Recent reviews by Frooby

The Dragon Expansion is by far the most frustrating and game-hijacking expansion in this whole game. Not only does it bog down turns by going through a potentially rather long dragon token draw step before every character's turn, not only do these tokens never go away if you avoid them, not only will dragons randomly "strike" and ruin your game at regular intervals. Oh no, that's far from the end of your worries.
Some of these cards will borderline end a run where it begins.

Me and my friends got a green (grilipus) dragon card on a critical square, called the Mist Dragon. This dragon has a craft of 7, and instead of rolling to defeat it as normal, you instead roll two dice - the Mist Dragon automatically gets the highest as its result, and the character who encounters it gets the lowest. You cannot roll-off. This means you have to either have more craft than it, which is a tall order, or one of precious few cards which let you either get around this, or reroll results.

With cards like that which borderline brick an entire area of the board, this DLC simply punishes you for trying to play the game, and I do not recommend it whatsoever. If you have it as part of the legendary edition or something, do not activate it. It ruins the game.

I will start this off with this game's most positive aspect - the visuals. It's an incredible looking game, with brilliant art direction, style, and general mood. It's a beautiful game, with tons of detail, and really sells you on a world that is broken beyond repair, where no building remains undamaged, and bodies are so plentiful they're stacked in three storey tall piles and used as ablative armour.

The concept is also quite novel - a game where you are not the main character, or even the focus, and instead simply trying to survive in someone else's war. Where you're so insignificant that the horror of this survival horror comes not from things trying to kill you, but from you being so pointless to kill you will largely be ignored - but when you aren't, you're dead meat.

That, however, does lead me into my criticisms. The idea of an extraction shooter that encourages you not to shoot is a bit paradoxical. It has a surprisingly in-depth weapon customization system, and a large variety of guns, but wants you to not use them unless you have to. All of the enemies are tough to kill, and spawn in very large quantities frequently. There's never one enemy, even in the case of super-dangerous enemies such as giant mechs and tanks, you'll see entire squadrons show up at once. And the weakest enemy, a cyborg torso dragging itself along the floor, can three-or-four-hit kill you if you're just starting out.

It's a brutally tough game, with very little in the way of clear directions on how to progress. The tutorial is unforgiving, teaching you how to shoot your gun but if you do, you get immediately swamped by 6 or 7 enemies - and when your starting gun takes four well-placed shots to kill one of them, and your gun only has a 10-round magazine, it's a pretty rough introduction to the game.

Additionally, there are some odd choices in the game itself - your health bar isn't labeled as such, and took me a couple of games to realise what it was. You're not able to pick up weapons without a better backpack, so you can't pick those up out of the gate either. You can't immediately see how much money you have in the hub area anywhere I could see, so I had no clue if I could afford things from vendors or not. Character movement feels stiff, either being too slow when walking or too fast when running, and with sprinting working on tank controls and allowing no sideways movement, it feels pretty clunky to play.

It's also horrifically badly optimized - I have a very high spec computer, and I needed to run everything on low just to get a consistent 60fps, and even then I got framerate drops when lots of enemies were spawning in nearby. The game is 82 gigabytes, and each patch needs you to redownload the entire thing, and I simply can't see where all of that storage space is needed. This is quite a barebones game.

There is also a bug which was affecting me and two friends I was playing with, which will cause the game to stutter and throw your aim directly upwards, which can kill you in the middle of a fight.

I do love how this game looks, so I am glad I got to try it, but I'm going to wait until this is further in development and more polished, as currently it simply isn't very enjoyable to play for me.

To offer a game as playable on Steam and then rip it away unless you give another company your information is absurd. I do hope Sony rolls back on this decision, as it will seriously hamper player count, and do permanent damage to the IP going forwards.

And to think, the game was looking so promising... Now one of my friends won't be able to play at all as his country blocked PSN in the first place.

EDIT: The changes have been walked back, but this is still a completely unacceptable breach of consumer trust, so I will not be returning, and I will leave this review standing as it is to ensure that Sony, and other publishers, do not forget what has happened here - because I sure won't.

An amazing game with a rich story and a great selection of characters to meet and interact with. The graphics are great, the voice acting is fantastic, and the gameplay truly is digitized D&D in its closest form yet - with all the joys of nat-20s on things that don't matter whatsoever, and nat-1s on things that absolutely do.

Two specific things I appreciate and applaud this game for:

- You can be the bad guy. Not in a cuphead sense where you get a binary option 90% into the game where picking the "be evil" option instantly game-overs you, but you can choose to be a villain, and you get to play the entire game and experience it from the point of view of a bad person. Such a breath of fresh air, and practically demands a second run-through - I cannot fathom why more "open" RPGs don't also offer such a fleshed out and genuine option.

- Sexuality, nudity, and intimacy is treated with full seriousness and care. It was always a bit of cognitive dissonance for me that games are totally fine with ridiculous levels of violence, as seen in Mortal Kombat or Doom, yet the mere act of nudity is avoided or even punished in many cases. It is refreshing for a successful, popular game to include full nude character models and genitalia, and full options for romancing and bedding a majority of the recruitable NPCs in ways that don't feel like they were done as a last minute thought or forced, but genuinely earned through gameplay and through bonding with the characters you fight and explore alongside. Finally it is treated as a normal thing that people do, and I cannot express how good an idea this was.

