Recent reviews by Mutant1988

It's good.

This is the good part of Modern Warfare 2 (2022) and you don't have to pay money to enjoy it.

Your enjoyment is heavily dependent on having regular squad mates to play with however.

Don't bother buying the game. The campaign is probably the worst Call of Duty campaign so far. It's 70% being led around by the nose and 30% gameplay where you actually have any agency on how to approach things. It's absolutely miserable on Veteran difficulty, to the point where I question if it got playtested at all.

The campaign is also marred by bugs that bring down the experience, such as light bloom/lens flares being visible through geometry (Which is outright blinding in one specific mission) and broken event triggers in one specific mission making you unable to complete the mission until the AI responds, all the while you're being sniped by invisible snipers through geometry.

And there is A LOT of instances where AI shoots you dead with pin-point accuracy through geometry.

Multiplayer is whatever, it's Call of Duty.

The mode that's worthwhile is the DMZ mode and you don't have to buy the game to play that.

So don't buy it - Stick with DMZ.

Mostly a good game.

But they had to add predatory micro-transaction models.

Real money to premium currency that's mismatched with item prices, so you're always short of being able to get an item bundle with the nearest premium currency bundle and must buy another bundle or buy a much larger one in the first place, thus always leaving you with some premium currency left over.

Why not just do real prices without the stupid premium conversion and mismatched items?

In addition to this, the store inventory is on a rotating timer, presumably to invoke a fear of missing out to pressure customers into buying.

Please change those things. 1 to 1 pricing of premium bundles to items/item bundles (Or just skip the premium currency entirely) and remove the timed inventory - Everything for sale should be available at all times.

Edit:

The game launched without:

- Private servers.
- Crafting.
- Mission select of any kind. You have to sit and wait for missions to appear and you
might have to wait days for specific conditions to be in rotation.

But it launched with:

- The same completely random crashing issues that it had in the pre-order beta.
- 3-4 levels more than the pre-order beta (I forget exactly when each new level was added).
- A store system that require you to wait for every even hour to refresh.
- A paid cosmetic store with mismatched currencies and FOMO timer.

It still doesn't have:

- A mission select that allows you to pick specific mission, difficulty, side-mission and conditions.
- Shared resources between characters to mitigate grind.
- The full suite of crafting features.
- Any kind of narrative progression beyond character level cutscenes. There's no ongoing arc of any kind, no pivotal narrative mission or any kind of boss fight. There's no appreciable difference past reaching level 20.

Address those last ones and rework the cosmetic store and this rating will change to positive.

To celebrate the 3 year anniversary, David deleted Dusk in preparation for showcasing Dusk mods, forcing him to redownload the entire game on stream.

10/10.

1
The Ascent is a cyberpunk top down RPG(-lite) shooter with action packed gameplay and an incredible atmosphere to the world it takes place in.

The world is Veles, a cyberpunk dystopia were corporations rule over the masses within giant arcologies, which each citizen is indebted to serve as payment for the cost of transfering to the planet in the first place, due to the astronomical expenses related to space travel. These people, you among them, are called indents. Which is short for indentured worker, bound to serve out your work contract until your debt is repaid or more likely, until your death.

What sets The Ascent apart from many other cyberpunk works is that it's not only about humans. You share the world with intelligent alien life forms, most of which suffer under the same oppressive corporate rule as your player character. Humans are in fact not at the top of the power hierarchy. You however, do play as a human. A human you can customize to your liking as male or female, skin tone selection and a good selection of punky hair styles, tattoos and shirt prints. You can also go back and change all of these things at an in-game vendor.

Once you enter the game proper, you find yourself at the very bottom of the social hierachy as well as literally, working off your debt as a sewer maintenance worker in the cavernous sewer system at the bottom of the arcology, an area appropriately titled the "Deep Stink". But from here, things change quite a lot, as social order collapses within the arcology with the sudden bankruptcy of the controlling mega-corporation, the Ascent Group. Before long you're enveloped in a plot that involve rival mega-corps and experimental technology, taking you throughout the unveiling of the plot from the bottom of the arcology to its very top.

The world is definitely the star attraction of the game. It is a wonderfully realized cyberpunk dystopia, evoking all the great works of the genre, but most definitely Blade Runner (In the background of one environment you can see a building that appears near identical to the police headquarters from the movie). From the filthy polluted lower habitation blocks to the rainy mid-height up to the luxurious pinnacle, the environments are stunning. They're also populated with lots of innocent bystanders that will run in terror as you wreak havoc, although oddly not if they're a fraction outside of your camera perspective (A limitation of the AI perhaps). If you're squeamish about collateral damage and harming bystanders, this might not be a game for you, as they're very likely to get caught in the crossfire. A lot of environment objects also react appropriately to gunfire and explosions, with pillars crumbling around their supports and neon displays shattering. The music is also perfectly matched with the environment and action that takes place, with moody atmospheric tunes for the exploration and thumping beats for the combat. The soundscape overall
is good, with gunfire sounding appropriately violent, enemies reacting accordingly and any future technology sounding like you would expect it to.

