Recent reviews by Glitchy Girl

Also for whatever it's worth - because I bought the game through Green Man Gaming I guess my review doesn't count toward the percentage? Make of that what you will!

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You may have actually seen this post that I wrote... if you bothered to read through it. But I'm also submitting it as my review because I feel like it adequately explains how I feel about the game and why I have it a good rating.

That said, I may tweak it on down the road.... but for what it's worth here are my thoughts!
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Honestly the game is pretty good! It's definitely got an art style to it that can be anxiety inducing for some folks.

That is the use of bright and in some case toxic looking colors and patterns that do trigger a feeling of revulsion in some folks. Which is then taken one step further by the use of enemies, and characters that enter that uncanny valley of having a vaguely human appearance which is then taken in an unsettling direction. It is for sure not going to be for everyone.

And the art style honestly goes pretty well in creating the contrast in the environment... that is the, "natural environment" of the world with it's greenery and streams and so on which is then deformed by these very manufactured looking block buildings, and weapons which make up the landscape. And in between you have these weird techno-organic blob like masses belching out ticks, pink cats, blue lobsters, and so on.

(An aside: Just in the world itself, the lore is rife with more incredible creatures.... Biosynthetic silk worms that belch out the silk that make your runner shells etc... it's honestly kind of wild, and in many ways something you could liken to a fever dream now that I'm putting this into words.)

All in all, it really makes an experience that folks seem to be heavily divided on one way or the other. (As far I can tell?) Which I'm honestly enjoying!

That said the game play itself is pretty darn awesome in my opinion as well. Now mind you, I don't play a whole lot of shooters I've honestly been quite taken with the whole explore, shoot, run away/kill/die cycle that is extraction shooters.

Having dabbled with The Cycle when it was a thing (RIP my friend D:) , a few hours in tarkov (maybe 15 on my wife's account xD) , Synduality, and now this. I'm honestly loving it!

The idea of classes in an extraction game is a bit odd... but still fun, the gunplay feels good to me, as well as the variety of different guns that do exist.

Getting out is rewarding as heck, and if I die (which is what mostly happens), I can honestly hop right back in if I want to go with a free kit by hitting the next button a few times. Or if I do want to take a bit longer, I can just go build a specific kit and go from there.

My only real gripe with Marathon is not the game itself, but with Bungie's stance on allowing the game to be played on Linux, or the Steamdeck. Having this outmoded view that linux somehow = cheaters, and thus making every attempt to stop folks on Linux/steam deck/ etc from being able to enjoy the game. It's an outmoded (and in my opinion stupid) perspective that will only serve to decrease the number of folks who would otherwise want to play and enjoy the game.

That aside - I do kind of want to address my fears about the future of the game.

My fear is that there is at least one person out there who has a community that numbers in the literal millions, who wants to see the game fail. The reason? Nothing to do with it's mechanics, art style, or approach to the genre.

Instead, they went and branded it as, "woke dei slop". In large part, because the game was put out by Bungie. A company known for not being so shy to about continuing to embrace the idea of hiring folks who 1) can do the damn job and 2) come from a variety of backgrounds. Whilst also, being known to do more than just give corporate lip service to the LGBTQIA+ community during Pride Month.

So rather than actually try to judge a game on it's own merits, or even try to offer any sort of suggestions for improvement. They call it, "slop" without giving any explanation and want to see it shut down.

This is something that would only serve to kill a game that hundreds of thousands of people are playing (the game is cross platform mind you, so we have players on Steam, Xbox, and PS5) and currently enjoying. Added to that, it would also be a slap in the face to those programmers, designers, and artists that poured in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of combined manhours into making something that folks are getting to enjoy, and just play around in.

And that is something I really don't hope happens.

If you read this far, thank you for putting up with all my writing and I hope it provided some sort of benefit to you, and have a good day. :3

I gave this game a good review during it's beta period because I still enjoyed the heck out of it over the ~ 70 hours or so I played, and having played 5 hours so far I can say that I do agree that it deserves a good review.

To begin with, Bamco (Bandai/Namco) DID make efforts to improve on the game from the beta. To begin with, game stability is heads and shoulders better than the OBT. While playing I've not run into any crashes, which was an occurrence every ~ 2 hours almost to the T (memory leak? ) . Furthermore netcode seems a lot better! I've only had once instance of rubber banding, and it's been pretty decent.

