Recent reviews by Sparra

A fantastic game that made the transition from a top-down game to an over-the shoulder game. Shooting at the bugs and bots in this game is very fun, as your guns feel punchy and the enemies react to getting hit up to and including getting dismembered by things like explosions. Playing against the bugs and the bots really does feel like its two separate games in one, as just the ability for the bots to shoot guns and rockets back at the players changes up how you approach a mission and the objectives you need to do.

Plus, all the planets and weather effects frankly look fantastic! I've been to foggy fields scarred by craters like it's space verdun, rainy highlands akin to Scotland, forests of lavender trees which hide swarms of bugs, and places so orange it looks like the movie Dune.

I also love that the game is perfectly happy to give players hilariously powerful artillery and airstrikes, but said support is also indiscriminate and will happily kill players as well as scores of bugs and bots.

All of this is wrapped up in a nice lower-priced package and along with very fair and reasonable DLC practices, like microtransactions that are actually MICRO (a full outfit will run you like 2-3 dollars, warbonds that contain weapons, outfits, and emotes are 10 dollars each and never expire) it makes for a very fun and compelling co-op game that's a lot of fun to play with friends as well as with strangers.

This is the game I play whenever I have an urge to play an MMO. Why? In a game you pick a character, level up over time, set up a build, gear up, then go forth and attack the enemy team who is doing the same thing! For me at least it checks all the checkmarks for playing an MMO, without any cost or subscription!

Also, I find that DOTA turbo while it isn't perfect, I love the fact that matches can be over within 25 minutes on average vs over an our in normal dota. Sure, DOTA turbo has its flaws, but the consolidation of the whole game loop both still works well and is very much what I prefer.

As someone who doesn't really play many horror games and doesn't like stealth games, I really enjoyed Amnesia the Bunker! Note that I played on Normal difficulty on my first playthrough (which I've now finished). The open nature of the game combined with multiple solutions to problems I found really enjoyable.

The monster hunting you is clearly the focus of the game, and I could tell a lot of effort went into making it both frightening (and later on for me simply intimidating), while also making it fair. The game very much encourages you to keep moving even when near the monster (I only ever hid under a table/bed a couple times), and the game gives plenty of clues on where the monster is and what it is up to so it is very much possible to be relatively close to the monster and still be safe(ish).

The layout of the bunker itself is also well done, as there were only a few times I actually managed to corner myself and that was all through my poor planning. I am absolutely terrible at reading maps and tend to get lost, but as I got further into the game I got better at memorizing the layout of the bunker. It's a pretty large area, but at the same time it's not also -too- large, as the bunker itself is split off into multiple wings/sublevels.

The story is told through a series of journal entries, which also give you the clues you need to progress (important journals are marked to stand out). I found the story to be pretty straightforward to follow, and I only got tripped up by the clues on where to go next once, and that was simply because I was misreading the relevant entry.

Since you have a gun as well as multiple ways to deal with the monster, I found Amnesia: The Bunker to play less like a straight stealth game and more like a cat-and-mouse game. Getting seen by the monster isn't always death (though if it gets to you it is), and I found it enjoyable to have to plan around the monster when I needed to do something loud that would draw its attention.

I enjoyed my time playing Amnesia: The Bunker, and even though a playthrough of the game is relatively short (I clocked in at about 6.5 hours real time), I found that the game didn't overstay its welcome.

Don't let the simple graphics turn you off, if you like the Battlefield series of games, Battlebit is a fantastic game like that series, with many neat little features that it borrows from more hardcore FPS games while introducing some of its own ideas. The level of destruction players can do in this game is fantastic, and while you won't be creating craters in the ground, pretty much every building can be leveled if it takes enough damage. This includes larger buildings, which often collapse in dramatic fashion and can seriously change how the area around it plays. There's a nice selection of guns and gadgets to pick from as well, from RPGs with scopes with accurate ranging markers, to grapple hooks that let you scale buildings. The game can be a little slow to unlock new guns, but every gun I've tried so far I've enjoyed. The game also scales up to 126 vs 126 teams as well.

For 15 dollars this game is an absolute steal for what it offers, and it's easy to group up with friends with the built-in party system (which unlike in Battlefield games, is easy to use and works very well).

If you've ever played TFware on Team Fortress 2, this is all you ever wanted from that mod.

If you haven't, this game is basically first/third person WarioWare with a wide variety of minigames, and fun "Boss" rounds at the end that are more involved. The best parts for me were the trivia questions (and especially the trivia Boss Round). The game is free, and it's a small fee for workshop access, so all in all this game is a fantastic deal and very, very fun with friends!

As much as this game seems like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, Treason is actually a really fun traitor social game! The clue system in the game forces traitors to move as fast as they can while also having innocents scatter out to get said clues. The game rules are simple enough to understand, and consistent across all the maps in the game with large signs on things like the bomb site and where the C.P.U. is so even playing on a new map it's very easy to pick up on things. Rounds tend to be very short (on average, I've seen rounds last about 3 minutes), so even an early death isn't that big a deal. Treason is very straightforward, and I honestly really like the clue system, so I recommend it for those interested in a traitor game!

