Recent reviews by TheMilkLizard

Bad unpolished soulslike with a bad story, bad metroidvania, repetitive combat, bad and poorly animated platforming, and a lot of jank for a AAA EA game from one of the biggest licenses on the planet.

Such an aggravating game I can't wait to turn my boy into a sith.

Play Stellaris instead. It feels too often like your choices don't matter, and when they do, it is in the worst way. The battle tactics thing is the worst bit: Play a random guessing game and hope it works out, or just favour your best aspect, and hope it works out, and repeatedly load to try to figure out the opaque system.

Play the battles manually, with no fast forward, for a microscopic advantage, wasting more of your time.

Try to use your fleets tactically, but retreats almost always injure your heroes, and they are ruiniously expensive to heal when they're good.

Just play Stellaris, you will have more fun, the only problem with Stellaris is that once you play a really long game it'll slow to a crawl eventually, but at least it'll be good.

Hours of fun. I like this sort of cheap, disposable, multiplayer time you can have with friends. It is perfect for a LAN, for hanging with buddies, drinking, etc.

You're a stick person, you can hit things, block things, and use weapons to kill your opponents. Lots of weird weapons (Including snake guns that fill the arena with AI snakes), and physics stuff going on.

Only downsides are finding a match, and some network issues causing poor hit registration and issues where levels perpetually skip. Pretty minor all told.

I'm being petty, but geez, this game wastes your time. Structuring the start like "The God of Small Things" of GTA-clones was a bad plan, but even worse when it just goes into classic open world shenanigans. The gameplay ignores a whole bunch of general QoL stuff common to most open world games, but particularly GTA, which really lets it down, and makes it more of a chore. The only time the game is interesting is during the linear story bits, which isn't really what you'd expect from an open world game.

After being dumped into my nth overlong loading screen for nonsense, this game has earnt the slightest payback in terms of a negative. In this case, because I had a different objective marked, I accidentally stumbled into a mission when I was try to do side objectives, which I was then locked into-aborting the mission was listed as restarting, and last time I tried it, the game crashed on me, when I was actually trying to "stash" my carry money, and instead had to kill a bunch of enemies who were glitching in and out of floors without ammo because I wasn't intending to do a mission. Naturally, I get killed in the below average combat, doing a mission I hadn't wanted to, losing the cash I actually was trying to stash originally, which for some reason, is halfway across town, because screw you. Cue the longass loading screen which will no doubt send me back into the same mission I hadn't wanted to do.

If you're looking to enjoy this game, take a free tip. Ignore stealth, unless it's to get a sneaky first kill. Combat is way easier, and if you're actually carrying bullets, you'll do a lot better with that than buggering around with the vestigial, boring stealth system. If you want a much better version of the same concept, get Sleeping Dogs.

Buy Borderlands 2. Skip this one. Most of the classes are underwhelming, the gameplay is unfinished feeling, and it feels like walking through water just to play the game. It's got all of the annoyances of a borderlands title. None of the perks.

So, turns out this actually came out. Thanks to Reva for letting me know. 9 years of development, it still doesn't feel finished.

If you enjoyed Lugaru, you'll probably enjoy this, because it's very much just Lugaru 2, it has the original campaign as well (Presumably in the new engine, I haven't completed that part). I did, so overall I'm mostly positive and recommend it for anyone who liked the original. Play it with the "Balanced Combat" mod, it makes the fights last longer which makes the counter system a lot more interesting.

Everything else is nitpicks. For 9 years of development, the game brings nothing new to the original, the effort in making a custom engine for level creation to streamline development does not show in more content. The engine and models are nicer, but nothing special by today's standards, which is to be expected, it's a homebrew engine that went through 9 years of changes, it could never keep up. Less forgiveable are the performance issues, especially when particle effects are involved. At least the visuals still look nice when adjusting settings. All of the old annoyances with the interface are still there, the controls are limited and can prevent you from doing what you want to (Like easily dropping weapons to pick up a different one).

The campaign has no proper difficulty curve. A bunch of early fights involve armoured enemies and dogs. Because combat is so deadly, often these fights devolve into using the jumping kick to cheese them. It's overpowered, the enemies never counter it. Especially if you get spotted by more than one enemy, you'll probably end up abusing this, which is really boring. Otherwise, there's not much chance of actually damaging them. Later fights actually get easier, for most of the game, only ramping up for the end, but the most fun is had with large amounts of weaker enemies. Unfortunately, this concept isn't really developed either.

