Honeybadgers

I've got no complaints. The only way it could have been improved was if The Pillows did the soundtrack. The story and characters and vibe is equal parts punk rock and Saturday morning cartoon, with silly lighthearted characters and plot that works because the game just doesn't take itself seriously. It's short, campy, endlessly energetic and likable, with tight gameplay that constantly builds on itself and never asks for a grind with music that slaps hard. Temper your expectations, this game doesn't want you to take it seriously. If you think the dialogue is cringe and stupid, tweak your mindset. The physical comedy has some genuinely laugh aloud moments, too. One scene with a certain tall red haired Scottish lady stands out. Add to that it has no microtransactions. no in-game purchases. No cringe advertising or pre orders. Hell, the game was released on the day it was announced. That's so righteous. I don't want a sequel. I just want this little star to shine bright and be remembered fondly. But it's absolutely slaying the competition, so of course we're gonna see it get ran into the ground by Bethesda. Dangit I made myself sad.

This game is a fever dream. And not a fun one. The rhythm aspect can be beaten with spastic flailing. It doesn't cue clear instructions on movements. The dances rarely "vibe" with the songs. The song selection is really weird. Why is a rendition of a Monty Python song in there? Lots of Latino songs. Not enough songs either. Well. I take that back. There are a lot of songs. But they're buying a SUBSCRIPTION. I'd understand if they were expansion packs entirely. But making someone pay monthly is just absolutely cancerous anticonsumer behavior. This game should keep a child under 10 happy for a little while but I just don't like supporting abusive monetization. And it's not fun whatsoever for adults or as a party game. Just skip this. And bring back guitar hero or rock band.

I don't do review bombing. I generally will give any game credit where it earns some. But when I give a zero, I mean that this game has no redeeming features. There is no reason whatsoever to play a game that is so toxic and cynical that it thinks you are either going to shell out thousands, tens of thousands, or over a HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars just to avoid their grind that will otherwise take you ten. literal. years. of gameplay. This isn't just a case of "oh well, this game isn't for me." I can't think of anyone who should be playing this. The game was designed from the outset to take advantage of people with gambling addictions, people with poor money management, and children. There's nothing else to it. This is a scam of a monetization scheme wrapped up in a diablo 3 skin. I can't even begin to picture the absolute sociopath who saw this game's monetization and greenlit it. The gameplay is okay, if extremely shallow. Sound design is okay. But the community of actual players have already become the most toxic group of sunk-cost fallacy groupies, and there's no offline, single player way to avoid them. So all in all, no. Don't even "give it a try for the story." Blizzard and Netease need to be taught a lesson, that this will never be acceptable. They just flat out refused to release the game in Belgium, where loot box gambling in kids games is illegal, because Blizzard thinks that this abomination's gameplay literally can't be separated from its monstrous gambling mechanics and grind. This game is for nobody. Absolutely nobody. And I can't understand why any game journalist would look past that. Every journalist worth a damn should be shouting from the rooftops that this game is a literal scam and to avoid it at all costs. not "oh well the graphics are okay for a phone game and you can play it for a bit without paying" (ignoring the fact that it utterly pelts and shotguns you with prompts to spend money) I'd be boycotting the journalists who reviewed this game and didn't give it a sub-20% score, too. Genuinely the most egregious AAA game in history that I can think of. Worse than shadow of mordor. Worse than battlefront 2. This is all the evil and hatred of video game executives, balled up and given the title of a major IP. You want a silly fun little gacha game that doesn't treat you with absolute giggling contempt? Go check out Azur Lane.