Furthermore I'm finding that movement feels a bit cleaner (not sure if this was tweaked... or perhaps as a result of the net code not being as jank) and I've also NOT found myself stuck/having to use the stuck command so far.

As far as the other things go. The pass is pretty straight forward... do things, get xp, get levels, which leads to getting skins, emotes and clothing. Nothing that you'd consider pay to win... and the syn coins pay for most of the next pass if you want to do that route. The pass itself is pretty chill... with 100 days, to go and work on nabbing 100 levels. (A level a day is pretty doable! )

Haven't gotten to the PvE bits yet... but am looking forward to that and will update my review as I go... and if things do go sideways or fall apart... yeah I can easily change the review to negative. But for now I'm enjoying the heck out of it!

Will be submitting this review later, but with all the people review bombing.. I just want to even things up a bit! All in all though the game is worth playing and enjoyable!

This game can be described as what would happen if "Don't starve together", "Rust", and "Rim World" managed to have some sort of weird three way beautiful baby. As such it is an overhead survival game where you start off on a planet where you can play alone, or with friends.

Much like any other survival game you start off with nothing, aside from sticks, and build up from there. With an end game of either escaping the planet (in the Single Player mode now added), or to progress in terms of technology, and just get to build the cool things (Multiplayer), and to kill one (Multiplayer PvP).

As referenced, the game itself has three modes currently. Single player, which you can progress through with an ultimate goal of leaving the planet if you wish, and unlocking a NG+ that keeps your stats, and starts you on a different map. You then have PvE Multiplayer, and PvP Multiplayer.

Crafting entails everything from building a basic base, with chests and so on in the early game. To building Nuclear Reactors, Solar Panels, Oil/Gas refineries, Mechs, heavy weapons and so on towards the end of the game. With other features including cooking, first aid, fishing, mining, and so on.

Other than that the game also has bits in place for trading, and an economy by way of providing the ability to mint coins (that can be converted back to resources), and build vending machines for trading if folks want to go down that route.

All in all, with this latest update I feel that I can very easily recommend this game. In many ways due to the dev's reworking of various systems that took the excessive grind out of the crafting system (resource requirements), decay ( originally too fast), and hunger system (again too high) and brought it into line that made the game play more about playing, exploring, socializing, building, and (sometimes) killing. As opposed to simply maintaining everything you managed to build so far!

If after all of this you are still on the fence about the game. I would recommend checking out the Demo. It's an eight hour thing that lets you try the game in it's entirety. All without having to commit to making a purchase!

I've been playing this game since it first released. And even when it was a, "janky mess" with so called missing features. It allowed folks to see a variety of fun worlds and just keep exploring.

Five years later it's still doing that. Most definitely worth checking out!

100/10 would not recomment if you like having a life. Else go for it! This game is entirely amazing, with a team that really cares about what they are doing!

TL:DR version -
Positive aspects:
+ beautiful game environment
+ robust crafting/mining system
+ robust base/home building system with the ability to use voxel tools
+ consistent updates ( in my experience since starting the game)
+real time/non turn based combat , healing
+ good in game community/active devs, GMs
+ original race concepts (synths for example)
+ Solid performance, 60 FPS on highest settings with medium draw distance. Drops a bit when entering populated cities (my cpu is a bottle neck in this case >.<)

Negative aspects
- feature incomplete (this is not unexpected-it is an EA after all!)
- steam community/forums for the game semi-toxic
- PvE - mobs are currently bugged out, and are to be fixed

Points to take note of:
~ Recreated SWG assets. (not ripped from the game, but modeled after and used in the game)
~ Similar skill system to SWG
~ Real time, third person view combat.
~ Mining/Crafting Similar to SWG
~ Full PVP world

Long version
This review on the game is based on having played the game after 54 or so hours based upon steam's estimation.

I will start by saying that the term SWG 2.0 is a bit misleading. Because to say this implies to me that this game and it's price tag are just a product of a few people trying to cash in on graphically prettier version of Star Wars Galaxies, and call it a day. The more fitting term that I would go with, as coined by those who described Repopulation would be a, "Spiritual successor" to SWG.

Now granted, the initial experience of the game resembles SWG, down to the familiar UI and clicking noises for typing. This may lead to the impression t that this game tries to be SWG. What with a UI that is very similar to what you'd have seen in SWG, the skill trees, and even how some of the classes are named. The next point of similarity is the mining and crafting system which seems to be almost lifted out of SWG, which is not a bad thing mind you because of the complexity that this mechanic afforded. After harvesting/mining though it is pretty much at this point where the similarities end.

