Recent reviews by Dr. Death

I dont know how honest and reliable i can be with this little time on the game, but its just NOT fun to play at all.

What a bittersweet note for antimatter games.

RS2 DOES miss some of the spark that RO2/RS1 had, and you can tell that in the server player count. I am not a sloptuber essay writer so I'm not going to make a 3 hour video between the differences of RO2 in detail vs RS2 to explain how RO2 was more hardcore and as such it's audience is stuck together to the game for longer, but I will say that while some things were improved, others not so much.

The game removed tanks and any ground vehicle to give only the BLUFOR the helicopters. Now I know that tanks weren't big in the vietnam war, but it does feel weird to know a game known for it's combined arms operations had it's entire ground vehicle component removed, specially since the M113 as a drivable vehicle could do great. And yes, there were ground vehicles and sometimes tanks when the north vietnamese army was involved in real life operations.

Stuff that should be in here but are missing include the factions of South Korea, thailand and the philipines, and for a campaign that "progresses with technology" it's surprising to see many stuff be used just the same.

So let's talk about the helicopters... Maybe I say this because I'm a flight simmer at heart but I am disappointed. Sure, they are way better than in battlefield, but I don't think the maps are big enough to justify them to begin with. Maybe it's the outdated Unreal Engine 3 platform (and it runs like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for being UE3), but a 1.4km 20 second ride between the helicopter pad to the contested objective isn't what I had in mind when I heard you would be able to fly helicopters and ferry soldiers to combat. Not that it matters much anyways, attack helicopters are neigh impossible to use because of how little weaponry they carry, and the transport helicopter, while working as a mobile spawn point, offers no advantage compared to spawning to your squad leader, unless you're the squad leader. The physics themselves are "OK". But nowhere as realistic as I imagined at first. That's a "me" problem though. After all I am the one that actually wants helicopter rides to last 10 minutes at least. More helicopter variety than the OH-6, AH-1G (with a very weird and probably fake mutation of it's weaponry with a dual grenade launcher/machine gun turret?), and an unknown variant of the UH-1 are the only helicopters in the game.

No, you can't use the planes in any capacity, the addition of the AC-47 is nice, but this was a perfect opportunity to insert different types of planes as different types of commander bomb support. It sure would be nice to have the capacity to call in a MOAB!

The weapons and the shooting is some of the best in any game. Together with Insurgency the RO/RS saga has the best weapon resting mechanic and the recoil/bullet damage are handled pretty perfectly. 5.56 out of an M16 is accurate and with little recoil but you need about 3 or 4 shots to kill, although the 7.62x51 NATO feels a bit weak. There's a weird issue I've noticed that I'm not sure if it's lag related or skill issue or what, but I notice that there's a small delay between me firing a shotgun at someone point range and the shot killing them.

The vietcong spawning mechanic is... Weird. A squad lead puts down a "tunnel" which is a mobile spawn point, 1 per squad, takes 10 seconds to put down and until someone from the other teams gets there and holds F for a few seconds to destroy it, your entire squad can respawn there unlimited times. To be quire frank I just don't like the way the respawning mechanics work in this game, but maybe I play too much Squad.

There's no KGB/PLA/MACSOG/Cambodia/Laos representation in this game of any kind. A bit of a non-issue, but it sure would be nice to have some maps related to the hidden proxy spec ops conflicts of other nations.

No destructible environment, which yeah, I know I can't ask UE3 to do everything at the same time, but come on, it feels weird to know the trees are invulnerable to napalm and the buildings don't get touched by artillery. It sure would make the game feel better and more unique if there was a gameplay shift from destroying cover with support.

Another minor personal complaint would be to ask to see bigger distance in firefights to allow snipers and adjustable sights to stretch their wings just like in RO2. Then again given the setting I understand this was not a priority.

What is NOT a minor personal complaint is strangely enough how few mods there are for this game compared to the previous ones in the series. Green army men? Yeah that's neat, I tried to find a server in the matchmaking and 8 minutes went by before I decided to stop. There's basically only 3 "major" mods for this game, but none seem to have populated servers to play. One of them, G.O.M. at least adds the bot support for singleplayer local sessions, just in case the servers shut down (let's face it, this is more than likely going to happen soon anyways).

So as a final point in this review, lets address the elephant in the room: Antimatter games closed down. Technically they changed name to Blue dot games to focus on the cancelled '83 project which is now seeking better funding, but basically Rising Storm 2 is end of life and as far as I think, there will be no more RO/RS games in the future, which is a shame.

Still a fantastic game and not one realistic shooter enjoyer should miss, but I feel like we, as a playerbase, got robbed, from an unknown party and by an unknown reason, from a WAY better game. It's by far one of the less broken and least janky vietnam war game out there.

Its good, but way too short.

The game has one of the most terrible ways to implement a life system in a game:

You have multiple characters and you can switch between them at any moment freely, they each have their own life bar, and health pickups only goes to whoever picked them up, even if they have full health. You have to switch characters before they die and make sure to use them when you see a health pickup, and for the love of god don't get that character killed, because instead of switching to another character, the game puts you back in the start of the stage WITHOUT that character and WITHOUT giving the rest extra health.

That means that if every one of your characters have low health, but they are all alive, your options are:

1- Lock the ♥♥♥♥ in and do no hit runs until you finish the level and get your health restored for the next level
2- Play without being hit until you find health pickups, which are not that common, and pick them with the character you want to have the most health
3- Swallow the stupid pill and kill yourself to start with a new life, with every character at top health, but way further back.

