Recent reviews by FFIVEZ

TLDR; 4/5. An excellent co-op shooter that my friends and I can't stop playing.

Long Review:

Let's address the drawbacks first. The anti-cheat system, known as "Netprotect", has sparked controversy among players considering joining Helldivers 2 (HD2). This software, notorious for its intrusive nature and questionable effectiveness, deterred me initially due to privacy and stability concerns. However, a developer addressed community worries on Reddit, which alleviated some of my apprehensions and led me to purchase the game. Although there have been reports of instability, my experience has been mostly glitch-free, albeit with occasional restarts. Server-related issues have improved, yet crashes and connectivity problems persist.
Regarding gameplay, I find little to fault. While it can feel repetitive and simplistic, the core mechanics are well-executed. Grinding for better gear can be tedious, but not overly so. HD2 is best enjoyed with a full team; solo play or random groups on higher difficulties can be challenging. The community varies, with dedicated players alongside those who enforce "meta" builds or engage in disruptive behavior like team killing.
Developer balancing decisions have also garnered attention. While I understand the aim to diversify playstyles, some adjustments, such as nerfing the Railgun, seem questionable. While the overcharge mechanic attempts to balance high-level weapons, it may discourage progression and limit player's ability to reliably deliver anti-armor fires at higher difficulties.

On to the positives: HD2 is undeniably fun. Despite its repetition, the thrill of intense missions and narrow escapes is exhilarating. The diverse enemy types demand strategic mastery, especially on harder levels. The developers' intention to give each weapon and stratagem a unique role is evident, fostering diverse gameplay experiences. The meta-game, where player actions influence a galactic war, adds depth and a sense of collective effort.
The game's matchmaking system facilitates cooperative play, allowing friends to easily connect regardless of platform or experience level. Cooperation is key to success, enhancing the game's appeal.

Overall, HD2 is a worthwhile purchase despite its imperfections. As long as developers maintain community engagement and provide regular updates, I foresee continued enjoyment with my squad for months to come.

TL;DR: 3.5/5. A mish-mash of inspirations from a whole plethora of different games and genres that is rather fun to play.

Realistically, if you're reading this review, you've probably already heard quite a bit about this game. It's stirred up so much (quite frankly unnecessary) drama that it's actually reminded me of why I deleted most of my socials. My review won't really delve into the absurd amount of drama surrounding this game, as I believe a game should be judged based on it's gameplay more than anything, but I will give my own cursory opinion about it. First and foremost; there is no concrete evidence that a large amount of AI-generated content was used in the creation of the game, nor that models or assets were stolen from any other titles. If evidence does eventually come out to the contrary, I may alter or edit this review. At the time of writing, however, no verifiable evidence supporting either of these claims has been presented. That which has has been roundly debunked. Secondly; even if AI was used, it is still a massively original creative work. I'm not going to spend much time giving my full opinion on the whole AI debate, but even if AI was used, the vast majority of content in this game is still quite original - if not somewhat derivative of other works. People need to realize that AI is a tool, not a replacement. I have yet to see any AI generated content that I think has any chance of replacing human originality and creativity. The successful artists will be the ones who realize that they can utilize AI to enhance their abilities, fill in skill gaps, and dramatically increase their productivity. The unsuccessful ones are the ones who, being completely honest, weren't good enough to compete with what amounts to a fancy data aggregator in the first place. So, even if it was used, I personally wouldn't have any problem with it. Finally, almost all of the controversy surrounding this game amounts to "it's successful and original and therefore I hate it". Almost all of the criticisms levied against this game amount to it taking what other, larger franchises have done and doing it better than them. Most of the drama and controversy surrounding the game is artificial and is propagated by a vocal minority of damaged egos.

Moving on to the game itself:
It's fun. It can be described almost entirely by equating it's mechanics with those of other games: it has the movement and artystyle of Legend of Zelda, the creature-capturing and survival mechanics of Ark, and a general theming and world-building similar to Pokemon (if any of that wasn't already obvious). There really isn't much to dig into - the game can be learned and master in basically seconds, but there's a lot to explore and discover in the world itself. The pals are interesting and fun to watch and battle, the enemies and bosses are challenging and require you to keep a careful eye on who you bring out to face them, and everything just generally meshes together really well. As with many survival and creature-capture games, you're going to be spending a decent amount of time gathering resources and capturing "pals", but that's not something that any survival game, in my opinion, has done a very good job of making interesting.

