Recent reviews by Rudedog

While this is still a Rad Codex game, in my opinion it's one of their weaker offerings. It's still a fun, well-built game, but it has some serious flaws from design decisions that just didn't pan out. It's worth the cost, but Horizon Gate and Void Spire were better IMO, and as a veteran of all their previous titles, it's impossible not to compare it to earlier offerings.

The good:
The wyvern mount is a really fun unit with some good variety of builds for such a simple and limited unit. I like how it can be a mobility enhancing suit of armor or an independent combatant in its own right.

I liked the setting of Graven. I wanted to learn more about this underground world and its people, the diecast. There wasn't as much world building as I wished for, but what we got I liked.

I liked the narrative setup of the lone Wispslayer sent on a suicide mission, joined, against his will, by his stalwart friends. Discovering the devastated, occupied city learning its fate from its inhabitants was a strong hook. While the story is very limited and localized, that's not better or worse, IMO, than the grand globe-trotting adventures of Horizon Gate. It's spartan, but I think the bones are very sturdy. I do wish there was more elaboration, though. I was left wanting to learn more about this place and its people.

I liked some of the streamlined systems such as upgrade skills covering two damage types instead of one. I also didn't miss some of the more obscure weapon types like whips.

Mechanically and thematically, the wisps are an interesting enemy I would have liked to see more of, and the fragile wisp nodes that act like mecha pilots are fun to fight (and briefly use).

The ruined tower was a decent home base with enough unlockables to make it feel like it was an interesting location. I would have liked if it had included chests for my surplus gear rather than having to leave it on the ground though.

The bad:
Delayed actions weren't very useful in previous games, and they are far, far worse now. Simply put, there are not enough options to trap enemies in their AoE, so they are impractical to the point of useless except for manipulating the AI, which is terrified of them well past the point of rationality. There needed to be more ways to halt enemies than surrounding them or blinding them then debuffing their movement. As it is, it feels like we are being baited into bad build options. I was happy every time I saw an enemy charge up an attack that I had no problem walking out of.

Upgrade depth is very shallow, compared to previous games. This is true for both number of classes to choose from and material tiers. Gone are half the base materials and all the elemental materials. Accessories are now very situational and niche, almost to the point of irrelevance at times.

A lot of the new systems were not very intuitive or well explained, such as the requirements for breaking blocks and digging. Some ability descriptions were similarly very unclear or counter intuitive. Some items were changed with little fanfare making them very confusing for a series veteran. For example, gauntlets are now a weapon slot item rather than an accessory, which isn't bad, per se, but it did trick me into putting it in my acc slot, wasting my slot for half the game due to not reading closely enough.

There are excessive numbers of enemies in the early to mid-game. A lot of fights start you out outnumbered 8-5 where the average strength of each enemy is greater than your units. I found the difficulty very uneven, especially for the random encounter areas since it seemed to scale off number of wisps killed rather than team power. Some battles were brutal while others were cakewalks.

Beyond delayed actions (but certainly including them) a LOT of the class abilities are either so under powered or so difficult to use that they are effectively useless. It wants to reward you for wombo-combo with your whole team, but mostly it just wasn't worth the effort. I found myself doing mostly normal attacks and healing skills plus the occasional instant cast spell.

There was less dialog than I expected. I wish we got more NPCs with something to say about the situation and more outsiders to give us perspective.

Overall: It's a big step down and backward from Horizon Gate. It's still better than Alvora Tactics (and even that's not bad IMO), but I expected more and better, not less. I enjoyed it and can still recommend it to others, but I'd recommend Horizon Gate or Voidspire Tactics before Kingsvein.

TL;DR It's a poor sequel, threadbare, and with some poor design decisions desperately trying to hide a lack of polish, but it holds up just enough to pass muster, especially at a discount.

Subnautica: Below Zero is everything Subnautica was except slightly less polished, smaller scale, less fleshed out, and less exciting. It's a testament to the first game being so good that even this poor, stripped down sequel is good enough.

Below Zero is a DLC that grew just big enough to be big for a DLC, but not big enough to be the full game its being sold as. The ambition of the developers obviously grew with the success of Subnautica, then deflated as deadlines neared, and it shows.

