Recent reviews by Benjamin the Rogue

I played this game back in 2012 with my buddies on the X-box originally. It was tremendous fun for us. I bought it for my computer not much longer after that to play with other friends. We had a grand time for about a year before life drifted us apart.

I recently came back to it this year as I have a friend who is just getting into PC gaming, and I went through my library to look for fun games she can try that aren't too extreme. This game fit her violent urges, hidden bloodlust, and love of adorable things perfectly. We now ride diarrheic deer through forests dishing out bloody vengeance together regularly, when she's not stabbing me in the back for kisses from princesses.

I was very pleasantly surprised to see the developers are still actively making new content for this game, even if it's mostly reskins of the art-style and a few new concepts. Being able to create your own characters with the new art tools DLC is brilliant. Bringing back the ability to clap some alien cheeks has filled a hole in my life.

In this era of cultural desolation and crumbling ideologically-corrupted IPs, it's nice to find something from the past that is still cozy, fun, and merry-making.

Shine on, you violent crazy diamond.

I've tried and tried and tried to just push through this game and ignore my issues with it, but after a while, I just couldn't take it anymore. The 90% of the main characters are insufferable, the morality of the devs is shown to be completely screwed up through what they think is acceptable moral behavior (their concepts of good and evil are wildly messed up. Seriously, it's not "good" to invite legions of evil creatures to live in a city of innocent and defenseless people), their ambition was greater than their ability, and I run into a lot of broken content when it comes to how the game is supposed to work verse how it does.

I guess some of the music is fine.

I'll probably come back to this and create a more thorough review, but I'm just too grouchy to do it now and I want a more clearheaded take.

Welcome, survivor, to the ever after part of the zombie apocalypse! I hope you like casual mobile-like gameplay, because that's pretty much the (not literal) name of the game. Some people say games like this can be as vast as an ocean but as deep as a puddle. This is just a puddle. But, hey, some people like to play in puddles.

The game has a puddle deep colony managing, unit managing, exploration, resource, and tech-tree system. It's all pretty shallow and quickly explored. The colony system is pretty much just "build the thing they tell you they want" and wait until the next demand. Resources are pretty much just explore until you find what you need, establish resources extraction, and then build storage. The art style is fairly simple, though I did enjoy watching regions upgrade. Combat is based a lot more on exploring and taking all of the territory around where you need to attack than teching up or finding better equipment.

Random events kind of suck because you can't prepare for them, but the good thing is you can sometimes wait to address them until you move around your combat units. However having a region taken over by wolves despite having combat troops right there and having to wait to reclaim it instead of driving them off with clubs and fire seems immersion breaking.

I don't even remember the music.

Anyways, it's not all doom and gloom. It's very easy to play. I didn't detect any hiccups or experience any crashes. It seems a light load for a game.

Overall, however, if I'm recommending games on if it's worth your time or not, I'd probably pass on this one for now. Keep searching, survivor.

I love an EUA that says they're allowed to go through your computer and sell the data to third-party groups and requiring always on internet requirements to play.

It pains me to not recommend this game. PGI has done tremendous work legally and financially to pull this franchise out of a tailspin that seemed to all but ensure Mechwarrior's doom. They've spent many years agonizingly fighting through many legal and corporate shenanigans to make it this far, so I don't want to cast doubt on their dedication to the series. However, as much as I love them for saving Mechwarrior, I have to take as much of an unbiased look at the game and be honest about it. As usual with my reviews, especially this one, TL:DR on the bottom.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries has a tremendous amount of problems. I'm not going to include game play mechanics that I disagree with as flaws if they are working as intended, as this is about how well they pulled off what they were trying, not a "If I was in charge, this is what I would have done" essay.

One big problem that seems to be the theme of the game is that it feels very shallow. Play the game enough, and you'll come to notice that it seems to have a very thin skin stretched over a very basic game. From the coding to the concepts to the writing. What's there feels like it was done as quickly as possible as close to some sort of deadline as possible. Or more likely, done on the absolute cheap. The real heavy lifting seems to being done by the modders right now to finish the game concept we were given. I don't know if this is a fair assessment of what is going on behind the scenes, but it's what it feels like.

A) The AI is absolutely atrocious. The more you observe the AI, the more you realize it was given very, very simply programming. Your teammates will be in your way more than they will be assisting you. You will grow to hate them, especially because outside of combat, they have absolutely no interactions or value except to eat up your C-bills.

