deskrit

A very hollow, janky, buggy game. Feels like it was made by people who read a description of games like Elite, Freelancer, Privateer, X and other games in the "space enterprise/action" genre and decided to make a game that could meet a checklist of features of said games, but with absolutely no depth or meat or, in all honesty, fun.

Cheese: The Game. That is For Honor. Forget the fact the game doesnt actually function on a technical level for a moment. Sure, that makes it a 0 and well deserved, because a game this technically broken doesnt deserve a single cell and the creators deserve some serious financial repercussions. Forget all of that for a moment and let me tell you about For Honor. For Honor is a game with 12 characters, 4 of which are playable. The other 8 are for marketing purposes only. They can be selected and using your input device on them in game will make them move and even execute moves and it will feel as though they exist, but they dont. Why? Because the balance in this game is ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS. For Honor is at its core a fighting game, akin to Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. Those games generally end up the same way, only 1 or 2 characters are "top tier". These things generally are unavoidable, but are organic. Most fighting games end up with a "tier list" organically, birthed from the billions of hours that millions of players worldwide will put into the game, learning and mapping it all out. The developers rarely actually KNOW which characters that players are going to figure out interesting and powerful tactics for, they simply develop the roster around a core set of mechanics and design philosophies. In effect, most fighting games evolve and distill down naturally. For Honor was designed from the factory with a tier list in mind. And the way in which this game plays makes it absolutely hell if you decide you like one of the unplayable characters. If you REALLY want this game, you need to google for the "Best for honor characters" RIGHT NOW before you buy it, and decide if one of the 3 or 4 viable ones interest you. You see, the problem is that despite what you may be told by people who casually play the game, or what you might see on YouTube videos, For Honors combat is dog simple. It is built entirely around spam, and abuse. Each of the 4 playable characters are playable because they possess a handful (or even just a single) insanely powerful, easy to perform move or ability that renders the entire roster nothing but cannon fodder. Take the peacekeeper, the current top tier character (and without doubt she will be until the heat death of the universe, as she has been since closed beta and has been receiving BUFFS each patch). Her basic light attack is so fast that only 2 other characters have the block speed to block it. And if for some reason she falls under attack, or faces another PeaceKeeper she can dodge with such speed and distance that it renders her invulnerable until she decides otherwise. Forever. With 0 cost of risk or resource. She is unstoppable.... Unless you pick one of the others, who have equally broken mechanics, and have had them for the entire run of the games playable(such as it is with the network issues) existence. Warden is nearly as fast, and can kill any character in 2 hits with single button moves and has unblockable chainable stunlock. This move takes 2 buttons. Warlord has unblockable stunlock that chains into unblockable stunlock and cannot be interrupted, as well as nearly 3x the the health of any other character. This move takes 2 buttons pressed at once. Orochi is even faster than PeaceKeeper and has even higher damage and the second longest range in the game, and can dodge-attack with unblockables with a stick input + 1 button. And those are the 4 characters that make up 85% of the matches online. Without fail, without change, it will be those 4 in whatever combinations every single match in every single game mode. If you pick anyone else, everyone on your team is going to moan and whine at you. I should also mention that EVERY SINGLE MAP IN THE GAME, IN EVERY MODE is built around removing combat from each encounter. You can throw people into pits in this game, it ends fights in seconds. There are pits everywhere. The games duel mode, which focuses on 1v1 balanced combat.... always takes place on a narrow bridge or a cliffside. Not just every other map, but literally the duel arenas are built around the pits. So most duels end up just being whoever can press the throw button first. Loading takes longer. In summary, For Honor is a haphazard comedy of disastrous design encapsulated in a beautifully rendered game that looks amazing in marketing shots and YouTube videos but has no depth or actual meat to the gameplay. Between the deliberately terrible balance, the lack of actual combat due to all maps designed around throwing each other off cliffs, to the fact the game hasn't actually been functional since release due to the networking architecture being so (well documented elsewhere and not the focus of this review) broken I feel safe in declaring this the worst high budget AAA release of 2017. Maybe ill be proven wrong later in the year, but i sincerely hope I dont end up buying whatever game out-craps For Honor

