Recent reviews by Difficulty Tweak

♥♥♥♥ you eezo

own the biggest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to ever ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

Back in about 2007 or 2008, I saw an ad for the Complete Saga on TV, and it blew my little child brain away. I actually got so excited over being able to mix and match stuff from different eras that I actually screamed at my mom to buy me the game. Complete Saga got a lot of hours out of me and many fun memories, but as time marched on and LEGO games became more advanced, it did actually get left behind.
When the Sequel trilogy (ew) finished, it was basically only a matter of time until a new Complete Saga came out to update everything, and that's what Skywalker Saga is.
For those of you expecting a one-to-one update of Complete Saga, I'm sorry to disappoint, but it's not. There's quite a handful of changes that were made that put distance between Complete Saga and Skywalker Saga, some good, some bad, and here's a short list:
-The Cantina is gone completely and has been replaced by an open world/galaxy map, which I feel is a bad thing since you lose that visual reminder of your progress as the Cantina fills up with people. This also means custom characters are gone as well.
-Episode 1 actually adds the Control Ship as a level in the episode, as opposed to it being cut content in the original game and an extra in Complete Saga.
-Episode 2 doesn't have a gunship battle, but it does have a chase with Jango in the asteroid field which I don't remember being in either the original game or Complete Saga.
-Episode 3 completely skips the Battle of Coruscant's space section and starts on the Invisible Hand.
Many parts of Complete Saga that were full levels have been either merged into the open world, turned into cutscenes, or those that were retained as levels were heavily truncated into much shorter missions. The first level of Episode 1, the Theed levels, and the Invisible Hand were all significantly cut down compared to how they were in Complete Saga. I imagine the case is very much the same for the Original Trilogy and the Force Awakens.
The game is good - very good. It's just that I think a lot of what made Complete Saga good (the longer linear levels as opposed to the open world with short missions, for example) being lost has harmed the game quite a bit.

$60 for a mountain of improvements to ME1, all three games, along with all the dlc except the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ combat simulator from 1, with visual improvements to the games, and you have a very good deal

my first experience of the greater wargame community was someone named jesus saying hi all, someone named AutisticUnicorn saying hi back and asking if it took 2000 years to climb off the cross, and then a player named johnrambo saying to repent

Speaking as someone who's played the original GMod Tower back between 2013-2015 and was also a donor, Tower Unite pales in comparison to the original thing. I could comment on the time it's taken for several of the classic GMT games to be brought over to TU (UCH/Little Crusaders, Source Karts/Accelerate, and PVP is still missing but is coming soonTM) or how long it's taken for other content to be added (the Arcade and the Volt Nightclub were not shipped with the game and I believe are fairly recent additions)

This would be excusable if it weren't for the fact that Tower Unite is almost five years old (!!!) at the time of this review. I'm not going to act like I know Pixeltail's situation, because I don't. I *do* recall GMT's development being quite slow, with Source Karts taking something like a year to be added, and by then Lobby 2 was literally a couple months away, but that was when they were basically just a group of Source modders and not presenting themselves as a professional developer.

Regardless of the slow delivery of content, that's not the main issue with TU. That would be the price tag - $20 is simply too much to ask for the game when there are better equivalents that are free (ie, VRChat). GMod Tower had no price tag, you effectively got it when you bought Garry's Mod, alongside a bunch of other community gamemodes like Murder, TTT, and DarkRP. With Tower Unite, though, this is all you're getting - a weaker version of GMT with a nonexistent playerbase. I rarely see people queueing up for gamemodes that aren't Minigolf, Ball Race, or Accelerate. Virus, Little Crusaders, Planet Panic, etc are all basically dead gamemodes since there's never enough people to queue for them. While I'm on the topic of the playerbase, there are simply too many servers that splinter the playerbase - something like seven of them. At peak hours maybe only one of them is full, typically one of the US East servers while another server (a US East or US West) is maybe only half full. You know how many servers GMT had when it was still running? Two. One was US East, and the other was either US West or an EU server.

Now, to all of this you might say "Well, GMT Reunion is a thing, why don't you go play that?"
It's dead. It was alive for probably a few weeks back in 2019 for the 10 year anniversary, and now nobody plays it. The fact of the matter is that when GMT shut down, most people thought that was the end and never gave TU as much as a glance, let alone pay attention long enough for Reunion's announcement and release.

TL;DR TU is an inferior version of GMod Tower with slow development and a nonexistent playerbase, the latter of which is hampered by an insane pricetag and an excessively large number of servers for how few people play it. Pixeltail really should just release the GMT source code instead of holding it hostage behind TU leaving Early Access, because by the time *that* happens, if at all, the few people that are left now won't even care.

bretty good game
dialogue system was kinda hit or miss since i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ accidentally romanced ashley because ♥♥♥♥ me i guess

I had absolutely zero expectations for the game due to me hating the reddit swarm hivemind over 'le keanu chungus 100 wholesome breathtaking destruction 100' type-♥♥♥♥, so I went in expecting a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and instead got a decently entertaining game that was worth the money.
HOWEVER, I cannot recommend the game at full price for several reasons, namely that this is not entirely what was advertised - Cyberpunk is an 'RPG' in the same sense that most modern Ubisoft games are RPGs - you have stats, gear, perks, and that's it. There's no real roleplaying, and the game is not only incredibly linear, but also quite literally takes place in V's head. There is no 'city burning' like the E3 trailers suggested, the entire game revolves around the biochip and getting it removed, and even then the endings are disappointing, as you either kill yourself, let johnny take over and then he leaves a grave marker for you, get the chip removed by arasaka and then either get put into mikoshi or you die in six months, so basically no matter what, anything you do means jack ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥.
Corpo and Nomad are very clearly hamfisted into the game for the sake of the plot and are also notably unfinished (Corpo has a revenge hook that never gets brought up, for example), while Streetkid is the intended path, and all three lifepaths merge after the prologue. In addition, customization is notably poor - you cannot go full Maelstrom/Strogg chrome tank, and there is no transmog system for cosmetic purposes.

All that said, the game has a good amount of side content, the visuals and audio are very pleasing, and the gunplay is extremely fun, but the linearity and wasted potential is a deathblow for me. Get it on sale if you really want it, otherwise, you'll probably find a better cyberpunk RPG in any of the Deus Ex games or, better still, Shadowrun Dragonfall and Hong Kong.

been following this since 2011 and now that i've beaten the game, here's the final verdict;
xen is gorgeous but interloper goes on for far too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long
nihalinth and gonarch boss fights were cool i guess

a thousand dollar investment for a retcon
cool game