Recent reviews by mopblock9

As some of the other reviews for this title mention, this game was the product of a game jam. This fact shows in gameplay to an extreme degree; their is no tutorial, minimal variety, and hounestly next to nothing to do in the title. I understand many of these issues were addressed in the sequel, but as it stands it is quite impossible to recommend this glorified proof of concept as a paid product. The gameplay loop is pretty simple; you are given a gun of questionable usability and are to locate 11 tapes across a procedurally generated map, while fighting off drones and turrets. The main gimmick is that you have to physically press buttons to use the gun in all parts of the reload process, which adds a bit more difficulty to actually using the weapons. The issues of this title all stem from a lack of content; there are only two types of enemies (stationary turrets and flying drones), three types of guns (a semiautomatic glock, a m1911, and a revolver), and the map tileset is not sufficiently diverse to not feel repetitive. You fight one, maybe two of the same two enemies periodically, where each bullet they fire is lethal (which is not always the case for you) and pick up items rarely as you slowly walk around. The game is never fast paced enough to demand mastery of the reloads, making it awkward, and the lethality of enemies often makes runs end with very little one can do about it, before even considering the limited and rare ammunition of the game. There is some faux-depth to the story in the tapes, but it's rather boring and not interesting to justify slowly walking through empty rooms for an extended period of time.

The one saving grace of this title is workshop support, which can provide a few new weapons and tile components to make the game better, but ultimately the game is most held back by a boring gameplay loop. Walking to find enemies that either kill you or are killed by you instantly, only to beget more walking isn't really fun in this case and the mechanics are never really developed enough to justify playing this for any real amount of time. It's not high-stakes enough for a tactical shooter, nor intense enough for an arcade shooter. It's a walking simulator with a gun, without reason to walk or shoot.

A fun concept for a game jam, a snoozer of a paid release.

This game is decently fun, but is definitely on the rougher side of what you will find on the market.

When I first purchased this title, I had virtually no expectations for it, outside of the existence of the workshop, which was itself enough of a draw to get me to purchase the game. Really, I was hoping for a workshop and roguelike version of Project Wingman. What I got was a fun product, that I put on a Steam Deck to play offline in travel, which it excels at. Despite it's untested nature, the game is evidently functional on the platform.

As the name implies, this game is a roguelike-title that sees you attempt to work your way through twelve standard levels and one dedicated boss stage, across three standard worlds (and one boss world). In terms of roguelike mechanics, you the player collect research points and money throughout a run, where money is used within runs for procurement of up to three levels of upgrades for all of your systems and planes (Which is to say four systems and the plane itself. For me, this typically looked like flare upgrades, cannon upgrades, rocket upgrades, AA missile upgrades, and Micromissile Upgrades, in addition to my plane). When you die, all of your money is expunged and the upgrades lost, so you are really incentivised to spend it. Research points, by contrast, are used for game-wide procurement, which allows you to procure new aircraft and subsystems to use in the game. This includes a pretty wide array of equipment, from the aforementioned subsystems to Air-Torpedoes, MIRV Air-to-Ground platforms, bombs, and even more futuristic items, such as railcannons and laser blasters. In terms of airframes, the selection is modest but capable, with planes divided into the roles of bombers (High payload, or ground selection capability, at the cost of avionics, or the air-to-air selection allowance, with high durability and low speed), interceptors (fast but weak aircraft, with an avionics focus over payload), or fighters (the jack-of-all-trades aircraft that boast middling speed, armor, payload, and avionics). Each aircraft also possesses a wide array of skins. Money and research points are acquired in-game through dealing with primarily optional targets in missions, where most missions only require you to destroy a few specific targets before you can progress, with a notable increase in difficulty between worlds. To that end, the game does a good job of providing an array of optional targets in positions that are often dangerous to pursue in gameplay. Really, though, this generosity showcases the biggest weakness of the title itself; the balance of the game.

