Recent reviews by [EDF]Yadde

EDIT: The biggest issue of not being able to remap buttons, and parry being 2 button combination has now been fixed, which is enough reason to change this to a positive recommendation. It still has some questionable design choices but those can ultimately be tossed in to the "flavour of the game" rather than dealbreaking category.

Okay metroidvania, but will not recommend until they actually let you change controller inputs, parry should NOT be a 2 button combination when your timing has to be very tight, especially when THERE'S A COMPLETELY UNUSED BUTTON ON THE CONTROLLER THAT IS NOT MAPPED TO ANYTHING. This could so easily be mapped for parrying, or alternatively to your second weapon slot instead of having to do the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ dark souls d-pad swap

Basics, dear devs, basics!

As of now out of all first person shooty games, Into the Radius has enough of gunplay and shooting, inventory tetris, meaningful gameplay and not looking completely ♥♥♥♥ to hit that sweet spot of actually being on average one of the best VR games. It doesn't really marvel in any specific aspect, but the combination of all the features does deliver a solid enough package.

It doesn't have Tarkov level of gun customization, but it lets you have a laser pointer and holosight. It doesn't have Hot Dogs level of gun variety, but you are given a couple choices between a few pistols, rifles and shotguns. It doesn't have Walking Dead amounts of looting, but there are a couple wooden chests with guns and food cans in cupboards here and there that makes you want to explore every room for a chance to get something. It doesn't have 50 different enemies from your favourite horror novels but especially on your first inexperienced run even the first enemies do make you wary and the sense of danger is real. It doesn't have Stalker quality anomalies but they're just as deadly and you're gonna need those probes to get around them. Combine this with a tolerable amount of bugs only here and there that mostly might just make you chuckle, and visuals that might not be awarded any awards on the next video game oscar but still makes you feel you're right there, in the Radius, and you'll have a good, solid game that isn't overly expensive for the experience.

Thinking man's "JRPG" with replay value

Game starts as a good enough Ninja Gaiden style platformer, but to my surprise slowly opens up to a more complex game with tight controls and top notch music. Definetely worth getting.

Overall a pretty good, albeit short metroidvania. I can see the death mechanic being a nuisance for less experienced players and I fell victim to it at one point, but overall I didn't find the game too hard, even when I had to fight 6 of my own bodies in the middle of enemies that are way tougher than they should be if you are only using your default gun. There is something you can do to make your gear retrieval easier, but I'll leave figuring that out to the other players.

I have only played the Tiberian Dawn GDI campaign halfway so far, but I can already recommend the game. It is more or less exactly what you'd hope from a remaster: The same good old game you loved and hated almost 20 years ago, with a few modern tricks like updated sidebar and unit queuing to make the game ever so slightly even more enjoyable than it was back the, without touching or trying to reinvent the game again.

This is what a remaster should be like. No silly lootboxes, no major changes to the gameplay yet leaving the game open for modders to spice it up, and biggest caveat being something like pushing the game installation to over hundred times what it was because of 4k textures, but that's a small(big?) price on top of the agreeable purchase price to pay to be able to play two really good classic RTS games like these on modern computers. Good job EA, for once you didn't release something people immediately hate, even though most of the work was done by outside studios.

(game still has most things you also hated on them like not so great pathfinding, so keep that in mind)

TL;DR Game is okay enough for the sale price, but there are so many little design choices and dumped down features that pile up to be overall a meh experience and just makes you wish you were playing XCOM 2 instead.


I didn't expect this game to be the modern take of X-Com Apocalypse, especially for the price it was released with. Fundamentally the game pretty much plays like XCOM 2 so if you're familiar with that one you'll feel pretty much at home with this one. It has all the things you did (and didn't) like about the previous game. If it was just that then I would actually recommend the game, even for full price.

The problems start to arise when you start to notice small bits and pieces here and there that slowly make you question the decisions the devs made. I don't mind the slightly different approach on the missions and the game taking place on a smaller city and the maps are tighter. The breaching is a nice addition until you realize that you might actually have wanted to be able to tell where your units go after the breach. Instead they just borrow the AI pathfinding from the enemies in XCOM 2 that makes them randomly scatter behind cover once the breach is over. This can lead to some annoying and unfair situations that happen solely because you didn't have any control over where they go. After a few missions you realise that every encounter pretty much plays the same. You get 1-3 encounters, start with a breach on those, and then just gun the enemies down with your weapons and abilities. After a while it starts to get quite boring due to the small scale of the maps and there's no feeling of "this is an important mission".

