Recent reviews by TheApotheosis

I found this little gem one day while scrolling through my backlog, and while I can't recall where exactly I got it, I knew it looked fun and so I installed it. I urge you to play this game if you enjoy games like Armoured Core, MASS Builder and Daemon X Machina, it is very similar to those games and stands alongside them all as a brilliant addition to the Mecha genre.

This game is a brilliant gem and should be celebrated.
\Captain Ethan of Echo Squad begins his assignment one day in Europe, training in his mech when suddenly accosted by Russian helicopters and tanks. You easily slay those, expecting to be facing more come the next mission.
However, instead of Russian armour, you find yourself facing down hordes of Eldritch horrors that pour forth from canyons and corridors, towering constructs of flesh and muscle that want nothing more than to tear you to pieces. These rage-filled creatures are the "Reds" and they are your worst nightmare come to life. What framed itself initially as a story about a normal mech pilot during a new Cold War suddenly becomes the tale of daring heroism displayed in the face of an extinction level event for humanity.

The story is simple but effortlessly charming and really quite gripping, and the cast of characters you meet along the way are fun and surprisingly deep. Everything is fully voiced and really well voiced for that matter, and some of the back and forth between people on the field can be genuinely heartfelt and interesting at times! Reading Ethan's diary before every mission paints a rich picture of a man who finds himself as the sharpened spearhead of humanity's fight against the Reds, the ace pilot who is humble even as his fellow soldiers are awestruck by his presence. You learn of his plight and his struggles and you genuinely begin to connect with Ethan on quite a few levels.

The gameplay is fast and hectic, with deep hordes of various horrific monsters standing between you and victory. Projectiles fly everywhere as you dance amongst the combatants, and the objectives you are presented with are many and varied, ranging from defending a location against waves, escorting conveys and even delving underground to extract data and resources from abandoned facilities. You feel rapid and nimble in a good way, though you can also construct your mech to be slower and sturdier if you so wish.

The mech construction is deep and intricate, with many different factors you have to take into account. How much ammo stowage can you carry? How quickly can you regenerate your energy reserves? How much damage can you realistically take before it all comes to an end? What kinds of weapons do you feel most comfortable with, from lasers to rifles to rockets and even more! The deeper you progress, the more powerful and exciting your arsenal becomes, and after some upgrades, you can become an obscene powerhouse! It's so satisfying to vapourize entire waves with a bombing run, or instantly terminate a heavy enemy with a single railgun blast!

However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, sadly. There are a few low points, as to be expected.
Your mech does not handle inclines and slopes very well at all, and can routinely struggle to maintain speed over even the tiniest of curbs or bumps, to the point where walking up a slope is faster than turbo-boosting up. Some rock geometry is also a little strange at times. The mech's left leg is also very wonky as well, which makes it's walking animation look quite strange. The hanger section can also get very cluttered and complicated, though every stat your mech possesses does have a very informative tooltip if hovered over with the mouse.
Your allied units, the mechs specifically, do not activate their boosters ever, meaning they are left to slowly walk from one point to another. They also refuse to move from their destinations as well, meaning they operate more like gun towers than mobile combat platforms. Your tanks and other vehicles are very expensive to upgrade fully, and sometimes don't path very well while simultaneously being slow on their wheels.

Please play this game, if you are considering it. It is well worth the time, and the Dev definitely deserves your support.

Let me preface this review by stating that I've never, ever played a Battlefield game before, and have also never played a "Triple A" first person shooter game at or around it's launch period, during it's prime time. The last similar game I played was BO3 and that was years after that game came out. So, of course, that might mean I'm missing something because of my inexperience or unfamiliarity with these kinds of things.

