TheBinarySurfer

I'm being generous with the 3. Weak plot and mediocre writing, godawful animations that are actually worse (in the case of the face) than the ORIGINAL mass effect a game now 10 years old. Frequent massive bugs that break the storyline, NPC's not having death animations just teleporting to a 'dead' state half the time, the female character is so godawfully wooden and robotic (almost inhumanly so) in her facial expression i restarted as a male Ryder within hours. MMO style world = big and empty. A game TWO YEARS old managed to do better in making it feel 'full' than this (Witcher 3). The problems go on; bad driving mechanics, somehow weaker shooting mechanics than the previous game (how the hell did you manage this? It's like having designed a sports car and 'the new model' turns out as a horse and cart, horse sold separately!!). None of these flaws are breaking on their own, but a bit like a boxing match it's rarely one blow that puts it down and out for the count, but a succession of relentless failures to match even the standard of the previous mass effect 3, all annoying and some immersion breaking that add up to a weak, even bad game not worth the money. Combine all this with the SJW nonsense (every character almost is bi-trans etc.; i don't mind there being characters that are but come on, every one almost?) and I think we're watching the slow, gradual death of a studio by a thousand cuts. What's also fascinating is how the review sites are still scoring it relatively well, whereas the user reviews tell the real story in most cases I suspect. Oh and the multiplayer is ok; mediocre, nothing special but fun for a few hours with friends; really not a significant iteration on ME3's though. Also, sadly although the ending is better than ME3's, it's not by much; it's almost as though thousands if not millions of complaints re. ME3's ending somehow resulted in more shallow, callow, weak choices. I wanted to love this game very badly as I did it's younger relatives, sadly what I got was a fantastic PR campaign and little actual substance with almost no quality or love poured into it. This will be the last Bioware game I buy after now preodering two mediocre releases in a row (DA:I), I'll save my cash and plough it into a studio that at least takes pride in what they produce (e.g. CD Projekt). I'd like to blame EA, but based on some of the inexperienced, or just plain idiotic (Manveer for example) folks they've hired this one's all on you Bioware.

Simply excellent, best FPS i've played in 5+ years: intelligent level design, weapon upgrading system that reward good gameplay and using the tool for the job. No cover system, instead giving you health / ammo / armor for 'glory killing' (melee killing or instagibbing). A fanastic melee system with over a dozen unique animations, well scripted, the levels are fantastic and the enemies quite challenging. The campaign was also a pleasant surprise in that it took me about 12 hours to complete (this is very long for a modern FPS single player). The 9 rather than a 10 is for the...lacklustre multiplayer, just didn't feel great and the same care and love that was clearly lavished on the main game didn't feel quite there. There's also dozens if not hundred of nods in there to classic PC games - doom, quake and others. Oh, nearly forgot, the boss fights are the right mix of challenging and interesting with just a little bit of 'you died, learn the fight!' in there to make it not a cakewalk. Interesting take on the original Doom story too. Really this is two separate games: 8/10 on multiplayer for daring to be different to the CoD/BF bland model and being more fast paced, 10/10 for the single player, excellent and no regrets whatsoever. I hope they release some significant SP DLC packs (or better yet, sequels).

Incredible game; very stable, great writing, excellent voice-acting, interesting and engaging quests, good crafting and loot system, huge epic scale, dozens of hours of fun in the base game alone, and the expansion(s) appear equally epic. CD Project set the new standard for open-world RPGs: this is the milestone to hit in the future for all developers: the best RPG i've played since Baldurs Gate 2 / Dragon age, possibly even better than both!

Fantastic setting (WAR world at the end times), great idea to copy the L4D model....Where it starts to fall down is the execution and then falls flat entirely in stability and features as advertised. I could go into a lot of detail, but after less than the 2h minimum playtime I gave up: multiple crashes, each resulting in a total loss of the time invested in the current game session and no bug report / error message to check for, AI useless so if you lose a team-mate it's essentially game over (and don't even think about trying to play with all bots, no chance). No offline mode for play with bots (see above). Buggy as hell Ratmen, frequent deaths of player character due to clippiing into scenery. Instant disconnect and loss of game session and all progress if you get a steam disconnect while **** list goes on. First and last Fatshark product i'll buy frankly...I'm amazed by the reviews on this game i.e. that they are largely positive. Let's not even start on the piss poor loot system and arbitary rolling + rather silly 'buff your role' mechanic that frankly turns the game from a challenge into a near impossibility.

A great game, great concept and excellent setting that suffers from a number of baffling design decisions and poor 'knee jerk' balancing. The Microtransaction model also loses another point for me as done right it's great, but feels like SoE are starting to 'milk' it a bit. They are getting better at it, and the gameplay in an organised outfit (BRTD in my case) is incredible (this is not a CoD/BF4 style log-on play solo game). Overall it could be better, but is still currently head & shoulders above the rest of it's modern peers.