Recent reviews by The Seldom Seen Kid

I wish the devs would quit updating it so that I could play the actual "definitive edition".

Get the GOG version instead. This one has one of the earliest Denuvo implementations and stutters all of the time because of it.

Otherwise, it's basically Human Revolution with worse story and level design from what I remember.

If Wildlands was a 6.5/10, this game is a 5/10. While it is far less jank as UbiSoft have refined some of the basics like animations, physics, gunplay, graphics, performance, etc., so much content was stripped out that the game feels like a failed MMORPG experiment. Here are a few examples:

- The world is pretty much barren. Civilians exist only in bases. Enemies exist only in patrols of 2-4 outside of said bases. There are animals roaming about, but none of them are predatory.

- All you do is base infiltration. There are small buildings scattered about everywhere, but most of them just give you cosmetic items and have no enemies guarding them. On "Immersive mode", the other stuff you find are blueprints and weapons that are pretty much the same or worse than the ones you already have. Gone are the Rebel Ops missions that had you clearing out buildings on a timer, defending radios, stealing planes/helicopters and so on. The convoys are still here, but they are worse in every way. They are not marked on your map and instead very seldom spawn near you, expecting you to notice them before they've driven off. Turn off some of the all-encompasing UI settings and the game doesn't even mark them when they are near. I'm not even sure if you get less resources if you blow up the truck or not.

- You can no longer spawn vehicles anywhere. Couple that with the new traversal system, general lack of helicopters placed around the game world, the map being far more vertical and full of obstacles and it feels like it takes an eternity just to get where you want to go.

- The survival elements are lacking. Even with all the difficulty settings cranked up to their maximum, ammo and health syringes are everywhere. A lot of the items you can craft can also be bought from shops. Rations only give you minor +5% or +10% buffs to things like reload speed, stamina or health regeneration. It's not even worth bothering with collecting the items you need to use for crafting half the time. Maybe it would have been if permadeath was an option, but there is barely any punishment for dying. Ghost Mode does not exist in this game, even though it looks like it would have been far better suited for it than Wildlands.

- While I'm glad that stealth has been significantly improved as enemies no longer automatically know where you are once they've been alerted, this still isn't Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. What's worse is that the fact that the AI in the previous game cheated and forced you into open firefights actually broke up the monotomy of the meta of constant sneaking. In this game, it's so easy to get the drop on enemies that I was in danger of falling asleep half the time.

- Could someone explain to me what the point of having all these options for difficulty and UI settings is when the game clearly wasn't built around them? "Yeeeeeey, the game is less of a looter shooter now!" - yeah and there is nothing to do in the open world as a result, because all of the guns feel the same.; "Yeeeeey, I can turn off marking enemies!" - yeah and now your "Sync shot" button has a dice roll on whether it even works or not.; "Yeeeeeey, the game no longer clutters my screen with icons for useless ammo and health pickups!" - and you've also missed the convoy that spawned up the hill and the collectible you've walked past 10 times.; "Yeeeeeeey, I can turn off the crosshair and use ADS for more immersion!" - yeah and now you are also stuck with a useless aiming mode and forced to use another with a zoomed-in FOV that does not get affected by the slider in the options.; "Yeeeeeey, I can turn off having 2 primaries!" - do you prefer binding your handgun to "2" or having that button just not work?; "Yeeeeey, I can turn off the wall hacks and health regen!" - you have also just bricked half the character abilities in the game.

- And of course, because the game is a "live service" title, the experience includes:
• multiple layers of DRM (one of which requires you to be always online even during singleplayer)
• microtransactions
• content that is no longer available to experience
• content that requires ownership of other Ubisoft titles in order to obtain (if that isn't a "macrotransaction", I don't know what is)

As usual with modern Ubislop, the devs are too busy tripping over themselves trying to please everybody and their grandma. If you want to make a stealth game, then you build the game from the ground up to be one. Stop with this "Oh we want it to be a stealth game, but it should also please the hardcore tactical shooter and the RPG and the arcade racing and the RTS and the etc., etc. crowd!" You can't just patch that ♥♥♥♥ in post-launch. And until people start realising that and accepting that some games may not be for them (even if their favourite streamer was paid a crap ton to get them to buy in), we are going to continue being fed mediocre crap like this.

Keep the car at around 100-120 KM/H at all times. Thank me later.

Mediocre to bad. It's a checklist game where you can't even complete the checklists. The "job" you just picked up wants you to destroy a bunch of drones with the shotgun? Too bad, because you've already liberated the area and those no longer spawn. Same with the one that wants you to photograph convoys. The map even tells you you need to destoy 5 armored personel carriers to get some extra liberation points for unlocks. Guess what? I was stuck on 2/5 because I had liberated the area. At least with the jobs, you can theoretically do them in other regions you have not liberated, but this thing was area-specific. And no, trying to exploit the blimps does not work because they only send troops and Wolverines at you.

