Recent reviews by Vanguard

I want to recommend this game so much, and you should still buy it. It´s gorgeous. The Art direction is unbelievable. This is the most stunning recreation in sound and feel of what it´s like to be in the Warhammer 40K Universe.

- Heart pounding sound and graphics.
- Insane amount of detail and exploration options
- dizzying complexity in the geometry, making me feel almost lost in between the gothic architectury
- The look and feel of enemies can be overwhelming, especially the later threats deep in the bowels of the hive.
- While many of the weapons are less than impressive, the bolters have to be an absolute favourite of everyone.
- Really cool NPC´s, world details, etc., again, you can really dig the 40K feel here.
- When combat doesn´t end up in the scenarios described below, it can be very satisfying.

Necromunda is an amazing game! That being said, there are some things I have >>>grave<<< issues with, which make me want to quit this game 11 hours in, and I haven´t finished the game yet. The entirety of the issues make me borderline on recommending this game.

I just don´t understand so many of its design choices.

Gear feels absolutely unimportant:
- Haven´t felt any difference between 50 armor and 70 armor - actually the more the game progresses, the more glass cannony you will feel. The game seems to rely mostly on active defenses during slide moves, etc.
- Almost zero impact if your weapon is +0 or +3 - that means they will still be good if you favour them, so it´s not necessarily a bad thing.
- Bionics health upgrades seem to not matter at all, you still die all the same.

Health restoration and combat flow:
The game heavily emphasizes close proximity due to how health regeneration works - the closer you are, the more your autosanguinis upgrades will restore your health when you shoot an enemy or kill it with a knife attack. ((Edit: After playing through on medium, this might be inaccurate. Health regeneration seems to occur on any kill, no matter the distance. Just on hard, they´re so much in your face, it´s hard to tell.))

However, every fight ends up in visual clutter, with plasmaguns, grenades and psyker abilities lighting up your screen like christmas. Almost every enemy will bumrush you, teleport or jetpack behind or near you, etc. - almost the only way to stay alive in many battles is to abuse the invulnerability frames you get from knifing enemies. With enemies being able to use their grenades in close range, there is also no chance of forcing the enemies to switch their weapons, while if you try using your grenades in close combat... well, let´s say it doesn´t end pretty.

So, the result is a headache inducing, knife-kill spamming, weapon switching mess of close combat without any sense of rythm to it. Amusingly, some enemies can burrow to burst out near your location - even if that is the top of a chimney or something like that. So don´t expect any rest or respite.

The quick death:
While there are many abilities to control the flow of combat, and enemies aren´t overly tanky, in between you will have plenty of enemies in later stages of the game which have an enormous one shot kill ability, instantly breaking your shield and health, no matter how many defensive options you chose in lieu of crit upgrades. So while you´re being bumrushed and try to dodge-slide-wallrun your way out of this mess, you suddenly get trashed, without knowing why (see the visual mess described earlier)

The slow death:
In areas where you need to solve certain objectives, eventually you´ll run out of shield packs. If you don´t laser focus on finding the objectives, the constantly spawning enemies will eventually drain you. Its inevitable. Once your shields are down, health restoration up to 60 on knifing an enemy will not safe you from the one-shot damage some enemies dish out.

Side missions:
GOD EMPEROR, ABSOLVE US FROM THIS ABOMINATION.

NEVER do any side missions, if you can avoid them. They are just recycled main mission territory with limitless enemy spawns included, so you can´t even explore the terrain, giving you the most of the headache-christmas lighting on screen-invulnerability frame spam experience this game has to offer.

Enemy spawns and AI:
Enemy spawns are a huge problem in this game in my opinion - I´d prefer it much more if this game had a combat-exploration feel like the Fallout series (New Vegas, 3, 4), since the Warhammer universe is predestined to the relict-dumpster diving game.

There should be more varied AI instead of the bumrush-until-its-done style we see here a lot of times - even grenade launcher enemies prefer to give it to you point blank. There is an astounding amount of neglect of will to stay alive in many enemies here.

A limited amount of enemies and resources would be a better experience for this game, imho, but I understand the game might just not be for me.

Edit: I replaced the game on medium difficulty, and the endless spawns weren´t such a big issue anymore except for one mission specifically - usually the endless spawns are used when the objective is to retreat anyway.

Funnily enough, the random loot game gave me another gun in this playthrough, which I never found when I played on hard - basically a black hole launcher. Quite the game changer. Not sure, the random loot system is such a good idea after all, when this one gun constitutes a massive power shift.

