Recent reviews by Xlis1

A VERY rough diamond, just like the rest of the series.

It has some performance issues, some AI bugs, and apparently A life is basically entirely non functional at the moment, but i expect those all to be problems the devs solve given time, and even if they don't, modders most definitely will. grok is already hard at work on the game and with the improvements to gunplay and core systems already in stalker 2 im sure the eventual GAMMA 2 (or i guess just GAMM or GAMMS given that the A previously stood for anomaly) will be an absolutely incredible experience for the dedicated GAMMA enjoyers such as myself

This game has flicker strike (and its viable). I know there are some people out there (such as myself) who are willing to buy the game just based off that info alone

Now that that's out of the way, i do have one more thing to make very clear about this game before I even comment on the gameplay i have to mention just how ABYSMAL the translation is, there are plenty of places that straight up don't have translations (they show up in Chinese) luckily those missing translations are all in places where they are not too hard to figure out the meaning to (ex: a continue/ok button on a popup) but there are a few just really poorly worded descriptions for skill or item effects (likely machine translated) that are so bad it can sometimes make it hard to figure out exactly what they do

That's not the end of the TL problems though. There are 2 different skill augments called "charge" one makes you "charge" at out of range enemies with melee attacks, the other gives you the option to "charge" up an attack for a second or so to do more damage, both of them are called "charge" which creates some confusion.

I'm not asking for/demanding perfect English from a dev who likely cant speak it at all, just good enough to understand what things do is fine, if they could have someone who speaks both languages at least a bit sanity check the translation files that would be great.

One thing i cant overlook is the search function seemingly not being effected by the language settings, it feels like it gives me almost random results, which i believe is because its searching the list in Chinese (presumably the Pinyin text version) this makes the search function 100% useless for anyone who doesn't speak Chinese.

All of the above is honestly pretty standard for an early access game from Chinese indie dev's, while i do hope it gets fixed soon, i have my doubts it ever will. Its not enough of a problem to keep me from playing the game, but i'd be doing an active disservice by not mentioning it at the top of my review, as im sure it is more than enough to ruin the game for many non Chinese speakers.


As for the actual game itself, its pretty good. its got a skill system simmilar to the gem system in PoE, just witth much fewer skills total, but a similar level of complexity to them, with all of your favorite PoE oddities like cast on damage taken, cast on hit, minions/totems/turrets casting your skills instead of you, and so on and so forth.
This game does differ quite heavily from PoE though in that it's streamlined just about every aspect of the formula down to be easier to immediately pick up and understand. PoE is a game so esoteric and overly complex that most people wont even finish once before they resort to following a paint by numbers build guide. this game cuts a lot of that depth out, which is not a bad thing, in fact i'd say its a good thing. instead of asking first time free divers to take a quick jaunt down to the bottom of the mariana's trench of mechanical depth that is PoE this game makes a far more reasonable course and lets you play around in a shallow reef before gradually moving up to deeper waters as you get comfortable. it never reaches the same level of depth as PoE, but it does get pretty deep, and as someone who doesn't have a PhD in PoE build crafting, the marginally simplified mechanics are much appreciated.
The game features a perfectly serviceable crafting and item progression system that is well explained, has lots of quality of life features like built in loot filters, auto loot, auto dismantle, reroll until x affix (or stop at any number of selected affixes) when crafting and whatnot. great stuff that you normally only see in quality of life mods for single player ARPG's (if only that search bar worked in English ;-;)


TL;DR:
If you like build crafting in ARPG's but don't want to get a PHD in PoE, and you can tolerate some at times incredibly questionable translation, this is worth checking out, at the very least give the demo a shot, it lets you do roughly the first 30 min to an hour of progression and the save file transfers into the full game flawlessly if you do decide to buy it.

The game has potential, but id hold off for now. I understand that im not supposed to be rambo, and combat is an absolute last resort, but the enemy placement and AI basically forces you into combat that you are going to lose, and lose very quickly in most cases.

for example, i once loaded into a level and was immediately greeted by 2 dudes with guns, luckily they were facing away from me, but they were standing on either side of the alleyway i had spawned in, i assumed they might be neutral because "there's no way they just spawned me in a dead end alleyway with the only exit being watched by 2 stationary armed guards....." long story short they were not neutral, i did end up winning that fight, but it made a lot of noise, and drew in more enemies, i did my best to sneak around them but there's only so many places you can hide in an ashen desert

