Recent reviews by Astraben

El juego peor programado de la historia.

Whoever tells you this is a "flawless port" is lying to you. It´s full of inconsistencies, leaks, bugged features like Reflex, DLSS and DLAA, is incredibly ugly on Native Full HD and requieres DLDSR to be decent. Just check the community discussions tab and see how many people have problems that will never get addressed because they have either paid off the critics, or deliberately accomodated for them.

The game is beautiful, scary, and when it runs well it`s decently optimized.
However, the issue of stutters goes unadressed here almost always. Dead Space Remake suffers from load-in/load-out stutters, aka Traversal stutters, for its entire duration. No amount of tweaking, troubleshooting or shader compiling makes a lick of difference. You will stutter as you fight, as you walk, as you interact... And they are not necessarily big FPS drops that have you spinning around. Just the constant twitching is enough to drive some of us who notice it insane.
At 24€, I´d recommend getting it only if you´re not particularly bothered by stutters and reeeeeaaally reaaally want to play it. My new price of entry for this title, as long as the stutters aren´t fixed (which they won´t, EA doesn´t see the profit in PC, consoles did get a fix a year ago), is 10€. That´s the price that justifies trudging through the stuttering.

I´d heard all about this game before the free week came on. I´ll go into this "free week" thing a bit more, further down the line. Personally, I have difficulty getting into ARPGs. Something about their design, their gameplay philoshophy, doesn´t click for me. Still, I went into Diablo IV with an open mind, maybe it´d triumph where Grim Dawn or Titan Quest had failed. Boy, was I wrong.

I have one good thing to say about it. Graphically, the game is very good. The cinematics are amazing, truly great. I also really like the character design and the visual feedback in combat, enemies disintegrating when I hit them with a corpse bomb, their skin and flesh flying off as their skeleton is left behind. It´s really kinda neat.
And that´s about it.

In no particular order, and off the top of my head, here are my gripes with the game:

1. The story is kinda boring, and it shouldn´t be, from what I gather. You meet the setting´s "God" relatively early, and it doesn´t really make any impression on you. You are given an objective, you go to that objective, someone talks to you, usually ominously, and you then go somewhere else to be talked to. In the few hours I was allowed to play, I met some supposed big names, the Pope, "God", God´s crazy exgirlfriend, and God´s Necromancer Jesus son. And they were all completely unremarkable! Even Lilith is so generic I don´t really understand why she´s the ultimate evil. Acts like a pretty run-of-the-mill demoness from where I´m standing. I have a bias for Angel vs Demon stories, shoutout to WotR, so it´s a shame they couldn´t get me into it in 5 hours.

2. The gameplay is mind-numbingly boring. I know I might be to blame a bit on this, I want to play a Necromancer, I have no problem sitting behind the lines and letting my skellies do most of the work. But the complete lack of threat from the AI (on the highest available difficulty, mind you. It´s not the highest overall, you need to complete the game once to unlock that) is ridiculous. I have no idea what I´m doing in these games, and I was just mowing the opposition down with two buttons. It´s kind of a running theme with ARPGs that they´re either really easy or really hard, but this was up there with the bootleg Chinese spyware ARPGs I downloaded when I was 11.

3. The loot is boring. I guess it gets better eventually? I wouldn´t know, because SPOILER the free weekend only lets you play until you hit level 20! I like that you can transmog, at least.

4. The damn CAMERA in this game. Why am I stuck looking from 5 meters above ground? I can´t see my skellies max aggro range! I can´t see much at all! My screen is filled with 8 minions, all the enemies, all the effects, and my own PC running around, my capacity to tactically evaluate the situation just doesn´t exist. I´ve been attacked from behind by enemies I couldn´t see untill they were on me. I don´t understand why this is a thing.

5. The towns, the merchants, the upgrades, the zzzzzz... What am I even looking at? An armorer sells armor that´s 90% my total gold reserve, is worse than what I´m already rocking, and is incredibly ugly to boot. Only 3 items on display at a time. Again, WHY? You´re also bombarded with resources in this game. Rawhide, elderberry, wahamugabuga essence, what the hell is all this for??? I´ve watched reviewers ask these same questions after dumping 90 hours into the game, so I guess it´s not just my ARPG defficient brain acting up.

