Recent reviews by +Argonaut+

I didn't help liberate Malevelon Creek for Sony to give all my personal details to the Bots.

Sony; you can stick your PSN account up your bug hole.

[EDIT] It turns out, Helldivers have actually stuck the PSN account requirement directly in Sony's Bug Hole.

I’m going to begin with the usual “I’ve got 3.8k hours in Vermintide 2 and have been a fanboi since I got Ursula for Kruber in VT1”

In short, I’ve played the living t*ts out of Vermintide 2 and I’m spectacularly disappointed by Fatshark and Darktide.

The beta was quite rough, Connectivity and DC’s galore for me, although the initial rush of "Wow this game look sweet " and the various different enemies looked cool, the setting is great and the aesthetic is really on point for 40k. Environment Artists; Great Job! Having been through some rough patches with VT2 (I’m looking at you WoM) I knew FS would be…experimental with their methods and directions they choose.

I’ve had maybe 19 hours in the Beta before I realised this game was f*cked.

I’ve been a fan of Fatshark for years and have had a huge amount of goodwill and understanding for some of the baffling and bonkers decisions made in the past as deep down I though FS was a company that seemed to be working with some integrity towards their internal vision, and although they sometimes dropped the ball they always attempted to keep ploughing through and work through the problems for the good of their players and community.

Unfortunately it seems FS have completely ignored anything learned from VT2 and have decided that idiotic levels of Grind and a downright insulting method of gaining weapons and upgrades is the way forward. I cannot facepalm hard enough that this is where they’ve decided to go. More grind? Really?

I don’t know what’s going on internally but there seems to be a shift from FS putting players and the community first in their efforts with the game, to making cold hard cash the one key element that overshadows everything else. The players are bottom of the list of things to GAF about.

Why would any company want to plummet their own reputation to the point they’re being compared to the revolting practices of EA and Blizzard?

I genuinely thought FS had some kind of integrity to at least try and have some self respect but clearly not.

The game is deeply flawed at launch. Weapons grind is insulting and entirely RNG. Character grind is even worse and quite frankly I don’t know why anyone would bother getting one character to 30, let alone 3,4 or 5. There’s some very deep seated issues with the way melee and ranged combat work that vary from irritating to downright infuriating, and there appears to be complete RNG over Grimoires, Scriptures, Locations, Maps, and anything whatsoever that FS feel should be RNG.

Weapon and class balance is completely out of the window. You can get stunlocked by ranged fire making it impossible for you to avoid the damage from the ranged fire while you continue to take ranged fire and be stunlocked. It can be a better choice to actually die and get ressed as you get more HP that way than continue to fight on. Chaos hounds bounce off the ceiling and pounce on you. You get HP chip damage through your toughness(shield). A toddlers colouring book has a more engaging story.

It’s like at any development meetings for Darktide anywhere ever the conclusions were; MORE RNG, PILE ON THE GRIND. Need a weapon? ,RNG AND GRIND, Character?, RNG AND GRIND, Contracts? RNG AND GRIND, Pennances? MAKE THEM SO GRINDY PLAYERS HAVE TO ACTIVELY P*SS OFF THEIR TEAMMATES TO ACHIEVE THEM.

Korean MMO’s that are Free to Play have less grindy systems than this. If it wasn’t causing so much of a pushback from the community it’d be comedy gold that someone thought this would be fine.

I have absolutely no idea how we got from 4 years of Dev on VT2 with all those painful lessons learned to… this. It’s truly stupifying that we’re here and Fatshark are making everything that was bad in Vermintide 2 worse for Darktide.

I was going to have some kind of episode about the cash shop, but it seems there’s already several threads on the Forums venting the utter outrage at the truly dispicable practices that are now part of FS’s repetoire.

So here’s where I’m at personally. I have no goodwill towards FS anymore, I have no intention of persuading my friends to buy it and will actively talk people out of paying for DT and sinking money into FS’s pockets. A guy who loves Vermintide 2 telling everyone to stay away from Darktide.

You’ve blown in Fatshark, you’ve sunk to the lowest level and for me at least, cannot be considered to have any interity in your actions or vision. You’re in it for the money and ♥♥♥ your customers, loyal players and long time fans. the VT2 group I play with are all talking about easing off playing and generally finding something else to do. Hardcore Fans can’t be arsd with the BS you’ve put together here.

You’ve blow it. You’ve blown the goodwill, blown the engagement and simultaneously tanked your own product. [edit] I guess you’re not too bothered if everyone’s already paid?]