You also have to collect a bunch of junk items in order to sell them and earn enough cash for weapons, attachments, gear and upgrades. Looting everything quickly gets stale as it's barely worth anything and set to infinitely respawn at the same location. This means that if you want to get something like the expensive weapon upgrades, you probably have to run around the same location for hours, looting the same 3 lockers over and over.

Nearly all of the weapons feel terrible to use as they do too little damage and make you hold down SHIFT in order to steady your breath while shooting. The recoil is too high otherwise. I have no idea why you'd ever use the pistol, SMG, assault rifle, "freedom launcher" or shotgun over the M14 because that gun is not only more accurate, but double-taps the regular enemies and destroys vehicles in a single magazine.

The "strongholds" in the first zone were also pitiful. They are large sections that got closed off by metal walls. The game tells you you need to jump a bike over the walls or blow a hole in them using explosives. But guess what? There is also a door you can go through using the bolt cutters you picked up in the tutorial. So why would I ever use the other two options?
Once you get inside you realise there is nothing much to the structure and it only has like 5 enemies. It's basically the stronghold outposts from Far Cry 4 but less heavily-guarded than the regular ones from 3. I don't even think they have an alarm system. Even if they did it made no difference to how easy they were to take over. On "hard".

The blimps are a disappointment as well. They are teased multiple times as these "if they see you, all hell breaks loose" scenarios. In reality if you get seen, they will send one squad after you and then lose interest almost immediately. I had to force myself to stay in one spot and shoot at them frequently while trying to exploit them for job completion. Couldn't even get the squad to spawn at one location I was trying that at. Only the Wolverines kept showing up.

When all of these things start adding up you quickly realise why the TimeSplitters 2 fan patch has an option to remove all game files except the ones needed to play TS2. That is probably the best part of the game. That it has the entirety of TimeSplitters 2 hidden within it. Unfortunately, TS2 has its own problems as it is a very bare bones port that doesn't allow you to bind weapons to number keys and still only has the 1 checkpoint in the middle of the level.

Pros:

- Combat feels amazing. Activating bullet-time highlights weak spots on enemies. Targeting said weak points makes enemies drop ammo, health and bullet-time refills. The game pushes you to always be on the offense and you can pull off some sick moves using wall-running, sliding and shotgun-jumping.

- Melee "glory kills" do not kill the pace of combat by locking you into an unskippable animation. A quick flick of the katana does the job. They are also not the only way of turning enemies into resource pinatas.

- The weapons feel distinct from each other and have their own strengths and weaknesses.

- No gameplay balance breaking secrets or progression systems you have to look up guides for or grind through. The game does it the old-school way by introducing new enemies, weapons, level hazards and ramping up the challenge. It's a short campaign at about 6 or 7 hours, but it feels like they went with all killer and no filler.

- A basic story to at least provide some context to what you are doing and why. It also surprisingly refuses to reuse the tired cliche you will be expecting the entire game.

- The AI can be surprisingly agile as you will often see humanoid enemies use their jetpacks to get to the platform you are standing on.

Cons:

- The AI can be really stupid at times. You will frequently see enemies standing in one place in the middle of combat, throwing themselves off buildings or failing to aknowledge that you are even there until you open fire.

- The level design is great, but the game never pushes you to use it. In something like Severed Steel, you are invulnerable when doing slides, wall-runs, etc. It feels like these levels would have been a better fit in that game. Here you can simply circle-strafe to avoid projectiles and hitting weak points is far easier if you do so. There is also no point in littering the levels with resources if killing enemies quickly maxes out the ones you carry. These things combined result in you frequently murdering everything within an arena 5 meters away from its entrance and then realising there were ammo, health, straight walls and a lot of verticality you could have utilized.

- The platforming is too easy. Falling simply has the game teleport you to the last platform you were on. I think it took 10 armor points every time that happened at one point, but even that penalty seemed gone later. If you look at the patch notes, they also added an extra jump you are able to do while wall-running. This seems to have removed a lot of the skill required in mastering some of these platforming challenges, as previously you most likely would have had to use the slide-jump boost and wall-switching in order to gain enough momentum. Now you can stick to one wall much longer by re-jumping on it twice. The tutorial at the start of the game isn't even updated to aknowledge the added jump.

