Đánh giá gần đây bởi flame from Halo

I picked this up with the $20 humble bundle and I can confidently say this is the worst dlc I have ever encountered for a strategy game.

I have been trying to conquer the Americas and not only am I fighting endless hordes of natives that never dwindle in number, but even after I end the war for some reason the nations I just crushed can instantly turn around and slaughter my colony I just established.
Not only that, but the colony I just established that fears AND respects me REFUSES to allow me to enforce peace, to which they lose all the provinces I just gave them within a year. No notifications either, I just lost a colony on the gulf of Mexico because I was fighting another war just to get a notification that my military unit meant to quell rebels there was an 'exile army'. The 12 province colony that I established was cut down to 1 province **and I never even knew it was happening**.

This has happened 4 times so far: I conquer, I give the land to a colony, they lose 80-90% in a follow up war I can't intervene in.

Edit: I get a pop-up in the middle of my screen every time I conquer a province/battle/finish a missionary mission/all casus beli updates for or against me, how in god's name do I get 0 notifications at all for my pseudo-vassal getting attacked or losing territory?

Edit 2: You can't enforce peace, you can't offer condottieri's to your own subjects, if you send a warning to nearby enemy tribals it has no affect because they are across the ocean and not 'neighbors', and on top of that even if you give the colonies tens of thousands in ducats they won't even buy mercenaries to defend themselves.

They designed colonies to be as defenseless as possible against natives, while making sure any attempt to take more than 5 provinces in the Americas generates a new colony automatically. I would be mostly fine with this DLC if it didn't make conquering the Americas feel like CBT.

Halo holds a special place in my heart, I've had this username for over a decade and am proud to keep it, but Infinite was not a game that added to that pride. I may seem critical of this game, but it is because I know that this game could be great and that there is a solid game hidden beneath a lot of development flaws.

I do want to start off with what I like, because there is a lot to this game that makes it a blast. Most of my enjoyment comes with playing with friends, but the game also has a few things that draw me in besides them;

• I enjoy quite a few of the new maps, the ability to move around and scale up walls is a neat addition that allows you to traverse the map easier [especially some of the more obstacle heavy ones].
  
• Some of the new weapons are real fun to use [such as the spike launcher], and I greatly enjoy the changes made to the grav-hammer [slower swings but much greater aoe] since it feels far more like a heavy weapon used to kill your foes in a single blow rather than something you kinda spam hoping you are close enough to kill.
  
• New abilities are kinda gimmicky but quite often just as fun, allowing you to pull off a lot of neat tricks that would be impossible in older Halos [such as driving an enemy hog off a cliff and grappling back up/grappling a flying banshee].
  
• The xp gain in the game was initially abysmal, but was drastically improved from beta launch, proving that 343 does listen to player feedback.

Despite this the game has major developmental issues, with the ability to draw upon two decades of experience they were unable to make this game anywhere close to a full Halo experience on launch [with supposidly 3-4 years of developement time at least dating to 2018]. This Halo has;

• No individual queues for the modes you want, first and foremost which is the lack of a dedicated slayer list. [some even claim this is intentional to fuel the challenge reroll system and make you spend currency to get off of awful tasks you are having trouble queueing for properly]
  
• A campaign that is fairly neat and in depth for the first few missions, but slowly opens up to a mostly empty world with tedious grinding or traveling similiar to newer Far Cry games. [The writing might also hurt to listen to with how bad some of it is, so fair warning]
  
• UI bugs, a small gripe, but since beta launch there have been many ui errors between joining and leaving games as well as not knowing whether you are in your friend's lobby or not.
  
• Core features are missing from the game to get it out early, such as co-op campaign/firefight/forge/the vast majority of multiplayer modes/custom games that don't crash.
  
• People afking games with no decent way to report is incredibly heart breaking, especially in ranked games where every player matters. Disconnect issues also make ranked climbing incredibly frustrating when a disconnect causes a demotion.

Finally, the problems specifically about leveling/monotization of multiplayer. No, making a multiplayer mode free is not a gift from the heavens and does not wash away any criticism of the system. The free aspect of the mutliplayer is specifically to draw in cash from the battlepass/store, which would be criticized to hell and back if it was packaged in the $60 core game.

