Recent reviews by [LUE] DB

Boring, bland, and lacking in depth.

PD3 is a game trying to directly compete with its predecessor PD2, and the strategy was to mimic PD1's gameplay while having a fraction of the content PD2 currently has. The end result is a game with barely 2 hours of content and a dull progression system the disincentivizes having fun the way you want.

It's not without positives; the gunplay is far sharper and on point than PD2, with standardized health values across all difficulties removing any sense of cops being bullet sponges. Stealth is a massive upgrade, to the point where it was fun to engage in rather than being tedious and frustrating.

But the upsides end there. Instead of PD2's expansive skill trees, we instead get a dozen or so tiny skill branches all focused on a trio of almost completely imperceptible buffs, and perks that have niche effectiveness. There's very few standout skills, and nothing even remotely gamebreaking like PD2 had. It's grounded and tries to keep things tame, and while it succeeds it doesn't make it fun or interesting. I can't even remember a single notable skill I had on my builds, all I did was pickup armor nodes and ones making ammo efficiency slightly better.

Armor is its own talking point, as unlike PD2 and even PD1, armor no longer fully regenerates shortly after taking damage. Armor loss is now effectively permanent, with only a small percentage at a time that can regenerate, in an effort to forcibly make you be desperate for resources and escape under duress. It's a sensible design change, but it makes armor far too valuable as while you similarly have no means of regenerating health beyond medkits, you have way less health than armor.

The gunplay is fine. It isn't mindblowing but it was fun and serviceable. The weapon options, though, were severely lacking. It's almost entirely rifles, a couple of (hot garbage) SMGs, and a pair of shotguns. All you get. For secondaries, it's all pistols. JUST pistols. The monstrous weapon variety PD2 had is completely missing and instead we get a bland and forgettable series of guns where your true options are limited, as any sane player is going to default to the rifles and pistols that one shot every cop type.

But the heists just lack something almost indescribable as to why they aren't fun. It's hard to grasp, precisely, why this is. It's not the lack of objectives, as all of them have numerous steps (for both stealth and loud), most of them far more complex than the average PD2 heist. The best I figure is that the entire rest of the game drags down the experience so hard that the heists are dull and a slog to play through. With nothing to look forward to, no fun alternate builds to try, no crazy weapons to experiment with, and no incentives for pushing yourself, once you've played each heist 2-4 times...why keep doing it?

The progression system does this feeling no favors. Rather than a standardized experience system, you gain infamy experience by completing "challenges", 95% of which boil down to "Kill cops with X weapon Y times" and "Complete X heist on each difficulty Y times". You fairly quickly exhaust the gimme challenges and are solely reliant on the boring slog grinds after that, all for the meager option to paint your guns a slightly lighter shade of black. You gain skill points up to infamy level 100, a feat which isn't terribly brutal to reach but is almost exactly where the boredom sets in.

Getting infamy passively through just completing heists was added, granting points based on three factors (basic completion, getting all bags, and completing in stealth). It doesn't really change leveling up feeling vapid and unrewarding, and incentivises boring gameplay (stealth over shooting cops).

PD3 is a game that starts off perfectly fine but by the 15 hours point you'll be wondering what the point of playing is and, sadly, there really isn't one. There's no carrot to aspire for and no part of progression interesting enough to keep you on the grind for hours, nor are any of the heists so wildly exciting to justify replaying them so much. They're fine, they're better than the mediocre PD2 heists but nowhere near its highest quality ones. PD3, at its core, feels like an advertisement to go play PD2 again.

This could change in years, if the player base has the patience for that. I personally do not, as the devs bizarrely want the game to feel more like PD1 than PD2, an odd decision given PD1 is well...dead and PD2 isn't, but with updates slowly pushing the game further in that direction, I don't have any interest in wasting any more time expecting an actual sequel to PD2 that is clearly never going to happen.

I'm not a Sonic fan. My friends are die-hard avid Sonic fans who keep buying me these games because they think it's funny, and I 100% them so I can judge them without any real bias.

The TL;DR for people scared of reading is that while I didn't really feel any disappointment or resentment towards Forces while playing it, I simultaneously can't actually point to any individual aspect of it that's really fun or well done. Forces manages to almost perfectly land in the realm of complete mediocrity to an extent that it's impressive.

