Recent reviews by Bungd-up

It's like a happy medium between the otherwise smooth-brain gameplay of WOT and tryhard gameplay of WT Ground Battles.

You have WoT style healthbars, but also a "lite" version of a WT-style armour, module, and crew system. Compared to how the game used to be before it was on Steam, this is actually a fantastic improvement and strikes a great balance between fun and tactics.

The game's main focus is actually Co-op PvE, rather than PvP modes. This is insanely refreshing, and while the tech tree can get grindy later on, especially without premium time, it's really not terrible and most PvE matches are over in less than 10 mins. The game also offers opportunities to earn premium vehicles without spending gold, although it can be a bit of a slog to earn the "medals" required.

Honestly my only major gripe with PvE is that the game mode seems to be populated with a lot of unbelievably idiotic players that ignore secondary objectives because they're too busy tunnel-visioning on getting kills, not realising that *not* completing secondary objectives nets the entire team a -33% reduction in post-game rewards. People will literally be right next to an objective that they just need to take one second to destroy or park on to capture, and they'll drive right by it. But then I suppose random matchmaking in a lot of games suffers from stupid players, so this is hardly an AW-exclusive problem.

Haven't tried PvP, mostly because online PvP in any and every online game is just a brain tumor waiting to happen, but it's there as an option, though it's actually worse for earning cash and exp for unlocking new vehicles, and is really just there as another mode you can earn a few more decals, avatars, and camos from achievements with. You can completely ignore PvP and not miss much.

TL;DR - If you like tank battles, but you don't want to get nickel-and-dimed by Wargaming's "premium shells" BS, and you don't want to spend the next 42 years grinding through rage-inducing ghost shells and garbage matchmaking with Gaijin just to unlock modern tanks that'll just get one-shotted, then you might want to give AW a spin.

"When the 'Sorry' stops, the war crimes begin."

-Canadians

Full disclosure, I'm not a diehard Battlefield fanboy, but I have played most of the entries in the series from BF 1942 in 2002 up to the present. I think the only ones I've missed are Bad Company 1, 1943 and BF4. I don't consider the Battlefield games remotely realistic and have no idea how some people possibly do, when I'm used to Arma, Insurgency, etc. The franchise occupies no special place in my mind, but it is a fun combined-arms arcade-y feeling shooter.

I'm approaching BF2042 with that same mentality, and honestly I'm enjoying it. It's absolutely not perfect - there are still some minor bugs here and there, a few network and lag issues, and I've had a couple games drop. Portal map rotation doesn't work past the first 2 maps on a playlist, etc...

But I picked it up in the autumn sale, played it a bunch over the Black Friday weekend, and can honestly say that while I have no experience with the original train-wreck state it released in, as of November 2022 it's a pretty alright game that can offer up a lot of fun if you go into it with the right set of expectations. Namely, go in expecting that it's just a decent combined-arms FPS with a limited selection of default maps but a pretty solid library if you're willing to put together some of your own matches in the admittedly kind of wonky external web-based Portal system (This couldn't be a series of in-game menus? Seriously?) Yes, destruction has definitely been toned down in this game, much to its detriment. People shouldn't be able to completely flatten an entire map, but there are some massive buildings on some of the maps that take absolutely no damage when they should at least get a few holes in their walls. Some maps though, like Doha, do have a number of smaller structures that can be quite extensively destroyed.

What people call the "plus" system, where you can hot-swap weapon customisation on the fly, is pretty cool and definitely something that should continue going forward. I also enjoy progression and unlocks, being more of an RPG player, so that adds some goals in the game to work towards.

Unpopular opinion here but I also like the *idea* of human player characters being unique versus generic soldiers as AI, I just think specialists were implemented poorly. The "No-Pat" storyline also reeks of paper-thin writing and more of a way to shoe-horn in specialists than an actual backstory. Really, if they wanted players to have unique soldiers, just throw in a character creator with a bunch of customisation options, let people design their own avatar, and claim they're just part of a PMC. None of this goofy No-Pat storyline, none of these often cringey stock specialists, but custom loadouts can still make sense.

Portal is a fantastic inclusion and also something I hope will continue. I *hate* online multiplayer. I just want to enjoy some single player skirmishes against AI like the old Battlefield games, but with shiny new graphics and some of the new gameplay systems. And 2042 definitely delivers on that.

All in all, aside from some minor gripes, while it may not be a great "Battlefield" game to those who have some sentimental attachment to the franchise, it is a pretty fun FPS that still feels just a little short on main game content, and I'd recommend picking it up any time it goes on sale for at least 50% off.

