An absolute quacker of a game.

Puns aside, this is fun and surprisingly deep game that keeps you coming back for more. Mechanics are tight and while there are some areas I would like to see improvements made, there's not really much that cannot be fixed by the active mod community.

Not as much humour baked in as the original, but a good story with solid, enjoyable mechanics. Appreciate there being multiple paths to achieve your goals and perceptible consequences to your actions.

Fast, hectic fun.

ESIV Oblivion with a darker storyline, better combat and far, far fewer bugs.

Slightly rocky few hours, but the devs pulled it out of the bag and fixed a few critical issues. This is what you get when you take a very good game and crank all the dials to 11. Skill systems are polished, controls are responsive and the new WASD control scheme just feels right. Will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played PoE before, yet with enough differences to make it feel nice and fresh. Is this the most hyped game of the year? Yes. Does it live up to the hype... impossibly yes.

In its present state, no I cannot recommend this game. The engine rebuilt from the ground up? Why then does it contain the same sticky collision bug as previous versions amongst other issues. The physics are good, they feel like the correct balance being on the arcade side of sim rather than the sim side of arcade (looking at you there GRiD). But how can the graphics look worse than previous versions of the game and yet run so much worse? Why do the AI ram you off the track as if you were not even there and then not only do they not get a penalty, you get a penalty for the collision and subsequent trip off the track as all the energy of the collision goes into your car while they sail on serenely. Not to mention the car painter is the same primitive slap on shapes rubbish we've had for years. I don't expect some of these complaints to be addressed, but the performance and AI absolutely need to be improved. Note: When changing graphics settings frame rate tanks until the game is fully restarted, how are we supposed to dial in optimal settings like this???

This is a difficult one, can I recommend this game. Compared to previous Bethesda titles (looking at Fallout 3 & 4, Skyrim) then yes; there are less bugs on launch (less, not none) and there is no Fallout 76 style micro-transaction shenanigans. But by making that comparison, no. There is little to no innovation here. The "space-powers" you get are reskinned Skyrim shouts, so yes you can Fus-Roh-Dah a spaceman off a mountain. Settlements, crafting and most other aspects of the game are reskinned Fallout 3/4, as is the conversation system, quests, character animation style. The NPCs in this game are all one-dimensional and for the largest part completely dead behind the eyes. There are so many jarring little things that knock you out of immersion and once you spot them you see them anywhere... watch as any NPC getting out of a chair stands up, makes a small but noticeable pause stood in place then smoothly rotates before walking away. It's a little thing but it's so uncanny valley. Then there are the weird resolution issues, I would be fine with the black bars on the sides running 5120x1440 if only the ship builder did not treat the mouse as if it were offset by a quarter screen making the whole experience unusable. So, no, I cannot recommend this at present. Hopefully things will be patched and improved, but given Bethesda's track record on that front I'm not going to hold my breath.

Controls can be a little janky in places and marines sometimes get stuck on terrain. But apart from that this is a cracking strategy game. Really captures the spirit of the franchise and is more than happy to induce levels of anxiety... in a good way. Losing a marine feels bad man.

I am tentative in approving this. The art style is spot on, the combat is satisfying so when playing I have to say I am having fun. Have not played enough missions to get an idea of the number of environments/level designs but they seem varied enough. The main reason for this is the constant crashing, there is a reconnect option but that involves minutes of downtime going through all the loading screens again, would be better if the game just loaded straight back in. Currently I am getting at least one crash to desktop every match sometimes more. And if the game crashes and the boss is killed while you are loading back in, no resume, no XP no loot for you. Not refunding but I am going to leave it for a few patches.

Edit: After the latest round of patches the crashing is getting worse. I now cannot play a mission without crashing to desktop 3 or 4 times, sometimes I load back in a crash again before I have even moved.

Edit 2: After the Dec 15th patch GPU crashes are still occurring if a little less frequently. Still cannot set graphics to anything higher than `low` without getting multiple GPU crashes per game.

Let's get the obvious stuff out first. Graphics are incredible, sound design is excellent. But that's not enough to base a game on. I had decent fun with the campaign although I found it very hit or miss on the difficulty levels. Some missions were a cakewalk and felt like there was no need to think about how you approached tasks whilst others were very hard to get past due to irritating RNG. There was one driving mission where I was blown up by the APC only to spawn at max speed right behind a truck which immediately spun me out and failed the mission as the target got away. Guess where I spawned retrying that? Yup, back behind that same truck. That was the only mission I had to restart from the beginning though. Was about 8 missions in when everything went bad.

That was when the day 1 patch hit, after that the game crashed after a few seconds regardless of settings (annoyance #1). This meant I had to reload the game, which defaults to loading multiplayer; getting to single player campaign requires a restart from the multiplayer menu (annoyance #2). Sometimes the crash would bugger up some game files requiring a lengthy file validation and refresh (annoyance #3). The servers were having issues, so I had to queue to get to the multiplayer menu, then, queue again to get to the single player menu (final nail in the coffin).

At this point I called it quits and refunded the damned thing. I really wanted to enjoy it but it made it impossible for me to do so.