A legitimately bad game masquerading as a decent XCOM remake. Man, I had a review in my head about this game but as I sit here getting ready to write it all down i just find myself drained of energy thinking about this game. Its basically everything you loved about XCOM but distilled down and made tedious, clunky (not that the original XCOM wasnt a bit clunky even in its day)and artificially difficult. I have heard it described as a puzzle game more than a strategy/tactics game and I feel that is very true. Instead of planning out battles and strategy, you are simply guessing which research is the "right" one or which broken combat mechanic you need to exploit for the next battle. But none of that really matters. The ONLY thing that actually exists in this game is the AWFUL, unspeakably bad air-combat minigame. The ENTIRE game is dependent on it. And its awful. Just so bad, unfun, stupid, broken, and repetitive. Note I didnt say hard, because its not. Its dog simple because its so easily manipulated for victories that its pointless. Except its the most important thing, because ALL of your "reputation" with other nations is based on how long and how many UFO's you allow to roam their airspace, and the game is idiotically unforgiving. You let a few get by, and you lose the campaign. But you wont know it for awhile, its only a little while later that you realize your rep dropped so much from those 2 UFO's that you missed that your funding level dropped to the point that you can no longer continue. The nations of earth do not care that you stopped 90 + UFO's in one month, and killed hundreds of alien soldiers on the ground. They only care that you let 2 slip through and a fishing trawler was strafed costing the lives of 2 fishermen. NO MORE FUNDING FOR YOU. The air-combat very much encapsulates the entire game: artificial difficulty pretending to be challenge and depth that completely falls apart as soon as you put a modicum of effort into it. All you need to win any air battle is one plane to bait, and other planes to shoot, and thats LITERALLY IT. The types of planes change, but ultimately dont matter. And as mentioned above, the entire game is built around this. You will very quickly learn this and have so much money that it trivializes the game. **** HAVE TO DO THIS OVER AND OVER AND OVER, OFTEN 100+ TIMES A MONTH (the games time measurement). You will have 5 or 6 ufos appear, click intercept, click the planes, click the UFO and do this 6 times. Then press time acceleration and have to fight 6 tedious air battles that all play out EXACTLY the same, and i mean that. EXACTLY. Also, the air battles have Atari graphics, and thats not an exaggeration either. The types of aliens you fight on the ground change. You get better weapons, but they are 100% graphical and have 0 effect on combat. You have beautiful artwork on the ground maps, but none of it matters. It is there to obfuscate and create the illusion of depth and tactics. The ground battles are almost exactly like the air battles except the terrain is procedurally generated and the computer cheats profusely to the point that its actually pretty enjoyable to just watch them break line of sight, shoot through walls, move the equivalent of 100- 200 movement points a turn (your soldiers typically have 40-60), dodge multiple 95+% hit chance shots, ignore AOE damage from grenades and rockets, and just generally do everything a game like this should never, ever do. I want to go deeper into the ground combat but im getting near to the character limit on this website and im just about out of energy. Just to say, that if you willfully lobotomize your good sense, you can get some challenge out of the ground combat. It looks wonderful, and can be highly amusing, but this involves ignoring the terrible AI and purposefully ignoring the handful of things that break the **** problem is that if you dont use them, you will just die to the bad fundamental design. Amuse yourself for a second here, just trust **** to google or whatever search engine. Search xenonauts strategy. Specifically search Terror Mission strategy or Base Assault. Those are 2 of the most difficult mission types. Now, just read what people say on forums. Here, let me help you: "Just load up your guys with explosives" "Give everyone a rocket launcher" "You havent been using rocket launchers and C4?" "Didnt you bring enough rockets?" "Did you forget to switch out all gear for rockets and C4 on some new soldiers?" "Just load your men down with C4 and rockets until the inventory is full, drop all that stuff at your starting point and come back and get more rockets and C4 when your guys run out" "Just start shooting rockets into the fog of war when the map starts, if you can see terrain shoot at it." "Oh the civillian casualties, yeah dont worry it says you have to save them but the game doesnt track it, just shoot rockets everywhere" Thats xenonauts

