Recent reviews by Pentbot

It is the 26th of October 2026, and Helldivers 2 has recently patched their game to change to Easy Anti-Cheat, citing that it is to combat "rampant" cheating by way of mods. Made all the more suspect that there was a FAQ section in their announcement post, that came out a few hours /before/ the patch went live, and before the community was made aware of such change...

Putting that aside, ever since this update, the stability of my game client has nosedived, with the game at random intervals crashing to desktop. The longest uninterrupted stretch of gameplay I have enjoyed was about 1.5 missions, with the shortest intervals not being long enough to get to the Super Destroyer's bridge. To put some numbers on this, in the 2.7 hours I have logged since the patch update, my client has crashed about 25 times. Granted, Helldivers 2 has never been an especially stable title, but this is orders of magnitude worse.

For what it's worth, I have never modded my client, and I have never cheated. Ironic that I am suffering this instability, while one of my friends who is modding enjoys a more stable experience.

My next steps are to recreate these problems, and use the crash logs to see if I can get some help from their support team, cause I would really like to be able to continue to enjoy this product I have purchased. Should my problems be resolved, I'll change this review.

It is still a bit to early for me to properly assess the game in terms of it's mechanics/UI/balance/game-feel/etc - what isn't to early to assess is that the game has already crashed to desktop twice. These crashes occurred during Co-Op play, and it resulted in all three of us crashing out.

To the game's credit, it appears that not only is the progress auto-saved, but that it did/does so after each door, so not a lot of progress was lost, so at least it's doing better than it's previous instalment in that regard.

I just want so much better for this game. Pretend like I'm giving this a positive-ish review because I feel it does way more things right than wrong, but I would be remiss to not point out it's many shortfalls in the UI department, and I'm all for getting that extra attention with a thumbs down.

But first, the Good:
-Brewing potions is neat, and the fact there are many different ways to make the same potions, as well as an array of different options to dress them up. The potions you brew to donate to your adventurers are functional and cheap, while the ones for customers can have positive quirks to up their value. Do you strive for perfection, making sure your ratios are exact, or do you just kind of wing it with whatever you have?

-Characters are narrativly rich. I have not "finished" any of their stories yet, but the dialogue has a healthy dollop of nuance that means I'm always looking forward to the next level up in their relationship, and not just for the sake of discounts/card unlocks.

-Bartering with Customers is rewarding. There is wide selection of cards that can go into your haggle deck which I feel could lend themselves to a wide variety of strategies, and while it might be a bit of a chore to haggle tooth and nail to end up at +30% to your first couple of dodgy potions, later on it's much more rewarding, and more difficult as customers become more picky/stressed/arrogant.

-There are a bunch of little systems that means that there is a healthy amount of random chance (say, what ingredients you get from adventurers/guild hall outcomes/day events) which gives you the spice, but the player also has some options to forge their own path (do you buy ingredients from Quinn, or take a random box from Salt and Pepper which would mean less money spent per ingredient? - Which ingredients do you grow in your slime farm? - What kind of haggle deck do you want to build? - when do you commit to an advertising campaign from Moth person whatever their name is I can't remember?)

Now, the Annoying.

-There needs to be way more work done to make the UI nicer, cause there are so many QoL features that could make things way easier, which I suppose is not surprising when there are so many systems in a game like this. For example;
Not being able to sort Quinn's stock by any method, only being able to view 10 ingredients at a time in Quinn's shop, having the double dialogue box come up showing what ingredients are going to be available after expanding their stock is unnecessary, if you want to by all 10 of a particular ingredient, you need to click all the way up from 1 to 10, there is no button to empty your cauldron of all the ingredients you have in it you need to double click each one, sometimes the ingredients stack on top of each other and so to remove the bottom one you need to remove the one above it you have to double click on each ingredient to add it to your cauldron, there is no way to sort ingredients in ascending/descending order of strength, the order of ingredients are in the order that you get them and you can't change said order, for some reason by default when going to the brew menu you are automatically looking at not only potential ingredients but also fire fuel and other potions you have making that menu even more cluttered, you can't see which positive/negative traits are of a potion you are about to/or are brewing you have to mouse over each ingredient and check, it can be way less clicks then it is now to swap to a different cauldron (just have an arrow at the side of the cauldron to go to the next one), there is nothing in game of a "shopping list" so you can remember what you need to go and buy from Quinn, you can't check what the monsters/obstacles are of an expedition in your shop and have to check with an actual adventurer, I want to be able to sort ingredients by type in the slime garden window, I want to change the order in which ingredients appear in, I want to be able to ignore particular ingredients, I want to be able to do like a "brew rehearsal" to see if a particular combination of ingredients is going to work before I go and buy/find/grow said ingredients, I want to be able to save a specific combination of ingredients to quick-put into a cauldron, there is an icon on an ingredient which shows which area that ingredient can be found - why not the reverse? (i.e. before I send an adventurer out I want to see what ingredients I might find or at the least what I've already found before), I would like an icon that shows if I have expanded Quinn's library so I don't accidentally use my last one of a rare herb, I would like to see a breakdown of the +% on what determines the current potion sale price, now that I think about it I'm not even sure if there /are/ any keyboard shortcuts //for anything at all//, or show prompts to indicate said shortcuts, I want a place to see where all the loading tips are cause there is some critical information in them and my computer is loading this game too fast for me to read half of them, why is when I sort by ingredient trait it shows both the positive and negative ones with no way to filter for either, while you can sort for ingredients that have for example A B and C (which shows you ingredients that have to have A, B and C)(which also still shows your fire material and potions at the end of that list why do I need to see that I don't want to have to keep clicking to turn off that filter), there isn't a way to filter for the /absence/ of say B and C (i.e. only show me ingredients that /don't/ have something), there isn't an option to show ingredients that you've previously had but how have none of (which is possibly only a problem cause of the poor search ability, i.e. there have been times when I've been trying to find an ingredient that I've run out of, but I didn't /know/ I had run out of it), there is no ability to have "favourite" ingredients (which I'm not even sure would fix anything, but it might help), when you have paid for a enchantment you are no longer able to check any potion or ingredient for that day as to what traits they /actually/ have, enchantments only show only one icon of what they enhance despite enhancing multiple traits, you can't mouse over said traits to know what they are (I know I have trouble remembering between the two ones that feature a head), it would be nice to see what the upgrade path of the various cauldrons are before I commit to buying one, potions you have made are not grouped in any meaningful way with no way to filter them.

