Recent reviews by Jeff From Marketing

I should have followed my own advice, and only buy a game based on what's currently available, and not future promises.

Sure, the game as it is now is fine, but it's nothing special really. Most importantly: it doesn't do anything that the original AC can't do without some mods, which comes at a much cheaper price for the player. If you're like me and your favourite kinds of cars in these games are the more "normal" road cars, then the original AC has that covered just as well if not better, or (if you have a PS5) Gran Turismo 7 outpaces this. If you're more into GT racing, then go to ACC or LMU, which are very heavily focused on those cars and specialise in it. If you want rally, go to AC Rally or even EA WRC for similar reasons.

The big thing AC Evo had going for it so it could stand out among the crowd was the open world career mode in the future. The big selling point that they're now gutting and replacing with a system that sounds incredibly similar to the original AC's "career mode" which was already super shallow and uninteresting. This genuinely had the very real opportunity to become the "sim racing Forza Horizon" which is something that very much does not currently exist in the sim racing space, and so AC Evo could've absolutely carved out a very strong niche for itself there! But now? I struggle to see what will set it apart not only from its competitors like LMU or GT7, but what will set it apart from its own predecessors. Especially for the price, considering you can pick up the original AC for single digit pricing on sale.

This is easily the best feeling Borderlands game in terms of gameplay: movement feels fantastic, the guns feel good with all the variety you'd expect, the Vault Hunters themselves are so much fun to play and build in all manner of ways, all the new tools you're given are similarly quite fun to play with and weave into your gameplay, etc.

Storywise it's still no Borderlands 2, but I don't ever expect them to reach the heights of Handsome Jack again, and that's okay! But it's a much needed improvement over Borderlands 3, and is plenty serviceable and even enjoyable for what it is. Honestly my biggest criticism story wise is that it seems a bit hurt from the more open structure of the game, which affects the flow and means that things don't quite tie into each other as neatly as they could.

There is still the looming spectre of optimisation, however. It has improved since launch, but it's still rough, and still leans too heavily on upscaling and frame gen technologies for decent performance even on higher end systems. If you play on Linux in particular, you still have some really rough visual artifacts. The price is also not exactly great, $110 AUD is absurd, and the DLC pricing is similarly ridiculous. While there is a lot of content to enjoy in the game, and the game itself is quite fun, I can never justify spending that much at once on a game.

If you can get around those things, I do very much recommend the game! Just keep performance in mind, and wait for a sizeable sale if you can.

Okay yeah I can no longer in good conscious recommend this game anymore. Which is a shame, because I rather enjoy it!

The actual game itself on a mechanical level? Fantastic! It's absolutely a step above Dirt Rally 2.0 in terms of how it feels to drive, and the stages themselves are absolutely fantastic to drive on. In terms of the most important parts, this game absolutely nails them. The feel, the sounds, the cars themselves, etc. When you get it working, everything just feels right! If you have a wheel and pedal setup it's even better, but even just on gamepad it's an absolute blast.

The kicker is that "if you get it working" part. It's... temperamental at best. The anticheat the game uses precludes anyone playing on Linux (which includes anyone on Steam Deck) and even on Windows machines it's very finnicky and, frankly, insane. I couldn't get the game to run unless I put it on an M.2 NVMe drive because of the anticheat, it just seemed to freak out if I put it on my SATA SSD.
VR, even though it's listed as a beta, is even more of a pain to get working. It's incredibly resource demanding for some gods forsaken reason, and will almost certainly require you to mess with SteamVR settings just to get it even playable. I've had to do more messing around with VR just to get this game working than I've had to do for literally every other VR game I own combined.
And while this isn't my particular wheel-house, triple-screen support does not exist, despite it having been a part of advertising earlier in the game's life span.

But now with the recent news that EA is basically putting Codemasters on life-support and (in all likelihood) choosing to drop the WRC license entirely, there's no hope for this game to get any further improvements. VR will now always be an unoptimised mess that only barely works, triple-screen support will never come, we'll never get any further optimisation. And worst of all, EA has killed any hopes for any future rally games from Codemasters indefinitely.

It's funny if you think about it, both EA and the FIA gave WRC the same treatment: mismanaged from the top, making it difficult for newcomers to get invested, and just consistently making choices that hinder its ability to improve its situation. So in that way, this truly is the perfect WRC game for authenticity!

UPDATE: changing this back to positive, as Sony have announced that they're backing down on their mandatory PSN account linking. I do hope this means the game gets put back up on Steam's storefront in regions where PSN is not available, but I believe that's now on Valve.