Flawless example of style over substance in game design. This is a beautiful game. The sound is the best in the industry, as you would expect from DICE. They know videogame sound. The graphics, everything from shaders to particles are exemplary, and the optimization is fantastic. There is no better optimized game engine on the market than Frostbite and BF1 is the finest example of that. Unfortunately, Battlefield 1 is also the worst entry in the entire franchise. We all remember Battlefield 1942 fondly for its crazy, insane, chaos based gameplay. We remember the ships, the planes, the tanks, the big maps and the hilarious hi-jinks. Noone remembers that game fondly for its gameplay. Battlefield 1 lacks all the charm of 1942, but is loaded to the gills with its janky, unbalanced, and sloppy gameplay. BF3 and BF4 for the first time in the franchise, made the actual moment by moment gameplay good. The gunplay, the vehicular combat, and the interaction of those elements were top notch, and finally... FINALLY the gunplay matched up to the scale and quality of everything else. It did the whole schtick of "modern tactical shooter" better than anything on the market and made the contemporary (and far more widely known and popular) Call of Duty feel like a terrible joke. Bf3 and BF4 had tight, responsive, and skill based infantry combat that sent a chill down the spine and took serious effort to master. Noone loaded up BF3 for the first time and went on a killing spree of epic proportions. No, you loaded the game up and died like a **** for several hours until your body and mind adapted to the gameplay and environment, which were designed to reward skill. In short, BF3 and BF4 had a "skill cap" that both existed and had a notable and noticeably scale. Sure, you could be a 45 minute first time and get in a tank and slaughter some infantry for awhile. But then again.. your in a tank. That was good. As soon as you came up on a better player in a tank, you died. As soon as you came up on an engineer with more skill, you died. BF1 has none of this. BF1 has none of the good of BF3/4. Remember how you had to "tame" weapons in BF4? Remember how great your 950RPM AEK-971 was? or your 1000RPM FAMAS? Remember how you were taken aback by the recoil at first, and died like a moron 20 times in a row until you learned to pull against it, learned that the AEK was better in 4 round bursts, learned to yank to one side, learned to yank down sharply at first and then loosen up a bit on the compensation in full auto situations? Remember how your slow firing 500-600 RPM weapons required you to have better aim in CQB, required you to pull up to hit the head in order to stand a chance against high RPM weapons in CQB, but at range you could burst fire and out shoot them? Remember when it took skill to play the game? Those were fond memories. BF1 has none of that. In fact, you cannot burst fire any weapon in BF1. The only rapid fire weapons in the game are the assault SMG's and the Support LMGs and if you try to burst fire then you miss every shot. The LMG's are HARDCODED to be mag dumped. The guns LITERALLY INCREASE IN ACCURACY WHEN YOU HOLD DOWN THE TRIGGER. It even tells you this in the tooltip when you pick Support. This means if you want to hit a target midrange, you need to open fire and just randomly loose 20 or 30 rounds until the "spread" starts to visibly tighten up, then actually aim. Its absolutely moronic and encourages bad, spammy gameplay. The SMG's are no better, but instead of increasing accuracy the more you full-auto, they simply have no accuracy beyond CQB and extremely low bullet range and velocity. The developers solution to balancing SMG's (the primary weapon of the assault class) to everything else was to simply make them worthless beyond 30 or so feet. No matter what you do, be it single shots or careful bursts (which you cant actually do because first-shot accuracy is no longer higher than follow ups like in most FPS games and prior BF titles) you will NEVER hit targets outside the intended combat range. Scouts and Medics now use sniper rifles and DMR's. Thats it, they are just bolt action sniper rifles or DMR's, not much else to be said about them. NEVER. Skill plays no factor. And thats the killer of this game. The game is now built around rigid roles for each class. You cannot deviate from those roles. You can no longer take a high RPM CQB weapon and simply get really good with it, and use it to soften up targets at further than its optimal range with precise bursts. You can no longer take longer range, lower RPM weapons and do well with them in CQB by learning to aim for the head/ride the recoil up to the head Im at the 5000 character limit. I wanted to go into more detail but i dont have room. But suffice to say, the game has lost everything good about BF3/4 (tight gameplay, powerful but skill-heavy vehicles) and replaced it with bombast that looks great but feels terrible

