Recent reviews by IndieBob

Great game but so buggy! Lost about 5 hrs progress due to one crash.

All the positives of other reviews are true, but the manual save features plus deaths which occur as nothing more than gags - which can literally lose you hours of play give this a negative. They need to work in an autosave system which loses you a couple of minutes at the most so you can enjoy the gag and move on - game play experience unruined.

Hero goes round and round. Why? Nobody knows. Kept looking for depth. Kept assuming I was missing something. Hero goes round and round. Why? Nobody cares.

Initial impressions: I haven't been as blown away by a shooter since first playing Battlefield 2, way back in 2005. Phenomenally good fun. Still diving 200+ hours later. Perfect "sit down for an hour and have a blast without having to remember a zillion details from months ago" game.

Middle Impressions: One of the best things is that when they re-balance the game in any way, a bunch of squealing man-babies leave negative reviews and quite the game - so they're out of your life at least until 2 days later when they get over it

Final Impressions: I gave HD2 a massive break and returned to discover it a different game. It's now a game where the egos of players is stroked by making every enemy made of paper in comparison to when I last played. No need to cooperate or for team work, just an endless, soulless, brainless shooting gallery for the sub-CoD junkies. No longer the cheer when you finally bring those four chargers to a halt, they're easy fodder now. Same with bile titans. People just run about doing their own thing. Peurile.

Also: more bugs, and not the good sorts. Dropped connections; players and enemies frozen in animations; when things spawn in they zoom in from stage left and then start moving, as if being delivered by some invisible conveyor etc. If it had released in this condition it wouldn't have been the success it was.

A surreal, beautiful, engaging nonsenseathon. Highly recommended.

So today I am sad because, last night, I realise why people might rate Remnant 2 a 7/10 or even lower, and why --- despite the replayability, superb game systems, graphics etc -- was I a reviewer, I might have done the same. It's something which is heavily hinted at in the tutorial and, though I missed it, even more strongly hinted at in the various bits of gameplay I have seen - that, like in No Man's Sky, Remnant's ultimate conceit is that the Universe is a computer simulation. I cannot get over how much I hate this idea. It's transformed the game from one saving a universe, to a game about resetting a video game. Nothing in the game world is meant to be real, nothing counts, it's a game about a buggy illusion, soulless computer models interacting, nothing momentous happens, nobody had hopes and fears, they were just simulated to appear as if hey did - ultimately an empty experience … and that makes me sad.

All that weird tech in the worlds you visited, the magic, the mystery, freakin' spirit planes, alternative realities - all the wonder you felt about the crazy Remnant multiverse, how it fits together, what laws operate in these places, all that is gone. It's just a simulation - everything explained, wonder not required.

That's it really, but just to anticipate some responses to my reaction:

"I hate to break it to you but you're just saving computer game characters in every game you've played" - come on mate, that's not the same thing. In the game world the characters have been real, in remnant they're not. Half of one's investment in any game is treating what happens as if it counts, that you're doing something of import and that's why it's worth trying. Worth spending hours going up against mighty bosses, hordes of mobs etc.

"but Elon said the chances of us not being in a simulation are billions to one ..." Elon says a lot of things, I get the feeling he also takes a lot of cocaine before he says some of those things. That doesn't make them true or accurate or that a story based on his premise would be any good: that we're a simulation nested inside billions of other simulations, which would be the obvious extrapolation from what he said. If the chances of us not being in a simulation are billions to 1, it would hold for the world in which our simulation is running and the world in which that simulation is running and so on... billions of them, each simulation adding another layer of unreality, removing us yet further from anything that really matters.

"but there are scientific papers …" no, there are not scientific papers about the universe being a simulation, there are scientific papers about a holographic universe, which is a different thing entirely. These are papers in which they attempt to show proofs that it's possible that the universe is a 2 dimensional surface, e.g. that the entire universe is in the event horizon of something like a black hole, and is not the 3 dimensional space we perceive it to be.

"but hey, the kids like games, the universe is a game, it's a really cool idea, computers and shizzle. " - it's only cool until you think about it.

Anyhoo, don't worry about me. I will probably get over it and be back to playing the game in a day or two, but I can easily understand why some reviewers went cold on it, despite it's many impressive attributes.

At the end of the game a shimmering figure that comes up to the console, and resets the universe. That's Glarbol, a low level IT operative who works a 23 narvok shift for Smellzor and his only jubal was to watch the simulon to see what was causing the resoks...

But he was out grabbing a covak and having a shazlock when it happened, and now he's probably going to lose his bonus and his younglons may not get the latest mezko. Heck, he may even get a reprimand from Bosulak. Silly old Glarbol!

That's the gravity of the story behind Remnant 2. If you can get past it, you'll love this game.

Because otherwise, it is amazing.

I used to love this game but I went off it.

No private team voice chat, which I don't like. I can't always play with friends and I play games to socialise. They talk some guff about "there were no walkie-talkies in the 1890s" and it being a design decision not to include it (with only public voice chat - which is needed but they should also offer private voice chat). So, in a game with zombies, water devils, giant spiders, phantoms made of flying beetles, giant pig butchers, hell hounds, in which players have second sight, can glimpse the spirit world, telepathy is beyond belief? Seriously!?!?!? IN A GAME WITH AR-STYLE POINT AND PLACE WAYPOINT MARKERS!?!?!!? At least just admit "we can't do it". I am not asking you to get rid of public / 3d positional audio chat (it is needed) but if PubG has both, you can too. It's not just that, when I've played with friends, with voice chat over discord, it feels like cheating, like we might be winning because the others can't chat like we can.

People don't want a single player experience, or one where they're penalised for chatting informally. Want to increase your player base? This one is more or less free.

"Oh but who wants a 12 yo yelling at you" etc. arguments just don't make sense. Well, a) that doesn't happen, or so rarely it's not worth talking about. Besides, someone could still do that but they'd also be giving away your position in the world with public/positional chat, the way it is.

There's other stuff too. You lose the charming low-tech gunplay of lower levels as you get more powerful. Back to Crysis's run and gun roots, auto pistolas / fast load traits etc. Something made more viable by them changing the default stance to "run and gun" mode, rather than the original "gun lowered" view.

They also started introducing bot matches and useless deathmatch/blood royal modes, rather than developing the actual USP hunt aspects. If I wanted PubG I'd play that, deathmatch, battlefield or something.

It is le groove.

At the current offer price of a couple of quid, I'd recommend it. Definitely worth $2/£2/€2. At full price, probably not. Some nice environments, some good puzzles, and a nonsensical plot which takes itself a little too seriously. Definite budget constraints showing, the protagonist's wife seems to wear the same low cut top through the entire game, plenty of jank and few scares other than jump scares. It's not THAT bad, passes the time, but it's not going to change your life.

It's as close to Azad as any game yet.