But this is what happens when you get older, you start to really focus on UI, and having a bad one just kind of hurts.

While the development team are still working on patching the game as of 13-Nov-2022, little of the list I just rattled off are featured as it's mainly gameplay breaking bugs that they are focusing on, which I have encountered a few times already.

If you wanted to play a more beefy version of Reccetear (sans combat sequences), with the character models from Sea of Thieves, deck building akin to Heathstone, a robust potion mixing system, with a dollop of visual novel/dating simulator, then this is an easy sell, and I think you should absolutely support the developer as I don't feel like this style of game comes around very often.

If you are an old fuddy duddy that get's hung up on sub-optimal UI, come back in a couple of months.

Hey hey people, Pentbot here.

This is more of a first impressions type review, so add as much salt as you wish.

I have played through the first two campaign missions now, and a bunch of stuff has become evident;
-The spritework across the board looks superb.
-The unit and building sounds are crisp (I especially love the */bwong/* of the minstrels hitting stuff)
-The UI feels pretty good///I have not encountered any massive shortcomings in my limited playtime.
-Has really taken the Heroes of Might and Magic formula and has brought it into the modern day (It feels like it's inspired from three, but that might be my bias coming through)

Keeping in that mindset of it being essentially HoMM3-dash-2;
-The Hex-based combat feels great; like a comfy pair of shoes. I especially like the addition to opportunity attack rules concerning units moving through/in/away from another unit's adjacency.
-There is terrain elevation now! There are still obstacles, but with the addition to elevation, you can buff units by just having them be up high! Or nudge off enemy units from their lofty perches! Or just swap spots!
-It's an interesting choice to be made when levelling up a hero, whereby you can increase the available number of unit stacks - and that there is a limit to them, which is a great way to get heroes out and about without them just building a death-stack.
-This spell system. Wowzers. I have got a lot of work ahead of me to find some good combinations, and the fact that your "mana" (in game called "essence") for spells is tied to the number and type of unit stacks... and that a whole bunch of spells are unlocked at the start... and that there are different types of mana, and if you can get a combination of different kinds you can pull off some neat combos...
-Even just the advent of the Rally-Point building that takes up one of the build spots in a city is great; it allows you to recruit units from your other towns.
-And the towns are modular! Maybe you want to go ham on the minsterals, well just build taverns! Just want more money, build buttloads of farms! Don't have any lumber around? Build lumbermills in your town!

TLDR: I'm loving this game at the moment, I've only just scratched the surface, will be playing more, you're all truly wonderful, have a good one!

I wasn't sure if my amount of playtime (~10 Hours) was going to be a good indication of the games potential, especially since it /feels/ like there /should/ be more. But after delving into the wiki, it looks like there is even less substance then I was giving Frostpunk credit for.

Allow me to regale you with the cascade of little grips that on their own, are not terrible, but add up to make a game that doesn't feel like it's complete;

• There is a really big focus on having workplaces and shelters be warm, and anything below the highest level of warmth is going to risk your populus in some way to the cold -- fair enough -- except for your Scout team/s, that are completely fine and healthy except for story events, where they can spend weeks away from your colony lugging around a buttload of stuff, and also not require food?
  