B) There is a small selection of missions that you will repeat forever. There are very few specific scenarios that aren't just dressed up versions of the normal missions. It doesn't even matter where you are in the Inner Sphere. You could be fighting on a major planet from the lore, or a major sector capital, and you wouldn't even notice any difference from the last hundred missions you took on from the Periphery to Terra.

C) Reputation is very, very basic as well. You'd think making a mortal enemy of a Great House or pirates would result in some sort of consequence beyond them merely paying you less. Yeah, that's right, you can always keep accepting contracts from anyone, the only penalty is you get almost no say in the contract bonuses. You'd think spending years burning through their units and foiling their military operations without mercy would cause them to take a more severe approach to you other then refusing you a decent bonus the one time you mysteriously show up to take a contract from them.

D) Visual effects. The cockpit is lame looking, and the explosions and effects are pretty anemic. The first time I ever had to deal with artillery in the game, I was being deployed from the dropship and already had artillery coming in my direction. It was exciting to get off of the ramp already under fire, but as I dodged the shells, I saw the explosions and it completely took the wind out of my sails. The explosion effects don't even look finished.

E) Speaking of weak, the sound effects and the music itself. There's a lot of bad games with great OSTs. This is a mediocre game with a mediocre soundtrack. But even worse are the combat sounds. The big guns and lasers of the battlemechs sound pathetic. Hard to get that big stompy mech fix when the guns sound like something I can actually carry around.

F) Bugs. Enough bugs to give me fatal errors at least once a day while playing. I don't see a lot of bugs beyond getting stuck on the occasional rock and having to hope the mech doesn't get destroyed before I can make it to the extraction point. I don't see mechs falling through the ground or cartwheeling into the sky or anything like that. It's just the underlying code that just has a hard crash kicking me back to the desktop once or twice or five times a day. Might be that the game isn't super optimized.

G) The story. Man, is the writing for both the dialogue and the story bland as all can be, if not outright annoying at times. Some people will try to tell you that Battletech has always had weak stories and it's totally normal to ignore the single player campaign. Don't listen to these people. They're why we can't have nice things.

There's more, but I really don't have the heart to rag on MW5 or PGI.

TL:DR PGI worked hard to save the franchise, but didn't have the energy or the skill to make a good game. We're left with a very bland Mechwarrior game that's pretty brainless. If you want brainless big stompy mechs, this will do for a bit. Get it on sale. 50% sale at least.

*DO NOT BUY*

TL;DR on the bottom.

First off, I'm just going to start with why you shouldn't buy this game at all, and that's because of the DLC and content policy. Back in the day, people were outraged when they found out that Total War: Warhammer II was going to be a separate game from the first one, because it was released so soon after I and not only that, but it was clear from the content in II that it was content cut to sell in a different package. They said this wasn't the case, but then the DLC started dropping, and like before, it was absolutely predatory. Content in DLCs that you don't have access to will still show up in your single player games. You just won't be able to use them, but the AI will. This means the most devastating & powerful units will be used against you, and the late game will become unmanageable with the units you do have access to, unless you're throwing multiple armies at single armies to overwhelm them. However, the AI will often have more than one army to throw at you, so you're always going to be on the backfoot trying to deal with these advanced units that you don't have anything equivalent to. Not unless you buy the DLC. You also need to buy individual DCL for every single faction you play. Don't worry, they will give you some free content. Oh, you didn’t buy Total War: Warhammer I? I guess you don't get to use some of that free content for II then.

The fact that they make it so the AI has access to powerful DLC content while you don't is purposeful and intentional. Even if this was a perfect game, which this one isn't, they should be punished. That deserves several flying middle fingers.

The game continues the Total War franchise’s downward arc. Everything just feels like there was less effort put into it than what went into a Total War game of the past, from the minor to the major.

For a game that's about managing individual regiments of units around a battlefield to pull of tactical maneuvers, this game has some of its worst issues in that very department. Since day one of this game’s release, they have known about the issue of regiments not accepting orders after you issue them such as to charge or to attack, especially if you tell more than one unit at the same time to attack a target. When you drag the units shadow to tell them to form up in a specific orientation facing a specific direction, you can often come back to find that they had either decided not to at all, or they went to a seemingly random spot instead. Give multiple orders while the game is paused to many different units, and tell them to run? You might find that when you check up on them after darting off to another part of the battle that they have just decided they're going to walk instead run. Hope you actually didn't need them anywhere in a hurry, or to run away in a hurry.