Another issue with the game is that you cant move while attacking, this wasn't a problem until the second to last level, the library, which gave me moving platforms between pitfalls with enemies in between. Not only you have to deal with precision platforming, and then the knock back of the enemies if you play on veteran difficulty, but you also have to deal with timing your attacks correctly or risk being moved by the platform into your death. A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ level.

It's cool, if a bit rough around the edges, I simply do not like roguelikes a lot.

You know what? Screw you!.

*ROGUE-LITES YOUR PACMAN*

There's an issue with this game: It's a literal dopamine addiction.

Every mechanic of pacman has been perfected to make a game hard yet always giving you the edge and a slight advantage to make sure you're always getting hooked on winning and having a lot of adrenaline inside you.

I'm surprised this game isn't more popular nowadays.

If you know invictus you know what you're getting. An old indie russian made racing game with a small budget from the early 2000's, with a pretty damn impressive physics engine for its time but not so much today.

You start with a crap car and you race to unlock upgrades, other races, and other cars, these upgrades make your car feel less like an anemic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and more like an actual car that take you 100kmh+.

The real downfall of this game is in its content, namely, the tracks; there's a ton of races that distribute every unlock in every car, yet there's only 6 tracks:

Hungary, which is basically a dirt/mud racing complex
United Kingdom, which is a closed off field of road in the middle of nowhere
France, which is a mountain pass around a lake
Finland, which is a snow skiing complex around a frozen lake
USA, which is a small piece of highway and a beach around it based on california
Germany, which hosts the only asphalt race track

There's at least 50, and if im feeling lucky, i'd say about 100 races, and they are all a variation of one of these tracks. The way the tracks are handled is that each map is actually a small sandbox on which each race picks checkpoints and walls around to make a layout, but that doesn't make the game with 6 maps feel any less devoid of content, specially when each map is about the size of a gmod map, if taken to scale. How does CRC pretend to extend its play length with just 6 small maps over several variations? By making each race a nearly 10 minute race with 6 laps. I am perfectly OK running laps on a game in a virtual car for hours but i dont know what CRC does wrong. I dont know if its the sound, the physics, the keyboard controls, the AI, the graphics, the cars or the maps, but after 4 minutes each race feels like a misery.

The game does something VERY weird with the graphics. It wants to simulate sunshine brightness, but this came long before HDR was even a theory in PC gaming, so what they do is... have a gradual reduction in color contrast if you look at the sun's direction. That means that as you make a jump and look up, you will notice how suddenly the colors on the game go away before coming back some seconds later. Its frankly an awful effect and it doesn't land well at all.

The least i talk about the music the better. Whatever weird underground band got hired to use their music for the game just sucks and i dont wanna bother listening to them. I think you can replace the ingame music with your own, but i just turned the music off due to how bad the songs were.

I'm having SUCH fun with this game. The lore, the graphics, the map, the design, the MUSIC is AMAZING.

This is basically a souls-like metroidvania.

I 100% recommend this game if you play with a controller. The reason why i DONT is because im playing with a mouse, and it's gotta be one of the most frustrating and annoying ways to play a game.

Half of the game wants to be played fast, with quick reactions, jumping from one place to another zip-zap-zoom. The other half wants you to take your time and look at where you would end up jumping to. The issue is when both of those happen at the same time while the attack has this AWFUL delay. You fire a small spread shot with your hand, but you cant just fire it, you need to HOLD the firing button for a while, which when you have to think fast and use it to stop or start the movement of platforms or to get rid of enemies while on the move its just frustrating and annoying.

Being able to tell where you WOULD land compared to where you are aiming sucks. There's a line indication to where you are going and another line telling you where Dandara will go if you jump, and if things are ideal, those 2 lines will be the same. The issue happens when you know where your mouse is or where you want to go but the game thinks you WANT to go somewhere else and jumps in a direction not intended. There are also a lot of times where you see a jump that you THINK you would be able to make but the game goes "Nuh-huh! You gotta be 3 pixels closer for you to make that jump!".

The fact that its a souls like means that your currency is tied to the place where you last died, and if you die before recovering your currency its bye-bye to all of it. I'm not going to pretend its a bad idea to copy that design, but it is frustrating and it makes me just want to close the game after i fail and miss out on a ton of money that i could have bought upgrades with. The game would be a LOT better if you didn't lose the currency to make upgrades that make the game easier when you die.

PS: You can suicide to re-spawn faster, but for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason that wont leave a body with the currency for you to pick up, so if you kill yourself you lose literally all your money without any chance to recover it, unlike if an enemy killed you.

This is a fantastic game and its one of the most beautiful way to write lore for a made up universe. The art style is amazing and in character with the other SuperGiant games the music is glorious.

I just wish the game wasn't so damn repetitive. You basically go through a season of this sport and you have to do it every time per character, albeit after the first one the seasons end up being under half in length, that's still about 7 or 8 times you "re-do" the game. Yes, there are differences and things that change, but it still feels like playing the same game over and over and over nonstop with increasing difficulty just for the "good ending".

The game is good and i've been a huge fan of the original, that being said i dont think that 15 USD is a price worth paying, even with the extra features, for a game that is still made in flash and has a crap ton of bugs and issues.

This game needs a remake in a better and more modern engine, but i dont think its worth paying the money for an improved version of a free game.