Recent reviews by Watcher Rat

First off, ignore the playtime...I've been playing this game since 1994, after all, because I am old.

Now that we have that out of the way, this is my all-time favorite game series; it got me into games like this, and will always be a favorite. When games like Doom were the gold standard, Bungie introduced this as their first full-narrative shooter, with a fleshed out story, and some mechanics that had not been seen in games (see, in the old days, we couldn't even look up and down when we were shooting things). Marathon was a breath of fresh air in a genre that was just beginning to define itself, and though it had a more limited release being primarily a Mac/Apple series, it has held a ton of fans throughout the years.

That said, this game came out in 1994. Some plug-ins might spruce up the look a bit, but it's not a game that's going to wow you graphically these days. The look is old, many of the controls are antiquated (some rebinding will be needed), and generally speaking it's going to feel like a game from that era. For those unfamiliar with what this means, it means some areas will be brutally difficult (Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap is a level we all lamented). Some areas you can screw around and soft lock yourself, requiring a reload. Some areas you might get lost, finding yourself running low on oxygen for a couple of the maps where this is an issue. Things like that.

If you can get past those quirks, however, you can find a real gem of a title. Marathon, in many ways, is your proto-Halo; you'll notice a ton of things that were referenced in Bungie's later works. The second and third titles in the series are still coming to Steam (although are available elsewhere for free); I've always considered Marathon 2 to be the strongest of the series, but enjoyed them all. The story continues in a pretty organic manner through each title, though it gets a little weird in the finale. If you have the patience, you can find out why there were people devoted to celebrating the story for the last three decades.

Edit: By the way, when the next games come, rejoice: the damn flies apparently went extinct between this game and the sequel.

Loving it so far, even though I am just as bad at this game as I was at the first. That said, I feel like having Poseidon's keepsake listed in the "N" slot instead of the "C" was a missed joke opportunity.

Start a colony, adopt a fox that slowly gets turned more machine than animal due to the many fights it picks when it chooses to slaughter your enemies, accidentally drop a mountain on a colonist, repeat. What's not to like?

Generally pretty fun! My advice is not to overplay it (can be easy to get burned out on), but seeing as I got a good 90 hours in before that hit on a $30 title, I'd say that's a pretty good dollar-to-hour value.

Pros:
-Great graphics that lend themselves to a fun, varied world.
-Fixes for problems come very quickly for a smaller company, each patch has been quick to address big issues.
-Lots of variety and fun to find out there in the world.
-Guns to shoot not-Pokemon with.

Cons:
-Some minor bugs that may take longer to be addressed while more important things get fixed (it's early access, so this is not a gripe, just a reminder that the game won't be perfect)
-The building system has a lot of potential, but needs some definite quality of life improvements at some point.
-There is a definite cap on your "things to do" list where you just won't have much left to keep you interested.

There are also some things that I could list as cons, but they will likely be addressed in later patches. The big one is that the random dungeons all have more or less the same layout with little variation. Now, again, it's early and they've already said they'll be changing this, but if you're buying the game now, then it's worth knowing you'll see a bit more limited experiences in there.

That said, still fun. It's cheaper than a AAA release and it's very easy to get value out of it equal to the money spent, so my complaints are superficial at best.

This is one of my "forever games" - one of those titles that I play a while, set aside, then come back and play from the start again later on and enjoy just as much. Vanilla or modded, Stardew is one of the few games that I never uninstall, because I know I will always be back. The developer is one of the best, constantly looking for new ways to add to and improve his title. Set aside your expectations and relax, this game is just like coming home.

Played the first time, we laughed, we cried, we peed a little thanks to things rushing us out of nowhere. Some of the most fun I've had with friends in a game in some time, absolutely worth $10.

Let's get this out of the way, yes, I'll (hopefully) be playing more of this game, it is just nigh impossible to recommend this game in its current state. There are several major problems that are plaguing the game, and will continue to plague the game until something major gets changed about them. Let's break a few down:

Minor Problems

-The UI is a severe downgrade from MW2019. A lot of features are outright missing, such as the barracks, or the ability to save your attachment loadouts for each gun, meaning you have to re-do your guns every time you want to change playstyle.

-The UI also has several elements that either do not work at all, or work inconsistently. The most recent back on Nov. 16th fixed some things (camo selection is less touchy now), but there are still a lot of problems. The big one now is that the social tab of the menu ceases to exist sometimes, making partying with friends nigh impossible and requiring a client restart to fix (which only occasionally fixes the problem). Lots of basic visual issues with the UI as well, it does not seem like it was given a particularly careful QA inspection.

-Lots of players experiencing minor graphics and sound glitches, the game seems very poorly optimized.

-IW/Activision has repeatedly advised using older Nvidia drivers because of an issue, but the game will still pop up an error message while loading. Just mentioning this to say that hitting "Continue" does not load up the game, but instead goes to a website; hitting cancel, unintuitively, is what launches the game. This is more to help anyone who gets confused by this.

