Recent reviews by Zionyx

I've been playing DRG for a few months, and I've enjoyed it greatly. Here's the quick pitch:
* 1-4 player co-op, PvE only game
* Mine minerals, kill enemies, a variety of other objectives. Harder difficulties = more enemies, harder enemies.
* 4 distinct classes, with meaningful differences
* Procedurally generated maps - every level is different, every time

* Excellent, non-toxic community. An active, welcoming Discord. Players are friendly and welcoming to new players (we were all greenbeards once...). The server browser is good and easy to find games.
* The gameplay loop is great. The classes are well balanced and complement each other. As you get better at the game, you'll start to look at the levels in different ways, depending on your class.
* The developers pay attention to the community. Bug reporting is public so you know your issues have been seen. New content is still coming out - they've just released "Season 1" of content, so it seems fair to assume there's still plenty to come.

* The voice chat controls are really not as good as they should be for a co-op game, so lots of people just use Discord instead.

* The end-game, "cores" system is... very long. Think ~10 months to get everything, even if you complete every challenge every week.

Deep Rock Galactic is great to play by yourself, it's great to play with randoms, and its even better when playing with friends (but don't let your friends not owning it dissuade you).

One of the most fun and creative games I've played in some time. A must buy.

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EDIT ONE YEAR LATER:

This game is still just as great. It is now in its third solid season of new content, which has added even more depth to the game. The voice controls (see "the bad" above) are much better (but not quite perfect).

The devs are still updating the game regularly with bug fixes (and excellent patch notes, so you know exactly what has been fixed). The community is still great and still growing, several years after release. Modded content gets better all the time, with new and interesting ways to play. It's even better value than when I first reviewed it.

I've played all the various Halos since ~2002, and have 3000+ hours on MCC. Despite all that, I can't recommend it. Here's why:

* The ports of the games are reasonably solid. The games look great in 4k. Several longstanding H1 graphics bugs have been fixed. MCC is now the best-looking versions of any of the legacy Halos.
* There is online co-op for all games - something that H1 & H2C historically lacked. However, H2 co-op can be very buggy. The others work well.
* The achievements are varied, mostly fun, with some good challenging achievements also.
* The new mod tools for H1, H2C, and H3 are really good. The same internal tools that were used to build the game. Despite my overall-negative review, if modding is your thing then this is a great buy.

* The game remains buggy in some regards. There are still far more crashes than acceptable. Sometimes co-op just doesn't work. With the release of Halo Infinite, it doesn't seem like there's going to be much more attention given to MCC. How it is right now (Nov 2021): this is it.
* There is no compensation between KB/M and controller. Controllers get a form of aim assist (sometimes called "sticky reticle"). Above a certain level, 100% of players play controller because the assistance is just that huge. If you want to get good while still playing KB/M... good luck.
* The netcode is simplistic and not worthy of a game being released any time in the last 10 years. The end result is a lot of saying "... what in the ♥♥♥♥ just happened?" Every modern game uses rollback, client-side interpolation, etc, while MCC uses a janky combination of server-authoritative combined with certain (but not all!) weapons being client-side. It's a mess.
* The engagement between the developers and the community is basically non-existent. 343i have long enjoyed this power-imbalance and have never changed. There are no clear or effective feedback mechanisms and bugs usually go unresolved or unacknowledged.


* Matchmaking sucks, not a little, but a lot. It's really awful. With H2C (2004), Bungie made the decision to move to matchmaking, instead of a server browser. Select what you want to play, and a game will be found for you. Simplicity is good but it must be executed well. The matchmaking playlist experience has become the dominant form for playing Halo ever since. And in MCC, they've managed to make this experience really, really bad.

The worst part about this all is that 343i actually have a reasonably good Skill-based Matchmaking system - the system used in Halo 5 (TrueSkill v2). It calculates players skill (with a confidence level), it can award different values depending on team performance, and it can scale depending on the number of players in a party. They even have a less-sophisticated but still reasonable system that was used in H3, Reach, and H4 (TrueSkill v1). But they didn't even go with that. The ranking system is taken directly from Halo 2 (2004) which uses an incredibly basic system of gaining/losing points, translating to specific levels, and with no consideration for party-size.

So how does this work in practice? Solo searching in matchmaking is incredibly frustrating. The game is largely unable to balance teams effectively (due to not tracking skill levels). Groups of 4-stacks in 4v4 MM (the most populated playlist) are common and will win every time. The game makes no effort to match them against other 4-stacks. You can lose to the same team for over an hour straight. The ease of making new accounts results in anyone in the "Ranked" playlists making a new account whenever they get to too high a rank, so the system fails there as well. (nb: there is an incredibly narrow window where you can get a good experience: be a reasonably good player and play in a 2-3 player group. for everyone else: guess you just don't matter.)

Either 343i know all this, and don't care, or they're incredibly clueless. Pick your poison.

* Good if you want to mod (although playing mods is harder than it should be)
* Campaign and online co-op with friends works well. For some people this will be enough
* Custom games work well
* Matchmaking is extremely broken.

The core of Halo is the multiplayer experience. The other features are great, but with multiplayer/matchmaking this bad, I just can't recommend it.

Engaging, quiet, emotionally riveting gameplay. Played it start to finish in one sitting, barely noticed anything around me the entire time. Deserves nothing less than 10/10.