Recent reviews by Ilostmycactus

It's good.

Very frustrating, even on easy.

It's good but has drawbacks.

I'm not a fan. Overwatch is already fast paced, but this feels even more frantic. Often I struggle to even know what's going on because there's a constant cacophony of explosions and people moving around, it doesn't feel good. Did I get a kill? Maybe. The scoreboard says I did, while I never noticed because everything is just so messy. Solo engagements are manageable, but once everything goes together you just spam abilities and hope for the best. It feels like there aren't many sound cues. Flight controls are inverted and you can't change them (at least on keyboard).
The maps are also pretty bad and hard to learn. Labyrinthine, without good ui like distance information for those floating objective markers. No mini map. Many of the corridors look the same.
Finally, it has its F2P elements. You can't check challenges in match, if someone takes the suit you need, then too bad (there are only 4 options per challenge).
Instead of backfilling, if someone leaves the match at the start then the whole thing gets cancelled and you get booted to the menu, no priority queue or anything.
It just doesn't feel very polished to me. Acceptable, ok, but not a blast to play. Maybe an Overwatch hardcore competitive veteran would like it more than me.
If the game looks fuzzy to you then turn post processing down and it will look better.

I'll start with negatives. It's a free game, there is grind. It has sporadic crashing. Matchmaking can be unfair at times. Some playstyles are much better than others.

That said, I feel like Mechwarrior respects my time a lot more than other free to play games (looking at you warthunder). There are also a decent amount of free mechs that get rolled out and plenty of trial mechs.

Mechwarrior replicates the slow give and take of mech combat really well (as opposed to something like Overwatch which I tried again recently, which is fast and blitzey). The game is a bit dated, but honestly if you want a free mech game, or even a decent free arena shooter, you could do worse (cough warthunder).

Frustrating.

The game needs a ton of work. There are many quality of life issues and bugs/performance problems that will really limit your enjoyment of the game. The gameplay itself isn't that great right now either. It doesn't feel very tactical, more of spamming the strongest stuff you can get and brute forcing each point.

The speed of updates will determine the life or death of this game.

[Spoilers]


Subnautica is a great game. It's atmospheric, beautiful, and sometimes scary. The music and sound design are amazing. You really get the feeling of uncovering a mystery and exploring the depths. You get to be creative and choose how you master your environment. The early game is good. The middle-late game feels somewhat lacking.

Searching for other survivors, hearing their recorded voices and written notes, seemed to ground me. I wanted to find and save them. However, you quickly learn everyone is dead, which immediately isolates the player. This has purpose in setting tone, yes, but I feel is more problematic than helpful. Alone, it was up to me to set myself goals that would entertain and immerse me. I lost the human connection. Pursuing the Degasi clues and investigating their bases revived this for me, but it quickly runs out of content and ends in similar disappointment to the other survivors. While understandable for the rating, the lack of physical evidence for the deceased felt like it siphoned off even more closure. Everyone is dead, and all you get are empty bases and lifepods. That's it.

For lategame, Subnautica wants you to explore more to find the real depths. This might be acceptable if it weren't for clumsy and obfuscating exploration. You have all this hyper advanced sonar and technology, but no way of filling out and charting a map of territory. If you don't want to waste your time like me, you'll quickly turn to guides and online maps. Leviathans also stop being a real threat. I already knew about the reapers beforehand and soon looked up the others, and they were still scary in the beginning. But I learned, that leviathans pretty much just swim in a circuit, meaning they're easily avoidable lategame. This is especially true with the grapple and jump jet prawn suit. A well timed swing and boost will propel you great distances. The prawn suit is durable as well. Basically, unless you want to pick a fight, leviathans can't kill you.

The alien plot at the end somewhat peters out and lacks the beforementioned human connection. All the alien ruins are so empty. The sea emperor quest is basically a crafting fetch quest. While I enjoyed the sea empress as a character, she has little impact on the majority of the game and is gone quickly after introduction.

The lack of real combat, an intentional tonal and social decision by the developers, is somewhat frustrating. I wanted to be able to hunt larger creatures. Not even from a destructive standpoint, but a utilitarian one to gather more and better resources, but you can't. Actual fighting is slow, wonky, and purposeless besides removing an immediate threat. You gain nothing else.

Gathering resources became tedious, with a ton of backtracking just to make what I wanted. The drill arm on the prawn suit increases efficiency, but not to a super helpful level. Inventory management was again, tedious and could use some real quality of life improvements.

Finding blueprint parts to unlock new equipment was also frustrating. Some things I had early, others not. Again I had to resort to the internet to find what I needed. Forcing exploration is fine, but without an actively charting map you will easily miss the one wreck that had your blueprint fragment.

Base building was fun and creative, but also somewhat wonky and unforgiving with placement of parts.

There are bugs, especially with the prawn suit inside alien buildings. You'll need the grapple arm to get free.




I enjoyed Subnautica. It was creative and fun, even with its flaws. However, I found myself going from, "I'm interested in getting the sequel as well," in the early game to "I just want to finish the game. All my upgrading and building is just busywork at this point. If the sequel is more of this, I think I'll pass," in the late game.

With all that said, Subnautica is still worth the price of admission. I got 50 hours out of a purchase I made years ago. If you're on the fence, give it a try.

Fun, but with a lot of frustrating design decisions designed to lengthen the game and that punish casual players.

Do you like tanks? Planes? Ships? Well then avoid this game because it's a waste of time grindfest with awful balancing, game design, and servers powered by moldy cheese.