-Pre-game lobbies are a struggle for a lot of PCs, the game tends to lock up for long periods when trying to load into a new map, which makes adjusting loadouts and such impossible at times.

-Hardcore mode implementation feels like a step down from previous titles. The mode just needs a couple quality of life tweaks that have pretty much been present in any other version of CoD HC mode, but it begs the question of why no one thought to include them here (for instance, I've noticed that care package rewards are not announced, so if you grab one, you have no idea what you got until you go to launch it).

-Weapon strength feels a bit off, especially in Core mode, with guns able to one-shot being inordinately common. That said, in HC mode, the TTK is lower so weapons actually feel a lot more even.

More Major Issues

-The report system is rife with abuse, leading to a large number of people having problems. People are getting names reported as inappropriate for normal unoffensive names and being forced to switch. Others are getting banned from chat having said nothing. A group of people I play with all got shadow banned on the same night after running into the same group of 4 people on the other team repeatedly during one night, suggesting repeated reports affected their ability to play.

-The spawn system has always been rough in CoD games, but feels particularly rough in this one, particularly in Ground War and Invasion. No care seems to be given to the location of enemies in most modes, so you will often appear directly in front of enemies (or see them appear in front of you). It is not uncommon in Ground War and Invasion to spawn directly underneath enemy vehicles and die instantly. This is also true of killstreaks: the spawning system does not check to see if an active streak has been launched where it's putting you, so it's quite common to appear in the middle of an SAE, Mortar, or Precision strike and die before taking a single step.

-Lots of problems with having files that need to be revalidated (that never get fixed when doing so), problems launching the game, loading into matches, crashing, and more being reported by a lot of the community, including by people running PCs that should have no problems running the game in theory. This goes back to the optimization I mentioned above, so it's difficult for any new player to know whether the game will work properly on their rig until after they buy it.

-Lobby connection is very hit or miss; it is incredibly easy to get lobby bugged, where you will be "connecting" eternally, but the game will never start searching for a match. The only easy way to fix this is to completely close and relaunch the game. This happens most often by backing out of a lobby after it tries to load a map (for instance if you need to pick up a friend into your party who just hopped on).

-The matchmaking is atrocious. This isn't even particularly a rant about SBMM (which has its own issues), but the number of times I will sit waiting for a match only to get into a match in progress, thrown onto a team that has 5 kills between them against an enemy with over 30 just between one or two people, and the match is more than half over. I can't really attest to what metric their matchmaking is going, maybe things will even out over time, but thus far, the matchmaking has felt like it seems to swing more for blowouts than close matches; I've had a handful of the latter at best, and dozens of the former.

-The game also, naturally, has no automatic team balancing, so you can end up with a team of 5-6 people against a team of 1 who never gets reinforcements (and there's no real penalty worth caring about for quitting out instantly in that moment since wins and losses don't really mean anything in unranked gameplay, not that there's a barracks to track them anyways).

I'm sure there are quite a few additional problems that I'm not thinking about as I write this, but those are some of the biggest ones. There are some potential fixes to the game, but a lot of them are going to involve tweaking massive systems, and IW/Activision have been close lipped about doing so (no word yet on how they intend to combat report abuse, for instance). Hopefully they can fix things, but for now, I can't say it's a good purchase.

Edit: Side note, The hydro dam level is perfect. I don't care what anyone says, spending the entire match under water humming the Jaws theme and sneaking up on people is extremely fun.

I can run ineffectually into battle, be bad at the game, AND audibly cry and call out for my mommy? Clearly this game has exactly what I needed to bring myself into suspension of disbelief. It is just like real life!

At a glance, it seems like it should be repetitive, and you'd get bored of it fast...but for some reason, that doesn't really detract from things. It's early access, so there's more content on the way, and there are some bugs, but nothing truly game breaking most of the time. Small dev team, so updates aren't going to come daily...still fine, since the game is just plain fun.

I've only been using the non-Steam version for a short while (I didn't even realize this was on Steam until just now), but since I saw it was here I got this version instead. I was a MASSIVE fan of the Escape Velocity series back in the mid-90's, and I still go back and play those games to this day periodically; Endless Sky, being a love letter to those games, fits perfectly into that niche. There may be parts of it that are not quite as complex, or have a different feel, but it's an amazingly fun game that I have no problem sinking hour after hour into to do each campaign. It's genuinely a fun time, and gives you all sorts of experiences. Want to trade? Trade. Want to fight? Pick up a warship and go learn the ropes.

To some, it may be too easy; if you die, you can just reload your save game since there is not currently a hardcore mode...but you can certainly make your own, saying that dying means deleting your save file (though I might suggest escape pods being put in as either a feature or a mod might be best to have before trying that, unless you are VERY good at surviving in big fights). Still, I have thoroughly enjoyed every second I've spent with this game, and look forward to making hundreds of characters just like I did with Escape Velocity over the last 23 years.

Plus...it's free! You lose nothing by trying it out, so really, what do you have to lose?