Also: The "cold dark" mission is a better aliens game than almost all other aliens games themselves.

I am looking forward to "Necromunda 2" and by Helmawr, if it doesn´t get made, I´ll be very sad about that and have to pray to the forces of chaos. YOU DON´T WANT THAT, NOW, DO YOU?

A cyberpunk Twinstick shooter with beautiful graphics, doing many things ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ right. The soundtrack, the immersive feel, solid controls with a variety of weapons. Most of it falls into place. So why can´t I recommend it? Let´s start with the good.
- Graphics, Audio and world (narrative, lingo, etc.) draw you into an intriguing coorporate world where you fight for survival as an indent, battling your way up the coorporate food chain.
- Customizable layout allows for a variety of playstyles
- Core game loop can be extremely satisfying with explosions, while battlying a strong diverse cast of enemy characters that include some of the most strong archetypes. Rushers, brutes, snipers, ambushers, artillery, soldiers, area denial, minion/turrets spawners, etc.

The bad (not gamebreaking):
- The UI is very counterintuitive. It takes a long while to understand what every symbol means.
- The attributes you stack which govern the strength of your cyber abilities do not feel impactful

The worst:
Enemies are vulnerable to a variety of damage types. Of the four damage type which exist (physical, electrical, fire, digital(?)) some enemies will take extra damage from while they´re quite resistant to others.

What intially starts of as a very solid system, which makes you a better and more effective killing machine by observing those rules, it becomes punishing to the point of harassment after roughly ten hours of play, as level scaling kicks in to eleven. Because you´re only allowed to carry two weapons with you actively, this means, either peppering robots with your ROCKET LAUNCHER (RP-23 which is advertised as being used to fight light armored vehicles) which takes you round about twenty shots or switching to an unupgraded digital(yes, this is a real damage type) weapon and dealing with an enemy in two seconds. Did I mention that the rocket launcher was upgraded 7 times by that point? Well, you get the picture, when you kite entire robot platoon for 2 minutes straight only for them to rubberband back into their guard position, healing to full and forgetting about your existence, like it´s an MMO from 1990.

So why don´t you simply switch weapons dummy? Well, I do, and it circumvents the problem, yes. But, because enemy composition can switch nearly on the fly (from robots, to humanoids, back to robots) it becomes a weird game of pausing every two minutes to switch your primary, secondary, tactical and potentially your skills and modules, which is VERY immersion breaking.

*Sigh*

Don´t get me wrong, it´s not a bad game. If you can life with breaking the gameflow every few minutes to manually switch layouts (because why would there be alternative weapon sets like in Titan Quest, which at the press of a button allowed you to deal with a variety of situations?) then it´s still a nice game, worth the asking price. It´s not as exhaustive as AA or AAA titles, but it knows what it wants to be. It´s just that what it wants to be is not as polished as it needs to be, ironing out the last few remaining quality of life issues and this game would be very recommendable.

The Verdict
Wait until alternative layout switches are in the game, then get it ASAP

+ Depth of Gameplay
+ Playable despite it´s heavy reliance on Free-to-play elements
- Some pay to win elements, such as flags giving a massive bonus to your survivability and offensive capabilities
-- MASSIVE grind with tons of different currencies: Ship XP, Free Ship XP, Commander XP, Elite Commander XP, Dubloons, Credits and to some extent Flags and camouflage, most of the important currencies only trickle in between battles by doing daily missions
- Without being in a clan your progression is roughly hindered by 20%. Go find one!
+ Playable despite it´s heavy grind/payment based progression in lower tiers, just don´t expect to get to Tier 2 without heavy monetary investment this lifetime.
- Daily login bonus and daily missions "require" daily play. Subscription model encourages daily login. It´s basically a MMO subscription model that clocks in at roughly 14 € per month for premium.

Spoilers incoming.

I`ve enjoyed the Fallout games greatly. This isn´t anything like the Fallout games. However, even on it´s own footing, the game doesn´t hold up.

I played/am playing the game on hard - this might influence how the game behaves in terms of scaling. Keep that in mind when reading on.

Pro:
- Fun, at first glance, setting.
- Ability to play without companions, due to feats that make up for the lack of companions
- Well written and acted characters
- Okayish skillsystem and impact on story/decisions
- Fun flaw and perk system
- The ability go rampage in the midst of byzantium, because, trust me, they ALL DESERVE IT.

