Recent reviews by ashax

While not a Warrior's Creed game, it is a below average Assassin's Creed game.

Story is predictable, dialogue and acting is meh.

Lacks cool set-piece missions of previous AC games, but the Hitman-like missions are ok.

Parkour and the new controls they use is janky; The map itself is pretty good though.

I don't mind the new Mark and Execute Sync Kill Assassin's Focus ability, but the game have so few good assassination animations (and most are janky and not fluid).

Notoriety system is okay but could be improved. The Mercenary/ Merchant/ Scholar Token currency felt unnecessary.

Skill tree is w/e (no double assassinations without throwing knife use is weird). Available Tools and their upgrades are alright (usual Smoke Bomb, Throwing Knife, Dart, Noisemaker, and a new Trap).

Limited number of Weapon and Armor set effects, and most of them are uninteresting.

Combat is parry/ dodge centric with light and heavy attack. Not as flashy as previous Assassin's Creed, so it felt w/e. At least there are no forced combat encounters other than the final fight if I recall correctly (maybe there are some in the "rebel-related" story missions but I might've cheesed them using smokebomb assassinations/ banked Assassin's Focus).

It's not a Warrior's Creed game, but it is worse than all the previous Assassin's Creed games. I can't remember a memorable "cool" Assassin's Creed mission from the short time I played this game.

Review written after Realms Rebuilt (version 0.5) update:

TL;DR
Better prologue/ long tutorial and Story Quests and progression. Kinda-empty endgame grind, bugs, kinda janky combat.

Non-procedurally generated handcrafted realms for story progression is way better than the previous progression. Crafting unlocks is also better than visiting each realm's Essence Trader. However, the balance for progressing through the story on the highest difficulty is worse than before as gear tier upgrading system is exclusive to endgame.

Story progression major bugs were quickly patched, but others remain (e.g. some minor realm card effects are not working, few of which are essential to min-max your equipment stat).

Right now the Endgame consists of building your Estate, grinding T4 essence for upgrading gear Tiers, grinding T3 essence for making infusions, and making min-maxed Melee, Ranged, Magick, or Recruit/ Follower gears which involves target farming materials with the best stats from Tier 5 Material Point of Interest Spawns in Random Realms or certain Storied Realms, and a massive amount of Fabled Creature materials either from Fabled Creatures, RNG from normal creatures, and Fae Vault bosses.

I hope there will be more to the endgame, maybe a separate progression, quests, and unlocks (e.g. reputation) and events at The Watch (hub) which utilizes public realms similar to No Man's Sky as well as more Major realms beyond The Watch.

Campaign:
Great Cinematic experience, better with friends, very cool.
Only low point I can think of are the "Rats" section of the 2nd mission and some downtime sections from the "Cave" mission.

PvP:
It's ok, a bit death-bally and significantly less emphasis on Melee in my short experience with it.
I didn't have much interest in it before and quickly lost interest in it, so I haven't played a lot of rounds nor grind each classes to unlock their other, more interesting weapons.

(Co-)Operations:

Patch 3.0 (2024/09/26) update:

Armor attrition vs Minoris is better which made the melee combat survivability less punishing or gunstrike reliant. Adjusted spawns for the Chaos faction nerfs made it less overwhelming.

Overall an improvement to the push forward combat that plays better and makes you feel more like a Space Marine, but also makes the game easier (which I think is alright as they will add new enemies and difficulty tier).

They also fixed the bugs with the Supply pod full healing characters with +20% max HP passive/ perk and healing past contested health bug with Melta/ Las Fusil/ etc. which is good.

Original Launch review:

Only having 6 missions on launch is terrible, -Tide games and World War Z had more on launch in the past and still needed more content.

Balance seemed all over the place.
At the higher difficulties, there are fewer resources, it felt similar to the tactical survival experience of Back 4 Blood and World War Z. Depending on your build, you want to be thrifty with ammo and to save it for a wave/ Terminus miniboss/ or an enemy calling for reinforcements from an out of reach place.

Enemies becomes bullet spongy at higher difficulties and are more numerous, and Medicae Stims heals less HP. Different weapon types seem to have different effectiveness vs specific enemies. Running away to the next airlock/ elevator to despawn enemies behind you is cheesy and effective, but not fun.