That being said, I do have a few criticisms of the game itself. Firstly, the open world - while beautiful and large - can feel a bit empty at times. Movement across the map can be kinda slow, fast travel points are just a bit further apart than is really comfortable, and 90% of the world is empty with the exception of random roaming pals. That's not to say it's completely empty - it's not. There are villages, basic NPCs, bosses, dungeons, and various other areas to explore and secrets to uncover, but there's definitely a distinct lack of stuff going on especially when compared to some of it's inspirations like LoZ and Ark. The game world is very static and doesn't really throw anything unexpected at you. You might occasionally get raided or come across a challenge, but unless you seek out activity, it's mostly quiet. I feel like it would benefit from a more robust quest system, or more dynamic interactions between pals, or more NPCs to fill-out the world. Additionally, we can't talk about this game without talking about the bugs. I am very forgiving when it comes bugs, but I'll always make a note of them. I've encountered two situations that required a game restart, each of which was rather frustrating (stuck in terrain once, fell into a strange piece of geometry that required a respawn once). While I haven't encountered this myself, when you boot up the game and start a new world you get a pretty big warning that says something along the lines of: "Save data may sometimes unexpectedly disappear or become corrupted" with a link to instructions on how to manually back up your saves, which is not particularly confidence-inspiring. I'm pretty sure this will eventually be fixed, but definitely make a note of the fact that it does have a considerable number of EA bugs and glitches.

Overall, it's a fun and entertaining game. It's a shameless derivative work that takes several key elements from a number of inspirations and just blends them together in a fun and enjoyable way. I don't think it's any sort of groundbreaking game, but it just goes to show that indie devs are on the rise and are making AAA studios sweat a bit, which I'm all for.
3.5/5, do recommend.

TLDR: Boring and relies entirely on shock factor for it's success. 2/5

TLDR; If there was a "maybe" option for steam reviews, I would probably put that. 3/5: has lots of potential but is a bit barebones in it's current state. Purchase only if you're willing to stick around for the long road to the early access dreams, and want to see a more fantastical, D&D-inspired M&B: Bannerlord or Warband experience.

I'm a sucker for these types of open-world build-your-own sandbox titles, so as soon as I saw promises of building my own kingdom I was immediately hooked and bought in. And while I can definitely say that there is a skeleton of something great here - that's all it is. A skeleton. A framework for what could potentially become something truly great and enjoyable. In it's current state, it's unoptimized, buggy, and lacks some of the promised content.

Let's start with the bad: it's VERY early access. It buggy and laggy, even on my relatively high-spec PC. I've reloaded several times due to random stuttering and performance drops that made the game basically unplayable. It's very easy to close and restart, thankfully, so you never really lose that much time playing. Still, it definitely needs a once-over on content that is already implemented in the game to optimize and bugfix. Honestly though, that didn't bother me as much as the tediousness of the game. Obviously, the dev plans on adding a lot more and fleshing out the world significantly (I hope). But as it stands right now, the game is just kinda boring. Progression feels completely flipped on it's head. You are the heir to the Harbinger's Bloodline, an ancient and magical ancestry that gives you unique powers and, as royalty does, a castle. You start the game in this giant, albeit decrepit, castle and are told that from there, you will reforge your bloodline's kingdom and fight off the "unforgiven" - the main antagonists of the game. Then... nothing. The game very quickly devolves into a never-ending grind of menial side quests and resource gathering with no apparent purpose. As it stands, most of the castle is irreparable simply because those features haven't been implemented yet. Side quests are very menial and tedious ("talk to person, go to location, collect X of thing, return to person, turn in for reward") or ("kill X number of specific enemies"). It's just plain boring. I get that there needs to be *some* grind and filler content just to help with progression and story, but I'm 14 hours in and I'm getting a little sick of chopping down trees, mining ore, and killing the same 3 or 4 enemy types over and over again, which so far seems to make up about 90% of all gameplay. You simply can't progress without going through these repetitive tasks - and even then, it seems like at the moment there really isn't much to progress to.

Now let's move onto the good: it's a skeleton, but it's an intriguing and enticing skeleton at that. Combat feels fluid (definitely room for improvement, but generally feels very good), movement - while slow - is workable and provides plenty of options for traversing terrain (climbing, grapple hook, mounts, there's even a flying broomstick you can get which is a little game-breaking but fun). There are lots of skills and different ways to fight - magic, technology, melee, ranged - and while almost all of them are incomplete, they all are viable ways of dispatching enemies (that being said, magic is well and above the most powerful option you have, nothing else even comes close to how broken magic is). There are combo spells (enemies that are poisoned with gas can be detonated by fire spells, etc.), fluid weapon transitions, and generally the game encourages experimentation and exploration. City building, while rudimentary, incomplete, and somewhat tedious, is at least rewarding. There is also a clear storyline and plans for how the story will develop.