6. Lastly, a bit of a nitpick. Remember when I said the gore was a marvel? Why, when you´ve invested that heavily into visual feedback, does it go away IN LESS THAN 5 SECONDS AFTER COMBAT???? Can we PLEASE look at the pretty carnage a little bit? Walk back through a dungeon and see what we did to them filthy demons? It´s infurating to notice a warg got demolished in full detail and his body is dancing around as you unleash hell and then it just goes *pop* and dissapears. Very mad about this.

Overall, bad experience would not recommend.
Onto the Blizzard slander.
This free week thing is a LIE. It´s a time limited DEMO, not the game. Once you hit lvl20, regardless of what you´re doing at the time, the game disconnects from the SERVER. It´s not a "whelp, it´s over, hope you likey likey", a giant banner pops up, says "BUY NOW", and then disconnects from the game server. Do you know why this is? Because 95% of the playerbase that would play this game would just complete the campaign once during the free week, dabble in another character and maybe some post-game content, and be burnt out on the game already. They just want that money upfront, they don´t trust their product to attract players beyond the 20 hours you would get, at most, playing during the free period. This says more about the game than any review ever could.

AVOID.

This game made my PSU explode, and it doesn´t even have a monitor select option.

Abusive monetization model. Incredibly frustrating economy systems. Overpriced, unbalanced premium vehicles. Bad map design. Bad netcoding. Bad implementation of damage models for many vehicles. Bad moderation, I´ve been verbally abused by people friendly with moderators in the past and they ignored my reports.
Bad community outreach, the developer never listens to feedback. Lately, they´ve taken to gaslighting and blaming the community for not liking changes made to the economy to make it even more predatory. The developers also lie, constantly. Numerous times they said they´d never do one thing, or implement X mechanic, only for them to see they could make more money off it and do it anyway. You might find your favorite vehicles destroyed completely because of one arbitrary change the developers decided to implement, and you might have even paid money for said vehicle.
Stay away from this game, don´t listen to sponsored content, this has been a shipwreck for years now and it will not stop any time soon.

The game has a decent enough gameplay foundation, but there are several issues at the moment, mainly, but not exclusively, with its AI systems, that make it a pain to play at times. Some examples:
-AI tanks will nail you hull down after cresting up a hill in T-55s without rangefinders, and in angles that require milimetric precision to not hit the ground.
-AI tanks will then proceed to never get a shot near you, depending on the mission.
-AI allies will never restock their ammunition, they will leave you alone and outnumbered every time.
-AI allies will never point their armor at the enemy. I´ve been shot and had to relocate crews to find my allied tank facing the enemy with the rear and a completely turned turret.
-AI allies can´t keep formation. They will never be able to keep up in open terrain, they will get stuck on trees and buildings, and when they catch up they will drive around, again showing their rear to the enemy.
-Branches and brushes will stop tanks dead in their tracks. Not trees, bushes I can bend with my foot.
-Restocking ammunition cycles through ammo types you don´t necesarily want stocked. In a T-72 you will have to hit the button three times for every APDSFS round you want ready.
-M1s will absorb APDSFS at point blank with their turret rings.
-Tanks will remain operational after being hit and compromised dozens of times. I´ve emptied ammo racks in M1s that still popped up when using the commander´s targeting, and I´ve been shot in the side by previously immobilized enemies.
-Sometimes TOW missiles will register a miss in the AAR when they should have gone straight through a target.


These are some nitpicky gripes I have with the game in its current Early Access shape. I´ll edit or remove this review with future updates.

(Quest 2 user)
Is the game good? It can be.
Is the game worth buying? No, it absolutely isn´t, at least if you´re gonna use it as the startinf point for your VR journey.