I loved Redout 1, and have played it quite a lot! In fact I have all the achievements for Redout 1.

However, Redout 2 to me is one step forward and two steps back. While there are things Redout 2 improves upon compared to the first game, I do think the first game is the better racing game.

First, the difficulty is just all over the place. Others have mentioned the issues regarding the tutorial, so I won't repeat them here. For me the problem lies in that as of writing this I have the game set to "Pilot" difficulty (setting 3 of 6) and I continuously crush the AI, like it's not even close. However, when I set the difficulty one notch higher to "Redout" I will pull pretty far ahead during the first half of a race, but then the AI gets hilariously rubber-bandy and whips past me, putting me all the way to last place with no hope to compete. I have also noticed that the AI seem to have difficulty racing on the tracks, as I've seen them routinely falling off the course after a jump and respawning. And of course with how hard the rubber banding the AI is, on Redout difficulty they crush me no problem anyway. Also the gimmick events like the Speed event are hilariously difficult and don't scale on chosen difficulty.

On top of that, if you blow up or crash outside of the course, it's so punishing you HAVE to restart the race because you are NOT going to be able to make your way back up to the front.

The game also has a new customization system, where instead of distinct cars and tiers, there's now a point system. This seems great, as the options to bias a car in specific directions sounds great, but the campaign has EVERYTHING locked. The campaign very slowly drip feeds you parts, which you then have to immediately equip because the AI cars objectively outclass you (they have a higher point score than your car), so there is in practice no options at all. On top of that, every single color and pattern type is locked behind campaign events as well, so you're stuck with a purple car for a while, with no options for even basic colors.

The racing itself also features a new boosting system, where you have 2 different boosts (a weaker one you can use whenever, and a more powerful one that recharges), and if you overheat your car, it burns away your health. What ends up happening is that you're going to be boosting nearly ALL THE TIME, while in Redout 1 you had a far stronger boost, but had to time it right to get the most out of it.

I hope you like the health regen sound. You're going to be hearing it. A lot.

The boosting system adds an extra layer of complication that I'm not sure is even worth it to be honest. That and now you have to deal with rotating your ship with the D-pad, so now you're using 2 joysticks, holding down the gas on trigger, and juggling the shoulder buttons for your two boosts. It's a lot of fingerwork for a racing game, and I don't really think it adds anything.

The music in Redout 2 is also just overall weaker compared to the first game as well. Redout 1 has really good songs like "Sand Wars," "You Will Burn," and "Arabia Terra" that I listen to on Spotify all the time. Nothing I've heard so far in Redout 2 comes close to those fantastic tracks, and the music is overall a bit more sedate in Redout 2.

It's such a shame too because I was looking very much forward to Redout 2, and I want to like it, but between rubber banding AI, a customization system that refuses to give you options to really play with it, and complication seemingly for the sake of complication, I think Redout 1 is the better game.

With the latest update, Fall Guys now requires an Epic Store account in order to play. When I was reading the update notes for the game, I thought it was going to be optional (but you'd need to if you wanted to do cross-play) and I'd be able to play the game on Steam just as I always had.

Turns out it's not the case, and my refusal to make an Epic account means the game will no longer work.

For the TL:DR: When everything works, there is fun to be had in the main mode of Battlefield 2042. Hazard Zone (or Haard One) is alright, though it's not really for me. Battlefield Portal however is fantastic, and honestly is the most redeeming part about this game.

The problems that 2042 suffers from aren't just from the current swathe of bugs and latency issues that are currently plaguing the game. I feel that many of the problems can be directed to questionable decisions that make up the framework of the game. The most obvious of these issues is the removal of classes in favor of specialists, which in-game basically translates to one of your equipment slots set by the character you pick (a grapple gun, a deployable shield, a syringe gun, etc). The problem with this is that this means you only have one equipment slot to freely put something in, which indirectly kills what little teamwork players in battlefield had over the past games. Why would you bring an ammo/health pack when you can bring a rocket launcher or armor and mix it with whatever primary weapon you want? The restrictions on choice helped with nudging players toward working together, and in battlefield 4 in particular there were all-class primary weapons you could bring in case you didn't like a class's default weapon type. On top of that, the specialists in general aren't balanced particularly well, with several specialists clearly being better than others. Having a grapple gun, extra grenades and a wingsuit, or deployable shields you can place on the ground are overall just so much more handy to have in any given situation than an ability to hack a vehicle to disable its gun for a few moments. To make matters even worse, these specialists have zero personality and WILL NOT SHUT UP, constantly feeling the need to speak up, as if they're trying to justify their existence. I sure hope you're ready to hear “Leave me, I'll be ok!” every time you hold space to jump back to the spawn menu. Plus they don't even fit the setting, as the world is falling apart and the world is slipping back to war, the specialists love to quip “Well that was fun!” and “I'm not overconfident, I'm just better than you!” and then they make a Dreamworks(tm) face. I wish I was kidding.

