Recent reviews by adnauseam

easily my new favorite game, and its worth is beyond the $40 i paid.
i'm cautiously optimistic for future updates and what the life of this game will be like.

played in Server Slam, ran up behind some random and decided to call out to him through voice chat.

told him i hoped it was a good idea i chose not to shoot him, and we tagged together to run the playtest.

weeks later, we joined back up on launch day and let time disappear as we played together for hours.

10/10 game, would make a new friend and enjoy days of great fun again and again.

a store description that boasts ".. more than 2,000,000 players .." while the active count is ~2,500 at the time of writing, and a playerbase so elitist that you can expect to get yelled at for making simple mistakes.

devs are more focused on making gooner material to boost income, meanwhile the game still hitches and stalls.

this game really had a great potential, and it was slaughtered by a boring storyline, big anime tidds, and excessive microtransactions.

give me the classic PSO2 back and i'll play it like this nonsense never happened.

oh, this is a breath of fresh air in an era of lifeless games.

perhaps best utilized as a mind cleanser, or with some audio in the background for easy listening. this is so creative, and so cute that i could scream at it. i only wish there were more clutter objects, as well as workshop integration for players to add their own new things.

I had a lot of fun playing through early access, and I really enjoy the new visual style. Definitely a major update, and I can't wait to play the full thing.

Despite only having 200 hours, I can easily say it's an addictive management game with a lot of replayability. Add the Space Age DLC and there's even more stuff to play with and learn about. I even nominate it for Labor of Love 2024.

Is it Half-Life? Well, it certainly uses a lot of Half-Life 2 assets that we're familiar with.

Is it fun? Well, there's things to interact with like a tech demo, but this isn't even really a tech demo. The team wants to show the style and concept they're aiming for, and this feels a bit like "we want to make something cool, so we'll use Half-Life as the medium."

Is there anything new, innovative, groundbreaking, exciting, etc? No. There's snow deformation and an abundant use of particle effects, but I'm of the belief that a game product should be fun before it's pretty. This has a lot of flashy stuff to look at, but doesn't offer anything further that you can't get from the already established Half-Life titles. This feels like the Black Mesa project again. Fans taking their own initiative to do something that isn't necessarily needed, putting their own spin on Valve's existing content, and I suspect this project could take about the same amount of time as Black Mesa did.

A question: If Mark Laidlaw regrets posting Epistle 3, what makes you think that you have the right to go make it a reality after all this time? If Valve themselves have already created Alyx which directly retcons the story to shift it to a new position, what furthers the idea that this project should exist? Again, this demo offers nothing new, exciting, or innovative outside of a graphics engine change for flashy effects. There's nothing compelling or engaging.

You don't sincerely trust EA anymore, do you?

- Horrible forced "product" placement ala Rocky's inclusion. His character could be swapped out with any other name and it would be exactly the same. Seems like you just want to pander toward a young rap-oriented audience.

- Takeovers are objectively the worst addition to NFS, and EA is really hoping that you won't be educated enough to know that they're just gymkhana courses. Again, forcing me to listen to Rocky's inclusion as if I could possibly be more disinterested of his opinion of my performance.

- The prologue entry was like experiencing whiplash in quick bursts. Yaz is pumped that she's your best friend, and you do absolutely nothing wrong to her, but she's mad Rydell didn't apologize to her so she works to steal every single valuable vehicle that the garage has worked on (especially yours) so she can feel strong? This is a weak hook in the narrative to convince the player they have a reason to see Yaz as a rival, rather than her just being a 19 year old who committed grand theft.

- The constant spoon-feeding of expositional dialogue that is unskippable, poorly voice acted, and woefully disconnected from everything going on is too much to bear. I actually turned the dialogue volume to zero so that I didn't have to hear their conversations, instead just reading the subtitles. On that note, the creative writing is also, once again, very bad. EA can't decide if they want to go hard and gritty, or soft and kid-friendly. Cops call you doofus and knucklehead, but then threaten to kill you and call you an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It's almost comical if it wasn't so pathetic.

- It is beyond disrespectful to shoehorn side narratives along the main story that range from blatant racial inequality and profiling, to the kind of life struggles a transgender person might experience growing up, to having an unashamed Trump-esque gender-swapped political figure on the radio, only to drop a random amount of money in your bank account for completing the side bit and never bring this up again. As a player, I cannot engage with these stories you're forcing into the game, you do not allow me to ask questions, I cannot form any meaningful relationships to this because you present it and then go, "Okay, moving on!" Don't spit in my face like this, EA.

Remember when Need for Speed was about street racing, maybe throwing some cool decals and paint combinations on your car along with it? EA doesn't seem to remember. They're too blind by the haze of heat that swirls in their corporate hydra heads. They'd rather buy your mistrust for $69.99 over and over. As a kid who grew up on High Stakes, Hot Pursuit 2, Underground, and Underground 2, I hope any consumers that happen to read this hear me when I say DO NOT BUY THIS. Let the title die. Let the company wither.

There are minor things about this game that I enjoy, but with how many missing features there are that Heat had on top of all of the other questionable design choices of Unbound, I can say that the pros most definitely do not outweigh the numerous cons.

Go play Heat, or even NFS 2015.

coil head split me open and put his hard spring inside

it's like one of those great 2D flash games from years ago..
assuming more content is added to flesh the game out of EA status, i think it has potential to be a great finished product.