Recent reviews by Wisq

Forget all the nonsense review-bombing about the whole "you need a PSN account" requirement. This is a Sony-published multiplayer game with crossplay. It was always going to need a PSN account to make that work, and they said as much from the start. They just didn't make it mandatory at first because the servers were having technical issues (probably high load).

As for the game itself, well: Helldivers 1 was already a better "Starship Troopers" game than the actual licensed Starship Troopers games, and with a hilariously over-the-top "Team America World Police" tone to it.

Helldivers 2 is pretty much everything I could have wanted in a sequel. Sure, I wish the Shredder tac-nuke made a return, but that's really about it. And given how many old (and new) concepts they're re-adding every patch, I would not be surprised if it did return.

There's definitely some bugs they're still working on, and those can be frustrating now and then. But they've polished it enough that the actually frustrating bugs are pretty rare now, and most of the rest are just easily avoided, or even funny and enjoyable.

Overall, incredibly good, especially for a developer's first game. Starts out with Earth geopolitics, expands into space, ends with total domination of the solar system.

The seven different factions each have different endgame goals, although there's a fair bit of overlap between some of them, such that their gameplay is similar and they can get along to some degree. I've only played the Resistance so far, and I've got 200+ hours in the game now. It's deep, and it's fun.

There's still some rough edges, like the battle formations system being a bit crap (please, let us preview and edit formations), and the semi-monthly "assign councillors" phase can get a bit tedious by endgame when you're waiting months for ships to travel around the solar system.

The endgame also lasts a bit too long, and could be sped up if the aliens would work harder to defend their colonies. Without going into spoilers, one of the Resistance endgame goals involves reducing the alien presence in the solar system down below a critical threshold, and in my game, the aliens made that difficult by being cowards. Whenever they saw one of my doom fleets coming towards one of their colonies, instead of choosing to stay and fight and go down with their space station -- which would have probably done some damage to my fleet -- they conveniently decided to pick that exact moment to go strike at my nearest colony instead (and thus not be there when I arrived). The gesture was pretty futile and just served to slow down the game.

That said, it's still in Early Access and is receiving regular updates. I really want to dive back in immediately, but I'm resolved to wait until the next major update before I go again -- just because I want to see more of what's to come, rather than burning out on the current build.

In theory, this should be perfect for me. I love sci-fi, I love intricate and detailed simulators, I love Kerbal Space Program, I've got a very firm grasp of orbital mechanics, etc.

What utterly ruins this game for me is the maneuver planner. It feels like they took the original Kerbal maneuver node system from 2012 and somehow made it way worse. The adjustments I can make are always either too small or too large: Sometimes I'll have to keep sliding in a direction for ages (repeatedly lifting the mouse) to get it to change my orbital parameters; other times, I just want to make a fine tweak, but the instant I grab the node it decides to send me off to interstellar space. (I've literally had the game crash because it generates such extreme trajectories.) All the while, it's extremely laggy because it's busy generating orbital projections, making it extremely hard to stop at the precise orbit I want.

This is not an unsolved problem. Kerbal has had this solved for years. (The first precise maneuver editor mod came out no later than 2015, and they eventually integrated this functionality into the base game.) Yes, Kerbal only does two-body orbital mechanics while CoaDE does N-body simulation — but that's all the more reason that we should have more precise controls over our maneuver nodes, so we can fine tune our burns without having to drag a mouse around, needlessly calculating every trajectory in between our current one and our desired one.

I'm sure there's plenty of other interesting aspects to the game — I never even got far enough in the campaign to start designing ships or etc. But since the maneuver planner is required for pretty much any mission and I just can't stand it, this is where my interest ends.

In Road 96, you play as a teen trying to get across the border to escape your fascist country via whatever means necessary — hitchhiking, walking, bussing, taxiing, even stealing cars. Meanwhile, you meet many interesting characters along the way. Some might help you, some might arrest you, some might even kill you. But every one of them is a new and (IMO) fun experience. Basically, it's part roguelike, part visual novel, with random road trips that combine aspects of survival and dialogue to create a unique personal story each time.