Mouse and keyboard are completely disabled **** is connected. This game was released in 2015. Let me retype that, so you are clear. Mouse and keyboard are completely disabled **** is connected. In a game released in 2015. The only way to re-enable is to use your gamepad to access the options menu. A deal breaker for your basic 360 plugged into a USB port, but for someone with a bluetooth PS3 controller, its beyond a deal breaker. This game was a gift, or I would have steam refunded it immediately. Intolerable.

The game no longer has mouse aiming. In fact, the mouse is completely unused, even the menus are fully keyboard or gamepad driven. If you, like many, have hundreds of hours in BOI Vanilla with the mouse + KB then this is a purchase you should most certainly skip. Its an absolute deal breaker, and I wish I had realized before giving the developer money for this game.

The original Baldurs Gate 2 is considered by many to be the best RPG of all time. Enhanced Edition is a half arsed, repackaged, joke of an "update". The new content is trash. This is low grade, modteam level stuff and not the good kind. Other than obviously having a proper audio studio, the voice acting is even comically bad. The writing on the new characters and the Black Pits 2 is just a joke. The combat of the Black Pits 2 is effortless. Effortless in that they basically put old mobs in the arena, changed the names, and said "hmm just make them immune to everything, figure out a way to hack the engine so that this creature is not even effected by things that are not actually possible in the games rules, make that creature ignore AC/Saves/resistances, this creature just add a couple 0's to the HP number, and this other one lets just triple its damage and add instant kill abilities, oh and forget about QA its not important". The Black Pits is actually really great in concept, and I wish Beamdog had been competent enough to execute it with even a modicum of quality. It should also be noted that as of this writing, there is a pretty good chance that if you try to import your party from the EE of Baldurs Gate 1's Black Pits, it will probably crash the game and corrupt the file. That right there is a good idea of the quality of the new content. They created a pittance of new content, and then didnt even QA it enough to make it functional. The only redeemable bit of it has one of its best features (start a party in BG1 EE Black Pits, play through the BG2 EE Black Pits with the same party much like the original vanilla games) is about 50/50 on whether or not it will eat your party when you import. Make a backup before you even try. The biggest problem overall is that QA is non existent. Over the years fans have patched and improved these games to an impeccable state (these as in BG1, BG2, IWD and so on). Beamdog basically threw all that out and just scaled up the art, and dorked around with the source code enough to break everything. The game crashes and soft locks in the most exciting and unexpected ways. Its amazing that a game with access to millions of dollars and professional game developers can utterly ruin something that a bunch of fans made perfect for free. The entire EE re-release series is so buggy that its widely considered to be a practical joke, or possibly some sort of social experiment. Its easy to see why if it wasnt for the fact that money was spent, and is charged, for this game. Baludurs Gate 1 and 2 are masterpieces. Undisputed examples of "video games as art". Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 Enhanced edition are terrible, half arsed "updates" to games that were already perfected both technically and content wise long ago. If you want to play these games for the first time or want digital copies, then just buy the pack avaialble with the original versions of all the Infiinte Engine games that has been avaialble for years and install the latest community updates and enjoy yourself. Do not give Beamdog reward for trash, because the greatest danger is that they have said they wish to make Baldurs Gate 3 someday, if they make enough money on these re-releases. That would be a travesty, and if you contribute to that then I hate you. And yes, I hate myself, because I have these stains in my Steam list too :(

