Recent reviews by Tychoid

I didn't actually expect to like the game this much. I'm generally pretty averse to sweaty games these days. I liked the server slam / open beta well enough - but it didn't really hook me. I decided to buy the game since I grew up on the OG Marathon series and was morbidly curious with what they were going to do with my boy Durandal, the S'pht, and the rest of the Marathon world.

And here I am pubbing with randos and actually enjoying the cooperative aspect of watching out for my squadmates while we traipse around the map desperately trying to complete our objectives.

Nothing about Marathon will likely blow your socks off (except, perhaps, the visual/audio style). I wouldn't put it up for game of the year by any means. But there's just something really well put together about it all that makes the whole thing greater than the sum of its parts. It's just a really satisfying gameplay loop.

Bungie might not be the studio they used to be, but DAMN do they still do gunplay and worldbuilding well. The currently ongoing ARG has been really fun to follow as well.

Worth it for $40.

Performance fixes came really late, and I might argue there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in that regard, but most people are reporting that it is far more playable now.

The game itself? Great. Plenty of content, most weapons feel better and are more mechanically engaging than they have ever been, and the monster designs are solid. It's a great time to get into the game right now.

An almost perfect mix of the more flexible power fantasy of DOOM 2016, and the more strict 'combat puzzle' challenge of Doom Eternal.

I say "almost," because even on the default Nightmare difficulty option, DOOM: TDA leans more on the side of power fantasy than it does on punishing gameplay. You shouldn't go into TDA expecting cracked-out Eternal or Ultrakill gameplay. The skill ceiling of TDA is much lower than in Eternal & Ultrakill.

That said, there is a commendably ABSURD amount of difficulty/accessibility options you can tweak to your liking. As a place to start, I would personally recommend turning down Parry & Melee Slow Motion, Parry & Dodge Window, and turning up Enemy Projectile Speed.

Positive/negative aspect breakdown. Negatives first.
- The Dragon and Mech portions are arguably just barely passable. They are set pieces and not much more. Very quickly gets repetitive. I wish these sections either had much more depth, were optional, or were left out entirely. They are massive speed bumps to replayability.
- It's just a tad too easy for my personal preference, and the skill ceiling is far too low for people on Adderall.

Positives.
+ It is really satisfying to learn how to fight each new demon the game throws at you, and filled with enough fodder enemies to satisfy the Doom Slayer part of your brain.
+ Shield parry mechanic feels extremely satisfying. Especially once tweaked to your liking (I just wish the default options didn't make it feel so 'squishy').
+ Soundtrack is excellent. "Unchained Predator" and "Into the Void" are responsible for a couple new gym PRs.
+ Weapons are excellent. Good classic and creative variety. Good at making you feel like the Slayer.
+ Performance on hardware is excellent. As expected of ID.
+ Plenty of certifiably badass moments from the ole' Doom Slayer.

tl:dr: Not a masterpiece, but absolutely don't miss this one if you're a DOOM fan.

*Got this 'free' with a hardware bundle*

I loved Borderlands 1 & 2, and burnt out pretty quick with 3. I haven't touched a Borderlands game until this one since 3.

+ Mobility, gunplay/gunfeel are excellent and fit right in to Borderlands. Both are very noticeably satisfying. These are the main thing that hooked me enough to counter my Borderlands Burnout™️
+ Open world combined with mobility options feels good. Exploration is fun and rewarding. I'm not getting frustrated by cliffs that take several minutes to go around like previous Borderlands entries.
+ QoL additions such as instant mark-pickup-as-junk and early access to weapon and backpack slots significantly reduce inventory management headaches.

- QoL could still use some work. Actual inventory management and item comparison is still very slow & clunky when you do have to interact with the menus. They really need to have the menus remember sorting & filter options.
- Personal taste, but the playable characters are neither interesting nor particularly likable. Buuuuut at best, I've never found ANY Borderlands character to be anything but borderline annoying. Intolerable at worst.
- Performance is inexcusably bad. Borderlands 4 does not look good enough to justify this low of a frame rate. This is by far the worst I've seen, even with all the other UE5 monstrosities that have come out recently.

RANT: I'm a huge advocate for technologies like frame generation and up-scaling, but pushing them as a hard recommendation isn't just lazy - it is showing a complete lack of understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of those technologies. A bit of an extreme opinion - but I don't think frame generation should even be an available option for first person shooters - much less a recommendation under 60 fps. There's a lot of debate on whether publishers, developers, industry best practices, or the UE5 itself are to blame. It's most likely some combination of all of them. Personally, I think the buck stops with the publisher. It is their literal job to streamline publishing as best as they can across the pipeline for a good and sustainable product. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter; the game needs to run good, or people aren't gonna buy your crap anymore, the right or wrong people get blamed, stocks fall, people lose their jobs, etc. etc. I'm hoping it's just growing pains for new tech that will get ironed out soon, rather than really cool & promising tech being a collateral casualty of customer sentiment. Rant over.

It's really good! Even in this early access state, we had hours of fun with it. Already surprisingly polished. A little lacking in content, but still worth the $15 asking price, imho.

I thought it was going to be a cozy, short little game about fishing! ...and it is... but I didn't expect them to throw SO MANY new game mechanics and mini-games at me at every turn.

