Honestly I didn't even look at the content and still haven't. I just autobuy Space Engineers DLC at this point. I've never been disappointed yet. Keep it comin'.

Honestly this is the only commendation and thumbs up Gaijin will EVER get from me. It's also the only $2 Gaijin has gotten from me since 2021, and probably the last $2 they will ever get from me.

I bought this specifically for the track "Airstrike" which was used in a really great machinima about a dogfight between a Ju-87 and a SB2U-2. The video went viral for it's excitement factor and high production quality, but of course, since the creator used the "Airstrike" track here, Gaijin's rabid intellectual property lawyers forced it to be taken down. Frankly it was the best War Thunder video I had ever seen. Gaijin is braindead. All the time. Not just sometimes. ALL the time.

(By the way, most of the money you give Gaijin ends up with those lawyers - NOT in coders or game development staff, but in IP defense to prevent any competition to War Thunder, because if there was a competitor, then they'd actually have to make a good game!)

Anyway the rest of the soundtrack is OK. Just OK. It's industrial electronica, so if you are in love with that genre maybe you'll like it more than I do. I just found the Airstrike track to be particularly good. I'm planning on overlaying that track on the famous final dogfight between Maverick and the two Su-57's at the end of the new Top Gun movie. Then I'll post it on YouTube where it'll exist for a short time before the lawyers get me.

This is really a great remake of this classic game. It comes with options you can set which will either improve the game in smart ways (I use a few of them), or retain the classic methods from the versions of decades ago (I mostly use things that make it feel like the old NES version I grew up on).

One thing i find interesting is that, apparently, only about 75% of players earn the achievement for entering the Maze for the first time. That means about 1/4 of those who startup the game never even actually play it? Crazy.

Anyway, it was a great game in the 80s and a great game when it was remade in the 90s and it remains a great game today. If you're a player of RPGs, this is literally the original ancestor they ALL came from, so why not check it out? But seriously, you should actually enter the Maze, that's, uh, where the game is.

Gameplay advice section: You'll screw yourself royally if you only have 6 levelled characters. Continually build up a full roster (which is 20 characters) and take turns leveling them all as you go. Spread your capabilities and G-N-E alignments. Don't say I didn't warn you when you have been playing for 12 hours and suddenly your party gets wiped from something out of your control, and you have no characters that can even attempt a rescue mission because you didn't level any. I guarantee you that's the number 1 reason people don't complete this game: they have their main 6, their main 6 get wiped, and then they ragequit and never come back.

I mean, it's OK, but geez this is overhyped. If there was a way to leave a review without a thumbs up or down I would have. But since I can't, I'll go with thumbs down as balance to it's Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, which I don't think it earns.

My sincerest apologies to any fanbois that upsets. No sarcasm. I just found it simplistic and boring, personally.

it's ok on sale but it suffers from the primary problem that all Microsoft games do... it's made by Microsoft.

it's hilarious how they're making a DLC when somehow this crap still doesn't have all the same feature set that the original DayZ ArmA mod had...

...CIRCA TWENTY-TWELVE

You're gonna see a lot of reviews like that go like this:

Either,
Thumbs down, but the whole text of the review is positively praising the game,
or,
thumbs up, but the whole text of the review is negatively criticizing the game.

And it's all completely warranted.
For me, I'm going to go with thumbs up and criticize the glaring issues.

Pros:

The game is pretty great; it really grows on you, and the co-op multiplayer is fun.

Cons:

Graphics --- Bad. No anti-aliasing, and I wasn't even able to force nVidia anti-aliasing on it. It seems immune. The ingame environments and models are somewhere between Morrowind (2002) and Oblivion (2006) or kinda like Neverwinter Nights 2 (also 2006) without anti-aliasing. Nothing really looks good at all, and sometimes the environments just feel sparse and unfinished.

User Interface --- Horrible. One of the worst I've ever had the misfortune of trying to use. For example (and this is just one of MANY possible examples I could go on about), there is constant use of iconography WITHOUT any mouse-hover tooltips, so you need to go find that weird button in the middle-right of your keyboard (as far as possible from both your hands) that shows your buffs on a screen that blocks your view and prevents you from taking action while the screen is up (hope you're not in combat!), rather than just put your mouse over the buff icon to find out what the heck that symbol means like any newbie game developer would know to provide for the user. Basic Game Design 101 failures all over that place with this UI. Trust me, it's WORSE than I'm making it sound.

Multiplayer --- Has issues. There's significant desync at times with the locations of pathing entities between host and connecting client, and it's one of those "co-ops" where only the host really exists and the connecting client is just a tag-along. You can't even enter separate zones from each other. Speaking of which...

Zones and instancing --- Again, just like games from nearly 20 years ago, there's loading screens between zones all over the place. Every couple minutes you're traversing a zone with a rather long loading screen (that requires a button press to advance, even!) and if you're in multiplayer, you have to wait by the door for your friend. You can't leave. I don't understand how a game released in 2022 with 2006 graphics ALSO needs 2006 instancing and load points.

Invisible barriers --- Everywhere. Again, let me remind you that this game is from 2022. I haven't seen this many invisible barriers since probably.... 2006.

NPC conversations --- Cringeworthy and bad. Where voice acted, the voice acting is bad, and doesn't match the text on screen. Worse, in multiplayer, whoever is not the one who initiated the conversation can only see HALF the conversation. Good luck keeping up with the storyline when you're getting 50% of the dialogue, and that 50% is confusing because what you're hearing doesn't match what you're trying to read along with. The last time I seen an issue like this in a co-op RPG was... Neverwinter Nights 2, from... 2006.

2006 --- That is the year this game transports you back into, game-development wise.

Thumbs up though, would definitely recommend this game. No sarcasm. I have no idea why my friend and I are enjoying it. Zero explanation for that, sorry. But nevertheless, there it is.