I had hoped this expansion would breathe new life into a buggy mess of a 4X title that suffers the same issues of an incredibly stale late game that the Civ franchise has to grapple with.

Boy was I wrong.

Not only are Humankind's new diplomatic features even more shallow and limited than Civ VI's paltry World Congress functions, but they're not explained at all. The new diplomatic and stealth units are virtually useless or don't function correctly. For example, Envoys are supposed to generate additional influence or the new "patronage" resource depending on if they're in another culture or independent peoples' border respectively. Except they don't actually increase anything. It's virtually impossible to collect the new resource because it only drops randomly from the AI doing things, and it really doesn't have much of an effect on the game, you'll never be able to collect it fast enough to get the new diplomatic stars, and the actions it's used for can be made completely irrelevant by just playing even barely competently.

And the bugs. It's like Amplitude is either incapable of fixing actual breaking gameplay issues, or more likely knows they're there and just chooses to ignore them. The infinite turn loading bug, which I'd like to point out has been an issue SINCE RELEASE is still not fixed. The issue with audio crackling, also a problem SINCE RELEASE is still not fixed.

I would love to know if the invisible districts bug is still present, but I haven't been able to get far enough into a single game thanks to this expansion introducing the most frustrating Amplitude bug to date: The unendable turn! At a random point in your game, one of the speech bubble events will appear on the "End Turn" button, claiming you have "urgent affairs" to attend to. Except when you click it, nothing happens. There's no event to coincide with this notification, but you also can't cancel it or skip it. Saving and reloading also does nothing, the bugged event will always pop up on the same turn for that match, no matter what you do, meaning once it happens your game is done for, and you're starting over.

The new Diplomatic Affinity cultures are also complete garbage, because the diplomacy system they rely on for their bonuses just flat out stinks, as mentioned before. These cultures effectively bring nothing to the table that isn't massively overshadowed by even the worst cultures from the base game.

All in all, you're really better off skipping this expansion. It's like Amplitude looked at their game, said "How can we make this expansion as functionally worthless as possible?" and just brainstormed a list of stupid ways to implement features.

Save your money, I wouldn't even install this expansion if it was free.

Let me preface this by saying that Humankind isn't a game you shouldn't buy, just that you shouldn't pay full price for it. You'll probably still enjoy it if you're a fan of Civ or 4x in general, but it has some major issues that honestly should've been fixed long ago, while the devs seem happy to ignore them in favour of adding more shallow and questionably balanced content.

First, the game's pacing is completely out to lunch. Even on the slowest game speeds, you'll barely have time to make it through a fraction of the tech tree for each era before you're already being prompted to advance. A number of cultures' emblematic units don't show up until midway through, or at the end of, each era tree, so your EUs are already largely obsolete by the time you unlock them. Some cultures also play like nearly identical carbon copies of other cultures, and there are definitive culture sequences through which you can completely cheese the game by min/maxing on bonuses.

There are copious issues with graphical and audio bugs - constant background crackling when any audio plays is enough to make you want to shut off the decent, if not repetitive, soundtrack (Which you can expand by paying $3.50 for small music packs, in a shameless case of wallet-squeezing the consumer). Units, terrain textures and whole districts/cities will simply vanish late game and become invisible, with cities becoming just masses of greyish ground textures. Airport and airstrip runways and textures disappear, and things just generally become a graphical mess that Amplitude should be utterly embarrassed about. It indicates that they never even play-tested their own late-game to catch it, or it would've been fixed before release.

Then there's the constant infinite loading loops. The game will constantly get stuck trying to process a battle action, or ending a round of combat, or ending a turn, and it will hang anywhere from a couple minutes to hours. I've left the game on one of these loops, and taken my dog for an hour long walk to see if it would resolve itself, and even after getting back it was still processing. The only thing that fixes this issue is to save the game and reload the save, and you'll do this *FAR* too often to excuse. Even in the starting Nomadic era, you'll run into this problem.

The unit tree also has some massively glaring gaps that make absolutely no sense - WW1-era siege artillery never upgrades further? Napoleonic-era Cuirassiers upgrade into 21st century Mechanized Infantry mounted in Strykers, and Musket-armed Line Infantry upgrade into WW2-era infantry, which then don't upgrade further?? It makes no sense at all, some of the gaps. It's like they got to the early late game and just said "F**k it, good enough."