Based on several posts by the developers of this title, the intended way to play this game revolves around building up a fleet of capable aircraft that are well suited to several specific tasks and intentionally selecting aircraft for missions: if a mission involves shooting down a flight of AWACs craft, you ought to have an interceptor on standby, if a mission involves destroying a radar array, you ought to have a bomber, and so forth. In reality, this is not how I, nor anyone I know, plays this game. Typically, we just build into a strong, jack-of-all-trades fighter that can solve the game, which means we aren't spreading our upgrade points across numerous planes. If you eliminate all of the targets on early levels (and you should, since the increase in difficulty makes getting money in later levels substantially more inconvenient), you can have a fully maxed aircraft before the setting change, which completely throws off the balance of the title. Without a need to stick around and build capital, there is no reason not to just rush the myriad of decently well-crafted main objectives and bug out. In fact, doing so is the optimal way to play, given the increases in enemy armaments. Thus, there isn't really much progression after the very beginning, making the roguelike elements of the game quite stale. And yes, you can take on optional challenges to make the game more difficult from this point, but you are never really prompted or rewarded for doing so, with progression through game-wide upgrades being quite sluggish. This is worsened by the huge difficulty disparity across mission goals, which range from simple tasks like "blow up this big, glowing, immobile monolith" to "fight a flying battleship and several waves of hyper maneuverable fighter jets." Really, the lack of scaling makes levels more RNG than a difficult climb. That's not even to mention the awful final boss, whose presence is identical in every run on the final day. The final boss is incredibly bad;
With the first phase being a clever attack on a floating platform against static defenses and a few squadrons of fighter jets, the fight starts off as an incredible test of your flexibility as you juggle ground and air management. Once done, the player can take out some support pylons to summon an hounest to god metal gear, which is an incredible looking setpiece that forces the player to engage powerful weapons at extremely close range in order to best it. While this phase can be annoying, it is quite the spectacle and I never felt cheated by it. The final phase, however, tops Bioshock for the worst final boss in games I've played. The mech's head will take flight and boast a health pool that is an enormous bullet spoonge, whose main attack is trying to ram you in midair, forcing you to either deploy back-firing weapons that are useful exactly no where else, or "joust" the bloke. Jousting will literally take over an hour, at the distance you have to move away from the boss in order to dodge safely, and it's just not fun. It feels like a gear check in a game otherwise befit with choice in approaching problems and is just unfun after the spectacle of prior stages. Combined with Roguelike permadeath, this had ended so many of my runs in the final minutes that it wasn't even satisfying to best. From gameplay clips on the web, it seems like most players don't even bother with the boss in vanilla, which is really indicative of how out of place it feels. My last point of contention with the game has to do with control rebinding, which you cannot do from within a match (it must be done in the main menu), which is a huge deal to me since plane controls are more about fine tuning the exact feel of how I play the game, not really a one-size-fits-all approach.

If you can get past these quirks, however, you will find a fun dogfighting game that is fit for quick games against seemingly overwhelming odds, that you can even play in Co-Op, topped off with a small but dedicated workshop community. The soundtrack is short, but fun, being quite reminiscent of Ace Combat or Project Wingman songs, but in a more arcade-like presentation.

This DLC is functionally just a map pack for Ready or Not, featuring 3 new maps and a few cosmetics (with free weapons added in an update alongside the DLC). The cosmetic items for the most part are just more of the same somewhat-generic cop attire, with the vest being okay for Payday Baby SWAT cosplay and none of the other items particularly standing out in any respect. Since the real meat of this DLC is the collection of three maps, the rest of this review will take a look at each of them.

Dorms is another one of those levels, like Ends of the Earth that tries to make you feel bad for shooting at the bad guys of the week, with this collection being a large homeless group in an abandoned building. Unlike the mission of the base game, however, this mission feels overly contrived to create such a moral situation, and so far outside of the realm of possibility that the entire concept almost becomes goofy. The homeless people are all inexplicably armed with powerful and expensive weapons, including (for some reason) m4-type rifles and generally behave no differently than any other enemy, making them feel more like a Fallout raider gang than any well-grounded opposing force. The Fallout comparisons don't stop there with this map, however, as the map itself looks like basically every generic Fallout 3 location, and quite far from what you would find literally anywhere. The map is a two-story decrepit building, complete with caving ceilings, holes in the walls, and a church filled with drugs, which is frankly unable to be taken seriously in any respect. The enemies in this mission are not a challenge, but I would say this is the hardest mission to S rank of the bunch. Why? I hear you ask, and the answer is simple: the entire map is rubble, so when (not if) a random weapon goes flying because some random surrendering dude decides to go for a field goal with it, you will literally never find it (unless you have bots do it, but even then their pathfinding is terrible on this map). The map looks bad and fake, the situation is frankly stupid, and the gameplay is poor, making this the worst map of the bunch by a long shot. To give credit where it's due, the map's challenge achievement for speed-running it is quite enjoyable in multiplayer, with the joys of clearing multiple floors at the same time, but that's really the only positive to mention here.

