Recent reviews by ShadowDoctrine

It's pretty, but it's not made very well.. it's significantly improved from when it launched, I'll give credit where it's due but it's still pretty unstable and crashes occasionally.At its core It's basically Ark: Survival Evolved so if you're looking to buy this or that, I'd go with Ark as it's the older sibling and seems to be the favourite. It's got a ton of DLC and essentially it's the same thing just prehistoric rather than Pirate themed. I do enjoy sailing around in Atlas but that's pretty much the only difference I care about. Everything else is ARK.. I would like to recommend this over the dinosaur variant but I can't because It's just not that good lol. I mean I like it and when it works it's good fun but at the same time.. steam charts don't lie - Atlas has a peak of 1800 or so over the last 24hr period and Ark has had 102,000 active in the past 24hrs - 67,000 in the last hour alone.. statistics don't lie.. You know which one you're going to like more in a choice between two games on the same engine lol xD

Yeah, I like it. I'm not the best business/tycoon mind around..so it can get frustrating when you're not making any profit but when everything falls into place and your plan works it's pretty satisfying, especially when you start in 1850 and everything is really slow. As you progress through the years though it gets better and eventually your little network of trucks, trains and ships has turned into a logistics empire or nightmare? depending on how well you plan ahead lol, I do a 50/50 mix of empire/nightmare most of the time, I lose track of things get distracted with other things and I guess that's part of the fun really. There are tons of mods too, like thousands that enhance the base game even further I played TF1 with mods and that was great too but I enjoy TF2 better, the graphics are nicer/ the game runs better too for me anyway, I don't drop any FPS or lag out even with 300+ mods active, I mean i lose maybe 10fps I only have a 72hz monitor and with a 1850 start i'll be on 72fps and by 1950 with an extensive network of trains/trucks/ships and a few planes I might be down to 60fps because of the amount of traffic on the map.. I imagine it may drop another 10 if I continued another 100 years on but still, losing 10fps per 100 years isn't worth crying about lol.. Anyway the answer to the ultimate question "Would you recommend this game to others?" Yes, totally. It's good fun if you like management / tycoon games. I mean it's no Railroad Tycoon 3, I loved that as a kid and this is definitely up there next to the classics but rather than Tycooning one aspect it includes all forms of transport - definitely worth giving it a shot if you're on the fence.. :)

Yes 100%. Great game; kind of like squad and post scriptum with some kind of resource management game thrown into the mix lol.. I don't know how to describe it, but it's one of my fav games in the steam library and I've collected about 300 titles since creating my steam account 8-9 years ago.. Hell let loose is up there with squad on my favourites list and it's not even finished yet.. recommend this to anyone that enjoys squad and post scriptum; though it's more gameplay focused than realism it doesn't make the battles any less intense. You will die a lot, even if get real good at the game.. it's a ww2 front-line.. expect to die when you spawn, when you're running, when you're hiding, when you're shooting.. and you won't be disappointed..

Sometimes it even comes from behind you when you're facing the enemy; refer to Murphy’s Laws of Combat #12.
To be totally honest, you can take a lot of those laws of combat as good advice for Hell Let Loose too, more specifically: #1, #11, #13, #15, #18, #20, #22 (applies to engineers building fortifications), #24, #36 (applies to intersections and/or bridges usually), #47, #69, #100, #113 and finally #115 - Learn these laws and you'll do just fine in HLL - see you on the battlefield :)

Yes 100% I only have 258hrs on steam but had played it previously atleast 700hrs on the actual game launcher thingy :) one of the best combined arms games you can find, kinda like battlefield with the ability to play an infantry armour or air role except in a bigger scale, a little bit like squad too in terms of rally points and spawning in the middle of the map.. but unlike squad planetside2 can run on a toaster with relative ease lol. My system is due for an upgrade, built it in 2014 but i still have 150-175+ fps on ultra with a GTX 970.. it's not demanding at all in terms of hardware, does demand a little patience as you will die. a lot. sometimes you die intentionally though to control the flow of battle, there are 3 factions fighting for dominance over a single continent and the continent is covered in strategic locations/bases each with their own defences which players can spawn into if they secure them.. essentially the game revolves around "Advance & Secure" gameplay your ultimate goal is securing more territory than the other 2 factions eventually locking the continent to your faction for bonuses you can read details here https://planetside.fandom.com/wiki/The_World I cant be bothered going into it lol. Anyway each continent caters upto like 2000 players at one time, give or take some i forget the actual number per faction but it's a lot of people in one spot so yeah.. Don't come into Planetside 2 expecting a long life, just enjoy the few seconds you're alive and try to make the most of it step by step, eventually you'll survive minutes instead of seconds, but like i said earlier, sometimes you intentionally die to spawn elsewhere so your Kill/Death ratio doesn't really matter ultimately. As long as you steer the battle toward ultmate victory you can die a thousand times and it won't matter as long as you win xD