Let me preface my poor review with this recommendation - If (and only if) you haven't played it yet, when this game is under $5, buy it and have a good time. But $40, no way. Noooooooo way. I beat this game about five years ago when the steam controller came out. By then, the game cost me $2 on steam. There's a reason it came out and immediately faded into the background - it was derivative, boring, and dense in all the wrong ways with only the combat BARELY holding it up. It was derivative even immediately following release. 2012 wasn't exactly an easy year for a bland game to come out, Journey, mass effect 3, far cry 3, the walking dead, borderlands 2, dishonored, diablo 3, FTL. Skyrim and dark souls had come out the year before. Fast forward to today, and we get... The same game... But wait, I get a loyalty discount of 50%! So I have to pay ten times what I paid for the original for a game that needed a whole lot more than a graphical overhaul (which It honestly didn't need, the art is practically the only part of the game that has aged well) You can get it to work with a steam controller, and it works pretty well (it's how I beat the game the first time) But the steam controller is discontinued. Damnit (double damnit since mine finally bit the dust after years of loyal service and I want another) The people calling it "lore rich" are also the type who might think my biochemistry textbook is "lore rich" because they can't understand 90% of the words that are simply overcomplicated ways of saying something we already know and recognize. An elf is an elf. Not a fae or whatnot. It has all the tolkein-esque tropes (not a bad thing) but just scratches off the words you know and writes new ones on in crayon. So you wind up barely understanding the concepts at all, and the game now has to go into absolutely EXCRUCIATING detail explaining the things that you would otherwise already know. So the game is just a plot dump. Constantly. Every single character tells you their boring life story that does nothing to flesh out the feel of the world (which is sparse at best) or develop their characters since random NPC's are utterly meaningless in this game. The combat is the ONLY part of this game that has aged with a modicum of decency (the art and sound is fine too, but those can't hold up this kind of game on their own, only enhance it. see World of Warcraft for that - old ass art and music but ties the gameplay and world together stunningly) and it too is feeling archaic and dated. The skill system is very nice and I like the theoretical versatility, but all it boils down to is what button you're mashing. The combos are okay, but don't tie together at all, and in a post-dark-souls world, lacks the weight and punch that we'd expect, nor does it have the over the top DMC style that the other camp of action games has. So it feels really, really clunks. Which is a shame, because this could have been a gold star selling point if they took a little time and polished it up to a mirror shine, because the core pieces are present. And none of the non combat gameplay has been improved. This game suffers HUGELY by being open world. If it was a linear fantasy action game, the smallish studio behind it could have had a potential smash hit. But they were chasing the "open world" trend at the time that just did this game no favors. Load times are inexcusable and unimproved from the original. The art direction gets really bland once you're away from the main set pieces. Monsters are forgettable. Quests are just the veeeery worst kind of "go to X kill Y of Z" I highly recommend you don't touch more than 1 in 10 of the side quests you get. Only do the ones that sound super fun. Final boss battle is a QTE, but a pretty genuinely awesome spectacle nonetheless. I didn't feel super cheated because of how fun it was to watch, but it could have been a top ten boss battle of all time if they'd have actually let you fight that amazing monstrosity they created. And lastly, the game has this really unpleasant feeling of claustrophobia because of one critical, instantly-fixable issue that they didn't touch: the camera is angled ever so slightly down. Not enough that it jumps out, but you'll start to feel kind of "closed in" like a PS2 game trying to save Vram. And then you look around and slightly pan up and WOW the game opens up. But it auto-pans down, so you can't just KEEP it at the angle that lets things feel big and airy. Would be so easy to fix and do so much to improve the game. So, yeah, I had fun with it for $2. I'd have had fun for $5. But it's not worth replaying. Or repaying.

An incredibly solid strategy game, with great visuals, gorgeous mech detail, and hits on almost everything you'd want in a mech commander game. The difficulty curve is tough yet fair, providing adequate challenge from even the very first non-tutorial mission (second mission) and you will be struggling to make ends meet, taking contracts just for money because your best mech got blown to pieces and you lost a pilot. The action is tense and spectacular, with a SERIOUS focus on positioning and strategy. Some missions you REALLY don't want to bring your heavy mechs because you need speed. Sometimes you want your light mechs because you need a spotter for your three monster LRM boats. You could have a berserker melee force, a sniper lance, and everything in between. Balance is great. getting in close has high risk and high reward. Staying far out leaves you potentially vulnerable if something gets in close. Overall, this game is addictive, satisfying, and deep. I have pretty much two complaints that keep it from a perfect ten. Firstly, it needs voice acting. It's painfully dry in the dialogue department, and I don't care about anyone but Yang. Even the flat dialogue itself would benefit some even modest voice acting. Community voice actors aren't that expensive and would add a huge amount of depth. And second, line of sight and body blocking needs to be a thing. I want to be able to dive in front of my shadowhawk that got knocked down and tank all subsequent shots with my dragon. I have run into this multiple times where I think to myself about how much I wish I could have saved one of my mechs by just body blocking, and have fond memories of MWO, a wolfhound diving into the backside of our critically damaged VIP, burying his face in the VIP's buttcheeks and tanking every single shot, saving the VIP and winning the game. Give me those two things (I don't expect voice acting, but patch in body blocking) and I'd be one happy clam. As it is? I'm still having a ton of fun.