I dislike PvP extraction shooters in practice but i like them in concept, i think they encourage incredibly annoying play-styles like extract camping and as someone with pretty bad vision i can never seem to spot people from as far away as everyone else seems to be able to, so i was really excited to hear this was going to be PvE only. but the devs made a lot of the extracts spawn points for seemingly infinite amounts of enemies, who often spawn in squads of 5-10, they are also mostly behind choke points that are patrolled or straight up guarded by a faction. all of that together basically means, yes, even in a PvE game, the devs have made the AI into extract campers. To get to extract you would have to break through that checkpoint, which is incredibly hard, then fight past the 1-2 spawn waves coming from the extract, and pray to god that there are no exo skeletons or mechs either in said waves, or close enough to hear the gunshots. basically extracting comes down to luck, you are not given enough tools to sneak past such massive hordes of enemies, who's AI seems to just wander randomly at times making it hard to tell if an object will make for a perfect hiding spot, or if they are just gonna turn a 180 on a dime and then bline for that spot. on top of that you get spotted incredibly fast (within their relatively small detection range) you cant go prone, and there are very few things to hide behind in a lot of places, the checkpoints they set up by extracts are even set up like id expect them to be in real life, that is to say, they arnt made to be snuck through. which is a problem when thats what your expected to do.

as for technical concerns, the game runs alright but not great, i get significant pop in right at the very start of a mission, like the loading screen ends before its actually done loading everything in.

my biggest technical complaint is the mouse input, there is only 1 sensitivity slider, in third person its incredibly slow, and in first person its incredibly twitchy and fast, so you either make it slugish and annoying to explore and keep your head on a swivel like your clearly supposed to, or you make it even harder to survive the near mandatory gunfight before extraction on most maps

im not gonna go into detail on the water system or anything, i think its an alright idea but settings for water usage speed, its scarcity, or even the option to turn it off for people who have very little time to play each week would be nice.

some other more minor complaints i have that didn't really fit anywhere else:
- a lot of the in game text is incredibly small and hard to read without leaning into my screen,
- i cant tell one faction from another visually
- the skill trees are generic and incredibly boring (why do some characters have skills to allow the use of different packs and others dont? the shaman is supposedly a looting focused character but doesn't get access to the higher tier packs? why?)
- after every mission, regardless of outcome the game says that there was a server error and your inventory was returned to its state before the mission started, which just isn't true, you still lose any gear you died with or keep any loot you made it out with, not sure what the error is for
- the """tutorial""" is god awful, it tells you basically nothing other than the movement and inventory controls, and it doesn't even do that very well

TL;DR: its not in a good state right now, im hopeful that most of my above complaints can be fixed in the relatively near future though, if the game looked interesting to you before launch, id check back in with it in 2-6 months, the devs let this one out of the oven a bit early, I think it needs some more time to cook before its playable enough even for early access. personally im not going to refund the game, but i wouldn't blame anyone who did.

The aftermath of the resonance cascade but the science team is biblically accurate.

In the interest of full disclosure as well as to make this clear: i have refunded the game (and my refund was accepted)

if your coming from SPT and hoping that this will be a comparable, but officially supported PvE experience, stick to SPT for now. the AI here is so brain-dead and unresponsive that I honestly enjoy getting aimboted by the random god SPT scavs more than these bots that act like someone playing 3 or 4 FPS games at the same time (so AFK most of the time, only moving once every few minutes, slow to react, barely moves even if they acknowledge that they are in a firefight)

performance is also not great even on my 3080TI, that might get fixed in the future but its bad enough that id be doing a disservice to not at least mention it.

i've refunded the game, i'll let them cook on this for at least a few more years and see if its worth playing then.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Server issues and problems with progression have pretty much all been fixed. Disregard any reviews that talk about them, they are likely not updated

How a starship troopers game should be.

Feels like a western EDF, its got deep rock style mission structure and some very fun insect dismemberment that seems to actually effect the bugs fighting capability (shooting their legs off seems to slow them down, and has appropriate animations.

As far as the EDF comparison goes you should fee right at home if you have ever played high level EDF with more than 1 air raider, friendly fire is a fact of life and your team is just going to have to accept that :^)

while the assortment of air, orbital, and deployable support isn't quite as good as EDF's there are still plenty of fun toys ranging from "Dear sir..." to "To the inhabitants of these grid quarantines..." and most entertainingly, "two whom it may concern" (which of course includes your team mates)

As someone who is a MASSIVE fan of payday 2 and to a slightly lesser extent payday the heist it really pains me to say this, but payday 3 is not in a good state right now. It feels like the payday 2 team worked on everything in heist, the gunplay, the enemies, the heists, the gameplay, and got that like 90% right, the in heist experience is still very good. but whoever worked on everything out of heist must have been someone who entered a coma after the launch of payday 2 because there are so many problems in both the UI design and skill tree that were also in payday 2 at launch, but got fixed that are inexplicably back and just as ♥♥♥♥ as they were then.