Couldn't handle it; interacted with 4 people on the bridge I was certain my selections would make them jump off. 2 saved 2 died.. I'm not an empathetic person and I don't care that the dev had a rough time, we all go through hard times at some stage in our lives but suicide isn't the answer.. one could argue homicide is the answer if suicide is an actual option, why not take out the people that cause you so much stress. I mean one of the people I saved allegedly killed 40 people already and was about to jump off the bridge and I saved his life because after 40 people he started to feel guilt.. One would think that if there was guilt to be had it'd come sooner than the 40th victim... just sayin' - also there are no offensive answers, like for example, if I encountered someone threatening to jump off a bridge in the middle of the night and there were no witnesses; I would probably try to coerce them into going through with it because.. well why not? nobody is going to report your actions because nobody else is around so you could totally get away with it. Like an assisted suicide, maybe even convince them they don't have any other options really.. there's a whole range of potential conversations you could have with someone willing to end their life. Also; why is life beautiful? It's interesting, sure.. I'll give you that; but beautiful? I dunno about that one.. You don't even get to convince people that life is actually beautiful, you just say it like it's a statement they're supposed to believe because you said so.. If someone said that to me on a bridge i'd p*ss myself laughing.. "Thanks bro my life is so crap im on the edge of a bridge ready to jump and you start a conversation telling me not jump because you think 'your' life is beautiful" way to crap all over my day LOL. -- I recommend this game anyway.. i don't like it but I'll support it to spread the message that Suicide is a crap answer to dealing with sh*t.. there are easier options..

Good fun to pass time, If you ever played SWAT or Rainbow 6 (pre-siege versions) you remember the planning phase and you can kind of do the same thing more or less.. rather this one is a top-down view the entire time you plan your method of entry, set up go codes and waypoints, angles of attack, utilise various tools/equipment at each junction where needed i.e flashbangs, bolt cutters, breaching charges, picking locks etc there are a range of devices and equipment available that's all that I could think of right now though. Anyway; once you've established your plan you move on to execution phase and can take direct control of one of the troopers or if you've established a complex enough plan from infil to exfil you can sit back and watch them execute your perfect little plan.. it's quite satisfying spending 10-15min planning on a hostage situation and then watching your little dudes execute the plan within 2min eliminating all the tangos and rescuing the hostages without losing anyone.. I mean it rarely happens to me personally I always manage to lose atleast one of my troopers because they're incompetent, it's not my planning at all.

lol..I mean, I've never stacked a team in a doorway and been mowed down by a surprise AK47 behind them because i forgot to put a guy facing backwards for security... not me, never.

10/10 would lose 6 guys facing one direction after planning for 20min again and again, it's a great little game that you think you're going to play for 30min then you quit at 2am after 6hrs playing lol

It's like Chivalry, but better.. it still has some abusive people playing it but I figure they just haven't learned how to lose and still have fun.. I mean I'm not real good at it, never was too good at chivalry either I'm an archer mostly so we basically have our own minigame within these games as Archers we tend to try eliminate other archers from as far away as possible doing some neat lobbing of arrows across the maps, meanwhile there's everyone else fighting in close quarters doing their thing and sure if there's an opportunity to snag a wounded target we'll totally attempt to get some arrows into it.. and then there's the horse people.. i think the horse people are to Mordhau what Archers were to Chivalry.. they're the annoying ones that only ride horses and become pretty good at it sometimes.. i've only played 8 hrs but i find the horses to be more annoying than a decent archer as they're fast and usually have a lance which can poke you in the back or face or chest or where-ever, doesn't seem to matter where you try to run to, crouch, hide the lancer will stick you no matter what, unless you can monkey up a ladder into a tower or inside a building those horses will stick ya lol.. hell even if they miss the horse hitting you still does damage which is what i find most annoying, you can dodge their giant pointy stick only to be trampled by the horse in the end..

Anyway, swordplay is fun too despite failing miserably at it I can get a kill every so often though i'm better with the bow so i tend to stick to the ranged combat.. it kind of reminds me of Kingdom Come: Deliverance style combat, just less 1v1 and more real i guess. Gameplay-wise it's pretty fun though comes with a few different modes, frontline is full team deathmatch, horde is vs AI in waves similar to Chivalry bots and then they got this Battle Royale which I guess is just a free for all to be last man standing.. I've only played Frontline so far though, I think some people in frontline should probably stick to duelling though because i've been killed multiple times already because I witnessed a 1v1 and shot a guy in the back so that my team mate could help us get on the objective then the very team mate i helped kills me because he thinks he's special or something.. guess what, he's not special,.. i might be new to Mordhau but I know a fking objective based game mode isn't a ranked duelling arena. Play the objective or Fk oFF to a different server you duelling ♥♥♥♥♥.. you don't 1v1 on the frontline unless you're a special kind of stupid and accept that you're trying to 1v1 in a 32v32 situation.. bit of a rant, but hey i got team killed by a rank 127 player because i tried to PTFO on my first game.. lol there are even ranked servers specifically for duelling i found out later.

