Recent reviews by Jimmy Lander

Look how they massacred my boy

Great story, great atmosphere, questionable gun game, wildly inconsistent frame rates, looks terrible with DLSS or at mid settings, very cinematic when it works and very scripted/robotic when the progression suddenly breaks. Definitely a culturally important piece of work but I'm so tired of poorly optimized titles at this point. V's megabuilding frame rates are absolutely atrocious, same for Kabuki circle and pretty much everything that's not the desert or Northside.

I'm very happy with this franchise, it stays consistent, you sort of know what you're getting and you're still wowed by the beautiful level design and the open-ended gameplay. It's not a cheap title but given the effort required to pull off a game like that I'd say it's worth supporting if you can afford it. It's clearly a game made by a passionate team and very fun. Reminds me of the days when games used to be experiences not live services.

I really like the game but the cartography table which is used for map sharing between people breaks your map because it was coded by two-year-olds. It causes your own markers to duplicate and floods your map with old markers overtime until the map becomes so saturated that the markers become useless. And you cannot delete or move any markers.

The problem is this:

Basically your map has two options for what you see:
* personal: shows only your markings and discoveries,
* personal + cartography: shows your personal map as well as everyone else's last records of their maps onto the cartography table

When you record your changes to the cartography table, anyone else can update their map data by reading from the cartography table.

Problems is that anytime people record their map onto the cartography table, they also record back the old version of YOUR map with all its outdated markers and names, even if you've deleted them or moved them and re-recorded this to the table. And once you read the cartography table, not only are those markers restored to your map, but they are restored onto the PERSONAL map (meaning not as part of the toggle-able "cartography table" map). We're 7 people playing on a dedicated servers and this made all our maps ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unusable. For this I am giving a trash review, because it's been 10 months since this issue was first reported and they still haven't fixed it,.

This game just doesn't work. Ignore the huge grind it is, it simply does not work. Major heists crash or freeze and are unfinishable. Objectives fail to load, controls freeze, worst case it outright fails for absolutely no reason or simply crashes or goes to a permanent black loading screen.
Which leads me to the loading times: The loading times are outrageously long and too often a loading screen gets stuck and you enter a state where you are seemingly loading in, but you're actually stuck in the loading screen forever and you have to Alt F4 force exit. Some times the game completely loses its ♥♥♥♥ and you load in a broken state where you're just watching some place in the open world but your character has not spawned (it's just your camera view), you have no hud (not any ui at all), controls don't work and ESC can't be pressed. Another force Alt F4 situations. If for some reason your game works, the loading screens are still ridiculously long and there's too many of them. When a heist mission fails you have to wait 4 minutes for the game to reload your checkpoint.
Absolutely outrageously broken game. It can be fun when it works but it just doesn't. And every lobby, almost no exception, has some modder who insta-kill explodes you in your apartment or just spawns 600 npcs in your house or spawns a flying ship in the sky or a ufo, etc. I honestly don't mind the modders too much but the actual game content and logic is so horribly broken that it is actually literally unplayable at times, especially Doomsday Heist and Diamond Casino are littered with game breaking bugs that have not been addressed properly for YEARS. Stay tf away, half your time will be wasted in loading screens and bugs.

Amazing game, everything feels vibrant and exciting! Atlas Reactor is the perfect game for those who enjoy the feeling of empowerment gained through dominating the battlefield with your strategy. The game utilizes simple and easy to learn mechanics, so the learning curve isn't big once you grasp the core. You can play 4v4 and be a part of a team or play as all 4 by controlling 4 charaters selected by you (sorta turning the game into a chess thing). Additionally there's custom modes. It has a decent player base and a discord server and it's been holding steadily throughout the years with a good flow of updates and support. I definitely think you should give this game a go. It certainly deserves a bigger player base.

I really liked Life Is Strange, as did you probably, but before you buy BtS know that it’s a pretty different experience.

I think the game is good, but after finishing it I didn’t find myself dwelling on it or thinking back about it much. It had a lot less impact than LiS and I think that’s because the entire game feels kind of forced.

Firstly the way Rachel and Chloe become friends is really forced and in addition to me totally disliking Rachel, there was absolutely no chemistry between her and Chloe. In Life Is Strange I was always excited when Max spent time with Chloe and here I kind of felt forced to go with it because I knew that’s how the plot was supposed to be. Their relationship doesn’t feel organic and in my eyes 50% of the time their conversations felt extremely awkward. Rachel’s personality is also pretty shallow to me. She comes of as unstable and pushy most of the game, she’s insensitive towards other people and is generally reckless in her behavior.

The gameplay outside of conversations is nothing special and is pretty generic. You walk around and solve puzzles from time to time, although this time around it’s not as interesting because you lack the ability to time travel. Chloe’s new ability isn’t bad but the conversations that might happen during her quicktime event often times feel awkward and unnecessarily stretched, producing weird responses and really don’t feel natural in some cases.

The relationship between Chloe and Joyce was interesting and it really made me feel compassion for Joyce, but there’s not much happening there. There are a few options that prompt you to “befriend” David but ultimately they’ve made David conflict himself as he constantly switches from “I just want you to accept me as family” to being an enormous jerk. The choices there are mostly hollow.

The ending consists of a build-up leading to nothing. I won’t spoil it of course but I personally didn’t like itз . The most notable thing to mention would be that the vibe of the game doesn’t feel the same because despite using the same mechanics it just doesn’t succeed in Convincing you of the believability of its story. Additionally it creates a lot of plot holes. I’d recommend it if you just want to get back into the universe of Arcadia Bay, but be warned that it won’t feel the same.

Honestly I wouldn't listen much to the negative reviews, people are getting too petty in my eyes. But here is all the objective truth so you don't read biased reviews:

Section 1: Storyline
- Incredibly goofy/silly/ridiculous plot and development
- Decent voice acting and amusing/annoying dialogue between characters (depending if you like Hurk or not)
- The reaction you'd get after finishing the DLC is something like "What the hell did I just play lol" or "This was ridiculously epic"

Section 2: Gameplay
- The gameplay generally feels familiar enough to the core game but also varied in terms of how you engage and fight enemies.
- With this expansion you get beam weapons, weapons that shoot exploding orbs, gauss cannons and tazer rifles, etc. The weapon handling also feels different than the way it feels in the main game, and weapons are definitely not reskins of original weapons.
- The combat can get repetitive as the most common enemy variations tend to just differ in their health pools, but there are objectively 5 main distinct new enemy types introduced (with the addition of some main game enemies) so for me personally it didn't feel that way.

Section 3: Visuals and Terrain
- The visuals are immersive and beautiful as always.
- There is a day/night cycle.
- The map is somewhat varied, there are 3 distinct variations in terrain: dunes, rocky cliffs and the border area where the terrain starts climbing up in a stairlike manner.

About the duration of the DLC, you can play it in one go, but it's definitely not short (and by that I mean it's not an hour or two long experience.) There's visibly effort put into it and the end product is a fun and enjoyable spin-off involving Nick Rye and Hurk JR.

As with all of Sanctum 2's dlc, this one adds even more brilliant and equally as fascinating maps with so much effort and passion put into the visual design, accompanied by a more challenging and refreshing set of map layouts. The maps are as always beautifully crafted, and the new weapons, towers, enemies and perks are really fun and creative! It goes without saying that I'm recommending it and I hope you'll have as much fun as I do playing it!

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