You have to ration your ammo in-between fixed ammo crate placements and try to use melee, the environment, and equipment you find as optimally as possible (explosive barrels, explosive flowers, and level gimmicks such as the fire wall at the end of the first mission or the train diverter control panel in the last mission).

Regardless of the difficulty, missions have RNG aspects to it such as the mid-level events requiring 0-6 (!) sub-objectives to complete.

Perk and class balance seemed to be all over the place, but I need to play more to be sure, and there seems to be some bugs or hidden effects.
Examples for balance stuff:
- Certain classes have ammo generation perks later on in their class (or weapon perk line) which seems to be a mandatory pick compared to the other options;
- Bulwark's 23 perk restores contested health to your max HP which substantially reduces the need for healing items when paired with executions, or allowing full heal + wound restoration when paired with a Medicae Stim.

Also you use the same currency to buy weapons, class perks, and Space Marine Chapter Customization and you always feel poor while progressing initially, with some classes having more expensive weapons (e.g. Assault).

You also need to grind each class and weapons types. You can max out a class to level 25 and still need to level other weapon types, but trying to do it in the higher difficulty sucks because your lower tier weapon is weak, negatively affecting the strength of the team and your character.

It combines the grind of The Division 2, Destiny 2, Warframe, and Outriders; It also reminds me a bit of Lost Ark grind's tediousness too for some reason (minus the RNG aspect of PROGRESS of Lost ARK). If you like the grind in those games then you will probably like this game as well.

Unlike those games, there is no daily/ weekly reward limit for content. Time limited factors in this game is in crafting for Descendant/ Characters (and their intermediate materials), Ultimate Weapons, and Upgrade Materials. Other time dependent thing is the weekly hard mode rewards rotation, where you require certain weeks to target farm Reactors, equipment for Skill power and skill related substats, with a specific element type, skill damage type, and Ultimate weapon type combination, and External Component, equipment which gives Max HP, Max MP, or Def mainstat and substats including elemental resist, with 2 out of 4 types drop on alternating weeks.

Prepare to grind a lot of the content, which will take more time if you don't have the specific content farming build to optimize runs, don't have friends to power level a low level descendant (that is not specialized for mobbing), don't rely on bugs/ exploits (e.g. Fusion Reactor required material consumption skip), or don't run the easiest mission that give out disproportionately high rewards that they still have in the current version. The game also forces you to run some of the easy content that you are Over-geared for just to grind specific materials so you can craft endgame items that requires it.

There is a Battlepass which has a daily, weekly, and seasonal mission. If you buy the premium line, you can get enough Caliber (premium currency) to buy the next Battlepass.

Not recommended if you are not a Remedy fan; I recommend getting and playing their other games first.

Short-ish length (6-8 hours) with 50% gameplay and 50% watching Live Action streaming show.

Some crashes and softlocks.

Game is fun but still have crashes and disconnects with no reconnect features as well as having a lot of unfixed Known Issues (Damage Overtime only working for Host, misaligned sights on AMR and HMG, Spear lock-on & Arc weapon targeting issues, Stratagem not deploying on where the beam is at, etc.).

The upcoming requirement to link a PSN account means that my online friends in the Philippines might lose access to the game.


A lot of issues are fixed, but disconnects and crashes still happens often, playing through Quickplay matchmaking could still be frustrating due to it. But if you have a premade group with Steam friends it should be fine.


Great coop PvE game, but currently it is rife with technical issues.

Disconnects, Crashes, Matchmaking failures, failure to join a (specific) friend as host, mission rewards not updating during peak hours, etc.
And unless you are friends with the host, there does not seem to be a reconnect feature after you disconnect/ crash.

My friend who has a 10th Gen Intel CPU mentioned that he is a bit worried about high CPU usage (high 90%). I have an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU and the game ran fine, excluding the crash issues.

The Silver lining is that unlike Payday 3 launch, you can actually play this game.

You could also link a Playstation Network Account for Crossplay.

It's Remnant 1 but more.