• I said that they had improved the battlepass progression, but what I didn't mention is that they initially had progression for it set much higher. In tech previews you can see from July 2021 the xp requirements to level were halved, xp for challenges were doubled, and daily match xp was not capped as it was on release [for non-battle pass players]. This directly shows they tweaked the game to make the game as grindy as possible, making it so you had to play literally 2-4 hours to level *once* on release . Without public backlash this would have been the norm, this is what they wanted, to get frustrated and buy the battle pass to actually get rewards in the game.
  
• The battlepass on release was pay2win and it is still one of the easiest ways to level, that doesn't bother me. What does bother me is that there is no way at all to unlock premium currency or items no matter how much you play, log 500 hours and play every day? Congrats, you still get only about 1/3rd of the entire progression rewards. It is simply demoralizing seeing almost every level up reward armor locked behind a paywall. I prefer my games in 1 time payments, not a subscription fee every few months [or at least a play-to-unlock option]. This point, I will grant, is a personal preference/problem and is not a flaw for people who pay for the battlepass.
  
• The battlepass is $10, the better battlepass is $28, but what if you don't even want to have to work? There is quite literally a button you can press to level up [for 200 game coins or $2]. The battle pass loses almost all meaning in terms of hard work when, on day 3-5, you can see several people who are already lvl 100. There was physically no possible way to level up that high through game progression at the time, but with a few numbers and the 3 wacky digits on the back of your credit card you can get all season rewards near instantly.
  
• The store is a joke, the prices are quite simply outrageous. Armor sets or warthog colors for $10-20. I have seen more than a few people defend the store in discussions, many of whom criticized Fallout 76 for the same thing not a few years earlier. If you can buy a cosmetic in a game for the price of dozens of individual high quality games on sale, then that is a pretty messed up business model for a Halo game. One of the armor sets that comes to mind costs $20 for armor/belt addon/color/staff cosmetic... for that same price you can get all 6 games of the masterchief collection when it is on sale.

At the end of the day, I will play this with my friends since it is the game that everyone is playing at the moment. It is fun to run around in a hog with the boys just as it was in previous Halos, but the game is severely lacking in variety of gameplay and rewarding progression. The game was released half-baked with over half of the core features missing because of christmas sales, and it just sucks to see a franchise I adore fall into the microtransaction/'it will be great in a year, give it time' category.

Edit: The reviews show how exactly the game is fairing. Around launch the game was 90% review rate and every month it drops lower as the updates are farther and farther apart. Still no infection, still no custom games browsing, still no proper theater support, still no firefight. The core game-play is smooth and that is IT. That is all the game has going for it and it has been limping along for a year and a half with everyone hanging onto that line for dear life as the player base sinks lower and lower.

Edit 2: Almost 2 years after launch and the game is nearly in the state it should have been at launch. Forge is added to be met with resounding applause, slayer/infection game modes, and several new maps. This is all sadly too little too late. Most of the community has moved on, almost every single department head at 343 has been replaced since the game's release and with slower updates coming out with fewer promises being fully delivered the game has sealed its fate [unless a miracle occurs].

Free stuff for Stellaris, no reason not to get them if you own the game.

Only reason it isn't 100% review is sometimes it doesn't download/people are salty because this was a pre-order exclusive, so they're mad their exclusive isn't exclusive.

Happy I got it because I use the anniversary portraits in 80% of my starting races [Fairy dragon/Hydra/Evil Crow/Void abomination], but I do empathize with the pre-order crowd.

This 'expansion' adds very little to the game that I enjoy, and I recommend prospective buyers take a few minutes to read this or other recent reviews. Take note: a lot of the negative reviews around release were specifically for a major update released along with this. The update screwed up the pop system of the game in favor of boosting performance late game, so many of the early reviews were *specifically* targeting the update and used this dlc page for their outrage. Take the 40% it is sitting at with that in mind.