Are you an older gamer? Do you fondly remember Mega Man from the golden days of Nintendo? Did you love those games? Have you not played them in a long time, but sometimes sit around and reminisce with friends in a "hey you guys remember Mega Man? those games were awesome!!!!" kind of way? Then you will enjoy MM9. If you are a big MM fan, as in you STILL play those old games, then you will hate this game with a burning passion. I could go on and on, but the im going to keep this short. There is one statement that a friend said (another one of those "still plays MM games" kind of person) about this game that sums it up perfectly. To paraphrase: "Its like Capcom suddenly realized that the NES Mega Man games were popular on the internet, and then they went to gaming forums and searched out discussions about those games, noted that everyone talked about how hard they used to be challenging and that it took real skill and dedication to beat them, and rewarded said attributes with excellent gameplay, and wrote all this down on a checklist. Then the lead designer, at the beginning of the project somehow distilled all those qualities down to one statement about what gamers wanted: GAME MUST BE REALLY HARD. They mistook "Challenge" for "Hardness" and built the entire game around that. And to boot, the guy must have been a really crappy designer because the entire source of the challenge in this game is a whose who list of terrible things that the AVGN has made a career out of lampooning." That sums it up. This game is as hamfisted in its "challenge" as Mega Man 8, but with a dose of HGH. And yes, I mean that in a bad way. However, this game has some of the best music of the entire franchise. They got that part right at least.

Extremely poorly designed game. Its obvious all effort was put into the art department and the marketing, because the gameplay is a step back in every way from BF3. The technical shortcomings are also staggering, to the point that the game is still effectively non-functional, even after 6+ months. From my standpoint, BF4 is the end of the franchise. The ill will this disaster **** has created for DICE/EA has destroyed the Battlefield for the fans of the games. I would be willing to bet, from this point on, we will see BF head in a Freemium/casual direction. There is no hope anyone will be willing to spend the 120$ pricetag again, in a year when BF5 will be released.

World of Tanks is a game based entirely on an RNG (Random Number Generator). Any veteran of the game will tell you, that basically, nothing matters. Every single aspect of the game boils down to the RNG and the vague boundaries that are defined in its algorithms. No-one knows exactly how it works, but what is known is that you have as good a chance at succeeding at one thing, as you do failing at it. The in game numbers listed on the weapons and tanks are almost completely irrelevant, because the actually mathematics used to determine armor penetration and damage are so convoluted and apparently outside the bounds of what is listed or logical, that its meaningless. Wold of Tanks is a game designed to completely remove player input, decision making, and "skill" with the use of the RNG to determine everything from whether you can hit your target, to whether you can even SEE your target, and its built around a game that gives the illusion of actual action based, skill oriented gameplay. The intent of the game is to allow everyone to be able to succeed, regardless of skill level or investment. In this way, it gets significant props and can never be accused of being "pay to win" because everyone is at the mercy of the RNG and its modifiers. The game also can manipulate individual player accounts to keep them within a certain "success metric" in order to make you want to keep playing, and keep folks from getting frustrated. Its not known the exact number, but it seems as though the sweet spot is somewhere between 48-51. That is, the game will manipulate your ingame performance behind the scenes (by performance i mean your chance to penetrate/be penetrated, damage, etc) to keep your win rate somewhere between 48% 51%. If you get above around 52.25% win rate a modifier of varying intensity gets put on your account that causes your shots to penetrate less often, and your armor to be more susceptible to penetration and damage, until your win rate drops back down to the target global ratio. The games matchmaker works brilliantly in that it lumps people together who are above or below the curve, and places them against folks at appropriate levels to balance out the regional server winrate. IE, the people on your team are most likely all either doing too poorly, or too well, and are being placed against a team that they are highly likely to either win or lose against, thus bringing both groups of players up or down in winrate as necessary to keep the golden 48-51 ratio. Its quiet an impressive algorithm, but it completely removes the competitive aspect of the game and renders everything you do meaningless. It is of course possible to go above or below the global ratio, if you are just absolutely deliberately trying to do badly or have a really good group of friends you play with that are capable of overcoming the account modifiers (this is hard to do, the game limits groups of friends called "companies" to 3 per match. each match is 15vs15 so its very, very hard for 3 people no matter how skilled to change the outcome, although its very possible if your company is skilled and coordinated). However, rarely, you will get a match that is balanced with the Matchmaker algorithm not trying to promote or demote anyone. When this happens the game really shines, and its a shame that the game is built around the model that it is, because the game can be very fun. Unfortunately everything is designed to be very comfortable and to prevent anyone from either falling too far behind or getting too far ahead, in order to encourage spending money on the in-game real world items and "premium time" (which increases your rate of experience gain for leveling up tanks). It is obviously a very successful system, as the game has done extremely well, but after playing awhile it becomes utterly soul-less and unsatisfying and only the absolute die-hards or the folks that have spent vast amounts of real world currency hang around beyond the tier 5 or 6 vehicles (out of possible 10 tiers).