All in all - there's a lot here to be excited about. If the dev manages to deliver on their promises, at worst we'll get a M&B clone with magic. At best, we'll get a truly unique kingdom-building sandbox experience. I'll be watching this game's progress closely and checking back occasionally to see if progress on the game warrants a change in my review. Like I said, if there was a "maybe" or "neutral" option on Steam - or better yet a plain old -/5 stars rating, that would more accurately reflect my feelings on this game in it's current state.

TLDR; Good concept with extremely limiting mechanics. 2/5

I've tried time and time again to figure out how this game is supposed to play but I just can't. Armored Brigade is a top-down 2D military strategy simulator that seems like it almost understands what it's trying to do. It runs well, looks pretty, and has a lot of features, but there are glaring issues with the combat system that just make it frustrating to play.

The main issue is that there's really no tactical AI to speak of. You don't get the kind of granular control in AB that you get in other similar titles like Combat Mission. The types of movements that can be performed by different units are extremely limited in scope ("Advance", "Reverse", "Advance to Contact" is basically as complex as the commands you get in this game are), and individual units have no real initiative or ability to fight outside of what you specifically tell them to do. You can't tell them to suppress certain positions where enemy contact is likely, they don't really pop smoke or react in any meaningful way when they're being targeted or fired upon, they don't seek cover and concealment well, pre-planning orders is basically impossible (there are no "pause" or "wait" commands, you can't really pre-designate unloading points, there are no orders for pre-planned firing or targeting arcs, etc.). The fact of the matter is if the individual AI units had any sort of initiative or individual command options then this game would work really well. As it stands though, the EXTREMELY short time-to-kill, combined with the significant lag time of giving orders, the lack of granular control in giving those orders, and the lack of any sort of individual AI initiative just makes this game a frustrating experience coming from something like Combat Mission.

There's really no fun in ordering a convoy down a road just to see them all get killed by a recoilless rifle firing from a concealed position that none of them react to and that you can't order them to react to because any orders you send them will take 2 minutes to arrive, and even the ones that do reach them aren't specific or granular enough to actually micromanage them in a way that will prevent them all from dying.

In other words: in games like this, you either need to have perfect control over your units, or your units need to be competent enough on their own that you can trust them to react appropriately if and when they come under fire, which this game does not do. I think the glaring oversight with this game is that the developers failed to realize that even though war is about orders going down and information going up the chain of command, lower-level commanders are still able to actually command. A vehicle commander or squad leader doesn't need to wait for General R0BIT to tell them exactly where to move and how to do it. On the scale that this game tries to represent, I would give an order more like: "Secure this bridge using fire support from a nearby tank platoon" and leave them to figure out the individual moving parts of that movement, but this game seems to take a weird hybrid approach that just straight up doesn't work and results in units that feel utterly useless unless used in large enough numbers to compensate for the ridiculous number of losses they'll inevitably take.

It's really a shame given how polished and good-looking the game is. Everything else about this game is nice and I really want to like it, but the glaring issues with the combat and control make it impossible for me give a good recommendation.

I'll keep returning to it to play more to figure out if there's just something I'm missing, but until and unless I figure out what I'm doing wrong, I'll stick to Combat Mission and other tactical strategy games.

2/5 Almost good.

TLDR: 2/5. A largely disappointing successor to arguably one of the most beloved Paradox titles to date. Victoria 3 simplifies and abstracts to the point where it actually makes the game more difficult to play and really doesn't feel in the spirit of it's predecessor at all. Just play Victoria 2, it's cheaper and just a better product.

There isn't really a way I can overstate how excited I was for this game. Victoria 2 was the first Paradox title I'd ever played, and to date remains my favorite. It was complicated, convoluted, and buggy - but it was beautiful. It scratched a strategy itch that no other game could quite reach for me. So when Victoria 3 was announced, I immediately pre-ordered and waited anxiously for it's release... only to be completely deflated the moment I booted up the game.