People are idiots. I don't play multiplayer, so take this as a review of the single player. It's friggin great. Some real emotional moments, downright stunning visuals, solid core gunplay, punchy weapons, good mobility, real three dimensional movement in space, air combat is nice in an extremely arcade oriented style (you can roll, which is more than can be said for battlefront or battlefield) and the emotional heart of the game is a sarcastic robot straight out of interstellar. Is it DOOM? Of course not. It's not supposed to be. It's a romping sci fi adventure with a cast I'm genuinely going to remember, a somewhat forgettable plot, and will be one of the few FPS games that I will actually play again in the future. I'm not sure I'd pay 60 bucks for a single player FPS game, but I'd definitely say it's worth 45. People who just buy COD for the multiplayer are the typical angry teen morons. If you want a FPS multiplayer game with some realistic gunplay, just go play CSGO. The amount of work put into the single player makes this damn near as good as DOOM. I'd give it an 85 or so, rounding up we'll say 90.

I was hoping this game would scratch the SupCom itch that was left so badly un-scratched by planetary annihilation. By the time I finished the tutorial I pretty much hated the game. Functionally, it's mostly there. Units are slow and dim witted, they do not move in sensible formations (my repair units keep charging to the front of formation) and there is no in-mission voice acting to lend the game ANY degree of interest. But beyond "mechanically functional" my limited praise turns to severe criticism. The sound design is nothing short of appalling. Units make strange, irritating noises, with such little variety there's no audible way of distinguishing them. There are two types of noises, explosive or lasers, and they pew-pew-pew and explode with limp, uninteresting flatness. The "AI" narrator has this weird, pseudo-compressed audio feel that in no way matches the game we're playing. Explosions feel flat, guns feel weak, unit barks are nothing short of OBNOXIOUS to listen to. The music is bland at best, obnoxious and not matching the game at worst. The visual design seemed good in small video clips, but again, it's just bad. Textures and colors are very low quality and not well matched to create any sense of artistic cohesion. Everything is just a boring, stupid, simple hovercraft or a plane that flies like a ground unit in the sky. It may sound petty, but in this day, I expect guns to look like they're shooting the projectiles that are leaving their barrels. They do not. Projectiles just emerge from vehicles, sometimes not even from their guns. Maps are just flat out ugly, and wouldn't look out of place in 2002, only with worse actual level design. Overall, visually this game is a drab, clashing mess with no sense of personality or character. The UI is terrible. Everything has a delay that just doesn't feel right like it does in some games. the visual and interactive components to the UI are all over the screen and horribly, horribly communicated. You cannot tab switch between unit classes when more than one are selected. Strategically this game has absolutely nothing to offer. Visually, it's bland, unoriginal, and uncohesive. Audibly, it's downright obnoxious. Avoid this game, period.

I started out loving darkest dungeon. It is truly terse, dripping with atmosphere, with gorgeous visuals and exceptional narration. The gameplay is pretty good as well. But the game has, for me, a huge problem. It's just too punishing to play. The progression is slower than vanilla world of Warcraft, and you will spend a lot of time grinding dungeons far more than feels appropriate. I guess i just didn't enjoy the core gameplay loop enough, but once i got a solid team to level 6 or 7, i took a step back and realized that i haven't been having fun for the last ten hours. Even optimal playing is just not acceptable in the pacing. I feel like the game needs a setting that lets you bring in higher level characters to lower dungeons just to accelerate the grind that is necessary to progress, because i got so insanely tired on hiring four new guys, running a level one, and then firing them all. That system for getting money is demonstrative of a piece of bad design. Overall, very playable and i cab definitely see the appeal. But it just ground me down until i wasn't having fun and by that time i had fifty hours in and was not even half done.

