Recent reviews by Aerensiniac

Updates seem to be slow af but now that chapter 2 is out im vouching for this game.
Small winks towards the original hades in its design, a talent tree for each character which i dont even know when i saw the last time, and very very charming pixel graphic, diablo like looting and character building.

Really not much to add here. Its a vampire survivors clone but with its own perfectly fleshed out, charming little spin on the entire thing.
Whole heartedly recommended, it bought me some joy during a stressful week.

Only salty cause i cant play it to the end.

For the time being: Changed to upvote due to sony's backtrack.

As a fan and worshipper of DeepRockGalactic, i was charmed by Helldivers. I loved the StarshipTroopers style hyperbole, the aesthetics, the selection of guns and the general ambience and immersion of the game.
The ship upgrading was an extremely nice touch which could serve as a form of player housing down the line, but many of its features remain to be seen in the future.
Looks good in terms of graphic, tho its optimisation sucks and it has a solid sound profile.
The TL;DR: In terms of basics the game is set. No complaints.

But before all of it:
its 2024.03.17 a few days after cutting edge, the first warbond dropped, so the game is barely past 1.0.
My review reflects this, barely released state of the game. With that being said:

You might have heard the words "spaghetti code". Its what you'd call in coding terms a jumbled mess. Something that is extremely hard to maintain because changing something will have unintentional backlash and changes throughout the entire software.
When it comes to Helldivers, these were the two words that came to my mind while playing, but not just for the code, but for the entire game and it surrounding development, and even company structure.
If there is such a thing as "spaghetti code" then Helldivers 2 would be a 7 course complete Italian wedding meal of only mixed pasta dishes and with a complementary taste testing on top.

Helldiver's engine is Autodesk Stingray. An engine that has stopped all support and updates in 2018, 6 years ago.
May this fact serve as both an excuse and a reason for the game's many issues on their behalf, which are so plentiful that the last time i have seen such level of instability in a game, it was roughly around the year 2000.
Just joining and inviting players is a trip through wonderland in and of itself.
At times you can, at times you cant. Sometimes you need to restart the game, steam, or the entire pc itself and then it all works suddenly.
Audio might bug out and crackle like your grandma's gramophone, or it may not, you may get stuck on any screen of the game, crash to a hard freeze upon exiting or launching, and the entire thing might permanently burn itself into your running tasks lists with a cpu load of 80% until you restart your pc.

And thats all before you'd actually play the game.
Once you get to it, you start to realise that every part of the game functions in a similar manner. Things might randomly spawn on your head from thin air. Shots with humongous travel times fired by enemies and even the environment have at times random hit scan moments which should be literally impossible as you run about, yet somehow that bug mortar shot or that meteorite manages to hit just the exact top of your head.
Despite damage zones, heavy enemies at times die from one shot to the head, and at other take 3 armies and 6 supply bases worth of ♥♥♥♥ along with orbital lasers and railguns to bring down.
You throw yourself to the ground and you might get up instantly or you might not and your character is going to take a breather on the ground despite your 15th time of pressing alt, and god forbid you actually landed on a terrain object such as stone cause then it gonna ragdoll around like the happiest pig in the playpen.
You taking damage is also a complete mystery. A guard dog's laser touches the outline of your helmet? Dead. Or not depending on what mood the game is in and you gonna sun bathe in it.
Projectile vomit of bugs at times hit scan you even in the middle of a dodge jump for an insta kill, and while waiting for your respawn you watch your teammates bathe and splash around in it like an entire school of children in a lake during summer time.
Oh and dont get me started on spawns.
Oh god the spawns.
A bug farts for 0.1 seconds and a bug breach occurs. Completely unpreventable.
Surely, bug breach is supposed to be something only used by a specific species of bugs, so does the game say, but nah, anything can call in a bug breach at random, and it takes 0 time to achieve it despite having both an audio and visual signal that "me, im trying to call for reinforcements, you should probably take care of me" the entire circus was called the moment the visual warning appeared, you cant do f about it boi.
And such a bug breach may call in no heavy enemies or it might call in 6 of them at once.

Its a MESS.
Its a completely inconsistent mess.
And sadly it doesnt stop there either cause the developers themselves have no idea or direction they want to take the game in, so the complete loadout and everything included is a joke.
There are heavy armors and there are light armors.
In light armors, you can run away.
In heavy armors, you cannot run away and you will die instantly.
Thats the practical use of armor scaling. Oh and maybe medium armors if you like edging it.

