of this game. It was marketed and billed as a lively, vibrant city, full of action and adventure, and factions that would each have a different attitude towards you. In fact, it's just a very very expensively decorated but functionally inferior version of Saints Row 4.

I mean, it's still a pretty huge sandbox world full of stuff to do though, right?
I guess. It depends on how much you enjoy irrelevant, low-effort busywork. It also depends on how much you enjoy going from one neighbourhood to another, and discovering that a bunch of nondescript mooks are magically three times your current power level, and can shrug off assault rifle bullets like they're the complaints of overworked game devs bouncing off the desk of an uncaring manager.

There are other open world crime sandboxes that have more content than this, and which is better balanced than this. If you want to drive around sowing chaos, go play GTA - I hear it's much better.


I don't get it man. This game is gorgeous - how can you hate it so much?
If you want gorgeous graphics and a lovingly crafted world with interesting characters and costumes, go watch a movie: the framerate will be better too.

But I heard that it was only Playstations and Xboxes that had performance issues?
You heard wrong. This game has crashed on me at least once an hour, ever since I got about halfway through. It runs like crap, and my computer is no slouch. If you don't have a top-end gaming rig, don't even BOTHER wasting your money on this.

I'm sure it can't be that bad. So many people love this game!
I'm not going to get philosophical on you. I'm just going to point out that there are people who think 9/11 was an inside job, that the earth is flat, and that masks will literally cause them to asphyxiate and die. People are schmucks, and a lot of them had decided they were going to love this game, sight unseen, years in advance. A lot of the "positive" reception this game has got is down to amazing marketing, and nothing else.

So... should I wishlist it?
Definitely, if you are a masochist who loves the feeling of disappointment, or if you are a YouTuber looking to get millions of views on an Epic Bugs compilation.

The Outer Worlds: a promising start and a prototype for a future masterpiece - a game with more than its fair share of funny moments, but not as many meaningful choices as I'd like.

Is it worth buying at full price, or should I wait for a sale?
Definitely wishlist it and buy it on sale when it's 50% off. The asking price is just too high to justify, in my opinion. I'll expand a little bit on this point over the rest of this review.

How much replay value does this game have?
Technically, I'd say you could squeeze four playthroughs out of it, each of which could last about 35-ish hours. In practice, you are probably not going to find it worth your while to play it more than once, or twice at a push, owing to the lack of meaningful difference between the various dialogue options.

How robust is the character creation in this game?
This is going to be something of a running theme, I think: it's good, but you have less choice than you think. There's the potential for about 30 different humans faces - and thousands of hideous, repulsive, misbegotten rejects from the cloning factory.

How many play-styles does the game cater for?
About four, by my calculation. Sure, you can mix-and-match a wide range of starting attributes and skills, if you like, but there are just four optimal roles you can spec into. Anything in-between might leave you feeling like it lacks for punch.

How's the writing in this game?
It's serviceable. There's very little here that will truly surprise or shock you. It has no shortage of black comedy and I have actually laughed a lot more at this game than anything else I've played this year, so it's worth a buy if only for that! But I did find myself eye-rolling when the second of two elderly women I encountered *also* addressed me as "dear".

How solid is the combat?
Honestly, this is where the game's lack of meaningful choices hurts most. The enemies are fairly basic, which needn't be a big deal, but you just don't have quite as much variation in the available weapons as I was expecting. It might have helped if different copies of the same weapons had marginally randomised stats - but they don't.

Does the game perform well?
It's serviceable. My computer (which is a middle of the road gaming rig) was able to run it tolerably well between 50 and 60 FPS at a decent quality, but it does suffer from frame drops and snags from time to time. I'm not sure it would perform so well on a lower-end machine.

If this game had a sequel, would you play it?
I'd definitely be interested to see it if they made one! This game certainly shows a lot of promise - it's smaller than I expected, but it's good quality. With more time and a bigger budget, I'm sure the team behind it could work up a real masterpiece.

TL/DR: This is a game to mess around with and have fun - it has the most to offer to the player who isn't afraid to go out on a limb and try something wacky.

A minor spinoff of the XCOM Franchise, Chimera Squad nonetheless is a welcome addition to my library of strategy games. I'm going to level with you - please keep realistic expectations when buying this game. If you came here looking for XCOM3, well duh, this isn't it.

What Chimera Squad *is*, is a much-needed fleshing-out of the XCOM world - instead of fighting off cosmic horrors from beyond the void, this game's scope is much smaller, dealing with keeping the peace in just one city. Personally, I think that this is great, because it lets us begin to dig our roots into a better developed and characterised setting.

Chimera Squad is built on the same engine as XCOM2, and reuses a lot of assets from the previous game - but this is an example of recycling done right. There's a huge amount of original art in this game which helps to offset the reused sections. One thing which has definitely been imported over along with the art style is the bugs. Yes, I'm delighted to announce that soldiers still sometimes randomly snag a bit of terrain, and begin levitating three feet above the ground. And yes, if you're as familiar with XCOM2 as I am, you will probably notice some of the recycled animations here and there - like Viper civilians running around with air-guns in their hands, as they appear to forget they are not actually armed in this game.

WEAKNESSES:
- Some bugginess and performance issues
- Voice acting is a little sub-par in places

STRENGTHS:
+ Excellent narrative development
+ Nice change of scope and theme
+ Interesting tactical choices
+ Sectoids wearing T-shirts

It's like Ori and the Blind Forest but this time it's almost exactly the same?

