Recent reviews by Frankium

TODAY MARKS OUR MOST GLORIOUS VICTORY YET, HELLDIVERS

The Sony automaton threat has been forced to reverse course and managed democracy is back to full fighting strength once again! Props to Arrowhead for admitting their mistakes and doing so much to save the game.

Speaking of which, Helldivers 2 is a co-op masterpiece of the Left 4 Dead and DRG caliber. It's a blast with friends, is extremely cinematic and has a passionate and fun playerbase and meme culture. With the defeat of the corpos, Helldivers 2 and managed democracy is once more free from AAA greed and scummy business practices.

Now is a better time than ever to join us in the fight for galactic liberation!

As a Verdun veteran, Isonzo is a significant upgrade. The devs have introduced progression, class and weapon slot customization akin to that of battlefield without compromising the game's realism, as well as several non-direct combat roles such as building defenses as engineer and issuing orders/calling in support as an officer. There are a lot more ways to play Isonzo than there are to play Verdun. The gunplay makes the guns feel significantly heavier and more awkward to use, which is accurate to the strange design of many of these weapons. What really makes the game is the maps. They are on a much larger scale, both horizontally and vertically. The arid, mountainous environments make for interesting places to fight. There are still some issues with map balance and the occasional bug, but overall it's absolutely worth playing if you're into history.

Seriously impressive work on this mod, I found it every bit as captivating as the official half life games. The story, the map design, the combat and the characters are all amazing and feel like they'd fit in canon. The new AI, weapons, enemies and command mechanics put a fun twist on the combat. The Xen Relay Grenades stand out as an incredibly interesting and fun weapon to use. My only complaints are of a few bugs involving floating striders and doors not opening, but they're pretty rare and easily fixed by loading your last save. Otherwise, if someone told me valve made this back in the early 2000s, I'd believe them, because it's up to that quality. Breadmen, y'all knocked it out of the park.

If you like any of the DOOM series games, Prodeus is the retro shooter experience for you. The game looks, feels and plays like a 90s DOOM game with improvements that weren't possible at their time.

The GOOD:

Some of the best weapon design I've seen. The combination of sound design, animation and enemy response makes each and every weapon feel BEEFY. I will never get tired of shooting in this game.

The combination of old-school pixilated graphics and modern rendering looks incredible.

Fast, fluid movement, much like that of quake and old source games.

Great level design from both the developers and a highly active and skilled mapping community.

An awesome, heavy soundtrack from Andrew Hulshult

The BAD:

Lack of punishment for dying. Dying respawns you at your previous checkpoint, however, all monsters that you killed are still dead. You aren't forced to repeat that intense arena fight from the beginning.

The ingame map is a bit difficult to use for navigation sometimes, however, the levels are not mazelike and getting lost is easily fixed by spending a minute or two just looking around.

The price is arguably a bit high for an early access game that only has a few levels of the main campaign available.

OVERALL:

There's room for improvement, as there was in DOOM 2016, however, it's in early access and will likely improve over time. Overall, even in its unfinished state, this game's awesome and is absolutely worth playing.

Playing this masterpiece has been the most fun I've ever had with a singleplayer campaign focused fps. Put simply, the super high-octane playstyle of the Slayer coupled with his blistering firepower, the great strategic depth to the gameplay and brutal, yet fair difficulty makes DOOM Eternal both literally and figuratively an absolute blast. Get this game, it is good.

Deep Rock Galactic is the greatest PvE co-op I've ever played. The gameplay is best summed up as a mix of Team Fortress 2's class based system, movement mechanics, humor and combat combined with the hectic fight for survival of Left 4 Dead, set in the fully destructible, resource-filled, randomly generated caves of Minecraft.

Each class has their own weapons, support tools and traversal tools. Each weapon has a complex and well-balanced upgrade web, giving the player great creative freedom to build their weapons for different purposes. Each class has a traversal tool that brings unique movement and terrain manipulation mechanics to the game. Each enemy is designed to counter certain builds and to punish players for making mistakes, however, each enemy has counters of its own. Coupled with the random terrain generation, this makes for endless replayability, driven by improvisation and experimentation.

