Recent reviews by Hate Army

Bonfires with 16 times the detail.

Great game, play it.

Imagine a fun game, with LOTS of customization. It's all great, until you hit some random mission that seems to have been created to frustrate your specific build. So you look around for advice, and people tell you if you're running the same build throughout the game, you're playing the game wrong. You're supposed to be collecting all the random ♥♥♥♥ available for sale, and every time you lose, you swap random parts around and try again, and keep doing it until you discover what random configuration of parts actually "clicks" for the part you're getting filtered on. So you continue through the mission and YET AGAIN, you find a completely different mini boss who does "nothing personnel kid" all over the arena, and for this guy you're supposed to go back into the garage and reconfigure ♥♥♥♥ to try and find the next build that unlocks the next part of the mission.

Or just give up, and look up a guide that will tell you which set of parts you're supposed to use. I have no idea if I'm being destroyed because of my parts, or because of skill issue, and the gameplay loop of dashing all over the place spamming all 4 weapons on cooldown is not engaging enough to make me want to keep playing to practice and find out.

TLDR: Imagine if dark souls required you to experiment with every random sword, hammer, axe and spell until you beat each boss, and you couldn't tell if you needed to fix your roll timing or you need to swap to some other weapon.

I can only imagine what kind of trash the earlier games in this series are like...

It's like Diablo 4, but fun.

Absolutely recommend this game. Will take some getting used to, if, like me, you've never played DnD or Baldur's Gate before. But I'm having fun attempting to rewire my brain to play this for the game that it is a DnD campaign in video game form, rather than as a tactics combat RPG.

For those who have played this type of game, you don't need a steam review to convince you.

Overall a fun game, despite the flaws and missed opportunities.

I'm really enjoying the overall feeling of wonder and exploration, the risk/reward aspect of checking out extra chambers vs making a beeline for the objective. All the weapons feel pretty powerful, even the lowly starting sidearm. It's also quite exciting dashing around a room blasting enemies away.
Weapons, much like the powerups, are somewhat unimaginative. I've so far unlocked a shotgun, carbine, rocket launcher, and swarm like machine gun. None of these weapons feel too different, with the exception of the rocket launcher and the shotgun. Alt fire modes are similarly bland: Either massive blasts of projectiles, or a powerful channeled beam.

Too many items have risk/reward attached to them, to the point where there are multiple kinds of debuffs: malfunctions and parasites. Malfunctions can be repaired if you achieve some condition, which is nice, but parasites are permanent, unless you find a station that lets you convert the parasite into money. Moreover, some parasites have a negative effect when they detach.

Dashing around a room makes it VERY likely you'll dash off a ledge, or get dinged by a stray projectile coming from behind you , and your camera doesn't see it, because it's over the shoulder, rather than an isometric view like most shmups/bullet hell games.

A lot of the enemies are pretty generic floating orbs, floating squids and turrets or four legged wolf-like creatures.

A lot of the story segments are boring, and downright stupid because they have absolutely no connection to what Selene is doing on Atropos.

I was hoping this would be something like Fire Emblem for PC or maybe FF Tactics with modern graphics. This is not that. This game seems to have a decent enough foundation, but needed LOTS more time to be polished up, and refined.

I barely got out of the tutorial section of the campaign before the issues became apparent. I requested a refund, but got denied because I made the mistake of trying to tough through the issues past the 2 hour mark, to see if the game would pick up steam...

TLDR: Mom, can we have Fire emblem? Mom: We have Fire Emblem at home. Fire Emblem at home:


I first tried the campaign on HARD mode, but didn't manage to get past the second combat scenario. Even using the game's UNDO mechanic to rewind out of bad positioning and sub-optimal turns, I wasn't able to finish it without losing a character. Just a skill issue? Maybe. Maybe if I had spent a few more hours, I would have found the perfect series of turns that resulted in killing the enemy commander without losing a unit, but then that doesn't fill me with any hope that the game would improve.

When the game punishes you THIS HARD, and THIS EARLY, without giving you the various tools to plan an attack, things like classes, equipment, formations, synergies, etc. I have no reason to believe it would somehow become easier when I'm able to tweak all these things to get the most out of my team.


Part of why combat is so difficult, even on normal difficulty, is that your character can't move past an enemy character, which they call zone of control or "ZOC". In theory, this is good because it's more realistic, and makes positioning of units even more important. In practice, this is a terrible idea, especially when coupled with the maps in this game that have multiple obstacles and thickets everywhere, traversing the battlefield becomes such a chore that you feel exhausted just closing the gap to engage the enemy.


Points 1 & 2 are terrible design choices, in isolation, HOWEVER, consider this. Monsters in this game, just as in other similar games, are multi-tile units where a couple of the tiles are considered "weak points". That's fine enough, except that the weakness tiles are determined at random, AND the weakness (sword, axe, bow, magic) is also randomized. On top of this, you need to hit the same tile multiple times in a single round in order to break it and get a guaranteed crit, which is nearly impossible due to the positioning and movement issues mentioned above.

