Recent reviews by TheFragile :3

Very well-made game with a nice amount of depth. Hoping this game has a healthy following for a good while.

One of the best games I've ever played. :3

It's not necessarily challenging, but it has a great story, wonderful aesthetic, and lots of charm. Can't recommend this game enough.

I kept my original review at the bottom because someone was upset that I reviewed the game with 8 hours played. I felt like 8 hours was enough to have a reasonable opinion about the gameplay and mechanics, but I told them I'd finish the game and update my review anyway.

My opinions haven't really changed since my original review, and if anything, they further cement my problems with the game.

- Stealth is just too good in this game, and the lack of variety in stealth is what makes it get quickly stale. What doesn't help at all is that the enemy AI is quite dumb and predictable. Every single enemy in the game does one of two things: stand in one spot and only look in one direction, or walk a route where they will inevitably look left, then straight, then right, and they may finally repeat that looking pattern a couple more times before moving elsewhere. It doesn't really feel all that cool or rewarding, which is a shame because I'm a fan of stealth. If you're hoping for something even remotely close or interesting to your favorite stealth games, this isn't it.

- The only thing I'll slightly change is that gunplay *can* feel decent if your character skills have weapon accuracy maxed and the weapon has an accuracy upgrade. There's a few other things that can affect accuracy such as injuries, but until your weapon accuracy situation is in the best state it can possibly be in, it's just not that good. It's worth mentioning that even when your weapon accuracy is the best it can be, it's still completely inferior to stealth. There aren't many missions where stealth can't be used at all, either.

Additionally, here's some glitches and general frustrations I came across. No spoilers ahead.

- One time when my partisan was downed, their body teleported across the map.

- Sanek's disguise ability makes it so you can't save the game because "the character is busy". However, there was a time where after he was no longer disguised, the game insisted that he was still "busy". I tried putting the disguise back on and then removing it again, but still the same issue. My only way of fixing this was loading to an earlier save, which is frustrating.

- During one mission where you need to kill an important enemy, the important enemy runs off to a nearby village. During one of my attempts, the important enemy started to casually walk in the middle of a firefight towards the area he just ran away from. This is not expected behavior, as he's supposed to stand until we engage in a cutscene with him.

- If you're in the enemy cone of vision, they start to get suspicious (which is expected). You can do just about any action without immediately alarming them while in their vision. You can throw a grenade, throw a rock, heal yourself, and it's no issue. You know what is an issue? Placing a harmless bottle on the ground. Placing a bottle on the ground in their cone of vision IMMEDIATELY alerts all nearby enemies. Let me emphasize that you can throw a grenade in their vision, but not place a harmless bottle.

- Mission failed screen has been completely unresponsive a few times, causing me to quit the game completely to fix it.

- I've had partisan #1 stuck in the reviving animation if they happen to get downed while reviving partisan #2. This also caused the partisan #2 to be 100% incapable of being revived (which is never supposed to happen). Additionally, if you revive partisan #1, they will be perpetually in that same reviving animation, and totally unable to commit any actions other than gliding across the ground. Had to load a different save to fix this.

- You can actually throw grenades over the walls of an adjacent room, even though the walls clearly go all the way up to the ceiling. May take a few tries to get the height and angle right, also assuming the wall isn't too high. One particularly egregious example of this is killing the final important enemy in the final mission.

- One mission has you running away from a ton of soldiers who are actively trying to find you. Once you get to the exit, a cutscene plays. However, I started to hear gunfire unrelated to the cutscene. I quickly realized that the cutscene is just playing over the mission I was just in, and my partisans were not teleported to a safe location. They were actually fighting even though I reached the exit. My partisans died, and I saw a "mission failed" screen while the cutscene was still playing. Moments later, I saw a "mission successful" screen placed over top of the "mission failed" screen, which is all still placed over the cutscene. This is confusing, annoying, and inexcusable.

- There are a few other glitches or annoying things, but the ones above were particularly annoying.

I do have a few nice things to say about the game.

- Voice acting was pretty okay.

- Between story missions, you can assign partisans to do some base missions for gathering resources. This is a nice extra touch to the game, though it definitely could have been fleshed out more.

Overall, I still cannot recommend this game. Most of the game felt okay, but the actual gameplay is where it truly fell short. It felt boring, unrewarding, and more of a chore than anything.


