Recent reviews by Dogbert

If you like the combat mechanics of Elite: Dangerous with the gameplay of the old Battlefront 2, this is... that. I do, and I like it a lot. I almost don't want to go to a HOTAS and VR setup; mouse and keyboard with a monitor are fine for me. It's also a very pretty game; on an RTX 2060 SUPER, I can play everything at max settings and never have framerate drops. The single-player is also okay for a once-through; I kinda liked it. I see other reviews saying it's "just one long multiplayer tutorial" but I was actually fine with that, because it's helpful with all the mechanics going on, if nothing else.

It's almost like they didn't expect people to play it this much, though, because there is so little in the way of cosmetics that it almost seems deliberate. And what little customization does exist is both extremely laborious to obtain AND just... not really *that* cool. In the day and age of Call of Duty's and Rocket League's and Destiny's and all that, it's just a really weird oversight to not let players customize their stuff (and pay for it!) up a point of uniqueness. Oh, and the single-player? You get two very meh skins for two ships at the end... that's it; there's no reason to go back and play them again to improve on anything, aside from Steam achievements.

Speaking of playing it this much, the ranking system is downright broken right now, and there's so much chatter about it that I'll be stunned if it isn't fixed in the next update. It doesn't really affect gameplay, but it's reminiscent of the old Halo days where you'd rack up a bunch of wins and rank up, only to have a single loss tear it all down... if you can even finish a game before someone leaves and it goes unranked, which happens a LOT. I had a 62% win rate in ranked matches at one point, and I was still only barely out of the bottom tier.

It's a really fun game and scratching an itch for me right now, but boy howdy do they need to impress me with the post-launch update.

Get the expansions on a sale, but if you particularly liked the MechCommander games, you'll love this.

Been playing this game for years, and I'll probably never stop. MechJeb is an absolutely required mod for the later stages, unless you hate yourself or you're literally a rocket scientist with a bunch of time to kill.

The career mode has gotten frustratingly harder over the years, The pace slows to a crawl with the dearth of science you get from missions after the very early stage. Doesn't necessarily break the game, but gets a bit grindey while you earn enough science to unlock the modules that either allow you to explore outside Kerbin or perform more experiments.

One of my all-time favorite games; played both the originals when they came out. The persistence from level to level is novel and really ties the single player campaign together: build early, build often, move it all cautiously, and zoom in after you issue orders to take in the massive battles.

Word of warning, though: you can't capture Vagyr capitals in HW2. Doing so just disables them. Still useful, but won't net you +1 capital ship.

The game is MUCH easier to pick up than it was around launch time. It used to have a notoriously steep learning curve, but that's softened over time, and it's now one of my favorite space trucking simulators.