I wanted to like this game more, the multi class system, the genuinely original plot, generally fun combat, all are absolutely smothered underneath a thick layer of grind and mostly terrible side quests. I feel like a streamlined approach would have made this a much better game, with almost none of the side quests and more time spent with the core characters. I love the New way that elves and immortal races are put forward, but feel like all the great ideas were just ground into boring dust with respawning enemies and a pretty poor interface and map for the multi quest style. Combat got very tedious, and while counterattack and blocking fishing felt nice, a lot of the combat got too clustered and messy to actually pull any smooth combos off, as you are far to easily interrupted, and enemy casters are literally the most frustrating thing i have ever seen in a video game. It mostly boils down to a button mash. I felt damage math was too complex, as I'd land a flurry of attacks for essentially no damage, only to have the next flurry take off eighty percent of a monster's life, so the damage system needed simplifying or better ways to communicate damage. Crafting was mostly junk, and the stealth is absolutely garbage. Overall, i don't think this one is worth playing, because while there were two excellent boss battles and a nice little story, it takes far too long to tell it and by the end, you simply won't care. I put fifty hours in, beat the last boss, and uninstalled it immediately.

I am not the type who thinks games can ever REALLY reach a ten. This one does. It's pure, delightful magic, with fascinating characters, brilliant writing, and real emotional pull. I won't spoil anything, but I killed someone early on and it was heart-wrenching. I reload the game and it lets me avoid killing that character, but it remembers that I did. The music is glorious. I am not a fan of the art style, but it is perfectly serviceable, so I can't really complain about it either. I was unsure about this game right up until I beat the title sequence. This truly is one of the top ten games of all time, purely though subversion of what you think of a video game is supposed to be.

This game is not perfect, but it really, really brushes up against it. In some areas, it can be so frustrating that it makes you want to eat your own keyboard, the game is a touch long, and the tension really needs to have a little more juxtaposition with relaxed, safe spots to explore. For the good: the game is scary as hell. Anyone who says it's easy, the alien is easily outsmarted, etc. is lying and just trying to be an obnoxious contrarian. Anyone who says the alien on two feet isn't immersive is also wrong. The alien is smart, it's omniscience as a constant threat from above or below even when it's not on the same floor creates a wonderful atmosphere, and it can be tricked into eating your fellow man when needed, or you can just sprint by the other **** and the alien will just decide on the closer brains to munch. It walks with a sense of security. Sure, it makes sense for it to be sneaky when it wants to be, but that's precisely what it has, absolute control. It doesn't NEED to sneak around munching heads because it's an apex predator. It moves with purpose and is absolutely unnerving to watch thump along, not giving a damn about anything around it, held against slithering, meaningful motions when it's stalking someone. It's not full of jump scares and grotesquery like dead space (a game I do like), it's got this feeling of oppression weighing down on you, not knowing what action or sound is going to bring the xenomorph out. The crafting is worked well into the game, giving you multiple options without overloading you with a bunch of items. This works out into giving you a resource pool with multiple outlets and letting you choose what you want to do with it, instead of giving you items themselves, forcing you to follow a certain method. This builds on the almost roguelike-nature of the gameplay. There are only two bad points that REALLY slam the game down at times. Firstly, the alien's AI is off at times. If it does decide to show up, and you happen to be in one of the hallway-type areas, you're going to be in for an obnoxious time. The alien doesn't patrol hallways well enough, it always sticks within a certain distance of you and never seems to pop back up into the vents. This leads to scenarios where you're hiding in a cupboard with your motion tracker up, and as the alien walks away, as soon as you hear it disappearing, you pop out only to see it having turned around and looking right out at your big stupid face. The best way to deal with it in hallway scenarios is to just nail the bugger with a molotov and make him piss off back to the vents for a few seconds. Secondly, the save system is obnoxious as hell. It's a neat little idea, but the problem with no quicksaves is that it punishes exploration in areas where there aren't many save points. I had a recurring problem where I'd run out into a big new area and 5-10 minutes of exploring, sneaking past the alien, distracting him into enemies and watching with glee as he chomped their brains out, only to just get killed before finding the save station and having to redo the whole thing over. So the best method for the game is to just sprint from save point until you find the next save point, tanking deaths, until you know where it is, and THEN do a sneaky stealth attempt where you try to be clever. it's inorganic and ****. Quicksaving would really solve all of the problems with the alien's occasionally dodgy AI and arbitrary punishment of time. Overall, I'd give the game an 8.5 (rounding up to 9.) the two flaws and lack of easing off the tension knob (the game really turns it up to 11, breaks off the knob and then sets it on fire. I don't count it as a negative because it's really just a personal thing) lead to me getting just exhausted while playing after a few hours, instead of hitting the sweet spot of keeping me in the zone nonstop. I had fun with it, it's VERY replayable, even if you know the plot, the game will never play the same way twice, and you'll get more than your money's worth if you're a fan of horror or alien. It's definitely the best sci-fi horror game out there (and system shock doesn't count because you can fight back) so definitely give it a look.