The game isn't without praise though. The environment/map visuals are beautiful, the natural wonders are stunning, and the terrain functions as far as gameplay go are awesome. It's the same as Endless Legend, with terrain actually being truly 3D in function, versus Civ's 3D terrain that functions more like 2D. The era system and changing cultures is also a refreshing change, but it also feels nonsensical at times, with the ability to switch immediately from, say, an ancient African culture to a classical Asian culture and then a medieval European culture. It would've been nice if such shifts were more natural and felt more migratory than just abruptly sudden, but I'm not sure how they'd have been able to work that functionality in considering the nature of random maps.

All in all, it's not a bad game. Yes, it's playable, but it has serious issues that haven't been fixed or even acknowledged despite the fact that it's been nearly a year since launch (Jul 2022 as of this review, release was Oct 2021), and yet the devs have time to add more cultures of varying balance and depth and content that isn't really changing the biggest problem of the dull late-game that many 4x games suffer from.

If you're thinking of picking it up, just make sure you're waiting for a sale. While the game is decent, it isn't worth sticker price, and Amplitude certainly doesn't deserve to take your $60+ for it until they shape up and fix the numerous bugs and issues that have been ignored since the game dropped.



TL;DR - Game is about a 7/10, and I'd wait for it to be on sale for at least 30% off respectively.

*Please note, this "No" recommendation is merely a "Only a 'No' for now", and even then only because of a couple sticky points, not because it's an inherently bad game or anything. You can disregard this, buy the game, and definitely still enjoy it. It's just a bit lacking in substance and has some issues at the moment that I'll detail below.

That out of the way, let me start by saying I'm glad Thunder Tier One (TTO, "the game") exists. For a long time, I've wanted after a special operations or PMC-themed XCOM reskin, and though this isn't entirely that, it does have some of that feel to it. TTO is RTT instead of TBT, it features free aim and movement instead of tile-based, it has no base-building or global map, but does have similar squad customization to XCOM.

A good analogy for the game would be that it's the offspring of the older Rainbow 6 releases, the more recent XCOM titles, and the latest couple of Ghost Recon games having too much to drink and fooling around in the sack together. It's a fully-3D, isometric Real-Time Tactical shooter for 1-4 players. There's PvE missions and a campaign, and co-op PvE and PvP multiplayer modes. The game is rigged up to support modding from day one, though the tools themselves are still forthcoming.

At a basic level, TTO does what it set out to do really well. You have a plethora of guns and tools at your disposal that can lead to some pretty gucci, 'Hollywood' style secret squirrel moments, like having a teammate run a fibre optic cable under a door, and then you or another teammate perforating every visible bad guy on the other side of said door (and wall, if you have a weapon firing a heavy enough round with enough muzzle velocity). Nothing is more satisfying than clearing a room with gunfire before you even step into it.

The missions are fairly short, but for the most part offer a nice steady increase in challenge. More on why I said "for the most part" in a bit. The customisation offers a pretty decent spread of options. Despite the game being set in the mid 1990's, you'll still see modern camouflages on offer, and I was a bit surprised to see Multicam for example, considering it didn't come out until 2003, but I guess that's just because people won't stop complaining about not including them until the devs did, time-period be damned (See equally stupid holosights, weapon skins and foregrips on WWII firearms in BF: V). That said, you have a lot of classic options - the old US M81 Woodland, the Chinese knockoff of it, "Duck Hunter", Swedish M90, and a whole lot of the typical Cold War solid earth tones to name but a few options. A decent amount of gear and uniform options, and these will actually impact your loadouts as different vests and backpacks have different pouch layouts and capacities. Armour too offers different protective profiles, so you'll want to pay attention.

There's a good offering of guns, though there are a lot of classics missing too that feel like they should be there. Modding will address this I'm sure, but it still feels a little disappointing not to see a number of quintessential Cold War and 90's firearms like the FAMAS, FN FAL, SVD, to name a few (Interestingly enough, there's a Vietnam-era CAR-15, but no later M4 or M16 models as well). The same for sidearms - there are a lot of options, but some pretty noteworthy omissions as well. All these weapons have multiple options for attachments - optics, lasers/flashlights and suppressors on rifles, and the latter two on sidearms. These modifications can actually have a pretty big influence on how some missions play out if you're trying to be sneaky, and it's worth fiddling with them.

Now, the downsides. The biggest and most glaring is that the friendly AI is an absolute joke, while the enemy AI can be utterly ruthless, and when your teammates are not busy getting you killed or blocking your shots, it's because they're busy getting killed themselves. I've watched as my team of 3 allies, whom I've told to fire on any contacts they see, allow enemy units that are in their line of sight run right up to them and empty full AK mags into my teammates' foreheads and the friendly AIs will die having not even tried to defend themselves since *I* wasn't looking in the enemy's direction at the time.