Gameplay wise, it plays much like your average twin stick shooter. You point, you shoot, you dodge. Keyboard and mouse controls are absolutely perfect, with movement being camera absolute and bullets going where you put the cursor (Weapon accuracy permitting).
An interesting twist on this perspective is that the camera cinematically pans around to give you a nice view on the environments, which are absolutely gorgeous. But this camera also sometimes interfere with your visibility in ways that are less than ideal and it's not uncommon to have the action obscured by foreground elements or being shot at from off-screen. This is not a game breaking issue by any means, but can be annoying when it happens.

One thing that is more important in this than many other twin stick shooters (I imagine) is that you need to cleverly use cover. When you aim, you can shoot from the hip at low height or you can press the aim button to fire higher. This plays into the cover system, which has you duck behind cover and use the aim function to safely fire over it, being able to dish out damage relatively risk free as long as you don't get flanked. But this also requires you to fire at someone that is standing, because if your target is also covering, you won't hit them. Likewise, if your target is low to the ground, you won't hit them if you aim high. There's also a handful of enemies which require you to aim high to hit them.

Aiming high might also have some statistical benefit in terms of damage, but after a full play-through on
hard difficulty, I can't really say I've noticed much difference. Overall though, it is a very neat system that adds a lot more to consider in the combat, as you need to keep an eye on your own position and stance as well as that of your target, as well as make sure that you aren't rushed or flanked. It can get very hectic.

The technical RPG elements are fairly barebones, with a leveling system that awards you skill points that you invest into incremental stat improvements, across 8 skills in 4 categories, each corresponding to a specific area of the body (Cybernetics - Head, Motorics - Upper Body, Internal - Biometrics, Lower Body - Frame).
On top of this is the guns, equipment and cybernetic augmentations you acquire, which account for most of the variety and depth of the gameplay. Weapon wise, which is to say guns of various types, you have
a robust selection. But if you're looking for a Diablo randomized loot kind of game, this isn't it. There's around
25-30 guns, most which fit into various archetypes or have specific elemental types and that's your lot. Progression in terms of weapons is mainly reaching the point of the story were you unlock the area where the weapon can be found and then putting upgrade components into it at a dedicated weapon upgrade vendor to linearily improve the stats. While the selection of guns is varied and there is a few odd ones in there, there's not that much room for personal touches or uniquely randomized gear.

Augmentations and Tacticals are the other two core combat systems. Augmentations use a cybernetic power bar, which you need to invest skill points into extending and recharging effectively. These abilities are very powerful, but have a set cool down on top of their energy requirement, so timing your use well is essential. Effect wise, they range from powerful melee strikes, damage negating shields, area clearing missile barrages, devastating jump attacks and lots more besides. The efficacy of any augmentation is also dependent on specified attributes, so this is where you'll see the most effect from your spend skillpoints, with abilities getting increased duration, power or number of projectiles.

The choice of armor feeds into the system not only providing you with damage resistance against specific kinds of damage, but also by most of them also increasing base attributes, making your augmentations even more effective. So there is more to choosing armor than just aesthetics, but as a hardcore cyberpunk,
why wouldn't you go for maximum style over substance?

Tacticals are deployable equipment which are charged by killing enemies, and range from various kinds of grenades, an automated turret, healing power fields and more. You can't simply wait for these to recharge but have to actually do something to get them out, which makes for a nice balancing act between juggling guns and augmentations to charge them up and then using the Tactical to give you breathing space or that extra edge to take an enemy down.

Continued in comments below.

I would recommend Hrot, with a few reservations.

At it's core, the game is fantastic. The levels are atmospheric, oppressive and appropriately dreary. The enemy roster is distinct, inventive and has clearly defined roles. The guns, after some sound and balance overhauls, are fantastically fun to use. The real star of all of it though is the soundtrack and ambient drone that accompanies all of it. Top notch stuff.

The developer is also very responsive to feedback, which is much appreciated.

Here comes my reservations though:

The game is really, REALLY stingy with ammunition. Which is fine as a balancing element (Especially for the highest difficulty), but rarely did I feel in the first episode were you given a chance to just let loose and not have to count every bullet to get by. I feel like a slightly shift in ammo drops to give you slightly more ammo for weapons introduced in the same level and less correspondingly for other weapons would help a lot to alleviate this and give you more play with the newest unlocked toys.

In Episode 1, there's a handful of instances were the way to proceed is to shoot an object in the environment. Every time this occured it felt poorly telegraphed and unintuitive, which was not helped by the general stinginess of ammunition pickups. Making the interactible object pop out from the environment more would help, as would giving you more "cheap" ammunition (Pistol/SMG) close to these objects. Mind, this whole issue might just be me being both blind and stupid.

The enemy behaviour when traversing from different elevations and from water is also a bit jerky and weird, but it seems like that is being worked on.

While sewer levels are thematically appropriate for being naturally both dreary and brown, they're still not that fun to navigate. So hopefully we'll see less sewers in Episode 2.

Index controllers not properly supported. Grip is glitchy and turning is impossible.

This game is the reason why I got VR.

It's a sandbox for playing around with lovingly rendered and simulated firearms across a variety of modes.

"This PC re-release brings the title to a new generation of gamers..."

Yes, but why though?