Recent reviews by A_Nerd

Shockingly expensive for what is an extremely limited and in many ways broken game. Huge fundamental features are missing. I wanted to like this game so badly, it looks SO COOL, but it just isn't fun at all.

Close to Half Life Alyx in terms of AAA quality of experience, surpassing it with some of the innovations here.

You can't pause the game. At all. Ever.

It is truly incredible to me that a large group of professional game developers went through all the work to make this game, and thought, yeah that's a good idea. I really am astounded.

Obviously there's lots of other problems with the game, but for me, this is enough reason alone for a refund.

Campaign is not really balanced as far as I can tell. If you want to play singleplayer get ready to just use super cheesy tactics and have super long boring battles where nothing interesting happens. I tried the tyrannids and lost completely, so I looked up online what I was doing wrong, apparently the only real strategy is to just sit hidden in gas clouds and fire from maximum range, ignoring all the other cool stuff the tyrannids can do because it isn't balanced to be actually viable.

So yeah I guess you could play like that but why? Why is the difficulty cranked up so high (even on easy)?

EDIT: When I say difficulty btw, the AI isn't good, it just gets way more ships than you. That's it, you have to figure out how to beat a fleet 3 times the size of yours, at a certain point that isn't interesting at all. Because the only way to do it is to use super game tactics that aren't fun.

For a brief minute I was in the top 10 or so players of this game. That was a while ago now, and I haven't kept my skills up, but just briefly I was there. This game is deceptively unique amongst roguelikes. No i-frames, meaning there is no invincibility grace period when you get hit. The levels are unforgiving and the bosses are extremely challenging. Little Hunter in particular is an especially impossible boss. But when you beat the throne, when you destroy the generators and manage to loop, there is scarcely a better feeling. It's a good game if you have the time to deal with its BS. If you have the patience to learn what mutations are good and which are worthless, to get good with the guns that are worth taking, and deal with the repetitive early levels, then I recommend this game. It's simple in what it offers, but rewarding in the challenge that it presents.

It hasn't got more content than Enter the Gungeon, or more synergies than The Binding of Isaac. It isn't a complicated or particularly deep game, but I still haven't found a more rewarding challenge than Nuclear Throne. If you are looking at buying this game in 2022, then you know what you are getting into, good luck mutant, see you on the other side.

While this might be a fun game I can't possibly recommend anyone buy it.

For starters, the tutorial is among the worst I have ever seen in a game, it lasts at least 2.5 hours where you cannot take ANY action except what the tutorial says to do, so you aren't really playing, just playing along. But it also doesn't tell you anything useful beyond the most basic concepts. There are a ton of interrelated systems here and none of them are really explained. I ended up doing a ton of googling (you will too if you play this game), in order to learn basic fundamentals like how enemies are activated and that strategies like sneaking around don't work at all (despite being encouraged by the game). The amount of reading you will have to do to understand how enemy activation works, what facilities you should build to not lose, how powerful you should be before doing missions, how to get the resources you need, what resources you DO need, what items work and which don't, and how to stop the aliens from winning is substantial and not explained by the game ever.

Next is the outright difficulty. This game suffers from a number of problems in its difficulty that much more challenging games don't. For starters, it is highly uneven, the beginning portion of the game is the hardest for some reason. Secondly and more importantly, if you do even somewhat poorly at the beginning (like you would if you jumped right in only playing the tutorial), then you will be very harshly punished later on, your game rapidly becomes unwinnable with even a few lost missions as you won't have the skilled soldiers or the resources you need to even begin to meet the later challenges. I followed the advice of 'don't save scum' which by the way is TERRIBLE advice, and so ended up never getting a soldier higher than level 3 (out of 10 or so iirc). This meant that when I had to desperately try to do the most essential missions to stop the aliens from winning they were impossible.

This feels like a game that was designed for an extremely niche group of super hardcore players who have mastered the game mechanics and exploits and know exactly what to do. Like I said, for those players its a great game. For the rest of us though, sucks to suck I guess.

Interestingly the one thing I don't have a problem with is the randomness of probability based shots, lots of people complain about that but it seemed fairly even to me. Problems arose when I fought enemies with dozens of health pips and at most my soldiers could do five or six damage per turn. With only four soldiers (thats the cap unless you know ahead of time to build a specific upgrade) and far more enemies, things go south quickly.

Experienced players might read this and say things like 'of course you did poorly, you didn't upgrade the macguffin" or "those enemies are supposed to be countered by this specific weapon" or "you need to focus on doing this mission or you lose" and while that might be helpful, the fact that I need to do research before starting rather than diagetically learning the lessons myself (something I find quite fun in most strategy games), is a critical design flaw, and makes an otherwise well put together and very impressive looking game, quite poor.

I'll try again with some of the mods that make the game more accessible, but at a certain point I can see myself just losing interest rather than trying to patch together an enjoyable experience.

Conclusion, save your money and time. Apparently the first one is better, maybe try that one.

Don't be tricked by the overwhelming positive reviews making you think this is a great game for everyone. This is a great game for a very specific niche group of people and is absolutely not for the rest of us. The difficulty is beyond punishing, its simply insulting. The expectation that a player fight a single boss dozens of times and demanding that you backtrack over vast areas already covered in order to make repeat attempts is an insult to anyone that doesnt have an enormous amount of free time to play games. The difficulty here is interesting in places but is mostly a time sink. Areas are difficult and fun but that is sucked away immediately when you have to cover the same platforming over and over and over again in order to beat the bosses.

Oh and as for where to go or what to do, expect to have the wiki open at all times. This game volunteers absolutely no information as to what upgrades you need/can get, or where. In fact at almost 18 hours in I have absolutely no idea what areas I should go to next, which bosses I should prioritise, or what is happening in the story.

