Recent reviews by Rostopher

Extremely silly - especially the full manual mode - and yet delightfully crispy gunplay. Slamming that magazine in and charging the weapon just in the nick of time to snatch a headshot on an oncoming enemy? Absolute cinema. A lot of folk are complaining that it lacks 'content', but I think it precisely stayed it's welcome, and was in fact just on the cusp of over-staying in that final encounter. Worth every penny, in my opinion.

It's just extraordinary. A genuine masterpiece. Everything that is great about games condensed into a meticulous, ingeniously crafted, pulse-pounding, nerve-shredding, heart-wrenching piece of actual art. Buy it. Persist with it. Beat the snot out of that mountain. Transcend your physical form. Start it again immediately.

Bought this on sale and finished it in one sitting. Loved the art style, the bone-dry humour and the way the story was woven into the languages that you discovered. Maybe a couple of nonsense puzzles, and for one of the languages, the structure was a little bit too esoteric, resulting in having to resort to Googling two of the puzzles in that language, as well as one instance of an item being so spectacularly hidden that I was wandering in circles for about 30 minutes trying to figure out where I'd gone wrong (thankfully stumbled across it just as I was starting to lose patience). But otherwise, an absolute delight from start to finish, reminded me of the classic point and click days, except I was collecting words instead of rubber chickens and pulleys. Thoroughly recommend.

Absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ miserable experience. 10/10 going into NG+.

It's good.

There's a lot of fun to be have here, but the game is marred by a ton of technical issues.

The good:
* Each machine is unique and takes a little time to get used to, but once you've got it mapped in your brain, you can do some wonderful smooth movements that are extremely satisfying to execute
* The breadth of jobs and contracts available is staggering, and the fact that you can choose either a quick version or an in-depth version depending on how long you're planning on playing is great.
* Detail on the machines themselves is impeccable, and combine that with excellent haptics on controller that makes each one feel really impactful.
* Multiplayer can be both chaotic silliness, and well-oiled machine - the potential for both comedy and slick teamwork is genuinely impressive, and it's a huge amount of fun to play with friends despite some issues (noted below).

The bad:
* Presentation outside of the modelling of the machines is very rough.
* Menu's are a nightmare to navigate, especially on controller - for example, you have to use the right stick to navigate, most things, but then the D-pad to select different sub-options, which is bizarrely unintuitive
* Biggest complaint is that it runs like absolute crap on the 3 different machines I tested on that more than met the recommended requirements, including on Steam Deck, which can run infinitely better looking games that this effortlessly. Even with graphics set to absolute minimum, and particularly if you have more than a couple of machines present at a job site. It doesn't run well out the gate, and seems to also suffer from a memory leak which leads to extended sessions seeing your FPS dropping to slideshow levels. Needs a fair amount of optimisation work, hopefully the devs will be on point for this.
* If you join a pal's multiplayer game, you get almost 0 progression on your character - all the money goes solely to the host, and whilst you do gain XP for character progression, it's basically negligible. It would be cool if they could figure out a system where you effectively bring your construction company to the table in someone else's world, sort of like a sub-contractor, and you can field all the machines you've earned in your single player game, and earn a cut of the XP and money for you own company in exchange.
* The M&K controls are extremely weird on some machines, particularly cranes where it's almost overly responsive to your inputs - having a controller on hand is very much recommended.

Overall, though, a tentative recommend from me as despite all the issues I found that I'd played for 10 hours straight and it was dark outside on day 1. It's conditional on the devs continuing to support with both optimisation and gameplay/UI improvements, but even in its current rough state, it's still extremely playable, so yeah, give it a whirl!

This game is genuinely a masterpiece.

It's a game about designing alchemy machines to synthesis molecules, it gives you a set of tools, the ability to manipulate these tools, and a target molecule, then says 'off you go'.

Few games out there can both make you feel incredible smart, then immediate slap you in the face saying 'look at all these people who did better than you!', and rather than that being incredibly offputting, you immediately go back your solution to see if you can figure out ways to improve it.

The intricacies of the puzzles are genius, and there's not a single one that feels unfair. The latter half of the game features ones that do initially look intimidating, but the learning curve is so masterfully crafted that by that stage, you will have learned a significant number of tricks to help you with build the more complex molecules efficiently.

Even when the game does say 'you didn't do as well as other people', there is genuine joy in finding solutions to these problems.

As well, the story that bookends the puzzles is really great - a factional struggle in a fictional semi-Venetian city, the final twist is some fantastically weird meta-storytelling.

The crowning glory is the wonderful 'Save to GIF' feature, that allows for easy sharing with friends to show them your weird-ass machines.

So yeah, if you like puzzles, I cannot recommend this game enough. It's weirdly relaxing, and and if you're like me, you'll lose hours of your life to perfecting your creations.

(Product received for free via the purchase of an Intel device)

This is one of those situations where I wish there was a 'maybe' answer option. I do not recommend it in its present state - but I will almost certainly recommend it in maybe 6 months.

Contained within this game is a thoughtful, tactical brawler. One that allows you to cleverly combine skill, gear buffs and abilities to yeet a boss off of a roof; one that allows you to pull off immeasurably satisfying combos and air juggles that look awesome and feel awesome to pull off. That lets you summon the Hulkbuster, and hilariously put Hulk inside of it.

I have sunk 95 hours into this game so far, and whilst I'm not going to say I loved every hour - because as I'll mention soon, there are SO MANY problems - what the game absolutely fundamentally nails is making you feel like Iron Man, like Hulk, like Captain America. Whilst the combat is superficially the same for every character, each has their own nuance and special intrinsic ability that, when combined with the lovingly crafted animations, absolutely immerse you in that character. And when the game gets out of its own way to just let you string together combos, parries, dodges and abilities, it's an absolute joy to play.