The game is playable. Mostly. That's the highest praise I can give it. I absolutely adored total annihilation and supcom1 (2 was fun but overly simple) and was looking forward to PA with serious intent. even bought in at $60 when it was "gamma" phase. I was blown away by the terribleness of it. The connectivity issues, the performance, the plastic feel of the units, the visual clusterf**k that the rounded planet and constantly shifting angle of the camera was, the fact that certain units are blatantly overpowered (annihilation games have never grasped the concept of making ground and naval units actually good) and the mechanics that make the whole planet concept even remotely interesting are impossibly hard to implement smoothly into gameplay. overall, the game is just poorly done. I applaud the devs for the idea, but the execution is appalling, and the amount of money they were demanding for alpha access (when the game was absolutely unplayable in that state) was just insulting. The game is basically in a very early beta state right now. that's the nicest way I can put it. bring up the balance, make it less of a visual headache, and fix the performance and implement smoother progression of tech and we'll talk. Until then back to starcraft and supcom FA

Very happy with this little gem. the art style is wonderfully functional, the gameplay is challenging and replayable. randomization CAN be your worst enemy, but 3/4 of the time you can make things work well enough to get a solid playthrough in. Not quite as polished and flawless as FTL, but I've got hours happily sunk into this game. Favorite aspect is that it's kind of mindless, yet still manages to challenge me. I love being able to wind down after a long day of work with a simple, challenging game while watching something on my other monitor. Worth every penny, and just like most roguelikes, don't expect every runthrough to be a complete finish.

Is it worth the money for the time you get out of it? not really. Am I glad I played it? insanely. The controls are the game's fun point, and if you're incapable of accepting repeated failure for the sake of entertainment, this is not a game for you. Moral? Buy it if you've got the money, but if you're cash strapped, wait until it's on sale. Either way, buy it.

The gameplay aspect is pretty much right where I want it. Deep, challenging, and replayable. A few too many "screw you" things that can happen (those tree monsters that follow you until you're dead for no reason) but overall, the gameplay is solid. But the art style is just disgusting to me. It's a game in love with tim burton to a fault. If this game had a decent art style I'd be playing it right now, but something about the scribble-doodle art style just doesn't lend itself well towards a game that you're supposed to play again and again. An adventure game? sure. But the gameplay just can't make up for the fact that I feel like I'm playing a papercraft game with art consisting of 15 bucks thrown at deviantart commissions from tim burton fans.