That seems to be the deciding factor. No matter what, your teammates will only shoot at things you're looking at, or that they're already engaging. It's infuriating, and it makes them completely beyond useless. The AI absolutely needs several passes to re-tool it and make it actually helpful, because at the moment even Ubish*t's terrible AI on Ghost Recon is better than the AI in this game, and I had thought that was as bad as friendly AI could get.

And the mission balance. There will come a mission, Golden Angel, that will have you throwing your hands up as to how a game could go from being so well-paced and offering a fair but beatable challenge (albeit rather linear), to... well... whatever the hell that mission is. There's so much wrong with it that I'm not even going to get into it. Just check out the Steam discussion boards for the game and search "Golden Angel". It wouldn't even be a particularly hard mission if, again, the friendly AI just wasn't so completely and utterly useless at *everything*, while the enemy acted more like the elite soldiers your allies are supposed to be.

Lastly, the game is just very bare at the moment for what you're getting. I know, modding is coming soon, and support is built right in. That's great and all, but it doesn't help right now. Currently you can play/replay the campaign and individual missions from it in singleplayer, you can play individual missions in co-op, and you can play PvP arena matches using existing levels. There are a couple modded missions the devs have released, though these reward no experience towards unlocks since mods disable the EXP system. Again, yea I know, custom missions will be coming, hopefully along with a level creator tool, but for now it's very much a restrictive menu of offerings that might not be worth full price unless you just enjoy farming unlocks.

All in all, like I said above it's not a *bad* game, and it's not a straight up "Do not buy" review. It's just a rather limited game that feels a bit more like a demo at the moment, and one which has a few frustrating issues that you'll undoubtedly notice. But I do have confidence that the devs will iron out the AI and mission balance (They've already alluded as much in the patch notes from the start of December), future updates will hopefully add additional campaigns of similar length, and the modding tools will breathe a lot of life into the game.


TL;DR - I don't wholeheartedly recommend it right now, but you won't hate it if you buy it. Just be aware that YMMV.

Save your money. Even as far as Paradox games go, this one is a horribly unstable pile of hot garbage. You'll never be able to finish an Ironman Campaign, because the save file will corrupt itself and never load again. And the crash reporter doesn't even work - it too will freeze and crash on you. I bought this in the summer sale, and at 20 hours have already gotten my money's worth, true, but that's 20 hours over 4 or 5 new campaigns that keep breaking. Sure, you can play non-Ironman if you just want to export your save and play a an alternate-history game across all titles, but you can forget achievements because Paradox is ridiculous and believes people shouldn't be able to get achievements without playing Ironman mode (Which, again, does not work because the auto-saves keep corrupting)

Don't think "Oh, it'll be different for me". No, it won't. Check the discussion forum - every update this game had has apparently made it worse and worse until now it barely even runs and Paradox has abandoned it to go milk money from people with CK III. Discussion is full of people with random, mid-game CTDs on completely vanilla, unmodded saves. It's just a trash game. Save your money for something else.

Now this is a story all about how the Earth got flip-turned upside down. And I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there, I'll tell you all about how people were mutated by the air!

Phoenix Point is the brainchild of Julian Gollop, creator of the original X-COM series. As such, it has many of the things that players of XCOM (And Xenonauts) will be familiar with - turn-based battles on tile maps, base building, recruiting soldiers for your squads, and the Geoscape, to name a few things.

Where it differs is in its story, shooting in combat, havens and difficulty curve.

Unlike the XCOM storylines, where earth is being invaded by extra-terrestrials, PP's enemies are the result of a mist-borne virus that causes people to lose their marbles, walk into the sea, and mutate into CRAB PEOPLE. CRAB PEOPLE. CRAB PEOPLE.

Obviously, XCOM Terror from the Deep and HP Lovecraft inspired quite a bit of PP (To the point that Lovecraft is mentioned by name in-game). That said, I really wish the horror was better executed. Aside from narration over still images, there are no real cutscenes. This is a huge missed opportunity, especially considering the revamp of the tutorial introducing some named characters. Remember in Starcraft 2 the optional cutscene of Dr. Hanson becoming infested with Zerg DNA? Considering this is an entire game based around mutation and body-horror, you'd think they'd have fit some truly terrifying (Or at least suitably creepy) cutscenes in.

The mission maps also lack any variety. There are all of 2 or 3 maps per setting, so you'll become familiar with them very quickly, and this makes the game feel somewhat bland and repetitive compared to XCOM 2 or Xenonauts.