This is probably the best map of the map pack, in my opinion, with players tasked with rescuing an undercover police officer whose cover has been blown from the very same Hope Street neighborhood as in Twisted Nerve. Unlike the prior level, this level is very open and contains about a dozen small, 5-or-so room single floor houses all connected through backyards, where players are expected to fight through the quite open backyards to find their man. The gameplay here is superb, with players having to make some really touch-and-go risky plays across open terrain to reach highly entrenched foes inside buildings, allowing repeated breaching action, allowing careful planning and hectic rushes to happen alongside each other, as opposed to the strategies being at each others throats. You will get shot from neighboring homes, you will be surprised by foes crossing garbage-filled backyards, and you will enter buildings to dislodge enemies from cover, and you will like it. Frankly this is the game's combat at it's best, with just enough enemies to have the map not outlive it's welcome, but enough foes to make it not over too quickly. Their is another loadout restricted achievement on this mission, which is quite similar to the one on Rust Belt. This map is also a rare map to take place during the daytime, which is a nice change of scenery. It also features probably the best "You Aren't Ready" twist of the level pack, near the map's end.

Lawmaker is an interesting map. Much like Valley of the Dolls, this map is a mansion raid, with players going to a house that is generally not dingy (unlike the majority of maps in the game) that has been attacked by eco-terrorists. The mansion is a sprawling 3-story estate, with loads of rooms and a huge balcony across much of the exterior, allowing for the rare (but noteworthy) ambush right off the bat. The map is quite well made, and gunfights (when they happen) are generally quite fun, but there is definitely a huge catch; this map is dreadfully barren. The enemy count for such a huge map is hounestly quite tiny, it feels like the number of enemies on 23 Megabytes a Second got placed onto Sins of the Father, which leads to a good chunk of time just searching for suspects. Suspects also get around on this map, which does make them harder to keep track of and more likely to ambush you, but can also leave you searching well after the house is otherwise swept clean of foes for one random doofus. I suppose this ties into the challenge achievement of this map, which is certainly the most interesting of the 3 (but hardly the most fun); which involves rescuing all of the hostages and locating the hidden mission objective before dealing with any suspects. This is OK, the hidden mission objective moves between playthroughs, but isn't super interesting, and the map isn't really memorable in any way in my opinion. It's not a bad map, it's just kindof there; not particularly hard nor easy, not memorable, and not standout-ish in any real way other than visuals, which are just generic. It's like the McMansion it was modeled after; generic.

All that said, all of these maps are generally just more content for Ready or Not, meaning that if you like the core gameplay loop these are worth a pickup, else don't worry about them. Getting these is just a way to prolong the replay-ability of the game, but none of them are especially interesting, with my opinion of them generally ranging from bad (Dorms), to solid (Narcos) with nothing super good or super offensive along the way.

I purchased Ready or Not hoping to have a solid cooperative tactical shooter to play with friends that looked and played both with difficulty and (some) realism. While Ready or Not delivers the gameplay experience it is going for quite well, at least aesthetically, there are some buyer-beware sort of hangups I have with the game that I feel the need to write a disclaimer about within this review.

First and foremost, this game visually looks phenomenal, but the method by which they force this presentation is quite anti-consumer, particularly for people with modest rigs. Almost all of the graphical effects (and especially post processing effects) are forced on, with no toggle in settings. That means there is very little difference between the highest and lowest settings for visuals (alledgedly so that this game wouldn't look bad when streamed), both in an aesthetic and performance manner, and annoying and awful looking post processing, such as bloom, CANNOT BE DISABLED. If you have a lower or even medium-tier machine, I cannot in good faith recommend this game for this reason alone.

Another disclaimer I have to provide with this game is in respect to it's portrayal of serious issues. While the first half of the game is passable enough for a police shooter, this game decides to include a school shooting mission. Now, I'm not one to suggest censorship of artistic matters, but the level as it appears definitely feels quite inappropriate for the media genre is possesses, "gamifying" one of the most horrific acts of terrorism regularly committed in North America in a way that feels inherently disrespectful; here you hogtie every civilian you find to rescue them on a 3 minute timer before restarting the level (otherwise you basically get a failing grade on the cop simulator) in a level whose base design wouldn't feel out of place in any other video game. The level is downright horrifying to play on the first attempt, but by the third it's just frustrating, and the depiction feels rather distasteful and disrespectful. The whole endeavor feels specifically created to get media attention and act edgy, while the gameplay wasn't considered, the whole situation awful, and the level not even connected to any part of the game's overarching plot. At least the other shooting levels tie into the story, but here we just have what can only be described as a disrespectful depiction of serious subject matter that cannot even be skipped. Also touching on serious subject matter, this game decides to depict human trafficking as "container full of women in the nude," presumably purely for shock value. This decision is also revolting, especially considering how some players in the online environment treat said container. A terrible and similarly disgusting implementation of a serious issue, that treats it utterly without respect. Look, I enjoy the gameplay loop of this game deeply, and am even recommending it despite these flaws, but this feels like a middle school edgelord's idea of a serious way to broach topics and is definitely far from the way to address it. Obviously, there is a political element to parts of this game too (LA depicted as destroyed, care for veterans, a half-assed attempt to cover the serious topic of prank SWATing) but this is definitely not the forum for it.

