Recent reviews by Dragonrage

Man I miss this so much

Did a bit of playing for this during the Free weekend.
Despite my low hours it was very buggy, considering this has been out for over a year now it seems.
It is still another COH game, so veterans or returning playing might like it just with how it is.... But that is a bit far from it.
- The writing at least for the first couple of hours just feels so bad, like a college student's combination of a sitcom with WW2 history. They pit your commanders against each other is some middle school playground arguments.
- Choices ultimately do not seem to matter much aside from prioritizing taking over certain portions of the map earlier than others, with little consequence of prioritizing one over another.
- The controls are pretty off and very different from COH2 or COH. This could just be me needing to spend more time to learn or go over the options.
- There are a ton of bugs, between Campaign breaking issues or AI, or Pathing for units.
-- Had multiple instances of overworld emplacements suddenly re-appearing after a skirmish or mission when I had just destroyed them in the same turn.
-- Instances of destroyed emplacements still mowing down companies
-- AI will sometimes just move squads in or through heavily fortified locations, not even attack moving or moving to proper cover at times
-- Had more than a few dozen instances of squads getting stuck with pathing to a location.
--- Getting stuck in an endless mantle loop
--- Getting stuck on stationary vehicles
--- Getting stuck on destroyed vehicles
--- Occasionally retreating to HQ despite a field Hospital set as an active rally/retreat flag
-- Tutorial bugs of going to quick, getting locked out after building a unit too quick, making the objective not clear since it was not built after the OBJ was put on screen

Note I have not tried multiplayer, but I personally enjoyed the COH series for its single-player campaigns and the coop missions. Really wished this was even worth the 30$ with it being on 50% sale, but I feel like I'd be more frustrated with the constant bugs and the subpar narrative/story.

Sony has reverted the super anti-consumer account linking and country barring practice, and hope they stay in their lane.

But its still not allowed in all the countries that PSN did not do business with. So we're back to square 1 with SONY doing some stupid stuff and just cutting friends off.

Not Arrowheads fault on the countries being denied service/right to buy the game & play it. It's been confirmed that SONY is to blame, preventing Arrowhead & Steam from allowing the game to be purchased and played in the countries that were first affected by the PSN linking issue. (And also more countries too, think they added 3-5 more countries since they backed off with the linking requirement)

This is the first Bethesda game that I did not finish, and that was due to just how bored I was of every single part of the game. There were only two parts of the game that I liked, and even then it got sullied by the amount of bugs or other brain-dead systems that made it worse as a complete package.

- I liked the ship customization, but the ship combat was buggy and sometimes just completely imbalanced
The constant loading screens and how fast travel worked forced me to add certain components that affected how I built my ship and how it looked, dragging down my positive outlook on the ship customizations.

-Mobility options were very nice, but they're all locked behind perks that are very infrequent and sometimes took too much investment just to obtain.

Now then lets rapid fire the cons that weren't mentioned:
-Bugs everywhere
-- Outposts get snapped sometimes, even the player home has stuff get completely reset, losing all containers and decorations
-- Fast travel sometimes has you stuck in terrain
-- Getting stuck in conversation mode, means you can't pull weapons out or soft-locking sometimes
-- There are like a few dozen more

- Requires a SSD and is 100+ GB, it will not even boot sometimes on an external HD
- Why are a lot of options behind editing an INI file, we're not living in 2009 anymore
- Weird balancing, some quest-lines have some random difficulty spikes where an enemy might take 20 seconds to kill you and the next mission has a similar enemy insta-gib you on sight
- Loading screens galore, everything is tedious
- Planets and moon exploration are practically all the same after the first 3-6 you visit. You can have hundreds of planets and moons to explore, but its all repetitive, and even with all the mobility options, it takes an excessive amount of time to just explore one fully. And its just not fun, super boring. (I see that post about our moon being barren, but realism does not equal fun)
- Melee combat is just complete butts, 0 nuance, and with very few ways to change, buff, or adapt your play-style in melee combat.
- Guns for the most part are also just underwhelming, the customization is axed by the perk requirement and how much you'd need to invest to get any mods for weapons that really change up how they play.
-All the companions are just so dull, Vasco might as well be the only companion with how cookie cutter they all feel.
-NPC's for the most part are also just meh. The fact that I cannot really remember anyone outside of the main quest-line after putting the game down for a month really tells
-Inventory management feels even more encumbering than all the loot you have to haul, it takes so long to go through, and overall is just made worse by the crafting system and junk loot weighing a metric ton.

-Outpost construction was what initially got me into this, but as with the bug above, and how lifeless everything feels, Fallout 4 settlements felt more alive than Starfield's outposts

-Modding scene is there, but with how new this is and updates, its hard to even keep a proper play-through with them enabled
-Feels like most modders would rather stay with Skyrim considering how butts CE2 is it seems, or just how much they'd need to change for this game to even feel decent

Overall it feels like this would've been put out by an actual small dev team for 40$ at most. Not a full long development AAA sort of shine (even by Bethesda standards). It does not feel worth the price of 70$, the 100GB that can only be put on my main SSD, and the 40+/60 hours I put into trying to enjoy the game.
IF this was Skyrim in space, that would've been cool enough to drop 60$ for it, but with my experience of it this year, it even falls short of that.

I asked 10 people that downed me if they were having a good day.
8 said yeah
1 said meh
1 told me to shut up, then he got domed and raged.
10/10 would clicky click in a group of enemies again

Was already a good challenging game before, but with the modding community pumping out so much content, its a steal, even at full price.

Killed all the bosses at the cost of my sanity, at least 200 bodies, and possibly the entirety of this side of the world.

Its a good game, lotta challenges to overcome, and decent planning for each mission/expedition as well as town management. They got proper mods to try both on and off the steam workshop so there's even more customization and fun stuff to tailor to your runs.

If you really want u can make this easier, but somebody's gonna point at you and laugh for doing so. (probably, maybe)

Only played singleplayer, but I can say that on the technical side, it really shows its age, and the buggy state of the singleplayer will make you reload checkpoints very often. There are many parts of the campain that will randomly instakill you for trying to play a certain way, and other parts where it will bug out if you try to be quicker than the AI teammates forcing a reload yet again. The story is okay, and the gunplay is also okay, but very slow and sometimes unweildy/clunky.

Because the heavy said so.