Battlefield 2042... More like Battlefield 2076...
At first, it seemed fine, aside from the fact that my game bugged out on the very first launch and locked up on the loading screen with the boat. Relaunching, I found myself face to face with decent looking UI. I called up a mate and together, we loaded into a game.
It might just be my computer but it took me a long, long time to load in, and when I did load in, I was not carrying a visible gun. It was there, I could shoot, but it took me dying to make my gun appear! From there, I proceeded to get no kills because everyone who I came across beamed me with the Bizon weapon, which has only just recently been nerfed.
I attempted to fight back, of course, but being only level one, I only had access to a piddling arsenal of weaponry, all of which are downright awful when unmodified or even lightly modified. Even when I managed to get into a tank, the only kill I could get was pinging one guy three times with the support gun, a .50 calibre machine gun. The first of these shots was a surprise headshot, and yet, he simply ate three .50 Cal rounds before going down.
The time to kill is just awful unless you get a one-tap or somehow beam someone in the head, and even then, with the disgusting amount of dispersion and recoil all of the weapons have, it is a tall order to take out anything at further than around fifty to one hundred metres. Either you pepper them with burst shots and take ages to kill, or you spray and pray and essentially waste your magazine. Simply awful.
Running around, I was very thankful for the unlimited sprint stamina, which was a welcome change from a lot of other games. Running a long distance is a chore but at least you feel fast, especially when you get the animation where you raise your gun in one hand.
The vehicles are ridiculous, and the only one that isn't is the jeep with the open driver seat, because you can actually shoot the driver. They all tank multiple rounds from anti-armour weapons, and the default anti-armour device, a Recoilless Rifle, does not even two-tap most vehicles. You need the C5 Satchels for that and they are only unlocked when you reach levels into the teens. The helicopters are disgusting and unwieldy to drive, and since every air vehicle carries unlimited flairs, they are essentially unkillable from lock-on ground weapons.

I found myself most at home with the PvE mode, which a lot of people will find umbrage with, as if i'm not a true FPS player. As if I'm not supposed to enjoy the product I bought with my own money in whatever way I most enjoy it, especially when it is essentially single player and not hurting anyone. To anyone who says PvE is not a real gamemode and should be looked down upon, you should be ashamed and embarrassed of yourself.
To it's credit, the game does allow you to level and grind mastery and attachments by fighting the bots, which is absolutely the right thing to allow. Why include the mode otherwise? However, it gives far smaller returns when compared to a similar PvP match, because ribbons are disabled for PvE. Using the PvE mode is almost mandatory for grinding out the attachments for the weapons you do have as well as the experience required to use new weapons. HOWEVER, for whatever reason, the PvE mode has an experience cap to it, which I think is rubbish and really punishing for people who can't keep up or can't sweat as hard as the rest of the playerbase. Definitely killed my buzz when I realized the entire match I just played would not count for anything because I'd reached some arbitrary cap.

As much fun as I find the whole "massive battles" shtick, this game, to me, has done a better job of advertising the other, far more polished games than it has done advertising itself. It is buggy, messy, not at all fun to grind or fight against the sweatlords, and when you do find something else you enjoy, it is capped for no good reason. Frankly, I would rather play an older game of the series so I can really enjoy what Battlefield has to offer, because this just doesn't cut the mustard.
We need to stop letting greedy corporations get away with releasing half baked ♥♥♥♥ nowadays. What happened to the times when you bought a game and you got a game, not a semi-completed shell of something resembling a game?

Generation Zero is a PvE FPS brought to you by the brilliant minds at Avalanche Studios.
It places you in the middle of Sweden during an apocalyptic robot takeover, where man's hold over the region has been usurped by machines, and mechanical monstrosities roam the landscape amidst the burning and abandoned ruins of human cities.

I love this game so much. It's a bit rough around the edges and a little bit buggy at times, but I don't think I've fallen in love with a game faster than I did with Generation Zero. I like to think of it a bit like DayZ but with robots instead of zombies. You could be wandering along happily minding your own business one moment, and the next minute, you're running around enormous empty fields lobbing flares left right and centre as a horde of Runners and Hunters chase you down relentlessly.

The robot designs are so gorgeous to look at, and while they may be a little limited at times, the animations are equally delightful to look at. Each machine has critical weakpoints that you need to shoot to destroy them quickly, and it's not difficult to find them if you use your head. Most of the time they're either coloured to stand out, like the fuel cells or joints, or they have some kind of vent or sticker to mark the spot you need to wail on. It's a really clever and subtle way of directing an observant player to aim closely and fire for effect instead of simply dumping mag after mag into armour for no real use. Hitting weakpoints or even weapons can knock out portions of a machine's arsenal, which is very fun if you manage to completely disarm a baddie. It's like you have a little friend now!

The sound design is so nice as well. Water sounds just right, the guns and explosives feel heavy and impactful, hitting armour or a critical point creates a vastly different sound and a spray of sparks as well, and the different calls of the machines speaking to one another can be rather haunting if you're trying to hide from a large pack. My favourite sound is the stomping of the Tank, which is audible from a very long distance away and allows you to know where this big baddie is sitting so you can either avoid, or engage.

