A charming and surprisingly approachable survival adventure outing for Ace Team's outlandish world and character design, with more under the cylinder than you might have initially expected.
Listen: Warzone is, like its skull-masked, kevlar-tucking “operators”, entirely solid. It bloody well should be, given its pedigree. But there is remarkably little interesting here – aside from flourishes like the sinister gulag section – to command our attention.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Hunt is that it has taken the unknowable, unexpected possibility space of something like Day-Z, and boiled it down to something you can, and must, play in under an hour.
Borderlands 2 felt like a huge step on from the original, and it was more colourful, with interesting characters and intense situations. The Pre-Sequel seems to try so, so hard to keep up, but this is not Borderlands 3, and the game – and everyone who plays it – knows that.
I would love to have been able to love this. But I cannot. It all works, nothing hurts, but it offers nothing that speaks to the heart. As such, I just cannot recommend it.
It's not that more Men Of War is unwelcome, or even that Assault Squad 2 isn't an essential addition to my collection of real-time tiny men games (it is), it's just that I'd like to see something else done with the template. World War II is a fine source material, but the fabulous battlefield simulation produced by this engine could do so much more.
I am sure that one day a F2P game will make me slap down some real world spacebucks. But not this time.
In conclusion, then: Loadout is a riot. Loadout is free. It does not, however, provide a model that is conducive to me wanting to spend any money on it. The loadouts of the name are fun to make, but ultimately lack the variety they believe themselves to have. These things seems like a failure for a free to play game, but perhaps I am simply not its cash audience.
It's an unusual, singular game that uses the normal tools of first-person shooter design (UDK) to make something plainly weird. I'd give it some kind of gold star for just being different.
I like Strike Vector. I like it a great deal. And I recommend it if any of that stuff sounds like your cup of rocket fuel. I just suspect that I will soon forget it. And that's a true and terrible shame.