Recent reviews by Gordon "Simcoe" Fawks

UPDATE: 2024-05-06

My recommendation has changed again. It is tentative whilst things change but as of Today the requirement to make a PSN Account has been dropped.

I hope this is good news and a relief to the developer and to the players who have all worked and played so hard to build a great game and community around it.

To more success and liberty in the future!

UPDATE: 2024-05-03

Sony's sudden and rather cynical requirement to force a link through a PSN account; which is at current count unavailable for 43% of Helldivers 2 players, may well destroy this game. I do not recommend purchasing it anymore, despite the wonderful and terrific work the developers have put into it. I might waffle a bit in this change of heart if the PSN servers were even up and capable of generating new accounts but as of writing they are down, anyways.

My sincere gratitude to the developers for the wonderful work they have done and I hope they can move away from such predatory publishers in the future. I've had 300+ good hours in this game and it's a shame to see it go this way.

The bugs are frustrating, the servers took a solid two weeks to be beefed up enough to take the player load, and I have never been so happy to suffer through these. This game is Amazing with a very on-point lesson in satire that I hope isn't lost on the player base.

Generally, yes. Sort-of.

After nine years the game is still somewhat buggy and really geared towards single-player play. Co-op is possible but it's really a sort of pick-up co-op without the option to share a lot of resources.

Navigation is also incredibly painful with poor wayfinding and waypointing.

That said, playing this on modern hardware is rewarding both for the entirely acceptable visuals and the scope the RNG has to get you some really great worlds and visual. Not as adept as other space sims, though, but considering the worlds are all living and not sterile corpsicle-worlds like some other games I'd say there's a fair tradeoff.

Yes I would recommend this game. It's got a generally good vibe, the player base is reasonably respectful, and self-sorting for skill level. Like Left 4 Dead you will really want to end up playing in groups you have voice coms with but ranks 1 - 3 are actually reasonable to play pickup.

We will see how much my opinions change after the class revamps in 2 days.

An exceedingly good little city-builder/sim, though there's not much development going on. The modding community is pretty stellar, though, and is doing a good job of adding more replayability.

So this is a VERY manual game. Prepare to get killed a lot from places, angles, and people you never see or expect.

But it's also tremendous both as a game and getting some effect of both the shocking arbitrary and abrupt nature of warfare.

Still lacking Brits.

So, Risen 3, why would you want to buy this game?

Twitchy controls, frustrating combat, hilariously disjointed dialogue. This game is a frustrating mess from start to finish.

First off, of all I say here I highly recommend this game.

Now, let's see the bad first; this could be longer for the price tag, it's criminally short and feels like content even in these chapters was cut, and the difficulty vascilates between trivial and merciless.

That said I generally adored this game. The environments are lush, the soundtrack (music and sound design both) are a true pleasure, and the characters are enourmousely endearing. Even the controls worked out well, allaying my concerns about 3D platforming in VR. The plot was a bit sparse, but I think this worked out well, letting the environments do heavy lifting and making one soak in details was a great decision. That it also leaves room to further go on to the next game is not lost on me.

If all you own for VR is first person shooters and VR socialization games you owe it to yourself to pick this up and see what else the medium can do.

If you're the dev I would recommend picking apart the difficulty curve a bit more. Your tutorializing is good, but it feels like walking I to a wall in two instances.

Excellent performance, snappy controls, few enough bugs and some excellent gunplay. I definitely suggest having dedicated people you play this with, though, as random teams can be quite frustrating to deal with. In-game communications are somewhat mediocre and some headsets seem to pick up their own audio (Though this may be more an issue with the headsets). Only having one map, given that I've played 67 hours and I'm still enjoying myself, isn't too much of an issue; but a second map or a few more guns would be nice.

Pay aspects are limited to weapon and players skins and have no bearing on ability within the game and every weapon has its application, so you never really feel like you're getting duds; though the shotguns are a touch frustrating.

Yeah, it's fun. Nice to hang out with people from around the world I don't get to see in person very often.

So I'd give this game a hard pass. Its controls are unpleasant, the game graphics are muddy and irritating to play through, and the gunplay is downright miserable to work with.

Adding to that this possesses all the worst parts of MMO grind and you have a real miserable piece of work on your hands. Definitely in the bottom tier of even free to play games.