Recent reviews by SaperPL

The story is what to be expected, narration, acting and all this is top notch. Puzzles are okay, but actually I feel like there weren't that much of them. But the stealth and combat are complete crap.

Stealth mechanic and level design make passing through some levels annoying as hell - you don't really know what is the spotting distance and in first person perspective you can't really grasp when which enemy will turn to start seeing you. There is that indicator and time of detection, but still it doesn't feel like any systemic way of passing through the level in stealth. It's neither scriped nor cleverly planned out, it's just yolo and you need to just push through until you get it right. At least that's my perception after passing main story. Our pretty sidekick can walk in front of the enemy in stealth sections and tell you to stay down, she can even bump into the enemies and start fighting with them when you are still not detected.

The fist combat shows the team implementing this either didn't have any experience with melee combat that is fair and systemic or they for some reason didn't want to make it this way to make it harder as a choice. But a lot of inputs don't register when they should, sometimes inputs queue when they actually shoudln't. Dodging often ends before longer attack of the enemy plays and its damage window is right after the dodge and even when you moved away, you still get hit. Often dodge needs to wait till your animation of the attack finishes despite you not seeing it clearly in FPP. Sometimes you can move after dodging, sometimes you will get stuck because you dodged into some uneven collision. Bossfights are balanced in a way that they force you to run out of health and be constantly on the edge while they keep replenishing you up to that last bar of health and you need to survive god knows how long because you don't really know what is the moment progressing to the next stage in bossfight.

You can't really store ammo for picked up enemy weapons, so you just have that clip those weapon had. Headshots don't instantly kill. If the enemies have helmets or just hats, headshots will first take it down, second headshot should kill them, but it looks as if in the late game you need to do three headshots when shooting from closer range to kill enemies, so it becomes useless. Just more health towards the later part of the game.

I actually passed the Egypt section by killing scouts with tools and gathering their rifles in one spot above Sphynx just to snipe guys in front of it because the stealth was annoying. One of the barracks infiltration I passed by standing on a rock so the enemies couldn't actually attack and I could just whip them when they got closer. Also btw whipping things doesn't break the stealth, but damage does. So I could hit selected guys and fight with them while the others didn't sound the alarm.

One funny thing in all this, and I have to give them the credit, is that early on if you don't pull out the gun, the enemies will fight with you the same way as you want to fight them, so for example in one spot you can gather tools to throw at the enemies and start throwing them, and they will try to throw these back at you. There's one section where I had a fun fight like this with two nazis where we were exchanging hammers and such.

Anyway, it's not really worth the money as for the game. It's too frustrating and there's nothing really in that gameplay. Even if you want it for the story, it will be frustrating and you will end up checking online info on how to get through at some point.

More puzzles and less fight, OR a dumb shooting setup where you could actually use the picked up guns efficiently would make it a lot better and worth the price tag.

If you are expecting this game to be a spiritual successor to drift stage - it kind of is, but then it's not really a good racing game. If you are expecting to have fun playing it with a car you like, fitting your style - don't buy it, it's not a game for you.

At the start you're most likely going to choose the easiest car that plays really well and delivers on the drift stage mechanic that it's really easy to start the drift and cover the curves on the route the way you like it. But once you get further away, to get all the cars, you need to play with all characters and their corresponding cars, and this is where the game shows what it really is.

It's a lazy-design game with each race tailored to specific car and with each "more difficult" car with less handling but more speed, the faked arcade'y car mechanics are getting less and less logical and intuitive to a point where the third car feels unfinished because breaking instantly straightens it from the drift, and pressing accelerator when drifting will either make you fall out of the curve or pull inside depending on too many factors to be able to reliably control the car.

Moreover you don't have track map, so you need to remember exactly when to start drifting ahead before you can even see the curve, or break because there are shortcuts that make you slow down and effectively fail the race. The speedometer is on in the corner of the screen so keeping track of the speed and trying to figure out the best speed for drifting a specific curve is futile.

Finally the big middle finger to the players are the races against vehicles that outright cheat - cutting corners as off-road modified cars when your car cannot do the same thing or a car that you already have and can play to test behaves completely different than when it's scripted in race for a perfect loop.

Effectively the game doesn't really have an actual race mode, it's always a time attack, trying to figure out the best time on the track against the time set by developer that seems to be set in order to teach you mechanics, but then you jump onto the next car and everything you've just learned playing previous car doesn't apply to this one.

So despite it having figured out a really good mechanic for steering for first two cars, the rest of the game has arbitrarily induced difficulty because the developer couldn't really make a proper racing game. Play the demo to see the controls, but don't buy it unless you're expecting to play "a dark souls of not actually arcade racers"....

The game maintains a facade of being fair while it riggs matchmaking against the seasonal (battle pass) tasks and introduces overpowered premium units that are later on balanced when those units reach critical mass of players using them.

The game maintains a facade of listenting to the community while forum moderation gate the feedback in a way that they select limited number of feedback topics to be forwarded to the developers and make arbitrary decisions on which suggestions are passed to developers without letting players know what are the rules for picking those. Feedback rots for years on the forums until it's unrelevant or by chance matches what got implemented by devs, so it's marked as passed to devs then.

The game PR/content creator community maintains a facade that arcade mode (which is the dominant one which can be confirmed by the replay database) doesn't have too much players, and it's treated as training wheels mode and thus broken for years despite most of the community prefering this mode. The realistic mode is about turning your graphics settings down and tweaking sharpness so you don't have fleshed out bushes and have sharp edges so you get competitive edge over players that want to play a modern game with modern graphics.

The game has terrible control schemes - apart from core controls of movement and aiming, multiple new types of mechanics in new vehicles are keep getting added as new separate buttons and playing on gamepad is virtually impossible for a new player, so people tend to use keyboard and mouse on consoles.

Seasons and events are constructed around Fear of Missing Out in a way that you have to spend multiple hours daily for two weeks over the event to get a vehicle that may not be available ever again apart from getting it from lootboxes (keys for premium currency mostly, or during events through non-premium currency but with impossibly low chances to drop anything, just so you waste your time and ingame currency), or second hand through a market where some vehicles tend to cost thousands of euros just because.

The game has solid arcade flying controls and plane/tank damage simulation that nothing's like it anywhere else, but don't get addicted to it, it's not worth it, the more skilled you are, the more you see how rotten to the core this game is.

This game is a pure awesomeness, a compilation of various simplified game designs dosed at right intervals in right amounts. The graphics might be 2D, but the art is top notch, the story and writing is fun with various jokes and references to games and culture. The only thing that you can pick on in this game is controls that are not perfect and require a bit of getting used to, but once you're there, it's awesome.

Amazing animations/climate, clever puzzles and some skill required in platforming. Good for chill without any rush.

9/10 for this type of game:
There's some minor issues with perception of space and the interface design on normal, non-VR display, but apart from that it's an incredibly well designed and intuitive fast paced obstacle course - addictive as hell, can't wait to check it out on VR.