Recent reviews by theprinceofhumbug

10 hour campaign, 20 hours with error codes, glitches, and server capacity. Will check back and update in 2 weeks when its actually playable.

Took me almost 5 minutes to find 6 sticks in a forest and the cows were floating. Microsoft Sam town guards. Check back when some more care has been added.

**UPDATE** LETS GO PATCH 1 FIX. I've kept my original angry review for context, but lets talk about the game.

Characters: well written; dynamic dialog; feels full of life. Sit still and look at the variety of walking animations, I'm serious.

World: design is insane, rarely have I felt like limits of player range hinder me in any way.

Art: its Cyberpunk, its great. you know its great.

Sound: music 10/10, scape 10/10, Sfx 9/10 (I always crave more foley in the cut scenes)

is gud.

**original review** Fix the Johnny visual glitch. Its been 3 years and to not have a work around that an 88kb mod can do its infuriating. I don't care if you have to Venmo the person who made it and just include it in the archive files but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, what laziness. There is no console fix, either. $70 base game. $30 expansion. Debilitating visual/audio bug during all of it. 88kb patch. unbelievable that a game with such great visuals and audio can't seem to patch a fix that absolutely destroys both.

Firstly I am by no means a lifer of Destiny. I didn't play D1, I got in the door at Forsaken, left for a few years, and then reentered shortly before Witch Queen. I don't have nostalgia value wrapped up in this, so this review is strictly through the lens of a D2 player.

The praises - Destiny 2 is amazingly creative and novel in the world of kind-of-shooter-kind-of-MMO games, and from a company with a legacy the weight of Master Chief himself, brings a budget that fits the aspirations. There is so much to do out the gate with crafting materials, currencies, and good god the equipment (the MMO overload, I call it). The weapons and various armor pieces offer you bites of lore to satiate curiosity and add depth to the story of Destiny - something still hotly contested by a legion of lorebook scholars vis a vis reddit.
The gameplay is tasteful and satisfying; gun mechanics feel smooth and make you actually forget you're playing an MMO when you are mowing down waves of red bars-- a colloquialism for the lowest tier of enemy rank difficulty. The jumping mechanics and platforming -- jumpy puzzles -- are glorious and keep the game from feeling flat. What the world may lack in its open expanse it makes up for in its use of vertical space, and what would otherwise feel like a relatively linear experience is distorted via claustrophobic expanses of tunnels juxtaposed with the absolutely stunning skyboxes that make your stomach drop at the scale.
The content library is vast with open world activities, random public events, quests both delivered and hidden make the world feel lived in and still mysterious at times. For the sweater players, late game content and gear grinding balance monotony with the satisfaction that the armor and weapon combinations you can build could be absolutely game breaking at times; at least until the patch comes.
The community is beyond helpful and offers you waves of resources, advice, build recommendations and even guided experiences of the multi-hour 6 person activity that bring many to this game: the raids. A dedicated discord to finding other players helps you substitute your dwindling friends list with others who are more active in the game and some of the people you may meet through there will be friends for life. A game, if anything, should be a way for people to come together and Destiny facilitates this in many, many ways.

The cons
Destiny lacks a unified voice in both story and content-- what comes from a single entity of Bungie feels like it is a game made by 5 different studios over the course of the last 10 years. Faces come and go at companies, but Destiny players feel this impact more than most other games. Content releases at their planned intervals can be met with jeers or cheers and are rarely between. What can be argued as knee jerk reactions from over-enthused fans can be simply read as: Bungie in and of itself has no idea what it has with Destiny nor what Destiny actually is, but it knows it must keep making it. The "good content" to "bad content" slider is a toggle switch. Some story lines will grapple you and hold on to you, while others may leave you hazy-eyed and skipping cutscenes like it's your 40th time on a boss fight and you've already memorized the dialog.
The content that is progressively dripped into your screen tends to be largely a refresh of older code blocks, dusted off with a nice, new sticker and placed back on the shelf for a premium. What novel weapons and armor are given are often behind harder content that demands more time, money, and friends than you may have.
Destiny 2 is a game that has been on the active market for 5 years and experiences more bugs and breakdowns than a AAA title should (minus Redfall/ Anthem, RIP) Weekly patches can and often do fix issues that benefit the player rather than the issues that inhibit the player; removes seasonal content out of rotation that could leave casual players confused and unfulfilled; and regularly spams your launch screen with an enormous amount of click-through ads and announcing returning content that has no tangible recognition to new players.
What once was an ambitious game on the comeback has turned into a floundering mess, splashing spaghetti-code waves that dilute or complicate experiences arbitrarily depending on the week itself.

Why I say I don't recommend this game:

Outright: It's too ♥♥♥♥♥♥ expensive. Bungie has priced out new players entirely of any real value or rewarding experiences of playing the game. I encourage all prospective players to scour the store page and add up the DLC - and yes, most of it is required to access much of the in game content that is otherwise paywall locked for you-- If you are not prepared to drop $200 out the gate and commit to $99 for the final expansion I would recommend spending your hard earned money elsewhere. EA copycat micro transactions aside, the segmentation of content behind an army of DLC and bundles is intentional to overwhelm you into accidental purchases to simply play the game The largest selling point for the last and supposedly pinnacle arc of the story is the return of a character that died 5 years ago-- and none of the content surrounding that is available to play anymore. Thank god for the YouTuber's composing 8 hour lore videos that act as seminaries for introductory players.

Bungie time and time again relies on its community to fulfill what they cannot deliver: a cohesive game with a consistent experience. Charging $99 per deluxe expansion or $70 for standard (but another $20 per dungeon, $15 for seasonal content-- and each of those is 4 times per year) would be criminal enough if many great weapons in the game weren't locked behind them, downright making this a pay-to-win game in the right (correct) lighting.

Overall, Destiny 2's value is largely placed on the backs of its players that do their best to make up for the corporate greed that is plaguing (and sinking) the AAA title world. Dollar for dollar the content is not consistent enough to justify the hefty price tag just to see the whole map. I hope in the future Bungie does something amazing to overhaul this game and make this review look stupid, but as it stands this is not a game I would recommend to first time players, and with the amount of paywalls and voids of sunset content: Bungie doesn't recommend this either.

I came here looking for an alternate scratch for the Civ Itch that regularly plagues RTS players from time to time. Luckily, this is nothing like Civ, and steps into its own right as a world history civilization simulation strategy game (say that 5 times fast.)

To those of us familiar with Sid's game, getting your basic feel for the turns, movement, and general layout of HUD features will be like a distant muscle memory. To those first starting out in this genre and comparing the two: Humankind has a certain simplicity to the user interface than Civ simply lacks on all accounts. What once was a learning curve preventing, I'd say, many of us from enjoying the first 100 turns of the game vastly filled with pain staking/wiki reading/ tutorial tip pop-upping moments that drag on like the centuries, is now stripped back and raw, showing you just enough to understand what is going on in your current focus without detracting from the absolute stellar topographical map design. To add, the audio cues of forests, deserts, and sea-side cliffs play when zoomed in closer to the corresponding tiles and its...its just fantastic.

I could go on, but seriously. If you want something strategic but adaptive, a pace you can control, and historical, witty one-liners voiced over as the lens of modernity, Humankind is for you.