-Really, that would be my only complaint of this game so far: there are so many mini-games constantly being introduced. Each individual mini-game (many of them one-time or optional) doesn't outstay their welcome, but I feel like all of them combined can be a bit much at times. Sometimes I really just want to get back to the core of the game: Fun new ways to catch interesting new fish, & then run the restaurant to sell them!

+Other than that, this game is an absolute steal for this price. Packed with fun, quality content. Good writing. Good music. Overflowing with well-designed game mechanics.

Crashes. Enough to be discouraging to continue playing. Once when the spider mech died during a tutorial message, the other two from aoe weapon effects killing multiple enemies. That is half of my runs wasted. You lose all progress gained in a crash.

Gameplay loop is also missing... something. I'm not sure what, exactly. Weapons, upgrades, and enemies are fairly uninteresting. Not terrible - just meh. The upgrades also seem poorly tuned. Why give us so many weapons if we never get the resources to get close to fully upgrading even a single one? Lots of useless weapons/upgrades/perks. The mining is also quite slow and boring. For a game where you spend more than half your time mining, it seems they should have made the mining more interesting. Maybe combat in the mines? More interesting mining options & upgrades?

Really not worth playing unless you're willing to mod it quite a bit. But Bethesda games are MADE to mod, thankfully. Vanilla Starfield I would give a thumbs down. There's just too many obtuse UI and gameplay systems to have a hassle-free playthrough. But with the right vanilla-friendly mods to get rid of just enough of Starfield's major annoyances, I've been enjoying it a ton. Though, unless you're already fairly mod-savvy, or willing to learn... piecing together all the correct mods and mod dependencies and .ini tweaks can be quite a bit of daunting work.

The bad first:
The game's two major issues are
1) WAY too many loading screens to get from point A to point B, which incentivizes the player to use fast travel which leads to the following problem;
2) There is much less 'journey' and 'discovery' in Starfield than in other Bethesda games. Because the player is encouraged to use fast travel so much, there is not much opportunity to discover content between destinations. My favorite parts of Starfield (and when they have felt the most "Bethesda-like") have been discovering derelict ships and stations, and investigating the mysteries within. But there are far less of these type of encounters than in previous Bethesda games. Which is a shame, because the ship building system is IMHO a lot of fun and rewarding. They are like your own little personal travelling home. I just wish the ships fit better into the exploration system.
Other minor bad points:
-First half of main storyline is boring and repetitive
-UI is awful (check out StarUI series of mods)
-Vendors have far too little credits (easily fixed with mods)
-Tons of other similar related bad design annoyances easily fixed with mods

The good:
+Built for mods (currently less moddable than previous BGS games, but that might be remedied with the CK early next year)
+Tons of content
+Gunplay is good
+Lots of systems to interact with
+Procedurally generated content is OPTIONAL to interact with (it is very easy to tell when someone has not actually played Starfield when they complain about the 'empty planets'. Even without procgen content, there is far more custom curated content in Starfield than in previous BGS titles. It's a bogus complaint. Nothing is forcing you to go to a random planet if you don't want to.)
+Main faction quests are quite good
+Main storyline gets quite good in the second half
+Really creative, fresh and interesting end-game system for replayability

If you're willing to dive into mods a bit - I would recommend Starfield. But if you just want a hand-held plug-and-play open world experience right after install, maybe give this one a pass.

The game is SO so good... but I just can't recommend it in its current state. Its just too buggy. Broken dialogue and missing character responses, wonky companion approval, disappearing NPCs, completely unresolvable questlines... The breadth of content and player choice is just insane in BG3, but the closer you get to act 2 & 3, the more broken those branching paths become. Those just kept adding up for me to the point where I felt like my choices didn't matter since more and more choices would just bug out.

I have little doubt they'll patch this game to a satisfying quality, but there are just a few too many bugs for me to enjoy it right now. I look forward to giving this a glowingly positive review when/if that happens.

Big mech stompy shooty. Sort of a mix between a sim and an arcad-ey mech shooter. Mechs feel big and heavy and very satisfying to blow things up. Decent game in vanilla state. MUCH better game once modded. DLC is good but extremely overpriced. I picked up the entire collection on sale for $50 and I'd say it's worth it at that price. Still has plenty of shortcomings though, so know what you're getting into.

Co-op members basically only control the mechs during missions and don't get to do much else. They can't bring in their own mechs, etc.

My recommended "must-have" mod list:
"YAML" or "Yet Another Mech Lab" - HUGE mod. A complete overhaul for mech loadouts. A much more sim-like mech building experience. I only use the base mod but there are plenty of addons if you want to go nuts.
"PilotOverhaul" - adds a lot more depth, character, and realism to the pilot system.
"Remove JumpShip Animation" - drastically decreases load times when moving between systems.
"vonBiomes" - adds way more and way better and way more interesting environments.
"Coyotes mission mod" - (you have to pick this one up from Nexus Mods) Adds way more, way better, and way more interesting mission types.
"TTRulez_AIMod2" - currently doesn't work too well with the latest MW5 patch/dlc, but a month out from this review, the creator should have it updated. Makes the AI for all mechs (especially your teammates) much less dumb. For example, your own AI lancemates will NEVER use their jumpjets in vanilla!

There are a ton of other mods to choose from to customize your experience!