There's 5000 reviews and most that are more than 5 words go over the story. None of them are wrong, the story is bad, but that didn't impact my opinion of the game. I don't know why Forces gets flak when none of the Sonic games I've played have good stories, this game is well within the norm of the series. Sonic is a cocky idiot, Tails is a useless idiot, Knuckles IS an idiot, Eggman's an arrogant idiot, everyone races to be the stupidest person around until the plot gets resolved. Forces' story gave me exactly what I expected from the other 8 3D Sonic's I've played.

Now I have an actual qualm with the "story" nobody else seems to, primarily being environmental storytelling and the complete lack thereof. As a basic example, Oil Ocean in Mania is set ablaze after the boss of Act 1, as that boss takes place in a pumping station and you kind of damaged both the pipes and killed the bot maintaining them. Place explodes, it makes sense. As a comparison in Forces, in one stage Sonic needs to blow up the reactor to the Death Egg to destroy it. You're harassed by NPCs the whole time to get to the reactor, then in the last 20 seconds you're told "Good job, the reactor's gonna blow!" and the stage ends.

All you did between the last nagging line to blow it up and someone commenting it's blowing up is run from left to right on a treadmill for about 10 seconds. Also the camera zooms out to showoff the looming reactor that is very blatantly not blowing up, by the way. The entirety of Forces operates this way, as NPC chatter is frequent in every single stage, typically repeating what your story "objective" in the stage is or what's going on in the war concurrently with whatever it is you're doing, but these never match up and don't make sense. In another instance in one of the Metropolis stages, early on there's NPC chatter that all their forces are getting obliterated by Eggman's army (note that at no point do you ever actually "see" this war ever happening in the game), then about 30 seconds before the end of the stage NPCs praise Sonic for turning the tide and letting them rout Eggman's army.

Sonic is literally just running in a straight line in the level at this point and occasionally riding linear rail paths arbitrarily floating everywhere. This kind of thing makes me do a double take and wonder if I'm insane and am missing some cool stuff Sonic's doing while holding the boost button, or if the devs are just really bad at environmental storytelling. But I played these levels a lot and it's 100% the latter.

Speaking of boost, the only knowledge I had of Forces before jumping into it was fans called it "the worst of boost-era Sonic". I had no context why, just that it's considered that. I greatly underestimated the extent to which "Boost 2 Win" would be the name of the game in Forces. Unleashed and Generation were avidly designed around boosting, but you had a lot of control over Sonic and still had to actually *play* the level still. There was a lot of crap to dodge and pits to avoid, especially in later levels, even while slamming the boost button.

Forces does no such thing with its many levels designed around boosting--you hold the boost button and generally can just use your other hand for anything else productive because it sure doesn't need to be touching the controller. For full 3D sections, Sonic is basically "glued" to the center of the area and struggles to move away from it while boosting. This doesn't matter because these sections of stages have no obstacles beyond a ton of passive enemies you'll plow through like a bowling ball. When the camera transitions to 2D sections, reaching the top route is generally a matter of "just hold boost" and not any actual skill or timing. Modern Sonic's stages almost all practically play themselves, and many of them are rife with psuedo-cutscene sections where the timer's still ticking but Sonic's running all on his own with no controller input allowed. These sections I imagine were intended by the devs to "look cool" but in reality they're incredibly boring as I'm not able to do anything besides watch Sonic run through some loops, jump on some buildings, and run around until the camera zooms back in so I can go back to holding the boost button.

Classic Sonic is in the game too, which more and more makes little sense considered how much of Modern Sonic's stages take place in 2D. At the bare minimum, unlike Modern Sonic, Classic Sonic at least requires you to play the game. Now none of his stages are particularly long, and most are quite boring, but at least you do the work. One of Classic Sonic's stages commits a damning gaming sin, doubly so for a Sonic game of all things--an auto scroller lasting about 40 seconds. It's incredibly boring and slow, two things Sonic isn't supposed to be. Personally I hated all of Classic Sonic's stages for being boring at best and slow *and* boring at worst, and I'd rather wish he just wasn't even in the game.

You can make an Avatar, your very own OC Donut Steal. They have their own stages. They...exist, I guess. The Avatar is just "Sonic but worse" is they can't boost but instead have an actual weapon with special abilities fueled by wisps found in the levels. You'd think without boost that the Avatar stages would "feel" better, but they share the same issues Modern Sonic does in that there's A LOT of automation. Worse is that using the correct weapon lets you skip most of the stage, and it feels like lazy level design to not have a proper upper route, but rather just empty air letting you skip everything. Stage 25 if played correctly with the Hover weapon can be beaten in 95 seconds, a grand total of 15 of those are ever spent touching the ground--12 of those are at the end on auto-play.