Mortal Kombat is a feast for the senses. Its without doubt the best looking fighting game released, and has a fascinating story mode with great voice acting. Story mode is basically the original 2d mortal kombat' retold as an interactive movie, with the storyline cleaned up and made coherent, and its very well done. Its pure camp, but its damn good camp, and the hamfisted delivery of certain scenes is purposeful, and wonderful. Dont mistake this as a cheesy comedy experience though, as the story is well told and has a "serious" tone. Its by far the most interesting and best told fighting game story ever, made all the better by the distinct and wonderfully modeled and animated characters. The AI is competent, and the superbosses are well designed and mostly avoid the super cheapness of the old games. Unfortunately, when you go up against another player, everything falls apart. This game's online component, as of this writing, is completely and utterly broken. The matchmaking barely works, the lag is stunningly bad, and the overall experience is barely functional on a technical level. I would estimate ~70% of your online games will end with a "desync" or will simply never begin due to instability in the handshake protocols. If you stick with it though, you will get the occasional lagfree, functional match, or if you have a community of local folks to challenge in person of course. Unfortunately, the balance as it currently is, is nonexistent. The overwhelming majority of characters are useless, due to the way the game calculates combos, priority, and frames. Roughly half a dozen characters are competent, and its less because they are balanced and more because they have 1 or 2 broken moves that are either unavoidable or get such high priority in match ups that they simply will not fail to connect unless your opponent is using one of the other broken fighters. Some characters can pull off combos that will remove over half of your opponents life bar using only two buttons and a couple of the DPAD directions, regardless of timing. Others struggle to pull off maneuvers that remove even a tenth of the lifebar, while requiring thumbcrushing finger dexterity and feline timing. Needless to say, you will rarely encounter anything but those handful of "working" characters online. In over 300 fights online I have only seen about half of the roster in action. There are issues that have been resolved, but at a snails pace. I do not know if the developer will be able to fix and balance this game before the playerbase moves on to something else or goes back to other, more stable and reputable fighting games. Right now, this game is worth it for the phenomenal story mode alone, but I would be hesitant to recommend it beyond that, given that the multiplayer component is so utterly broken. My advice would be to get it if the idea of a well made, interactive Mortal Kombat movie appeals to you, but if your looking for a solid, well built fighting game, then look elsewhere. A good base exists here for a great, long lived fighter, but as of right now, its nowhere near ready to claim that accolade.