So, with that debacle out the way: get this game. If you love Starship Troopers for its political satire, and you love just chaotic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around with friends, you will adore this game. Not to mention that it's just incredibly well put together, and it actually highly respects its player's time and money, which is nigh unheard of in the current gaming landscape

This is another case of "Steam needs a mixed review option" for me. I'm going to leave it as "Yes" just because I do like the idea of the game, and it is genuinely fun if you have friends. But I would recommend continuing to read, because there's a massive asterisk to attached to that recommendation.

On the one hand, if you can actually play with friends, it can be a good bit of fun! Even with the issues the game has. The small squads and semi-FFA nature are fun to play around with, I like the idea of all the build variety, and with how malleable and destructible the environment is, it can absolutely lead to some fun, wacky shenanigans.

On the other hand: do not ever play this game solo.

Not only will you get matched with people who are 100% in a full party and communicating super well while you're stuck with a PUG, a lot of the problems quickly become very very apparent. Notice how I said I liked the IDEA of all the build variety? Welp. There's really only a couple solid picks per class, and one of the entire classes is just useless.

Light class just brings nothing to the table and dies super quickly. Its weapons don't reliably do more damage than anything Medium or Heavy can bring, and they have a health pool that can be depleted by a stiff breeze. To make up for this, they get the choice of more mobility or invis. More mobility is useless if you don't have anything else to back it up with because all the other players have to do is just shoot you a couple times and you're dead. This is MAYBE more of a problem with controller, but on M+K it's a non issue. Invis is the only way to make the class even slightly viable, and even then you still run into the issue of a stiff breeze being enough to kill you. And a stiff breeze WILL kill you, because unless you can delete your target in a single shot (good luck) then you're going to die from them retaliating.
Medium meanwhile has access to weapons that kill just as quickly as anything Light has, more destructive capability, as well as the ability to instantly revive teammates and heal them, on top of a plethora of gadgets of all kinds. Including wall hacks.
Heavy gets an obscene amount of health, which is exacerbated by the shields they can put down to cover them and their team mates, and they also get access to weapons and gadgets that can still do obscene amounts of damage.

In a team based objective game, not having anything to contribute to the team AND not being able to reliably get any picks before dying is not useful. And even for the two remaining useful classes, each class has like one, maybe two weapons they can use that are actually useful and not just a meme.

So again, I love the idea of the game. Playing with friends is enough for me to ignore some of the glaring balance issues. But I just can't overlook the horrific balance as of the time of writing when I'm playing solo. Playing solo is just a miserable time in this game.

Genuinely the most fun I've had with a Warhammer DLC to date, and this is in a game with Ikit Claw and nukes.

The faction mechanics are a lot of fun and very well thought out, and honestly makes me wish the rest of the factions had this level of campaign depth. This is is the first time I've actually had to really think about what I'm building and what resources I need, and how best to spend those resources. Combined with reasonable timing to access some of their most fun units (held in check with the usage of unit caps) and this is some of the most fun I've had on the campaign map for a long time.

And in terms of battles they are a blast to play. From the simple pleasures of blunderbuss units just shred whatever they can get line of sight on, to the sheer joy of watching your excessive amounts of artillery tear apart the enemy before they have a chance to close in. And if they do close in, that's what bull centaurs are for!

Though it's hard to talk about the Chorfs without the elephant in the room: price per content.
Hot take: it's actually fine and not a problem here. There's complaints on how we only got 3 Legendary Lords instead of the usual 4, and that in the 4th's one place we got a Legendary Hero accessible to all lords. But here's the thing: how often do you play all four lords in Tomb Kings or Vampire Coast? When was the last time you actually felt like playing Khatep or had him be a recognisable force on the map? Same with Aranessa from the Vampirates? Instead of four lords with one of them being forgettable, we got three lords bundled into a fantastic faction to play, and a legendary hero that acts as a mini lord due to how drastically having him in an army can shift your unit composition. Nothing here is just simply forgettable.

This is, in all honesty, the new bar of which other DLC have to compete with now. It's well worth the price.

I've played this game for a lot longer than Steam suggest, since I've played it through Game Pass for a pretty long time, so take the time on record with a lot of salt.

TL;DR game itself is great, people suck, game would vastly benefit from better server options.

Overall, I do enjoy this game! As much as there's very very little mechanical progression, it's still a bit of fun to just go through the content that's available, sail with some friends, and just generally mess about and do pirate-y things with people you know. The general gameplay loop is pretty entertaining, and it has actually gotten better and they've added more to it since I last played which is always nice!
Honestly if it were just PvE, this would probably be one of my favourite games, just because of how easy it is to jump in with some friends, mess around for a few hours, and then head off. As well as being able to take extended breaks without lagging behind in any real capacity.

