Mass Effect: Andromeda - My Final Two Pence

Creepy faces, shitty cutscene animations, bugs - despite all the obvious flaws and problems, I was genuinely excited after the ten hour trial of Mass Effect: Andromeda. What followed in the 70+ hours with the retail version was mostly frustration, boredom, game-breaking bullshittery and the occasional glorious, hysterically funny moment with a great new crew.

(WARNING: SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!)

Ryder fucking shit up.

Tedious busywork
Scan enemies to help us gain a tactical advantage. Scan plants because something something ecosystem. Scan a bunch of satellites in half a dozen solar systems to figure out where some missing shuttle went. Scan a fucking door, because otherwise the nearby activation console won't become interactive. There is so much scanning in this game, I've literally watched entire 40 minute episodes of GameSack on my smartphone whilst scanning planets for worthless resources. I'm not making this up. It actually takes hours to scan every system in the game and there is zero sense of reward, which is true for the vast majority of quests in Mass Effect: Andromeda.

There is a side quest where an NPC gives you a shopping list and sends you to the market. I'm not joking. You're supposed to go to a bunch of merchants and buy some shit for a Turian, then come back with the goods for a bit of experience. There's even a goddamn followup quest, which has you buy some more stuff for him. I don't care how desperate they were to add "content" to this game. If I'm supposed to be some galaxy-saving superhero and you're telling me to do your shopping, then you fail game design on the most basic level.

What's worse - these pointless filler-quests never end! It's impossible to enjoy, let alone focus on the game's main plotline, because you're constantly getting interrupted by bullshit. Download a list for movie night aboard your ship. Place, scan or find a bunch of nav beacons randomly scattered all over a planet. Do boring, arbitrary stuff, some of which doesn't even come with dialogue, a cutscene or a decent reward, but just text boxes (email, datapads etc.) and a shitty experience reward. Zero satisfaction.

We'll bAAAAH! Nevermind!

Game-breaking bugs
I'm not wasting any more of anyone's time blabbing about the fucked up animations, because it's been done to death and I just don't find them massively game-breaking. Besides, there are so many actual game-breaking bugs, so how about I talk about those, instead? Like the time I went into my room on my starship, only to have the door close behind me and never open up again. It wouldn't budge, no matter what. So I went and loaded my most recent autosave, which lead to a black screen. The autosave broke, meaning I had just lost well over 30 minutes of progress, thanks to a stuck door.

"Only idiots rely on autosaves" is what most sane people would say here. Problem is, Andromeda flat-out refuses to let you save during critical missions. Sometimes you're not in a mission at all, but manual saving still won't work, because somebody is talking, a door is closing or there's some other shit going on, which temporarily prevents the manual save feature from working. During my time in Andromeda, saving was disabled more often than not.
That's a huge problem, because scripts regularly fail to trigger, causing missions to get stuck, preventing quest baddies from spawning or, in one hilarious case, causing infinite enemies to spawn until the whole game crashed.

Poor game-design
Instead of a minimap, Andromeda uses an Elder Scrolls style compass. And what's the first thing modders put into every Elder Scrolls game after all the nude mods are done? A FUCKING MINIMAP! Because the compass works so well and everyone loves it. To make up for it, PC users get the most amazing UI controls, ever. Menus are sometimes closed with the ESC key, sometimes via Tab and to make matters more fun, certain other menus can only be exited with the T-key. Some menus, such as the Strike Team window, don't respond at all. I can't hire, equip or release any strike teams (all buttons and hotkeys are unresponsive), so there's one bit of filler content I won't be interacting with. Shame!

I was excited about the combat during my first ten hours of trial gameplay. Little did I know it would never advance beyond what I've seen in the trial, because you only get three active skills as opposed to the four skills characters had in ME3. Sure, you can unlock and level up every single skill in the game, given enough time and experience points. But what's the point if you can only ever use three at a time? And remember when you could still issue orders to your squad mates? In Andromeda you can tell them where to go, but that's it. Yes, they've actually managed to dumb things down even further since ME3.

