Recent reviews by Breakdowns

FragPunk is something of a tragedy.

The game itself is solid; two teams compete to plant the bomb or prevent the bomb from being planted. There's a time limit, the maps are asymmetrical, characters and weapons must be chosen. We've seen all of this before. The twist? Cards that teams can vote on that subtlely or drastically alter the core mechanics. One card makes characters' heads enormous, making for easier head shots, while another shrinks everyone's heads, making head shots more difficult. One card spawns grass on the entire map, obfuscating traps and even making crouching enemies just that little bit harder to see. It's a breath of fresh air for the tactical shooter genre, all wrapped in a self-aware and un-serious package that feels right at home in the grimly sardonic Borderlands franchise.

The game is a fun time with a clever hook. So, what's the tragedy? FragPunk is a live service. And it's not shy about this at all.

It has the usual live service warts like funny money. Excuse me, funny *monies*. Multiple currencies that all do something different, all designed to entice you while obscuring the real monetary value of things. It also does not let you play all the characters out of the gate. You have to grind funny money to do so, and FragPunk is not going to make getting that funny money easy or fun. Characters (called Lancers in this franchise) cost a lot of funny money and you don't make much in a single session. You're very much made to feel left out. But don't worry! You could open your wallet to make this problem go away. And while you're at it, why not buy some skins?

The game is extremely pro-active about promoting all of its wares. The main screen is a dazzling array of colors and sound designed to show you the latest skins, battle passes, events, stickers, and all manner of up-selling straight out of an unregulated mobile game. A lot of time and effort goes into all of this. How much is that distracting from the fun game play? The game locks you out of ranked mode until level 30. But you won't have all the characters. How can you fairly compete if you've not been given the same tools as your competitors? Doesn't matter - the *game* doesn't matter. You could buy that competitive edge if you wanted to. That's what matters.

If you're confident you can look past all of this (the main screen does mercifully have a giant "PLAY" button to whisk you away from all the razzle dazzle) then FragPunk is a fun and interesting game. It's just too bad it wasn't developed differently, with the ability to host private servers and, well, to own the game in any capacity. As fun as the game is there is absolutely no way to know if it will make it through the year in a market saturated by live services all competing for your attention.

Fun game. Very unfortunate.

Finally a fighting game clears the lowest bar possible: a fully integrated single player mode, modernised netcode, and a reasonably sized and well-balanced launch roster. Not just for the hardcore fans but lots of fun for casuals as well.

Minus points for going the battle pass/microtransactions route. The game is also very stingy with alternate colors and costumes.

Rise is a good entry point to the series if you've been scared to the plunge. While it's not "easy" per se it's definitely the most forgiving entry to date, with generous mechanics to help you land hits, avoid getting hit yourself, and more flexibility with weapons than ever.

That said, Capcom continues to make bewildering choices when it comes to playing with friends. Quests are effectively doubled by making single player and multiplayer versions, each tracking their own progress independently; if you progress in the single player missions you will not progress in multiplayer and vice versa, meaning you could make significant progress in one and effectively having to re-do those same quests later.

This is eased by a special license mission in single-player that will allow you skip some difficulties in multiplayer. Bizarrely, the first license in 4 star difficulty unlocked only up to 2 star in multiplayer. You can skip some grind but not all.

Like Monster Hunter World, Monster Hunter Rise - an ostensibly multiplayer-leaning game - makes playing with others strangely difficult and obtuse. World had its issues but at least after watching a cutscene a player could easily help you with a story quest via the SOS system. Here you will get no such help unless you're deliberately playing the multiplayer wing of quests. For no discernible reason.

The game retains it's absurdly deep well of mechanics, menus, and friendliness to player choice. All weapons are viable and rewarding, you're free to gather and farm as your leisure, and there's always a way to min/max. This aspect of the game remains a highlight to players who like to squeeze every ounce of value from their games.

Rise is a great game made with love and care and will reward you for exploring its depths. But the series' strange aversion to making playing with others simpler continues to bog it down. If you can play with other immediately or you don't mind the painfully obvious attempt to increase play time and follow both single and multiplayer questlines then these issues shouldn't be a bother. But be warned that if a friend joins you later on it might be a bit of hassle for both of you to play together due to the baffling multiplayer design choices.

Easy to recommend, easy to pick up, lots of depth once you get in there.

Getting started is fairly straight-forward provided you read the ample text in the game's many menus. Getting additional oxygen, food, and other resources is not too difficult. What'll really bake your noodle is getting anywhere further than mid-game. You have to spin a lot of plates in this game and those plates can come crashing down with catastrophic results. Be prepared to restart many, many times as you learn.

It's frustrating but in a really fun way.

The core game play is excellent but the systems built around it remain frustrating and very clearly tied to waiting rather than success.

It's impossible to describe this game without talking about Fat Shark's previous work, Vermintide 2, which seemed to solve many problems that currently plague Darktide. From small things like no clarity on what differentiates the different difficulty settings to large things like the crafting system still not being implemented, Darktide seems like a step backward in terms of systems and features, even if it's step forward in visual fidelity.

Darktide is a slave to the live service model, to such a degree that progression is inexorably tied to it. Outside of the typically 20-30 minute runs the game lives and dies based on item acquisition, a process that is frustratingly tied more to waiting mechanics than any actual player success. Completing a run will grant you exactly one random drop. But the store, which rotates inventory hourly, has much more randomly generated items. Want a shotgun with decent stats? Your best bet is to wait every hour for the store to roll over since the random item granted at the end of a run could be literally anything. There's another store you can check but it rotates every 24(!) hours.