First things first, which are the negatives:
-The game´s optimization is insanely bad. Used to be that it was bad in and of itself, plain resource consumption, badly coded behaviours and unoptimized map geometry. Nowadays this has gotten much better. However, the game can just up and ♥♥♥♥ itself right in front of your eyes for no reason other than it feels like it. Picture a man you´re having a nice conversation with and the dude just rips a fat one with a packet and keeps making eye contact without a change in his expression. That´s how playing BaS feels like. You´ll be fighting people for an hour and then the game just stops working. Add to that it´s a VR title, this can make you literally puke.
Yesterday I was playing at 72fps, not a care in the world, today the game has capped itself at 36 and is bleeding 12 frames a second. No explanation to be found anywhere.

-The game´s modding community is amazing. But. Half the mods are broken, the other half can be broken in an instant, try to uninstall some and the game will still tell you that it can´t start up because those exact mods are "out of date", despite the fact you´ve uninstalled them.

-The gameplay is nice and all, but as with the optimization, it ♥♥♥♥♥ itself big time. Get your sword stuck behind an enemy´s shield, prepare for some crazy stretching. Been fighting a bit too long? Your character has now begun to compress into themselves and you can´t either move, fight, or see anything. I´ll say, though, that one day this happened to me, I was basically on ground level all shriveled up, and I just started jumping around like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ goblin stabbing people in the face with a dagger. The joys and disgraces of full physics combat.

-The enemies are quite boring and the magic is a bit clunky. The devs are working on improving this next, so kudos to them!

-You are going to have to do some file digging if you missclick on the settings tab. Choosing Very High will lock you out of being able to change settings in game because the thing will move at 2fps tops. Don´t try it with a VR headset on. That´s why I said don´t use this as a starter.


Now, the positives:
-It can feel amazing. When everything clicks during combat it´s like nothing else in the world.

-The devs are very good at keeping the updates coming, every 3 to 4 months you´ll have something new to look forward to, and the potential is immense.

-The mods that do work and are actively updated have Skyrim levels of care put into them.


And that´s pretty much what my 10 hour experience has been like! Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree.

Soy usuario F2P, lo que más me interesaba era ver cronológicamente la historia y quizá hacerlo parte de mi rutina habitual. Cuando he visto que literalmente ya no se puede jugar a expansiones pasadas, he decidido no tocarlo más, no vaya y en el futuro me roben, como han hecho ya con los que compraron las expansiones y el juego base desde el principio. Vergonzoso modelo de negocio.

Más allá de esta infamia mencionada, el gunplay está bien y desde luego puedes grindear hasta desfallecer, pero el juego es lo más artificial que he visto jamás. No existe nada en él que sea orgánico, todo lo que puedes hacer está marcado por una lista que ir rellenando, tipo Excel, y te limitas a checkear cajitas como si estuvieras haciendo inventario en una tienda. Incluso las primeras misiones de campaña (que puedes jugar pero no avanzar en la historia, para eso tienes que pagar mínimo 25 euros) son poco más que espectáculos sin desafío que te dan masticadito y por ver algo bonito, pero banal.
La única excepción son las cortas pero aún así refrescantes "Zonas Perdidas", que puedes ir descubriendo más o menos por tu cuenta, en cada mapa. El problema es que estas zonas también están marcadas en el mapa del mundo, no solo existen pistas visuales respecto a ellas. Es decir, al final, son una cajita más que rellenar. No hay nada que me moleste más que explorar el terreno por mi cuenta, descubriendo antiguas naves, cuevas y recovecos, y que al final no signifiquen nada, porque o bien no he pagado lo necesario para que haya algo en ellas, o no están en la "rotación" de eventos.

Cuando Bungie decida no jugar con el dinero de los usuarios y vuelva a poner en el juego todo el contenido que han borrado, me plantearé recomendar Destiny 2.

Review Exclusively for Halo: Reach
NOW EDITED BELOW:

Many months after release, sound is still so bad it gives me a headache every time I try to keep progressing on the campaign. It was supposed to be fixed, it is definitely better than it was at launch, but the sound quality is still awful.

If you use a headset, I advice you not to buy this game, I should have refunded it, don´t make the same mistake.

EDIT:
The game has, at some point, had its sound fixed. It is now definitely worth purchasing. Mod support makes it an even better deal, I recommend playing through the campaign once and then trying Ruby´s Rebalanced Campaign.