Recent reviews by Midlane Aneurysm Speedrun Techs

Being back in the saddle of an OmniMech-- even if I'm coming into the invasion of the Inner Sphere from the wrong side of history-- feels good. Clans feels like the logical step towards a more narrative MechWarrior experience. Yes, we lose the sandbox and procedurally generated elements, so a campaign is what it is... But that also had been the case in EVERY modern MechWarrior. MW5 was the exception with its PG'd missions, and needing to let go of them for the sake of a more curated mission experience is just the nature of the beast.

The biggest issues we've seen thus far are technical in nature-- performance stutters, some odd co-op behavior, etc. The core gameplay loop is solid, the cinematics look good, and piloting a Clan mech feels like it should. Issues are being addressed in patches, and PGI has been very upfront about what their patches and fixes are intended to address. Frankly, I was ready to be disappointed with the launch, but overall I've been having a blast. Big recommend for any fans of the MechWarrior franchise.

Got the base game and Gathering Storm on sale for ~$12. If I had paid $20 for that bundle I would have requested a refund.

The base game of Civilization VI feels like a straight downgrade from where we left off in Civ V (with DLCs included). It felt half-baked, feature-incomplete, and extremely underwhelming. There was a glimmer of something interesting in the idea of "districts" as focused developmental modules for cities instead of everything being an 'internal' building path, but still. Since EVERYthing was on sale after the announcement of Civ VII, I picked up Gathering Storm as well.

Hoo boy. Very much a disappointing entry. It feels like Firaxis has really lost their touch. Brave New World gave us Civilization 5.5. Gathering Storm gave us... Civilization 6.01. So many of the mechanics come together in a way that results in almost every single campaign playing out the same damn way: Even with just shy of forty hours played, I feel like I've seen everything: The AI is somewhat combative early on, but rapidly becomes extremely risk-averse, and the winner of a given session is *always* some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ camping on a less-occupied section of the map, spamming either a Science or Cultural Victory.

I remember brutal, drawn-out wars with Ramses and the like from Civ V, but the only "drawing out" you get here is the AI mounting a feeble defense of whatever the first city you attack, and then sitting back to let the awful, half-assed "Loyalty" mechanics completely flip the city out of your control. Civ VI feels like it was developed without any knowledge of previous titles, not in the sense that we should never move past previous design, but in the sense that it seems like the devs need to re-learn every time that people do not like pointless speedbumps and busywork. Needing to turn border-cities into red light districts just so that they can pump out enough loyalty pressure to make conquest mathematically possible isn't fun.

Furthermore, it feels like customization has absolutely been flushed out with yesterday's shi--uh, trash. "Basic" customization hardly offers anything, and "Advanced" customization barely covers the stuff that basic should have. For instance: I hate the "Age" system. I do not like that my progress in an upcoming era can be crippled by poor (or "poor") performance in my current one. Do I have any option to disable it? Only if I want to completely disable ALL of the attendant content of the DLC.

Similarly, I like "long-tech" eras, in that I enjoy getting to spend quite a long time in each technological era, learning its nuances and attendant strategies. But if I want to actually experience that, I *have* to play at either Marathon or Epic pace. But those speed settings *also* neuter population growth and production speed, so I don't get to enjoy a given tech era *more*, I just have to go through the exact same amount of action *more slowly*. The idea that in the 2020s we cannot have an 'advanced customization' page that basically breaks down every possible part of this game to your liking, or even adds in a bunch of crazy-ass experimental stuff, is a joke. Developers should NOT be treating the third party modding scene like it's the *actual* "Advanced" customization tab.

Literally why even play a MOBA in 2024?

Serious review:

Do not get into Dota as a new player. Dota is not meant for people to get into. Dota is meant for people who've been playing since 2015 to continue playing the game that ruined their lives. Valve has made it very clear they have neither interest nor the capability to de-enshittify the game. Lower levels are overrun with smurfs, bots are rampant, account buying and selling, etc. The community accepts all of this, along with blatant exploits, and only whines when it's a ranked game that threatens their MMR.

It cannot be stated enough: Probably 95% of "new accounts" playing Dota are smurfs. This is a miserable, toxic, what-is-wrong-with-you-people experience for new players. If you have friends to queue with, it's like recreationally eating lightbulbs. If you go into it alone, it's like recreationally dropping bricks on your ballsack.

League sucks and is STILL somehow less destructive to your mental health, because Riot doesn't let smurfs run the damn insane asylum.

