Recent reviews by eb

Ace Combat 7 is a good Ace Combat with a few things dragging it down.

Enemies are the most annoying they've been in any Ace Combat, and drone enemies especially so. There's a ton of scripting in big fights, which really slows the game down on replays and makes bossfights a chore rather than exciting. There's also a lot of gimmick missions with annoying failure conditions, but missions are checkpointed now at least. I found myself enjoying the score attack and CAS/ground support (Mission 12 especially) missions the most.

There is another problem, and that's the usual Ace Combat MRP grind has been vastly expanded. This is good in the sense that there's about as many variants of the F-15 as there are Gokus in a Dragon Ball fighting game, but a lot of the actually good Optional Parts (which are critical in making older aircraft as performant as the newer or fictional prototype ones) are locked as multiplayer only.

There's a mod on the nexus that disables this to let you use MP parts in SP, and it's a godsend. It does make the game really easy but AC7's difficulty curve is frankly a bit too high for people new to arcade plane games and who dont want to deal with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like Cape Rainy Assault (a fantastically written mission let down by that opening sequence) or any mission with an altitude restriction. Like it's fine for me, I've been playing these games for a little bit but I can really see how it would be frustrating if you didn't learn it already playing the previous (and much easier) games in the series that these gimmicks reference. Like going back to AC4 or 5 from AC7 it's incredible how easy those games are compared to AC7 on Normal, especially when you have zero MRP and still need to buy planes.

Still, the game is good enough to warrant every boring scripted interaction with Mr. X or installing a mod to take High-Speed Data Link Antenna so you dont have to gun down drones. Also, go play Project Wingman. That's got the PS2 feel of the classic Ace Combats that got us here, and *especially* if you liked AC7.

It feels really weird to do this to Nightdive, who are generally great, and to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DOOM of all things, but here we are. There's a ton of inertia on player movement and mouse input for some reason making the game feel godawful to play, at least on keyboard and mouse. It feels a bit like it's adapted for controller or something. Hoping Nightdive fix this. For reference I'm on the D3D11 renderer, and I checked most of the settings but couldnt figure out if I'd missed anything.

I really wanted to recommend this but the default vehicle controls aren't rebindable. I'd like W/S throttle control, A/D yaw control, arrow key pitch and roll but I can only rebind throttle and seemingly can't unbind WASD from pitch/roll. I tried using my controller (8bitdo pro 2 bluetooth) with Steam's default controller bindings, it put my helicopter throttle on right stick and didn't change the button prompts off of keyboard. This is all jank I'm prepared for, but not having the same helicopter controls I've used in every game since Battlefield 2 really detracts from the experience.

If you're okay with rebuilding every vehicle to fit your controls or want to build your own go for it.

The First Descendant is a rarity, a fully coop MMO that's also a fun game with good fundamental mechanics. Unfortunately it's let down by a deeply inconsistent difficulty curve and one of the least enjoyable artificial difficulty spikes I've seen in an MMO with Hanged Man.

For context I played the game almost entirely solo with occasional exceptions for missions that weren't balanced for solo (missions where you have to defend a static radar with a health bar, missions where you have to capture or collect simultaneously).

Note this is super cut down from my original 16,000 character review lol, gabe says 8k or nothin'

The Issues:
Balance:
- Weapons can roll %ATK, %Weak Point Damage, %Crit Damage and %Crit Rate. Or you could roll flat damage against a specific subfaction, which is essentially useless. Or lower recoil, which is also useless. The MG I used for the entire back half of the game happened to roll 8.3%ATK, 6.8% Weak Point Damage and 33.3% Crit Damage, which isn't even a good roll but it's good enough that it vastly outclassed literally every other gun i got both in terms of number DPS (and yeah I'm aware that the DPS number is not the actual DPS) and ingame performance. Being able to roll these stats on a gun gives massive importance to just using the first good roll you get forever, and you only mix it up if you want to lower your DPS for whatever reason. It's fine when you have a build that relies on a specific weapon's ability, that's interactive and part of making a build. It's an issue when you don't need to even make a build because the developers have to account for the vast gap in power between people who get good rolls and people who don't, or do get good rolls, don't realize it and scrap/don't use them.

- Red healthbar enemies can spawn with special quirks/mutations including my most hated single special ability, Partially Hardened. Partially Hardened reduces the enemy's hitbox to their head ONLY. Any other hits do no damage, and explosives seemingly can't headshot, although you can still CC them. This is fine when it's on ranged enemies with easily accessible headshot hitboxes. It's incredibly annoying when put on a heavy melee charging enemy, which, as the special abilities are random per encounter (so if you die and retry a fight you get different specials) can result in some absurdly unfun combos once enemies start stacking specials. The worst one to me is a melee enemy with the bubble shield and explosion, as a melee enemy will rush you down while you can't shoot them outside the shield, explode as soon as you're in the shield, and then run you down and repeat the process as you're getting back up. It's not that difficult to deal with but it's emblematic of TFD's concept of difficulty: give enemies immunity so you don't have to actually balance player damage.