- The game is really bad at explaining what it wants you to do in order to defeat bosses. For the first one, unlike every enemy you've faced so far, you need to shoot ALL of the weak points until their individual health goes down. After which, you can shoot the baddie inside past the point of his health dropping to 0 and yet the fight will keep going. With the second boss, you need to shoot specific sections that aren't highlighted, even though the game has been teaching you the exact opposite so far. Oh and you can swim now, even though that's never been a possibility before. For the last boss, the game starts spamming projectiles at you and deprives you of resources. I still have no idea if you are even expected to be able to heal or defeat some of the enemies here.

- The game also used to have 4 set difficulty options. I would prefer those instead of the god-mode toggle, pick-up disabler, enemy/player damage and bullet-time burn-rate sliders in the settings menu. At least that way I would know the game difficulty was somewhat ballanced and I wouldn't be able to optimize the fun out by using unlimited bullet-time or making some enemies invincible (the slider doesn't apply to weak point damage surprisingly enough).

- While it's good that there is a story, it feels a bit bare bones. A lot of things mentioned have no context behind them, leaving me confused. Maybe the context is to be found in the codex entries you can pick up by walking over them, but my idea of fun in this kind of game isn't stopping the action every 2 minutes to look up a guide to stop the action for 2 more minutes while I read a text screen. It also doesn't help that Father will often talk to you in the middle of combat or that if you quit the game after starting a new episode, his dialogue will not repeat even though you've just restarted from the same checkpoint.

- Some of the weapons kind of suck. The SMGs feel outclassed by the pistols and shotgun for 2/3 of the game. It's not until you start facing more robot enemies that take less weak point damage that they come into their own. The minigun feels like it was nerfed to do too little damage to be worth using most of the time. It's just "the SMGs but worse" in a lot of situations. And I don't know whose terrible idea it was to have the railgun need to charge up every shot. I need to somehow predict when exactly the damnable thing will fire while dodging enemy projectiles? And it does too little damage to the tougher enemies to be worth using anyway. Could have tightened the spread of the rocket launcher's rockets a bit more too so it wasn't only useful on the one mini-boss enemy.

- Dot crosshair feels a tad too large. Makes it hard to aim at distant targets.

- Signposting isn't always clear with where you need to go next. The levels are pretty linear aside from a few backtracking instances though, so you won't be needing a guide to look at.

- The soundtrack can get stale as there isn't much variety between song compositions. The choir that seems to be featured in every song became outright grating at points for me.

Never was a fan of Half-Life 2.

The game has way too many problems that you will constantly be forced to deal with.

The combat feels like ass and I will try to break down why:

• The weapons feel like peashooters. I will not be able to pinpoint exactly why, but it's most likely a combination of the animations, sound effects, bullet spread, physics and the enemies not reacting to being shot. It's a downgrade compared to the first game. I don't know why Valve couldn't at least keep the gibs.
  
  
• The enemy AI for the Combine is some of the dumbest I have ever seen. They just stand out in the open and let themselves be shot. If they have a clear line of sight on you, they do not move.
  
  
• On Hard, the enemies are bullet sponges. Certain Combine soldiers can survive a double-shot shotgun blast to the cranium. Poison zombies will survive a direct hit from the rocket launcher. Some of the Headcrab variants also take more than 1 magnum bullet to take down, which I find unacceptable.
  
  
• Weapon switching is way too slow. Even with "Fast switching" enabled, the game would do good to at least remember the last weapon used in a slot, so I do not have to press a button multiple times to get to it. Even if I do, I then need to wait for a second for its draw animation to complete before I can actually use it. Combine this with the previous point and one of the most frustrating situations you will find yourself in is being 2 meters away from an enemy that is melting your face off after surving a double-blast from the shotgun. The 2nd most-frustrating situation would probably be trying to throw grenades back using the gravity gun.
  
  
• The game has that old shooter trope of making your screen jump whenever you get shot, which I think we've since all agreed is terrible and have moved past in game design because nobody likes their aiming ability being artificially constricted.
  
  
• You do not get proper feedback when you are being hurt by some of the enemies. I swear, if I ever see another Manhack in my life, I'm going to lose my ♥♥♥♥. As if the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Snarks weren't annoying enough.
  
  
• There are infinite enemy spawns in some sections of the game. I guess I will explain why this is bad design: You have no way of telling when the game has switched to an infinite spawn until you've wasted a ton of resources on killing enemies. In vain. It also deprives you from the feeling of accomplishment you would be expecting to get from completing a difficult battle, creates positioning problems when trying to run through enemies and needlessly overextends firefights until they become repetitive.
  
