Recent reviews by Turbine

game is clearly aimed at children and has awful, predatory pay to win mechanics and gambling with lootboxes, whats more, they recently increased the price of loot boxes AND reduced the amount of parts you get inside, GREATLY reducing your chances of actually getting anything AT ALL unless you spend an excessive amount - which is what a lot of people seem to do based on their 1 shot weapons and absurd abilities, which, to an average player looks very much like many people are outright cheating

as you level up, your weapons become less effective and cost more and more each level to maintain any degree of competitiveness by levelling up them alongside you - same with pets, weapon add ons, grenades, tools etc etc - EVERYTHING requires levelling up to keep it at a useable level and it costs FAR more than you could ever obtain through playing for free

on top of this, in order to complete daily missions you are regularly required to spend more keys than you can possibly earn, if any, further reducing your chances as a free player to be able to obtain any kind of even ground through lootbox weapons

the devs are despicable with their predatory tactics and for that reason alone, i cannot recommend this game. the only reason i play it is because my son likes it for whatever reason and he likes it when i play it with him but its so incredibly frustrating joining match after match where people are either clearly cheating, or, heavily invested financially into the game to the degree that you just cannot win 8 or 9 out of 10 games, without opening your wallet

they deleted my items that i paid for with real money

just played this game for a few mins before work, created character which was basically just skip through with default parts with the exception of a couple of things and then straight into the game, ive just collected the first gun which is a shotgun so obviously for those in the know, i am barely a few minutes into the game

and what i can say for certain at this stage is that this game absolutely SCREAMS mobile port, from the graphics quality to the menus to the interface, its purely a mobile port.

the control scheme is also not very intuitive - unless of course you are on a mobile device and then it makes perfect sense just to tap on the screen in specific locations to perform specific actions, such as equipping a weapon........but on pc the controls are weird...........press alt to show mouse and then click the places youd normally tap on the mobile screen - its an extremely lazy way for the developers to port the game with just absolute basic and unintuitive controls that are obviously more suited to a mobile device

i havent seen the cash shop yet, but at this stage its pretty clear to me that its a case of "churn out a game as quickly and as cheaply as possible in order to get more potential paying users under the umbrella", very very lazy (i hope after writing that that there is actually a cash shop)

anyway, i will give it more of a chance later but lets be honest - it doesnt look promising

yet another open world zombie survival game that saw the success of dayz and tried to imitate and improve but in the end ultimately doesnt bear any resemblance even if you squint from 500m away. stuck in development hell with nothing to show for it and lets face it, why bother finishing it now? most of the people who have bought this game have already bought it, by a substantial margin, so the devs already have the bulk of the cash they are ever going to get for this game now so why bother to conintue working on it for the handful of people whos cash they already have? might aswell just take money and run, right devs?

and that is the danger of early access. most sales made before the game is ever finished and devs lose interest in continuing to work on it because they know they have already had their payday and thus there is a huge incentive for developers to release games they never even intend to finish because they can simply place the entire risk on the consumer and of course valve dont care about devs like this because they still get their cut so why would they. win for valve because they get their money, win for the devs because they know whether its worth finishing their game or not and an outright loss for the consumer who pay the price in good faith only for the product to never be complete, and that is why early access should be removed entirely from steam and other platforms but it is also the reason why it wont be

devs like these are the reason that the gaming industry is in desperate need of regulation, if it isnt scummy devs charging you a fee for every ingame action or for content you should already get anyway, then its the ones who release a small fraction of a game and never finish it

the fact that they are prepared to sell their game as part of a bundle to me just demonstrates a desperate push to get something..........anything...........more out of it financially. all they are doing now is flogging a dead horse for as much as they can without any care or consideration towards the consumer. these devs are scum and they cant even provide a half decent game to back it up with and certainly wont be honest about their intentions

do not buy

great launch

servers down, allegedly for up to 48 hours on launch day, amazing. i hope the dev sticks to the timescale that they set for themselves as not much annoys me more than people unable to stick to their own timescales

anyway, this game is currently impossible to play, at first i thought it was just an infinite loading screen of the silhouette of a cat running, but i later found out that there is also a menu screen

there are no servers and you cannot create your own local server, rendering this game currently impossible to play

waited a long time for multiplayer in this game but it got cancelled because of incompetent and lying leadership, i wont be interested in the false promises of any future projects

i feel invincible

codehatch

they take your money and make a different game from the one you purchased, then they abandon the one you purchased

this isnt even the first time they did it, its not even the last time they did it

in any other field, these crooks would be imprisoned for fraud but the gaming industry allows this kind of practics - for years i have been harping on about how the gaming industry is in desperate need of regulation, the practices employed by people like this should be criminal and codehatch is the perfect developer to argue my point

its not even as if they try and fail, they literally take your money under false pretences, make promises they never fulfil and then ultimately leave you high and dry - and its not even limited to which of their products you purchase, they do it to everything they touch

absolute scum and a bunch of thieves

i played for over an hour......i looted various items, a wooden door, a lamp, some bandages, an m4, some clothes, a whole load of ammo, an ace, a knife, backpack etc etc

the loot is abundant and there seems to be no logic surrounding what spawns where and there seems to be little variation between certain things like types of clothing/armour. i also ended up dying of thirst because despite having a drink and drinking it fully it did nothing to replenish my water meter whereas eating did replenish my food meter, i found a lot more food than drink and in fact only found 1 drink so i am not sure whether its a bug with the item or the feature itself, also certain food items like stew you should in theory get some water from but you dont, unless the water feature is completely broken