Annoyances:
- It's about the orbs. Bosses in TFD have 3 healthbars and between each healthbar is an immunity phase where the boss will go immune and roughly 7 out of 10 times spawn 3 to 5 metal orbs over their head. The other 3 times they'll spawn adds, and those bosses are much more fun to fight compared to the orbs, since that's an actual fight. The orbs float around semirandomly and after you destroy them all the boss immunity will disappear until it's time for the next healthbar. Orbs were cool the first time, in the first dungeon. They were okay through the next 4 or 5 dungeons, gaining a few interesting permutations like orbs you have to destroy in spawn order (or they all respawn), orbs which respawn if you don't destroy all of them quick enough, and one that I absolutely hate, which is orbs flicker immunity on and off randomly. This is on top of the boss already being immune, so you just have to sit there and keep switching orbs to progress the fight or crosshair camp one at a time. It's the slowest part of the fights by far, and It's reused constantly seemingly without regard to whether the last boss you did had orbs or not.

- The Dungeons themselves peak in difficulty with Bio Lab (honorable mention to Seudo, runner up Agonia) and afterwards rarely ever reach the same difficulty as even some of the normal missions, which past a certain point start spawning old bosses with one less healthbar instead of a yellow health enemy to add a little extra challenge. Those old bosses aren't anywhere near as difficult as when I first faced them (even with their higher levels), but they're still harder than the boss of the final dungeon, or really anything after Bio Lab.

- Gameplay ends up calcifying as your gun is almost always your safest dps option, and in some characters' cases your only source of DPS. This creates a need to be able to shoot bosses without taking damage in return, which results in bossfights turning into corner peeking at angles so that the boss can't hit you with their gun. The AI is just programmed to walk towards you if they cant shoot so you can just circlestrafe around a crate thats just tall enough to block their gun but not their head, or you can cheese a sniper boss by just learning the timing of their shot and moving 2 steps to the left, completely invalidating all their damage.

Dealbreakers:
- The crafting UI is godawful. it looks like they took the form for the webstore and very lazily adjusted it to handle crafting. Basic mat crafting should be done at the workbench, not Anais.

-The Hanged Man is the last Colossi in the game, is completely optional and is the worst designed fight in the game. Hanged Man is a team-communication based fight, at the end of a long string of content which has required absolutely no team communications at all.

The Good:
-Grappling hook is good. Adds a lot of universal mobility and makes jumping puzzles far more tolerable (and the jumping puzzles in this one can be pretty annoying if you're not paying attention).

-Gunfeel and shooting feel decent. It's not trying too hard to wow you but it feels pretty good compared to division 2's flurry of bees chipping away at armor or destiny 2's visual clutter. You can and should be hipfiring most of the time, and in some scenarios you will have to as you won't be able to see boss AOEs otherwise. I also experienced weird lag whenever I held right click to aim and I'm not sure why.

-The module system is pretty good and one of the places I don't mind stacking good stats since it's a universal upgrade system for all guns/descendants. I quite like the module system, one of the standouts of this game, although it is entirely rng based. You can do some pretty zany things with modules like running two MGs to never run out of white ammo, which I tested near the end and it worked really well.

-The MP system is interesting and rewards active ability use, but it also requires some care. Enemies drop MP boxes where they die, so you have to go to them to regen. Once I got my modules up my abilities became the vast majority of my damage, so keeping myself in MP became an interesting gameplay consideration over just a flat timer like every other game in this genre does. TFD does still have cooldowns, they're just quick.

-The entire game can be played in coop, 4 players all the way through. In modern MMOs this is a stunning achievement and should be recognized. I don't know any other recent MMO on the market that does this.

-The maps are laid out quite nicely and are split into 4 or 5 quadrants (quintants?) with 2-4 missions per quadrant. The missions flow into each other well and the small sandbox nature of it means you actually have room to do stuff in rather than a claustrophobic cave or arena.

Conclusion:
It's a fun game if you're just playing it as a casual third person shooter with friends. When it gets too annoying, feel free to uninstall it because I sincerely doubt it's going to change for the better. TFD does have great gamefeel and despite the lack of optimization it's a genuinely fun time. It just isn't a coherent package.

Surprisingly decent. Mediocre unit pathfinding, keyboard camera shares binds with the building UI (so you can accidentally input orders to any unit with the circle menu if you're holding WASD when clicking on it) and a somewhat annoying repair mechanic thats based on a global cast AOE circle on the map rather than a more traditional unit-based repair (units with repair capabilities exist in the game, the campaign just doesn't give them to you aside from one mission).