143 skill points spread across a ton of skills. You get to use three.

What's worse, combat feels increasingly annoying the further you get into the game. There are countless enemy outposts on every planet, but killing the enemies is completely pointless, because they will respawn the next time you go there. In fact, you can kill everyone, save your game, reload and all the enemies will be back. Fantastic!

Baddies also drop a ton of loot, all of which clutters up your tiny inventory, forcing you to throw away or deconstruct stuff every ten or so minutes. Ultimately, I just stopped picking up loot altogether, because it wasn't worth the hassle. 90% of the weapon modifications had negative side effects or were for guns I never used. There's a bunch of augmentations for armor, which always come with massive penalties. What would I want with a +50% shields -50% health "upgrade"? Or a melee booster, which comes with massive penalties to the damage I deal with weapons and powers?

Spawn placement has its problems.

Then there's the Nomad, which replaces the Mako from the original trilogy. I'll admit I actually enjoy driving around in that thing, though BioWare made sure to avoid making this new vehicle too fun or even convenient. By default, the Nomad will get stuck or even roll backwards the moment you try to drive up a molehill. The only way to avoid that is by switching to six wheel drive, which allows you to climb even the tallest mountains. It also causes the Nomad to slow down to an agonizing crawl. This means you're constantly switching driving modes, which adds absolutely nothing to the enjoyment of the game. What the hell were they thinking?

Worst of all are the unskippable cutscenes. Let's say you're exploring a planet and some NPC asks you to get back to the Nexus ASAP. So you leave the planet and get an unskippable liftoff cutscene. You bring up the star chart, zoom out, look for the Nexus, then you get an unskippable cutscene of you approaching the Nexus. Then you get a little unskippable video of the Tempest appearing near the Nexus, followed by yet another unskippable video of the Tempest actually landing. The NPC you're supposed to meet is in Operations, so now you get an unskippable cutscene of the little subway train taking you there. You talk to the guy, get sent to another planet, so now you get the subway again, then the liftoff, then the animation of your ship moving to the planet, then the landing sequence, NONE OF WHICH CAN BE FUCKING SKIPPED! I get it, all of these videos and sequences mask load times, but for fuck's sake, they can't be interrupted even when the loading is done! Why am I even playing this on a PC?

Some seriously bad storytelling
Attention - there be spoilers here!
Towards the final stretch of the game you find out that the Andromeda Initiative was started as a plan B to escape the Reapers. Funny thing is - that's a secret, kept by the leaders of the entire thing. Most of the pioneers getting frozen to explore Andromeda millions of lightyears away do so, because they wanted to see something new, make discoveries, start a new life... you know, all those perfectly valid reasons to leave the fucking galaxy.

This is absolutely ridiculous! The vast majority of people traveling to Andromeda had no idea about the Reapers and just wanted to explore somewhere new? Why? Has the entire Milky Way been explored already? Was there nothing left to discover? Then why are NPCs constantly whining about how much they miss their friends and families, their favourite food and all sorts of crap that reminds them of home? Who the hell would be insane enough to have their ass frozen for 600 years, drift through space, hoping to wake up in the right spot at the right time millions of light years away? I'm lucky when a new games console or a piece of hardware I order for my PC lasts for more than three or four years if it isn't dead on arrival. These guys blindly trust their starships to last for centuries, just so they can explore boring, single-biome planets. Granted, these "golden worlds" were supposed to be perfect when they had been spotted, but that was 600 years ago!

Dat casual sex tho!

None of this is even remotely plausible. Why they wouldn't simply use a much more believable setting, in which a bunch of would-be colonists head to another galaxy in order to escape the reapers is entirely beyond me. The first people to arrive were out of food and resources after 14 months and half of them turned into violent criminals. Criminals, who managed to settle in the new galaxy just fine, by the way, entirely without the Pathfinder. Great preparation and screening, really!

