Recent reviews by 11gscanlan

I open the game, and notice that by default, all of the sound in the game is muted, so I turn it up. I decided to play by myself, but I found out that there's no enemy AI. But I can still load into a match where it's just me by myself.
The music is a constant loop of vague battle drums that gets really repetitive after a minute or so.
I got bored and spent the match trying to kill my own ants, all the while the camera keeps cutting to random locations to show me nothing happening, but sometimes there's a crate falling, but mostly meaning I can't actually use my moves because I can't see where I am.
When I first got to play as my Ant Queen, the Ice one, I picked to use her class ability, where the camera showed several ice spikes slowly rising out of the ground one by one, forcefully making me wait about a full minute with no control. All of the ice spikes were placed in locations where they couldn't actually rise out of the ground.
I knocked down a BBQ with a rock attack that my Ant queen was under, causing her to get pushed out of the map.
When I next got to play as my Queen, I could move underneath the map and shoot back above the map.
I started charging an attack as an ant before the timer then ran out and control was shifted over to the next ant. Before it was then returned to the previous ant's attack taking effect after their turn ended.
I then returned to my Queen, who I started charging an attack, only to then take 200+ damage, likely from the game finally recognising I fell out of the map, but that meant my attack froze and the game locked up.
I then quit the game. This experience changed my life.
On its own, this is a really good project. But I don't see myself actually sitting down with friends and playing it, there's just not enough here and what is here feels very unpolished. I'd rather just play Worms.

Factories and Shapes. What's not to love?

After playing this game a few times, I've come to the conclusion that it just isn't my thing.
Don't take this as a warning to not play the game, by all means, buy the game and come to your own decision.
I just didn't enjoy my time with it. The AI was boring and cheap, there's AI generated assets everywhere, and the game play is just a whole bunch of "walk to objective, interact with object, find exit" over and over again. The only differences are the enemies you face and the looks and gimmicks of each stage. There's little to no plot tying the game together besides the very mundane and overused "oh noes, my family member has been kidnapped, gotta go save them!" trope that's quickly discarded 10 minutes in.
I would've refunded the game if I could, but I've sunk about 5 hours into the game, and really don't feel like playing the game any more.

I keep trying to enjoy this game but there's just too many things that annoy me when playing Helldivers 2.
FIrst is the fact that this game uses up way to much of my CPU, causing it to reach 90 degrees at times, and no matter what settings I change, limiting the FPS both inside the game and outside, setting the graphics to minimum, or changing the numerous settings like resolution, render scale, and other display tweaks, nothing stops it. This is the only game in my Library that does this and it makes it really hard to play any longer than a single mission at a time because my PC gets incredibly hot and it doesn't seem like the devs want to do anything about it. If anything they just add more content which makes the problem worse.
Secondly is the fact that, while 90% of the community is very friendly and welcoming, there's still those few people you join in missions who get incredibly toxic if you don't follow the commands they attempt to give incredibly quietly on voice chat, then if they end up dying at the end of the mission they act as if it's you're fault and blame everything on you, which just makes me unwilling to continue playing the game.
On top of that the game gets incredibly repetitive. You land, you do the objectives and shoot bugs/robots, and then you leave. The higher difficulties help but after playing it for 30+ hours I feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer. Sure I could continue playing to earn more medals and credits to spend on the warbonds and stratagems that keep coming out every few months, but why would I go through the effort when it's just more weapons to do the exact same missions with.
Any progress you make feels pointless when no matter how much effort you put in to try and liberate a planet, the devs just decide that the planet should get re-captured again and you have to do the same missions all over again to re-liberate it. So it just feels like constant repetitive grinding for an end goal that amounts to little to nothing besides in-game events meant to blow the community away like the black hole.
I still enjoy opening Helldivers 2 from time to time and knocking out a few missions with friends every so often. But besides that I just don't feel any incentive to play the game besides being bored and wanting something to do.

It's certainly another costume for Amy.

Abandonware. Quite sad really.

Yeah it's an alright Sprite Editor and Pixel Art Tool. I use it from time to time.

