Recent reviews by Xara

One night, a certain dumb nugget waited for three hours before coming to understand that his friend had passed him up. Emotionally numbed, he went off to an izakaya alone to contemplate the meaning of life and companionship then drown those thoughts under warm cozy tonkotsu ramen.
The next night, he played this game for the first time.
Let's just say the ramen shop scene with the doctor hit far harder than it had any right to.

This is a sort-of adventure game that advertises the ability to guesstimate the player's personality based on their choices and non-choices. The game also insists on flashing bright constant reminders that it's watching every move you make, resulting in a system that appears quite abusable. What the game doesn't show off immediately is a rather engaging underlying narrative that presents a handful of moral and philosophical problems to the player. The game is still loudly broadcasting its judgement of the player, however the world, the philosophical thought exercises, and the ending especially are interesting enough on their own merits to warrant a blind full playthrough of the game.

"What does it mean to be human?" the game asks. "What is a good person like? What does it mean to be a friend? A good friend? Are any of these possible for me?" Sitting here now, staring at a fluffy bunny decoration that was supposed to have been an outgoing gift, I find myself asking all these same questions, even after the game has ended.
Surely a game that can do that is worth an asking price this low.

How it Started (2016): Finland added to game as quasi-wildcard REDfor aligned nation to fight against NATO!

How it's Going (2022): Finland officially petitions to join NATO IRL.

So don't get me wrong, the gameplay is very cool and the fusion of genres is unique, crafting isn't that annoying, it can actually be played solo, and anyone specifically coming from League of Legends will enjoy the mechanics as this game takes more than a few cues from its design.

So why is this on my poop list?

Matchmaking.

Why does "Normal," unranked, unformatted matchmaking have a ranking? You have a ranking in Normal mode and if you do remotely well for any reason, that shoots up and suddenly you're dumped into a room filled entirely with 3000-hours-played sweatsters who proceed to pixel perfect oppress you out of every match for building a "wrong" item once. Or going to a "wrong" zone once. Or god forbid, not finding that one weapon ingredient exactly on time.
Quite literally overnight, I went from building whatever I felt like, going wherever I wanted, and contesting drop boxes for luls (3.5) to being 2 levels behind at all times cus ??? and getting deleted out of the game for the crime of not finding a single 9V battery in a zone they were supposed to be in (7.5)

This is on top of the 5-25 minute queue times because I guess we don't have enough of a playerbase? I don't have the numbers on that, so I dunno.

Leave the ranking competition stuff to Ranked mode. Isn't that what it's for? I don't always want to have to be rocket scientist perfect all the time. Sometimes I want to just ♥♥♥♥ around. Explore the game. Have fun. This game was fun - until the entire game became a Korean tournament without my consent.

A great battle royale game with workable crafting, interesting AI interaction, interesting passive mechanic that could be better but meh it's fresh, and a workable map that's just big enough, arriving at a time when people were looking for a good battle royale not named H1Z1. There's a clear objective beyond just shoot the dudes, and the bullet sponging nonsense doesn't show up until the very end of a round when you theoretically have bursty weapons and abilities to counteract it. It's one of the most complete and fleshed out battle royale games made.
What could go wrong?

Two problems. Games take too long (30-60 minutes per round), and the entire thing is kneecapped by the fact that the DLC gated behind the vanilla+DLC paywall. Ubi just can't figure out that very few people like vanilla Division, but a lot of people liked this DLC, and even more would like and get it if it was standalone.

Had this DLC released as a standalone product, it would now likely be sitting in the dominant position PUBG currently occupies. Shame, really.

Concept is coo,
Optimization is poo.

Do your homework, make absolutely sure your setup can run this thing before you buy in. As of 5/1, the current build leans on GPU and quite heavily on RAM.

The game is fun, IF it runs.
It'll get dry after a while, but hopefully mod support and additional maps will help that.
Look out for updates before buying. If the devs know what's up then RAM/CPU optimization, another map, and mod support should be the top priorities.

4/8 (hilarious lawsuit update)
It has recently come to my attention that the devs do NOT know what's up. Useless novelties and threatening lawsuits for concepts you didn't create mean nothing if the game still bugs up and doesn't run. Yeah, buyer beware.

Singleplayer: It's really rare nowadays to find a modern shooter campaign that isn't just "shoot and spit on anyone who's not white." Sure this one takes a sharp turn onto Hollywood Effects Lane and Incoherent Storytelling Street, but it's definitely not bad, and at least it actually tries not to be racist.

Multiplayer: I ended a round with a 360 dropshot noscope and everyone yelling at the killcam. Then I returned to the lobby to find that I had been hacked up to Lv70. 10/10.

I wanted fluffy tail.

2/10.

Great title, great series, and although it seems to appeal to quite a niche audience, it does so very well.

If you like RTS games that don't allow you to get away with just hitting 1A, and you're not turned off by what at first looks like commanding 10 different types of ants you know nothing about on a hill, and you enjoy the cold-war era setting, you will absolutely adore this game and its faithful depiction of reality dressed in an RTS flavor. Speaking as a brand new player to the series, the learning curve for a brand new player is incredibly steep, but if you like the genre and the concept, it's deeply enjoyable even as you're struggling to learn.

If you don't enjoy any of the above, you might not be as impressed. I'd say it's still worth a shot if you at least enjoy the RTS genre.

I've heard great things about this game, I imagine it would be pretty fun to play.

Now if only I could actually play it.