Better Halo game than Halo 4, somehow.

nice

Buy it if it's $12. I feel a bit bad for anyone who paid full price for this.

This is still the best post-Far Cry 2 (yeah im one of those guys) Far Cry though. The best Far Cry 3-style Far Cry. It's still full of mandatory WHOA DRUGS BRO interactive cutscenes (i.e you have to hold W as someone monologues at you), enemy AI that makes me never want to use stealth, ever (seriously it completely destroys their ability to do anything to you) and far, far too few enemies to actually give you a proper firefight (in coop it's really bad, I don't think the game scales up enemy spawns at all)

Add to that a perk point upgrade system (tied to challenges like shoot A mans with B Gun) to unlock things like a wingsuit, parachute, the ability to repair a vehicle and other things you'd think would be necessary but require an extra 20 minutes of playtime to unlock. The game is so incredibly easy vanilla that it doesn't really become a problem, though.

I'm not going to comment on the story. You're buying a Ubisoft game. You know what you're getting into.

The good parts are the gunfeel. Far Cry 5 does a great job of including a wide roster of weapons, and giving those weapons a great Hollywood feel to them. Gun stats are all over the place, but everything feels and sounds consistent. Graphics are nice too I guess. There's also a lot of vehicles, that's kind of nice I guess. Planes are cool. Helicopters are ridiculously overpowered, they're nice. Are there any other good parts? The cutscenes are good if you enjoy hatewatching things and complaining to your coop partner I guess. I definitely do.

I played the game with mods turning the enemy spawns up and making the guns more accurate/the enemies less bulletspongey, so the parts I liked were fighting hordes of cultists, which really does not exist in the vanilla game outside of certain setpiece fights in missions (and even then the spawns in those missions are a joke). I also had a mod that allowed me to increase my weapon ammo limits to like 1200 or something so I never had to do the make-work of fast-traveling to an outpost just to restock ammo.

The Vietnam DLC is actually great. Give me a full game designed like that with an objective at the end of a large sandbox area that I can choose my way through (well I'm still basically on ubisoft rails but the illusion of free will is important in these games. Like every GTA 5 mission dictating to you which car you would drive where for how long so you could listen to Rockstar's constant stream of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ non-jokes).

Everything else aside, if you're not interested in ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 2010s action movies and reenacting them, Far Cry 5 is a waste of your time. When there's stuff happening it's actually fantastic, and I really wish Ubisoft would do something interesting with this engine, but I can make do with mods and ignoring as much story as the game lets me.

The best of a mediocre series, I suppose.

really bad. i would not be surprised if this was some new ubisoft studio's first project.

this game is awful. this is a step back from Far Cry 5 in almost all aspects and frankly that is an achievement.

Features in Far Cry 5 that New Dawn does not have:
-weapon customization
-anywhere near as many weapons, opting instead for the same weapons split into 4 tiers with different paintjobs and attachments
-planes
-helicopters

The usual Ubisoft Story caveats apply. It's really bad this time but most cutscenes and dialog are skippable. Not that I skipped them. I need to stop doing this to myself.

There is one set of three missions that made me Alt-F4 after about 30 minutes of fruitless attempts at "puzzle" solving (it turns out i needed to hit an input that the game does not have listed in its binds and that apparently displays once and never again, as I had to be informed of its existence by my coop partner. We also had to restart the mission because the input would randomly not work in certain mission areas).

You get Super Jesus Superpowers at some point (double jump, a berserk powerup, some other ♥♥♥♥ I don't care about, probably stealth or hunting buffs) and those are pretty cool. I wish they'd backport those into FC5.

Expeditions are great. Frankly, I wish every mission was an Expedition style combat scenario rather than what they are. I only played the first one (unfortunately FCND is just that intolerable for me) but it was the exact sort of content I wanted to see in FC5.

The usual perk point ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ from FC5 still applies. This game is not an RPG. This game is a looter shooter, except you craft all the loot yourself (once, and then it's free). Enemies are Borderlands-tier of bulletspongey once you start getting to the higher levels and god help you if you don't have a purple gun for a purple enemy or a gold gun for a gold enemy.

It turns out that even if you only make one game, you can still ♥♥♥♥ it up royally. Thanks, Ubisoft.

an enjoyable 5-6 hours of coop qte adventure, but it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks and I hate it. A game that I played through twice and had fun, except that I also hate it. I don't like it. Good game though.

If this game is $10 again and you have friends to drag through remote play i recommend it. just do your best to stay calm, it's possible and the game makes it easier by being coop so you have a friend to talk about how much you hate the game with.

shouts to my boy asked me to leave a review love u kinkyyordle420