In terms of what this game does well, the obvious answer is gameplay. Playing in multiplayer is a fun challenge that forces players to use spatial awareness and quick-thinking, even at a slow physical pace of movement. While realism does fall short in some respects (being able to keep fighting with all limbs shot to pieces, player armor tanking hits like a truck, the whole healing system, and sending 5 guys into extremely large enemy rich areas expecting results), the lethal gameplay is worth picking the game up for. I find the nonlethal challenge to be fun, but frankly unrealistic and occasionally frustrating given the RNG of NL options (half the time you have three guys surrounding a dude pelting them with attacks for ages yelling at them and you can't just arrest them while they are stunned, they quite literally "say no" to being arrested and thus your only option is to keep pelting them with whatever until they change their mind or you run out of ammo). The environments all have a very different vibe to one another and play quite well, with enough variation to keep you coming back for at least two to three runs per map (~18 in the base game) with attempts lasting anywhere from 5 to 60 minutes depending on map scale and your willingness to take risks. There are frankly more weapons in this game that you will ever use (many of them looking and feeling identical however), and the drip is largely awful unless you like cosplaying as Payday 2 baby SWAT or really dig Hawaiian Shirts. A good coop gameplay loop, if a little lacking in long term replayability and with a passable if ridiculously easy singleplayer mode. It's not the best balanced all around, but as a PVE title the odds are in your favor, so it's not really that big of an issue.


Frankly, if you can excuse the hangups mentioned here, you'd be hardpressed to find a better modern cooperative tac-shooter.

5/6ths of this 6 mission mini-campaign is an absolute blast to play, feeling like a delightful extension to the already great Project Wingman mission offerings, this time playing on the other side of the conflict as a Federation Reservist, as opposed to a mercenary freedom fighter as in the base game. To that end, this campaign takes place between Mission 11 (Cold War) and Mission 15 (Consequence of Power) with the campaign hinting at a post mission 16 twist.

As a campaign that occurs concurrently to the base game, but from the opposite perspective, players can see their actions in the main game come to light, as well as hear new dialog from returning characters (such as Captain Woodward, Stardust, or even Crimson 1). Unlike the base game, many of the characters friendly to the player are hostile in their encounters in this DLC, providing a bit of perspective on the whole issue.

This DLC provides a selection of a few of the mid-to-high tier aircraft from the base game (so nothing new there), with some slightly altered hardpoint selections for the players to mess around with at no cost (unlike the base game). I can't complain about the selection, though some new planes would definitely have brought this DLC to heights even higher than it reaches presently. There is, however, an entirely new soundtrack for this DLC, which is fantastic as ever, and more than makes up for the lack of jets.

Below, I've broken down what the levels offer in broad strokes. While I have done my best to avoid spoiling too much, by very nature of a linear story some things will be stated here, so if you want to go in entirely blind, I suggest that you stop reading here (that said, this will mainly be location and mission style spoilers, which might be purchase relevant to note).

In terms of levels, the first of the six takes on the role of brief tutorial, with players responding to Mission 11 and meeting the entirely new airwing they are a part of. This includes some context about meeting the freshly humiliated Crimson 1, and leads to an encounter against a sortie of mercenary pilots and other air threats.

The second level sees players defending against a fully fledged naval invasion, with an enemy well supported by the ship players capture in the base game. This plays out a bit like a reverse D-Day, with allied positions dug in along the Coast against numerous landing craft, where odds are quite a bit against players in an endurance test of a level .

The third level sees more air-to-ground combat, which is always a delight in the game, with players taking out air defenses and fighting alongside an Airship against foes. Quite a fun romp, well complemented by the use of ground attacker aircraft.