Forces has serious momentum issues, where you go from a standstill to 10% speed and then to 100% speed in the span of 2 seconds. The buildup will cause you to fling yourself off cliffs by mistake in numerous instances and overall feels very jank. Sonic comes to a dead stop if he jumps in midair and isn't holding forward. The homing attack is also jank, refusing to lock on sometimes and happily letting you fall to your death when over pits.

The game if you blitz it takes ~4 hours to finish, 25 if you want every achievement. It's not *hard*, as half of every stage plays itself and the game is comically lenient with S-ranks. By the end of it, I can't say I hated Forces but at the same time I can't think of a moment where I thought "this is really fun". It just exists as a mediocre game that does nothing amazing but nothing offensively bad. Boring, forgettable, far too easy and absolved of anything challenging, but functional.

I have put a lot of time and money into this game. And, as a disclaimer, I don't regret that time. The whole of 3.13 was arguably the most blissful three months of gaming I've ever had.

The problem is that the developers had, outright had, a perfect game. For a fleeting moment in time, PoE was borderline flawless. There were almost no complaints, variety was at its peak, the playerbase was one of the strongest and well retained it had ever been, the balance was arguably way too player favored but screw it, with the amount of time and variety PoE offers, earning your way up to that power was immensely satisfying. The endgame had a wealth of variation and options to specialize in. 3.13 is considered by many to be the peak of PoE.

Because unlike other games, GGG does not do what other game as a service games do. They do not continually stack and improve on what works and iterate what doesn't. 3.13 was hardly intentional, more like a freak lab accident that briefly escaped before the devs angrily wrangled it into a cage and sedated the hell out of it. 3.14 rolls around and it was, in short, 3.13 but worse. There were no raw improvements, just nerfs for the most part. It was tolerable, but the peak was crested. We can only go downhill from here.

3.15 comes and brings with it what was some of the biggest nerfs the game had ever seen (until 3.19, at least). An immense reduction in player power, insane mana cost spikes, drastic reduction in survival, mobs became stronger, got more health, and players were in summation much weaker than ever before. The game was still playable. I was experienced enough to persevere, many were. But at that point I wasn't sure if it was because the game was still fun, or I wanted to succeed out of spite.

3.16 comes with more nerfs, and a meta change that persists today: an overwhelming focus on defense. Ironic, as it would be. Defenses were lauded as being kinda trash prior to this and this patch buffed them significantly, and simultaneously jacked up mob difficulty. The end result is the near entirety of your build feels almost hyper focused around shoving in every conceivable defense to increase your survival. This ends up putting a lot of pressure on your gear and it becomes frustration, tedious, and exhausting to numerically manage all sorts of difference defensive layers to max them all out. Feels great when you do, but the extra frustration on top of patch after patch of nerfs was taking its toll.

3.17 comes out and half of it was a massive improvement of a core feature lauded as being one of the best in the game from 3.13. But the nerfs are still present, and even more get piled on. Gear pressure continues. We have additional endgame bosses now, and more ways to maximize your gear. The level of additional tedium starts to become painful.

3.18 features more nerfs, surprise. The league mechanic from 3.17 goes core in an embarrassingly half-assed fashion leading to some of the most extreme player frustration I had ever seen to that point. Super mega difficult endgame bosses get added, making gearing take even longer as a result because the goalposts for sufficient gear to clear all content has been pushed back even further. You need even more time to finish your build, to optimize everything to a point where you can clear all content. I, to be blunt, was on the edge of quitting here. The league's mechanic, sentinels and recombinators, were so comically broken in the players' favor that they helped stave off what had become an unerringly arduous task of pushing your gear to the point where you could topple all endgame content.

And that leads us to 3.19. There's been a lot of player frustration leading up to this point from a bevvy of nerfs and very little to compensate for it. While most league content goes core in some fashion, naturally sentinels and recombinators--two things that greatly helped alleviate how elongated the gearing process had ballooned to--didn't go core. That in itself was a net nerf to the players, on top of archnemesis--the 3.17 core mechanic that was the root cause of a lot of player rage--was getting buffed to be even harder. Many skills and defenses were nerfed, with the promise that the devs would totally compensate for the nerfs in 3.20, but leave us screwed for 3.19. All of that, in isolation, were enough to extend the length of the loot grind to complete the endgame to such a tedious degree that the game felt barely worth bothering with.