An ever more severe issue is units disengaging from their targets. Especially when they've been hit by a disruption unit, of which there are many. You will often find them on the battlefield standing around doing nothing, sometimes even after you tell them to attack a target. Their target could be mere meters away from them, so what appeared engaged are actually not. Even getting attacked in the back without being engaged in the front isn’t enough to rouse them to take action. This makes them extremely susceptible to taking free ranged and melee damage that they really shouldn't be.

Like your heroes? I hope you like micro-managing them in battle if they're in melee, especially if you're fighting another hero. The issue with units disengaging then standing there doing nothing is even more pronounced here. If your hero suffers a knockback or stagger effect while fighting another hero, which is common, your hero stops fighting. But the AI controlled hero doesn't. Did your hero knockback or stagger the enemy hero? Yes, that too will make your hero disengage from its target. Expect to take lots of free damage when you're trying to manage your army in a fight and can't micro-manage every swing of your hero's weapon.

Actually pulled off the dream maneuver, completely encircled your enemy's army, and are about to deliver a Cannae-level slaughter? Surprise, you just made their army invincible. This happens any time you completely surround any unit or squadron. Your units stop dealing damage to the enemy when they get pressed together. Have fun staring at the models of the the units as they all stand around pushing each other around in place instead of killing. This becomes a huge problem in battles when you need those units to finish killing the one you've surrounded so you can get them to another location to support the rest of your army. Not only do they stop killing the unit they've surrounded, they keep expending vigor, which means they start to get very tired while doing nothing useful, while the unit or squadron you've surrounded instead acts as if it's resting. You can see how this is snowballing into a crippling issue in the middle of a fight. You are effectively punished severely for surrounding units instead of being rewarded for pulling off a crushing maneuver you probably worked hard for. The only way to fix this when you notice it is to pull your units back to allow the enemy to have more space and then to attack them again. This can incur a lot of casualties to your own units though, if the one you've surrounded haven't broken.

Another frustrating issue is pursuit. Once you've broken a unit, if you're in the position where you can actually chase it down because you have a unit that is faster and/or much less tired, you'd think it'd be easy for them to overrun the one running away. No, instead somewhere unbeknownst to us, Yakkity Sax begins playing as your men run around willy-nilly or instead follow right behind just on the edge of overtaking them. Because entire squadrons have hitpoints pools, you also have to whittle down much of it before you start dropping models. If you're chasing a unit with a lot of armor with a lighter, faster one, you're probably not going to get very many. Gone are the days of sweeping through capturing masses of prisoners with fast units like in Total War days of yore.

Sieges feel very much reduced in this series than in previous Total War games. With a few exceptions, you always start lined up facing a single stretch of the castle wall, and there is only one castle wall, no more layered defense. Yes, and only castles. There are no more town battles. Also, occasionally the game will instead load a field battle instead of a castle battle for some reason. Infantry get free invincible ladders, but you can't assault the walls unless you build a single siege item first. An extremely frustrating issue that still exists to this day is having ranged combat units on castle walls that do not fire down on the enemy for inexplicable reasons. This can absolutely turn the tide of a battle you thought you were in a much better position than you actually where.

What does this game do right? Context-specific traits for heroes is good. It does end up becoming pretty predictable & easy to manipulate, however. Being able to build your characters RPG-style is helpful, if also very formulaic and gamey. Flying units are a big addition to the series, as is magic. But in the end, the DLC policy is the giant stick in the spokes for me, especially when I run into so many issues of both functionality and scope of this game when compared to past renditions of the Total War series.

TLDR: A predatory game series that is shrinking in scope and growing in bugs and functionality problems. A hard pass.

The base game of Rimworld is an excellent story-generator with its character generation, scenario generation, and story-teller AI. The style and the atmosphere of the game is very comfortable and while it seems simplistic in some ways, it hides a sophisticated game engine under the hood. But what really makes Rimworld shine is the developer's loving support of the modding community. This game is the first game I ever ended up modding extensively. Modding is built into the game so well it's seamless and very very easy to add mods. In fact, it's almost too easy. Very quickly you can find yourself playing a game modded to Hell and back and you'll still see mods you want to add. The modding community and the developer really give this game a lifespan that will continue well beyond what most triple-A games could even rightfully pray for.