This review is for the single player, because the if you want to play a multiplayer RTS, you already know that SCII is about as good as it gets. The campaign is just atrocious. It's polished, as blizzard games always are, but it's about as relevant to multiplayer or RTS elements as I am related to a tuna. It's essentially a nonstop flow of new, gimmicky map ideas, and while I'm okay with mechanics that supplement the RTS elements, I don't like how many levels were DOTA-esque and central around the hero. Starcraft and warcraft 3 just don't blend well together, and it might make new players think that the hero concept has anything to do with the game, where it doesn't. I can count on one hand the number of missions where I felt like I could play proper zerg (I'm a terran player and still felt like zerg got cheated) and the number of departures from multiplayer zerg is almost frightening (queens are completely changed, all the mutations and different attributes of each unit make them feel completely different to how they do in multiplayer) The character arc for kerrigan is bipolar at best. She starts out just right, but almost immediately, goes completely bananas. They really could have paced her arc better, instead of wildly bouncing around. And pacing the story around what happens in the very first mission just doesn't set a good tone for the rest of the game. Interacting with your crew is pretty awful, as well. WoL's crew was equally as varied, but they were human, and thus, relatable. The zerg characters were just goofy and camp. Tychus and Matt in WoL were central, driving characters that you felt invested in. I went through every piece of dialogue in HOTS, and I absolutely hated almost every word spoken. I wanted nothing more than to not listen to those irrelevant sidekicks. Starcraft is dark and a very human story, and the zerg campaign made it feel goofy and completely inconsistent in tone, bouncing between drama, cliche, and humor with all the smoothness of falling down a flight of stairs. The game is also just brokenly easy. I breezed through it on brutal, and I'm by no means a great starcraft player. Cinematics are as good as video game cinematics can get. But unfortunately, and this feels unique in a blizzard game, they feel completely detached from the game that I was playing. If you're looking to play some multiplayer RTS, buy this game without even batting an eye. But if you're only looking for a top notch single player RTS, I'd suggest you go to **** and find the starcraft brood war mod done in SCII graphics.

The option to have two endings was a bad idea it made both endings feel watered down and rushed. The final engagement was a bit boring, and the love interest felt a little shoehorned in. Some animations are stiff and jerky, and voice acting was very dodgy. It froze my computer three times. Apart from that, however, the game **** me in like a black hole and I loved every last minute of it. A word of advice, however, if you want a good ending, do not kill any humans you don't have to, anywhere.

Short answer, is it worth your money? If you like tower defense, yes. If you don't, I'd try the dirt cheap (and very good) mobile version first. Long answer, it's the first game, with a pithy little story, hilarious voice acting, gorgeous graphics, and nicely polished gameplay over the first. Each unit actually feels useful, the transformations are genuinely good, the maps are challenging and reward twitch gameplay. The not so good would be that the game can move faster than you can move your character around. More than once I dropped a repair node or decoy to dart back for a powerup, only to have my squad plow into death. the ability to stop your units seems like it would help tremendously. I also just don't feel like it has much replay value. Something needs to be done with regard to multiple game modes and assault types. If you want a tower defense game with huge replay value, defense grid is probably a better choice. That said, it was $15 and it entertained me for about as long as an average AAA shooter does these days, so I'd still give it a passing grade.

While I can understand that the mechs were getting a bit on the crazy-fast side of things, to the point where tanks and quads were getting a bit pointless, there was something deeply satisfying about 4 and for answer's speed. You felt as good as the AI's, with lots of tweaking and fettling to perfect your playstyle and build that perfect next. Having gotten started with the AC series with 3 and all of its sequels, I appreciated the twitch gaming. But V has taken it in a wildly different direction. Gone are back weapons, introducing instead a maddeningly complicated, difficult to discern and recognize system wherein most of the damage types don't make sense, the weapons don't feel very potent, customizing them doesn't feel like it has any impact (to me at least) and single player is almost completely gone. I feel like a pretty seasoned AC veteran (having hundreds of hours logged in 3, SL, last raven, etc.) and I slogged through V's single player and very, very repetitive and confusing missions, and by the end, was left completely cold. There isn't anywhere near enough difference between light cores and tanks, the AI based opponents take way too much of a beating, they have decided to make the bloody mechs handle like a slow, ornery bear, and the level of complexity is brick-wall thick and once I'd figured it out, it didn't feel in the least bit rewarding. The online only idea was interesting, but ultimately felt unfriendly and uninteresting. Overall, it's an average game. Nothing particularly wrong, nothing good. Graphics and controls felt deliberately complicated, worse than AC3's (which were rewarding to master) or AC4's, which were buttery smooth and intuitive. Many aspects felt pointless and contrived. Overall, not a fan. Hoping that they'll bring things closer to AC3 in the next release, but with slightly more streamlined controls of 4 . Hell, I'd take 4 again as well. Just anything more than this bland piece of tripe. I can appreciate the urge to innovate, but breaking something because it wasn't broken just because you wanted something to fix just feels ****.