i was beginning to think there was no wildlife, no enemies, nothing at all except me.......then i started seeing deers, i saw deer after deer after deer, i shot a few.....their bodies disappeared within seconds, you cannot harvest anything from them, i encountered no zombies whatsoever

there were 4 other servers, they all had pings of 9999 and only 1 player on each server so i decided to play solo since i had little other choice, there are no official servers that i could see

the optimisation is poor, expect high cpu/gpu/ram usage - steam still shows that you are ingame even after you have closed it so you either have to restart steam entirely or close the game through task manager (if it lets you). the loading times are horrendous and there is no loading bar so it appears as though the game has just frozen until several minutes later when it finally loads - initially everything is very sluggish and i had very few fps until after about 10 minutes of playing when things began to get a little smooth

you cant turn things like shadows, reflections, effects off, you can only set them to low and despite trying various resolutions and settings, the graphics didnt appear to change much and are not at a particularly good quality to begin with

i mean for free, its alright but needs a lot of work before it can be taken seriously, like the addition of enemies but even with some changes what the game will definitely need is players because currently there are practically none and its nice that someone has bothered to develop this type of game completely for free so it would be equally nice if people gave it a try, i didnt notice any type of item store or anything so it seems to be completely for free and for that reason i hope it succeeds as there are many games in this genre but in my opinion very few that pull it off and if you look at the amount of games in this genre that are actually free, it is a very small amount but despite the odds being stacked against the game i wish it success although patience is required if you are looking for something to get more than an hour or 2 out of as in its current state it is still fairly limited

i did not try out any of the building so i dont know how that works or if it even exists

the inventory management is pretty standard and self explanatory, intuitive

so there you go, you might as well download it if you like the genre and keep it in your library, who knows, it might be worth it one day

one more thing, i checked this game out a few weeks back having seen it on the upcoming releases in the free to play category, i visited the games website and saw that there was a demo available but since it was fairly near the top of the upcoming releases list i assumed that it would be on steam in the near future and decided not to bother downloading it because it was around 8gb in size, turns out i was right and it was released on steam, obviously.......but, the game shows up in task manager as being a demo and although i understand that this game is early access, if people are downloading a demo i think you still need to make this clear as to me a demo implies a more limited product than an early access game and if this is just an oversight and it is not actually a demo then the dev should probably change the name of the .exe

i swore i would never buy this game after gearbox sold out to epic throwing piles of cash at them in order to create a sub platform within an existing platform, that by itself is bad enough for me to avoid any games from this developer for the rest of my life, the fact that they are essentially prepared to take a bribe in order to enable this sub platform which to me demonstrates a certain disdain towards their customers

that being said, i got it for 5 quid on humble choice along with 8 other games so here i am

i like the borderlands series, i always have and it has not been the quality of game that has changed my mind about the series but the actions of the developer

the game itself is alright, its just more borderlands and a whole load more borderlands dlc

i run this game on a ryzen 3400g using the onboard graphics, it does work at 1080p and you dont have to set EVERYTHING to low, but you have to disable anti aliasing etc and even then you will get around 30fps at best but more like 25fps consistantly which to me, for a modern AAA game, is pretty good. anyway, i opted to run at 720p and it then becomes a lot more playable so those of you with extremely poor systems who are considering a purchase, there you go

personally i dont think we should support such unscrupulous and deviant developers but hey i own the game so what can i tell you other than whatever percentage of the £5 that i paid for those 9 games that gets siphoned off to gearbox.........its probably worth that, i will go ahead and assume that they get 20% given that they are the AAA offering of the month and obviously humble bundle themselves will want a sizeable cut so i will assume that they also take 20% and perhaps another recent and high scoring game might get 10% leaving 50% for the remaining 7 games so lets say 7% each for those guys.............doesnt seem like unreasonable speculation, so i am happy to assume that i paid just £1 for this game, give or take

humble bundle has been astoundingly low quality in recent months so i cancelled my subscription but they begged me to come back because i guess they dont know where their next meal is coming from so they offered me either 2 or 3 months (cant remember which) of choice for £5 per month - just incase anyone was wondering how i got choice for £5 - it pays to cancel

anyway, back to the review of the game - i havent played enough of it to be able to form a respectable opinion yet but i will still recommend against it because the practices employed by the developer are harmful to the gaming industry on the whole, in my opinion, including trying to create a sub platform, millions of dlc, season passes etc..............it all costs us more and earns them more and the gaming industry is in desperate need of regulation, as it has been for a number of years now, to reign in devs like this...........i am surprised it didnt go to early access and i think it probably would have if it wasnt for the exclusivity

so yes, dont buy it, vote with your wallets.........there are enough mindless drones in this world who are prepared to not only bend over and take whatever scummy devs like this throw at us but they also blindly defend it and in some extreme cases they even promote it. the only way the industry will change is when people stop throwing money at it...........nowadays many devs offer "free" updates, they make a point of telling you its free, insinuating that they "could" charge for it and that you are lucky that they didnt. in the old days, all updates were free, they were expected to be free............if you bought a dlc it would completely change the base game into something else entirely in some instances and add huge amounts of content - we used to get value for money, nowadays they just see us as cash cows who can be infinitely milked for every penny we have, they even pay experts to come up with new and ingenius ways to depart us from our cash. some of them spend more money on advertising than they do on development and people STILL buy it, they get sucked in with preorder bonuses and buy it before its even released. the gaming industry has gone beyond ridiculous

so yes, that is my review of borderlands 3