Recent reviews by paperman2

Currently, the gameplay and mechanics feel decent but the UI is severely lacking. Character appearance customization takes priority over loadout setup but players must jump through several menu tabs to buy, equip, and accessorize their characters and setting up a loadout takes even longer. Currently, the loadout system in match is incomprehensible. Abilities can't be changed in match. Weapons and gadgets are severely limited in during a match despite there being 10+ options, severely limiting your ability to adapt using your utility.

The biggest obstacle to my fun is the frequent crashing despite changing settings to low and being able to comfortably run the game in that state. I will crash several times a night, often in the latter half of a match, cutting the fun out and my team is left hanging as they wait for a random to join. I'm unable to rejoin my own party. Why is rejoining a match, even if quickplay, not allowed in 2024?

Unplayable connections and hit detection. Game randomly crashes without explanation.

This collection of games is fine to play through the campaign but match making is spotty and prone to having issues like having difficulties joining on friends in lobbies or taking a lobby with you.
This game has recently opened up with the community maps that can be downloaded and played but quick play matches with randoms is still tied to specific playlists of game modes. This can prevent you from playing the 2 or 3 game modes you desire and instead be stuck with a bunch of slayer matches you have minimal interest in. It's time to move beyond the early 2000s, where you can pick the game mode you want to play. Online multiplayer continues to disappoint after several years with seemingly little to no effort made to provide balance for MnK users. The design of gunfights is heavily lopsided against MnK with the bullet magnetism and tracking being almost non-existent while controllers have very strong magnetism and stickiness.

This game combines the good from the standalone games along with some of their bad and adds in 343's touch to the mix, polluting the experience with a terrible UI, little to no effort to support MnK on a PC game, and dead curated playlists that force me to play gamemodes I am not looking for. I will never play this game solo, I only play when my friends want to play it and even then.

Great story! Would play through again!

UI is extremely clunky and can be counterintuitive at times. Combat takes too long and cannot skip cinematic combat despite having a setting in options to do so. I don't want to be forced to watch 10 seconds of attack animation without the ability to interact with anything else when there are 15 attacks going on each turn.

The story is told through dialogue paired with still frames with detailed, beautiful background art. However the flow is broken by the inconsistency in which lines have voice acting and which are silent despite it being core story dialogue or exposition. The game forces you to interact with characters aboard your ship and click through an ill constructed conversation menu to learn game mechanics. This is paired with the option to ask those characters about their stale backstories.

The game feels unpolished as it has random bouts of sluggish loading times, inconsistent UI, and semi-frequent crash when loading some missions.

i5 6600k, 970gtx Win10