A very fun game with a tight gameplay loop. Best played in co-op, but since the multiplayer is cross-platform, it's a lot easier to get squadded up. Uniquely, Helldivers seems to have figured out a way to make dying feel less frustrating and off-putting than a lot of other comparable (as much as ANYTHING is comparable) games of this genre, with responsive timers and relatively generous respawns. The ability to pick-and-choose both mission types and difficulty levels also massively increases the degree of player agency.

Big shoutout to the community for their unity in opposing the PSN debacle, and a congratulations to Sony for doing the right thing by reversing course. Anti-consumer policies and behaviors should never be the industry standard, but especially one that come out *after* the game already has sold so many copies.

As someone who was first introduced to the tactical side of the Battletech franchise with MechCommander 2, I was excited to hear about the development of BATTLETECH. When I heard that it was going to be turn-based, however, my enthusiasm was tempered. I've always maintained that while the tabletop game was turn-based because it is simply not feasible to represent real-time strategy on the tabletop. MechCommander (1 and 2) made the decision to move the game to real time for a VERY good reason, and it bore out in greater tactical depth, more meaningful choices, and the feeling of actually commanding a BATTLE.

Unfortunately, while this may or may not be a faithful or clever adaption of the tabletop game, it is a disappointingly mediocre, under-designed experience by the standards set by a 20-year old entry into the franchise. The devs clearly did not actually consider the implications of most of the mechanics that went into combat, with the end result being needlessly stiff, janky, and poorly-balanced. I've heard plenty of griping about how the late game is a miserable slog of over-beefed doomstacks of enemy units blasting your lance apart, but even my experience in the early game has been extremely disappointing.

In a word, combat ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks. The existing evasion system (mechs build up stacks of "evasion" by moving, and evasion is used up point-by-point dodging incoming fire) MASSIVELY privileges the AI's swarms of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ light mechs, which nevertheless will effortlessly dance past the outgoing fire from your own lance (even comprised of EXACTLY the sorts of mechs that would qualify as "light mech hunters" in the lore and other games), while inflicting disproportionate damage on your own units. Because again, every incoming attack consumes one stack of evasion, and with all of the AI's light mechs acting on one turn (since initiative is set in blocks based on chassis weight and pilot skill), they can rush in and focus down ONE of your own mechs by stripping away all of your evasion stacks and hitting it over. And over. And over.

Lacking any sort of "glancing hit" system (i.e., a die roll that's almost-but-not-quite a hit still does some damage), fights in the early game as an agonizing process of systematically wasting turn after turn stripping down a single target's evasion, only to watch it just BARELY survive, and use its own turn to run away and regain all of the evasion stacks you JUST got rid of.

Also lacking any sort of "overwatch" system to allow a mech to forego its attack and instead try to open fire off-turn means that anything that if your lance gets scattered due to terrain and one of your mechs loses line of sight, you can't position it to, say, provide a faceful of hurt to the Jenner that you KNOW is about to round that corner. Instead you just have to passively sit still and let it run past you to get a bunch of free shots on your rear armor.

Landing hits at long range is also an exercise in futility. It feels like anything more mobile than a fixed turret WILL dodge your fire, forcing you to turn every mech into a close-ranged brawler just so that when the computer's aforementioned swarms of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ light mechs rush up to you, you at least aren't suffering from the massive "minimum distance" penalties for using a long ranged weapon.

Also, while you are guaranteed to face absolute swarms of light mechs from all but the earliest game onwards, you are restricted to your own meagre four-man lance. You know what MechCommander gave us over two decades ago? That's right-- deployments based on drop weight! Being able to customize your forces to meet different threats in different ways. Instead, BATTLETECH contents itself with a lazy my-rules-are-not-your-rules system that completely stacks the difficulty on the side of the fight that has more units in play.

In short, as much as I tried to like this game, the design problems are so fundamental and so obvious I'm shocked that this product has such a positive rating. Maybe people just don't remember that we've solved these problems, whether by transitioning to real-time combat, integrating a hybrid "real time with pause" or "action points" turn-based, or even just by having more options available within the turn-based structure. But I remember, and it makes me deeply saddened that this project could have been MechCommander 3 instead of Fire Emblem: Robots.

EDIT: Having now completed the campaign, I understand a bit more of why people that complete the game have a sunnier opinion of it.