-The crisis ascension perk is my main draw to this dlc, without it there would be no reason for me *personally* to really enjoy it. Buffs to subjugation, military, purging: it is what every sociopath who plays this game wanted! The problem is that;
---Most of these bonuses come stock standard with just starting off as a fanatic purifier or certain degrees of militaristic/xenophobe
---The end game doomsday cube is just the equivalent of the Death Star VS Star Killer Base when compared to the colossi from the Apocalypse DLC [blow up a planet vs blow up a system]
---If you happen to grind out enough dark matter to finish the crisis engine [which takes quite a while] you just push a button to get an end screen, no real cutscene, just the end of the game

-Custodian is basically just a kind of weird middle ground to being a federation leader, but of the galactic community. You can get a federation fleet Galactic Defense Force fleet, you can declare someone a crisis and have everyone declare war on them [that will last decades if you don't do all the work cause wars are still broken in AI vs AI], and you can become the Galactic Empire. Besides the meme of being the emperor it is pretty underwhelming, there is very little you gain that you couldn't just do by being a tyrannical ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the base game.

-I *HATE* espionage in almost every strategy games since it usually adds very little to the game and ends up being pretty tedious with the AI annoying you more than anything. Stellaris has done exactly that. While giving envoys more tasks than just writing love/hate mail was a great idea, the tasks are overall underwhelming. Half of them do very little and the other half affect diplomatic relations. Why would I not just have an envoy sit in their embassy and just gain favor over time? Basically no reason. If you want to be sneaky and set up a master plan to make 2 empires hate each other: 1) they already hate each other or 2) have so much trust/bonuses they will never do so. At the end of the day it is another layer to the game that adds so little I barely use it, since most of the time the empire in question will be conquered in short order.

-Nemesis ships are a joke for a selling point, slightly better ships that cost minerals instead of alloys [they are also just assets taken from the pirates, so they are ugly].


I am a huge Stellaris nerd, but this expansion really lets me down quite a bit. I wouldn't recommend this dlc for the $20 they mark it as, heck not even $10 on sale, if you can get it cheaper as part of a bundle it might be worth it but besides that I would hold off on it unless you really like Stellaris or really want that crisis ascension perk. For me it was more trouble than it was worth.

This game is pretty great.
-Quality dialogue
-Interesting characters
-Cool/unique story
-Soundtrack
-Fun combat [until the final level]
It hits a lot of the same beats that made Hotline Miami fun to play.

But ... the game stops in the middle of the action. There is this story where you are just starting to really get into it and invested in the world building. So many things are set up as major conflicts/reveals *in the last 2 minutes of this game*. For $15 I can't recommend it but on sale it is worth the experience.

There is a massive free DLC supposed to be added onto the game that expands the story but will not conclude it. If you are on the fence I would wait for the DLC reviews.

I like this game, the core mechanics are solid and the game is punishing yet fair (mostly). The writing is top notch and the setting is unique. There is even the Neo Scavenger Extended Mod that is still being updated to this day, adding a lot more to the core game than was originally there.

The problem is that this game was last updated in 2017, which leads to;
-game breaking bugs brought up years ago that still have no solutions and will force you to restart [even checking both forums many problems go without solutions]
-the game has great writing but it is limited by the locations you can visit or npcs you can talk to

I do like and recommend it, but with a warning: this game feels like it is in beta with the core mechanics down but not a lot once you dig into it, that combined with the bugs might leave a bad taste in your mouth. I recommend this on 50%+ off sale or if you have watched a few videos and know what you are getting into. I will definitely play more since the combat is so fun, it just seems like there is a lot of lost potential in this game.

I hate this heist.
Wide open areas, snipers galore, and 15 goats scattered all over the map that you can't even sprint with just makes the heist unfun at any higher difficulty.
That is only day 1.

At 58 minutes I realized that I had stopped playing Kenshi and Risk of Rain 2 to play this game.
What the hell is wrong with me?

At least I know the guy who has the world record for Egg Returns Home Casual Ending 1.

The rpg aspect kinda takes a backseat in this fallout compared to NV and 3, but the shooting and crafting is miles better.
With all the dlc it is worth it if you pick it up on sale.

Great game but don't expect Fallout 3.5 or NV 2

My only context of this game was Wack Woohoo Pizza Man, memes, and the OST.

It lived up.