Recent reviews by LumpyGrumpySpaceWhale

Where to begin with this game. It is easily the game I have the most play time in but it is a game that nobody can recommend lightly.

It's grind heavy repetitive and half of the features required to play the game are community made apps that you need to chase down and download, but you will fall in love with your ships that you make, you will encounter challenges that you will overcome and you will see a true masterpiece of astrophysics simulation.

The community is what makes this game, literally, they make apps that make this game playable, without them the game would be terrible and borderline unplayable. But the player made groups like the AXI, F.R.E.I.G.H.T and Cannon all make the game interesting and fun with events and goals set internally.

Odyssey was a rough launch, I'm still not fully sold on the on-foot stuff but the new ships they've been adding have been nothing short of 'chefs kiss'.

I cannot in good conscience recommend elite to anyone, like the rest of us you just have to be drawn to it.

If you decided to get the game anyway, 07 Commander.

Great game, too bad the only players left on the servers are either hackers or gods and at this point I can't tell which is which.

I recommend this game.

The first play through is a bit of a slog, the first and last bosses of chapter 1 act as notorious filter for potential members of the fanbase. If you are reading this review after loosing to big B (you know who i'm talking about) or the heli from the first mission, just keep trying. look up a tutorial or what ever you need to do. I'm on my 2nd playthrough and I just steamrolled everything in chapter 1 with the same build. Everything gets a little easier as you get better parts and develop your reflexes.

GTA V will always have a place in my heart as one of my favourite games of all time. However, over the last few years I have noticed increasing stability issues and memory leaks over numerous systems I've played on.

Other issues I have come across have affected my PCs over all performance and functionality, such as my start menu becoming unusable, background programs remaining active after the game is stopped and so on.

However with the recent update, these issues have been overwhelmingly routine and new ones keep popping up regularly. The most recent of which crashed my entire computer, the first time that has happened on this brand new system. I uninstalled shortly after, last straw and all that.

Combine this with the content (Or less than lack there of) of the most recent update, I cannot in good faith recommend this game. It is a broken and buggy husk of its former self and has turned into the PC sectors watering hole for dumb asses and haters.

Just avoid this game, go play something else.

TL:DR
Microtransactions = BAD
Gameplay = GOOD

Gameplay is excellent, even if the weapon sandbox is very limited and a few choices 343i made with it make little sense to me (shotgun, disruptors, hydra, plasma rifle why do you exist?) Unfortunately you cannot choose which gamemode you load into and there are only a hand full of maps. But this isn't why i'm giving this game a bad review.

But my biggest gripe with the game is how predatory and invasive the microtransations are. It has become a staple in the halo series that you can customise your spartan. Every game onward from halo 3 on the xbox 360 have done this and every halo game has allowed you to customise your colours (more on that in a second). While the customisation in this iteration of halo is very promising, I cant do anything with it unless i was to shell out AUD$7 minimum for a piece of armour or up to AUD$30 for a pack of armour pieces. Everything down to what colour you can be is monetised.

For some background: The AUD$30 pack is twice the price of the battle-pass for this game. The battle-pass by the way takes too long to progress through. The challenges are ridiculous in some cases and you can only progress them 3 at a time (4 if you have the battle-pass) I've only played 12 hours at the time of this review/rant and I've only hit level 5 on the pass. A friend of mine has played 30+ hours and hes only at level 8 and he has that extra challenge slot from the battle-pass.

Even after all of this monetisation, they still expect me to pay full price for the campaign (AUD$90), With the money i would have to shell out to play the campaign, I could buy 3 sets of armour or 6 battle-pass seasons or some combo of the two. While i was not completely blind and oblivious to the fact there was going to be monetisation in this game, the fact they have given us nothing is outrageous. And the stuff they did give us is very limited. There are 4 pieces of armour you can unlock for free. They are at a very high level on the (free) battle-pass, i get to finally change my helmet at level 96.

Conclusion.

This game is great, the gameplay is solid and would have hit all the points if the didn't get greedy.
They can keep their ludicrous prices how they are, they can keep their battle-pass system and they can keep the campaign the price as is. All I'm asking for is for 343i to throw their fan-base a bone and give us some easily accessible armour customisation, especially those of us who are going to be playing the AUD$90 campaign.

They made promises they would give us this and have completely gone back on that. While at the time of this review i have yet to see if they will give us any good armour for playing through the campaign. If that becomes the case, then thats all i ask. However if the leaks are right and they just give us colours to play with, then i will be sorely disappointed as will a great many people who love this franchise.

Best damn game to be released in the last 10 years. If you like to build things, Solve problems or defy our lord clang on an hourly basis, this game is perfect for you. I find that when ever im making something 'different' i need to cook up creative solutions to make it, then that usually brings about another problem, then another, then another. It is a very mush enjoyable and fresh game play loop that is different with every world you play.

Attention to detail is great, but the controls on pc are terrible, it is un-optimised on pc (i have a GTX1070 and 16 GB of ram with more than 14GB available at any one time) but i got around that with a somewhat steady 30-40 FPS after tweaking some settings. Im not a PC master race kind of guy i just like to play games but after nearly a decade of 60FPS or higher this is just unacceptable. Especially since i know RDR2 doesnt look nearly as good as it should on PC with my settings (Yes i changed the settings to use DX12). Ill probably keep playing it because of the beckoning of friends to come play Online with them but beyond that, probably not.

TLDR;
The game is good but runs terribly, controls suck, imo not worth the $90AUD they are charging. not even worth the $70AUD they charge on the 20% off sale they are having right now.
Save your money until they really bring the price down.