Despite each of the new environments still being bioluminescently gorgeous, their small number and cramped, busy, if not downright claustrophobic nature undercuts the sense of wonder you got with the exploration of the previous game. It's far too easy to get lost in the same-y twisting tunnels, despite them not being all that big, and there, frankly, just isn't enough to discover to feel like you have much variety. The devs have tried to compensate by slowing down all forms of movement and making the exploration much less directed (or hand-holding if you will) than the previous game, but that just exacerbates how easy it is to get lost. I found exploration still enjoyable, but significantly diminished from its predecessor.

The enemies are also pale shadows of their previous counterparts. There are only a small handful of aggressive fauna types, and those are more bothersome than terrifying. They don’t do enough damage to inspire terror, but their aggro range seems much wider than before, causing them to be more of a bothersome annoyance than a real threat, despite their louder roars. Overall, it feels more like harrassment than being hunted. There only 2 leviathans that you will likely encounter that feel like real leviathans, one on the above water ice shelf and the other in the deepest areas. Technically there’s also one in the abyss beyond the map, but why would you ever meet it?

The crafting too has been toned back. Gone are several gadgets, and most of the new ones are either downgrades or totally pointless. The robo-penguin is basically a short range drone that lets you pick up crafting materials hidden in otherwise inaccessible areas along with the occasional plot relevant item. The base construction is slightly improved with a few nice additional aesthetic options, but it’s largely the same as before.

Gone is the seamoth and cyclops, replaced by the seatruck, essentially a seamoth that can tow modules behind it like a long-haul train-semi. The problem is, most of the modules are utterly useless, and towing them encumbers an already slightly ponderous and slow vehicle. The prawn suit works for pretty much anything, making the truck a slightly faster but also slightly less nimble option. Overall, I found that the prawn suit outclasses the truck for basically everything but speed, with the added advantage that it can operate perfectly well on land and has built in storage.

The plot for Below Zero starts out strong enough. You are a new protagonist, here off the record looking for details to your sister’s death, who officially was labeled killed by her own negligence by the evil megacorp that employed her. It doesn’t take long to learn that there is chicanery afoot again involving the same virus the protagonist of the previous game stamped out, as well as additional alien relics that offer tantalizing clues about the fall of their civilization to augment what we learned in Subnautica. While all that sounds great, the game is so hands off about directing the player that the A plot can easily become impossible to advance unless you are willing to look up spoilers and location details. Even the more important B plot can be frustratingly hard to advance since it’s not always straight forward to get to the waypoints you are given. It seems to be promoting a “no stone left unturned” mentality for exploration, and given the sometimes frustrating nature of the environments, it was not well appreciated.

Overall, I’d say for the current full asking price of $30 it’s just barely worth the ride. Those who haven’t played Subnautica will probably enjoy it more than those returning, but even as a sequel it’s serviceable, if unpolished and tepid compared to it predecessor. If you can find it on sale for half off, I’d absolutely recommend it. On its own merits, I still think it was an enjoyable game, it just looks shabby compared to what came before.

TL;DR Unsubtle in its storytelling, a bit overzealous in its reuse of assets and mechanics, and weighed down by NPCs with much less emotional resonance than they needed, but well voice acted, and beautifully textured, The Outer Worlds qualifies as a competently made RPG, just a forgettable, cartoonish one. It wants to be Firefly the RPG, but it didn't put the work in.

Cons

Asset recycling: An almost palpable fog of cut corners shrouds the game from nearly the beginning, with many, many, MANY reused assets, both in setting and items, some of which can be justified by the dystopian world building, but many of which strain what can be forgiven. There are too few armor and gun archetypes, and your equipment upgrade cycle quickly degenerates into swapping in the next identical looking version without even an attempt at lampshading. There are only 3 tiers of each weapon. Many of the locations look similar because with the exception of the Groundbreaker and the Bzantium they are all using the same assets. Exploration is somewhat damaged due to annoying invisible walls and poor/unforgiving jump physics. With just three exceptions each, all the companions had the same options for the skill trees.

Cartoonish storytelling: At the overview level, the story is solid. You are a colonist recently thawed by a rebel scientist from an abandoned colony ship that time forgot. You must make your place in a dystopian world while trying to figure out how to save the rest of your frozen fellows. The problems come with the villains, the corporations of Halcyon. They aren't just cold, ruthless, and cruel, they are positively cartoonishly evil often for little to no gain. The Board of Halcyon's policies make Andrew Ryan (Bioshock) or Vault-tech (Fallout) both seem well adjusted by comparison! I'm not a fan of Randian ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ philosophy, but the game lays it on so thick i simply could not take it seriously.