This is a game I 100% recommend. I just wish I had the time to give an in-depth review worthy of this game.

Very fun, very fast, very...varied? A handful of control options make for a massive difference in how to get down the pitch and stuff the net. When I was practicing before joining my friends online, the tutorial was straightforward and got me on the pitch pretty quick, and the game was a lot of fun with my friends trying to control the ball. It gets a little frustrating at bits when you're playing with people with more experience than you, but luckily this game gives you the option to play the AI, so you don't have to jump straight in against human players. It definitely fills the role of a party game with friends.

With multiplayer added, this game has finally come to be my childhood dream come true. It has everything my little child brain dreamed of when I first experienced playing Harvest Moon. You have meaningful relationships with the townspeople that reward you with items and recipes, quests, missions, a large variety of different crops, animals, fishing, foraging, mining, cooking, crafting and smelting options, it has a combat mechanic, and to top it all of, you even have a travel mechanic.

The music is enjoyable and fun as well. The art style is retro Super Nintendo era, which just adds to that Harvest Moon feel. The characters are all quite distinctly designed as well. The story, for what is there, is mildly interesting, and well written. Being able to build a relationship with your choice of villager to the point of marriage is also a very well done mechanic, as it is not overly easy nor punishingly hard to do. It just takes a time and small resource commitment to earn that relationship.

I can't recommend this game enough now that the multiplayer co-op is a function. This is truly what I've waited for as a kid. Having now experienced it, it reawakened that childish delight at being able to work on a simulated farm.

Get this game and chase chickens with some friends!

The Emperor is dead, death to the false King.

This isn't a story about redemption or valor. It's not about being a hero or saving the day. It's a story about dragging people kicking and screaming down into the grave they dug for the rightful ruler of the Empire. There isn't much to tell you whether or not you're a good guy or a bad guy, all you know is you have enemies to kill and the equipment and missions to do so. The gameplay is very tight, flight feels smooth and responsive. Only having two weapons feels restrictive at first, but it quickly becomes apparent when fighting it was actually a rather good design choice, as there are often times you don't want to be fumbling for the right weapon out of a list. It stays fast paced and reactive, and swapping between one of two weapons to quickly snap of shots with them at their appropriate targets begins to leave you feeling like a bad-ass gunslinger. Which you won't feel like until you've put some work in. You start the game with only one single-seater attack craft and it is without any upgrades at all. You have to earn them through missions, and the more risky the mission setting, the more you earn.

Luckily, you aren't punished with a game over if you die too many times, you instead learn to fight better and you get to keep trying. Even after you beat the game, even if you only select the easiest missions, you still keep the upgrades and currency. You can even go back and redo missions in the middle of the campaign at higher difficulties, making it significantly easier on you to play through at lower levels to earn the rewards and some currency to outfit yourself to stand a better chance on the more difficult settings. You'll need it. Even with a full picket fleet at your command (more on that in a moment), you're going to want them and yourself upgraded to be able to tackle some of these missions. But it doesn't feel frustrating, because you can move to another one if you can't get through it, which makes the entire experience so much more enjoyable. The addition of having wingmen to back you up in these missions that you can give orders to (or pilot if they are in one of the other three fighters), it was a surprising but welcome addition to the game.

In the end, everything about this game, from the flight, to the fight, to the framerate, the game was just 100% smooth. That's the best word for this game: Smooth. Even the menu, the story, and the credits are smooth and polished. The team that made this game should feel proud. The only gripe I have is that it wasn't longer, there wasn't more, and it wasn't bigger. I'm not saying there isn't enjoyable replayability to it, but that I wish this team had the kind of resources to make a grand scope game with this style and story. Pretty much a near perfect game as games are meant to be.

TL:D
Gamplay: Smooth and fun, the fleet mechanics are well balanced and expertly implemented
Sound Effects: The radio chatter is perfect, weapons firing and cycling sounds exactly like it should in space, and the music is sublimely subliminal.
Story: The story is sparse but impactful, especially the end. You're only given pieces to decipher what is happening, but when it all comes together, you'll be shocked.
Visuals: Ever wanted to fly one of those little ships in a Homeworld space battle? It feels exactly like how I imaged it would be.

9.5/10. I only wish it didn't end. Someone fund this team and let them loose on the gaming world without restrictions.