Recent reviews by JimLahey

As of recently, I have had a new set of standards for a game. I really wish there was a "mixed" option for the recommendation button, but in my personal case, the good outweighs the bad.

The GOOD:
1. The game is a ton of fun to play. It really is the epitome of a looter-shooter with a fun campaign, engaging side quests, and the classic unique borderlands feel to it.
2. The skill-tree. It is perfectly done. I like games with skill-tree's. ARPG's, RPG's, etc. - I love customizing my character's fighting style. This skill-tree is simple, but advantageous - never feel like I am lost reading insanely complex skills and character impacts. Everything just makes sense.
3. The audio is awesome. I love the sounds of the guns, the voice acting, and especially the music in the background of a heated fight.
4: Rarely do you find a good vehicle in an open-world game. Even gems like Elden Ring had terrible vehicles (horses in that case). the vehicles in this game are insanely smooth and actually get you from A to B at a significantly faster clip than if you were on foot. Well done!
5: The weapon system is great. Enough said.

The BAD:
1A: Battlefield 6's beta set a new standard for 2025 PC releases. Never once did I experience overwhelming bugs, optimization issues, or frame drops. Never. My standard is set high nowadays, especially for AAA games like this one... especially when DICE dropped an incredibly clean BETA product.
1B: Optimizing this game was a nightmare even with a 4080 Super and pretty much top-of-the-line technology. The game started off with massive frame drops, crashes, and freezes until after about 3 hours I found the perfect setting. Even then, in cut-scenes my frames drop to 30 fps and it feels like you are scrolling left and right in your phone's camera roll. Ugh.
2: The pre-order gear. I spent $130 on this game. You get a level 1 gun and 2-3 level 30-50 guns right off rip. I hope you are seeing where I am going with this... my level 1 gun was useless an hour into the game, and my other guns are useless until I put another 20 hours in the game... seriously????? I am not asking, nor do I want a handicap throughout the game, but at least give us something in the level 10 range so that we can get some real value out of our extra $60 we spent!
3: The open-world can feel pretty stale at times. A lot of the wilderness is met with the same exact enemy types, with cool extra things to do being few and far between. Gotta add more substance to really compete with the open-world masterpieces like Elden Ring, Dying Light, and Horizon.
4: Painfully bad, and I mean REALLY bad, server connectivity with friends. Don't even try it, move on and play by yourself.

Overall -
Potential: 9/10
Current state: 6/10

The game needs some cleaning up... big time. The flaws with optimization, crashing, frame drops, server connectivity, and pre-order value not being given until end-game all really hurt. Any powerhouse game would collapse with issues like this. But even then, when I finally circumnavigated these issues, the game really opened up and became a blast. CLEAN IT UP AND YOU HAVE A MASTERPIECE ON YOUR HANDS!

It's an early access game, so by playing it now you are willingly accepting the bugs that come with the game. Because of that, this game is a 5/5 for me. The bugs can be relentless at times (inventory bugs the most noticeable), and assuming these bugs get repaired, this game is perfect. I have never been into survival games, and even less into horror games. This game brought two of my least favorite genres together, and made it into one of my favorite games to play at the moment. Must get game... but if you are entirely unwilling to deal with bugs, waiting is acceptable as well.