Recent reviews by Good Old Hoxton

For the price, probably one of the most charming games I've ever played.

There's a surprising level of challenge to this rogue-like, as you potter about in little tanks in myriad top-down battlefields, upgrading your abilities and vehicle, and swapping out your turrets to cause extreme brain haemorrhages for anyone familiar with tanks.

Not only are you able to use multi-turreted tanks (as the name suggests), but you're given the option to challenge yourself with vehicles that only have one. Even better is the Kettenkrad, which has been given the ability to drop landmines, but also to mount guns so big that it sends the little vehicle flying when it fires.

Fitting a gun turret the size of a pickup truck, onto the top of a tank that was just barely bigger than a Fiat 500 and no taller than a 6-year-old?

Yes, please.


The gameplay loop is a simple rogue-like, but still feels varied enough every time to warrant repeated playthroughs with the dozens of adorable stylized tanks that you can unlock and play with.

The cast are cute; The art style is simple; The gameplay is pleasant; The devs put polls in the game to vote on what tank gets added next; And I don't think there was a single point where anything in the game felt particularly unfair, even the three fairly challenging bosses.

Easily an 9/10, with a surprising amount of depth, and a must-have for anyone interested in tanks!

With the advent of CU29 coming up, I though it'd be a nice idea to try and get back into Halo Infinite after the disastrous launch and constantly delayed game elements.

Gunplay's fine.

Graphics are fine.

Everything else?


Having played this game's campaign, and been thoroughly disappointed by a piss-poor story, only barely carried by semi-competent character writing, an attempt at revisiting it only yielded a strong reminder of why Halo should have just stayed with a linear story campaign. Traipsing around the map Far Cry-style wears thin quickly, even with the grappling hook added to your repertoire of skills and powers.

Plot points set up in the previous game are resolved off-screen; Major events happen away from the player, and even away from the camera. This sort of storytelling, in the same series where we got behind-the-scenes looks at the Covenant collapsing or the Flood causing problems or humans fighting in New Mombasa, is an insult.

Created Conflict? Oh, that just sort of fixed itself.

The Banished? Yeah, they just sort of somehow came back and won everything everywhere.

Blue Team? Somewhere else, I guess.

What about those characters from Halo 5? Pfft, who knows?

We might have had some answers in a story DLC - a story DLC which they decided to not do anything with, and instead focused on the ridiculous storefront[/i] that is the multiplayer.

On that topic, I've also found the multiplayer to be a hacker-infused mess; Fresh accounts will appear, gun down your entire team over and over, and if you wish to report them, you need to visit an external website and painstakingly upload your evidence. The slog of a process means that by the time you've reported even one, the hacker could quite happily have stitched together another 100 accounts.

This, of course, doesn't even cover the absolutely ABHORRENT monetization in the game.

Want to customize your Spartan like the old days?
Too bad, pay for it.

Want to try that new Battle Pass, because YES, this is a live service game?
Pay for it.

How about -?
Pay for it.

Want to -?
Pay for it.

The game is a money sink, filled with cheaters and watched over by a truly lazy dev team.

A weak foray into a beloved series, and another "live service" game that's going to go down as a mess and eventually have the plug pulled when it's not generating enough from people paying almost £8.99 for textures to put on a select few pieces of equipment.

4/10. I'd refund it if I could.

Save your money.
Buy the Master Chief Collection instead, and relive somewhat better days of Halo.

As someone who basically just beats off over 80s / 90s sci-fi classic movies, this is probably the best video game rendition of one of my favourite franchises that I've ever played.

Yes, it's not technically amazing. At its' core, the game is a relatively bog-standard FPS, with a variety of weapons, equipment, and a skill tree that progresses at a steady rate as you play the game. Whilst some more ill-informed people might complain that the environments are all the same - a generic nuclear wasteland - I vehemently disagree.

It's GREAT that they're all the same. You know what they're the same as?

Those brief, amazing glimpses into the Future War that we were shown in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The shattered buildings; The burned out husks of cars; The skeletons of four billion dead people lining the streets; The HK-Aerials soaring overhead with their searchlights; Death wrapped in chrome stalking around every corner with the single-minded evil that only Skynet could achieve.

And ho, boy, if there was ever an argument in favour of ray-tracing? This is it. The experience of hiding underneath the trailer of a long-decimated semi-truck as an invulnerable, flying tank shines a spotlight where you were, in the knowledge it can absolutely obliterate you instantly on higher difficulties? God, it's a rush I've longed for.

The game PERFECTLY captures that feeling of hopelessness that we're only told about in the movies, with you being forced to scrounge for scraps of crafting material, ammunition, flimsy first aid kits, and trading materials. Every human you meet is distrustful of you, afraid, or angry. Every machine you encounter is only there for the sole purpose of putting your entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ race into the ground.

For the first half of the game, the T-800 is a very real, very terrifying threat, being nearly completely immune to every weapon in your fledgling arsenal, until the point you unlock Plasma weaponry. And even then, be cautious; Sure, you've got a Phased Plasma Rifle in the 40 Watt range, but guess what? Every T-800 you bump into is gonna have one, too, and those guys know how to use it.