Weakly characterized Companions: This is admittedly subjective, but none of the companions caught my interest or made a firm impression as to who they were. The only one I had any attachment to was Pavarti, your very first companion, and only because you spend the longest with her and her similarity to the must deeper and better portrayed Kaylee (Firefly), except as an asexual lesbian. The rest of the cast had all the flair and depth of a mud puddle. A few of the supporting cast at the various locations were memorable such as most of the faction leaders, but fewer of the niche NPCs left an impression than your average Fallout game.

Pros

Graphics: It's damn pretty in a lot of places, especially when you get away from the massively overused shipping container home clusters that pass as cities. Lava flows, rivers, tall grass of various shades, gorgeous character models, and well designed monsters all impressed me. The sfx are a bit overbearing and distracting at times, but almost everything looks good.

Voice Acting: Is pretty consistently good, much better than what I expect for this sort of game. The script might not give them much to work with, but the delivery was usually well above average.

Nothing fails utterly: Despite how many complaints I had, none of them were crippling. At worst they were a little sour, more often just a bit eye rolling or uninteresting. Even at it's worst, The Outer Worlds never lost my interest, and I logged a respectable number of hours on it. I came away thinking the game needed more polish in a lot of places, a lot more... everything, especially as the game winds down, and some tweaks, but it was fundamentally a sound experience. Not an instant classic to launch a few franchise or a game you will want to replay many times, but a competent if slightly underwhelming effort. I wanted it to be more, but I'll settle for this.

Tactical combat is solid. Dialog is surprisingly well written at first blush. Setting feels as mythic as promised. Balance is a bit questionable in places, but overall it feels satisfying at multiple difficulties. After 2 and change campaigns I can recommend it so long as the paper doll graphics and super basic animations don't really bug you too much.

Now 60 hours in I can say the game has not disappointed. The novelty of being surprised by new encounters ends after about four campaigns, but that was still about 30 hours so I can complain. My main complaint is currently how poor a choice pretty much all arm transformations are and the leg transformations aren't much better. Basically, there isn't much reason to go further than the head unless you want to intentionally nerf a character or have already lost a limb. Hunters seem weak compared to the other two classes. Even with my tactical RPG chops I still take injuries in any difficulty higher than adventurer from time to time.

All that said, I'm happy with this game at full price, as is, as I totally got my money's worth out of it, and it seems like it's still getting developed. Aside from the graphics and animation during battle, this is one of the best tactical rpgs I've played.

I can't recommend it. Between F2P cheaters and garbage servers ruining PvP and terrible decision making at Bungie constantly nerfing things that work in PvE to try to balance said garbage-fire PvP, the game is a mess. However, given their willingness to change things quite frequently, who knows how the game will play in a couple months time. There are some interesting stories and the co-op FPS gameplay is functional, but it's no masterpiece. There are some interesting guns to collect, but don't get attached to any of them as they will become worthless over time as force obsolescence is the new paradigm going forward. The newest content is obviously low effort compared to the older content, and Bungee seems determined to turn the game into Fetchquests, the Grinding. I've completely lost faith that they can make good decisions. Their unwillingness to deliver robust content upgrades or finish any story thread, their constant schizophrenic tinkering with the guns, the, admittedly relatively modest, bugs, the OUTRAGEOUS virtually-rewardless grind, and their low effort content additions have driven me away. Playing a video game should not feel like an unpleasant task or obligation, and that's what D2 has degenerated into..

BL3 has problems, deep rooted writing problems, but it's still Borderlands and it just barely makes the cut.

First the bad:
The new characters are even less fleshed out than previous protagonists with almost no personality or backstory, the new villains are one-note and obnoxious beyond belief, the main narrative is meh, the pacing is especially crap (Athena is done in a flash while Eden-6 goes on forever), the writing's extremely uneven and often leaves a sour taste, there are a couple of "very-special-episode" missions that are neither fun nor funny but seem to simply exist to virtue signal, and the ending is frankly confusing garbage. Worse, a lot of the writing has a "Take that, Fans!" flavor to it. It feels like the writers of this game hate their core audience and fans and would like nothing better than to tell them how disreputable and disrespectable they are. Frankly, that's almost as off-putting than the rest of the flaws combined.

Then the Good:
All that said, the core gameplay is still engaging, some of the new guns are interesting, there are some great missions and a lot of decent missions, a lot of the legacy cast are as fun as ever, and there is quite a lot of game here.