The fourth level is that aforementioned 1/6th of the DLC that falls short. It's a tunnel level, which forces players to effectively either have godly reflexes, or fly at an excessively slow speed (~411 SPD when I played). The game is very unforgiving, with some absolutely stupid garbage included such as terrible lighting (I had to triple my monitor gamma to even see the first turn), uninspired interior textures that are glitchy (your plane can and will clip through the tunnel with your camera alongside it), and for some reason underground active SAM sites, defeating the entire in-universe explanation for flying through around 92 miles of tunnels in a jet fighter. The worst part of this mission is the part directly before the end, where you have an incredibly lengthy tunnel that your plane will scrape the sides of if you are playing well, which any incorrect motion for the 30 seconds of constant minor changes in elevation will send you frustratingly back to the start (no checkpoints, as you'd expect from this title). There is no skipping the tunnel, and after the tunnel there is no skipping a ridiculous fight, where any misstep will send you back fifteen minutes to the start of the level where you will hear the same dialog again, each and every time. This level alone brings the entire DLC down and almost made this review negative, it is just that bad. All the level would need to be to be good would be to remove the tiny tunnel at the very end of the tunnel section and improve the lighting, which ruins an otherwise fair tunnel section that would otherwise be passably frustrating and turns it into a 30+ attempt slog.

Luckily, the DLC improves greatly after it's hardest challenge, with the fourth level basically serving as the opposite of the second. A Dunkirk Mission, if you will. There isn't much to this one, with a reminder that you are the "bad guy" faction thrown in for good measure. A fun but brief combined arms endeavor that has a big chunk of dialog right through the center.

The final level is this DLC's boss, which is probably the largest aircraft in the game, complete with a talkative, over-exaggerated villain to cap off the fight and numerous stages to engage. A delightful boss, if a tad easy to fly into supporting airships, as with the base game. The bosses dialog even provides context to the base game's Deal, and shows off the superweapons that destroy Cascadia in the base game. This DLC does wonders for providing new lore information about the Federation and the mysterious Cold War that happens in the backdrop of the franchise, serving as a delight to play, excluding the fourth mission.

I would describe this game as my top game of 2024, but I can no longer in good faith do so. This game has been a cluster of bad developer decisions, and going back on the most important promise for me personally does not sit right with me for me to review this game in a positive light.

Since launch, this game has featured a premium currency called Super Credits, which can be earned in regular gameplay in increments of on average, 10 at a time. If you are playing the lowest difficulty possible (RE: the most efficient for grinding), you can get maybe 400 or so Credits an hour, doing a mind numbing-ly boring and truly unenjoyable grind for credits, involving no fighting and just running around empty maps looking for cargo containers.

This game features a quasi-Battlepass system where you buy pretty much all new content using the premium currency for around 1000 credits a pop (so basically every month or two you have about a 2 and a half hour grind to get any new content for free). This is the only way to get new content once the launch content has been exhausted, since ALL new weapons and armor added to the game are only added to this system. This was excusable in the past, since the Battlepass was not time-limited and you could purchase things at your leisure. Traditionally, the only truly free content in this game has been stratigems, which have since been introduced increasingly only through this system, further reducing the amount of content in an already expensive game. There is also a premium store for the premium currency, where content is priced highly and the store itself utilizes FOMO tactics to encourage purchase, specifically alongside the ability to buy Super Credits to access items in the shop. Previously, items were more or less cosmetic only, with this basically being a way to get reskins for armor (with the occasional unique armor ability locked to this store annoyingly).

That said, in the past week from posting this review, weapons and game altering items have been included in this premium FOMO store and, what's worse, is that they were removed from a non-FOMO oriented purchasing plan in order to be put here, at a cost almost double what we as players have come to expect from the content. This is frankly unacceptable to me, with the game already being content starved for player-usable items without a serious grind and a seriously slippery slope of content additions being increasingly paid-only.

This game is hiding DLC behind premium currency already, and is now making the DLC timed exclusives, which is entirely what is wrong with the games industry at large. Given the lack of free armor and weapons over the past year and the increasingly egregious pay-to-win slippery slope of content, I cannot give this game a good review despite the actual fantastic elements of the game. And this is all posted without mentioning Sony's previous attempts at forcing third party accounts and the kernel level anticheat. If you are a player looking for a good coop game with a fair price plan, go play Deep Rock, this game is no longer worth it.

Payday 3 is honestly the ideal heisting game on the market, and it saddens me to see the current trend of utter vitriol dispensed against it in Steam reviews. The game isn't perfect, and I will be the first to admit that the game has had a troubled history from poor servers on launch, to a cumbersome armor system, to some absurd DLC monetization. That all said, the game is so much more than that, and that so many people refuse to give it a chance is just tragic, hence my writing this review. This will be written in the context of Payday 2 existing, which is a game I love as well, though I think comparing Payday 3 in the context of it may miss the mark since they play quite differently on purpose.