Annoying are the continuiting issues with item states. It's understandable that the game starts levels with different equipment, though often it feels dumb that the weapons were just abandoned in between-just one of many things that makes the story silly nonsense. Less forgiveable is how many levels have a break for dialogue in them, which often acts as a checkpoint. On your first attempt at what follows, you'll likely have all the weapons you looted. If you fail, only what the game wants you to (Though, full health). Which is pretty silly, if you're charitable, or broken and incompetent if you have programming experience.

The new campaign is only about 3 hours long, and is padded by long parkour sequences, many of which are pretty bad. It does come with the original, and a mod campaign "Thermium 2". Thermium 2 is pretty bad, focussing on dialogue and a branching story, neither of which really pay off. I had the most fun with the "Slayer" mod campaign, which seems to be unfinished at this point, but it used the combat to the best effect and was probably the best balanced and challenging campaign.

If you liked the original, and pay less than $15, then go for it. It was a fun nostalgia trip, but I wasted the money I paid to finance development. They made 3 hours of mediocre graphics in a linear campaign just like the original, which they took money for almost a decade ago in my case. I expected more, especially considering most of the development diaries were developing assets and developing mapmaking tools. I'd never buy anything from the makers of this game ever again, but I got maybe 3 hours fun out of it.

Rubbish. I thought it'd be ok, an improvement on the original. But it's not, it's utter crap, and it is definitely not worth a single dollar. Buy "Sniper Elite 3" instead.

Here's a list of why you shouldn't buy this:

-Ugly as sin. The effects suck, and the textures are repetitive.
-Feels awful. You'll think the game is lagging. No, that's the movement speed, the laggy mouse input.
-Worst of the Call of Duty clones. You'll get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pseudo military dialogue, walk from location to location. Just running down corridors. Then shoot some enemies with ♥♥♥♥ AI, but they're not even interesting or convincingly bad, they're just poorly pathed, stand still.
-Enemies can however see through foliage, which sucks.
-Stealth system relies on hiding in foliage and hoping the enemies will pretend you're not there.
-Checkpoints are miles apart.
-Slow mow kills aren't even nice to look at, come on, it's Cryengine, you can do better.
-You won't give a ♥♥♥♥ about the story.
-Encounters are boring.
-Enemies will psychically know their mate is dead.
-The bullets do NOT use a proper physics object, which means that leading targets can be useless.

Basically, there is one reason you want to play this. Long range sniping of enemies running from place to place with the killcam, and decent spatter effects, and entertaining locales. Instead, you have protracted "stealth" sections which fail to do the All Ghillied up bit, they're slow, they're boring, you have no real creativity, and it's linear and again, boring as hell. This is most of the game. You could cut it and it would be better.

Most of the levels are clearly unfinished, you'll blast the couple of lazy enemies in a second, and you'll run on to the next area, it's rubbish. You'll get to a location for a proper bit of shooting, then back to square one. And the rego will still suck and you'll feel like you have cancer using it.

Don't pick this one up. Pick up "Sniper Elite 3" instead, it's not a perfect game, but it's better than this.

Ok, so my review is basically a bug list that needs fixing from the devs:

Crashes when trying to retreat during special missions. Being able to see the battle play out is ok, but your maps often mess up the pathing, and then it can take forever. There's no way back to the menu screen then.

Not being able to control your men during special missions. If you ask me to do a 31 v 31 skirmish with native gear against armed enemies, then letting me use the basic mount and blade commands would be nice

The command and control system has gotten worse from Warband era Mount and Blade, I haven't played enough Fire and Sword to comment. There's a map, but it's unintuitive, didn't work for me while trying to move units, and it plays out in real time. I used to just ride my horse towards the nearest high point and tell infantry and archers to stay there. Now I have to sit on my horse and wait for them to get there. Not good.

Horseman are worthless. Don't pick up any Harquesibiers if you plan on fighting on the land. You'll bury them the next day. If you get them to follow you, and make sure they hold off, and play a retreating action with them you can inflict some casualites, but they have really, really low survivability, even if you don't let them get mobbed. Often I'll steamroll an enemy, but lose most of my stupid horse gunners.

Armour is key, but doesn't seem to scale up nicely. I'm still on a fairly easy difficulty, and the armour is tissue paper. Especially to guns. Taking 27p damage in a 32 head protection helmet when I can't even kill regular troops on every hit with a high end gun is infuriating. I guess it doesn't matter so much since the armour costs nothing once you start raiding convoys, but still.