The overall game story isn't super complex, but it's well-told in a very unusual and interesting way. It's 1996, and you're coming up on the ten year anniversary of the terrorist attack in 1986, when bombs went off above a border protest and rocks fell and everyone died. Meanwhile, you're learning about how all these events and characters are interconnected, and you get to help choose what direction your country should go in.

Each trip takes about an hour (if you make it to the end), and there's maybe somewhere between 6 and 12 trips per game (again, depending on how many make it to the end), so you're looking at 8-10 hours per playthrough. I did three playthroughs, for a total of a bit over 20 hours, though of course my third was a bit rushed since I was looking for specific events and had seen the rest. Still, it managed to surprise me with new scenes I hadn't encountered yet, even on the third playthrough.

Numerically, of course, 20 hours for a $20ish game isn't great. But I prefer quality over quantity — and R96 was a unique experience that I'm glad to have played.

Good presentation (graphics, sound, music), and a big world to explore. However, the mechanics really let it down, and very quickly become incredibly tedious. (And that's once you understand them, which the game does nothing to help with.)

Firstly, this isn't a game where you just control a single monkey and go off exploring on your own. You're managing a whole tribe, and you need to develop their skills and help them evolve. You do this via unlocking nodes using "neuronal energy" (i.e. XP) on the "neuronal tree" (i.e. a skill tree).

There's a huge problem with this system: Eventually, you'll need to pass a generation. When you do, you only get to "lock in" a handful of skills. Everything else will be wiped out, and you'll have to spend XP on them again.

Eventually, yes, you can lock in everything and finally stop losing skills every time you gen-up. But it's needless grind that seems to exist solely to pad the game's length. (Plus, advancing a generation is tedious: You need to pair up all your monkeys again, make them mate and have kids, etc. This takes about 5-10 minutes or so, and it's just needless busy work.)

Each kid has a chance of having a helpful mutation, and once you're satisfied with the mutations in your tribe, you can "evolve". This is like a super-generation-up. These mutations become a permanent part of your skill tree, and any feats you've completed — like "discover {location}", or "dodge an attack from a giant warthog two times", or "apply the healing properties of honey two times", etc — advance you by a certain number of years, typically 20,000 to 40,000. (You need to have completed at least one of these to evolve.)

At first, it's easy to evolve. Everything you do is new! But late in the game, I ran out of locations to explore and had done all the spontaneous feats I was going to do. I had to start treating it like a tedious achievement checklist, and doing things I would never have done otherwise. (Dodge a warthog? Why? I've killed dozens of them for their meat already.)

There's a ton of other problems, too. Early on, before you've learned weapons or how to intimidate as a group, your only realistic option is to stick to the trees, away from the dangerous predators on the ground. But the jumping system is garbage — no preview of where you'll land, and the game uses the same button for both "jump" and "grab onto surface", meaning you'll probably just end up immediately letting go again. Be ready for tons of "broken bone" injuries, and learn what plants heal them.

Speaking of which, the game pretty much requires a controller — I tried KB+M and it was awful — and even then, the button overloading is crazy. I know that console games in general have this problem, but this takes it to a whole new level. The same button is used for

• sprinting
• swimming
• jumping
• grabbing onto something while falling
• standing up
• laying down
• sleeping
• picking things up
• taking things from other people
• trading your item for theirs
• butchering
• constructing stuff
• probably several other things I've forgotten

Meanwhile, there's a whole button pretty much just dedicated to smelling things, and two whole triggers dedicated to adjusting your "mood". It's the most bonkers control scheme I've ever seen, and there were probably hundreds of times where I did the wrong thing as a direct result of this awful system.

But, back to the game. One key part of the game is leading your tribe around the map, either to change settlements (which you will do a lot, there's rarely any reason to stay in a location very long) or just so you can keep an eye on them / intimidate animals better.

You can also have your tribe do things, like sharpen sticks to turn them into spears, or grind herbs to turn them into medication — pretty useful if you want to arm your entire tribe (and you want to arm your entire tribe), treat wounds, or apply preventive medication. You do this via a mimickry system, which involves doing an action and then pressing a button that makes them mimic what you just did.

