Recent reviews by Realm

Frostpunk 2 takes a macro-scale approach to city management in comparison to Frostpunk's 'piece-by-piece' approach, and offers a substantial amount of new and well thought out gameplay mechanics. Notably, district planning and research goes hand in hand with the delegate voting system, letting you have a pretty expansive list of options for perks, buffs and function variety for resource production and population control.

The music is amazing, but I can't really make out which one stands out above the rest, and some outright copy a few segments from the first game. While that's fine for nostalgia, continuity and the general vibe, I was really looking forward to seeing this game have something as through-the-roof as "The City Must Survive" or even "Into the Storm" tracks.

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As for performance, this game is pretty demanding, and frankly not in a good way, if you want to build a sprawling network of settlements. I can't pinpoint it, but when you go above 30k population, or more than 3 settlements, the game seriously starts to choke on itself, with frames coming to a halt whenever I zoom out to the frostlands. It's a beautiful game, but could absolutely do with some graphical and technical optimisation, because individually the city assets are less detailed than the first game, but runs substantially worse on the same settings. It looks like a huge problem across multiple game titles running on Unreal Engine right now.

Additionally, some continuity in Utopia Builder mode drastically breaks down when you introduce some laws or interact with a faction in some way. For example, setting up an Enclave district for a faction is supposed to solve the radicalisation problem, and stop people from joining. Yet even when you move that entire group to the enclave, more people might choose to radicalise and basically self-banish until a good chunk of your city willingly goes into a prison. You also can't permanently get rid of a faction, even if you successfully condemn them until they have 0 members left; it just starts counting into negatives. And one of my biggest gripes with in regards to these problems is this: Faction X, let's say, has a manifesto that promotes Equality, yet when I want to pass a law for Equal Pay (which should fundamentally go hand-in-hand), they start whining that it doesn't align with their worldview. These kind of little issues add up to a lot of lacking common sense that I would like to see resolved.

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All in all, it's a fun game, it has interesting mechanics and it's different enough from the first game to warrant a sequel. It has a great atmosphere and style. But you need to prepare for the fact that it has some notable performance and gameplay logic faults. Also, it supports mods, the one thing people wanted in the first game.

Play it for the music. Play it for the suffering. Play it for the atmosphere. It's unforgiving at the appropriate level, and beautiful in presentation. If the video game industry had such an equivalent, I would consider this game to be soul art.

Crashes on death, crashes on attacks, crashes on tax evasion, crashes on parrying a filthy casual with a 1911, 10/10.

Would

+
Gun-play is fun, movement is fun, playing with friends when it's going well is fun, the combat is generally satisfying.

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Garbage matchmaking, no match abandonment penalties, people actively land separately from the team by a couple hundred meters and then ragequit.
You're practically forced to play with a premade squad which removes all the fun of meeting other people in a massively multiplayer game.
Most of the character design is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and that's still an understatement; most of the skins are so horrendously over-designed, that it's genuinely impressive.
The server stability keeps getting worse by the week - exclusively in Apex Legends, I have been disconnected from matches and lobbies more times than I can count due to some error code written in the Forbidden Tongue. In the past few days, I've found myself to be trapped in endless kick-rejoin cycles where the game is frantically lobotomising itself.

I love the game, and it has undergone enough fixes to be worthwhile now.

It now has improved replay value, offering a much more expansive network of upgrades, weapons, armours and other gear to work towards. Offering dynamic, limited-time missions and events that more live-service games should really be taking notes of.

All in all, my concerns about content have been almost entirely addressed. The neutral/performance concerns have been partially addressed, and most of the negative points are now completely negligible.


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It has massive replay value, there are gameplay mechanics I haven't even considered the existence of in other games, and it balances realism and fun gameplay quite well.
Its battlepass feels like a nice-to-have once you've saved up enough premium currency (which the matches are quite generous with), rather than a necessity to keep up with the weapons you get through natural progression.

I don't know how it is for anyone else, but I also found that resource and level grinding hasn't been a bottleneck for mission performance - you can collect a decent amount of XP and samples (resources for upgrades) and medals (unlocking weapons, skins, taunts and team buffs) over time, without having to actively worry about it. As far as the gameplay quality goes, Helldivers 2 makes a joke out of other newly-released online co-op games. And that says a lot, considering most of them have come with an AAA sticker plastered over all the bugs and holes, as well as a pricetag that's triple of what this game asks for.

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Please optimise the game. The performance is terrible in contrast to how much power it eats up. Not to mention that the game continues to eat all hardware usage even when you tab out.

Automatons can shoot through some natural terrain that seemingly have no projectile collision.

I feel like after 50 hours, I've already played through all the available mission and campaign formats - and while there is a good enough variety of them between the enemy factions, it would be nice to have more. I don't know what shape new missions might take or how they would connect to the campaigns they're in, but this was the main reason why I slowly burnt out of Deep Rock Galactic.

