Recent reviews by [Bot] Hal

Supergiant did it again. They made a quintessentially perfect game. It looks wonderful. It sounds wonderful. Darren Korb is obscenely good at this thing. It's mechanics are comfortably familiar and yet in many ways completely different than the first game. Always fluid and routinely satisfying. It's a worthy successor to one of the best games I have ever had the pleasure of playing. If you've conquered death, what threat poses time?

A PvE game w/ a simple conceit - re-live Starship Troopers. You are weak. Your enemies are many. Everything you use can kill you and your teammates. You wish it was better at killing your enemies, because god there are so many.

The gunplay is solid - it could be snappier, and this isn't a game for the pixel hunters, but things feel chunky and physical, even when the spongy aiming mechanics of heavy weapons come into play. The blood and gore flying around, the atmospheric effects, all of it keeps you grounded in a very physical world. Running around the world can be a bit tedious (Desperately wish there was a toggle sprint and not just hold-to-sprint) but those short breaks between encounters are necessary to get your breath back.

The game isn't outrageously pretty, but it does maintain really great atmospherics that paper over some basic terrain etc., and you really don't care once you're in the sh*t.

The game keeps you active with dozens of mini-game mechanics, from the way some in-game missions require communication and light puzzle solving, to the way calling down your orbital attacks - known as strategems - requires a keycode to be input. Not only does this help break up what could otherwise be slightly monotonous game-play, but it causes difficulty to ramp up SIGNIFICANTLY when you're under pressure. There's a mental load playing this that doesn't exist with other team PvE games like Killing Floor or COD Zombies.

The level up system is a bit funky(you don't get a ton stronger, just different), the fact that actual equipment is locked up in the paid battle-pass (Not *BETTER* equipment, really, but stuff you might want to try), and the early server issues are all mild negatives but this game is a blast and friends I haven't gamed with in years are pinging me asking to take a Dive. It's a blast.

Every time I come back to try this game, the UI is awful, the controls response is awful, you are killed by people who were supposedly right in front of you but lag is a major issue so you never saw them, the maps are so spread out you often have to spend time just figuring out where the battle is. Spawn camping is a major issue and their solution is GARBAGE.

Frankly, a very ambitious game, graphically OK-enough for a F2P, but the execution is cringeworthy, and critical reviews full of blatant lies. How a game can be "award winning" with the sheer number of fatal flaws is beyond me.