This system is awful and broken.

To understand why, you need to understand the equally awful inventory system. You only have two hands, and you always do things with your right hand, while your left one is used for holding things while you "alter" them.

Let's say one of your monkeys is injured. You've got a grinder in your hand, so you could grind them some medicine to help. You see the plant you need on the ground. What do you have to do?

• You'll need both your hands. If the grinder is in your left hand, move it to your right hand by pressing L1 (swap hands).
• Drop the grinder by pressing R1.
• Press A to pick up the herb. (Don't hold A or you'll automatically start eating it.)
• Press L1 to move it to your left hand.
• Hold L1 to enter alter mode.
• Hold R1 to begin altering it. (Don't start holding R1 before L1, or you'll throw it away as far as you can.)
• Let go as soon as you hear the audio cue, or you'll destroy it. (Can't hear the cue? That's your problem, go play another game.)
• Go find your grinder and pick it up by pressing A.
• Hold L1 to enter alter mode.
• Hold R1 to begin grinding it.
• Let go when you hear the audio cue.

Congrats, you've got medicine. Now you need to give it to the injured monkey, which means juggling their inventory, too. (Are you having fun yet?)

Now imagine if you want to have your entire tribe do this, so you can "mass vaccinate" everyone against injuries. You're looking at doing all of the steps above and also pressing "mimic me" between every step and also making sure there's enough grinders that everyone can do it and also making sure there's enough plants that everyone has one. And all the while, your food and water and sleep timers are all counting down, and you're at risk of being attacked by predators.

A lot of the game's systems would be great in a single-monkey exploration game, but utterly fall down when you try to apply them on a tribal scale. Even with something simple like "grab a dead tree branch and strip it with your bare hands to make a basic stick weapon", I would find some of them carrying an un-stripped branch, and some of them carrying nothing at all. And there's a bunch of activities that can't be mimicked at all, like fishing, or fetching coconuts from trees. It's unreliable and frustrating as all hell. Oh, and did I mention that monkeys refuse to eat or drink if their right hand is full, and they need to eat and drink constantly?

Ultimately, it's simply not worth trying to get your monkeys to mimic anything complex. They never evolve to the point that they understand how to do these things efficiently. If you really want to arm your entire tribe, you're better off making a pile of weapons yourself and then telling them to pick those up. (And don't forget to have your tribe put their weapons in a pile before you gen-up or evolve, because the game loves taking your stuff away from you whenever possible.)

All in all, of the 50 regrettable hours I spent playing this game, about 5 of them were spent coming to grips with the horribly explained mechanics (the tutorials are garbage), 10 were spent actually having some fun exploring, and the remaining 35 were just me hate-playing the game to completion because I'm stubborn like that. (And because I wanted to see if it ever addressed my problems with the game, which it didn't.) The ending actually came as a surprise — I thought I had 2 million years left to go, but it's just "NOPE you're done roll credits". But it was a very welcome surprise, and I wish it had come much sooner.

Outriders is one of those games that starts out bland, gets more interesting halfway through, and then gets repetitive because it never really progresses further.

Gameplay-wise, 95% of the gameplay is

• enter an obvious arena,
  
• watch enemies spawn,
  
• kill them all,
  
• repeat until enemies stop spawning,
  
• go smash some barrier / pick up some item / find some notes,
  
• enter the next obvious arena,
  
• repeat.

Really, I was enjoying these, for a while.  It was fun to find new gear, mod it to fit my build, tweak my stats, adjust things here and there, disassemble everything else to provide materials to do this all again next time.  But it was really starting to outstay its welcome by the end, and I had to basically force myself to finish it, since I was vaguely curious where the plot was going.

The other 5% of the gameplay is boss fights, and these suuuuck.  Three quarters of the classes in the game only get health back by killing things.  Guess who don't get any health during boss fights?  These guys!  Hope you found some weapons with lifesteal on them, because you're now screwed.