But that wasn't the extent of the nerfs. The developers decided to conceal the full extent of their nerfs thinking players wouldn't notice long enough to sell a bunch of supporter packs. Those nerfs were in the form of the game's most notorious crafting system (Harvest) being gutted into borderline worthlessness, several former league mechanics (Beyond and subsequently tainted currency) equally gutted into feeling meaningless, and the most damning of all, obliterating the drop rates in the game. They didn't nerf loot in subtle fashion, they were neutered by anywhere from 60-90% depending on the content you're running. It was noticed within the first day of the patch, everyone thinking it was a comical but extreme bug. It, truly, cannot be understated just how massive this loot nerf is. It felt like virtually nothing was dropping doing the exact same gameplay that had worked for years.

The lead developer announced that it was intentional. Not just that, but in an offhand sentence while discussing intentional nerfs to other content. This went far beyond 3.15's nerfs and was the most extreme destruction of loot acquisition in the history of the game, and its very first developer acknowledgement was an offhand comment. Since then, they've held their ground. This is the state PoE is going to be in for now, and by and large it can only go even further down from here.

And after a year of nerfs, of putting up with the gear grind become insufferably long, I've had enough. I can't deal with this game anymore. The timesink has become too extreme and GGG seems determined to strip everything fun out of the game bit by bit until the game is naught but a husk of what it once was.

They are, to put it in different terms, trying to bend the game back to a state reminiscent of patch 1.5, the state of the game 8 years ago. A state where the game was slow, loot was poor, and gear acquisition even slower. At the same time, we had no endgame then. The hardest content was like, lv79 maps. That's T11 maps in the current game. What was once the maximum difficulty in the game is now an irrelevant footnote in your character's progression. The gameplay "sped up" to compensate for the enormous wealth of endgame content, the extreme complication of gear progression, and the sheer difficulty the hardest content demands. Slowing the game back to that point doesn't change the gear requirements for the endgame. All it does is demand you spend more, and more, and more, and more time in the same, escalating in tedium grind to reach the same point.

It doesn't work. GGG bent the game too far and it doesn't work at this point. If you have any respect for your time, avoid PoE. It will not respect you any longer. And I say this as someone that's hit 40/40 challenges in six different leagues and put far more time into this game than any other I've played. And I bought a div card submission, too. I don't regret any of that, I can only lament the lackluster and lost future of the game.

The TL;DR is: Combat is bad, enemy variety is poor, exploration is dull, almost no meaningful upgrades, and the bosses are forgettable.

I want to preface saying that I got all the achievements for this game so I did spend an adequate amount of time playing it.

It's fun enough to play, but is so burdened by flaws and annoyances that pile up into an overall rather unenjoyable experience.

Map design ranges from annoying to downright poor design. The actual ingame map is poor, the entire map being just a bunch of red tiles instead of denoting a color for each major region. Additionally, it's filled with numerous one-way paths that make you waste time looping around just to continue exploring if you had the audacity to pick the wrong direction first. Several of these one-way paths are impossible to get back to until you get a late game upgrade, and I use "upgrade" very loosely here.

Because for a Metroidvania, the game doesn't really have upgrades. And I mean actual, gameplay improving upgrades letting you advance your exploration ability. The only actual upgrade that does *anything* for exploration is being able to turn into a cat. The problem is this does nothing actually beneficial for you--you lose the ability to make ranged attacks and can't climb ladders (which are common in the game) so you have to spend most of your time as a human regardless. The only thing it lets you do that's special is walk through tight corridors. Those corridors are few and far between throughout the game, like the cat ability was an afterthought. It's as if the developer occasionally remembered they had to do something with it now and then, so they threw in a token room every so often where you have to turn into a cat for 5 seconds before doing platforming as a human.

Like most games in the genre, the combat is fairly simplistic, with your options being a melee attack and a bow, along with a roll that has a large number of immunity frames that's mandatory to use to avoid a lot of boss attacks. The combat, though, ended up being one of my biggest annoyances with the game through its poor design and inconsistencies. The melee attack consists of a simple three-hit combo, but the problem is each stage of the combo makes your character step forward slightly. The end result is numerous annoyingly positioned enemies either cause you to fall of a ledge into spikes (which kill you instantly), or cause you to step forward and take contact damage with the enemy you're hitting.