===ORIGINAL REVIEW===
I wanted to like this game so much, but the combat is so bad.

Stealth is king in this game, but enemy routes are the same 100% of the time. This makes for somewhat bland and not-so-creative gameplay. Stealth really just consists of sneaking up behind an enemy, knifing them, and then hiding their body. Seems fairly simple (and it is), but it gets really repetitive. To be honest, stealth is likely too good, and in stark contrast to awful gunplay. What's really annoying is that if you're caught, all nearby enemies suddenly know your position on the map, no matter what. Really bizarre oversight and frustrating to experience.

Gunplay feels so bad. After the first few missions, enemy soldiers tend to have great accuracy while your accuracy is still mediocre. You can use cover to make enemy accuracy go down a bit, but it ultimately feels like you're always at a disadvantage. You could argue that you're going against trained soldiers, but the repetitive stealth is just not that fun to make up for that. You can upgrade your accuracy for certain guns and other skills, which can help a bit, but not enough in my experience.

For anyone claiming this is like XCOM or Fallout, that is a completely mistaken comparison. Combat is real-time in this game, whereas that isn't the case with XCOM and classic Fallout games. Combat becomes far too chaotic if you're not prepared for it, and your squad will likely die unless you had intentionally engaged in a gun fight. If you think you can quickly micro-manage your squad in the middle of a gunfight like an RTS game, it's really not that effective.

The story is otherwise alright and the aesthetics are cool, but the gameplay is just not there for me. I've tried coming back to this game a couple of times now, but I just can't get myself to enjoy this game.

While the game definitely had a bit of a rough launch, Turtle Rock has kept a reasonable amount of communication going with the community on what fixes will be going through, as well as the road map. I'm fairly optimistic about the upcoming changes.

Honestly not that fun if you're playing with randoms, but awesome if you're playing with friends.

One of the only fighting games I can recommend right now. Lots of developer support, extremely deep gameplay, great graphics, and still a large playerbase. Netcode is (usually) good, too.

Very unique and fun puzzle game that kind of simulates a fighting game in a sense (kind of like Puzzle Fighter). I'm hoping more people start to play online.

Capcom really wanted to make a game that is easier for casuals to pick up, but still have things that appeal to competitive players.

The result?

A watered-down fighting game that gets repetitive and dull. The game is very linear with how strong offense is and how weak zoning is. Many mixups are strictly between throw or shimmy, and playing risky is usually a lot more rewarding than playing solid. Combos are very limited with variety. Most v-triggers are recycled versions of each other, which is really disappointing. All v-skills are literally just a special move that is bound to mp+mk but they think they invented something incredible by calling it v-skill. If they had v-skills as a regular directional input like any other special move, no one would have thought anything different. The combos are also ridiculously easy to do, as they got rid of tight links that you'd see in any other fighting game. Some might say this is a good thing, but I always respected good execution, or going for different combos in certain high-pressure situations. Instead, you now have high-level Zangief players who mash for their links to connect (and it works), which is embarrassing for a competitive fighting game like Street Fighter. Speaking of Zangief, Capcom really went out of their way to make him so bad in this game. It's certainly possible to win with him, but you have to work so much harder than anyone else. (I'm not a Zangief main, but it's just an observation)

I feel bad for anyone who buys this game that doesn't take it remotely seriously (basically if they button mash and just wanna have some fun for a little). The single player mode is dreadfully bad, though it's never really been that great with the other SF games. Story mode just came out, so that'll give it a little more spice. Getting more colors for your character requires you to play through survival mode on different difficulties, which is a boring grind. Unless you play online against other people, this game really offers nothing interesting for anyone to care about for the offline content.

This game is a rushed, incomplete fighter that should have been much better. If they let USF4 ride out one more year while they carefully worked on SF5, I'd say the result could be a lot different. It's a shame, because I was really hyped up for this game, but after trying to give it a chance multiple times, it's not fun. Capcom said they may add changes to the character balance or game mechanics at the end of every year, so maybe things will turn around at that point. However, the character balance is mostly fine. It's the game mechanics that really make the game boring and not hype. No matter how excited you get for the next DLC character coming out, you always need to remember that they will still be restricted to the game mechanics.

2GUD

fun af

One of the most fun games I've played in a long time.