The A.I in this game - ironically enough - is rather hit-or-miss. It can get confused easily, stuck in places, not investigate noises, or simply choose not to investigate where it last saw you. On the same dime, the very same A.I in a gunfight is MORE than capable of shoving your ass into a sentient woodchipper and hitting you with a glowing purple stick until you stop moving. More than a few times, I found myself mildly irritated by the fact a random Endoskeleton was able to not only spot me, but practically Mozambique Drill me in the chest and head from about a hundred meters away.

Then again, I suppose it's somewhat fitting. They are Terminators.

Otherwise, the story is surprisingly solid. A lot of the side characters are really fleshed out over the course of the game, with their own motivations and past. Two of them are survivors of Judgement Day, which is something I really liked; It's not often acknowledged in Terminator games that Judgement Day itself was in 1997, and we really only hear about the year 2027 as a glimpse of the future. A solid 30 years between the nukes hitting and the rough point of the game starting, and it shows; The people you meet are tired, haggard, and always juuust about seem like they're gonna sell you to Skynet for literally two cans of beans and a chicken burrito.

In short, you play as Jacob Winters, who's the sole survivor of the Pacific Division of the Resistance. He's been running for a few months from...something. And it turns out, it's not done chasing you. You'll head to bombed-out Pasadena, to the sunny Hollywood Hills, and most importantly, the ever-so-faithful recreation of the Future War battlefield that we got to see in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, with the Plasma flying and the Resistance standing firm against a wall of leering, skeletal titanium.

So, yes, if you can overlook a mildly clunky FPS with A.I that leaps in difficulty from a Speak-and-Spell to the latest Skynet product in a matter of seconds? Sure.

But if you're like me, and have been sat waiting for years for the first machine to decide it doesn't like humans? Absolutely get this game. It's the most faithful Terminator game possible, and - dare I say - genuinely worthy of being a fitting addition to the original The Terminator / Terminator 2: Judgement Day lore.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BRAVO, to the developers. Your enthusiasm shone through in a big way.

Eh. I guess I could get into it.

Right then. I normally put humour into my reviews, but there's nothing even remotely funny about this pile of non-metaphorical bug-infested ♥♥♥♥.

First off, the game refuses to load most of the time.

Like, at all.

You click the button, say the magic words of "I want to play this game", and hey presto!

Your computer's ♥♥♥♥ the bed, mouse lag's appeared on the DESKTOP, and the screen's gone completely black.

In the off chance your game does decide it might entertain the idea of working for you, it'll do exactly the same
thing but decide to randomly deafen you with the stupidly loud default volume.
So, ears open for that one.

What else?

Ah, yes!

The performance is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ atrocious.

The framerate will immediately hit the ground harder than a man committing suicide from a tall place.
Between you selecting a command and the command actually being carried out, you might as well go put the kettle on. I did.
Had a cup of Gold Blend to calm myself down so that I could comprehend this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
I might go make another one, now.
And whilst I'm at it, I'd rev up those fryers, because I'm just about ready to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kill myself.

Misread title; Thought this game was about someone who didn't know how to wipe.

A more fun way to play this game after completing it is to not make any effort to actually snipe.

Just use the really cool little pistols they let you play with and go on a rampage.

The SMGs kinda suck, though. Also, be careful, because anything less than a slow-motion X-Ray headshot will probably ricochet off German helmets. It's OK, though, because the Russians you eventually encounter don't wear helmets because their Commie masters won't let them be alive for very long.

So, to be honest, this game can be played either seriously, by setting up a bunch of mines and by throwing rocks to annoy soldiers and then shooting people when your rifle fire is muffled, or you can play it the fun way, by not making a single effort to do anything tactically and repeatedly attacking people from long distances using the Webley revolver (which, I might add, is part of one of the DLCs, which are all totally worth it).

I don't get why people were upset by this game. I mean, yeah, I guess I could see it as emotional, but I'm just not feelin' it.

All it really did was prove that I'm the kind of person who would use an apocalypse or war as a chance to kill EVERYONE.

Like, for instance, there were some old people in a house, and I stole some soup from a pile of assorted ♥♥♥♥ in their garden (Don't ask; There's soup and ♥♥♥♥ absolutely EVERYWHERE in this game). I wanted more, so I listened to the two old people discussing how they met, this thing called "hoping they can see their grandchildren grow up", and some other ♥♥♥♥. I got bored of listening, kicked the door down, then killed both of them to steal the absolutely sweet planks of wood and practically broken tools they had in the chests next to them.

Uh, what else?

Oh, yeah. Later, I visited this house with some people there, and apparently the son was looking for medicine for his Dad. I had his medicine: 12 gauge! Right in the face! Boo-yah! ♥♥♥♥ you, old guy on a bed! I just stole all the planks of wood that you had, and you can't do ♥♥♥♥ about it!

TL;DR: This game told me I need to get professional help.

This makes you go left-right-left more times than the Nazis that are coming to get you can do.

I came.
I saw.
I went to the moon.
I memed really hard.
NASA, India, Russia, anywhere with a space program: Stop.
Make games like this.
I want to meme.