Recent reviews by docstaph

I really like cruelty squad, it has the perfect level of weird aesthetic/ outsider art, but straightforward and tight gameplay.

Unfortunately I think this game suffers from a a large amount of bloat, there are systems upon systems that are not explained in the slightest, not to mention how much harder this game is than cruelty squad, I spent over an hour trying to figure out a good direction to go, but was met with death at every turn. Also for seemingly no reason, all of my allies at the HQ became hostile towards me with again zero explanation from the game as to why, all i did was talk to a few people and suddenly the lighting throughout the base became red and other agents started to shoot me on sight. I think this game has a lot of potential, but i tend to get lost when a sandbox is too vast.
Most areas have 20+ enemies shooting you at once when you enter , so when death is only a few bullets away it can really make the act of traversing the world a chore. The art style doesn't help with this either, some people will just start shooting without a second thought, but they are very hard to make out among all the non hostile NPCs that also inhabit the streets.

While i really like the idea of a non linear imm simm from this developer, i find that the progression of difficulty is way too crushing to even get my bearings of the gameworld, which does not feel great, of all the places i managed to explore, most of them were completely empty upon me actually getting there, the way they are designed leads me to believe that there are NPCs/ Items not yet included in the early access that actually give you a reason to be there beyond plain curiosity.

The mech stuff is pretty cool, but it also suffers from a distinct set of challenges inherent to the gameplay and world design . The mech combat feels distinctly separate from the on foot imm simm quest taking and exploration I thought the game was going to heavily lean into.

My experience was mainly wandering around trying not to die, and hoping to find some sort of objective or hint to pull me through. I recognize this could be a "me" problem, but i found the opening of this game to be quite aimless

I'm willing to give this another shot upon release, but i don't think its quite worth the 40 dollar price tag at this moment.

Played a few rounds this morning, this game goes incredibly hard for a 15 dollar EA title.

The upgrade trees are very interesting with movement being a central theme of a lot of the skills it seems.

Enemy design is creative and interesting if a bit hard to read when things gets really going.

Each character has specialized movement abilities that help them zoom across the map. I was playing with people higher level than me and it definitely shows on how fast they were moving.

This game borrows a lot from DRG, and Helldivers, you are dropped in massive maps and tasked with an objective, waves of enemies will attempt to stop you from completing that objective. As soon as i was able to grind on the power cord connecting two objectives I knew what this game was going for. (and i liked it)

Once again the MOVEMENT is phenomenal, which really sets the game apart from its contemporaries, that and the acid washed moebius-type artstyle and this game really comes together to be something special, can't wait to see what updates the devs have in store for the game.

A very fun game dragged down by the whiniest community possibly ever
("NERF DIVE PLS AM HARD STUCK SILVER AND SPIDERMAN IS MEAN TO ME!")

it takes 10-20 matches to unlock ONE new weapon, gadget or grenade, i don't care how good the game is, i'm not playing 1000+matches with incremental equipment upgrades just to test to see if i like all the weapons. Not to mention you cant try before you buy so you'll often buy something that you hate and you stuck on the same wheel again.

I hate the modern live service game trend of attempting to monopolize your time and engagement baiting by locking all weapons behind hours of grinding. It would be the same as marvel rivals locking all heroes behind a grind (that you can conveniently pay to expedite).

This game does not respect your time; especially if there are any other live service games in your rotation. It sucks because this game is fun, but it becomes stale as i only incrementally unlock equipment.

whew boy 130 hours and i have some VERY mixed feelings
The story and its quests are undeniably fantastic
Characters are all 10/10
the games commitment to gameplay systems is extremely commendable and fun to engage with

Negatives (In descending order of magnitude)

-Gear progression basically grinds to a halt as soon as you get to the second region of the map
by the 70 hour mark (halfway through my time with the game) there was no longer anything meaningful to upgrade in terms of gear, i essentially had best in slot gear within an hour of entering Kuttenberg. Meaning that i spent the majority of my time with this game just clicking on guys with my sword and not even bothering to loot them because i already had everything i could want, this is a huge problem for me with RPG's and while it simply cannot be avoided due to the nature of a created work; in KCD 2 this point comes on far too quickly for the games own good and left me feeling numb toward everything except for the story in the back half of the game.

-Kuttenburg as a city
While kuttenburg is admittedly large for this type of game i found myself disappointed that the majority of houses and every single church in the entire game is boarded up and completely non interactive.

Sidequest design in the back half of the game
Side quests in the kuttenburg area are mostly forgettable, with a few notable standouts, which is a damn shame compared to the first half of this game where every quest in the region had an interesting angle or payoff at the wedding

Overall an extremely good game; the whole definitely is more than the sum of its parts, but i cant say i want to replay this any time soon .

A fun game with great gameplay variety. It always shows you something new.

Holy Crap though, this game has some of the worst writing of elder millennial characters ever, both Zoe and Mio are insufferable; they constantly flip-flop between being the complainer and the "HAHA EPIC BACON LOLZ" archetype.
this game seriously wants you to award it reddit-gold while you clap along to it.
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A poorly made quake mod with a funny name, every enemy is just a questionable reskin of quake mobs.

Great start, but content drip-feed is slow
2 years after EA release and we still only have 1.5 / ~5 main areas

I can tell this game is going to be great WHEN its done

Unfortunately it may well be 2027 before we see the mythical 1.0 release.

The performance of this game is getting worse with every update, on launch with my 4080 i could expect 80-90 FPS solid at 4k max settings. Then I came back to the game 6 months later, My FPS was noticeably worse averaging in the 60-70s. And now with every update the performance is getting worse, 2 battlepasses in 3 weeks? No problem, but now with the release of the latest terminids update, i am getting 30 fps barely in the menu for picking stratagems and then barely above 60 fps when on the planet with frequent dips into the 20's and high teens, WTF arrowhead? I'll take no new warbonds if it means that the games tech debt can be solved. Not to mention the plethora of audio bugs, random crashes, enemies running through walls, silent chargers, sliding glitches, getting stuck on terrain, messed up map generation, kill count on arc grenades still don't work, and there are so many more.

Bottom line, this game is in a WORSE technical state than at launch and they keep adding new bugs and performance declines with every update while never addressing any of them before pushing out the next warbond to make some more money while sticking their heads firmly in the sand and up their own asses, ignoring the growing community sentiment on how this game is becoming almost unplayable on even upper end PC hardware.

Take a month and iron out the bugs and performance and then maybe resume the never ending quest for more money, i'm sick of this fun game being ruined technical issues and it shouldn't take a (deserved) 2nd review bombing campaign to alert Arrowhead HQ that their wack ass spaghetti code product is becoming more unstable with every iteration.

#fixhelldivers2

The game crashes on startup now after the 1.6 Update.