(The one saving grace is that you can turn the difficulty up and down as desired via "world tiers", although you need to progressively unlock the harder ones as you go.  The difference is pretty stark — I got tired of trying to kill the last boss on world tier 13, and dropped it down to 1, and killed them in literally one shot.)

Each class gets nine abilities to pick from, but you can only equip three.  Honestly, I think this should've been at least four, maybe even five.  I settled on a build very early in the game, then basically never changed it after that — especially because you end up modding your gear to fit your choice of abilities, so changing your build would involve changing your entire gear set and power set all at once.  I'm not going to do all that, just to try out powers I had never used and that frankly didn't seem as useful as the ones I had — and with only three slots to put powers in, there's no room for experimentation.

Also, unless you have other friends to play with, you'll be playing mostly solo.  I had my lobby open most of the time I played, and I only got other people joining me twice through the entire 20+ hour campaign.  And it's hard to blame them, because when they did join, our only method of communication was emotes.  Seriously, who makes an online multiplayer game in 2021 and doesn't put in any kind of voice or even text chat?

Speaking of multiplayer, I think this game actively hates solo players.  If you die in multiplayer, not only can your teammates come revive you, but you also get one free self-revive per area!  Yet solo players get none of this, and are just instantly sent back to the start of the area.  This is genuinely baffling — I legit wonder if maybe a designer said "give single players one free revive", and a developer misheard it as "multiplayers", and everyone is just too embarrassed to admit they screwed up.

And that's just the gameplay side.  On the technical side, it's an utter mess.

Apparently when the devs said "this won't be a live-service game", they were referring to the "service" part, i.e. they wouldn't be providing any.  Sure, that presumably means no microtransactions and etc (thank god), but also no ongoing content updates, no events, etc.

Yet the game is very much "live", as in "online only".  Servers down?  No game for you.  Bug in the server code?  Sorry, your inventory is gone.  Not a week has gone by that there hasn't been some major issue with the game's online aspects.  There's essentially zero reason this game needed to be online-only — other looter-shooters like Borderlands had no problem with just letting people mess around peer-to-peer style.

There's also been plenty of regular bugs, too.  It's fairly common that I die while I still have shields available, or that I get stuck on some piece of scenery that shouldn't be blocking me.  The cover system is so clunky that it's pretty much useless, too — it's there for the enemies, not you, since you should be in the midst of the enemies killing them.  (There's no ability to jump, or to crouch.)  There's also frequent stuttering, especially when you first load an area.

The waypoint system is hot garbage.  I've lost count of the number of times I've wondered where to go, and hit tab to have it draw a line to the next objective, and that line just goes straight into a wall, or off into space.  I'll be in an area trying to find something, and the mission waypoint will be pointing to the entrance to the area.  This wasn't a case of isolated bugs, this was almost, every, single, time.  I've been told that you can log out and log back in to fix it, but these sorts of bugs should have never made it through playtesting, and "have you tried turning it off and on again" is not a reasonable solution.

This wouldn't be so bad if the map system wasn't just as bad.  You get a line-drawing of the area, and a "you're in this big area" indicator, and that's it.  No exact position.  No heading.  And since the scenery is usually "war-torn ruins" or "overgrown jungle" or etc, it's equally hard to try to match up the vague shapes on the map with the perceived shape of the area around you.  Your only option is basically to run for a while, see what area you end up in, and use that to orient yourself.

The cutscenes are a mess.  They decided to go with a ridiculously over-the-top shakey-cam effect that just comes off as nauseating.  They added an option post-launch to smooth out the camera, but this is all done algorithmically, which means it screws up cases where the camera really is meant to move quickly.  The scenes where you shoot your bounty targets are particularly amusing (and broken), because they're supposed to pan from your face to the target's back to yours in quick succession, and just end up looking like the cameraman died mid-shoot and is randomly flailing around.

As far as the plot goes, I'm not going to spoil much here, but it's nothing hugely special.  Humans go to new planet, mess it up.  That's pretty standard sci-fi fare, and Outriders just doesn't really have the characters to make it hugely interesting.  There's some obvious plot twists, some typical "noble sacrifice" moments, etc.