The Good
Payday 3 is a visually stunning take on the payday franchise, with numerous varied locations to rob from art galleries, to grandeous banks, to police stations, to penthouses. Unlike payday 2, which didn't really utilize it's DC based setting in a particularly meaningful capacity aside from a few heists (The Diamond and The White House, really), Payday 3 really take's it's New York setting and runs with it, with a great mix of real world and game-created locations to play around, such as the real world 47th St Diamond District or Ryan Park. These maps all play well, with the lower stakes heist feeling as fulfilling to play as the later Payday 2 heists, leaving the roster lacking the boring lows of Payday 2's early heists like Nightclub or Four Stores and instead replacing them with complex and enjoyable enviroments like Rock the Cradle or the Diamond District. The gameplay is less waiting-focused, and what sections that still involve waiting are designed to better fill that time with side objectives or truly dynamic firefights. Payday 3's stealth is enjoyable, being a lot more like the more modern social stealth of the new Hitman games than janky tacked-on open world stealth, as Payday 2 more closely felt designed with. In fact, most Payday 3 heists are designed such that you needn't even conceal your identity or pick up a gun if you chose to approach them in this more social way, with entire skill lines allowing you to just get away with daylight robbery in the most literal sense. The stealth is light years better in functionally every capacity from it's predecessor, and is well worth the time to enjoy. The gunplay is phenomenal in Payday 3, with concealment builds and finicky RNG-based dodge substituted with armor and cover, rendering enemies like snipers less of an annoying one-hit down as they can be with dodge builds, and more of a legitiment check on player skill that doesn't get away feeling too oppressive. The new enemies are mostly winners, with the tazer and shield redesign feeling much closer to how you'd expect them to be (and without shields having the highest DPS on the map, as they did in Payday 2 for some reason), and both Tazers and newly-added Naders have compelling weakpoints that can turn difficult foe into somewhat helpful asset if leveraged properly, which is a welcome addition for keeping gunfights solid. All enemies, except Cloakers, legitimently feel well made and balanced. The music in Payday 3 is gold, as one would expect, and the animations in the game are top tier, with the team clearly having poured loads of heart and soul into designing everything from the weapon inspections to the ability to flip people the bird. Payday 3's story is much more grounded, fitting the high tech but ultimately more realistic tone that the game nails; Payday 3 doesn't have billions of foes per heist like the second game in the franchise, but what enemies it does have present more of a threat.

The Bad
Payday 3 simply doesn't have the number of heists Payday 2 has built up over 10 years, which is somewhat detrimental to it, but is rapidly being remedied. While it doesn't have the lows of Payday 2 heist design, it rarely reaches the scale of puzzling present in the largest of it's heists, such as Buluc's Mansion, which is a bit disappointing. Payday 3 is much easier than Payday 2, which for DSOD players might come as a disappointment. Further, much of the difficulty is actually IRL skill based rather than relying on in-game skills, which have minimal impact as far as I am concerned. There is generally less character in this game, with the witty remarks from Locke and Vlad that would crop up in the prequels missing from heists themselves, whose voicing is populated exclusively by the main handler Shade, which I find as a bit disappointing compared to the good thing going with the DLC campaigns of Payday 2. The biggest issue with Payday 3 has got to be the exceedingly annoying design of the Cloaker, which went from being a teamcheck in 2 to an oppressive force of frustration in 3. Further, the bot AI in 3 is rather incompetent and utterly unuseful in the scheme of things. Finally, the specialist weapon system in Payday 3 is really poorly designed and could use a rework. That said, none of these issues are so much of an impediment to my enjoyment, where Payday 3 makes for a delightful way to kill time with friends in loud or stealth.

