Recent reviews by 草莓水

I am in two minds about Helldivers 2. On one hand, the game is an incredibly enjoyable experience when it works. I've not had so much fun with a shooter like this in years. Being able to obliterate robots or giant insects as you set up a nuke to launch in great fun. Learning enemy weaknesses, learning to play and build around them, and coordinating with your team to blast through missions that would have put you in the dirt when you first started in a great feeling. On the other, the bugs, questionable UX choices, regular crashing, and questionable balance choices have swayed me away from this game as I've played on.

Since day one, bugs have reigned rampant in this game, and while many have been fixed over the game's lifecycle, many more still remain, entirely untouched. From day one, I have been locked to 30 fps on low settings despite my system being capable of much much more thanks to a specific bug with those who have certain AMD GPU's. This has not been addressed or even mentioned by the developers, and to this day, I will crash if I raise any of my settings higher than 30 fps & low. The game has had countless bug revolving around host and non-host damage inconsistency, and certain damage types either barely work or don't work at all if you are/weren't the game's host. There are even guns in this game that have had badly misaligned aiming reticles since day one that have still yet to be patched in any way what so ever.

Not even the game's social menu works consistently. It has been an inconsistent mess since day one. It goes back and forth about whether it wishes to display my steam friends list in-game or not, and often will not allow the joining of steam friends' lobbies unless we also exchange friend requests in-game. It also has significant information lag. Lobbies that had four people in them even more than five minutes ago remain 'full' and unjoinable until the social tab finally decides to finally update itself.

This is to say nothing about the frequency of crashes. Never before have I witnessed a game so desperate to outdo bethesda for instability. You will crash for loading into a mission. You will crash for winning a mission. You will crash for having too many friends on your friend list. You will crash for using certain objectives. You will crash because someone else in the lobby is watching a cutscene. You will crash for aiming down sights on certain weapons. You will crash for playing too many missions in a row without restarting. Everything and anything will make you crash to desktop, and while the developers have been fixing crash source after crash source, there remain enough in the game to ensure most people struggle to stay in the game for more than an hour at a time. And that's to say nothing of all the extra ways to crash they add with every new major update.

Yet for as frustrating as frequent crashing is, what makes it truly an unsavory experience is that you miss out on all rewards from that mission if you crash. Something entirely out of your hands punishes you for not staying in the mission, even as many have run times of 30-45 minutes. While you can boot back up and rejoin your lobby, thanks to several inconvenient bugs, you might not be able to actually rejoin the mission despite still being in the lobby. That is, if you actually remain in the lobby after crashing. It's entirely possible to be ejected from your lobby after crashing through no fault of anyone in the lobby, and be unable to join either because you've run into the several bugs that make joining another person's lobby impossible unless the host restarts, or because the game is convinced there are still actually four people in that lobby, and will remain that way for five or ten minutes, or until the mission is complete.

Stranger still is Arrowhead's sense of balance when it comes to this game. The majority of primary weapons are useless for all but the bottom three difficulties out of nine, and they seem to have a policy of nerfing weapons based on use-rate rather than the weapon's actual relative power. Powerhouse primary weapons come in and rotate before being guttered and replaced with a new over-buffed weapon as though we were playing a PVP game with a cycling meta. Stranger still seems to be the developer's insistence on balancing around bugs. In recent times, fire damage's damage over time has been buffed across the board several times in a row, ensuring that enemies that use fire weapons kill you in a second with damage over time alone, and that players can roast whole hoards of enemies with their flamethrowers... as long as they're the host. If you aren't the host, your fire based damage over time effects do no damage at all.

Worse yet is that may of the game's current bugs or even intended features aren't explained in game well if at all. Armor rating was bugged for nearly a month after launch, ensuring the only good armor was light armor. Of course, none of this was made apparent in-game. Similarly with the state of fire's damage over time effects doing nothing, there is no indication in-game despite being a fairly build defining bug. Worse yet, intentional mechanics are also explained poorly. 'Boosters'(These are actual pieces of equipment, not paid for temporary boosters) act as team-wide buffs that you can equip at the start of each mission to make the game swing just a little further in your favor. A shame that over half of them have tooltips that either don't explain what the booster does or explain it so poorly as to mislead the player in what it actually does. Weapon stats suffer a similar problem. Each gun displays only the most barebones data, with several mechanics purposely simplified to the point of deception. For example, looking at the guns in-game might lead you to believe there are three tiers of enemy armor. Low, medium, and high, with guns having armor penetration stats of either low, medium, or high. Unfortunately, armor actually ranks on a scale of 1-10. Will your medium penetration weapon actually penetrate all medium armor? (Almost none o them do.) You'll only find out if you bring it to a mission and shoot at an enemy you already know has medium armor! That is to say nothing about the weapons whose few displayed stats are actually completely incorrect. To date, several weapons have had wildly incorrect damage numbers on their stats page that do not accurately reflect the damage they output. Some of these have been fixed, but as is the ever growing theme with this game, several more haven't been fixed and have been ignored.

Helldivers 2 has somehow become both the best and worst shooter I've played in years. I both love and hate the game, and unfortunately, the negative end has won out in the end. Maybe that might change in a few more month's time when more bug fixes and content are out. For now, however, I cannot recommend this game in it's current state.

Simple Breakout-style game. It plays and controls nicely, though it never grows more complex than it starts out as. Can't argue with a price of free though.

A lot of games make a big deal out of player choice, but few in recent memory offer so many intricate, meaningful ways of approaching any given situation. You fulfill or dash the spiritual hopes of an idyllic society, and decide the fate of more than one city over the course of your post apocalyptic journey. Your actions have far-reaching consequences that affect not just the world around you but also the way you play, and it's this freedom that makes Bad Rats worth playing--and replaying. It's deep and mesmerizing, and though not as staggeringly broad as the developer's previous games, it's more focused and vividly realized.
This focus is obvious from the first hour of the game, in which character creation and story exposition are beautifully woven together. It's an introduction best experienced on your own rather than described in detail here, but it does set up Bad Rat's framework. Truly a game unmatched by any on the market today, old or new, and worthy of every last praise it has received.

7.8/10 Too many rats.