More weapons, mods, accessories to find, upgrade, and use, and more builds to try, which will require many playthroughs of Campaign/ Adventure Worlds. There are more puzzle, dungeons, bosses, and events variety - each usually having more alternative choices or with secrets in secrets... in secrets.

Performance wise some areas at times have stutters/ freezes that could be fatal in-game.

Had some lag issues when playing coop, but it was very likely (80% sure) my friend's internet acting up.

Allegedly There is a save corruption issue (just like Remnant 1), one of my online friend was affected. They have a few backups for the character and world saves in the savegame folder that you can rename to rollback your save just in case.

You could also google and use the Remnant Save Guardian 3rd party app from the Github User who made the save manager/ world analyzer program for the original Remnant: From The Ashes; Use it at your own discretion.

It's good and polished for an Early Access game.

Content so far is 1 longer mission variant and 2 shorter mission variants for each map; There are 3 maps so far, so 9 missions total. There are some variances and added difficulties with some versions of missions with fixed Mutators/ Modifiers, such as less hiding spots, more threats, deadlier threats, more traps, less items, doors requires to be bashed from one side, certain doors becoming inaccessible, some conditional gates (timed/ remote controlled/ limited number of use/ camera triggered), etc.

You get XP, in-game currency, unlock new Reagent (player character) cosmetics, player icons, and room decorations from completing missions. You get tickets from leveling up which you can spend to unlock and upgrade Rigs (Active ability), Rx Prescriptions (Passive upgrades; Always active), and Amps (Passive upgrades; Choose 3 out of 9). For the Rigs, I feel like the Blind mine is too good, the Stun Grenade is good, and the Heal and X-ray are mediocre. There will probably be more Prescriptions, Amps, or more unique modifiers with positive effects in the future, since there is already a keybind for 'Inventory Item #5' in the Settings.

Endgame right now is replaying through Program X (Season 1), which is 10 missions, comprised of:
- 6 shorter missions with some hard modifiers
- 3 longer missions of each maps with hard and some unique modifiers (e.g. no rig & item spawn, 'Thief loadout', enemies have max noise sensitivity, etc.)
- A longer variant Police Station mission with 6 harder modifiers.
You get a Token for first time completion of the mission, and you can turn in 10 tokens to 'earn your freedom'/ 'graduate'/ 'be reborn'/ prestige, which would then reset the first time completion of the Program X missions.
You unlock trophies after going through the rebirth process, eligibility to equip one of the locked rebirth cosmetics.

Playing through it several times will make you realize that certain enemy spawns for the mission seems to be fixed/ scripted to always trigger after a certain condition (e.g. finishing an objective) which makes parts of runs predictable. You will also learn that some section of the map in certain missions is almost always so safe or learn the potential objective spawns/ distribution for the mission which makes the missions way easier and faster to complete.

All these are part of the fun in solving the level and going for A+ grades, but they will also make running the missions feel repetitive very quick, which is what I am starting to feel at this point. I am looking forward to the next few updates to see what direction, update rate, and amount of content Red Barrel will bring.

Review for Launch version:

It is okay if you are a fan of Starship Troopers or like Mil Sim/ Squad-like games.

Otherwise, I can't recommend it.

The new Tutorial Campaign (SOG) is too simplistic and short with dumb AI teammates that occasionally gets stuck in terrain and enemy spawning issues that sometimes blocks mission completion.

The game lacks a good tutorial, you need to read or watch guides and/ or join an experienced community group to at least learn the DOs and DON'Ts to not negatively impact your team even in the casual game mode (especially with regards to building defenses).

For the harder game mode (ARC defense) you NEED to know the basics and want to know advanced knowledge as well as communicate to tackle different objectives.

Joining an experienced community group is recommended, especially to learn the game (and the best practices) as well as playing with people who know what to do.

Classes have defined roles that they excel at, but only have 2-3 slightly different build options or almost no build options besides weapon choices (as is the case for Snipers and Rangers).

Galactic Front and Companies need more time to be fleshed out more (e.g. missing search feature).

RE Engine Lost Planet + Dino Crisis when? Also, I don't know why playing this game reminds me of FireFall.

Press F1 to check the details of the currently equipped suit (Abilities and Overdrive).
Press G to check current objective.