Last but certainly not least, GSG's dev team is one of the last of a great, dying breed: a dev team that actually cares about the game itself, first and foremost. They make significant efforts to stay engaged and involved with the playerbase, providing us with constant hotfixes, update progress reports, and even tease us with leaks of upcoming features on their streams. DLCs are purely cosmetic and are just a means to tell them "hey, I like your game, here's some more money to support development, keep at it".

This game rightfully earns its spot among my top three favorite games of all time. Get this game, it is really that good. The riches of Hoxxes await, so get out there and make Karl proud. ROCK AND STONE, BROTHER!

This game is made to be an accurate historical respresentation of WW1 trench warfare. It does a hell of a job doing just that. As someone who likes WW1 and WW2 history, I love it.

Fighting in the Great War through Verdun is an experience I will never forget. In the deadliest battlefields of WW1, there is no greenery. your only landmarks are sandbags, downed planes, muddy hills and even bodies. The bodies fill the trenches and shell holes. More and more bodies hit the mud as the machine guns keep firing. The wounded lay writhing and screaming in pain. The waterlogged trenches run red with blood. Artillery shells blow the legs off of men, leaving them to scream in pain as they bleed out. The shells leave craters to take cover in... if you don't mind the putrid odor of the corpses that lie in them. GAS GAS GAS! You are quick and throw on your gas mask as the yellow green cloud creeps into your trench. Your fellow soldier is not quick enough. He staggers around, choking, clutching his throat before he collapses, blood flowing from his mouth. Soon after, the opposing army drops into the trenches, bayonets and clubs and shovels and other brutal weapons at the ready. It's a massacre. Men are impaled and bludgeoned as chaotic hand to hand combat insues. Death and blood and rot are everywhere. Your fellow countrymen are dead. Your best friend just took a bullet to the neck and lays gurgling, choking, sputtering next to you, bleeding all over himself and you and the ground. Now he is dead. You're next. You could retreat, but that would be deserting. You know what happens to those poor, shell shocked bastards. There is no escaping your own gruesome, agonizing death. War is Hell. Do not play this game unless you are ready to experience all of this.

No other game I have played conveys the brutality, destruction, endless trench warfare and sheer loss of life in the Great War like this game does. And war in general at that. It accurately shows you exactly what WW1 was like, with attention to every detail. It shows you exactly what the cost of war is. It may be a game, and it may be fun, but it has a much deeper meaning to it than just that. If you learn anything from playing this game and experiencing the horrors of the most brutal war ever, it is that War is Hell.

The game has a very solid foundation and a highly dedicated and talented community, so much so that it still retains a massive following and a gold-standard status for team-based movement shooters even some 14 years after its release and even more impressively, it does so despite being run by a company that blatantly does not care about the game.

Speaking of which, TF2 has one colossal and perhaps eventually fatal flaw: it is run by a company too lazy to give the game any more than bare-minimum support to keep the lights on. Game-ruining balance issues, bots/cheating and exploits run rampant and have persisted for years. The only new content the base game gets is chosen from the community workshop by valve, not everything in the workshop is good and not everything is finished yet. Valve clearly adds community content without even reading the content description, which clearly states whether it's in beta or not, let alone playtest the content first.

TLDR: God tier game, but gets trash tier support from valve. Has an uncertain future with community servers imo. It's still worth playing, but is not consistently playable.

Everything about this game is a massive improvement on the original Half Life. That old classic has been remastered and improved in ways that weren't possible at its time. The graphics, the audio, the enemies, the physics and level design are modernized and improved. I stopped frequently over the many hours of gameplay just to look at the maps. The game looks and plays as if it was made by Valve itself back when it used to make games. It's at least as good as the Half Life 2 series. This is a must for any half life fan.

Edit: I've played the Xen Technical Beta and it blew me away. I had to stop and spend a lot of time just looking around because Xen is stunningly beautiful. Can't wait for the full release!