If you're looking at buying this product in the Autumn/Winter of 2022 don't. Don't hand over your money. i really mean it.


When’s next free update for VT2?

Oh no. It happened again.

I hopped onto Satisfactory just to rearrange a couple of conveyor belts and build some catwalks. Now it's four and a half hours later and I'm tinkering with my copper production facility to speed up the copper sheet production and wondering how Elon Musk doesn't get infuriated with his employees for not getting him to Mars already. I have left the game long enough to raid a plate of cold sausages from the fridge and bring a beer back to the PC.

This game is very very good at keeping you focused on what is enjoyable. There are lots of design decisions that just.. make this a more seamless experience. The ability to demolish entire buildings and complex structures and have it rebuilt - and improved - in under half an hour is satisfying, and it means you're always ready to simply smash stuff up because you think you can make it better. It doesn't feel like a chore to wreck your own work as it's quick and easy to rebuild stuff and the UI/building mechanics are intuitive and unobtrusive.

Rebuilding it more *efficiently* is the hook of the game and it capitalises on that hook so well. Minor tweaks become major rebuilds before you know it, and the gentle rising of the sun and tweeting of the birds reminds you that you've just wrecked another nights sleep trying to find a way to reroute your power supply to maximise the power grid. It's all good stuff.

I don't play a wide variety of games all the time, I have one/two.. maybe three games I play exclusively. Satisfactory has almost immediately made it into one of the top 2 games I'll play for many months to come.

This is a positive..ish review. I'm going to assume you have either played OMD1 or 2, or unchained.

In short it's a 3d tower defence game with amusing orcs and comedy traps.

It's lost a lot of the "juice" that made OMD2 such good fun. It's just the feeling I get that it's gone from a hard fought war of attrition(in OMD2) to the player in OMD3 needing to tailor their EXACT build to clear a level and without the EXACT build there's always one wave that completely screws you.

The result is, the levels can now be intensely frustrating rather than a puzzle to overcome through repeatedly trying things out. The level of frustration has been amped up by the player needing to replay or grind through on a lower difficulty to get skulls to upgrade the traps needed to complete a level. Beating something like Armoured Ogres becomes a massive annoyance as they are vulnerable to only a select few traps and you can't get those traps or upgrade them enough without going back through older levels. Forcing grind on a player is always going to make lots of people frown.

I have a nasty feeling some of this is as a result of the Stadia launch. There feels less gibs and body parts flying around and there are only 18 levels - something that means to increase the longevity of the game they had to give it quite a steep difficulty curve. The levels very quickly ramp up from "ok this is quite fun" to "How the AF am I supposed to stop that lot!", with a dawning realisation that you need to grind more skulls to boost your traps - making you go back and redo levels quite a lot. Again.

There is the possibility to reclaim any points spent upgrading traps whenever you like and this sounds like a really good idea to avoid the grind, but this just means you have to actually tailor your EXACT build to this EXACT level, and I find myself spending too much time in the trap screen deciding exactly what to upgrade rather than actually playing the levels. It soon become clear that even with a refund of upgrades I haven't got enough skulls I need to boost enough traps of the right type. Back to grinding levels on apprentice for Skulls I go...

There's some new features that are pretty cool, like the War scenarios that have massive fortresses to defend against a monumental amount of orcs, and some of the new traps are quite good fun. The new characters a likeable and although I've only really tried the souped-up bazooka the weapons seem quite well balanced.

Don't get me wrong, it's still quite good - but any game that makes you grind your teeth and shout swear words a lot should only be played in short bursts. This is one such game, so it's not a bad buy if you fancy playing it for a little while, getting through it on apprentice or war mage and never going back to it. Don't expect to be playing it over and over again like OMD2 or Unchained, as OMD3 played for any length of time will give you blood pressure problems.

I've really tried to give this game a fair go. It takes quite some time to figure out some of the mechanics, how -to sail your ship and so on- before you can really get your teeth into the content so I think probably the first 10 hours are simply finding your feet, but it's a good learning process which is simple to learn but hard to master, the Holy Grail.

Once you get the hang of things though, it could be magnificent game. There are messages in bottles, treasure maps, fights with Skeleton Pirate ships, clever merchant Cargo Runs with some really interesting mechanics to make sure you take care. Delivering silk that's been in the sea will reduce the reward for example. There's lots of random islands to simply stop at and rummage through. The sea looks magnificent and the physics of the ships and the changing weather is absolutely beautiful, crystal blue waters with brilliant sunlight gradually overcloud and transform into storm swept seas with huge rolling waves and darkling clouds. Very good stuff.