Lets go through some specifics, starting with the in heist problems:


- Cloakers can kick the last person alive
why? this isnt a thing in payday 2 or in payday the heist for a very good reason. losing a run to someone getting kicked by a cloaker feels bad, and it ruins what could otherwise be a super hype clutch heist saving play. add on top of this that cloakers no longer emit a constant noise to let you know when one is lurking around, and that they can begin their charge without line of sight, and it often creates situations where you feel like you literally couldn't have done anything to avoid them/had no real chance to shoot them before they kick you.


- The glass and window cutting mini-game/controls are both clearly designed for controller
they want constant input, which is not something mice do really, what you have to do is move your mouse very slowly as to not run out of mousepad space and have to lift/reset which will waste time/make it take longer to cut which can matter quite a bit, especially in stealth. Either redesign the mini-game, or let me use the movement keys as input rather than the mouse, it would work far better.


- Mantling can be a bit picky about where you need to stand for it to work sometimes
Not the biggest problem usually, but ive lost more than one stealth run to just being unable to climb something or jump through a window and just sitting in front of it jumping like a moron while im getting spotted

- Armor is the only thing that really matters
this is a balance issue, which ties into the skill tree quite a bit which is why im hesitant to put this in this section but it is an in heist thing technically. how long you last in a heist is almost entirely dependent on how many armor bag charges your group has left, when you run out, if your not already heading for extract, the heist is probably over, your HP pool is incredibly small in comparison to even a single armor plate and ♥♥♥'s/med bags heal a hilariously small portion of that already small health pool. whereas with investment of a whole 2 skill points a single armor bag charge heals 2 full segments of armor, or half of your overall armor pool if your wearing the heaviest stuff (which there is no reason not to use if you have it unlocked in loud) the sheer opportunity cost of not taking armor bags is enough to ensure that no other deployable will ever be taken if someone is seriously trying to do high difficulty loud


- Solo stealth is 1000x harder than duo+
I have a problem with co-op stealth, if a single person ♥♥♥♥♥ up and gets spotted, potentially ending the attempt, they feel like ♥♥♥♥ for ruining it for everyone else who was doing perfectly fine, even if those people don't really mind, its a terrible feeling and is why i do all of my payday 2 stealth solo, the design of payday 3 however, punishes me for not wanting to be subjected to or subject others to such a feeling. unmasked players will not be spotted by civilians unless performing an illegal action. so they can carry bags or complete objectives in civilian dense streets, bank lobbies, and offices without any real fear or chance of being spotted. on top of that even if an unmasked player somehow manages to get caught, outside of "secure areas" it pretty much doesn't matter, they get walked back to a "public area" and told they are very naughty up to 3 times before the guards will actually require being killed to maintain stealth. and during said walk the guard will practically beg to get their key-card stolen or phone hacked if they have either one. the benefit of being masked is being able to jump, and kill guards. Which is sometimes useful or even required, but makes traversal of the heist infinitely harder from there on out, in co-op how things usually go is one person will mask up to kill the camera guard or drag a hostage to a scanner or something, and everyone else stays mask off to transport loot and complete all objectives that can be reached without jumping, which is most of them. in solo, you just get ♥♥♥♥♥♥, unless your doing a flawless pacifist run, you are going to need to mask up at some point in the heist, be it to kill a guard who spotted you in a "secure area", kill the camera guard because there are 5 cameras for approximately every 2 square feet of space on some maps, or because the level design forces you to jump at some point. and you cant take the mask off to go back to the far more advantageous casing mode. I understand why you cant in co-op, it would be a bit broken, but for solo play, not having access to casing mode makes things infinitely harder.