Gunplay is very satisfying. The weapons look amazing and are generally appropriate for the setting and location, and they come with levels to show rarity and power. You can't just open up any random lootable box and find a gun either, so getting a hold of a good weapon feels really satisfying and can help you turn the tide. Various skills in the RPG-lite skill tree can help make gunplay even more enjoyable, but they aren't needed since it's already very fun.

It does have it's drawbacks though. Once you really get off your feet and stockpile a good few guns and skills, the only thing that can really contest you is a higher level Tank or Harvester, or maybe the Reaper. It's possible to get very powerful in this game, despite the story technically painting you as a teenage party-goer who washed up on the shores of Wweden one day after their boat was sunk. Some of the missions are crazy easy, and some of the locations can be real mazes that even veterans of this game can get lost in.

Either way, I love this game. It really has a lot of things Ive been looking for in a videogame, and I'm absolutely always looking forward to every patchnote or update Avalanche releases. I hope this game lives on forever, as it's truly a testament to what an indi game can look like when love and dedication is mixed into the development cycle~

It's very good in some ways, very bad in others.

The gunplay is super solid. More guns with more gimmicks, more often than ever before. You're gonna be spoiled for choice by the time you reach the ends of the main quest, and even then, you'll have barely scratched the surface. Ice is back and Slag is nowhere to be seen, and there's a new kind of status, Radiation, which makes enemies attack anyone in sight, friend or foe. Weapons feel strong and responsive without having to put all your skill points into gun skills, and with some thought, any enemy can fall before even the weakest of weapons. Enemy AI is till a ♥♥♥♥♥, though, and the loot in some of the harder areas is insultingly poor. Who knew a lauded Vault could be so barren?

The characters are... not as hot. There are no standouts. Everyone is an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ or just absolutely insufferable, and I could hardly stand them. With the death of Handsome Jack came the death of the only likeable character in the franchise aside from Krieg, and there was no way the twin villians in this game could even hope to hold a candle to Jack. The Vault Hunters in 3 are bland and basic, the ones from 2 either have their entire characters assassinated or are simply nowhere to be found, and the ones from Pre-Sequel are treated with the same respect as a wet turd.
The Sanctuary lot are still terrible, and it gets worse as time passes. Lillith is a plot contrivance, weak when needed to be and strong when needed to be. Tannis makes me sick to my stomach, constantly questioning how such a poorly written character could hold such importance. Ava... is an insult. A straight up kick in the balls. Whoever wrote her should be fired.

This game isn't as bad as the tech test that is Borderlands 1, and is utterly outclassed by the brilliant Borderlands 2. The gunplay being so satisfying almost makes me want to place it above the Pre-Sequel, but I don't think I can justify it. Everything else attached to the gunplay drags this game down to it's death.

In an age of Microtransactions, Triple-A greed and Live Services, Motion Twin has returned us to an age where, when you buy a game, you've bought the game, and that is that.

My brother got me into Dead Cells originally, and in the beginning, it was difficult. Back with the ancient item-specific upgrade system, before the second wave of runes, before the Assasssin and the Hand of the King, way back when the Watcher's fight marked the end of your journey through the island. It really was a ride.

A lot of things have changed since I began playing. Watching all my hard upgrade work go up in smoke was difficult, but i found the subsequent system way more satisfying. Learning they were nerfing shields upset me, but even now, I'm useless without a good shield on hand. Trying to figure out what that pesky door at the end of the Fog Fjord was for, and then learning it was going to be a new zone, with a brand new final boss to fight as well!

This game is truly fantastic. It's so satisfying to struggle against the monsters in the earlier biomes, only to find that one weapon, that one skill, that completely turns the tide and throws that strategy you were working on right out the window. It's so exciting to wander into a room full of violent enemies, only to emerge victorious from the fight, still healthy enough to take on even more of them. Learning the boss's movement patterns so you can determine exactly when to roll, to parry and to strike.

The controls are tight, the movement is quick and precise, and the difficulty ramps up nicely as you progress on and on. I will sing the praises of this game for a very long time, and I recommend it to everyone.

11/10 would honk Freddy's nose ag...
Oh damn, wrong game
11/10 would Pootis spencer again