No, the game does not get better-- it's still strategically shallow and the design flaws mentioned above are still slammed into your face every single turn you take, and every single time that your attempt to do something clever is laughed off by the game engine.

Nope, the reason the game gets better is because at endgame, light mechs stop being in the spawn pools for missions.

Having completed the campaign, and started a new Career (No ability to import your save over? No New Game+ capabilities? Nothing?), I was curious if my experience with the early game would be any better now that I had a completed campaign under my belt. Nope, no chance in hell. The early game is absolute garbage, and I do NOT mean that in the sense that a Mech* game should have a rough early game. You are not making hard decisions on a shoestring budget, making tough decisions about future loyalty, or any of that other stuff that seems like an obvious genre staple.

No, instead, what you're dealing with is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ LIGHT MECHS getting spammed on you again. And the more that you play, the MORE obvious it is how absolutely awful the balance and design around light mech combat is. The AI will gladly rush multiple light mechs out of cover and into the crosshairs of your much deadlier mediums PURELY for the sake of ganging up on and focusing down one of your damaged lights. Why? Because the AI has *no* self-preservation instinct. Every single vehicle driver or Mechwarrior that the AI has is a literally fearless death-seeker outside of pre-scripted "I got damaged so now I'm running away to extraction" segments. The sole surviving Jenner with its arms blown off and ammo depleted by an explosion will LITERALLY opt to rush into melee just to deliver a spite melee to increase the repair cost on one of your mechs instead of opting to eject.

If the AI had to deal with a reverse morale system from your own-- starts at full, ticks down as stuff goes wrong-- decisions and strategic depth could be reintroduced. Do you risk going for the early killing blow on the heavier "lance leader" mech, to demoralize the lighter lance-members? Or do you focus on systematically picking the lance apart from the bottom up, to better secure your flanks and deny them indirect fire bonuses, etc?

Also, other points of contention arise as you encounter them more and more. Not just matters or "This cool, obvious feature is missing" but even things like "This extremely obvious design choice was ignored to make an inferior, stupid design choice". A perfect example is how rear shots work. Rear shots (obviously) target the rear armor, which is UNIVERSALLY thinner than front armor. This alone is a huge benefit that makes some risky maneuvering worth it. In addition, however, rear shots also.... Ignore cover bonuses? The much, MUCH more obvious "Rear shots ignore EVASION bonuses" was overlooked, despite the fact that it intuitively makes more sense that shooting someone in the back has a better chance of hitting them since they CAN'T SEE THE SHOT COMING.

The final nail in this negative review is the genuinely AWFUL optimization. There are story missions-- not emergent procedurally-generated missions, but actual fully scripted NON-OPTIONAL, MAIN STORY missions that drop a modern PC to 10 fps. We have games from ten years ago more graphically intensive than this that had better performance.

A solid 5/10. And that's with a +1 because I love the franchise.

A solid entry to the historical total war side of things. My biggest beef with this entry into the franchise by far is the same problem they ran into with Shogun 2, however: Excessive regionalism of the game means that the factions all feel very same-y, with the exception of the Yellow Turbans. While this is mitigated somewhat by the retinue system enforcing a degree of unit diversity, it still comes out feeling stretched just a little too thin.

A very enjoyable side-scroller. Not a huge amount of depth to it, but fun to pick up and put down. 8/10 easily.

I've played Red Orchestra 2 for a few years, and when Verdun was announced, I had a lot of hopes for something of that quality, but with a new setting, because frankly I find WW1 interesting and under-explored. What I see hasn't really met those expectations. Movement feels like controlling a cloud instead of a body with mass, the lethality of weapons is badly overstated (rifle round to the foot? Insta-death. No bleedout, no bandaging, no getting to cover), and something about the game engine REALLY does not play well with textures at a distance. The game overall feels quite unpolished, although I do like the foothold/repulsion mechanic for determining victory, and the inclusion of gas and called-in artillery. It may be improved at a later date, but frankly I'm not liking what I see at this time.

Hoooooly crap. If you enjoyed the original Killing Floor, you ABSOLUTELY need to make this purchase. KF2 represents a massive improvement over its predecessor, and there is really no way in which it is worse. Even incomplete, the level of quality between this game and KF1 is like the difference between a full release and an alpha or early-stage beta. The game feels much more responsive, much more organic, and much more fun to play overall. I cannot recommend this game strongly enough for a KF1 fan.

Dated a skeleton, fought a racist fish, was on a gameshow. What a time to be alive.