I'm not one to just bomb a game for silly reasons. I can find redeeming features in almost any game to at least call it mediocre. But Mass Effect 3 is the biggest letdown in PC gaming history. ME1 was plagued with wonky, unintuitive controls and menu navigation, but painted a rich, colorful universe that just demanded exploring. And explore we did. The Mass Effect universe was second only to Dune. The storytelling and acting were deep and meaningful, and the game just FELT enormous, even if it wasn't. You had so much freedom to do things your way, that it was mind boggling. The sequel narrowed the scope to your ship and your companions, telling a deeper, more personal story that blended wonderfully with the broad moral strokes in the first. Sure, you had to be a completion junkie to get the perfect ending, but the characters were fascinating, their stories meaningful, and the voice acting was superb. I really cared about the people I went to battle with, so much that I happily replayed it entirely just to make sure that one crew member survived. And then comes three. It starts out very serious, if a bit disjointed. You have saved the galaxy twice, and you still got court-marshaled? Your estranged companion is thrust upon you and then taken away. Relevant members jump in and out at complete random, you have no control over whether or not people live or die, and the woefully limited, boring citadel (seriously? How do you make the CITADEL boring this time?) is just a place where you go to get side quests that are essentially a dull minigame that doesn't even encourage exploration. Your companions are very mismatched, with Garrus and EDI being the only really meaty characters. Joker is thrust into some disjointed, ultra-serious role, and the animations make his eyes look downright crazed. All the animations are pathetically stiff and wooden. Why not simply use the wonderfully animated SWTOR engine and simply transplant the gorgeous textures? The stories are short, the side quests are almost meaningless and always presented exactly the same way. You either fly around collecting items whose relevance is never explained, and running from reapers in the minigame, or you are on a tiny, repetitive map fighting for equally irrelevant resources. The combat is okay, but feels so sluggish and imprecise that you can feel the "controller-itis" in its DNA. So low marks there. Also, I don't know about the other classes, but the Vanguard feels downright worthless, with absolutely no synergy in its skills, whereas in the first two, it was a fast paced engine of destruction. The new relationships are shallow, jerky, and forced upon you so quickly and back-to-back that it's laughable. And then the whole story draws to a conclusion. All that work you did to unite the galaxy, seems to have no impact or weight whatsoever. The final mission is disjointed, and all it appears to change is the length of your cutscenes, because it all boils down to the ending. The choices you're presented with mirror nothing that makes sense, let alone what your goal was. No matter what type of person you chose to play in the Mass Effect series, the ending presents nothing that you have any interest in pursuing. Not to mention glaring plot holes and absurdities. The ending was so bad, it single handedly ruined the entire series for me. After learning how things turned out, I will probably never pick up a Mass Effect title again. Nothing you can do will alter the eventual outcome, either. Finally, we get to the day one DLC. I didn't knock off a point from Portal 2 for having it. That DLC was cosmetic and completely unnecessary. But the DLC that adds 1% to the game and costs 20% of its retail cost and should have OBVIOUSLY been included, is the final nail in the coffin for bioware. I don't like making broad generalizations, but after the awfulness that was I can't help but get the feeling that EA has finally destroyed what was once my favorite RPG makers. The Mass Effect universe was the most astonishingly well-conceived, lore-ridden universe in gaming history, and EA just destroyed it. The user score (and it's not like the /v/ bombing of portal 2, which I stood against) clearly shows that EA just pays for ratings, because while barely tolerable as a game itself, the second you finish it, there is no way you can seriously sit back and think "That made sense. That ending was totally logical."

If you need linear gameplay, avoid this game. If you need pseudo-realistic graphics, avoid this. If you need a plot driven game, avoid this. If you hate being told what to do, this is the game to end all. Don't like the world? make a new, completely random one. Don't like the textures? change them. Bored with mining? take all those blocks and build a ten story tall castle shaped like longcat. Bored with the gameplay? install one of the -thousands- of user created mods and play an entirely new game.