You can't do anything to avoid a boarding. If the AI thinks it will win a boarding, it will charge you, if not, it will sail in circles firing it's cannons. It's really obvious, really quick. So if the enemy boat comes at you, fire on it with a broadside and run away. Use your chainshot and it'll stop. It's fine for now, but it's going to get old soon, which brings me to the next point.

Boarding combat is really damn stupid. I don't seem to have any way of knowing how many men I'll field, how many combat troops I have on each boat, or assigning them, I can't order my men to stand grand, so if I'm outnumbered, there goes picking them off and using a local numerical advantage to inflict some casualties.

Taverns are just annoying. Fix the layout. I don't want to climb stairs to do anything.

Every menu takes forever to load.

Your ship will automatically land if it bumps into a port. This will cost you tax, and take a while, loading, more ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Sometimes pathing will do this for no reason.

Multiple ship boardings aren't possible.

I do really like this game. It shows a lot of promise, and a lot of people asked for it. But it needs serious patching, and probably some content updates. I just can't recommend it to you if you aren't willing to put up with the bugs. It's mount and blade on ships, and yeah, for the most part it works, even with the clunky, dated engine and combat limiting the boarding action. Like Mount and Blade, you can fall into a rhythm of progress and have a lot of fun. Just, look up a tutorial first. Recruiting is dumb, and you need to recruit heavily. There's a message board in towns for it. You advance a lot quicker in this game than the originals, or maybe I'm just better. The combat feels harder, and I played on fairly hard difficulties, full damage, full speed, full size, etc in Warband, which is good and bad. Getting better ships is based on "Rank" which is based on your reputation, which lags far behind what you can do combat wise. It's easier to steal better ships than buy them, which becomes more of a problem as you start looking at attacking Captains for their ships. I've got a fleet of Light Galleons, still chasing down a medium or an even better ship and the best I can buy is a brig.

Upgrading ships is expensive. Don't do it until you have a decent ship, otherwise you're wasting time. Don't be scared to sell ships and upgrade.

-Poorly optimised.
-Bad controls.
-Long load times.
-Unstable.

It's a bit of a mess, I'm kinda disappointed. The 2nd ran really well, quick loads and everything. This one dips framerate all the time, freezes, and crashes. And glitches are really annoying.

Played a good bit more since then. Seems very lacking in content. I've liberated most of the map. The objectives to unlock missions are unclear. They rely on liberating nearby settlements, but they'll refer to it with geographic locations which aren't marked.

The game is visibly unfinished. It's obvious that the missions were hacked together. None of the characters are likeable, Rico is ruined, it's not even fun stuff, it's just annoying. No point in watching the cutscenes, which the game is litered with.

You have to travel like mad, ground vehicles are a waste of time because the wingsuit is usually faster. Go to mission start, travel 2 ks to the actual mission start. It's annoying. You'll also clear all the settlements before your missions there, especially since it doesn't mark the ones to clear so you'll have them left relatively intact, so your missions occur in destroyed bases with no enemies spawning. Good work guys. Similarly, when you're attacking large compounds, it's obvious that team mates were meant to help. There are gates for you to lift, like in police stations, which you can do, but it helps no one, because Rico doesn't need a car.

The challenges to unlock upgrades are boring and tiresome, most of the upgrades are pointless. Nitrous is dumb if your car doesn't have it, you'll have to summon it if you want it, that's super annoying. Guns don't get upgrades, and I found the weapons in JC2 more fun, especially with upgrades. I loved my upgraded revolvers. This, the guns have no soul. There's obvious best weapons, and it's just a matter of switching between guns based on ammo.

Honestly, this game reminds me of the worst parts of JC1, not the best parts of JC2. They included some fun gadgets here and there, but they're just there for the Goat Simulator crowd to sell the game in videos and gifs, it doesn't improve it.

I recommend not getting this game. Get JC2 instead, it's still a classic, and it's far better than this. Even the lacklustre story, which at the very least, wasn't blatantly patched together at the last minute with poor rewrites.

Still broken.

Still worthless.

Game is full of worthless trash, and you run around this worthless trash, looking at worthless trash animations being killed by zombies which are worthless trash models.

I thought it was going to be the step up zombie-wise from Minecraft, and I heard they'd fixed it.

They haven't.

This game isn't even pre-alpha worthy. The interface is ugly and broken, the engine is worse, and there is nothing engaging about playing it.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.