Recent reviews by Benjie

Wildlands was a fun callback to the Ghost Recon games I used to play as a kid in the early 2000s, having not touched the franchise since then. For all the griping I read online about the loot boxes, I spent 60 hours and zero extra dollars enjoying the hell out of this game. I didn't touch online play (just solo and co-op with friends), so maybe the loot box problem is prevalent in that content - don't know.

This game is a great blend of tactical wet work and fps skill. If you're an OK shooter in FPS games and want a game where you can focus more on correctly directing a squad, you will enjoy this game. If you're like me and are less interested in squad commands and just a fast/accurate shooter, Wildlands is still conducive to this style. Granted, if you ignore stealth and pretend this is Far Cry, you're gonna have a rough time.

I thought the rinse/repeat of creeping up to a camp, deploying a drone to quietly mark targets, carefully plan out the order of enemies to take out with suppressed gear, and execute, would get boring after a while. Nope.

In terms of the main story, the characters and storyline were much more engaging and interesting than I expected. That said, if you want to just completely ignore the story and roam around the (HUGE, btw) map running your own ops on camps/towns/outposts hunting gear unlocks, go for it.

10/10

Northgard is a fun and whimsical RTS that's grabbed some good design ideas from several different RTS games down the years. The first few games as you learn will be about learning the game systems and focusing on surviving the winters and trying out different buildings and tech trees. Later on, you can focus new games on playing to the strengths you now understand as you scout territories and develop a gameplan based on the resources and terrain around you.

I had a fun first 10 hours, and at a glance they've already added new content since I played last - I will definitely revisit sometime in the future.

9/10 for casual RTS fans, 7/10 for more hardcore players (probably not what you're looking for)

Very fun spin on an RTS with a focus on base building. You start the game with a basic building and units, and your goal is to survive against the zombie hordes that cover the entire map surrounding your starting area until a certain amount of days has passed.

The first 10-15 hours of just learning trial by fire in regards to effective base building, unit control, tech trees, and when to play conservitavely vs when to expand aggressively are super rewarding. Once you've got a handle on how the game works, from then on it's really just optimizing like any RTS.

If you are casually into RTS games, you will love the hell out of those first several hours of losing to stupid mistakes and improving and eventually winning your first game. If you are more hardcore, the challenge offered by the harder difficulties and later maps is intensely rewarding and punishing.

10/10

This game is great in its simplicity - easy to pick up, hard to master. The missions have an FTL/XCOM feeling of being behind and having to make hard choices with direct consequences, which makes each run fun and stressful. The combat itself is very basic, but its also easy to get overconfident and make simple mistakes.

Overall, Into the Breach is a fun game to play here and there - if you're the type of person that likes to boot up FTL and just do one run then log off, this is the perfect game for you.

10/10

Disclaimer: I've only played the Vortex campaign, and never touched the battle/skirmish only mode. This is also the only Total War game I've played. Anyone who is a seasoned (or even casual player that's just played several) Total War gamer should completely ignore this review, but if you're new to Total War and want to get your feet wet, you might share my experience.

Total War: Warhammer II's main campaign was a fun and challenging experience. I honestly did not play many of the battles actively and chose auto-resolve much of the time, as I feel controlling the units and their responsiveness to be fairly clunky. I have hundreds of hours sunk into the Civilization franchise, so the campaign from a non-battle perspective was a fun escape from the norm for me. I've also spent a similar amount of time playing RTS games, but the Total War battle system just felt like too much of a far cry from traditional RTS games for me personally.

If you're looking for a game whose campaign tries to blend the 4k strategy game style with large-scale RTS battles, it's definitely worth trying out.

7/10 for me.

PoE 2 was a good experience, coming from someone that enjoys RPGS and CRPGS casually, having never really gotten that hardcore into the latter. I played about 80% of the storyline of the first game and caught up on what I missed from the wiki, and didn't feel like it detracted from my experience in PoE 2. That said, you can definitely identify areas in PoE 2 where playing the first game all the way through would have been beneficial. Overall, I'd say if you don't mind waiting on playing the newer title, play through PoE 1 first.