In the current industry, there are far too few games that show a true labor of love on behalf of the developers. This game is a definite exception to that, however. Deep Rock Galactic oozes passion and personality. The gameplay revolves around playing as one of four types of dwarves working space-faring mining conglomerate Deep Rock Galactic in caves of a hostile planet filled with bug-like creatures not incomparable to those of Starship Trooper (I have arachnophobia and these didn't bother me, to be clear). To this end, each class has three primary and three secondary weapons, each with about a dozen "overclocks" that dramatically change how a weapon is used (Want to turn a grenade launcher into what feels like a slug-launcher? There's an overclock for that!), a mobility tool, one of four grenades (to be clear, 4 options per class), and a unique class-oriented utility tool to accompany a literally endless supply of flares to light up the randomly generated caves. There are eleven unique biomes, with 8 main mission types, about a dozen modifiers, and about a dozen random events to boot, meaning you will never really experience the exact same mission twice. Deep Rock Galactic is a perfect "hangout" game, with humorous social elements all over the game, like the famous "Rock and Stone" button, the bar where players can share a drink with teammate (each with fun effects), a soccer minigame, and as of the latest update, and arcade machine. The game does feature a battlepass, which for me has historically been a turn-off in games, but the content in the battlepass is 100% free, and if you miss it, all of the content is added for free into the game's loot rotation, meaning this game does not use manipulative FOMO tactics against consumers. In fact, all content is free in this game except for a few cosmetic packs to support the developers, and even these are oft discounted. It's rather telling that a paid cosmetic-only "support our game" dlc was the top sold product on Steam when it released, and speaks volumes about the quality of this title. Free large scale DLC is also to be expected, though there is often quite a delay between releases due to the small size of the team. That said, small events are frequent, often with unique secondary objectives in missions, an entirely redecorated hub, a ton of unique dialog, and even some fun mission groupings, like the Easter Events notorious Egg Hunts (which consists of about seven straight Egg Collection missions). Seriously, try this game, especially if you are burned out on gaming; it might just rekindle that spark that has so frequently been snuffed out by greedy publishers in the past.

I think that it's probably safe to say TTS is a fun, if slightly flawed Battle Simulator type of game, with full campaigns (of varying length) accessible to each faction, and a range of WW2 era equipment to use and fight with. In terms of Battle Simulator games, this has to be my favorite (if for no other reason than that I have no gripes with the company that produced it, unlike it's competition).

Let me start out by addressing what I dislike about this game. Generally, the gameplay is pretty clunky, with you having to go through several menus to create a sandbox game and the apparent inability to swap nations in the sandbox on the fly. This is generally a lot more clunky than it ought to be and is the cause of quite a few more load screens. My other big complaints all stem from the campaigns, which, while incredibly fun, are also all functionally identical to one another. In all campaigns, you start out with but riflemen and the lightest possible tanks, which is a tad confusing given the IRL preparedness of various nations. This also puts the nation you play as at a disadvantage at the beginning of every campaign, regardless of circumstances. Play America? Enjoy having only the lightest of equipment at the start. What about Germany during it's blitz into Poland? Only light tanks... against Polish equipment far superior. This is a-historical in most contexts and also means that the opening level of the campaign is always going to be the hardest, with little difficulty to be found outside of it. You are only compensated on winning a level, so if you lose you may as well restart, since without the committed resources you are only going on a downward spiral, cutting out most of the resource management since you might as well fully commit to everything. Tanks exist on a linear scale, with heavier tanks being objectively better than lighter tanks in the campaign, in every aspect except cost. Ergo, it's objectively best to just use the upgraded mediums, since they provide the best bang for your buck regardless of circumstances, since an unnecessary unit cap makes more numerous light tanks irrelevant (despite cost already working as a unit cap, said unit cap also makes infantry somewhat irrelevant) and the enemy vehicle count rendering heavier tanks to few in number. Any real strategy is similarly irrelevant outside of artillery, since you can't have multilayered orders (I.e. go here, then here) or organize units (i.e. group 5 tanks in a battlegroup to stay together). The AI is pretty bad at pathfinding, with some levels seeing half your army randomly decide to commit suicide by dark blue water, with literally no way to stop them other than manual control, which only works one unit at a time. Every campaign also consists of defense and attack stages (or sometimes only one) which change gameplay in either "win every battle" or "win as few battles as possible while winning every battle." AI issues also make planes rather cumbersome, given that half the time they will not actually engage (especially jet fighters) or will randomly decide to land (fighter bombers especially). Cohesion with later added factions (Italy and Japan) into the campaigns of previously added nations is nonexistent, however.

