Recent reviews by Local_Shipwright

Hoo boy, Helldivers 2. Talk about a generational fall off.

When the game first released, it was everywhere, and rightfully so. The game was simply phenomenal!

Albeit being essentially built in a cave, with a box of scraps and an outdated, dead engine, the game was amazing. It was fairly well balanced, felt good to play despite the bugs, was challenging, but fairly so, and had both a positive new player experience and low bar to entry, alongside a wonderfully high skill ceiling. It was a perfect game for more casual play with a gang of friends, while also being a good game for players seeking something that would test and challenge their skills. They even said that all future stratagems would be free!

But it is no longer 2024, and while the first few content updates were fine, as time went on, a trend began to arise. The developers made it clear that they were either listening to the wrong people, or had no clue what they were doing. They made change after change, addition after addition, and fumble after fumble that often simply made the game worse. Not to mention the 30 bugs added with each patch. They nerfed a lot of weapons unnecessarily, buffed enemies that didn't need buffing, and began to lose the plot.

Then, they began giving less real content in each warbond, and eventually started locking stratagems behind them. Over time it felt less and less like a fun game to play with friends, to a "Give us money to play with all the cool stuff that often times would be meta or solve an issue caused by previous poor balancing/design decisions." And when people complained, they either wouldn't listen, or would be white knighted by people who thought the devs could do no wrong.

This eventually lead to the addition of the illuminate, where in my most humble of opinions, the game truly began it's dive towards the concrete off the top of a skyscraper. Tanky enemies that can remove you with a snap of their fingers (some can even fly and move around at high speeds without any sort of reduced health), combined with hordes of chaff enemies, and big scary enemies that had no noticeable weak spot, something the game taught you to look for. They felt frankly terrible to fight, not to mention the fact that they were often stuck to maps with city areas that didn't feel good to fight in either. The warbond that accompanied this update was also the first to introduce stratagems in the warbonds.

By the time the Illuminate came around most of my friends had stopped playing, and the couple that remained quit not long after their introduction, since they simply weren't enjoyable to fight against. And Arrowhead, instead of potentially reworking this faction, simply made it worse. They added a new giant enemy that could spawn everywhere and anywhere at anytime that had no weak spots and an insanely high health pool and the ability to erase you whenever, and giant ships that patrol around the map and take potshots at you, while you are effectively helpless to do anything. You can kill them, but it takes far too many resources to ever be worth it, especially with their not so obvious weak spots, and the ability to instantly vaporize you with their cannons, that originally you had no real way of knowing were targeting you until they fired. They also showed up in the new supercities, that were giant mazes of buildings that massively increased stratagem call in time because your super destroyer would often times have to reposition.

A sizeable chunk of people found the new Illuminate unpleasant to fight, because it simply wasn't fun all things considered. And Arrowhead did the right thing and hardly changed any of the issues. By this point, the game had become an overly buggy, unfair, unfun ragdoll fest. And while they'd occasionally improve something or fix something, they often took 2 steps back for any and all steps forward. And skipping a few more things along the way we're brought to...

Modern HD2, and how much it sucks. After adding a terrible unfun faction, they thought: "Hmm why don't we ruin the rest of them?" and would add both a horribly unfun to fight and weak spot-less enemy known as a war strider to the most fun and balanced faction, the automatons. And then would decide to completely ruin the Terminids, by adding a bile titan that can fly, with no sensible weak spots and the same health + a genuinely impossible to dodge attack AND that is invulnerable for nearly 75% of the time spent fighting it! Oh and if you somehow manage to deal with such a thing? It comes back in like a minute or 2. You get no breaks from it, it is a constantly present nuisance. I'm also 99% sure there has not been a single free stratagem added since the underwhelming W.A.S.P. launcher and FRV which were added not long after the Illuminate were over a year ago. The game's actively bleeding players, and the developers behind it completely misunderstand what the game is supposed to be, continuing to nerf anything and everything effective and fun, while rarely nerfing what is annoying and unfun.

The game seems like it's headed for disaster, and the developers don't seem like they have any plans on switching up their act anytime soon, which is a massive shame. This game is so promising, and was so fun, but with all the poor decisions they've made (a lot I haven't mentioned or gotten detailed with because all those grievances would make something so long they'd rival a google doc to expose a youtuber.) and the army of glazers the team listens to, the game is not looking like it's gonna make a turn for the better anytime soon.

Can't let gng know I fw this

Okay, furry bait and 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 stuff aside, this game is really good and fun.