On top of this, 2042 has decided to add “armor” as an item you can decide to take. While there's a specialist who can hand out armor, the item itself just gives you armor for yourself, which lets you take a number of additional hits before you die. This item is greed oriented, as it'll let you win any gunfight with an unarmored player 70% of the time. Couple that with the current latency issues the game suffers from, I've personally had to unload an entire magazine of an assault rifle into someone with armor before they went down. This item does nothing to help teammates at all, as even the rocket launcher helps the team deal with hostile vehicles, which is something at the very least. Almost every player you'll see in-game are using either armor or the rocket launcher, I very rarely see the ammo/health boxes, and have never seen the respawn beacon or the sensor beacon (I had to check that was even in the game).

The level design is also overall just average to bad. The problem 2042 has with maps is that a lot of the maps have little clusters of capture points between wide open fields, sometimes with gently rolling hills/dunes. There's no flow to the map at all, where something like infantry with vehicle support meets the other team and fights across the map, instead what happens is sporadic fighting across random parts of the wasteland with most players clustering around the capture points. A good number of capture points are also pretty open, making infantry fights in them not very fun (the deployable shield helps with this at least), but more importantly lets vehicles dominate the point without infantry having enough cover to deal with the vehicles. Some capture points are also on the roof of a building (even in breakthrough mode), making them next to impossible to assault without air support as the only way up is a couple of easily-camped elevators. I think upping the player count to 128 would have worked out perfectly fine if the maps were designed better, but it seems like 2042 just made most of the maps big just because they could (also distant infantry aren't even animated, they're just a static running man sprite sliding across the ground). If you've ever played in the early days of Planetside 2 back in the day, 2042 is suffering from many of the same mediocre map design issues that game had.

The primary game mode of 2042 (conquest and breakthrough) also don't have dedicated servers, nor a dedicated server browser. Any time you want to play, you MUST queue up in matchmaking, and once a round is finished everyone is disbanded back to the main menu. This is quite the strange decision for 2042, especially when DICE in the past went and put in a dedicated server browser for Battlefield 4 quite some time after launch, and not only that, linked up Battlefield 4, 1, and 5 to use the same system of server browsers, even letting you jump from game to game if you'd so choose. As you can imagine, this not only makes it impossible for communities to host dedicated servers, but more importantly to any player is that this means you're leaving it up to chance what map you get when you go into matchmaking. I have played the same map over a dozen times now, and have only seen a number of maps just once or even not at all!

I'm not going to comment much on Hazard Zone. It's... ok. It's not for me, and not why I picked up the game to begin with.

The only real redeeming factor that 2042 has is the portal mode it has (and it's not even made by DICE Sweden, go figure). The ability to build gameplay modes and rules has me very much looking forward to what people build in that system, and even now there are a people working on making proper infection or gungame modes. Even with the vanilla settings of being able to play in past battlefield games I've had a bunch of fun playing across maps of games I've played a long time ago, or never at all (I never owned Battlefield 3). Even the simple VIP mode the game came with to demonstrate portal is surprisingly fun. Portal mode also features dedicated servers, of a sort, which shut down if everyone leaves the server. But hey, there's a server browser, so that's nice! I just wish the “vanilla” settings of battlefield 1942/3/BFBC2 had more people playing them, as the server population tanks after every round and only slowly fills back up.

DICE then went and limited the amount of exp you can get in portal mode, because a bunch of people made xp grind servers with 1 hp bots, going back on their statement that you'll be able to play and level up in 2042 however they want. They did this 2 days into the pre-release. I guess that shows how good their word is.

Right now Battlefield 2042 is in pretty shaky condition, and I'm not sure if the pillars that make up 2042 are good enough to support the game long-term. Even more so, I'm worried that DICE will pull support of the game relatively quickly, just like they did with Battlefield 5 (and considering 2042 has an even worse reception than 5, it may come even faster). It's my opinion that the game started as an Apex-style battle royale game, but pivoted into a traditional battlefield game at the last moment when DICE realized that it wasn't going to do well at all. It would explain a lot of the really strange decisions, from the lack of server browser for the primary game mode with only matchmaking, the idea to only have specialists instead of armies fighting each other, and even how maps are laid out. I know I'm not the only one to have that theory as well.

In conclusion: Don't buy this game at full price. Wait for a sale, and you know DICE will put it on sale within 6 months or so. Even with a sale I'd be cautious about picking up the game.

My account was compromised at some point after taking a break for a few years, and after re-securing my account, I found that the only thing that happened was my player name being changed. As you cannot manually change your player name, I contacted Gaijin support to revert my player name back to the one I've been using for nearly a decade at this point, and it never changed from it from account creation up until this point. Gaijin refuses to revert this name change I never authorized.

Don't support these terrible devs, they clearly don't care about their players at all.