Recent reviews by NonStopWarrior

Unfathomable that they would add paid emotes. How disconnected do you have to be to your game and your community to think this was a good idea? I love this game, but the direction they are going is unforgivable. As much as it would still be disheartening, I would still much have rather seen paid DLC weapon camos, or even factions or maps. At least those would keep in line with the milsim environment the ORIGINAL OWI worked so hard to foster, instead of edging the game into fortnite lite. I can only hope they will change direction back to their roots of honest milsim instead of destroying the aesthetic for blatant profiteering.

But until then, I'll see you all on Project Reality.

Spec Ops: The Line holds an incredibly dear place in my heart.

I've played through this game a countless number of times now. It's not because it's a particularily fun game, or that the gameplay is notably immersive, or what most people would generally consider makes a good game.

But what this game has is a story. A story like no other game has had before. A story that perfectly weaves your actions and choices as a player into the tale, and pulls you along as you watch helplessly as the consequences of your actions unfold in front of you.

It is by no means a game that offers you comeplete agency, and the story is extremely linear. However, even though many people have analyzed this as a game that is supposed to be reflective of the player, I still like to view it as a story about the character and understanding why and how he makes the choices that he does.

Play it for the story, the experience is well worth it. And if you enjoyed it as much as I did (and still do), please consider nominating this game for the open category in the Steam awards for "Most Compelling Storytelling."

One of the saddest stories in video game development.

TL;DR - While there is a great game buried under here, it's buried beneath an entirely unplayable mess. Don't buy this game until the devs make it very public that they've fixed it, should they ever actually do that. Until then, try and find a way to get the original.

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I loved this game when it came out. I remember watching the trailers and having my hopes raised so high at the prospect of an open world zombie survival game of this calibre. And when it came out, it actually lived up to the hype. Somewhere in the outdated graphics, the lack of co-op, the awful sound design, and the disjointed voice acting, was a fantastic game with amazing mechanics. Hours were spent glued to my xbox fighting off waves of zombies, scrounging for supplies, searching every container looking for new weapons (and there must be hundreds of different weapons), building up bases, rescuing survivors and expanding my group.

And then Breakdown came out, and I was ecstatic. It's like they realized their weaknesses and limitations, and decided to devote their attention to building their strengths. While the story of State of Decay was decent enough to push you around the map and through events in the game, they now gave us the world as our playground and challeneged us to survive for as long as possible in whatever way we chose. Once again, many hours were lost.

And then came Lifeline, and in my opinion, the cracks started to show. It was still every bit as fun as the original, but what I'd hoped would be an entire urban centre to explore, turned out to be almost entirely inaccessible. The map consists of a large city area of which the entirety is inaccessible. The only areas you can explore are the suburban-esque areas of the outer limits of the city, which contain little more than the same houses and buildings you saw in the original. But despite all that, the fun was still there. The story was interesting enough, and being given a pile of new, military grade weapons to mow down zombies with was a blast. So even though the fun was shorter lived than the original, it still held up to its own.

And then...this. This terrible, awful, wretched money grab they shamelessly put out. The base game is still there somewhere, but it has been completely buried in a buggy, laggy, entirely unplayable experience. They boast about being remastered in 1080p, as well as improved textures and animations, but the game looks almost no different than the original. The menus are a little sharper, the icons look a little crisper, but the player models, zombies, vehicles, the world itself is unnoticeably different. The only thing that's really changed is that the game can't keep up with itself anymore. Frame skips are constant, even in low texture density areas. Bugs are rampant, with your characters floating in the air or falling through the world, zombies pop in and out of existence all around you, the game crashes to desktop.

And just to add insult to injury, the devs are charging more than the base game for this, and have made the original, playable version unpurchaseable. Coming up on a year after its release, the devs have seemingly made no moves to acknowlege that their product is broken, nevermind actually fix this game and make it playable again. One can only hope that day is coming.

It's like Risk had a baby with Battlefield, and this was their top-down offspring.

There are some issues. Vehicle shadows should be able to be seen through buildings. While I appreciate the game not trying to hold my hand, there are some things that could use a little direction or explaining. I still have't figured out what to do with the prison buses. You can trade RP for money in the armoury, and I have no clue why. The stealth mechanics are touchy at best. Capturing cargo trucks is near impossible, as every time you get close to it, they drive away, and if you wait until the enemy has surrendered, all your teammates will continue to engage it until it explodes.

All very small issues in a great game though. I'm excited to see where it leads.

9/10, would fail at throwing grenades again.