You may balk at this negative review, given the overwhelming praise and adulation that's flowing this game's way, everywhere you look. But I'm sorry, it's not worthy of that of universal praise. Nothing is. This game has its flaws, and I want to draw attention to them, because I don't want to see them repeated another time around. There is a good game buried in here somewhere, but it is spoiled by careless execution (as well as enough bugs to feed a hungry tarantula).

My complaints about this game's prequel are as follows:
- the art style came, too often, at a cost to the gameplay
- the autosave system was a bastard

I am going to essentially copy-paste those comments because, in many respects, this game is a copy-paste of its predecessor. I'm not saying that's an entirely bad thing! If you enjoyed The Blind Forest, you will probably enjoy this too. But it's not anything like the radical evolution I was expecting.

Like before, while the backgrounds are gorgeous, they are often too bright - especially considering your character is a luminous little star-gremlin. The camera movement in this game also leaves something to be desired - especially when you transition from one medium to another. If you are burrowing through sand, then leap out into the air, you will notice the camera struggles to keep track of you. This problem becomes acute, because there is an entire chase sequence *built* on this mechanic, which need not have been so frustrating if only it had been slightly better executed.

Like before, while the autosave system is usually "adequate", for the purposes of exploration, it often forces you to relive your most frustrating moments over and over, because boss battles and chase sequences are usually quite long, and they offer you no respite whatsoever. These encounters tend to be quite long, and by the end, they overstay their welcome.

And fundamentally, that's my parting thought with this game. While it's beautiful, it overstays its welcome. I'm only going to give passing comment on the story, because it's clear that that's exactly as much effort as the writers put into it. It's amazing what meaningless, pretentious trollop you can get away with when you use an artistic filter to make every character sound like they have a bassoon lodged in their trachea. This is a game which thinks it's deep, when really it's just very pretty.

Before I sign off, a word about the bugs. I have encountered multiple performance issues with this game, despite having a pretty solid gaming PC:
- Framerate drops
- Audio tearing
- Outright crashes

I hope to goodness that if there is a further sequel to this game, that at least *some* of these criticisms can be addressed. There's a good game buried in here somewhere - but if I could make one change myself, I would not have a glowing protagonist in the next one. I would much rather play as one of those delightful little Moki - they're irresistibly cute and also, they don't give me eye strain...

I'm going to upset a lot of people with this review, I'm afraid, but it has to be said. There are some serious problems with the design of this game. I'm sure people will tell me that "this is working as intended", but I'm sorry, it's not fun.

There's a lot to praise it for! And you may well be one of those people to have a blast with it! But for me, the moments of blissful carnage have been punctuated by some seriously stress-inducing encounters, particularly with the Marauders. This is an enemy which doesn't belong in any game - it recalls painful memories of going up against Brigitte in Overwatch. It breaks combat flow, dominates every encounter it's in, and appears all too often past the midpoint of the game.

The game is chock full of things to do, and content to pick up, and while at first this seems like a strong point, eventually it becomes just too much to remember, too much busywork.

My biggest gripe with the game, is the ammo system. I appreciate that there's a wide variety of weapons, and each is supposed to have a niche that it is best used for. But the game doesn't even *allow* you to attempt to get comfortable with a couple of favourites. It actually *forces* you to use the full range of weapons, *and even then, expect never to have enough ammo to fire half of your arsenal, at any given time.

It's really hard to concentrate on dismembering demons, when I'm essentially just trying to keep a balance sheet of which weapons I can actually afford to fire.

And finally, too many of the campaign fight areas are just obnoxious to learn. They're 9 parts parkour, 1 part actual combat. And mostly, you're going to die a lot on your first run-through, because you won't be able to see where you're going. You can only *really* start to play the game, once you've memorised the layout. Needless to say, this makes entering each new area something of a slog.

If the measure of a game is its ability to punish you, then this game scores 9/10, easy.
If the measure of a game is how much fun it provides, I'm going to give it a 5.

I am writing this negative review for one basic simple reason: once you beat the Campaign (which is excellent, btw), the replay value of this game is null. The problems stack up like this:

If you want cool skins, you need currency to access the Krypt. If you want currency, you have to play through either the Klassic Towers, or most particularly, the Towers of Time. In the latter mode, you will face enemies that receive special, unique bonus effects to help them present more of a challenge.

Those effects are *wildly* overtuned. Even with the purchaseable consumables, you will not be able to best them using your normal game skills. Some of them are possible to work-around, albeit clunky (the effect that freezes you slowly on contact with the enemy, for example, is an annoyance but you can use kick combos to keep the enemy away while you defrost). Some effects however, are simply gamebreaking - one of them allows the enemy to call in an Erron Black, for example, and you have not experienced true misery until you've watched your character be wailed on for 20 seconds straight because you never once had the opportunity to do anything that round.

Finally, the game requires a full-time always-online connection. Even the slightest hiccup on your connection, and I ♥♥♥♥ you not, you lose *all* of your progress on whatever tower you were working on - even if the game acknowledges that the server has seen you win. On top of that, the MK11 servers are not 100% reliable, so expect after an hour or two of gameplay, you will simply be unceremoniously kicked off.

Oh, and if that wasn't enough, this full-price game has microtransactions, and it also has lootboxes - because yes, there are lootboxes - which you have to endure a pretty relentless grinding process in order to earn. Party foul, Netherrealm. Get out of the house.

TL/DR: watch the Campaign on YouTube and save yourself £60.