The one saving grace was the main character — for a while, at least.  I liked that they were so blasé about everything, without trying too hard to be edgy and "cool".  There were a lot of moments where, in most games, your character would be getting all preachy and sentimental — and instead, the Outriders' main character is just like "lol, ♥♥♥♥ this, let's get back to the mission".  It was up to the other characters to try to preach and moralise about things, and your character just shrugged it off and got back to business.  Unfortunately, they seemed to abandon this somewhat in the late game, with your character getting as judgey and upset as the rest of the cast.  Bit of a shame.

Really, this is a mess of a game.  If you really want to play it, my advice would be,

• if you have friends to play it with, wait for 50% off
  
• if you don't, wait until it's 70% off (or more)

But really, I'd probably say, don't bother.  It's just not worth your time.

It's sad, because I don't think it would've taken a ton to change my opinion.  If the gameplay had kept getting more interesting until the end (rather than hitting a plateau halfway through), or if the plot had been actually something deep and interesting (rather than "serviceable"), or if the technical issues weren't there, I could at least tentatively recommend it — although still at a discount.

But unless you've played all the other looter-shooters and are starving for a new one, there just isn't really anything here to recommend.  There's lots of better ones out there, and Outriders really has nothing exceptional to be worth playing over those.

Seems like a cute little visual novel, but

• the ALL CAPS DIALOGUE (making it harder to read),
• the lack of any text speed options (meaning I click to speed dialogue up but sometimes that progresses to the next dialogue accidentally), and
• no ability to go back to previous dialogue (meaning I can't recover from the above)

make it a no-go for me. I'll update this if I ever end up going back to it, but it's just not comfortable to play in its current state. (Plus, I also hear there were going to be sequels / more chapters, but the dev moved on to other things instead.)

So I decided that — despite their blatant lies and misrepresentation, prior to its 2016 release — Hello Games had put enough effort into updating this game, and there were enough people saying it was better now, that I would finally give it a try … if only so I could say I had.

Started the game. After several minutes(!!) of "loading shaders", it launched me directly into my first character, without any ability to change graphics settings, change controls, etc. (This is a growing trend in games these days, and it sucks.)

Turns out there is literally no main menu — you can only change your options in-game. And apparently the options menu doesn't pause, at least in survival mode. Want to change your video options or key bindings? Enjoy listening to your character slowly die while you do. Oh, and if you die while in the options menu, hope you weren't attached to whatever you were doing, because you're going to get yanked out of it and respawned. Also, the graphics menu of course requires a restart, losing your current progress.

The UI is awful, even when it's working right. Some stuff is click, some stuff is hold, with no real rhyme or reason. I had the tutorial constantly bringing up menus that I had no idea how to access myself. I had rebound my keys, and so all the tutorial tips were useless, because apparently they don't know how to display non-standard keybinds. Oh, and you can't rebind most of the menu keys, either.

Some standard PC options are just missing entirely. Sprint is always a toggle, never a hold. It does have an FOV setting, thankfully.

My suit's voice had such a strong robo-voice that it was impossible to understand at times. I shouldn't have to enable subtitles to understand my own suit. Except I can't anyway, because there's no subtitles options. (Who needs deaf players anyway, right?)

Gathering stuff is fiddly. Either you're picking up stuff by hand — and you need to have the item under the cursor, and be positioned properly so it doesn't select the rock next door and etc (very annoying) — or you're using a mining laser that constantly overheats, seemingly for no particularly good reason except "well it's a laser in a game, it has to overheat, I guess". (The much more powerful terrain digging tool doesn't seem to overheat at all?)

All of the planetary stuff — exploration, collecting, crafting — had me wondering "Why am I not playing Astroneer instead?" And there's a million different better games for the space stuff, too, although I didn't get much time with that before it was "do I refund or not?" time.

I chose to refund. (This is the first Steam game I have ever refunded.) I might pick it up again when it's, oh, maybe 90% off. Or I might not, who knows. I don't care a lot about saving money, but I'm not willing to give them $30 for this mess.

