Recent reviews by Breeze Laundry Divergent

Edited my review back to recommend since Sony decided to not force us to link to PSN accounts anymore. I'm glad I can continue to play this game.

The game is fun, the sound is great, hits feel heavy and meaty when you swing and connect. You really have to take your time and understand what is going on at times instead of just mashing attack and going in.
However, I think the cap on the battle pass progress per week needs to be revised or removed completely. I understand you want people to come back every week but this is not the way to do it. Put weekly challenges for bonus exp or something like that so you're rewarded for coming back weekly but not REQUIRED to. I get you want to sell battlepasses to make money but you shouldnt also gate free pass progression behind it. How it feels right now is I hit my weekly cap and then I'm no longer incentivised to play that week, you don't gain progress on the pass at all, literally 0. If you want to leave a cap in maybe put it like a soft cap, so after you hit it, you still gain but at a slower rate. It just feels bad.

No multiplayer??????? Y I K E S.
Also feels like a mobile game with all the log in claim stuff, top up bonuses, event pass, etc etc. UI is huge and feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥ for a PC game, even when you scale it to the smallest setting. I played a bit and waited for a friend of mine to catch up only to find out we can't play together... so we both uninstalled. Feels painfully unfinished while already shoving cash sup stuff down our throat. Voice acting / writing is nothing special, some of the sound is missing in some places (I hope, because the silence is awkward). The game is pretty though, the artwork is nice too. Maybe I will revisit it later on in development when the game actually feels done.

Not worth full price:

If you liked the movement and pace of older COD games you probably will not like this one. Slide cancelling is gone, the overall movement speed of your character, slide speed and sprint/slide to fire time is slow. Sliding is purely defensive now to get into cover it seems, no more rushing. The further discourage rushing, you can hear footsteps from REALLY far, so players can easily get the jump on a rusher. In the matches I played, I did well when I played slower, topping scores and getting all my kill streaks etc. But when I rushed I hardly got more than 2 kills in a row if so much, since they basically knew I was coming well in advance and had all the time to hold a corner and get the jump on me.

The perk system is revamped, you get all at the start to choose from in your loadout, HOWEVER, you don't start the match with the stronger ones, so good luck if you want to avoid that UAV, Ghost perk requires you to play the match for a while before it's active. Considering how easily UAV is to get you just feel like you're always visible.

The strange thing is the Devs made it so that if you shoot and un-suppressed weapon you don't show up on the radar as a red dot, which I think is cool and their reasoning was they don't want to punish players for NOT using a suppressor, but if you can't counter UAVs with ghost (until later in the match) anyways you're gonna be visible regardless so I don't see the point.

So far from what I see the gunsmith system is kinda cool with how things are unlocked for the weapon class across the board, but the process of unlocking it seems very slow and grindy, I wasnt sure how I didn't get certain unlocks until I was told I had to unlock and level ANOTHER GUN to get the attachment for my current gun, which makes no sense to me. Why can't I just play what I like and unlock things for it?

I can't fully make a comment on the maps and stuff because I'm sure there's going to be more on launch. The ones I played in beta were decent enough. I didn't personally like the museum map I think, it was too bright outside and it just felt like a ♥♥♥♥ layout in general and a ton of weird head / mount glitch spots.

The graphics are pretty good, the engine looks and runs great. The sound is also really good, with clear footsteps as I mentioned earlier. The spectator cam is a nice touch, it gives you the perspective of a helmet cam mounted on the player you're spectating and I thought that was really cool. The menu UI is responsive and sleek, didn't really like that I had to press a hotkey to enter gunsmith, I would rather just be able to do all of that with just my mouse hand, but other than that I have no complaints with the menu and UI.

In conclusion, I cannot in good faith recommend this game in its current state. It feels like if you put Tarkov movement in a CoD game, but left the gunplay and TTK intact. It somehow manages to feel arcade-y but also feels like you need to play it with a more deliberate pace to win. I will not pay the full price for this game and I may revisit the franchise when "WARZONE 2" come out.

If you liked base Rise you'd definitely like Sunbreak, game still feels great and fluid and they added a lot more skills to each weapon to combat the increased difficulty this time. Personally I was slightly unhappy with how easy base Rise was compared to World/Iceborne, but they actually stepped it up this time by adding new attack patterns and combos to the monsters to give them some much needed extra challenge.
The graphics have been improved a bit, even the old maps seem sharp and crisp compared to before, weapon and monster attack effects also got bumped up considerably with the flashy moves having rich textures and vibrant colours, giving you that "WOW" feeling when seeing some of them for the first time.
The story is what you'd expect from a MH game, incrementally introducing new monsters and variants as you go and tying in the "main boss" slowly as you work your way up. Eventually climaxing with a large scale boss encounter. The final boss fight has an epic feel to it and when "Proof of a Hero" starts playing near the end it's hard not to get hyped for that final push. The mechanics of it gives me a lot of hope for the "TRUE" Final boss (which will come later with FREE title updates as usual) of the expac to be at least on par if not better than the Safi'jiiva siege in Iceborn.
Which brings me to the next thing, Sunbreak on launch doesnt have a ton of monsters out the gate, the rest will be added later with free updates, one such update is in August adding some new variants and a new Locale. The next two updates are in Fall and Winter so there's a lot right on the horizon.
For the single players out there, they added a nice Follower quest system, where you can take NPCs from the story (both Rise and Sunbreak) on hunts with you, they each have different weapons, strengths and weaknesses, behaviors and personalities. And honestly speaking, they're really smart. They dodge/counter roars, they heal themselves and you, save you from abilities. I once saw one of the NPCs throw a small bomb to knock a player out of a stun to save them from getting carted. These quests also reward you with new craftable armor sets and weapons which are actually really good for a lot of builds and definitely good for the FASHION Hunters out there (the true endgame).
The current end game loop is decent, you can fight special version of different monsters to get parts to upgrade pretty much all weapons to rarity 10 (current max) which gives you some variety in builds overall. The "Anomaly" monsters, as they're called, have special mechanics and "weakspots" that you have to hit to deal bonus damage and ultimately stop them from detonating and dealing massive damage to the hunters. It's a simple but fairly engaging twist on a standard hunt, however personally I find their HP pools to be on the big side, sometimes they take really long to die even with a good build.
Overall I already got 130+ hours out of Sunbreak and I enjoyed all of it. And considering all the updates are going to be free and the roadmap is already laid out I have no reservations in recommending Sunbreak as a must buy.

Can't say much more than what was probably covered in other reviews, but I just wanna say that the game is fun even with the issues that they faced since launch. It has big potential and the devs have shown with the latest patch that they DO listen and follow through with it. They even do challenges proposed by the community. While it was a rough start, they definitely turning things around.

IT GOOD

Great game overall. Much more fun with friends but it still holds its own as a single player. The story isn't very deep but is cool enough to keep you going into endgame. The game opens up vastly after the story is done with a bunch of challenging encounters, new armor sets and the transition from low rank quests to high rank then master rank in Iceborne. There is enough here for casual players as well as hardcore min-maxers when it comes to combining gear sets and bonuses to make a build that works for each encounter / weapon.

One of the best ARPG games I have ever played. Really in depth talent and skill choices / combinations and options to augment them in seemingly infinite ways. Not the easiest game to pick up and play for a newcomer though but luckily there are a number of guides available online to get you started until you get the hang of it yourself.