You are not rewarded for success, progress comes to those who check back every hour. That is fundamentally frustrating and unsatisfying, but it's best for the company to keep us coming back by slowing us down in this manner. Nothing kills the thrills and excitement from a close run like checking the store, finding nothing you want, and realizing you have to wait another hour to check again. It's awful.

Even though it's come so far since launch I still cannot recommend the game while it maintains these mechanics. While you can, with enough skill and grit, defeat the highest difficulty with mechanics alone, the game revolves around upgrading items and that system is rigged against the player. Wait for them to change it, if they ever do.

This game has kicked my ass every time I've tried to play it. It rules.

OS is the fun kind of simple and the interesting kind of deep. Simple because you can break the game down to something as simple as "press Q to put ball in goal" and deep because every character has different abilities, combo potential, and even some customisation.

Unfortunately, the game is marred by the studios' decision to use funny money and season passes, making it as predatory as any game that chooses to use those monetisation methods. It begins like the rest, seeming to be very generous with it's handouts. But the generosity dries up after buying two additional characters and the in-game currency slows to a drip feed. We've all seen it a million times before. It's disappointing to see here, though.

If you can get passed the shady business practices, there is a really fun game here. The matches are bite-sized, either a first-to-5 or, if the game is close, a tie-breaker of getting 2 goals ahead first. While the game ostensibly plays like a 3v3 soccer match it's possible to knock opponents off of the edge of the map. This leads to some interesting strategies, with some characters designed to control space, some to support others, and some built to get KO's and put the opponents at a disadvantage before their KO'd players can respawn. It's a fun wrinkle in an otherwise already-straight forward formula of using fancy abilities to get the ball in the net.

So far the only downside I can see is the monetization route chosen by the company. Opting for a live service approach means that if the game ever fails it will simply disappear rather than allowing players even the option of making their own servers. It's an expensive all-or-nothing approach. I hope the game succeeds because it's just that good. But it's an undeniable blemish on an otherwise tightly crafted and wonderful game.

Not worth it at launch, now worth it with some post-release development.

Apex is easily one of the better battle royale games to get spit out during the Great BR Oversaturation of 2018. With arena-style movement and a high TTK you'll have to use skills lots of players just don't have these days from all the tactical shooters out there, like your Counter-Strikes and your Valorants. You'll have to shoot a guy for like 8 solid seconds before they go down sometimes, making skills like tracking much more important than flicks or slow peaking.

The weapons are varied and fun, the hero-style characters you choose all bring something interesting to the table, and the maps all feature a lot of verticality.

The ranking system is excellent and should be copied by, like, every game. When a ranked game starts you "pay" into that game, and you can accrue points via your performance. Getting kills, assists, and high placements all add to your total "payout", meaning even if you lose you still climb if you're a killing machine. It's possible to get out of the first rank, bronze, just by playing since you don't have to "pay in" to compete. But from silver onward the "pay in" gets higher and higher, meaning you have to perform better and better and more consistently to climb. You're not "hard stuck" by others, only by your own skills. I can reliably rank up to platinum every season with just a bit of grinding, at which point the "pay in" for me is too high and the other players are too good. But I know I'm falling short, unlike other team games where you could play extremely well all day but not climb at all if you got too many losses. Ranking up feels good, and you know exactly where you stand.

A potential downside for many would be the 3-player stack you're forced into in the default modes. If you don't like relying on other people to get the job done you'll either have to be very highly skilled to carry them/play away from them or a decent rando wrangler. The game is also balanced for teams of three, so any modes where it's less than that can feel a little strange.

This game also uses the season pass, loot box, AND funny money systems. I hate it. It's possible to earn things just by playing but don't expect much of anything from that, and you don't have a chance in hell in getting anything truly high quality or fun because the loot boxes run pretty dry after your first couple dozen. This is not a "pay-to-win" game by any means but the fact that it uses all three of the worst, most exploitative gimmicks to make money just doesn't sit well with me.

It used to be that if you got the EA Pass, that thing where you pay a yearly fee to play just about anything on EA's Origin platform, that you'd get a season pass along with it. But they actually had the gall to take it away. ♥♥♥♥♥.

If you can tolerate some goofy team mates and either don't care about the monetization or are rich then Apex is a cinch. Rewards high skill, feels incredible to play, and for some reason plays way better on Steam than on Origin? (Whyyyyyyy?)

Great game, unique experience, crafted with care. Inventory system is weird and doesn't make sense, though.

Once you get used to the PvE aspects of the game, which includes encountering and understanding all the zombies and zombie-like monsters populating the map, the game becomes incredibly interesting when you factor other players in. On top of that, your characters can permanently die (and if you level up enough, you can graciously allow them to retire). There's a levelling system that unlocks new weapons but all weapons are competitive if you play to their strengths and can click on heads. Overall, this game is intuitive enough to keep you from getting lost and has enough depth to reward you for sinking time into it. For that alone the game is easy to recommend for someone looking for a fun challenge.

The big downside to the game is the strange, clunky, and completely unintuitive inventory system. It needs a serious overhaul because the way it actually works is not immediately apparent (I still find out something new about it all the time, even after 40+ of play). If they ever take another pass at it and nail it then I dare say this game will be close-to-flawless for what it tries to be.

If you're tired of battle royales but still have the itch now and then, want something a little different, and have 1 or 2 friends who are down to give something new a try, buy this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game immediately. Even if you end up not liking it I think you'll agree it was worth a try because it is very good at being what it wants to be.