- The bots are 2 steps forward and 10 steps back
so bots can do some neat things now, they can bag loot, grab loose loot, break display cases to access said loot, and even place deployables. that's where the improvements end, the downsides are that they do those things incredibly rarely and slowly, their deployables have 2 charges (0 skill points invested, even 1 point gives +2 charges) they are incredibly squishy compared to their payday 2 counterparts, which to be fair, were probably a bit tanker than they should have been, but this is way too much of an over correction. they dont revive other bots for some reason? and dont do that much damage/get many kills/help clear cops. they are glorified bag holders and nothing else, in payday 2 i was confident in my ability to solo DSOD loud with the help of the bots, they were reliable damage sponges and could shell out a fair amount of their own, in payday 3 Im uncertain they are good enough to be even worth reviving on very hard or higher as they often tend to stand in the middle of a room full of swat and just let themselves get shredded, meaning it would cost either some utility (a flashbang or smoke grenade) or a good chunk of my armor to revive them, and they would likely just stand there get 1 or 2 more kills, then go down again. they need a massive health and damage buff, give them at least 1 point of investment for their deployables, let me pick their deployables and tell them when to place them by requesting a resource with the ping wheel rather than them placing random ammo bags that i dont need in the middle of the street surrounded by 10 snipers 3 bulldozers and about half the NYPD

Next lets talk about quite possibly the single worst set of social features i've seen in an always online game:


- Lobbies as they existed in payday 2 simply dont exist anymore
Groups dont stick together after heists are over, severely limiting the ability to find and play with or even befriend good and experienced players to potentially heist with in the future


- There is no in lobby text chat
why? who thought this was okay? i cant coordinate load-outs, builds, or even ask if the group is trying to stealth a heist until we actually load in and cant change any of that anymore


im out of characters to use in this review and i havent even started on the skill tree or UI.... will continue in a comment on this review

they removed the fun content and refuse to add any more, im done giving bungo money just so they can pretend like they are gonna make more raids

ignore my steam play time i have over 2k hours on battlenet

MINOR THEMATIC SPOILER WARNING:
i wont go into detail about the specifics of the plot, character or anything else but i will talk about other media with similar themes, if you want absolutely no spoilers, i think the gameplay is good if you like designing and fine tuning RPG builds, or if your into fantasy or philosophy manga/anime. entirely worth the $20 asking price



the gameplay is solid, reminds me of terrarias calamity mod quite a bit in terms of flow and attack patterns. Some bosses have ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ last stand immunity/bullet hell phases but even on the hardest difficulty every time i ran into one of these bosses i was able to make my build so stupidly broken in one aspect or another be it damage or surviability that ii could cheese the BS phase. as someone who enjoys making interesting and varied highly tuned builds it was thoroughly enjoyable.


im not an art guy but i think it looks good, and if you like cronenberg or lovecraft your gonna be right at home


Before talking about the plot i feel the need to establish some credentials, im a massive weeb, in fact im such a weeb that I do volunteer work for 2 absolutely above board totally legitimate please dont tell the manga publisher manga translation groups. so ive read/am caught up on a few 400+ manga.

with that established, this games plot is incredibly good. I wasnt expecting anything going in after looking at anime memes in the featured screenshots but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ i was blown away. Without talking about any details, it reminds me a lot of girls last tour if it were written by HP lovecraft, and i mean that in the best possible way. there is some tonal whiplash going from discussion of super serious metaphysical topics, then within the same dialogue finding out that an antagonists name is a dumb pun on a late 90s childrens show. Its not uncommon for manga/anime to have that kind of tonal whiplash but that doesnt make it any better, this isnt the worst case of it ive seen but it could definitely do better.


as for other misc complaints:


- there are some typos and grammatical errors in a few of the lines of dialogue (not many ~10 from what i remember)


- some weapon descriptions have exact damage numbers, some dont, for no reason
> adding on to that, if a weapon has a special attack or charge attack only the basic attack damage will be listed, and sometimes not even that


- there are some terrain assets that go a bit farther than they should and makes it look goofy/unprofessional in a few places


- 2 achievements just didn't unlock for me despite me doing what they require, woulda had 100% completion if they did too (100% took me ~18 hours at a fairly casual pace)


- mechanical/item spoiler warning for this point:
>being unable to save loadouts for perks and weapons until the very end of the game is super annoying, by the time you unlock it you pretty much have access to every perk/weapon in the game and thus wont be changing them out as frequently thus you unlock it when you need it least

This is rebound sex for people who are burnt out on runescape/OSRS it contains many of the same features items and systems, but structured more like an idle game, meaning it doesnt require constant input to do things like firemaking, you dont have to bank resources while skilling and whatnot. if that sounds enjoyable to you, go for it, if not, move along.

For refrence. I have over 5k hours in OSRS, you can find me on the ironman highscores under the name "Xlis1 BTW"