Recent reviews by PhoenixTheSage

I was super positive for about a month and had some great fun in BTB with friends. Well, BTB being broken since that time is the LEAST of the things I have to say about this now obvious train wreck. The only reason I keep playing is for event items and acquiring exclusive cosmetics until one day in the far future 343's management hopefully gets fired and they clean house.

THEN and ONLY THEN, will I have hope that they'll provide the "live service" they claimed this game would be as the excuse for F2P schemes. No serious forward-facing development or communication is happening. No content. This game is dead. Population hitting as low as 2.5k and what's left is full of sweaty players abusing exploits, cheaters, and the worse desync/netcode I've seen in years.

Changing to a recommendation. After getting off the peninsula, things improve as far as the feel of character progression. The thing that really makes the game for me is soaking in what seems to be the superior world/quest/npc design, of any soulsborn game so far.

Update: The world is definitely a lot bigger than it lets on, and that's due to fantastic design. The initial area's rune acquisition is awful and feels terrible though. Mid-late game there's some severe balance issues with bleed and other builds being supremely OP atm, so I'd stay away from PvP unless you know what you're doing.

Now that I've experienced much of the content, certain design choices with many enemies and bosses are pretty terrible compared to previous titles, with completely unpredictable movement and attacks that you have no chance of learning or countering properly and a lot comes down to luck. Not because you can't learn the moves themselves, but because of the new feature that allows bosses to randomize and interrupt their own animation chains. Randomness is not good to such a high degree if you're trying to fight based on skill.

It doesn't ruin the experience, the game is still great, but it does make things frustrating at times. Not quite the same *fair* high difficulty that we're used to from Soulsborne games. I hope From Soft continues to patch out the rough edges, cause there's lots to love. (just from experience playing back since DS1)

Just a quick note, I played through this when it first came out and made it to the center of the galaxy. Hated pretty much the whole experience and only "finished" it because I was waiting to be surprised. I wasn't and I knew I probably wouldn't be. All that said:

Pulling a NMS is a phrase now for good reason. What they've done has turned a nasty slog of contentless boredom into what is a more structured, expansive, and fun experience within the giant procedural sandbox. Particularly with the combination of expedition seasons and base/settlement building encouraging you to find your corner of the universe and make it your own. Now if they put out a substantive space combat expansion, and that's something I feel I'd pay for now, I think it would solidify this game as a pretty incredible experience finally. Even without such detailed space/ship content, I feel overall the game has reached it's original potential and promise.

Definitely rough around the edges and an eye-rolling environmentalist political message-filled story even Greta Thunberg would find condescending, but despite that... love the core of the game. Not quite what I expected after a few years waiting to see exactly how it would turn out (was hoping for a more focused adventure design), but I got more content than I thought I would considering a 20 person team.

The gameplay loop (outside of quests), looting + crafting, world design and art direction hooked me all the way through. It felt like playing old school adventure games in a lot of ways (B&K, Ratchet/Clank) but suffers from a clearly forced open-world-but-not-really-more-like-MMO-questing syndrome that was likely pushed from the publisher if I had to guess as the game was in development hell for a bit. Worth a try, but for many I suppose not worth 60. Get on sale if possible.

It's good, everything I expected and well worth the price. It feels right to finally have Halo supported on PC again.

You'll find some caveats here and there that will get fixed eventually but currently their focus is getting the games out there in a working state. Halo CE needs revisions back to original xbox version from the broken gearbox port changes and inaccurate art.

In it for like 30 minutes now and it feels like a love-child of KOTOR, Dark Souls, and fantasy Warhammer. Emphasis on the KOTOR.

Little clunky, lip sync could use some work. Could use HDR support. I'm sure I'll run into bugs, but I don't care about that, just want it to be deep and engaging without real-life political drivel.

So I'm liking it so far, and the fact it makes cry-baby Kotaku and other hack sites mad is icing on the cake.

It's great, if a little low-aiming in terms of age-range.

9001/10

Well implemented (Arma 3 DLC model) and non-intrusive way of adding content while not splitting any playerbase. All are great visually and functionally the console projector is the best part.

Perfectly priced and good way to support further development of the game which is already priced low for easy entry but still needs more systems. Don't get too upset over the decorative addition even though the base game needs deeper mechanics.

These are indeed low hanging fruit like the devs pointed out, and are quick-and-easy to implement so don't take anything away from upcoming development.

A little clunky. Missing player-character RPG elements. A tiny bit overpriced. However...it's brutal-fun (unleveled Morrowind style), has a charming atmosphere, runs great and for a small indie team it accomplishes a great deal of what it promises.

Don't go into it with the wrong expectations.

The game is great, don't let the review bomb scare you, it was a dumb knee-jerk reaction by people. 4K works just fine and HOTUS fix is incoming. This game brings me back, it gud.