Recent reviews by StickNik

Great game.
Good bosses and enemy variety well designed for co-op play.
Cool classes and nice that you can multi-class a 2nd one.
Great weapons and gear that have immense variety and synergies.

Engaging gameplay and problem solving for the variety of well designed and distinct maps and scenarios, with the challenge coming from trying not to kill the bad guys if you can help it (and being fairly allergic to bullets).

Clean a focused game, with lots of depth in perks to tailor your play style around the core arsenal and the huge variety of bosses.

Had me hooked very quickly, excellent level design and interaction, fun mechanics and very much looking forward to full game!

Awesome tactical game. No missing hits!
Breach rooms with hostiles, use cool magic to knock people out, drug them up, teleport them around, and most importantly, defenestrate them through any given window or dark tendril portal (portable window).

Within a turn you can rewind and retry many different combinations of moves to best figure out the synergies you can create with complimentary and wholly unique squad members.
Makes it feel a bit like a puzzle game to start with (and can in particular levels with a gimmick or new mechanic), but as you get more party members and new mechanics are introduced, the gameplay depth really opens up. One stream with the main dev pre-release has him reacting to unintended room solutions, and the perk system giving you thoughts on how to tailor your playstyle.

The optional objectives (that earn each of your party members "Confidence" points in order to pull off new outfits) started with me wishing to complete most of them with my first run throughs, but many will become a real challenge that will get you to return to levels later with new perks or using "non-canon" party members. That's not even to mention a good helping of "Dreams" bonus/optional missions which can toy with the gameplay mechanics like having duplicates of squadmates, or just being even more challenging.

The story is comedic/quirky, but still allows moments to be sincere, throughout which it puts in effort to be engaging and clear, with little pinboard intervals between some missions to get you to connect the dots of the plot together and prevent you getting lost if you're not just skipping through it all for the gameplay, and also giving room to characterise the main characters with their typical behaviours and conversations.
Interesting character dynamics, unique lore of the magic in this world which is well woven into plot progression, and beautifully balances the absurdities of M4 magic staff carbines and the implications of powers like perpetually seeing seconds into the future.

On top of that, the art style compliments the gameplay with it's clarity, allowing for some visual humour in the twisting of magical stereotypes into this modern/urban setting, and giving all your team distinct personalities and designs. A few boss enemies also get this treatment, and I must say the final boss was a great combination of testing you on everything you're capable of, and narrative weightiness.

While you don't make decisions through-out the story beyond a couple dialogue variants, I was surprised to see the ending had a few nice decisions to make, that while might not change much, is a nice bow to tie on the end of the experience/ One major decision, and a few minor ones that allow you to choose the post-campaign paths your teammates decide to go down into their futures with little summaries of how they turn out.

Highly recommend.

P.S. The art for levels is made using tilesets for locations/environments the game also has a very intuitive from brief glance level editor that allows you to make levels as if you were designing them for the game. If there wasn't enough replayability in the base game already, there will be with this.

Outstanding game, uses the open world as a mechanic to evade monstrosities and try other avenues before bonking you head on a wall forever... but will still let you bonk your head on a wall with some bosses as it should be.

Everything else soulslike refined to a tee, getting flasks for defeating groups to fuel continued exploration and prevent constantly returning to graces. Only critique is keybinds, I use EMULight AHK tool to add quick pouch buttons and separate sprint and dodge.

It's aight, you could wait though for patches of another enemy faction and mechs and stuff, and for the servers and population to stabilise. Helldivers 1 had a more niche but long life, even if the peaks drop, there will likely be a healthy population for a time to come.

Edit: Jun 2024

Biggest problem is that it's a really grindy live-service game. Maybe it's the best, but I can't recommend live-service games. All the variety of equipment and enemy types from the first game has diminished, resources have caps that force you to spend or make you stop playing the game because it would be a waste, while stuff like samples and super-credits are a pittance unless you stop playing the game properly to purely resource collect.

War, war never changes. Front lines eb and flow. It's a bit samey at the moment.

Lovely Spies vs Mercs with more symmetrical player control of character, and wonderful ragdolling mechanics where being hit can knock you off balance, but can be survived. Playing dead and quadruple tapping bodies is a must.

POG game, doesn't hand-hold, so can be tough to know what to do next at parts if you're secret hunting particularly, but lovely set of movement mechanics and a good amount of variety and use of all mechanics before you finish the game.

Glorious, fast, polished gameplay.
My first Armored Core game (very much enjoyed on M+KB), and I fell into it real easy.

The controlling of your mech and the simple basis of gameplay is easy to pickup. The mech building variety is not left wanting, and though you might yearn for them more within the first couple hours, the ability to full refund parts means you can try anything out, you just won't be able to quick switch for specific bosses at checkpoints.
I think many people will find a small handful of weapons that you'll gravitate towards early on, but the difficulty and variety pushed me enough to try out new builds. The lack of friction in doing so enabled me to be much more experimental than I am in other games with more settled stats and commitment into them like an Elden Ring.
The abundance of customisation possibilities of colour/wear/custom emblems along with the parts make fashioncore tantalising, and being able to save 160 slots of custom cores along with being able to download custom cores one can share is a welcome sight compared to paid skins of many lesser games.

Missions have surprising variety in flow and objectives and there was enough enjoyment to have me playthrough to NG++, repeating many, although seeking new missions or variants was the bigger drive to playing through the 3 endings the game has. I will at least want to play through at least most of a 4th time so that I can re-unlock the last 3 arena battles that appear when approaching the NG++ ending, and am considering giving all missions a replay to pick up straggler logs and hidden mech parts that eluded me or didn't occur to me to look for in the story playthroughs (will see how S ranking them all will go).

Fodder enemies have some variety, but it isn't always apparent when so many are fairly easily killed in a casual run. The mission variety does manage to make some utilisation out of them, and you should never underestimate stray shots from them, but the difficulty will come more from the more unique medium and high tier enemies. Other ACs always require some attention whether or not they are contextualised as a boss fight.

Bosses are hard.
Luckily I took to the gameplay and speed of it well enough to beat the tutorial/intro level boss with minimal struggle, but the end of Chapter One is an intimidating fight which will skill check if you can handle the rest of the game. The Chapter One ending level as a whole is a good microcosm of the whole game. You start with fodder enemies and stronger sniper/turret hazards for a couple short areas, before meeting an AC enemy which will blow away most of the encounters you've had with how he matches your capabilities and slightly surpasses your equipment, but you believe you can beat him and should after a few tries. To end the level though, you have a boss that expands the limits of threat you can expect, and the first time you see the storm of missiles streaming your way, you will not be happy. Maybe you'll need to leave to level and buy some other parts before replaying it to get back to the boss, maybe you already have parts and will be switching out random stuff trying to feel out what you need, but eventually you will realise the initial intimidation at how you're supposed to dodge that torrent of missiles will be behind you as you've figured out how much damage you can dole out and avoid. You will latch onto something that feels right and I hope you stick it out until the joy of beating him relaxing to enjoy the cutscene after and a thread of story to follow on through the rest of the game.

Check the briefing 621.