Then the Verdict:
Is this a new high water mark for the series? LOL, ♥♥♥♥ NO! Borderlands 2 was better in almost every, non-graphical, way. Is it worse than Pre-sequel? Probably not. It is a mild disappointment IMO, but it's still good enough to be worth picking up and playing at a discount. I would have been more disappointed if I had played full price. Thanks Epic Game Store!

The bottom line:
BL3 is a game with a lot of technical excellence sabotaged to merely mediocre by ♥♥♥♥♥♥ writing at almost every level and an almost palpable hatred of the project that the writers seemed to have for it and its fans. So it's a decently made game with some very sour notes. If Gearbox hates Borderlands and its fans that much they should move on rather than sabotage their game. As is it is an ok game, worth picking up on major sale, but after pre-sequel and then this I'll be skeptical of future Borderlands titles.

There is an undeniable charm to the vehicle building, the initial exploration, and missions, but it wears thin pretty fast.

The building is generally excellent and intuitive while your tech is small. Once it gets complicated and large it gets very hard to get the fiddly cursor to target the right spots when they are exposed and forget about working deep inside. You will have to build from the middle out and completely start fresh to make any interior alterations.

The world looks decent and while there aren't any structures to find outside of missions, I enjoyed just roaming and rampaging at first. However, once you have unlocked all the brands and seen all the mission types it all starts to feel very repetitive. Strip mine resources, kill brain-dead AI bots, do the same few missions... The gameplay loop basically ends up in creative with no meaningful goals and little sense of accomplishment.

The enemy AI is extremely dumb, it only knows two tactics. Charge forward, guns blazing, and circle strafe, guns blazing.
Bot techs have a pretty small detection range, and will often let you murder them passively with as many shots as necessary without even dodging or fighting back as long as you are far enough away. Once you learn that and acquire the proper guns, combat is mostly safe boring slaughter with the occasional panicky ambush where you backpeddle while trying to keep your guns trained on something and hope you don't get stuck on the difficult-to-judge environment.

The game desperately needs some sort of late game aspirational goals, a much better AI, and some minor UI tweaks for the vendors. Base-type techs among the random bots would help. Because you can only rampage and build so long before the whole thing becomes pointless and there are already better games if you want to PvP with custom vehicles.

It’s was fun game in the honeymoon period, but that fun is definitely finite, and I found the end of it during the free weekend. It could still grow into a game I would want to own, but it's not there yet. As is I wouldn't pay full price, or even the discounted price, and I'm done buying games on their potential.

Corners were cut (in animation and voice-over variety especially) as is a Cyanide tradition, but it's Blood Bowl in all it's RNG heavy glory. It's a good game, worth playing for those that are willing to engage with a brutally unforgiving RNG heavy fantasy sports strategy game. There are free PC ports of the tabletop game, but none look as nice or capture the overall feel of Blood Bowl as well.

Buggy, half-finished feeling, and a bit sloppy in its execution in places, but with compelling world building, compelling storytelling, decently well thought out philosophy, and strong characters, Tyranny is good but falls just short of greatness, ambitious but slightly undercooked.

It would be fair to compare it to legends like the Baldur's Gate series or Planescape: Torment, but it doesn't quite live up to the high standards of those older games. The difficulty is very uneven, with the first few hours somewhat challenging but the latter 2/3rds of the game a virtual cakewalk. Tyranny does an admirable job of making your decisions feel like they have weight and consequence and not simply the illusion of choice, a rarity in modern gaming, even if some consequences don't feel particularly fair and there is a fair degree of railroading and a few artificial binary choices. Thankfully those latter are the exception rather than the rule. Many of the game's gimmicks like the missive system work well but are underutilized. The reputation system works fairly well except for its very, very uneven treatment. Some companions can be nearly maxed out in the first few minutes of meeting them while others must be carefully husbanded to reach higher levels. The spell creation system feels robust and was fun to explore. I ran into many data stubs throughout the game, something that shouldn't happen in a 3 year old title from a studio this renowned. I ran into a still broken sidequest that was supposed to have been fixed years ago. The DLC is obviously still unfinished cut content that should have been in the game proper.

Tyranny was worth playing so long as nits don’t ruin your experience, but it could have been more, better. It feels like 98% of a classic and 2% lazy/rushed. SO close to greatness!

Campy in the best sense of the word, this shooter won my heart when I learned I could lead my squad in singing patriotic songs.