  
• THE GRAVITY GUN IS AWFUL. First off, it's hard to tell the distance at which you can start slowly pulling and then grabbing objects with it. Second off, if there is too much debris in the room, you will probably not be picking up the object that you were aiming at. Third off, most of the objects that do decent damage are large and usually placed in small enclosed spaces, meaning that by the time you get those in position to fling at the enemy, you could have killed it 20 times with the shotgun. Fourth off, Valve made it so the best utilization of this thing as a weapon involves blocking your view. This means that the gun is useless half the time because YOU CAN NOT SEE WHAT YOU ARE AIMING AT.

The physics are incredibly wonky and not something that could be relied upon:

• You will often find yourself getting catapulted by no fault of your own.
  
  
• Doors and bodies do not mix well. What will most likely happen if they are near each other is that the body will glitch through the door, making both of them unable to stand still and having the sound effect for ragdolls hitting a surface play 1000 times.
  
  
• Objects in general feel like they have too little weight to them. Which is why your boat and car are so flip-happy and stacking any kind of object feels like a nightmare (especially given the fact that Valve couldn't figure out that they should probably let the player turn objects that they've grabbed).
  
  
• Gordon must have skipped out on leg day because his weak scientist calves are unable to push through piled small debris.

My god, I have seen better animations in games from 2001:

• What is that fast zombie leaping animation? Is he floating through the air? Why don't his legs even tense up when performing the jump? How the ♥♥♥♥ am I supposed to tell when it's going to jump? It's as if someone is throwing a frozen piece of meat at me.
  
  
• Why does it look like a rebel's upper half has a mind of its own? I swear, I've seen them run sideways while looking at me. Who the hell does that?!

The story:

• Any sort of continuity from the previous game has been completely thrown out the window. If the plot was Swiss cheese, there wouldn't be much cheese next to them holes.
  
  
• People keep praising the fact that the game has no cutscenes. And I would agree that this CAN be a good thing. The first game did it right. However, I would prefer that the 2nd game ACTUALLY HAD cutscenes. "Why" you ask? Well because I would rather be able to skip those instead of being stuck throwing around objects and hitting everything with the crowbar while perched on top of some random closet like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ that's waiting for the NPCs' little play to finish. The fact that you have to sit through those moments is the biggest replayability killer of the game. I am aware that it might have been done in order to hide some loading screens, but now that we're in 2024 and I have an SSD, these do nothing but waste my time.

Capcom have sneakily inserted Enigma Protector DRM into this game back in August of 2023. I was aware that the latest update broke modding support while addressing some long-standing issues. Previously, all of these bugs and more were fixed by modders. Now it is impossible to do so without rolling back to the previous version. I had my suspicions that this might have been done deliberately. Now I have confirmation. Once again, Capcom using it's resources to make the PC version worse. They couldn't even be bothered bringing The Mercenaries United to PC or fixing all of the major bugs.

This is also the second time Capcom have downgraded parts of the game with an update. When they migrated it to Steamworks, besides introducing a lot of new bugs, they reduced the water quality to that of the 360 version and removed DirectX 10 support.

Lackluster port with nauseatingly low field of view. Something you will now not be able to fix thanks to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ DRM. Slap in the face of customers. Especially given that Capcom brought in some new content for the Raid Mode of the XBOne/PS4/Switch versions of this game. I bet they didn't even bother porting that over. No, they had to use their resources to make the PC version even worse than it already was.

Edit: As far as I can tell, they've reversed course and decided to not add Enigma. They've also fixed whatever problem the Jill Samurai Edge DLC had. Good. However, content-wise this version is still inferior to the newer ports, so this review will remain negative.

Still in active development. Basically an early access game even though VOID removed the label. They recently switched the engine to Unreal 5 and ever since then the game is unplayable for me as it makes my GPU go haywire - screen goes black and the fans start working at 100%. The only other game that does that is modded SWAT 4, which is excusable for a free mod. Not so for a full-priced premium product.

The devs clearly don't know what they are doing as shown in their blog posts. They just launched a survey asking for direction from the community. Previously they were telling players to equip secondaries with no ammo on their teammates so that a non-lethal playthrough does not get ruined, completely unaware that what results is the AI pulling out their empty pistols and trying to shoot suspects with them. Have seen multiple instances like these showing that VOID does not play their own game.

Some things that were in the early access build have still not been re-implemented like working mirrors, the ability to turn off film grain, transparent glass and lighting that is actually usable so that you do not need to bring night-vision on nearly every map. Game modes and maps have been removed. The hotel map used to be one of the best in the game and had 2 different versions depending on the game mode. Now it's been replaced by a completely different uniform version that is bland, forgettable and has so many repeated sections it feels like a maze. PvP multiplayer is nowhere to be seen even though previously it was a major part of the game.

Might be a good game several years from now when it's completed. As it stands right now - avoid, even if it means it never gets finished due to lack of development funds. They should have put basic stuff in like tasing animations before 1.0.