Spiral Knights is a very deceptive game. It is free to play, if your happy with ~20 minutes a day in the same 8 recycled stages. At first it seems like a very casual, accessible game that is a great value. Unfortunately, if you want to advance, literally beyond the first 20 minutes of gameplay, you will have to spend money. Every single item in the game costs crowns, which is the ingame "gold" and energy, which is real world money from your credit card. You get 100 energy for free, and it regenerates slowly back up to 100 in what is called "mist" which is just jargon for "free energy". Each dungeon delve takes 10 energy, and if you run out of your mist you either have to wait, sell off a MASSIVE amount of crowns (an amount that is unlikely to be gathered by adventuring with your mist reserves early on) or spend real world money to buy energy. Now is where the trap starts - once you get past the initial "tier 1" areas, you are locked form advancing further without upgrading to "2 star" equipment. It costs a small number of crowns and >50< energy to craft a single 2 star item(as well as a purchased recipe and materials that drop down in the dungeons), and you need a full outfit (4 items at least) to get to the "tier 2" stages. This gets progressively more intense, to access tier 3 you need 4 star items which cost 2500 crowns and 200 energy - more than is possible to have on your person without spending MASSIVE amounts of time grinding dungeons and hoping you do well, or spend real world money. This is all well and good, and even with a small investment you can get alot of play time (as of writing, 4.95$ USD will get you 1600 energy points) but you better be careful, because if you end up not liking your gear you will have to just live with it or spend more money to replace it, as all gear binds to you once you equip. It should also be noted that when you die in the game, it costs an uncapped, increasing amount to resurrect. First death is 5 energy, and it doubles each time, and there is seemingly no cap. This can get really, really expensive and you have to learn to control your natural instinct to click the "revive now!" button when you die. And die you will. This game plays like a hybrid of zelda/gauntlet/diablo and its really, really hard. Each weapon class has a different moveset, and some are better suited to certain types of enemies. Woe be to you who brings a striker to a wolver fight. Again, you are going to have to pay in order to have a robust array of gear once you get into the midlevel game. Enemies can be rather unbalanced, sometimes you will get hit for 10% of your life gauge, and in the next room face an enemy that hits for 75% of it. Enemies have a dodge move that allows them to slide around you, and there is no counter to this other than learn when they do it and be able to move or block and hope your block strength holds out. The gameplay is pretty rewarding once you learn the different enemy types patterns. The problem is there are not alot of enemy types, and eveything is just a palette swap from the low level enemies. The stages also, are supposedly randomly generated but in truth there are about 10 "layouts" that get randomly shuffled around and populated with creatures. It gets old very fast, and only someone who really gets their jolly's off on this type of "stab stab block" gameplay will want to stick around and spend the real money that it requires to advance in the game. The player run economy is pretty interesting, only to see how an items value will change over time as new items become popular. SEGA and Three Rings promise lots and lots of new content and this could provide for a very compelling experience at some point in the future, but as of right now there is not alot of depth or gameplay to be had. Luckily the entire system has a robust built in "demo" just from the fact that its a "F2P" game so you should know by the first day or two whether its worth it for you to spend actual money on the game.

Lets get this out of the way: graphically speaking, Crysis 2 is noticeably behind the original, both artistically and technically. This should not be a surprise given the console oriented nature of the title. A side effect that has been turned into part of the games advertising is that "it runs better than Crysis 1 because of the optimizations". This is not true, it runs better because the game is so much smaller in scope and the fidelity has been reduced. I will also point out that the entire graphical options menu has been removed, replaced with 3 presets ala Metro 2033. Make of that what you will. The worst aspect, though, comes from the console oriented gameplay. Gone is the intuitive nano-suit from the original game, replaced by what boils down to a handful of hot keyed spells with some upgrades. Strength and speed are now "automatic" which, gameplay wise, means they are no longer present; your jump and sprint are now equivalent to the original strength and speed. The cloak and armor work more or less the same, but the means by which you pick them has been changed to a simple hotkey instead of the radial "jinking" of the first game(which had options for both, as well as combination keys for activation), which cuts the possibility of those awesome predator style murder fests that you might have enacted, or watched on youtube. Those wont be happening anymore. Partly because of the suit, mainly because of the layout and philosophy of the game. The entire game just feels alot more homogenized. The levels and engagements are totally linear now, there are only a handful of encounters that have multiple approaches. You no longer have any real tactical choice, but there is the illusion of it by means of very deliberate, obvious, and caged approaches that never go beyond "forward charge with assault weapon down street with plenty of overturned cars to duck behind" or "obviously open building window with sniper ammo in the closet". That's pretty much it. There is no sneaking, no grabbing a guy in cloak, jumping on a building and throwing him into the ocean before any of his buddies can react. No planting bombs on a roadway used by a jeep, waiting in the forest for it to come by and BOOM. No cloaking behind a rock and firing a silenced rifle bullet into the gas tank of a passing truck, and watching while the crew runs screaming into the ocean before picking off the couple of guys who survived. The sprawling jungle is gone, replaced by a cityscape that would have a hard time fitting its entirety into the first section of the original game. This is a console shooter ported to PC with the word Crysis stamped on the box. It is as enjoyable as any other game of this genre, perhaps one of the better ones in fact, but dont be fooled by the pedigree. This is not the Crysis 2 you thought it would be.