It's not a *bad* game though. The difficulty curve can be extremely unforgiving, and you should expect to fail or wipe on a few missions, maybe even lose a campaign or two until you get the swing. "Easy" is more like playing WOTC on "Normal" (or even "Hard" at times), but this makes those victories all the sweeter.

Speaking of combat, I love the Free Aim feature and true bullet physics. It's much more satisfying to be able to see an estimate of where your shots will hit rather than missing an entire burst of shots on a stated 99% hit chance.

Havens are nice, they work similarly to the factions in WOTC, with a bit more depth. They're a mix between that and an AI-Controlled PP equivalent. They're passive for most of the game, but near the end they may declare war on one another to mix things up.

Ultimately the game is decent, and if you like TBT games you'll enjoy it. That said, it feels very half-arsed in a lot of places, or at least like you can see the seeds of a good idea that just fell flat.

With only 1 DLC left to publish by the point of me writing this, I hope they're planning some free content updates to flavour the game a bit more, but I doubt it. Still, pick it up if you see it on sale. In some ways, it's better than XCOM 2 + WOTC. But in many more ways, it doesn't quite measure up. Still, a worthwhile addition, especially at a discount.

EDIT: Apparently I beat the game just before the new Windows update dropped and made it unplayable. Still going to recommend, based on my experiences prior, but until you hear that these new issues have been fixed, I suggest holding off on buying it.

TL;DR - Although it isn't a complete remaster, and you shouldn't pay full price, a lot of people on here are overreacting and/or don't remember how bad the original PS1 game actually looks now.

FF8 was my favorite PS game I owned back in my childhood. Weekends and summer holidays I'd stay up until the wee hours of the morning, my PS1 mini (The one that looked like just a slightly bigger Discman) whirring away as FF8 beat out Gran Turismo, the original top-down GTA, and 2 or 3 other games for my attention.

I was cautiously excited when I saw the FF8 remaster last year. I was over the moon that the characters and enemies got retouched textures and models, and the game had been given some bug fixes and an optimization pass or two over the original PC release, but I was also hesitant as people claimed the overworld map and most of the backdrops looked like they weren't touched up at all, and at full price that'd be something of a cardinal sin.

I ended up waiting until it went on sale, and while I'm glad I bought it at a reduced price, it is not the utter disappointment that hyperbolic people are claiming it is. Characters, GFs, magic effects, and many of the enemies have beautiful new HD textures and some subtle model adjustments.

Contrary to what people are saying, the backgrounds DID receive an art pass to smooth them over as well, and gone are the jagged, pixellated background textures of yore. For people claiming that the characters stand out too clearly from the backgrounds, you need to play the original discs - they've always looked like that. You're either just forgetting, or you never played the original release.

The overworld map and battle maps are a different story, and have been sadly neglected. This isn't a deal breaker at all, but considering about 2/3 of the game involve you freely roaming the world map, and you'll spend a considerable amount of time in battles, one would think that more care would've gone into updating them.

A few QoL improvements have gone in as well, namely the "3x Speed" mode (F3), which makes battles to item and/or draw-farm mobs actually bearable. There's also a "God Mode" cheat (F1) that basically functions like casting Regen and Aura on your whole party - Barring a hit that does more damage than a character has HP, their health will stay full, and they have constant access to their Limit Break as long as the F1 mode is active. While it obviously makes the game far too easy normally, If you don't really understand how FF8's systems work and you've buggered yourself into a corner against a boss that you can't beat, this cheat could save your whole game and let you get past that part without completely restarting a new game.

The audio also sounds a bit cleaner and less 'tinny' than the original. I'm not much of an audiophile though, so for me this is more just a bit of extra icing than an actual prop point.

Ultimately, am I glad I bought the game? Did it give me back some of that late-night childhood nostalgia? Did I abuse the absolute piss out of the Junction and GF-abilities system to min-max my characters? Is Squall a whiny, self-centred dink for most of the game? Should you buy this -on sale- if you loved FF8 as a kid?

Yes, yes, hell yes, absolutely, and do you really even need to ask that last one?

Just one last thing: Do yourself a favour, and play it with a controller for maximum nostalgia. Just trust me on that one.

Gaijin has absolutely no idea how to balance a game, but as long as you disable chat completely, just play it casually, ignore the battlepass, ignore whatever challenges they put out, and wait for sales to buy *anything* in-game or from their (mostly) ridiculously overpriced list of digital content ($80 CAD for premium modern tanks or aircraft lol) you'll be fine.

Game's also vastly better if you have a friend or two that you can reliably play with.