I had to make an account for this game to combat the angry nerds dragging down portal 2's score, and write an actual review (which nobody seems to actually write these days) First: to address the concerns of angry ranting kids who think this game deserves a "0" or "1" score based on playtime, DLC, or cost. Games cost $60 now. 1.) playtime - This is a 6-10 hour game. If you can pull it off in less, you're very clever first time around. Don't criticize a game paced around a player's mental capacity (I'd say I'm good with physics and a quick learner, and it took me about six hours to complete the single player) This also excludes the concept of co-op. Which is an entirely different, 6-10 hour game. Unless you have no friends (which I'm fairly certain is the case, if you are in any way put off by this game) then this game easily trounces many of the other titles out there for the cost. People are acting as if Portal 1 was a long game. It wasn't. it was an hour or two at best. This is easily a fully fledged single player game. You have the single player (full game) co-op (also a full game) and the developer commentary (which any self-respecting nerd will do, also a full playthrough) 2.) DLC: I'm going to be honest, this could be a negative box, but hear me out. I just don't understand why the dlc costs so much money. $0.50? Sure, I'd buy $5 worth. But some individual pieces approach the $10.00 mark. It also makes little sense in a game that isn't built around playing with lots of other random players, like Team Fortress 2 is. You buy the DLC because you want other players to see how fancy you look. But the great thing is that if you don't buy it, there is no influence on gameplay whatsoever. Consider this: If valve simply didn't include any DLC and just gave you the two robots with nothing from the current DLC selection, not a single player would be whining about a lack of anything. So it's a boon for some players, and has no impact on the rest. 3.) Cost. Games are $60 now. Not $50. It's been a long time coming (and seriously, everything else on earth gets more expensive, and games have gotten -cheaper- over the past 20 years? Inflation happens.) and this is in no way a "minigame" with a big price tag. It's $45. that's 25% less than COD black ops. And it's got roughly twice the content. If you are the type who complains about full-length games dripping with polish and fabulous content costing 25% less than the industry standard, feel free to flush your head in the toilet. Or wait until it comes on sale (hello? this is STEAM. They'll put it on sale in two weeks.) That said, let's actually review the game. If Blizzard is to great cutscenes, Valve is to great characters. There's no way I could imagine any other game designer giving a little sphere so much capability to display emotion with nothing but small rotating rings. The sheer amount of polish here defies logic as much the portal gun defies physics. I was expecting a shiny game. What I got was a whole world, expansive, with painstaking attention to the slightest detail, irregardless of whether or not the player will even see it. From the opening seconds to the final battle, there isn't a single dull moment. The voice acting is second to none. There are only a few voices in the game, but they're all played to the level of the greatest shakespearean comedy. No, you didn't read that wrong. This is a tragic comedy unlike anything gaming has ever seen. There is something satisfying about knowing that the voice for your arch-nemesis was picked because she is a trained operatic soprano. Gameplay wise, there is nothing reused that hasn't been thoroughly rethought, modified, and polished. A playthrough with the developer commentary will demonstrate how much painstaking work and effort was put into this game. The new mechanics do not feel cheesy, they feel perfectly at home in the portal world. I found myself thinking "how did they make puzzles WITHOUT all of these amazing new toys in the first place?" I won't spoil the mechanics, but it's safe to say that the puzzles are even more perfect than Portal's. They're challenging without being frustrating. There is no trace of "console-itis" anywhere. Anyone saying there is, was deliberately looking for it and ignoring the astounding world. You still feel that same sense of reward from figuring out the "trick." The puzzles are as much exploring and learning each component as blind trial and error, which is outright gameplay magic. The final boss was unchallenging, but still felt tense and frantic, and was just as deeply satisfying as the first time you laid hands on the fancy dual-portal gun. If I had a negative point about the game, it would be the loading screens. There are lots of them. But on the whole, this is easily - very, very easily, one of the best games of all time, dripping with polish, humor, cleverness, and brilliant gameplay. And I do not say that lightly.