Recent reviews by MCpl Green

There's a lot of depth and a greater tactical challenge to these scenarios.

We're enjoying it so far, and appreciate improvements that were made to some of the interfaces and flow.

Game performs horribly. Won't use the GPU. No meaningful graphics settings in the menus. Disappointly half-assed, regret the purchase.

Worth reconsidering if they fix it.

Two average missions that the squad AI can't handle. They freeze hooking up the supply lines. They actively disregard orders, or outright refuse to be told what to do.

It's an infuriating disaster, and I'm not talking about the fires.

So far, it is what's advertised.

Runs exceptionally well while looking nice. Very stable. The currently available content is a little light, but it works and appears to be in the process of being expanded upon.

I plan to update this as this situation will likely change, but right now, my experience for the first hour of owning the product has involved the product crashing on load, and compiling shaders at the start of the game. These shaders strike me as similar to MSFS's download system, in that is has me wondering if this is done deliberately to eat up those first two hours so people can't get refunds. The time from when I press play, to when I get to the menu, right now on average is about a half an hour. And even after all that horse manure, I often still get a compiling shaders progress bar on loading screens. What. The. Hell. Is. This. Garbage.

When it finished compiling however, I did rather like that a number of settings selections were available before the main menu or any audio/video playing on first launch. Well done there.

And before completing what amounts to the same tutorial I've done in every other title in the series, again, the game softlocks and I have to quit to continue. Did Gearbox replace their QA team with an AI? Did one exist to begin with?

My employer has produced higher resolution slide decks than this. And at times, it feels like they clicked through them quicker too.

In-game advertising. Could be the best game in the world and I'd downvote over this. I get that you're not a giant company, but this isn't a little news article on a feed, where the feature has another actually useful purpose behind it. There's at least three places in the UI that exist exclusively to sell me another title, and it's unacceptable.

This is a paid-for product on the PC market. You need to respect it like one, like everyone else.

Development progress is pretty slow paced, but it's a product I enjoy playing in its current state. Just have to be willing to accept that you're looking at long periods to get non-critical fixes or content updates.

The weapons are well done. The attention to detail makes me happy. I can't express enough in writing, the joy I felt, when my player took the magazine out of his pistol to check it, I accidentally left clicked, and the weapon discharged into the ceiling. That was face palming, the impressive part was that when the magazine went back in, the weapon failed to fire until the player ♥♥♥♥♥♥ it. We then proceeded to see if we could friendly fire with them that way. I'll leave it up to you to see the results for yourselves.

It's stable, works, still being developed and expanded upon. Still a bit irritated about Rebirth, but I can see the benefit X4 received from that project.

It's imperfect. There's a lack of player control over the strategic direction. The development options for your crew and boat are too limited. Sometimes a battle starts with you in tickling distance of a destroyer. I find myself fighting the interface at times, particularly with respect to crewing different weapons.

In spite of that, it's fun to play. There are different paths to victory. I'm still finding new ways to employ the tools at my disposal and I enjoy that experience.

It has also been consistently very stable, even after updates are posted.

If you enjoy the genre, you'll enjoy this one.

At the time of this writing, it's an early access title with active development. Updates tend to introduce errors, and while I haven't seen anything game-breaking, there have been some feature-breaking ones. However, a discussion post typically sees a response and a fix within minutes to hours, not the typical days to weeks we get from corporate development.

As it sits right now, you have an 80 - 90% solution on levels one to a hundred. The content is mostly there, some balance friction I'd like to see ironed out on some of the skills, but eh, good enough for now. There is a prestige system in place and it does work, and though it's setup to have more content beyond level 100, that content is not implemented yet.