Example: you need to kill a monster with about 4x HP of a typical enemy. It has two weakness tiles, front left (sword) and front right (spell). So you approach the monster, hit him with a spell on the spell tile, hit him with a sword on the sword tile. Then you try to position another sword unit on the side to chain attack the sword tile, it works, AND THE MONSTER ROTATES, ruining all your attempts to position units to take advantage of the tiles. No problem, eventually, after attacking with a bunch of units, you end your turn... AND THE TILES SHUFFLE so you can start moving units again to match the right weapons with the right tiles. Except, all the units that are in melee range can't move because of the zone of control of the enemy. Oh yeah, and the tile types shuffle as well, so if you had a bunch of swords and spellcasters up close, too bad, you now need axes and archers to attack the new weaknesses.

Very addictive game, in the infinite horde mode survival genre. Shoot enemies, collect XP, unlock perks, and try to build an overpowered build that melts crowds of enemies.

A couple of things I would like to see in the full game:

1. more enemy variety.
2. movement speed up, because as it stands, the beginning of a run feels very sluggish. also, consider removing the slowdown while firing.
3. show player stats and existing perks while deciding what perk to pick up after leveling up, so I can make a better informed decision on what aspect of my build is lacking.
4. different routes, that are unlocked by various things like exploration, pickups, challenge runs. For example, finding an altar and killing 100 enemies next to it could unlock a hidden boss.
5. many more weapons and perks.
6. add a "start again" button to the death screen so I can quickly go back to character select.

The ultimate Fromsoft experience.

I bought this game to play with a relative of mine, and for the most part, I've had a decent experience of it. That said, I can't recommend this game, as it stands now, particularly if you're not familiar with Gloomhaven, or at the very least, some other DND-style tabletop RPG rulesets. This review is just as much a critique of that ruleset, as it is of the game itself.

The game has lots of interacting mechanics. Between the different classes (de)buffing, moving, setting up traps, dealing with obstacles and enemies, there are LOTS of ways to deal with challenges.

City Mechanics are quite enjoyable, and do a good job of world building, advancing questlines, as well as giving a chance to do things like buy items, level up, etc.

Card Mechanics: Every card has a move action and attack action. At the beginning of every round, you pick two cards, and whichever you pick first is your initiative, which determines your turn order as well as your aggro level (monsters target the nearest PC, using initiative as a tiebreaker if needed). When your PC's turn comes up, you can perform the move portion of one of the cards you chose, and the attack action of the other card.

As a result, if monsters move around in a way you didn't expect, put up shields, etc, the actions you selected in the beginning of the round are quite possibly useless, or at the very least suboptimal. I can only assume this is why the developers included "RESTART ROUND" as a way to "scum select" your cards (you pick something, see what the enemies will do, then rewind to the beginning, and pick the cards that would actually work out well, given the enemies' rolls).

For both the move or attack action, you can choose to do a simple Move 2 or Attack 2 action that doesn't perform the action on the card (eg, you don't want to burn the card), but you still discard the cards you chose, which means there's a hard limit on the number of turns you can perform, before becoming exhausted. This is further exaggerated when you take lots of damage and have to start burning cards, further reducing the actions you can take.

When you eventually kill an enemy, the drop gold... ON THEIR TILE meaning that for you to loot that gold, you'll have to end your character's turn ON THAT TILE, or you'll have to plan your card choices to select a Loot X action, which lets you loot gold from adjacent tiles up to X tiles away. Because of how cards work, choosing a Loot action means you forego a move or attack action for that character's turn, making you have to decide between looting gold and moving/attack and making progress in a dungeon. Given the difficulty in this game, you will almost always choose to move/attack rather than loot. Why do mercenaries not just loot all the gold in a dungeon when they're done? They're mercenaries, right? They fight for gold?

Speaking of difficulty, it seems like the difficulty of the game is WILDLY out of balance. In your campaign, you can have up to 4 mercenaries at a given time, but if you take any more than 2 to a dungeon, be prepared for odds of 4:1 or more. The only thing you get in exchange is more options (since you have more characters), but because of how convoluted the card mechanics are, trying to balance all the options in your mind is pretty much impossible (this is where multiplayer helps a bit, since you can bounce ideas off each other as you spend 10 minutes trying to plan your turns)..

So? Play with just 2 mercenaries right? What's the big deal? Well, your mercenaries have personal quests, and you're encouraged to pursue those goals in order to retire a mercenary, and unlock a new class. This adds an almost rogue-like feel to the game, as it feels almost like a "meta". I have yet to retire a character, so I don't know if it alleviates some of the power complaints I have, but I can only assume that you simply roll a new mercenary to join your leveled up merc. Now you have 1 character who is level 1 or 2, and another who is something like 8 or 9. Should I go back and grind the previous scenarios for gold, XP and perks before moving on to the new scenarios? I can't imagine it makes much of a difference, every turn in this game feels like a grind and a chore.

All this adds up to disconnected choices lead to a feeling that you don't have good control over your characters, and what they do.

As of the date of this review, Gloomhaven is the top rated board game, but I'm left wondering why? It very well could be that playing the board game is more fun, in person, gathered around a table, watching your friends roll dice and get excited, all the while having drinks, but none of that seems to have survived the translation to a video game, where, at best, you're talking to people on voice chat, each in your own home, without any face to face contact.