One thing I will mention however, is the absence of a couple of features I would have liked to see:

- I would have loved to see a return of Divinity: Original Sin 2's magic mirror system. In BG3, it does exist, however you can only customize your player character, and not any of the pre-existing party characters, which is unfortunate. It's just a small inclusion I would have appreciated, as I think Lae'zel would look even more badass with long flowing hair.

- Unless you are playing with friends, there is no option (that I can find) to create more than one character. I would have liked to completely custom make multiple characters of my own to play as, but this is still unavailable without getting friends to help. There is a recruitment system, however the options are premade characters with no customization options, which almost sucks more as we got so close yet still can't have the full choice to make our own party solo.

In conclusion: If you're reading this review, you probably already bought the game because everyone else on planet Earth already shouted its praises to the heavens. And let me assure you, if you're still not certain - it has earnt every bit of it.

It is so hard to enjoy this game with other players.

Very similar to Rust, a game which incentivizes and rewards cruel PvP behaviour means that anybody not looking for PvP, and instead wanting to experience the many different PvE-focused activities are targeted anyway because everyone automatically assumes "player = enemy = kill on sight".

I will fully admit I'm not very good at the game, and I don't really have any friends who still play this game. So I'm forced to run a solo sloop, and I'm not good at it. Nearly every time I try to play the game, I get targeted by toxic players who sink me simply because I exist.

Why only "nearly" every time? Well, because I had almost a week straight of playing where I didn't meet a single other player. It was just me, the open ocean, and the fantastic Tall Tales, quests, faction missions and random encounters. And you know what? It was the best time I've had in this game. Just the right amount of challenging with the AI enemies, and without me having to worry about other players ruining the 30+ minutes you have to spend on each tale, and having to start all over again.

I wish so dearly for a PVE-only mode or an opt-out function. I would take something so severe as -50% gold and xp gain in return. I'd be fine with that. What I do not wish for is paid-subscription-only private servers where you cannot gain ANY xp, achievements, collection completions or gold, that entirely defeats the point of playing. That was a really bad move, and it makes me want to give up on this game. It's genuinely tragic how awful this game has become, and it's ENTIRELY because of its playerbase. If I didn't have to interact with anyone else, this game would already be in my top 5 games of all time.

Game has a lot of promise, but I noticed some very jarring issues with controls, gameplay, and general points about the game that made this rather frustrating for me.

- Control issues: The controls in the design menu are all rather unwieldy, with odd decisions on how to do certain things. For example, selecting a part to edit is not done by left click, but by right click. You cannot add a vertex directly in the exact point you want it, you have to instead go into edges and half the edge, then move the vertex to your desired position, which is quite unintuitive. Additionally, there seems to be no option to delete a part while you're hovering over it, you have to ctrl-z until it's gone. There is also no way to manually drag crew to different positions within the vehicle - to assign a driver to either the left or right side, you must put a part down on the side you want and it moves to there. If you put mirrored viewports on both sides of the hull, it decides randomly, and you can't re-assign it without placing it down again.

- Gameplay issues: I decided to go for scenarios first, as it's the first option on the main menu. Expecting a tutorial at the very least, or at the very least a pre-amble about "this is in WW1, this is your mission, design a tank for it", I was disappointed to find it took me straight into the design menu without any messages, help or tooltips at all. The only difference was that the test area was a no-man's land, instead of a training field. Further to this, as there were no tips or pointers, my tank didn't seem to work. It turned left and right perfectly fine on the spot, and went forwards and back okay, but anywhere past 7km/h and it would randomly turn left or right slightly, then correct itself, and manually turning left or right did nothing at all. It felt like an AI was controlling the steering and all I had was the throttle, which felt quite terrible. Further to this, there was no HUD telling me the mission objective, nor where it was, just a vague, vast empty landscape with an unknown mission to complete.

This is within one hour of playtime, and I already feel very unenthusiastic about playing this game further. I like the premise behind this game, there are great ideas behind it (even if it does just feel like a more stripped-down War Thunder when you get to the test areas) but in its current state I cannot recommend someone play this. Even for a tank nerd and enthusiast like me, this was just painful to play.

I may return to this and give it another try once it comes out of alpha.

Not really my kind of giant mech game. Nothing to compare sizes of those involved to for the first few levels (just barren wasteland areas with the odd tree here and there), the gameplay is stale, and the movement feels too floaty and fast for things that are supposed to feel like buildings. It's like watching toys get smacked together, personally.

Needs a lot more time in the oven to nail the feeling of giant mech combat, I'm afraid. Sorry. If you read this, devs, I'd recommend Armored Core 4 on PS3 as a great reference point with which to make your giant mechs feel giant in both visuals, movement characteristics and especially sound design, as currently the sensation of piloting a titanic weapon system is very much lacking.