Sometimes. Sometimes you take contact damage. That's half of the inconsistency in the combat, you sometimes take contact damage from touching enemies, Sometimes you don't! Whether or not you do is based on if the game feels like it. The other half is damage output from enemies and bosses, which has no consistency whatsoever. The same attack can do a massive variance of damage to the point where the damage values feel completely made up and just use a random number generator. As an example, one boss always starts by dropping a lightning bolt on you. Across dozens of observations, the exact same attack at random did barely a pixel of my life bar, a third of it, half of it, all but one pixel, and outright instantly killed me. Exact. Same. Attack. The *entire* game is like this--your life bar is just an imaginary number and the game decides you live or die from an attack based on completely arbitrary values.

Between all of these problems, I ended up just spamming the bow for the near entirety of my playtime. There's nothing tactical about this because you can't move and use the bow at the same time, but the bow was blatantly designed as the superior weapon in the game; the majority of passive equippables and required upgrades in the game buff the bow, the melee attack gets absolutely nothing unless you go out of your way to make it slightly less awful, and you can't do that until shortly before the final boss.

The boss fights themselves were at best acceptable, and at worst just downright annoying due to the combat mechanics. Your character cannot jump very high, and most bosses are the same height as you, with the end result being that if they pin you in a corner you WILL take contact damage trying to escape. Rolling is less useful as half the bosses have erratic movement such that rolling will cause you to take damage regardless. Overall, due to the fact you don't get any meaningful movement enhancing upgrades in the game and no alternatives or real upgrades to your attacks, the boss fights are pretty forgettable HP sponges where you spam the bow until they die.

Except they, for some reason, gave all the bosses special drops if you can beat them without taking damage. Half of these are items you can buy from a shopkeeper slightly later in the game, giving you a small power boost earlier than expected. The other half are exclusive items that are hilariously gamebreaking, capable of tearing through 30-50% of a boss's life in one use (and you get up to 2 uses of each gamebreaker item). The funny thing is all the bosses kill you instantly on Insane difficulty, forcing you to beat them hitless, giving you guaranteed access to all these gamebreaking items that let you crush the bosses without challenge. If the combat and movement systems were good in the game I'd accuse this of being cheesy and lame, but the bosses feel like such a waste of time that I fully advocate cheesing them.

I've never played the other games in the series, and that isn't a problem with regards to the story and characters because the game has basically no story or characters. There's an evil curse, you need to cleanse it. End of story. There's like five characters you meet a single time, trust you immediately, and either tell you completely obvious observations about the game world (everybody is dead or a ghost? Wow couldn't have figured that out based on the ominous music and all the ghosts I've killed so far) or just hand you a key item. Only one of these characters even has a name, which just feels weirder. There's a few other completely worthless NPCs who say equally useless statements like "I'm scared" that don't add anything.

And, finally, the game is short. That's probably one of the biggest upsides to the game, in that despite its stockpile of annoyances that incited me to make a review in the first place, it didn't last long enough to make me actually hate the game. It's barely 4 hours long, and that's on a first playthrough that got the true ending, all upgrades, and full map exploration. You can casually speedrun the game in under 40 minutes once you know where to go. Momo4 at its core being a short game is also the root cause of other problems, like how few upgrades the game has. Can't pace those well when you can beat the game blind in a single sitting.

Overall it's not offensively bad, not unplayable, is acceptably fun, but the problems with combat, lack of upgrades, dull exploration, and forgettable boss fights really dragged down my opinion of the game. But the game is often cheap on sale so it's still decent for a couple bucks.

So the game paints itself as trying to invoke the same sort of feeling as Alien and The Thing blended together. Going through the tutorial, this seemed pretty clear. The expectation to me would be that we spawn in a space station as a full group and have a time limit to do a bunch of arbitrary tasks to win. Except, one person is a shapeshifter out to kill everyone, making the group increasingly paranoid as time ticks down and forces the group to eventually split up which occasionally gives the monster some time to mess things up.

Effectively invoking the feeling of a bunch of hapless expendable extras trying to do something in Alien and the mounting paranoia from The Thing. In video game form, that would be incredible.

This game did not actually attempt to do any of that.