Soo at the end of the day 10/10 this spiritual successor to Chivalry is great fun.. my only regret was not buying it sooner.. I could've been that rank 127 killing new players for trying to do the right thing, ahh well.. give it time I'll kill me some noobs some day xD

Been playing on / off since launch (before steam, then bought it again when it came to steam because i like to have all my games in one library for convenience sake lol) has the characteristics of an elder scrolls game with the added bonus of being a MMO. I'm not a huge fan of MMO's in general, I played SWTOR back in the day and I've always been a casual Elder Scrolls player, ever since Daggerfall way back in the crappy graphics era of gaming lol (i mean it was good for what it was but in comparison to these days, crappy lol). Anyway ESO is basically everything you can expect from putting Elder Scrolls into a MMO environment, I can't speak for endgame PVE as I've not really done much I basically only PVP.. it's probably the best content in any MMO i've played PVP-wise.. You have the battlegrounds option which I don't like so much, versus the alliance v alliance tri-faction warzone where the three alliances battle it out for map dominance over cyrodiil, each alliance has a 1/3 chunk of the map as their home area with your ultimate objective being to claim ownership of the other 2/3 of the map, campaigns last from several days to a month and the higher end PVP can be faction locked so no cheeky mofos swap teams halfway through a campaign..the low lvl campaign is unrestricted though; and you can join PVP as low as level 10.. though you should be well aware that you'll probably get stomped over and over til you get better gear/ skills available lol.. Uh yeah so steam kept bugging me to write a review since i've put 1500+ hours into it so far, so i finally caved and here it is.. though it's not much to go on, it is what it is.. other people's reviews can give far more detail in terms of PVE content but 10/10 recommend ESO just for PVP content lol. If you're into medieval sieging and riding into battle on a horse/mount of your choosing. Only to get ambushed by a bunch of stealthy assassin types on your way to capturing an enemy castle.. then ESO is what you want.. Edit: still playing in 2022, 2476hrs.. Still fun, always new content coming in every few months.. Many hours worth of gameplay.

Great potential, just not much available yet. As more gets updated I think this game will be a neat little RTS package. I haven't played online yet as I'm too impatient to wait more than 3min but I spent a good 3 hrs or so just in the sandbox mode exploring the tech options and it's pretty cool kinda reminds me of the old Empire Earth series where you start in the stone age and work your way up through to modern era's. Graphics aren't AAA but they aren't bad for this early in development, I mean I've seen much, much worse from an early access title and that was something I paid for.. Anyway gameplay wise it's fun, the multiplayer options sounds really interesting and If I were more patient I'd stick it out for a game online, like 30 players free for all/team deathmatch then theres an apocalypse mode for upto 60 people or something like that. Sounds cool but yeah i have the attention span of a gnat sometimes..

The maps are random i think but they're huge, even in sandbox mode there are settlements scattered across the map they just don't advance from stone age so you can easily just take them out to expand your territory and build up a huge empire. The End-Game seems to be like the old Age of Empires Wonder Scenario, once upgrade to your final era it starts a 20min countdown to victory, which might seem irritating but it took me over 90min to reach the final era on my 2nd play through I'm sure you could probably shorten it to 60min but still even if you achieved the wonder status in 1hr you're still having to play a 80min game and that's without any threats on the map so I don't think multiplayer would see many wonders until the a majority of players were eliminated though I could be wrong..

- Also I checked the box stating i received the product for free because it's F2P.. so yeah Idk if it counts but I technically did get it for free, yes?

Edit: After a few more games I noticed the music cleverly transitions from era to era it's quite subtle at first and your selection of tech influences the music somewhat i.e I was advancing as Asia in my last game then selected west asia as my medieval stage and it slowly introduced some middle eastern sounding tunes over the top of the already playing music and I can only assume it would do the same for other selections like east asia or the european selections. Have to admit I really liked that, it's only a small detail but it's a nice touch.

Awesome game if you're into city building/managing resources etc. It's difficult to get into as it can feel a little rough at first but once you know what's what you can establish yourself a nice little town; then another town nearby and perhaps a little industrial park so your comrades can work and get paid. More often than not my first two towns end up merging into an industrial city which sets in motion the means to establish more cities in my country because after all.. this isn't merely a city builder. It's building your own little Soviet country (from scratch if you start with a blank map). It's pretty complex but it makes sense once you go through the motions and take the time to understand the little bits and pieces. Some of the terrain handling is a little frustrating when you want to smooth out a portion of the map it's very temperamental in which parts it will smooth over for you lol but recent updates have added more smoothing options and I'm pretty sure there's an update every Wednesday too so there's that. The dev knows exactly what he wants and what we want and tries to implement new things ASAP / fixing bugs - very active development which is more than you can say for a lot of games EA or not lol..

Anyway I 100% recommend it if you're a city/country/logistics management type of person.. super fun.. somewhat frustrating when things dont go as planned or you run out of something important. The downside of managing the logistics of industry that's running the country is when something runs out it's usually fuelling another industry that if isn't supplied again soon will also kill off yet another industry relying on that.. I find shortages create horrible chain reactions that are pretty hard to come back from sometimes but then again just because I enjoy these management games.. it doesn't mean I'm good at it ha!