As for the story, don't expect much. The most incredible and fascinating tale is only as good as its telling and this story is not told well, or at all really. The visual world building is interesting but devoid of significance. You meet characters who say things that refer vaguely to some kind of apocalyptic event that has happened in this bug city but you have no idea who your character is (or if that's important at all), why you are doing anything that you are doing, what the crumbs of narrative are referring to, or what the game is really about.

Ultimately the story stuff isn't really that important. The "Challenge" is my main issue. I do not mind difficult games, trying to beat a tough boss can be like solving a tough puzzle and yes, repetition is sometimes warranted, but this game has absolutely no respect for its players or their time. I've encountered bosses that are five to ten minutes of mundane but punishingly difficult platforming away from the nearest save point. This can only exist to pad length and difficulty in an unrewarding and uninteresting way.

After being defeated by a particular boss for the sixth or seventh time I looked online to see if perhaps there was a trick or strategy I was missing, turns out that particular boss was widely considered impossibly difficult without unlocking a particular ability. This information found on a forum was never presented in the game and not even hinted at. That is a fundamental failure of game design.

Ultimately this game is simply inaccessible to anyone who doesn't live and breathe these kinds of insanely difficult platformer/darksouls like games. Unless you have dozens of hours a week to sink into bashing your head against the wall that is this games difficulty curve then stay away. My advice to those who do play is USE THE WIKI, there is no diegetic information given to the player regarding what to do, where to go, how to make yourself stronger, and the story as of 18 hours in doesn't really exist in any meaningful way so you won't be spoiling anything meaningful and you will save yourself a ton of confusion and frustration.

Its a shame that a game with such polish and production value, that seems so interesting and potentially fun, is ruined by a catastrophic lack of respect for its players time. I am a patient guy but this is just absurd.

Highly recommend this software for anyone using a VR headset. When I first tried using the software it kept crashing when starting the tutorial, after posting a simple question about it in the Discord, the developer of OVR spent an hour reading the crash logs from my PC and walked me through the exact fix that was needed, for a problem they had never seen before! If that isn't the best support for a steam game ever then I don't know what is.

There's a ton here and almost none of it is really that interesting or fun to engage with. I love learning complicated mechanics in games which is why I thought I would love the trade system or the pops system or the characters system, but all three of those mechanics are extremely clunky and counter intuitive to interact with, and theres no incentive to really grapple with any of them as far as I can discern.

Take trade for instance, you are pestered to import stuff to your capitol, goods produced domestically or abroad, when you have a surplus of these goods you get a bonus, but the bonuses are all so minor that the distinction between them is irrelevant. The only time you notice what you're importing is if you don't have a specific good to build a type of unit. So essentially import iron, wood, and horses, and then just randomly pick something else for a + 2% happiness bonus to some pop or something like who cares? There is almost no impact to the game by engaging with this system. Oh and the AI constantly barrages you with trade requests for goods your provinces produce, which if you accept will make them starve because now you don't have food. And they will ask again and again and again. I even tried accepting all the requests (around 2 or 3 a month) but it doesnt even slow down.

Overall though my biggest gripe is the character system, you have way more characters than you could ever expect to keep track of, many of whom will become disloyal and then start civil wars cause why not. The event spam is real and you can either click through everything and try to muscle your way though actually doing something on your own, or you can spend hours tracking down every character each time there's an event that affects one of them. Most events make them lose loyalty by the way.

Its like the game is fighting against the player, the systems aren't fun, they aren't there for you to explore and tinker with, they are there to punish you, either by costing money, causing disloyal characters, or making problems for your country. At a certain point in my second game (as rome) I simply ignored the three systems I mentioned and it actually got little better. I just ignored the pops system entirely, never looked at it once and since my paying attention and trying to tinker with it had gotten me nowhere previously. I appointed the top character in every list for all the roles, instead of picking from the over 100 options and trying to figure out who would betray me. And then just fought a civil war every couple years which is fine cause the war fighting system is probably one of the best ones in the game.

And as for trade? I imported random goods to my capitol and denied all of the literally hundreds of trade requests from the AI and as far as I could tell there was no material difference than when I was studying each request and trying to strategize my trade.

All of this is to say it was a very frustrating experience playing this game, the systems were not fun, they were bad. Its worse than either EU4 or CK2 or even VIC2, Which is a shame because there are a few gems in here, army building and combat was cool and an improvement on previous entries, if the UI wasn't awful I would say a few of these systems even surpass their equivalent in EU4. Interacting with the politics was neat but it was overshadowed by the constant character event spam.

As an aside this isnt paradox's fault per se, but having over 100 characters to manage and keep track of goes from hard to impossible when all of their names are EXTREMELY similar, as in Quintilius Fabius Maximus is Consul and Quintus Fabulis Maxinimus is Co-Consul, can you tell those two apart at a glance? Now try with dozens upon dozens of characters for politicians, researchers, generals, and admirals.

I wanted to like this game, I really did, but this game did not want me to like it, or anyone to enjoy playing it apparently.

Seriously overhyped, the game is fine I guess but incredibly repetitive and gets boring pretty quick. Despite all the "intensity" it really boils down to forcing a very specific playstyle that requires the player to shoot enemies a bit, then do a melee attack to finish them off (this is optional but you will quickly run out of health and ammo if you don't) resulting in the player watching the same animations over and over again while your control is pulled away so that doomguy can perform one of a handful of scripted animations. Levels look neat but aren't well designed and get confusing.

Play Wolfenstein instead, same appeal, better game.