Victoria 3 is a sad, sad successor to Victoria 2. Paradox has been trying desperately to reduce the complexity of their games recently, ostensibly so that they're more accessible to a wider audience, but in doing so they're actively reducing the complexity and the number of features in their games on launch - and Vic 3 is a perfect example of this going horribly, horribly wrong. The entire game has been abstracted away. Want to manage an army? Sorry lol, you get 3 little buttons to click and wait for dice rolls to determine victory. Even if you have overwhelming superiority, victory isn't guaranteed because any modicum of skill that you used to need to beat your opponents have just been replaced by dice rolls. Want to mange complex pop dynamics and autonomous economic development? LMAO. What? What do you mean you don't want to spend the entire game in a single menu micromanaging buildings so that green line go up? What do you mean you don't want every single political policy to be a pointless random dice roll? It's hard to even describe how they managed to simplify and abstract the game so much that they actually made it more difficult to play. They've taken so much control away from the player that the entire game is basically played in a single menu - and a bad one at that. I'm not going to say the game is unplayable, as it's obviously not. But for anyone thinking that this is a good successor or alternative to Vic 2 - DON'T BUY IT. And if you're one of the people who thinks it'll be "fixed" with $80 of DLC - STOP SUPPORTING THIS HORRIBLE BUSINESS MODEL. I'll admit my own fault in this case, but we need to stop encouraging this company's practice of releasing unfinished games that they basically charge to make playable later.

So are there any redeeming qualities about Vic 3? Yes. The graphics are nice. I'll admit that I'm a fan of Paradox's new aesthetic, which, for a strategy game, should really only be a secondary or tertiary factor IMO. On top of that, some of the problems with the initial release version have been fixed in free updates. Military - while still miserable - has been... improved. The AI pops have *SOME* agency now, and can actually build some buildings on their own... but the rate at which they do and how the choose to do so are so abysmal that it realistically makes no difference. Basically, there's going to need to be 5 more of these updates before the game can even come CLOSE to what Victoria 2 was. But it's at least nice to see them going in sort of a good direction. I still refuse to buy any of the DLC though.

This review is a rough copy of another one I left for this game earlier. Sadly, I mistakenly deleted it. I tried to reproduce my thoughts as best as I could, but I probably forgot a thing or two that I put in my original since I also lost my notes for it. At the end of the day, I find Vic 3 to just be a disappointment. I seriously recommend buying Victoria 2 instead. It's literally a better game for cheaper. Yes, it's older and the multiplayer is a little worse... but not by much. Paradox still hasn't really figured out how to make MP bearable. As far as graphics go, you're staring at a map 80% of the time. It's not like you're losing on much there.

2/5 Play Vic 2.

War Thunder has always been a grindfest P2W, but I feel like most people (myself included) gave it a pass because of the genuinely impressive visuals, gameplay, and attention to detail. As far as vehicle simulators go, there really isn't anything like it on the market. WoT doesn't even touch it, and other than that I can't even think of any really big name competitors.

But at some point, we have to put our foot down and say that we aren't just going to let some cash-grabbing giant like Gaijin make it impossible to enjoy their game without forking over a ridiculous amount of cash. We simply can't let that slide.

I would say more, but there are already plenty of people who are far more invested into this game than I and who have already said anything I could think of. Don't let companies get away with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ practices like this. Everyone has to eat, but that doesn't justify raiding people's wallets so that Gaijin execs can eat caviar for every meal.

TLDR; The uncaring, unpolished, unapologetically unique and broken mess of bugs that I simply can't stop coming back to. 4/5.

My relationship with ArmA 3 is very much a love-hate affair. I could spend hours talking about this game, as I've played this game inside and out (if you couldn't already tell by my time played). But I'll keep it brief.

ArmA 3 is a military sandbox where you can basically do whatever you want. It's really less of a game and more of a military-themed platform on which players are allowed to build essentially anything. You're given a huge sandbox and told: "do with this as you please". Whether you're into hardcore military simulation with a dedicated community of LARPers who get frustrated whenever you don't address their player character by the proper rank, or just like vibing and dying repeatedly in more casual games of King of the Hill, or prefer to test your survival skills in Exile - there's literally something for everyone. I don't think I'm mincing words when I say that ArmA has perhaps one of the most expansive and developed modding communities of any game I've ever seen. Few other titles can claim to have literally been the starting point for titans like PUBG and DayZ.

Of course, it's far from perfect. What I said in the TLDR is absolutely true - this game is, quite frankly, a broken mess. The movement is stiff and unintuitive, the inventory system is archaic, the AI is a continual enigma that has researchers befuddled to this very day, and physics system is... well... let's just say it was likely made by someone who didn't do very well in their high-school science classes.

All this can sometimes give the game a feeling of being "wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle". I don't think that that's an inaccurate way to describe this game. But the beauty of it lies in the ability of the community to deepen the puddle themselves, and even if they don't - an ocean is still fun to play around in, even if it's only ankle-high.

Quite simply put - there is really no other game like ArmA out there today, and something tells me there never will be. Some people will hate it, some will love it, other will regard it with both contempt and affection (like myself), but it's undeniable that ArmA is something truly special and unique.

4/5 - the ocean is endless.