It's got a fun and fairly free movement system, which is always great.
It has a nice and fun artstyle and a simple, albeit very free character creator. It has 3 classes, Warrior which is your big strong tank, Mystic, your classic mage, and Bandit, the speedy gremlin with dual knives and a bow. It allows for both singleplayer AND multiplayer, which can be done either with friends or randoms. The dungeons, though there are only 2 of them currently, randomly choose one of ~3 layouts, and have different difficulty options to help reduce the repetition when revisiting them.
Only real complaints are a couple of the enemies (Like the wisps) can be a pain in the ass, and sometimes it feels like an encounter or boss fight wasn't exactly made with singleplayer in mind, though perhaps I'm just bad.

Overall a promising game, and I personally think it's worth the price.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ phenomenal fps game about stylin' and going real fast.
Manages to be both extremely serious, and not serious at the same time.
Also you can play chess, which I suck at but hey, chess.
The community is also pretty inviting, chill, and also talented.
Overall probably one of the best singleplayer games I've ever played, and I can confidently say is in my top 3 favorites.

(P.S. I don't get why the other reviews keep talking about robot sex? I mean, just go to the lust layer's secret, it's 100% sex trust me no cap fr fr.)

I can use good old gamebanana to dress as a cute anime girl as I go through the classic half-life campaign :)

Also don't let this game die, it's too good.

One of if not the best co-op horror or daresay best co-op games in a while. It's made by a single ex-Roblox dev and has the most simple premise. You and 3 others (usually your friends) work for a faceless company and go to a variety of moons, dodging spooky and dangerous monsters to collect a variety of scrap items. You then use the scrap you get from selling those items to the company to buy items to more effectively collect scrap. Then you can add mods and things to the game to make it more than 4 people, gets some QOL, or even get some funky music. Oh and one of the most popular mods was a JonnyRazer bad idea so that's pretty cool. Overall, phenomenal game that allowed me to die horribly in a multitude of ways, and have some of my coolest moments. 10/10

The best 4-player co-op horde shooter I ever done did play.
You play as a dwarf, who goes into a cave full of bugs, shoot said bugs, mine some ores and minerals, deposit them, and leave. The game has four classes, each with 3 primary options, 3 secondary options, 4 grenades, and a whole heap of upgrades for them. This allows for a ton of build variety, my only complaint with said variety being that the perks are really limited, as a tiny handful of the perks in the game overshadow every other perk. The developers themselves are really player first, such as allowing you to go back to any season pass for completely free, without any premium passes. There is DLC, but it's all only a few dollars each and just gives some nice cosmetics. More so a way to donate to these wonderful devs in exchange for some cosmetics you like.
(P.S. pls add a reward for buying all DLC because I did that I would appreciate that) :3

Idk man it just came free with the game. No clue what it does. But I have it I guess. Neat.

Really fun game about building tanks. It is well optimized while looking stunning and while it lacks a tutorial is relatively easy to figure out. Only one problem and that is that the free form hulls are a confusing and scary nightmare. So if you aren't the next Einstein stick to the generated hulls.

I'll put my issues with the game in as simple of a form as I can.
Issue 1. The camera is really jittery and it is not helped by the movement system that has you walk with the touch pad. while usually this wouldn't be an issue, the fact that you didn't need to hold down the direction just touch it with your finger and your character would take off at full speed made controlling the game more difficult to maneuver in than other games and left me with motion sickness.
Issue 2. Physics based climbing. While it does make the game more realistic don't get me wrong it was a pain to work with and really wasn't helped by the aforementioned jittery camera, and because of this it made the tutorial nigh impossible to complete because of a section where you have to scale along a wall across water and no matter how I approached it or how hard I tried, I couldn't get past and would slip into the water meaning I'd have to restart AGAIN and I got so frustrated I quit. which is a terrible sign for any game.
Issue 3. Really empty and confusing. Due to my inability to complete the tutorial a buddy of mine decided to check the game out and skipped the tutorial (after having it say he was 5' 1" when he was 5' 5") and he couldn't figure out the magic, and couldn't figure out where to go. Eventually he found his way to a map and was entirely unsure what to do at that point and after messing with some map geometry and physics props just gave up before even SEEING an enemy.
Conclusion: During an earlier point in time the game was revolutionary and impressive but now it's just a confusing, barren, and Motion sickness giving mess and it's sad considering how long it's been in early access so I feel the developers really don't work on it and tweak it as much as they should, from what I've seen they just add more new content without fixing already existent content and problems.

This game is probably the reason I have A Distinctive Lack of Hoes. Either that or just cause I'm ugly. Anyway 10/10