But there's one critical flaw with this game: people. People are a bunch of bastards. I'll be honest, most people you come across will generally ignore you; they don't want any real trouble and they're happy to let you by if you leave them alone. I love those interactions, those are my favourite.
But then there's the PvP crowd. These guys are the worst. Y'see, they don't ever actually want a fair and balanced fight. They don't want the possibility of losing. So what they ALWAYS do, without exception, is wait until you've done all the hard work of actually getting the loot (while you're not on your ship mind you) and just rock up on their fully armed galleon out of nowhere to just ambush you with no chance for you to fight back. There's no counterplay to this, no traps to set, nothing you can do at all to prevent it. All you can do is sit back and watch all the time you just spent go down the damn drain because someone decided to be an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and ruin your day. All with practically zero risk to the people who decide to attack you.
There are no private servers, no friendly-only servers, no PvP specific servers. If you're the kind of person who does this, shame on you. If you're the kind of person who just wants to enjoy the PvE elements of the game, be warned that there will be times you just simply don't want to play the game because of these people.

If there was any option to just simply not engage with the PvP elements of the game, I would genuinely love this game a whole lot more. I'd love to say hi to other crews without scaring the ♥♥♥♥ out of them or just immediately getting shot. And for the people who do genuinely enjoy a fair fight with other players, they should absolutely have the option to go into servers with like minded people. There's a reason every other game like this has that option, because it's much more fun for everyone. Hell, if something like Team Fortress 2 of all things can have friendly servers just for messing around and being friendly, then surely a game like this can.

Speaking of servers though, one other small issue: if you have more than four people who want to join, good luck! There's no consistent method of getting ships on the same server, even if you're on the same friends list or whatever. It's just a whole lot of messing about until you get lucky.

But if you're on a good day with no people ruining it, and you have 4 or fewer friends to play with, this game is genuinely quite relaxing and very enjoyable. It is very easy to just get lost in the vibe while sailing the high seas! Just go in knowing it can be ruined at any moment.

This is one of the times where I say "recommended, but with caveats" and I wish Steam had that option.
For starters, get the game on sale. It is absolutely not worth the $90 AUD full price, and the game seems to go on sale fairly regularly anyway.

But now for actual review time: this is still a very fun game! Especially after some changes to core systems that make the experience much more enjoyable. The best way I can put it is that it's halfway between Left 4 Dead 2 and Vermintide 2. You have the gun focused combat with the "get from saferoom to saferoom with a big set piece at the end" flow that Left 4 Dead 2 had, but you also have the ability to specialise into different roles with characters that have different abilities ala Vermintide. As someone who absolutely loves build crafting, there's some pretty neat things you can do here. There's also a pretty good selection of weapons, and the combat in general feels pretty good on the gun front, and the melee isn't too bad. No Vermintide, but I wouldn't expect it to be either. Again, the guns are absolutely the focus, but with the aforementioned build crafting you could absolutely do a melee focused build and have that be very viable.

In my opinion everything is just fine and dandy when it comes to the players, my main complaint however comes from the enemies. Namely in identifying special enemies, and the specials themselves. There's a lot of specials that look very similar to each other but do incredibly different things, and they don't do a good job of announcing themselves like specials do in both Left 4 Dead and Vermintide. The newer ones seem to be better with this than the original ones, but the original ones still very much exist and still cause confusion. In my opinion this is the main thing holding the game back right now. That and the full pricing.

But hey, if you can get a group of friends to get this on sale, it's genuinely a fun time in a group, and I've even had some enjoyment solo just messing around with things to test certain builds and what not.

Why are you reading reviews? There's a demo, go check out this wonderful game for yourself!

Alright fine I guess I should probably have something helpful here too.
The Outsiders and Two Feathers set out to make a game that is, in essence, a celebration of all things metal. By hells did they succeed! Headbanging while playing may not provide much advantage, but it just feels like the right thing to do.
So it goes without saying that the soundtrack is absolutely fantastic, and luckily the "shooter" part of "rhythm shooter" is every bit of greatness as the "rhythm" part is. Slaying demons to the beat of a metal soundtrack has never been so satisfying.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to listen to the soundtrack for the Nth time.

MY EMOTIONS!!
deep, thought provoking game with deep plots, story arcs, and intricate characters that are relatable? meh
a silly little game about a cat? literally the only game to make me cry
conclusion: more things need to be about cats.

For an actual review though: no matter the price, this is 100% worth it. It may be on the short end, and it may not be the most technically groundbreaking or whatever, but this is without a doubt the most charming and adorable game I have ever played. The year is only halfway done as of writing this, and I'm already putting this as my personal game of the year. There is a reason the internet has fallen in love with this game, and I am a part of that group. Do I really need to say any more beyond "you get to play as a dang cat!!"?