I know they are working on NPCs in missions; AI troops that can accompany you in missions, mechs and other vehicles for you to ride - so perhaps we could have missions where we (the Helldivers) are the reinforcements for an NPC battalion, or we (the Helldivers) are tasked with eliminating NPC troopers that have gone rogue and joined the enemy.

There are a lot of server issues. Some are simple nuisances and side-effects of server maintenance difficulties (planet statistics counters not working, bugged lobbies that people cannot join). Some armour customizability would be nice. As would if my client actually remembered and retained my character settings choices (body type, voice, taunts keep resetting).
I hope they add more soundtracks, adaptive music in a game like this is a godsend, but variety would be the cherry on top.

X
And some are more severe (games crashing mid-mission, players randomly booted, players cannot join at all, environmental features in map not responding to player input).
Current balancing is horrendous. Some weapons are redundant, enemy spawns are completely random and environmental hazards too frequent (especially meteor showers), etc. Enemies on higher difficulties shamelessly spawn right in front of your face, without Bug Breaches or Drop Ships. It's extremely frustrating to deal with on higher difficulties, because there are a lot more hostiles to begin with; not to mention that sometimes you have no idea which ones are about to call in reinforcements, so you get stuck in an infinite loop.

The game frequently crashes no matter how much I fiddle with settings. It has happened up to 5-6 times in one day, and it has happened from practically anything: Leaving game to go to your own ship, leaving party, joining party, kicking a player, starting the landing sequence, or just during completely random moments. But I still want to say that there are good days, and there are bad days. They are currently at a 2:1 ratio or something for me.

The performance is horrendous. No matter how much I tweak my settings, the game fluctuates between an unstable 40-70fps, sometimes hitting 30 for no discernible reason. I'm playing on a 3080, 64GB, 7 3700X build which has so far taken on any other game in my library head on at a stable 100~ or higher framerate at High-Ultra settings at 1440p. Reducing all the power-hungry settings in Helldivers 2 only nets something of a 10-15fps increase.
My friend who plays on a much older rig with a 1050Ti runs between 20-40fps on Low settings at 1080p, but God forbid if more than 2 other people join because then it plummets to 15fps - I wouldn't have thought that this is what they meant when they said "Minimum requirements".

The anti-cheat scandal, controversy, whatever you want to call it: There are countless threads, posts, discussions, and reviews that complain and exclaim about its usefulness, vulnerabilities, risks and dangers. While I do not fully know how true any of them are (because a part of me also believes that some posts are just fear-mongering, failing to provide evidence of any sort), there is no denying that it has sparked serious paranoia in the community, posed a risk to Arrowhead's reputation, and the damage control that has been put forward could have been avoided completely if they had just used a different anti-cheat and looked at the current solution's past controversies.

There is no war. There is only the harvest.

Things to briefly consider:
This game will frequently test your patience, then it will proceed to question your patience even more.
Make sure you have a large enough time slot for the endgame, because the cutscenes combined with the gameplay take around just as long as the LotR trilogy. Maybe that's an exaggeration, maybe not, but it certainly was several hours.
There are plenty of praises about this game, I'm not going to start repeating them all considering how late I've joined the party - there are core gameplay issues from a technical standpoint that are worth the read though, because it's best to know what you're delving into.

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The story is great for those who love surreal, abstract, science fiction and horror. It sets a standard for what a playable movie should basically be.
Sam feels like an actual human when walking and controlling him, the walking mechanics are well thought-through.
Visuals are stunning.
Artistically, this game is gorgeous, story and graphics, vocals, character emotions are portrayed to a degree I wish more games followed suite.
The music is beautiful, most of the time when it starts playing, you will want to stop in your tracks just to make sure that arriving at your destination doesn't cut it off.
It's given me ideas for creative work and has certainly had an impact on my future projects. I consider this with a very high sentimental value.

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The controls for vehicles and some terrain are unplayable and make it difficult to not become frustrated from the clunky mechanics. I am willing to overlook stuff like this if it's artistic intent, but it's not.
There are times when controls do the polar opposite of my input; bikes and cars drifting sideways, moving backwards, having outright seizures because of a single rock or bridge.
The collective assortment of bugs that are often made worse by "performance" updates which have so far only reduced the game's stability, make me question my willingness to replay the game in the future.
You cannot skip credits. At all. And they get shown twice. The first credits are a nice implementation because they show during gameplay and lore expansion, so that makes it more or less worthwhile. The second time is simply a nuisance, I mean I've already seen the same names, except it's just a black screen with text. I just want to continue playing, I already know who made the game.

My friend described his experience playing this game with me as "You're like a little kid in a theme park" because every time we drove past a pack of Z's I beg him to stop so we can do a drive-by like it's visiting a toy store or meeting my favourite character.

He also described his frustration of me being addicted to shooting Z's in the middle of a city.

Also you can drink bleach.

The first card game I've been able to actually enjoy.
The first card game I've seen that is as free to play as they come.

My main concern is the mid-higher level matches where people use broken decks which genuinely need a fix. One example: The Wandering Priestess build: It's boring to fight against, it's simply not interesting since all the opponent has to do is spam a single button to gain over 50 health points/armour after very brief preparation.