Recent reviews by OOster

An absolutely wonderful mix of new and old.

I first came into this series in the early 2000s with the original AC, AC2 and AC Last Raven. Games I cherished growing up in that Era. I have no experience with FromSoftware's other titles, though I can see where maybe some themes were added in.

Definitively, this is absolutely everything an Armored Core game needed to be for everyone: Big robots, robot glam, and challenge.

In previous armored core games you start with nothing, you go through a campaign, you either pass or fail missions, there was no mid mission saving or checkpoints. You do this until you beat the story line you took, or until cannot proceed and need to come at the missions with more funds and a better AC.

This could be overly tedious for some. Lots of back tracking, lots of long missions that end with long fights for you to loose then start completely over with again from the start. Loss in this series has usually been extremely punishing.

This new title changes things in favor for the player with added check points, and mid mission garage time (with parts you have already bought or found). And I love it. The game maintains its challenge, while respecting my time.

So for an old head AC guy I expected these things.

1. A challenging story mode with choices based on my AC progression.
2. Detailed garage, tuning, and AC customization.
3. Familiar control of my AC.
4. A particular AC atmosphere representation.
5. Game modes like Testing, AI Arena, Multiplayer.
6. Parts hidden in the world, Parts awarded for skill, Parts awarded for completing particular milestones, Parts Parts PARTS.

I got all of these and even more!

The bosses that aren't just ACs or AC like things. WOW these were perfectly implemented in a way that doesn't feel like it takes you out of the themes of the IP.

Biased Review 10/10

Realistic Review 8/10 - This game might be too challenging for some, and though I feel most could enjoy this game, it may be coarse for those who don't have the context of where this series came from.

My honest review over a year later.

It's got some good parts, but the bad parts are pretty bad.

Whats good:

Adds another layer on to the otherwise monotonous/boring exploration grind. I traveled to Colonia a few months ago and yeah looking for space plants and logging biological data makes landing on random balls of dirt more worthwhile. Before I left I did plenty of on foot combat which was actually enjoyable when it ran good. Going to abandoned outposts is pretty neat as well hacking open access to doors and locks to find salvage and what not. The visual effects for light atmosphere are pretty when they work as well, however that's just the thing, these things look and function nice only part of the time STILL.

What's Bad:

It's certainly not my hardware causing the visual effects to be pretty lack luster. (rtx3080, r9 3950x, 32 gigs of ram). Often times everything is still way too dark, and dark in a way that's kinda buggy. For example rings around a planet can completely disappear in the void even if you are on the light side of the planet, if you're on a planet with black soil near a red dwarf good luck, your high beams won't even help you. Then other certain details for other parts of this dlc can also get kinda funky too. It's honestly too much to list but to describe a few, sometimes you get stuck in loading screens when you're on your way to a combat zone, forcing you to relog into the game, walk half a mile to the combat zone then you're forced to call a taxi to get back home. Happened to me quite frequently even recently. Frames are not predictable if i get near a settlement sometimes i just drop to 10 or the combat zones drop to 30-40fps in general. The balance between ground and ship combat feels neglected, weapons are either useless (anything fully automatic), or completely op (shotgun, sniper, rocket launcher). Upgrading and engineering your suits is even more complex than ship engineering.

Engineering is the tipping point for me though and mostly at fault for my negative review. Cause honestly the other things to me are fairly minor inconveniences but the engineering for weapons and suits is just awful.

Some engineers are locked behind loot that's extremely rare and time consuming to find, then upgrades require loads of rare salvage that's time consuming and frustrating to find for a simple meager upgrade. Not to mention now all of your salvage/on foot loot is piled into one inventory. It's not like ship engineering where you just grab everything you can because each individual material for ship engineering has its own slot, nope you get 1000 item capacity that everything you pick up goes into. So you have to be careful what salvage you pick up because if you pick up everything its going to take your time away with basically no reward since there is salvage that is utterly useless. Half the salvage is literal garbage that cannot be used for upgrades/engineering and can only be sold for 1000 credits which is not even worth pennies when you consider my ship is nearly worth a billion credits. So your inventory becomes an overwhelming mess of crap that you're trying to use for an overwhelming task to mildly improve your guns and suits.

Ultimately its just poorly optimized, and flawed game mechanics. There is some fun to be had with the gun play, and there is a lot of wonder to be had once you see the scale of your ship and explore planets more in depth. But the bad parts are extremely bad.

Yeah, I mean its kinda crusty still but the progression is 1000% better. Best part is if you bought the game back in 2018, and like me you felt dropped off a cliff when the game fully launched with its insane grind, you're welcomed back with several worth while rewards for your early purchase.

Lots of rubber banding still. Better than a polished turd that's for sure.

If you like bf4 try this out. It's not the same but it's neat.

I can hear EMF5 in my sleep now.

I got this game day one it was great on launch but not enough content to keep players hooked at first. I came back learning they added new ships and a co-op mode aka fleet battles which seemed up my ally. I have a huge interest in space combat games. This isn't that game. It's dead. And I wouldn't mind that so much if I could have played with one of my friends in fleet battles co-op. But it's not actually fully co-op. Like most other EA games for some stupid reason they want to force you to play with other players. You cannot play this game with just one other friend. Match making goes on and on past 5 and 10 minutes.

Extremely disappointing. This game doesn't deserve its high ratings. It had so much potential but it's a lost cause. At least allow people to play fleet battles with player bots or something. But that's being too hopeful. This game is absolutely done for. EA's motto is that if the game doesn't sell, why bother fixing it or making it slightly better for the few who still might be interested.

Very sad

its good

This game sucks, my friend refused to play with me

yawn

Keep in mind this is early access.

A lot of my friends ask me what is the major difference between this game and Factorio other than its 3rd dimension.

#1 World exploration is top notch in this title, a very ornate world teeming with biodiversity. I'd say 1/3rd of my play through has been just exploration.

#2 infinite resources (for now?). Sure some mining "Nodules" are varying degrees of potency but all of them will give you materials at the same specified rate for the whole duration.

#3 Not all of the fauna is out to kill you, and can be extremely useful for research. Unlike Factorio where biters just want you dead and you gain nothing from killing them other than preventing percentages of damage to your factory.

#4 It's very relaxed and you can take your time, you can do this as well in a non-biter play through in Factorio, but this seems to be this games MO is being just chill and not rushed.

#5 There's a few more ingredients and raw materials which lead to some rather complex components. (Though some don't make much sense other than to lock you out like using rubber and beacons to make rifle cartridges/magazines).

These two games are very similar but they vary in ways where if you really liked Factorio I can honestly say you will like this game as well. There are some things that I dislike from Satisfactory in comparison. Like How easy it may be to lose track of what parts of your factory are making what (Factorio you can press alt and see everything at once), Rearranging and organizing your factory can be way more time consuming because of the added dimension, no blueprints, inability to rotate buildings with a press of a button (You must tear them down and re-orientate them then replace) and lastly the server hosting feature just barely works, my friends often lag heavily behind me and teleport in vehicles on their end. However as I said this is an early access title and Factorio goes full release on the 14th.

Satisfactory seems extremely promising and I'm happy I made the purchase.

The day I bought it I played it for 32 hours non stop.