It's a very good game, and quite fun in and of itself, though challenging. However, it's missing a few necessary functions, such as volume sliders, windowed mode, and resolution settings. The game is quite loud as it is. But besides these small quality-of-life additions, and (as a previous reviewer pointed out) it feels quite shallow. This doesn't, however, detract from the fact it's a fun little arcade-y drift game for £3. I recommend it.

Can't steer. Even with wheel sensitivity on its highest setting, the car turns like the steering's broken right off the bat. Put the difficulty at the easiest and it still turns like a limo with its front axle broken. For £45, a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥. Will change review if this gets fixed or addressed.

Allow me to preface this review with the following: I like this game, and it deserves a thumbs-up from a purely technical standpoint, however it loses this privilege for varying reasons I'll get to in a bit.

THE GOOD:
Grab That Auto 5 is a beautiful game. It looks stunning, the detail goes to a seriously impressive level for such a huge game. The weather affects terrain conditions, car handling, your clothes and hair can get wet. The wide variety of vehicles, weapons, and clothing numbering in the thousands of items to make your in-game character whoever you want them to be. A gangster, a rich businessperson, a military operative, just some average chump in a t-shirt and flip flops, it's all available.

The breadth of events to participate in are astounding. Character-led missions, ambitious multi-stage heists, PVP battles, vehicle races (which are the best, in my opinion, due to lack of people shooting at you and variety of sub-types), even a Mad Max style arena battle zone. There's also a single-player you can jump into, and go through an interesting but forgettable retired-heisters-go-for-one-last-score story without having to deal with the stupidity of the average gamer.

Sound design is on point, with a dozen different radio stations with a dozen songs or talk-show episodes in each. You can hear the distant explosions of somebody in an attack jet rumble over the hills, or hear the wind whipping your character's ears if you're going fast in an open-top vehicle. I like to simply stand outside when it's raining, purely because the thunder and raindrops sound so perfect it gives me chills.

THE BAD:
First off, let me get my main gripe in; This game is paywalled at the highest level. You can look up scores of Youtube videos crunching the numbers, but for the fastest, nicest cars you can get or the pub-stompiest of pub-stomping airborne vehicles, or getting maximum function out of your properties, you simply cannot play the game and save up. Millions of in-game dollars, per item, is ludicrous, especially when many of these items offer direct upgrades to their affordable counterparts - you simply cannot afford the best unless you pay real-world money for shark cards, and this feels incredibly in-your-face. Want to give the guy riding around in a Harrier jump-jet loaded with explosive homing ammo? That'll be a breezy 8 mil. It feels unfair in most situations, and the prices only rise with each update.

You "can" buy properties to unlock extra missions. A motorcycle club to do drug-runs, an underground bunker to do military hijackings, a luxury office to do car-smuggling, a nuclear facility to prevent the world being blown up. Note I put the word can in quotations. This is because while, yes, the purchases are optional and aren't necessary to get loads of enjoyment out of the game's non-purchase modes, the game will shove it down your throat that you didn't. Four or five characters will call your phone incessantly, badgering you to buy these properties because "trust me, you won't regret it..." according to one of them. I'm going out immediately and saying yes, you will regret it. These facilities cost anywhere from a couple hundred grand for the most basic ones, to upwards of ten million for a fully decked-out lair. Even if you do cave to the peer-pressure that the game puts on you (there is nothing you can do to stop the calls except pay up), the missions they offer (except, arguably, the office and nuclear facility) will not give you nearly enough revenue to justify the prices you're having to pay to access them.

Yes, the game actually tries to bully you into making a bad deal. And this is only made further annoying by...

THE UGLY:
Here's where I get less technical and more personal. I either barely tolerate or despise every single character (bar one) in this game. Grand Theft Auto has, historically, used parody of the real world to create humour in their games as far as I've seen, but 5 is the only one of the series I've played personally. The writing is so scathingly satirical and hyper-honest, that every character becomes a one-dimensional caricature except for Michael and Franklin in the main storyline, but even these two characters have little to really draw you into them or genuinely like them, besides the fact they are your avatar as the player.

Almost every NPC in GTA Online is written in a way that makes you dislike them, and they all act in mean spirit to your personal character in every mission, treating you as little more than a disposable asset they can use like toilet paper then discard when you're no longer needed. NPC citizens walking or driving around will over-react and yell slurs at you if you even think about disobeying a traffic law, and in the stereotypical Bible-belt redneck half of the island you'll be shot at if you don't toe an imaginary line. This is a world I genuinely think is an accurate representation of purgatory, because it just depresses the hell out of me.

THE KARA:
I like Kara (or Cara). She's the radio host of the Non-Stop Pop station, which I mostly use purely because she's not a stereotype or caricature or an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and is just a DJ trying to play good music and help everyone have a good day. It upsets me that such a kindly character had to be stuck in a world like Los Santos.

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FINAL SCORE:
8/10 game, I absolutely think you should play it. But be ready for the fact that 2K games will bully you into paying a considerable amount of money if you want the full experience. Please don't give them any more money than you paid for the base game.