Recent reviews by Blustride

I can’t claim to be an Ace Combat fan, having only played half of AC7 and Tom Clancy’s Ace Combat at Home at time of writing, but Project Wingman is so good it makes me want to track down the entire series for more.

It’s not a long or difficult game—I died more to the ground or obstacles than I did to the enemy—but it’s a great amount of fun. If you enjoyed Ace Combat, HAWX, or even Armored Core 6 recently then it’s worth giving Project Wingman some time.

The demo has clear technical issues, with pretty choppy performance even with a good frame rate, and it just doesn’t feel especially performant.

I played the game on PS5 and enjoyed it enough that I’m considering buying it again on PC, but the performance issues are definitely cause for concern. Still, if you don’t have a PS5 it’s still worth playing on PC.

Really enjoyable game, outside of a wack difficulty curve. This was my first AC game (and first real go at a Fromsoft game), and I had a great time. The core gameplay is fantastic once parts selection opens up, and the setup and general pacing of the story is good. It's a great power fantasy game.

Regarding the difficulty curve, most of the game is honestly fairly easy. A fight might take a couple of tries, but a bit of build tweaking or experience will generally get you through. A few fights though, Balteus being the most infamous, are completely out of line with the rest of the game. I don't mind difficult boss fights in a similarly difficult game, or even consistently difficult boss fights, but it feels like most of the game is a highway and a few bosses are brick walls in the middle of that highway.

The most egregious example is the tutorial boss. A small arena and a fixed build makes the start of the game genuinely pretty difficult, and then whatever expectations that fight established get shattered the moment you pass it and breeze through the missions until Balteus. An overly restrictive filter kills your flow rate, and I wonder how many people who might have really enjoyed the game bounced off of it because of the tutorial.

This game forces me to think. As a Guilty Gear player this is a new sensation.

It's a skinner box with cars. The primary path of progression is a slot machine. There are loads of cars, but if what you want to drive isn't a modern supercar there's a 50/50 chance it's not in the game. It's a shallow shell of a video game with nothing to do besides make number go up, whether that's the meaningless number by your name or the massive number of cars you're never going to drive. The only thing that keeps this game from being exemplary of everything that's wrong with the modern AAA games industry is the relative lack of microtransactions, but that's only because they don't have anything to sell you.

Campaign is forgettable outside of some truly atrocious Whedonesque dialog and the final boss. The final boss has two phases: the first phase is moving into and out of cover while you slowly whittle away at the boss and deal with a couple of chunky adds, then in the second phase you're locked in a cage with a tiger who can either two-shot you or just shove you off the arena, and there's no checkpoint so if you die you're sent straight back to the first phase. The boss is also faster than you are, so the only way you can possibly avoid it is to use Strand, which has no neutral game outside a grappling hook. On its own this is a mediocre expansion (probably between Shadowkeep and Beyond Light), but it's also coming on the back of some substantial player ability nerfs and a neutered buildcrafting system. The final boss could be fixed by just adding a checkpoint between the two phases, but overall I'm concerned about the direction the game is going. If I was able to refund this expansion I'd be seriously considering it, and I'm glad I didn't buy any of this year's season passes or dungeon passes.

The core gameplay is good. It's Vermintide but with guns. Everything else is lacking at best and abysmal at worst. Progression is my biggest issue with the game. You're going to be playing upwards of 6 hours every time you want to play a different character just to unlock complete builds and different weapons. The weapon options you can choose from are determined by two rotating shops, and have very little selection. If you just unlocked a cool weapon from a level up and you want to buy one to try it, if it's not in the shop your only option is to wait an hour for the shop to reset.

On top of that, the weekly challenges are far too involved. Complete 25 missions, when most take 20-30 minutes each. Find 25 of an item in a mission, except not all missions have them and you can't choose specific missions. Kill 750 of a specific enemy faction with melee, except which faction you're fighting in any given mission is random. Finish 10 secondary objectives in a specific mission area, except whether that mission is even available to play during your session is random.

Finally, the only part of the game that's feature complete is the cash shop. The crafting bench is still missing features (which exacerbates the progression issue -- on top of waiting for a specific weapon you have to wait for a specific perk as well), the story is barebones, and there's only one career for each class. The game's buggy to the point where a Crash to Desktop should be expected at least once per session, load times are abysmal, the AI director sometimes just decides you're not going to complete your current mission and spawns a nightmare combination of special enemies, you can't select a specific mission and difficulty to play, and we've only seen two mutations; one sets the level in pitch blackness when only Lasguns even have a flashlight, and one triples the spawn rate of the buggiest enemy in the game. Meanwhile, the cash shop by all accounts works perfectly and has loads of detailed and varied costumes to spend real money on.

Fatshark's priorities are clear. Even setting aside rumors of removed and reassigned content, between the hellish progression model, the lacking content, the fully-featured cash shop, and the game debatably not even being finished,, Darktide is emblematic of the live service scourge on the industry. It's got good core gamplay with progression designed to make it the only game you play so you keep spending money at the cash shop. Fatshark could turn the game around; they just need to finish the game and fix the progression. Until they do that, though, don't buy Darktide. Play Vermintide 2, or Payday 2, or Left 4 Dead 2, or any of the other co-op horde shooters out there. The only thing Darktide has that they don't is the 40k license.

I paid $11 for Ramlethal’s theme and got 12 other songs for free. Incredible value.

It's like Street Fighter on crack

This is truly the Dark Souls of Rhythm Games. Make sure to set aside some extra money to buy a new mouse when you inevitably wear out your current mouse.

(Real talk pls add custom songs, it's a fun engine but the provided songs are kind of lacking)