A lot of the ability descriptions are pretty vague or downright misleading. Some abilites don't have damage numbers displayed during the breach, so you'll be left wondering what you should use it on. Hunkering was replaced with an ability called Preparation which basically acts like hunkering but has a cooldown. The skill reads that you'll act earlier on the next round, but instead it actually delays your turn to the same round so it functions more as a "delay action" skill rather than "skip turn". There are a lot more small things like these, and the overall dumped down features that just add up to an slowly growing "Was this really worth the purchase?" feeling.

What makes it worse is that since this is basically just a standalone mod of XCOM 2, the developers actually made a conscious choice to remove the more complex things from it, even to the point of removing the ability to have more customization for the characters so you're forced to watch the default appearance they have (what kind of swat team doesn't wear helmets just so you can see their edgy hairstyle?). The characters overall are also really uninteresting and follow the sad trend of modern teenage edgy dialogue. Even the alien characters sound like 20 year old barely developed humans, while the enemy aliens retain their more alien monster sounds. You quickly lose interest on them and the effort of making them more unique is completely wasted on them, making your standard XCOM soldiers more appealing.

All this is topped with the game requiring an online connection to even launch, which I suspect (but won't declare as a fact) is for something like selling your data to 3rd party partners, so you're not even able to play it on the go unless you have mobile internet with you. A single player game with no online features should never force you to have an active connection just to launch it.

Path of autism

Overall, this game tries to be a second take on what Star Control 2 was, and it succeeds partially on it. The core gameplay mechanics are still there and you'll soon find yourself in a familiar feeling game if you played the original one, flying across the galaxy exploring different solar systems for resources and aliens

The things that Origins did better than SC2 are the things you'd expect from a modern remake. It's less cryptic for most of the time and it provides you with a quest log to keep you on track, something the original lacked and you had to rely on your own memory and notes. The mineral gathering portion has been made a bit less boring with a 3d plane to drive on instead of a flat 2d one, and there's usually a bit more going on planets than on the original game, and you can find more reasons to land on them than just getting more minerals. The universe overall feels a lot more alive too, with some solar systems having smaller alien factions and races to fill the void and give you some busywork quests you can complete for extra rewards.

Then there's the things it didn't do so well. The base setting for the story is okay enough, but the writing and voice acting in this game is absolutely horrible most of the time. SC2 humor was somewhat childish at times, but it was still something that made you smile. Origins dialogue consists mostly of the most stereotypical dialogue you could ever muster with no actual personality attached to them, spoken by the most stereotypical character design you could imagine with no actual unique features that make them look good. You get your basic "We are the bad guys, we are bad" and "We are the loser guys who say these things just to rub the fact were losers on your face" types of characters, and sometimes I get the feeling they used the wrong person or voice to act the dialogue on some aliens. I quickly started to avoid talking to most of the aliens unless there was some plot thing that required me to do so, because listening to the characters was torture.

You also start to notice very soon that this game, despite trying to be its own thing, borrows A LOT from the original game all the way to some core plot elements. You'll meet aliens that pretty much serve the exact same purpose as they did in the original game and it just gives off a lazy vibe of not bothering to actually come up with an original plot, and instead you get the feeling the game is constantly trying to remind you that "Hey, this is a game based on a thing you loved so much!"

The combat is also a lot more floaty, and overall it left a feeling that you don't have as much control over your ships as you did in the original, and the AI is pretty horrible at playing this game and usually only wins if they have some superpowerful juggernaut. It lacks same depth of rock/paper/scissors strategy SC2 had with the ship designs and while they're different enough from each other, most of them are pretty forgettable with just different colored lasers.

There's also some technical issues with the game like clipping, loading times, stuttering due to poor optimization and some REALLY weird design choices like not being able to rebind some important controls on the keyboard (world interacion button is permanently bound to E, and you could not change that). Hopefully these issues will be fixed in future patches.

HOWEVER, despite all the things this game did bad or even downright horrible, I did complete it. It served its purpose of being a timewaster by letting me explore an universe with a grand scheme slowly unraveling itself, something the original game also did. When I saw the credits screen the overall mood left in me was not disappointent, wich is a reason enough to ultimately recommend this game if you think you can look past your nostalgiagoggles, because there is a game here, and it can be enjoyed. Not for the full price though, would suggest you grab it on the next sale it gets.