Some side quests get a bit of a story, but it's best not to think about the writing too much. There is one quest where you're supposed to track down a killer. You go to the crime scene, there's a dead Krogan, you get to do cool shit like scan for DNA and blood and what have you. And there's a knife right outside on the porch. With an engravement that leads you right to your guy. Why in the ass do they even need a pathfinder and his badass scanning abilities if the killer leaves his shit in plain sight? Who wrote this? What were they thinking?

Bad animations are the least of his worries.

The main story has its good moments and I did enjoy most of the main plotline. What I didn't enjoy was the fucking setup for a sequel (not bloody likely at this point) or some DLC (you can bet your ass on that one). The only way to be more brazen about it would be if they had the next badguy dance around naked with a large sign that says 'DON'T FORGET TO BUY OUR DLC' on it.
To add insult to injury, an after-credits dialogue reveals that they have just spotted a ship full of Quarians, Elcor, Hanar - basically all the aliens which have been completely absent from Andromeda so far. You hyped for that DLC yet?

The new guys are great
I see a lot of complaints about Ryder and his team and I disagree with most of them. The whole thing is a bit unfair. People love Shepard, Garrus, Wrex and everyone else who isn't Kaidan or Jacob. Or James Vega. Or Ashley. Huh. Come to think of it, the original trilogy had some shit crew members, too. Here you get a bunch of new guys and immediately they're supposed to live up to the characters we've been following for three games. And honestly, I think most of the new characters do a pretty great job and they're perfectly likable.

I sense a butt coming.

Liam's idea of diplomacy involves naked insult fights, which is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a game, but at the same time it's utterly hilarious. You get a bit of a bromance thing going with him, though Ryder and Liam are the exact opposite of Shepard and Garrus. The latter are cool, they're professionals, they're planning shit through and they know what they're doing. Ryder and Liam play it by ear, it's pure chaos and there's a bunch of bizarre, crude humour here, which I absolutely loved.

In many ways, Ryder is the Anti-Shepard. He doesn't have a plan, he's no stern authority figure and the writers are doing a great job showing that he was never trained or prepared to become a pathfinder. He follows his gut and makes the best of the situation. There's that moment where the Tempest gets surrounded by a bunch of enemy ships. "There's over a dozen ships. They're scanning us!" And Ryder responds, "Well... scan them back!" with so much determination in his voice, I couldn't help but burst into laughter.

Sometimes things get a little too weird when characters suddenly drop references to Star Wars or The Avengers. But when my Turian space-girlfriend tells me she made cow for me and I see my character struggling to pretend he's overjoyed at the sight of this charred, ruined chunk of meat on his plate, I can't help but love the new crew. So what if they're a little more goofy than Shepard? Don't tell me you already forgot about the fucking emergency induction port!
Some characters are weaker than others and there's one crew member in particular, who had waaaay more text and weight on the plot than anybody else, which was rather annoying, but I'll get to that.

They do have the license, I guess.

Where's my first contact?
One thing that hugely bothers me about the setting is how, even though I'm exploring a brand new galaxy, I'm only making first contact exactly once and it sucks! So I run into a bunch of ugly aliens, who immediately open fire at me and that's that. By the time you bump into the Angara they've already seen tons of humans and they don't give two shits about you. They're also the ugliest, lamest and dumbest aliens in the entire Mass Effect universe, so thank god only about 80% of the game is about these assholes.

In fact, one of them, an Angara named Jaal, joins your crew. Then you get to explore that guy's homeworld, two other planets his people live on, figure out that the enemy faction is actually a bunch of mutated Angara. Long story short, you'll be playing the vast majority of the game dragging Jaal's ugly ass with you, so why we get six different team mates I'll never know. Unfortunately, compared to Turians, Asari and badass Krogans, the Angara are just a bit lame. Jaal keeps blabbing on and on about his feelings, constantly stressing that his people are very emotional, so you're always hugging it out and then he takes you to meet his family and his countless cousins and siblings. Basically, Jaal is Italian.

Surprisingly, you only suck his cock figuratively.