Sadly, get in its own way is something the game does often, and egregiously, at the moment.

The game is, as mentioned, a brawler, and as a brawler, it is entitled to chuck a ludicrous amount of enemies at you. In principle, you have the tools at your disposal to deal with this. But unfortunately, it would appear that Crystal Dynamics did not get the memo about unit slotting. For some background, the game has three different kinds of attack which you can deal with:

• blue - you can block, parry or dodge
  
• yellow - you can parry or dodge, but not block
  
• red - you can only dodge

This seems like a simple enough system, and yet, you can and will be attacked by 6 enemies at the same time. In cases where all the attacks are blue or yellow, this is fine, as you can parry all of them with a single button press, which is cool. But frequently the game will send a combination of blue, yellow and red at you, leaving you only with the options of attempting to dodge within a window a billionth of a second wide, or get hit by literally all of the attacks and get downed. Your best bet in situations like these is to hope that one of your abilities is charged, or a nearby enemy is available for a takedown, and exploit the i-frames that these provide to tank the hits. That is...not fun at worst, and mildly irritating at best. And that's to say nothing of the enemies who have ranged attacks that seem insignificant, but you will receive no warning they are coming, and they stagger you out of any standard attack you're trying to do. That's right, the Hulk can be staggered out of smashing by a tiny pistol. Great?

The mission structure and design is also wildly inconsistent. The game is at its best when you're dancing around a map, bashing through waves of enemies and generally causing mayhem. So it's immensely frustrating that so many objectives ask you to stand on a certain spot and don't move, either whilst you capture a point, or whilst your teammates destroy a power core that you have exposed, because you have to hold down the button to keep it open. Then there are the villains, which are a weird mixed bag. Seemingly counter-intuitively, the best ones are the battles with the huge AIM robots - one a giant mech, the other a flying weapons platform, both with various weak points, and supported by waves of tiny enemies, encouraging teamplay and target prioritisation. The worst are the actual named villains - currently limited to Taskmaster and Abomination - who are just damage sinks with very little real strategy required to take them down. You CAN debuff them to the point that you can yeet them off a roof, but there's only one level that allows you to fight them on a roof, the others are in contained rooms where this just isn't possible. The villain battles need some serious re-work if they're going to be fun. Taskmaster, for example, could be relatively weak, but evasive and supported by a whole load of minor enemies. Just spitballing, y'know?

Then there's the loot system. In principle, there is an interesting set of gear perks to acquire here - but their delivery, and your ability to rely on them is just... off. First and foremost, loot has no visual feedback, which is an outrageously disappointing oversight. I'd've loved to have been able to create my own vaguely unique set of Iron Man armour, or choose which hat Hulk is wearing; but as it stands the only way to change your characters looks is to use skins that must either be earned, randomly acquired, or purchased with real money. Second, loot has an intrinsic power cap that is at most +10 from the level that you earned it. Meaning that if you acquire a nice piece of legendary loot, you can only use it for so long before you must ditch it for something else when you are levelling up.

This makes the loot grind utterly meaningless until you hit the base cap of 130 power. Higher power levels from there are achieved by levelling up your 130 gear and gaining power from a major artefact. But the wild thing is, at this point the game just arbitrarily decides to give you LESS legendary loot. When I was 120-129 PL, the game SHOWERED me with legendary loot that I genuinely had feelings about having to delete. When I hit 130, I started getting showered with bad 'uncommon' loot that was immediately dismantled. It's a strange system, and whilst build-crafting is certainly present and possible, it's made incredibly difficult by this bizarre gatekeeping, combined with the inherent RNG.

And even after you've drudged your way through to power-level 150, the game's difficulty scales with you, meaning you're not actually gaining any relative power at all, which ends up making the whole shebang with the power/loot grind feel pointless.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The most recent patch (1.3.0 at time of writing) has addressed some of the outliers in the combat, making ranged attacks less frequent and significantly reducing the ridiculousness of the Assault Adaptoids, one of the more frustrating enemies to fight. The stability fixes are also incredibly welcome, though there are still some crashes and frame-rate drops in extremely busy combat sequences. The bugs with the daily mission system still persist, the Stiletto Bots (ridiculous lightning based enemies) still have a basically unblockable, undodgeable spinning attack that can and will down you in one shot if they start it within range.

I should also mention that whilst the campaign does suffer from the mission design issues I described above, the story it tells is, as one would expect from this developer, incredibly well crafted, and if you weren't a fan of Ms Marvel before, you will become one by the end of the campaign. It features great performances (Troy Baker's Bruce Banner/Hulk is a highlight), some terrifically done set pieces, and a whole load of heart. If the game were only the campaign (and were $10 less) I'd absolutely recommend it.

So... yeah. I desperately want to love this game, and there is most certainly a great game in here - but a whole host of minor and major frustrations, poor mission design and bizarre power/loot/difficulty relationship are holding it back. But Crystal Dynamics are smart, reactive developers, and this is not an Anthem, fundamentally-the-game-is-broken-and-not-fun situation. I am reasonably confident that in a few months, they will figure out what's fun in their game, and put the emphasis on it. But in its current state, and given how tired I am of having to tell people that a game 'has potential', I just.... I just can't recommend it. But it's one to keep an eye on. I sincerely hope they pull it out the bag.

Helped win a crusade, got to take over the kingdom of Jerusalem, and immediately got jihad declared on me. 10/10 would get executed by heretics again.