That said, the game offers a lot of good! Every faction has some form of unique "experimental" technology, which generally offers a lot in terms of making them feel unique. For instance, the Soviet Union has special tank planes, which will try to land behind enemy lines and deploy as a light tank. The United States has a special military base that creates WW2 variants of modern vehicles like the F16 or Abrams Tank, or an airbase capable of launching a nuclear equipped B29. These experimental weapons, while somewhat irrelevant in the campaign, do a lot for the game. The game features quite a few nations, with all the usual WW2 suspects present (America, Britain, USSR, Nazi Germany), as well as some nations which are a bit less common in WW2 games (Poland, France, Italy, Japan), each again with their own campaign (even with their associated military leader having presumably language-accurate voice lines). The game also allows players to directly take control over a unit to turn the game from Quasi-RTS to Quasi-FPS, with controls for all manner of vehicles, even unique to certain vehicles. For instance, tank destroyers without movable turrets are restricted in movement while in control compared to more traditional tanks. This type of gameplay is somewhat comparable to War Thunder or World of Tanks, except players can always dismount their vehicle and fight on foot. Any unit type imaginable can be controlled (except factories), including artillery and infantry. The game features a Workshop, which was the main draw for me (though this workshop has developed such that many authors seem to only put out "Demo" units, which you being expected to pay them for the rest of there work, which I'm fairly sure is against the Workshop ToS and might make the content less likely to exist in the future if Steam decides to crack down on it), which is of moderate scale. The game also features numerous maps in all manner of rural circumstances, though few are really unique enough to be worth talking about save for some of the newer ones (Japan and Italy maps). The tank combat is rather smooth, with tanks having an armor and health pool, ability to repair themselves, and more. Infantry is shockingly diverse in equipment, with all manner of equipment on even the most basic soldier (secondary arms, grenades, special grenades, thrown knives, etc.). The destructible environments are a nice touch and really emphasize the devastation you hath wrought on the local environment, which adds to the immersion nicely. The models are consistent with the art style, which, while minimalist in appearance, makes it usually rather easy to identify the sides of a conflict, excluding a few cases; blue(germany) vs. teal(france), tan(UK) vs. yellow(italy).

Generally a good game, with a few noteworthy flaws! 7/10

Project Wingman is not a particularly realistic game (after all, what realistic jet simulator would allow players to bring a standard payload of four hundred missiles?). Instead, it's best described as an ode to Ace Combat, with a similar style and arcade-like nature, but modernized and having learned from Ace Combat's mistakes. When I played Project Wingman, I had not played AC, and as such, this review will be written from that perspective.

Project Wingman is pretty atrocious at teaching it's gameplay. Lacking any form of tutorial, I found myself dying repeatedly on level 1 in an attempt to figure out and customize the controls to my liking. That said, the control scheme offered for m/k novice players was more than sufficient for me to enjoy the game thoroughly without too much in the way of issues after these first few minutes, so once you figure the controls out you probably won't face many issues with them later in the game (other than perhaps the hanger GUI). Project Wingman is also brought down (in my opinion) by it's specialty "boss squadrons" it's campaign. These pop up periodically in scripted parts of missions and are generally in jets more maneuverable than your munitions and jets you've unlocked (the latter can be resolved later, but still) and are usually bullet sponges. They aren't super fun to fight, and combat usually boils to praying a random fire and forget manages to be agile enough to hit them, while they themselves pose minimal threat to the player (in my experience). That said, boss aircraft (re: not squads) are well made and enjoyable, somewhat rectifying the issue. My third and final complaint about the game is to do with it's setting. Without spoiling things, the game plays into geothermal activity in it's plot and environment, and due to plot related conditions later in the game this becomes even more prevalent. What this amounts to is maps full of an ugly shade of orange, which is particularly tragic given the beauty and varied nature of maps before the orange becomes so overused. The plot and setting aren't particularly believable either, but my suspension of disbelief can accept that for railguns and scifi ships that are frequently present.

Project Wingman features twenty-four (mostly) unique aircraft, with a healthy mix of real life and fictitious birds to choose from. These are mostly customization in terms of selecting weapons in addition to the standard missiles, which typically revolves around equipping fire and forget air and ground missiles, unguided bombs/rockets, user guided missiles, and even some science fiction weapons (like railguns and hydra pods). This results in replayability and a less predetermined experience in missions, which is quite the selling point. Air combat is fluid and fun, with ballistic gunnery allowing for high skill dogfighting, and missiles dominating gameplay, forcing target prioritization and timing to adequately survive. The focus on missiles does at times detract from other non-guided options, in my experience, but as a singleplayer game adherence to a "meta" is far from required. The sound design is on point for the atmosphere the game cultivates and the voice acting, while not always written well, is convincing an furthers the story and atmosphere. The graphics are gorgeous and the game has a lively nexus modding community able to deliver further content as it is needed in addition to the campaign (21 levels) and conquest gamemodes.

Overall, Project Wingman is everything one could want in an arcade jet fighting game, with minimal drawbacks and fluid gameplay and atmosphere.