Weapons follow the same logic.
3/4 of your arsenal is completely useless with the exception of 1-3 shotguns. You will basically pick whatever penetrates medium armor with a relative good damage potential, unless you enjoy a perpetual "armor deflection" warning stuck on your screen.
Why are the main and secondary weapons useless and balanced towards being trash? Cause according to the devs, you should use your strategems. Surely:
Railgun is good against heavy enemies? Nerfed, now it cant do ♥♥♥♥ against medium enemies either. Use your strategems? Sure ima call in a prolonged 380mm barrage on that nest, oh wait the targeting priority on that is: 1. your teammates, 2. you, 3. environmental objects, 4. you, 5. your teammates again as they respawned, and 6. maybe if nothing else is around and we got bored of avoiding them, we gonna hit some enemies.
Also take these modifiers. Now strategems take 100% longer to arrive and have 50% additional cooldown.

The game has a cash shop and premium warbonds which offer paying weapons.
You buy a premium bundle and you got something on your hands that is worse than the basic weapons of the game, with additional insults such as boosters that have mystery descriptions.
Cutting edge bundle, its been a week slowly, nobody has any idea what the localization confusion booster does, how much of it does, whether or not it works at all. The only thing it confuses at best, is the players.
This will eventually undermine monetisation as well cause who would pay for this and why?

The game is supposedly a horde shooter, but there are endless memes about "hellkiters" and "hellcrawlers" because the last thing you can do on higher difficulty, is to engage your enemies in a fight.
I repeat: This is supposedly a horde shooter. Every part of it is designed to be as such.
But you cant cause its not possible. The game will actively punish you for trying to horde shoot your way through enemies on higher difficulty settings, and by punishing i dont mean that you gonna spend longer in the mission, no: You will be steam rolled, then set on fire and finally salted so nothing grows on your corpse.
I could go on and rant for a while longer but i will just stop.
The game has a severe identity crisis and that is on top of a completely broken heap of sticks that is its coding and engine.

The good will of its players and the immersion of it all wont carry it past a few months.
As beloved of a game it was at its release, i predict here and now that it will burn all that good will in a couple of months.
People will get frustrated with all its bs and for a very good, predictable and understandable reason.

All layers of this game are basically undecided.
Its almost like nobody involved with it ever thought that it would take off successfully. Like the expectation was that it gonna instantly flop and die upon arrival, so nothing was really given any thought. No testing, no direction, no arsenal balance, no long term vision.

I sincerely hope that the devs will eventually catch up with the realisation that there IS a future for this game as long as they get their ♥♥♥♥ together.

Absolutely adore the game, but as much i adore it, its absolutely broken, useless and unplayable.
The AI, the pathing of the pals, the jobs they are supposed to perform, all of it is completely broken, exactly to the point where at first glance you dont see anything wrong with it, but after couple of 10 hours you suddenly find yourself rebuilding bases in an endless loop of frustration cause mining pals get stuck outside of base, on top of mining nodes, on top of buildings and trees while the transporters refuse to transport and the base is littered with 3000+ items to the point they start to vanish.

I absolutely stand behind this game and love the idea and execution. It broke every record possible for a reason.
But right now, its a pile of trash that frustrated me to the point of rage quitting cause its an unplayable mountain of sewage and fallout due to the AI problems.

If you read this review cause you want to find out whether or not the game is good: Yes its good, but its too alpha.

As far as idles go, this is a surprisingly well thought-out little game.
I was surprised how the dev came around again and again to upgrade the core gameplay loop like threading a needle multiple times.

TL;DR: I had fun with this one. Lots to plan and manage. Doesnt let you get bored.

Good fun

Lovely game. Not exactly a deck builder, or a tower defense game, but a vampire survivors meets rogue like + defend your base + rng + cards.

One way or another, i enjoyed it. Could use a lot more unlockables cause you burn through them extremely fast, but has decent challenges and can easily give you a few days/weeks of joy.

The formula works, the game is enjoyable. Weapon combinations, upgrates, lot of rng.
The only downside i have seen is that some weapons are exceedingly useless. Especially melee.

