Recent reviews by Leonator™

I did my part against the tyranny of sony o7

This game is nothing short of a miracle. Never would I dream of having a story-driven, RPG-lite, first person shooter based on Robocop. It is a bit glitchy, it is rough around the edges at some points, it doesn't have the best optimization... but man, it is worth it

The game is just about remorselessly shooting gangs, but also about going around issuing parking tickets, solving local disputes and making choices between helping the public or the corporation. The tone is on point, it's as much of a dark comedy as it is a somber dystopia, as it is a touching story about humanity and trauma.
The graphics are great, Robocop looks and moves like he should, all the recognizable characters from the movies look perfectly like the real thing. The voice acting is great too, specially nice to have the real actor from the 80's, Peter Weller, doing Robocop again.

I greatly recommend the game, take it slow, explore around and try to immerse yourself on it, the devs clearly put a lot of effort and care into this, and it definitively shows... Just remember that it's a relatively lower budget AA game, not a Sony-caliber AAA cinematic experience.

And I would also recommend watching Robocop 1 and 2, the movies, before playing this... But hey, you should just do that anyway, great movies

Most fun I've ever had on a competitive-ish multiplayer game. if you got 2 friends to play with, go for it.
Monetization is kinda bad tho, so be aware, Premium money is expensive if you aren't american

I can't believe this is actually one of the best Sonic games ever made, lol

It's truly impressive how much better they did the whole "you get to be friends with Sonic and co." thing compared to Sonic Forces... The writting is fantastic and all the art is incredible, music is good too

Excelent remake/remaster of an old masterpiece, one of the best examples of it in the whole industry

Good game with a few odd design choices and somewhat glitchy.
The game is pretty fun, definitively scratches the management itch nicely, but it does come with a few oddities...

It plays in a level system of sorts, you have a few missions to complete, once they are done you can move to the next level and start a new station on a new map... in each level you can gather unlock points to spend on the skill tree. My main issue from the start is that the passengers are fairly demanding from pretty early, which makes the early game very difficult... once you start unlocking more features, hiring more staff (that are technically unlockables as well, since you carry them over from level to level) and getting better equipment, things become a lot easier, even if you are asked to build bigger and bigger stations.

The second problem is that levels are not very big in build space, they have unremovable tiles you can't build on, which ALWAYS end up generating right in the way, making the process of building an efficient station a lot harder, and in some instances, nearly impossible, often forcing you to long corridors for passengers to walk or short station lengths. I understand the positives of limiting the player with barriers like this, but having them be randomly generated and unable to be removed can lead to very frustrating layouts.

Third problem is the reliance on power generation. From very early on you gotta build many gas generators to keep the lights on and the trains running, which use lots of space and staff-time to refuel them. I don't really know much about how subways work irl, but I really don't think the mayor would ask you to build a subway station in the middle of the city but not allow you to connect it the city power grid from the start, that just seem ludicrous to me. The irony is that the final generator upgrade you get IS a thing that allows you to connect to the power grid, and once you unlock it, you'll never use anything else again... you should really just start with a smaller version of those instead of dinky gas generators, just makes more sense to me.

In general, I still recommend the game, it was plenty fun, but yea, lots of room for improvement

Very fun and polished game, looks nice, runs decent on my potato-ish pc, nothing to complain on my end so far!
Most of the negativity around this game on reviews seems to be the sheer fact that it's not Tarkov... which fair enough, Tarkov probably IS better, however Tarkov is neither on Steam or free, so that's that.

The game is what I'm calling an "extraction" type of game, seems to be getting popular. Basically you are deployed to a world with a bunch of players, each player has a set of goals to complete... the catch being that PvP is on, and if you die, you drop all the gear and weapons you brought with you to use. After you loot and complete whatever objective you have to complete, you try to get off on extraction points, all while trying not to get killed by other players.

Also, the free-to-play monetization stuff seems pretty fair to me, the game rewards you fairly, progression is pretty fun so far (if that changes, I'll update this review), and no pay-to-win that I can see. The cash shop isn't shoved in your face either, it's on it's own corner out of the way in a menu, very tastly done... Blizzard could learn a thing or two from this, hah

I recommend it

is guud, you shuut

So... this is a tough review to formulate. The game is well made, looks good, runs good, the lore is good, the new mechanics are interesting, everything works... however... I didn't find it fun at all.
TLDR: The easiest way I have to describe how this game made me feel is... Imagine Dark Souls, but if the combat didn't feel good and instead of rolling you only had backstepping.

The combat feels... off. I can't quite put my finger on what, but it just lacks either feedback or weight, the weapons just feel like jello. The big weapons are extremely slow. The mid-size weapons feel like crap. The 1 handed swords are the ones that felt the best, but they still lack in feedback. The dodging might be the worst thing of them all tho... You get basically no invincibility frames during it, you are supposed to actually dodge out of the way of an attack instead of rolling "under" it like on Dark Souls. That's a big blow to the game imo, the most fun boss battles in the DS franchise involve lots of dangerous rolling. Also enemies in this game are harder to stagger, kinda of unreliable to know when you are stunning an enemy with your attacks or not. Very often you'll be mashing the attack button in a combo and the enemy will hit you because it didn't stay stunned for long and you didn't notice... again, not a lot of feedback.

The game is pretty hard... as soon as you get to the first boss, you'll know the kid gloves are off. Tho while I won't often detract from a game for being hard, I love very hard games, this game's difficulty is often based on annoying you or being unfair. You'll often question yourself "what am I doing wrong here? Am I missing something? Am I supposed to be doing something else?". The game also loves throwing "traps" at the player... very blatant ones too. Enemies will be hidden around corners and ready to jump at you as soon as your toes are in their line of sight... Dark sous did that too at times, but this game does it literally every 2 or 3 rooms. I'm convinced there's more "sneak attack enemy trap" in one level of this game than there are in the entirety of any Souls game. It gets old fast.

It being hard isn't really the issue here, Dark Souls 3 is extremely hard too, but when combined with the combat issues I explained above... it just isn't fun. Dark Souls is hard, it infuriates and inflicts pain on you... but it's gameplay is also perfect, playing it feels like pure joy, you WANT to master it because the controls, the weapons, the movement, it's all just heaven. On The Surge, however, it's about the same difficulty as the worst parts of the Souls games, the movement feels unresponsive, the weapons feel like crap, dodging is unreliable and doing combos is as rewarding as spreading butter on a slice of bread. So yea, while just yesterday I beat the 2 hardest DLC bosses in Dark Souls 2 on my own, I ended up quitting about halfway through The Surge... The Fun-to-Frustration ratio wasn't balanced, so I had no desire to continue. It really sucks, I REALLY don't like giving up on a game like this, but at the end of the day, if you aren't having fun with a game, you are wasting your time.

So, the question here is... have you played one of the old pharaoh/zeus/caesar city builder games?
If no, I'd say give it a shot, just don't expect it to be the regular style of city builder. This is NOTHING like the SimCity style gameplay... and to be honest, I wouldn't even know how to explain it, it's very unique.

If yes, this game is that. Like, EXACTLY that. most of the negative reviews I read seem to have that as their main complaint. Outside a few changes and modern niceties, it's more of that style gameplay. And no, I don't think that's a bad thing.
As someone that LOVES pharaoh, having more of it seems like a good thing to me. The quality of it is pretty good, my only gripe with it is... lack of options. The most glaring one to me is no HUD size scaling, or at least font size... I think the text size is pretty small and somewhat hard to read. Other than that, I think it's a fun game, scratches the itch for more of that style of game in a more convenient way than playing pharaoh at 800x600 :p