The crew mechanics are good, and it is definitely a multiplayer game, although you can sail the smallest ship solo and progress quite quickly.

So, considering this is all quite good - why the negative review?

the game in its current state is a Toxic Players Paradise. By making it PvEvP it sets up griefers perfectly to systematically demolish your session. Here's my experience of the PvPvE environment so far;

Complete a raid on a Skeleton Fortress Island, having spent 20 mins sailing there and 30 mins surviving the waves of enemies only for someone to rock up in their ship, sink your stationary ship for no reason, kill you with cannon fire while you're on the beach and then take all the loot you've earned. CHECK

Get followed by a ship while we fight a Skeleton Galleon, waiting for us to defeat it before killing us and taking the Galleon loot? CHECK

Get fire bombed in dock over and over and over again until we have to restart in another server? CHECK

People attempting to form an alliance only to blow the snot out of you for kicks? CHECK

So, the ONE thing that would make me give a glowing review to this game would be a PvE only server. I suspect it'd be full of players who want to cruise around, fighting skeleton ships, killing the Kraken, following clues to buried treasure, and simply cruising the high seas as they're rendered SO WELL. Sailing about really is a fantastic thing to do in this game and when no one comes and gives you a good fisting the game is great.

If you like having serious anger issues and blood pressure problems because the game is designed to reward the worst, most vile, toxic and nasty tactics and don't mind wasting time for someone else to get the reward, spend your money. I mean it, you'll be bloody livid when it happens to you - and it will. I have yet to experience in nearly 40 hours of gameplay a positive experience with another crew.

IF you prefer to have at least some restrictions on the people who get the reward from completing an event or raid (so you can at least be rewarded for you time if nothing else), keep your cash until PvE only servers come along -or more importantly- go and spend it on something else.

There are some people in the world who use tampons to clean hard-to-reach areas of their car engines. These are the same people who get in an intense rage when the dishwasher isn't loaded extremely effectively, or the cucumber in their reduced-price Tesco's sandwich isn't crisp and fresh. These people are egocentric pillocks and extremely annoying.

They are also reviewbombing Vermintide 2.

At it's heart is a fantastic game. Pummeling your way through a huge pack of rats, flinging dismembered bodies around with your double handed hammer while a lunatic fire-witch incinerates anything within ten feet that makes a plaintive "squeak" is great fun. The game looks adorable and the story and characterisation are top notch. There's huge vistas, broken buildings, chaos-infested warcamps and darkling mines to bludgeon your way through and it's all deeply satisfying.

Now I'm not going to tell you it's perfect and it doesn't give you the same kind of deep throbbing in your gentleman's sausage that you might experience with, say, a ninteen-year-old nyphomaniac gymnast - but it is a bloody good game. Don't write it off because of the mixed reviews(at time of writing), because those reviews are from people who have significant hours in game (200+) and are developing a blood pressure problem over the lack of LOOTZ they feel they should have by now. Diddums. 200 hours of fun is abso-bloody-lutely worth the money I paid for it.

It is buggy (there, I said it) but the Dev's release a patch every 7-9 days and are ploughing through the bugs faster than I can plough through a patrol of Chaos Warriors, clanging a halberd into their foreheads (the Chaos Warriors, Not the devs). There are some clunky bits to the crafting that makes the attempts to get top-notch weapons annoying and some of the classes are unbalanced - almost hopelessly so in some cases but as I said - the dev's are working on it fast and hard. Drop rates for Perfect weapons are miniscule so if you're into grinding repetitive tasks for the hope of getting a great reward I suggest you try something many of us have, it's called a "Full Time Job".

If you like Left for Dead(2), If you like Vermintide 1, if you like mindless violence and blood squirting out of a pair of legs tottering around because you have just removed the torso with an axe, this game is for you. If you like rearranging your sock drawer and expect everything to be immaculate the moment you wake up I suggest you wait until Mary Poppins comes along to sing you a song about how lovely life is. Or get the game in a little while once the dev's have polished it. Just don't miss out on the gem. It's worth every single penny.

Here's my review. I'm deliberately not going to use a certain word.

The hype involved in Fallout 4(F4) is clouding the judgement of many people. The game is something of a dissapointment to me in that I sincerely hoped Beth would have learned a bit of a lesson with Skyrim. Ho Hum.