BG3 is a magnificent game in its own regard. For those who see such a game or any larian game for the first time, this will look like a game of the year thing.
We could go on about the immersive graphic, the sound works, the lively design of the game, but since i did not recommend the game, i will just say my part:

The insane hype around bg3 and watching a few videos about it got me to buy it, expecting another Divinity 2 level of game.
Just a few hours into it, i already knew that this was not it.
From the completely diseased California new age furry aka Trans character generator which was designed to make ESG clowns and investors tear up, to the stereotypical, utterly annoying companion characters with about as deep of a personality as shoe sole, all of it has struck me as a disease.
Then it went even further when i started to repeatedly see black and asian elves.
I mean sacrificing human characters on the altar of your ESG bs is one thing, but when you just sh*t over everything because of ESG, then you lost me at the very start.
Everything was there which was a hallmark of Larian's games, except this time around it all felt like it has been written by diversity hires and weekend d&d players.

And d&d it is my dear friends.
500 spells and a system that actively encourages you to use none because of spell slots.
There might be unique spells, there might be humorous or fun ways to bypass things, but you will probably see none of them cause you will be forced to either play Gaming Journalist difficulty where enemies die by looking at them, or you will be force feeding yourself and your entire party after every encounter you have, just so you can use your skills.

And force feeding it is, cause there is literally no way to as much as manage your party's health without those skills. You can try to mangle every trader you come across for potions, but you will realise very very quickly that your only option is to camp, which is then the next point: Camp.

The camp is also the focal point of dialogue with your companions.
When their trust gets high enough, when they need their diaper's changed or when they want to play a stereotypical geh, it will all happen there with a little ! icon above their heads.
And its all broken to hell and beyond currently.
Dialogues are mixed up, do not trigger, try to trigger but fail to, its a glorious beta level of mess.
Will my token black dude has only one purpose at the beginning of your relationship, which is to hunt down Karl, our college drop out stereotype, but if you let her join your wee band of clowns, he blows his fuse so hard that he will never mention her ever again.
Gets a token ! above his head too for the rest of the game, trying to say something, but never being able to cause the entire dialogue is somehow missing.

And that is the next grand point: Missing.
It was leaked to youtube that roughly 1/3 of the game was cut before release.
Not in sensible way to ensure story coherence, but in a completely broken, "someone let the dog into the studio and it tore apart all of our equipment" kind of way.
Key characters which should have been there to explain a bit of the backstory of the world and lore of what you find yourself in, like our honorable class reset undead, just casually pop up and are never mentioned again.
Meanwhile just him alone has over an entire hour of cut dialogue and voice lines. Removed for sh*ts and giggles.
Same is true for nearly all characters and the world as a whole.

Other popular things are: Chapter 3 is a bugged, low effort mess. No crafting, no point to books, fixed loot table instead of generating items at random, and much much more which makes this game a sub par clown fiesta compared to Larian's previous game: Divinity 2.

Divinity 2 uses the same engine and was not designed by neither californian ESG dropouts, nor diversity hires, and thats the tl;dr of this entire rant. Wanna play a good game? Go play Divinity 2.
Polished to perfection, and without the WEF, ESG and LGBTQ shait.

Shout out to nexus mods.
Your parents must be real proud of raising fascist shaits.

A good game, but falls in the typical tower defense issue: As difficulty increases, the less and less options you have at your disposal for tackling a mission.
You get more towers, more tools, more upgrade, more everything, and as difficulty increases you'll find yourself in situations where placing 1 specific turret on 1 specific spot is the only optimal way for you to tackle the level.

Its counter intuitive.
The more tools you have, the less options you get in using them cause you need to find that specific golden route the devs have thought of.

While the game outside of this is very good, and i'd recommend it, this is an instant no when it comes to TDs for me.
I prefer freedom in tackling problems, especially when i get a bunch of tools to do so.
Im not going to restart a map 80 times because i need to map out a specific building routine in order to complete it.

Every review i watched on this game listed it as somewhat mediocre, somewhat repetitive.
I disagree. This game opens up into unparalleled depths with character customisation and skill trees.
You have a full blown RPG system with character skill trees, rng/rarity loot, equipment, gemming, forging, salvaging as a foundation for the game, and then combat translates into deck building for card/turn based combat.

The game has incredible depth with a medium learning curve to it.
A very good time sink, you can enjoy building your characters and the replay value is also obvious due to the way rng is present in the game.

9/10 easily. Wholeheartedly recommended.