Recent reviews by Mike's Hard Elongated Bee

9/10 fun story, surprisingly difficult puzzles (ive got no sense of direction, kept getting lost)

You will crave The Sphere™

Our records indicate that you have not enlisted, your traitorous behavior has been noted. The Ministry of Truth will reach out shortly to... 'offer' complimentary re-education. Acceptance is mandatory.

See you soon, Helldiver.

Let's start off with, *DO NOT* buy this game. It's been broken for over a year by most accounts I've seen. The previous fixes don't seem to work anymore and it's only a matter of time before EA kills battlelog and makes the game unusable for the rest of the people who bought it. (See dec 8th service closures for games released around the time this one was). Those games are now significantly broken. (IE; Mirrors Edge Catalyst's achievements no longer work). Or are not even sold on here anymore (Bad Company 2).

The story in this game was one of my favorites and now I can't even open that because the game wants Origin to activate but any old Origin client wants the EA app. Even using some workarounds lands me in an infinite 'Campaign Initializing' loop. And the '-singleplayer' flag acts like the game is opening but just gets Steam stuck in the launching game phase.

I don't expect decade old games to be supported indefinitely, I expect them to work if they're still being sold. And not be broken by pointless branding updates to their launchers.

Game so good I actually submit crash reports.

In all seriousness, a truly remarkable work of art. You can feel the love that went into this game at every turn. Act 1 and 2 are fairly bug free, act 3 can be challenging with the bugs and the lack of guidance, so to speak. But Larian did a pretty good job of teaching you passively how the game works during the first 2 acts so finding quests and hidden areas isn't terrible if you like exploring. And explore you must, act 3 is the largest part of the game by some magnitude. I was still finding new areas right up until taking on the final boss.

And now that I've finished my first playthrough its time for a Dark Urge Tactician run. (The game has a choke-hold on me)

PS: Let Volo 'help' when he asks... if you can stomach it

You'll either love it or hate it at first. And eventually, either way, you'll hate that you love it.

Edit: So... many... belts...

Edit 2: After 100-ish hours and the war-crime I call a factory, its done. Core game still great, the story aspect started pretty strong but fell off after Phase 3, expected the alien artifact aspect to affect the ending more. Ending is pretty anti-climatic, kinda hoped for a bit more. Will continue to optimize for efficiency. It is all I know.