Recent reviews by Mana

It's alright I guess

Mad Max is an open world action game that is staggeringly well optimised. The core gameplay loop of driving around, fighting off patroling vehicles and frequent brawling remained enjoyable for me throughout the entire experience. In addition the game world is easily one of the best in the genre, taking the lifeless wastes of the Mad Max universe and making them interesting and visually unique, no world in gaming looks quite like this one.

As great as the good parts are, the bad is of equal magnitude. The core gameplay is fun, but the structure that gameplay sits in is the worst in the entire genre, the dull routine of clearing camps, and other markers on the map got old by the end of the first zone and the structure never really improved from there, locking off entertaining upgrades behind this filler content would be a fine move if the filler wasn't so boring.

In addition, much like other games sharing the Arkham/Assassins creed style parry counter combat system, I predicted that I'd have to gimp myself to make the combat entertaining. Even with intentionally not taking certain upgrades and fighting subotimally, the hand to hand gameplay fails to hold up as well as the vehicle combat, fistfights can be made entertaining, but all of the engagement has to come from the player, the combat system itself lacks Shadow of Mordors capacity for self tailored difficulty.

Despite the serious shortcomings of the filler content, the main campaign is a ton of fun, though it is gated off by the godawful map marker clearing. If the game is on sale or the world is particularly enticing to you, I'd recommend picking it up, if not, don't waste your money, while the good in this game is really good, the bad is horrendous.

It has that Turtlerock Touch™, I've been playing for 22 hours now and I'm finding fresh enjoyment in every round. The characters are great, both from a gameplay and a personality point of view, and the game is very finely balanced.

There is plenty of strategy involved on both sides, and I believe the community has barely scratched the surface on the possible tactics the hunters can pull off with splitting the team. Which is done rarely but to spectacular effect when pulled off. I've seen some ballsy ♥♥♥♥, like a wraith player taking out all the survivors on Rescue after leading the hunters on a wild goose chase. I've seen some great play from some great players, this is shaping up to be a very deep game, and the promise of new hunters, maps, and monsters will only add to that depth.

I'll do a list of the pro's and con's.

Pro's:

-Very well balanced.
-Great character design
-Highly replayable
-Visually interesting maps, with good atmosphere and interesting terrain
-High strategic depth

Con's:

-Minor mouse cursor bug, which is easily worked around but is an annoyance.

There's been a fair bit of whingeing on behalf of some on the large number of DLC skin packs available at launch, as somebody who is studying multimedia development, I can safely assure you that no, they did not parcel away content from the game to sell back to you, what happened was this, for the last months of development pre-launch, half the team had literally nothing to do, these people were the artists, they can only spend so much time playtesting to help the designers balance the game, and they need something to do, so they create skins. This continues right up until the game launches, including past "content lock", a point at development (also known as Gold) where nothing is added and the game is finished, being shipped to stores or set up with Steam. There are a whole bunch of actual in game skins, at least one for each character, and the skins themselves are harmless. Overpriced, maybe, that's debateable, but harmless.

It's too early for me to tell what negatives the game will have, so this section we be revisited over the coming weeks.

To put it bluntly, Enemy Within is a fantastic expansion in the traditional sense. Adding broad sweeping new features to the base game, as opposed to the modern day version of expansions. To put a cherry on the proverbial cake, Enemy Within is required to use the Long War modification, a brilliant mod which serves as a bona fide second expansion on top of the Enemy Within content.

Payday 2, it didn't get as popular as it has without good reason, but it has it's share of flaws as well. I'd recommend this game to fans of Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect 3 multiplayer or Gears of War's fantastic horde mode.

The games concept is simple, you and three friends attempt to pull off a variety of heists ranging from literally robbing a convenience store up to grand larceny, prison breakouts, robbing the FBI, and more. New heists are added moderately frequently, and each new heist is usually better than the last. Weapons are added quite frequently, and gameplay meta and builds constantly adjust. You can tackle heists in two main ways, stealthily or loud. With most heists having a predilection towards one or the other. Bank Heist for example, is a stealth leaning heist. Some heists are forced to be one or the other, Hoxton Breakout is loud, Shadow Raid is stealth.

To tackle the frankly impressive number of police officers send at you, you have a variety of weaponry at your disposal and they can all be heavily modified. Most guns have one or two builds that define their role in the meta, for example, the Car-4 can be built into a high magazine size combat rifle or the "overkill won't let me not bring a gun at all" weapon with absurd levels of concealability.

This game is going to be a lot more fun with actual friends, pubs can range in skill but even the better players aren't going to be much fun to play with online. The game is also considerably more fun when you keep up with the current meta, either through careful consideration of weapon pro's and con's or by just googling what's popular right now, the equipment and skills change frequently enough that there is usually a new build to try out or a new gun to bring to bear, even ignoring the constant stream of Gage Weapon Packs.

To reiterate, buy this game if you have three friends who enjoy playing co-operative games, and be prepared to theorycraft and try and keep up with the games constantly changing meta.