Recent reviews by Areus

I really enjoyed this DLC. The new plane is an improvement, and I liked the new campaign as well. The one thing to note is, this is even more unforgiving than the main game. It follows the difficulty curve established through the main game -- starting at the last mission difficulty and going up. So, if you got to the end of the main game and wanted more story with more challenge, this is for you.

I'm writing this because I'm too afraid to go into an area I think there might be a big fish in but too addicted to close out of the game entirely.

Let me start by saying that I'm not usually a lore fanatic. I'm not a hardcore 40k fan, I'm not demanding strict adherence. All I want is for things to be fun, feel right, and make some kind of sense.

What does not make sense, is not fun, and feels immersion-breakingly weird is how weak these Space Marines are. I'm wearing so much armor I go thud-thud-thud when I walk, have upgraded it with psychic runes, and I still can't rush a group of zombies without AT BEST spending weeks in the hospital when I get back to ship. If there's more than 4 of them, that's assisted suicide. I'm not going to go into a whole "Terminator power armor is XYZ" lore rant, because fundamentally the problem isn't that it doesn't match the books or whatever else, it's that it feels weird and bad.

2-3 guys with what look like m2 machine guns are a match for one of your Grey Knights. Even if you use your full psychic repertoire, which you're strongly discouraged from doing, you're still not looking at great odds with one of yours against a few of the normal "gun guys" that show up with every pack. They outrange you (friendly ranged weapons cap out at 14m, coincidentally almost the exact distance from the mound to the plate in a Little League game, and their effective range is much shorter), they do very similar damage to you as you to them, even though they're in rags and you're in so much armor you may as well be a Gundam, and they have full access to their ability roster.

And yes, it's all very winnable if you play smart, but I shouldn't have to be sprinting from one concrete chunk to another to take cover from glorified trashpunk raiders when I'm leading Space ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Marines.

The problem is, they didn't just make a 40k XCOM clone, they made it like a paint job on a stolen car. XCOM guys were weak squishy humans, and they faced off against fairly equal aliens, and everyone wisely stood behind hard things to avoid getting squished and shot at each other until a few shots landed and someone died. If they'd made this the world's unluckiest normal human troopers, that would have been fine. Derivative, not particularly varied, but "forgettable" at worst.

As it is, it's the most infuriating game I've played this year.

Very short, very plagiarized from Sweeney Todd.

Ran great on Ultra for the first 2 acts, although with plenty of bugs, then I hit Act 3. Chugged to the point of unplayability, kept dropping the settings until I hit rock bottom and it still dropped frames bad enough I threw my hands up. Give it a year, maybe they'll finish it.

Black screen of death

Unforgivably buggy, by far the buggiest full release game I've ever played. Hours wasted trying to get around game-breaking bugs and I still had to just give up after I could no longer access my spells or abilities. Even if it worked the strategy section is so horrible that I as a predominantly strategy focused gamer installed mods to avoid having to do it, roleplay is strongly discouraged both by frankenbuild-only difficulty and by mystifyingly stupid interpretations of the morality system (which will strip out your powers if you're too far in one direction or another depending on class), and branching paths are largely the choose-a-color-to-see-your-ending.

The previous game, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, was a deeply flawed game saved by incredible writing. This intensifies every mistake that game made, adds a few more for good measure, and drops the writing quality a couple levels.

It's addictive to try new builds and the side characters are (in some cases) well written, so I'd really love to see the rest of it, but until it sees massive bug fixing I can't even tell you how good or bad most of it even is. It'd take a LOT to make up for the mistakes it made in my first attempt, even assuming the dozens of bugs I encountered were fixed.

Platforming is tedious, finnicky, and way too common. Pathfinding and picking up garbage around the level is the primary gameplay modus, the actual DOOM part is spread too thin. Every time I finish a fight, I'm not thinking "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ did you see that" I'm thinking "Ok, fun time over, where does it want me to jump now?" I tried to like this, dropped it and came back twice, but the reality is if you want to make a Doom platformer you should warn people. (Also you should never do that)

Best cactus juice advertisement I've ever played. Would pierce again.

Given my playtime, it would be dubious to not recommend, but I do want to open by saying that this is a broadly flawed game. The combat interface is rudimentary, not allowing for things like formation movement that would elevate the strategy potential. The campaign interface is even worse, zoomed in so far that you can't see as far as your ships can move in a turn, resulting in tons of back and forth to try and see everything that might be happening and respond. The Necron and Tyrannid campaigns are a bit underbaked, very few ship combos that aren't direct downgrades from the mathematically perfect option in the Necron case and relatively simplistic storylines in both. Worst of all it's very buggy, more CTD than I've seen in a strategy game to date, occasionally ships will just sort of explode for no apparent reason, non-story invasions will happen where the UI says they're impossible. The pathing is bad enough that ships will frequently (maybe 1 battle in 5) get stuck together and grind themselves to death if you can't find the right combo of movements to pull them apart.

All that being said, it's a lot of fun to play, the story is well written, the art design is pretty, and the Imperium and Chaos campaigns are memorable. I'd give it a try, but be prepared for some frustration.