Recent reviews by Rem

A few friends wanted me to play this with them when it became free, I was reluctant for weeks. After finally being bored enough from playing other games by myself I decided I'd download this JUST to play with them again.

I actually really ended up enjoying it. The gameplay itself is pretty fun, most weapons and classes/subclasses feel unique in how they look and perform. Char creation is trash, and you can't remodel your char later so that kind of sucked when like 10 hours in I decided my char looked like a monkey and deleted her to remake. The exploration aspect of it is alright, there's not really much you can get to that's "unintended" (which is my crack) which is a bit unfortunate to me, but it's still really pretty. The enemy races are all unique from each other, but there doesn't really feel like there's much variety within the races.

My two major dislikes about the game is that even on PC mouse and keyboard there is aim assist and bullet magnetism. That's okay in PvE, but in PvP it makes things a little too easy. There are a lot of other mechanics besides reflexes/aim that separate good players from average players, but the simple fact that actually hitting your enemies is so easy kind of takes away from the feel-good of doing "well". The other dislike is that taking damage doesn't really feel intuitive visually. When I'm taking DoT damage while at low health and behind cover, a lot of the time I don't realize I'm even taking damage unless I look at my health bar or visually see what is damaging me. There's no damage "tick" queues.

BUT THE LORE. The lore is so good, like... Right up there with Dead Space. It's engaging, expansive, and you can spend hours reading it. It's definitely worth reading about the species, if nothing else.

The species are;
The Awoken - Humans who fled Earth during The Collapse.
The Cabal - The warmongering space rhinos whose society revolves around combat.
The Fallen - The insect-like humanoids who lost the favour of the Traveller (the thing that makes humans and (some) awoken magical). They worship machinery and technology, imitations of the Traveller, and are unwavering in their efforts to prove to the Traveller they are worthy of its power.
The Vex - Robot-like shells which house organic fluids, whose only goal is to protect the Black Garden.
Through their terraforming of planets, they have created technology capable of running infinite simulations. Through these, they see the possibility of each and every thing that could happen, and advance accordingly.
The Hive - The creepy humanoids that dig tunnels into planets and moons to reproduce - like ants - and through trying to save their species from extinction and a deal with paracausal forces/species became devoted to darkness, death and suffering. Their purpose of existence now to destroy all life in the universe.
The Scorn - Like The Fallen, but resuscitated after death -- haven't read much about their lore yet so I can't comment.
The Taken - Originally an offshoot of the worshipped Hive King Oryx. Using the power of the Darkness, he corrupted members of the Fallen, Hive, Vex, and Cabal species. Making them mindless drones that only do what the leader commands.

It's a really fun game (i've only played online) but...

Don't know what anticheat software is? Neither does TakeTwo/Rockstar.

"There are many facets of cheating in online games which make the creation of a system to stop cheating very difficult; however, game developers and third party software developers have created or are developing[10][11] technologies that attempt to prevent cheating. Such countermeasures are commonly used in video games, with notable anti-cheat software being GameGuard, PunkBuster, Valve Anti-Cheat (specifically used on games on the Steam platform), and EasyAntiCheat.[12]

Exploits of bugs are usually resolved/removed via a patch to the game; however, not all companies force the patches/updates on users, leaving the actual resolution to individual users."

They seem to take the "leaving the actual resolution to individual users." part way too literally.

The only unbearable problem with the game is modders/glitchers in my opinion, but nothing really gets done about it.

Most games will do a small patch every few days when they've found an exploit that can be abused in order to prevent cheating, but with TakeTwo/Rockstar you can expect a patch every... 4-6 months. After the patch there's usually a ban wave, which will give you a splendid week of modder free playing time. The other 16-23 weeks though? lol, good luck.

To give an example of how bad the modding is; I have played in approximately 30 sessions over the last 4 days. I left ~5 of those sessions because I was content and felt it was a reasonable time to get off the game. The other 25? Well, either server crash from modder trying to spawn too much money at once, or the entire lobby was just blowing up repeatedly and getting teleported around and having their weapons taken away. Oh, and vehicles don't save you - they'll just force eject you from them. You can also be frozen so you can't move your character, or modders can spawn 1000+ planes on you at once, crashing your game. Switching lobbies doesn't save you, because there's another malicious modder in the one you're loading into already.

To reiterate, it's a really fun game. One of the best I've played, actually. But unless you're going to play invite only sessions or instanced missions, it's not currently worth the frustration.

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September 6, 2018 - this review is still relevant.

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December 31, 2020 - still relevant. still crawling with modders.