I supposed dissapointment is the wrong word, as I am not dissapointed in my purchase, it is going to be worth the forty quid and hence my recommendation, but it certainly isn't an open world RPG.....

On to the game.

Having gone through the Character Creation process, moderately enjoying the new method of changing my face(although there isn't actually anything new to the mechanics of face-generation) I plunge into the opening sequences, checking out my wife and tootling around my 1950's house. I can't help feeling it's a little bit "Call of Duty", with very very linear opening sequence which is little more than an interactive DVD, going through the motions to set the scene and opening chapter of the game. I think it is too long before you actually get out of the Vault, but hey - it sets the scene well.

Once I've left the vault the Graphics are quite impressive for about ten minutes, and then Art-Fatigue sets in. It is quite interesting that the world is so full as opposed to the open tundra of Skyrim. but the similarity of the environment gets old quickly. The very few injections of bright colours are a welcome addition, but it soon becomes a bit samey. Why aren't the Rad Roaches evolved into some of the wonderful colours of Beetles and Bugs in the Real World? Why can't we have bright blue/yellow and green flying dragonfly bugs? Why can't the Ghouls eject luminous green snot when they get shot? Missed opportunities to break up the sepia-tone here...


I trundle around and speak to a few NPC's, and the dialogue controls are shocking for a PC game. Having to constantly remove my hand from the mouse or keyboard to press the arrow keys is a bad oversight and clearly the dialogue system is designed for a [word removed]

In fact, you can see the influence of the [word removed] in most of the design decisions. The RPG element has been streamlined to the point of being almost irrelevant, and having blown several Raiders head's off, the upgrading and tinkering with weapons seems pointless when you can simply get a better gun by searching the corpses you create. Tooling me up with power armour and a MiniGun so early in the game is purely for the benefit of those players with a low tolerance for perseverance, paitence, persistence, or any other good words beginning with P. In short, people who play CoD on a [word removed]

The option to build a base is a nice touch, but suffers from the same bad design which is aimed at a [word removed]. It is also wholely un-neccesary to build a base, so mooching around making things pretty is a gimmicky thing that has no real point in-game.

Maybe I've been spoilt by The Witcher 3, with it's interesting and deep NPC's in their lustrous and luxuriously detailed outfits. Maybe I'm being unfair to F4 as I am enjoying playing it.Maybe If it was released 18 months ago, it might have made a bigger impression on me but now, it all feels a little bit like Half Life 2 - good while it lasts but once it's completed, never visited again - and herein lies my disappointment.

This is an FPS, with some small RPG elements hanging on for grim death as a throwback to the earlier titles in the franchise. Take a look at what The Witcher 3 delivers as an open world RPG, and you too might find yourself disappointed with F4 once the lustre of the opening week fades.

I have got this early access game, and I have had more enjoyment and sense of achievement from cleaning the interior compartment of a commercial oven.

Apart from the whole balance-the-excel-spreadsheet survival mechanics, the tasks, gathering and general wandering around are simply too grindy. Sure the world looks cool ,and the dinosaurs are preeety, but hey. That's it.

Doing the same thing for long periods of time in exchange for rewards? I call this a real-life idiotic job. A mindless job with no stimulation, a bit like putting matchsticks in boxes one at a time or doing some other repetitive, soul-crushing work. To tell you what kind of bloody stupid grinding you've got here, there is a mini discussion in-game that "Shift work" is actually a bonus of this game. "Hey you get to do some intensely boring stuff in shifts so no-one is bored so much they actually die at the keyboard. Yay! Just like working in retail!"

I have heard it described as "five mind numbing hours" of babysitting.

If you really want to complete repetitive boring grindy tasks for reward, I suggest you go to your workplace and ask for some overtime. At least you might actually get some money for beers so you can get smashed enough to think this game is anything other than a poor attempt at jumping on the Jurassic World bandwagon.

Just in case you felt like you were getting somewhere, you log off and find out your body has been munched by all kinds of nasties and everything you did was for naught. We can't inflict this kind of soul-destroying work on prison inmates yet I have somehow paid for the privilege.

If you even consider buying this game, go and stick you head down your own toilet and pull the chain. The wash of water over your head and up your nose might hopefully shock you into realising it is the game that belongs in the toilet and not your own head. Do not buy it. I'm serious. I really mean it. Just don't. Go and find some other way of having fun, like re-arranging your sock drawer or something.