PROS:
- Living, breathing world with a fantastic amount of unique places/characters/voice acting.
- Good balance between clean gameplay and that rough CRPG feel.
- Ship travel/exploration design is great, removing the annoyance of endlessly running through old zones or breaking immersion through fast traveling.
- Clear sense that your decisions matter for your own character development, that of your party, and of the world.
- Character customization through talents/abilities/skills/items feels really good.
- Multiclassing was a bit overwhelming in terms of total customization options, but that's a good problem.
- Fun combat system once you get the hang of it.
- New addition of level scaling in difficulty options was a GREAT addition for those who want it.
- In my opinion, the revamp of the health (vs endurance) system from the first game was necessary and they nailed it.
- Ship customization (base building, basically) and battling was very basic in its design, but surprisingly fun.

CONS:
- Combat system isn't super intuitive, but you'll get on top of it eventually. If you are a CRPG veteran, it's what you've come to expect from these games.
- Balance between main story and side stories/quests felt a bit off. Games like this tend to have much more side content obviously, but Deadfire felt like the main story was very long.
- Main story felt a bit too scripted. Lots of dialogue choices, but at the end of the day I only felt like I made a few real meaningful decisions to get where the game ended up.
- Early release crashes and gpu bugs as you'd expect, but I'm sure they will be dealt with soon (or already).
- Few balance issues with multiclassing and class combinations that trivialized content, but not overwhelmingly so.

Overall, I'd say if you like CRPGS this is already and your radar and you are already going to play it. If not, I don't know what you're playing instead. If you haven't really gotten into CRPGS, I'd recommend both this game and Divinity: Original Sin 2. Both are good examples where the second is much more fine-tuned and better games from a development standpoint, but you could definitely benefit from playing the first in both series.

8/10.

I used to play 'mech games years ago as a kid, so jumping into BATTLETECH was a real treat for me. Nostalgia aside, this game really knocked it out of the park for me. The way I'm describing the game most easily to new players is that it's "XCOM with 'mechs" - a loose analogy, but it's the right headspace to be in when considering the purchase.

PROS:
- Amazing level of 'mech customization
- Intuitive XCOM-style turn-based combat (easy to learn, but rewards more thought out tactics)
- Unique mechwarrior (pilot) talent trees
- Wide range of terrain/battlefields which have different effects on battles
- Ability to make decisions that have a very direct and meaningful feeling of punishment/reward

CONS:
- Early release crashes and graphics issues, but they are probably already cleaning these up
- Storyline feels a bit restrictive and linear
- FTL-style events that happen between battles seem forced and unnecessary

Overall, the game is worth picking up if you like turn-based combat/tactics games. Personally, I felt like the storyline/characters/between mission events felt like the devs needed to pile content on top of a 'mech battle simulator to ship it, but at the end of the day I found myself skipping through everything so I could get to 'mech customization and battling during the campaign. If they removed the campaign completely and BATTLETECH was simply skirmishing and customization, it would still definitely stand on its own two legs for me.

9/10

Roguelike permanent unlock grinding, fast/responsive movement, expansive customization options, permadeath stress, memorizing enemy/boss cycles, fluid combat (especially when you've got all 5 spell slots equipped), and that decision to get greedy and grab a cursed item, then die in the next room and want to uninstall.

The last roguelike I played before Wizard of Legend was Dead Cells and they have a lot of similarities, primarily the super responsive and satisfying movement. If you buy one, try the other for sure.

10/10.

Feels like 20XX meets Rogue Legacy with a little Castlevania thrown in. Only 4 hours in, but this is the roguelike platformer that I've been itching for.

Really sweet game to burn off some steam playing. Good mix of an interesting/tense storyline and hack/slash gameplay for an enjoyable playthrough.