Cons:
- Annoying cartoonishly evil corporations.
- Overreliance of the story on black/white decisions. Monarch in the game might be the only planet I really enjoyed, because you can actually make an alliance between a not completely brain-rotten corporation and an anti corp faction.
- Absolutely disgustingly weak gun/equipment system
- An out-of-whack health and damage scaling system
- Unfun gunplay, as the enemy mostly rely on tons of health which can lead to backward dodging for a solid minute upon whioch the enemy resets like it´s an MMO from the nineties.
- Weak AI in general: Snipers, for example, simply sit in the same spot so you can pick them off easily. Brutes simply bumrush you, they never take a flanking path. Levels in general feel very much like a hose instead of a wide world.
- LEveling means you have to find the SAME guns than you already have but a few levels higher, as tinkering cannot be done to your current level usually.
- There are more loot containers in this game than a Bethesda game has bugs. It´s just not fun to container crawl in this game and it feels like a chore. I never ever want to see another 25xheavy ammo 20xlight ammo box in my life...
- Weird skill influence on combat can make overwhelming combats a complete joke, just by chance (Intimidate on humans, hack on androids, etc.), so just by reloading the combat you might just get lucky enough to progress without changing your tactics / weapons
- Completely whack perks can lead to headshot killing an enemy after 3-4 magazines (bullet sponge) and the damage transference to a nearby enemy kills it instantly. What the hell?

TLDR: Speedrush it on easy for the story if you want to - the game is badly balanced as most scaling shooters are (Warframe, higher difficulties of BOrderlands, late game path of exile if you screw up your build, etc.). If you´re an compulsive collector, this game will feel like a chore and it doesn´t reward exploring at all. Even with DLC not worth more than 30 bucks.

Explore alien worlds, discover a multitude of valid builds for your character, receive interesting loot...

Remnant is a fantastic game, that can be played with up to three players in coop. If you liked dark souls, you should like Remnant. I have nothing but praise except for a few little quality of life issues. Get it now!

Contains spoilers and maybe some nuts.

Pick it up in a sale and focus on the things that you find fun, neglect the fetch quests and try to ignore the fact that you´ll get captured about fifteen hundred times only to be let go again because reasons. Try to not hate the bliss sequences for not making much sense and just enjoy traversing the valley. Story is average, but the athmossphere is kind of cool.

The opening sequence entering the compound left a lasting impression on me and is easily worth buying this game alone for.

Contains Spoilers

"Dear god, let it be over, so I can finally uninstall this game.", uttered by me - a firm nonbeliever.

Far Cry 5 and New Dawn are so utterly badly written - not bad as in cringeworthy - but overly stereotypical and flat. The Moment when you see Micky and whatever the other bad-girls name is drone on the utterly forgettable story unfolds itself in front of you, is bad enough.

Worst is, if you realized that you´re forced into a neverending grind of materials to upgrade your weapons to level 4 only to beat the endbosses Micky and whatever-the-other-bad-girls is called, because the final map has you fighting in a claustrophobic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a scenario where you litterally would die of smoke inhalation, so badly is the obfuscation of your view...

The entire game is just full of questionable design choices like missing audioqueues, making dogs literal ninja ankle-biters, weapons increase by 50% in damage each tier, making the previous tier worthless to have, having helmets protect from headshots from a .50 Caliber point blank, where as an arrow to the chest does the job? And so on...

Literally, this game is garbage and it took me way too long to realize it. I couldn´t bring myself to grind the materials needed for Tier 4 weapons to defeat the final bosses.

Probably one of those games that is "better with a friend", since the companion AI is about as smart as the protagonist in this utterly forgettable game.

Avid player of CS1.6 up to CS5.something.

Installed the game, played for 45 minutes, encountered a wallahacker who ruined the fun. Checked the insane cheat rate in this game online, uninstalled and I´m done. GG.

Yes!

Oh, you want more?

Yes, buy it now! Nothing beats the feeling of your Nuclear reactor springing to life, while trains come back from your expansion to deliver uranium ore to your centrifuges, while factories produce armor piercing ammunition which get automatically delivered to your defensive perimeter which you need to protect your conveyor belts, which deliver the coal to your steam engines which power... Wait what? DIdn´t we have a nuclear reactor somewhere? And where is that engine fabricator I set up yesterday? And why are there bugs munching on my whatever it is?

IT IS JUST TOO MUCH! AARRGHHH!!

TL:DR; If you enjoy a sense of vertigo while you piece together a huge manifucaturing monster puzzle complex which will drive you inevitable crazy: yes, you´re home.

A scaling numbers game in which you try to beat quadratic scaling with a linear increase in your power. Heavy Lootbox-Pay2Win Elements, grinding will virtually get you nowhere.