Imagine if in Alien the movie opens up with every character being already isolated and having had no contact with any other character, and none of them are awake an alien bent on slaughtering all of them even existed. Just minding their own business, turning a corner in a hallway, and bam there's the alien. Dead in an instant. No scream, no evidence, repeat for every single character. The movie would be over in 90 seconds and Roger Ebert himself would call it such a miserable dung heap not even deserving of a pity 1-star rating, he'd have to invent a whole new sub tier just for this dumpster fire.

That? That's Unfortunate Spacemen.

Every player spawns completely isolated in some section of an otherwise abandoned space station. You are borderline weaponless (nothing more than a garbage pistol to help you), and have to get your bearings, explore for better gear, and perform the necessary objectives required to summon the spaceship to evacuate and win the mode.

Oh, and one player is the shapeshifter, the "Alien" who by design is expected to blend in with the group until an opportune moment to backstab them and get an easy kill off. Except, by design, the entire group starts isolated. There's no useful radar or waypoints to locate your teammates, and voice chat is intentionally designed such that you can only hear other players when they're physically close to you and a wall isn't in the way, so shout for help all you want but nobody will hear you. Nobody will find you.

Except the shapeshifter, of course, who wins 1v1 guaranteed due to having incredible health, damage output, and faster movement than the players. The intention is for the group to stick together as often as possible to make the shapeshifter bide their time and tactically strike, but that doesn't exist in the game. It's impossible for the survivors to find each other, they have no tools to do so! So they run around aimlessly until the monster, who has all the advantages, finds them and murders them.

There's no respawning or possibility of a teammate coming to your aid. If you die, that's it, game over for you. Not that it matters because matches last 90 seconds or less, with the shapeshifter systematically running around killing every single player one by one because everybody is isolated for too long.

Spawning the entire group (plus shapeshifter) together at the start and slowly causing paranoia and panic to spread would have been amazing, would have been actually interesting, would have been good game design. Instead you start off alone, confused, and die before you even know what happened. The game isn't just unwinnable as the spacemen, it isn't even PLAYABLE. In multiple matches, no player has ever found one of the many objectives needed to succeed. The shapeshifter just steamrolls brainlessly and wins.

It is, by all regards, possibly the single worst asymmetric multiplayer game I've played in my entire life.

Put 750 hours into a game, loving most of it. Then the game shifted to an onslaught of DLC's, most of which were either inherently terrible or contributed to a constant power creep. Infamy 2.0 sucked. Hype Train was a trainwreck. New heisters that have no reason to exist kept getting added bi-monthly just so Overkill can rake in that $5 profit. When Jiro came out, I thought "His backstory is neat, looking forward to it never being brought up again."

That's what PD2 gradually became to me--a game shrouded in pure apathy. Every time that prick Almir goes ";)" I expect disappointment. And even then they manage to outdo my non-existant expectations. They kept releasing garbage DLC one after another for a quick buck. I stopped caring about their new content because all it did was introduce more power creep and more bugs. The game was still fun though. Still played it. Always through the new weapon DLC of the week was stupid but I'd still play.

There's only so much BS a community can tolerate before it collapses. The game has a price, the obscene amount of DLC has a price, and now Overkill triple dipped into microtransaction crates that actually give buffs. And the skins inside are ugly as sin too. The devs have become too greedy and have the game has become something I have no desire to ever play again. And it sucks to me. I'm witnessing the death of a game and its community.

Giving these goons money just keeps reinforcing the idea that they're right. If you like Pay 2 Win games then it'll be right up your alley. If you hate P2W games like a rational human being, don't touch this crap. It's long past its prime.

ETS2 is an impressive game, as on the surface it just looks like an average simulator, but is well detailed and actually portrays driving a truck as accurately as it can. The European environments are beautiful and varied, making every delivery feel unique. The early game can feel a little taxing, as you're forced to use mostly terrible trucks for random employers in order to make money. This isn't all bad, as it allows you to test drive almost every truck in the game before you eventually save up to purchase your own truck.

From there the game gets more open as you can explore and do deliveries at your leisure, eventually building enough capital to hire new drivers to make money for your business as well, or take your money and customize your truck to look more impressive. Ultimately, ETS2 is built to be a relaxing game that's mostly stress-free, yet remains incredibly fun.

My only problem with the game is when driving in towns I would have to frequently save and reload in order to despawn cars--the game will attempt populating towns with an infinite number of cars which never leave due to their close proximity to the player, and with civilian AI being very unintelligent and traffic lights lasting all of five seconds, traffic becomes congested within minutes. Other than that, the game is fantastic and is a great time killer.