I've been waiting for a game like this for years, so you can bet I jumped on the chance to get in on the closed beta a few weeks ago.

The game takes its gameplay cues from submarine simulators like the Silent Hunter series, Dangerous Waters, etc. As such, the easiest way to avoid trouble early on is to move around stealthily, keeping your use of "loud" systems like thrusters and reactors to a minimum. Later on, you have plenty of options to fight back and defend yourself, but stealth will still come in handy to save money on ordnance, or when the odds are against you.

Gameplay is very open-ended. There's a plot going on around you, but you're free to participate or ignore it as you see fit. Ultimately, you can treat this as an adveture, a sandbox, or anything inbetween. (Note: I haven't yet finished the story, since I've been focusing mainly on testing the gameplay, but I'll update this when I have.)

Aesthetically, the console graphics are reminiscent of the MS-DOS and earlier era, but they're all cleanly simulated within a 3D engine. That's the "modempunk" aesthetic, similar to games like Quadrilateral Cowboy.

During and after the beta, I've had lots of chats with the developers, both on Discord and by email. I've brought up bugs and had them fixed within hours, sometimes within minutes. This is a very capable and responsive dev team, and I have full confidence that this game will sail through Early Access to a final bug-free release.

(Full disclosure: as a particularly helpful beta tester, I was allowed to keep my copy after the beta ended. Thus, effectively, I "received this product for free", and so I've indicated that on this review. But my original plan was just to buy it and keep playing it as soon as it hit Early Access, so getting it for free was just a bonus anyway.)

This one didn't really click for me. The expansion/colonisation parts are okay. The initial game was interesting, expanding my reach and butting up against other empires. But once I got into military planning and combat, things really started to fall apart.

Combat is realtime and is always limited to a "long range + medium range + melee" three-phase system, after which it just ends, even if there are still ships alive on both sides. As such, it can take several turns to actually wipe out a fleet, even if you dramatically outclass them. There's also no way to use e.g. stand-off tactics that don't involve diving down into close-range combat.

There's little rhyme or reason to either the AI ship designs or to the tactics they use in combat, and strategic movement is fast enough that you can easily get ambushed, so it's very difficult to plan ahead. Even if you've already fought a particular class of ships, there's no way to see what their stats are, nor is there any sort of intelligence / spying system to see what an empire is capable of (e.g. what techs they have).

Even if you could see their techs, it wouldn't really make that much of a difference. Weapon and defense techs are really just a three-tier system with very little personality to each. Compare this to, say, the old Master of Orion, where ship technologies were numerous and varied, there was no guarantee of getting any particular technology, and there was a tendency for an empire to focus and rely on a particular weapon type, making it easier to design against them (if you had the tech to do so).

The victory conditions are also pretty wonky. By the end of my first game, I was stomping all over the galaxy, taking over every system and controlled well over half of it. I was notified that I was well on my way to both the expansion victory (75% of systems) and the supremacy victory (controlling all faction homeworlds). Yet despite clearly being on the road to inevitable victory, I still lost because the other major empire happened to reach the annoyingly arbitrary economic victory, by making 720k dust over their empire's lifetime. (Granted, you can turn each victory condition off if you don't like them, but they're all pretty arbitrary to begin with, and not individually customisable.) There also wasn't any sort of end-game summary with graphs etc. so I could see what I could've done to stop them.

The hero system is okay, but it doesn't give you very many over the course of a game. It would also probably be a lot better if the heroes were distinctly separated into two separate pools, one for running systems and one for commanding fleets. As it stands, you can quickly run out of skills to add to your governors — and yet the skill tree is completely hidden from you, so you often have to pick combat skills (useless for a governor) in order to get to more skills that might actually be useful to them. The only advantage of the current system is that you can level up a planet governor by having them run a fleet or vice versa, but it doesn't seem worth all the extra mess.

I may come back to this after trying some other modern space 4X games, but I doubt it. Doesn't really give me what I want out of a 4X.