I really enjoyed this game, I first started playing it around the time Chapter 2 was being announced and have followed it and enjoyed my time playing through every Chapter as it released, I've S ranked almost every level, have nearly all of the achievements, and cannot wait for Chapter 5 to release. But after 30+ hours and critically looking at it, it feels very unpolished.
The main gameplay is Pac-Man, plain and simple. You are in a maze, you must traverse the maze while collecting many items throughout the maze, and you are being chased by enemies. Later in the game you unlock power-ups that you can use to your advantage, environmental traps start getting introduced, and every enemy behaves somewhat differently in each level.
The lore is also fine, you are some Guy who did a bad and wants a second chance at life so you do an evil and now have to play Pac-Man in Hell.
My main concerns come from some of the choices the developers made when it comes to certain aspects.
The later levels tend to drag hard, with multiple different mazes in multiple different areas introducing multiple different gimmicks, all in a single stage. This does keep the game fresh variety-wise, but makes some levels drag on for as long as half an hour to 45 minutes long. And almost completing a 45-minute run only to die at the last minute is not fun when getting back to that point takes so much effort. Especially if you die to stupid means like the game freezing, crashing, or randomly locking your inputs and an enemy kills you.
The Enhancements made to the original 3 chapters just feel unnecessary. The graphics improvements, while making the game look better, also made it so a majority of people were locked out of being able to play the game due to the raised PC requirements. I was able to run the game perfectly fine on my GTX 970, and then the developers expected me to upgrade to a recommended GTX 2070 to run the higher graphics requirements. The last thing gripe I had with the first few chapters was how they looked.
Some other issues that arose with the launch of the enhanced update was with the AI. I noticed that Stage 2’s AI kept getting stuck and standing still for long periods of time, and in Stage 4, one of the AI never actually hid like the rest, instead deciding to never stop chasing me, which ruins the slower, more tense atmosphere that level had.
The Developers decided in chapter 4 that they should add more lore, so you get to spend even more time stuck in cutscenes and not actually playing the game.
They also added the cliche "notes from a previous survivor" that you can find in levels that just explain the lore, because if I play the funny Pacman horror game for anything, it's to stop and read paragraph long text documents that just explain every character's origins and powers and stuff.
Characters' animations and AI break constantly and T-Posing in cutscenes are very frequent. The game likes to crash or softlock you constantly. I've gotten stuck in objects, you can completely skip the first section of the hospital level by Teleporting through the door right before the first section meaning you can grab all the shards without the enemies spawning, the springboard thingy in the Joy Joy land level can launch you off the stage and into a pool of lava which doesn't kill you and forces you to restart the stage since you are stuck. The game outright crashes when you press the "quit to desktop button"
I also don't like the way the Boss Fights were handled in the Enhancement. I don't claim to know the developer's intentions when it came to adding boss fights to the first 3 levels, but I personally feel that they were unnecessary. They feel like a tacked-on afterthought copy-pasted in from the multiplayer spin-off.
In concept, I don’t mind every level having boss fights, though in my opinion, the Boss fights were introduced at a good time at the start of chapter 3, when you felt confident in the game's mechanics and, as the story begins to unwrap, the bosses start getting introduced to signify the enhanced danger of delving deeper into the nightmare, as well as spicing up the later levels.
In the execution however, now when I revisit the first level, instead of being chased by frenzied monkeys back to the ring altar, I'm instead forcefully teleported to a preset part of the map while 2 chef monkeys stand still and camp the exit.
The other 2 levels' boss fights just lock you in an arena and tell you to survive an onslaught of attacks for a few minutes before you're allowed to leave. These levels feel like they weren't designed with boss fights in mind, and the boss fights that we ended up with are so drastically different in execution to every other boss fight in the game that they feel unnecessary. The boss fights in later levels still feel uninspired with you needing to run in a circle for 2 minutes and then click on the enemy to damage them, rinse and repeat. And adding these boring waiting rooms to the first few levels just makes them feel bland, like... I want to escape but now I have to stop and survive a barrage of attacks for a few minutes before i'm allowed to leave. Or in the first level’s case, a 45 second detour where you have to get 2 chef monkeys to start chasing you so they stop camping the exit. It just feels like the Devs wanted to add content from Monsters and Mortals but they did so in a way that completely ruins the flow of escaping from the levels.
In short, It's a good game but I feel it could be a lot better.

This game overheats my CPU but it's worth it for the funny bouncing circles.

Outdated, and a Terrible Tennis game to boot.