• On medium difficulty, prior to upgrades, I need to have half my population be devoted to collecting raw food. Ok fair enough, but this job has to be done at night, when it is colder (so I've heard), and the only risk of the workers falling ill is them walking to their hut. Also, why do they hunt at night? (it is so that you can cheese it by having workers work a day job, and then manually take them off that job and put them onto the hunter's hut at night?) Also, what are they even hunting? What other creature/s have survived this frozen wasteland to provide this much reliable nutrition?
  
• By contrast, you can get away with having like two chef's in 1 cookhouse for a long time.
  
• Coal is just freely available by thumping the ground? Then why /also/ include an actual coal mining building, which can only be placed on specific tiles? Not to mention the outpost that exists in most of the scenarios where a team of 10 people who don't need food, shelter or heating are able to convey 800 coal per day from a distant outpost? Yeah, no wonder they limit the number of outpost/teams players can make.
  
• The automatons need heating to function, and need to recharge each day (as far as I can tell the "going to be refeuled" animation is just for show, and doesn't actually decrease their productivity), yet the first one we come across had been snow-sweeping a bridge for god knows how long before we encounter it.
  
• Why are the Automatons affected by the Foreman upgrade?
  
• Speaking of the Foreman upgrade; Always through the game, there are a bunch of choices which basically boil down to increasing/decreasing discontent/hope (which I mean, is a bit bland, but anyway) yet using the foreman ability on a building is just a straight win. You mean to tell me, in a setting where people are getting up in arms about chefs and potential deserters stealing food, that giving 10 days worth of rations to someone that then bosses you around at work /doesn't/ have any negative side effects?
  
• Shouldn't Steelworks need fuel? Putting aside the requirement to heat the building for the workers (unless you use an automaton), no extra energy is required to turn raw iron ore into steel? In a game who's central premise is all about burning through coal to keep warm?
  
• Why are medical facilities manned by Engineers? Is that they they need a 1:1 ratio of staff to patient? Could you not think of a better name for "skilled worker?"
  
• It wasn't especially intuitive, for me at least, to know that rather then having people work on collecting the coal deposited by the thumper (which itself is odd - why wouldn't I want to collect the coal being thumped?) I needed to build a gathering station near it and have /them/ collect it, that way the workers stay warm? The game mentions that 1 thumper feeds two gathering stations, but that doesn't account for the increased gathering speed tech?
  
• A building that has been turned off still a) has workers go to that workplace, to potentially get frostbite and b) still consume coal with their heaters. The obvious way of combating this is to manually free the workers up, and then turn off the heating, which is even more tedious when you consider that I would want to turn off the building after that anyway, so I don't have a little red icon over the building saying that no one is working that building...
  
• The "Faster outpost team" research, which, as you might imagine, makes the outpost teams faster, in fact doubles the output of the team.
  
• There is apparently a recommendation in the wiki to turn the generator down during the day to save coal and then turn it up for the night, which, along with not being telegraphed that that is the case (after all, the big temperature display front row centre doesn't change on the time of day), sounds like painful micromanaging!
  
• You would think in a world where they can make steam powered factory robots they would also have invented thermostats! Where is the setting where I can set the building to be a particular warmth level, rather then if the heater/steam tower/generator level thing?

I don't even feel like this list is comprehensive. It kind of feels like the designers focused on weird things when making the game. In any case, if you want an experience where you and a couple of colonists try to eck out and existence in a frozen wasteland, and all of the mechanical and emotional struggles that follow on from that, give Rimworld a shot.

It's alright, I guess.

A Roguelike Steampunk Mech game where you power your various system using a gem-match system? Sounds pretty good - but I tell you what, give it a while before you buy it.

After having played through the entire (rather short) campaign which has a moderately interesting story, some of the weaknesses start to shine through. The UI is pretty unintuative, the variety of weapons/mechs/systems/characters are limited, the missions all pretty much devolve into "kill the enemy mech" and the currency you get in game doesn't feel like it is purchased on anything exciting or lasting...

But I have heard they are going to be adding more content into the game, so stay tuned. Otherwise, go somewhere else.

A top-down, indie, roguelike spaceship simulator.

A particularly good example of a game with has a handful of basic concepts, which can be fleshed out to have an elaborate plethora of tactics. For example, will you play a ship that focuses on weapons, if so, beams, missiles, lasers, or something else? Will you play a ship that focuses on boarding parties, and teleports hand-to-hand specialists to kill the enemy crew? Will you make a ship that revolves around the use of drones that attack the enemy or protect your own? Will you do a mix of everything mentioned? Do you upgrade your engines for more avoidance, or your shields to soak more hits? Do you want better blast doors to protect your crew from boarders and isolate fires, or do you upgrade your sensors to see what your foe is up to?

My tip to you, do not feel bad for having to look up how to go about unlocking the other type of ships, as some of them have rather convoluted requirements that do not occur in every playthrough.

Speaking of playthroughs, the game was developed with a 10% win rate in mind, even on “easy,” and since the sectors are procedurally generated, it is possible that even through you did everything right, you can still get WTFROFLStomped.

You cannot do worse then -my- first playthrough, I can guarantee that.