The races are at this point are as follows. A little lizard race that weren't intended to be playable and yet ended up as such due to player demand (which in my opinion reminds me slightly of the Geico Gecko) . A robotic race (the synthetics) which lack the ability to use armor but rather instead are intended to focus around the ability to a) modify your body to provide you more armor upgrade stats, or b) allow you to transfer into a new body , whether it be into a larger combat mech, another synthetic chassis that was just built, or the fallen body of an enemy sythetic that was killed (or a friend who died o,O) while leaving the old body lying there. Your typical human race which is composed of different sub types of human with different backstories and appearances (genetic lineages?). The Lokri, another human looking race that look a bit differently and are more adept and "psychic abilities" which will have some advantages for the magic like abilities and skills available in the game. (not yet implimented). Another psionic based race called the D-Tanix that are going to be some sort of energy looking guys (not in game yet). And finally you have the Veli which I would say are akin to space ninjas, and a PVP required, "alpha race" who pretty much have the ability to teleport, and slowly lose energy over time and who are required to kill on of their opposing faction (Vindicator kills Verrator, or Verrator kill Vindicator) to extend their life, which are purposely going to be made to be in low numbers.

Combat, and healing are done in third person/over the shouldver view akin to games like Firefall, Definace, Day Z TPV, H1Z1 TPV, etc etc. And is real time combat as opposed to the turn based combat seen in SWG. Same goes for combat healing of other players which requires the use of a medic gun for healing others, or stim packs to heal yourself.

Housing is pretty fun, and comes in the form of either house parts that you craft and plop down yourself, prefabbed housing, or housing that you build using a voxel tool, all of which are tied to a hopper. In this game a hopper being a central terminal that you can use to tie all your items to in an area which can then be packed up and moved with little issue if you want to find a new spot.

PvE at the moment is broken with the presence of a few of the planned mobs in the game with an AI and attributes that does require tweaking if you want to avoid a horrible death. More mobs to be added once these issues are fixed.

As far as work being done, it must be said that this game is far from feature complete and is most definitely a game you could call an "Early Access" title, despite the fact that the game the main guys working on this project started according to some sources as far back as 2012-2013? Despite this fact, it's not unusual to see the content constantly being updated and nearly daily patches in an attempt to work towards bringing the game towards a more complete state. With an emphasis on *more* given that an MMO is truly never complete given the addition and tweaking of content as time goes on.

The community is a mixed bag as you may have seen on the forums, or even in the reviews, or on the reddit page. The forums seem to be more toxic in the way of community with people on both ends spewing vitriol at one another. Whilst in game, things are a lot more sociable in my opinion especially for a PVP enabled world. This being that as opposed to having players only interested in killing other players (you do have quite a few of those), you have those players more interested in working with each other to build things up and who just wish to craft, mine, and socialize. Add to this, active staff who are on nearly at all times who are always happy to socialize and talk, and who jump in to make sure that nothing which has broken stays broken.

The game's graphics are quite nice looking,but the client itself does appear to suffer from lack of optimization. An issue most noticeable with the Nvidia cards. (Using a 980TI here, and having some performance issues, whilst better performance is being reported with those using ATI cards). As of this review a patch was done adding the ability to turn on and off some of the visual effects, I've yet to find out if this affects the game's performance in any way at this time.

Another issue that I want to bring up is the use of assets. This has been mentioned and will probably continue to be a bone of contention for some. As it is now, the assets are *not* ripped from the SWG client or from SWG Emu. They are in fact modeled after these SWG assets at a higher poly-count, and skinned from scratch. And quite honestly, in my opinion (for whatever it is worth) I feel that it was a good choice, because the harvesters, and the assets used in the game fit in with the world/terrain.

All in all, as you can see by the time I put into this game, I am still continuing to enjoy it and if things keep progressing as they are, it is one that I will hope to enjoy for years to come.

*edit* Updated review because client is far more optimized than when I wrote the initial review.

This is a wonderful, and colorful game that you can play for as little as you want, or as much as you want and feel that you got something done! As it is, the game has no shortage of content whether you play with a f2p (silver) account, with a p2p (gold) account, or lifetime account.