The whole setting feels like a big missed opportunity. I get to play this Pathfinder guy, whose job it is to discover strange new worlds, yet I never get to meet any fascinating new aliens, which have never seen a human before. There aren't even any cool animals to interact with, because absolutely every living creature on every planet simply wants to kill you. Speaking of planets in a strange new galaxy - they're deserts (fucking two of them!), jungles, frozen wastelands... you know, if this is all the Andromeda galaxy has to offer, we may as well have stayed in the Milky Way. There's nothing strange or alien going on here. Such lack of creativity!

It looks utterly breathtaking at times
No, not the characters. But the landscapes are incredible, gear is ridiculously detailed, the lighting is phenomenal and in some moments the game looks better than pre-rendered cutscenes do in other AAA-games. There are other games rendered in Frostbite, which look even better, but it wouldn't be fair to call Andromeda ugly, just because its inhabitants walk around like human-gorilla-hybrids with a load of shit in their pants.

Screenshots just don't do it justice.

It's glitchy, game physics love to act up and don't get me started on the hair in this game. But damn, the planets in this game are a sight to behold! Yeah, PC Gamer refer to Eos as Arizona and they're not wrong, but while it may not look alien, it looks real as fuck.

Ridiculously realistic rain effects, spectacular tech combos, my first gigantic, super scary remnant architect - at its best moments, Andromeda looks absolutely amazing. With that said, I can't remember a single piece of music I've heard on there. And I'll never forget the tune the original Mass Effect played when Shepard became the first specter.

Please don't kill the franchise
There are some great moments in this game. Some are hilariously funny, others are genuinely exciting and action-packed, especially when you take on some of the game's largest enemies. I didn't entirely hate the story, despite a few stupid plot holes. I like the new crew, even when I kind of hope that Jaal is gonna die in the first DLC. And I like Ryder, because they weren't even trying to make them anything like Shepard. Ryder is more laid-back, more relaxed, has a bit of a potty mouth and honestly, that totally works for me.

BLAM! Shotgun to the face is fun, even with a dumbed-down combat system.

Unfortunately, all of the cool stuff is buried underneath tons upon tons of dreadful generic and sometimes completely boring padding, which often comes with no interesting story whatsoever. I don't want to complete some random Turian's shopping. I don't want to spend hours scanning planets for small deposits of iron. And when I end up skipping 90% of the battles, ignoring the loot and refusing to spend yet another useless skillpoint, then there's something fundamentally wrong with the game.

I hope this won't kill Mass Effect. I'd like to see a second game set in the Andromeda Galaxy, based on these worlds Ryder has found and terraformed. I would totally play Ryder again and I'd hang out with the new crew some more. But at the same time, I'd want interesting, meaningful quests. No more filler-crap, no more plants, rocks and doors to scan, no more side missions granted by email and datapads, which contain absolutely no story. I don't care if an Andromeda 2 could be completed in a mere 20 hours if all the content is fun, well-designed and interesting to play. I've spent more than 80 hours completing this game and I'm just glad it's over. And that's never a good sign. Still enjoying the multiplayer, though.

Mass Effect: Andromeda - I'm Home. Fuck The Rest of You!

The Mass Effect trilogy tells my favourite story, ever. I like it better than any book I've read or any move I've watched. No other game has moved me so much with its storytelling. I can watch Atreyu's horse die in the Neverending Story, laugh about it and eat a steak. Made of horse. But when Mordin Solus made the ultimate sacrifice, I could have cried like a bitch. I didn't, because my girlfriend was in the room, but damn. What a guy!

He was the very model of a scientist salarian.

When I heard they were making a new Mass Effect I got angry. For me, Mass Effect was done. Finished. There was no need for another story in this setting. Better stop while it was still great. Yeah, yeah, controversial ending, whatever, go choke on a bag of dicks.
Then they announced it - Mass Effect: Andromeda. Meh. No Shepard, a setting countless miles and years apart from the original trilogy. What's the fucking point?

Things went quiet for a while, then we got the E3 trailer and people (rightfully) took the piss out of the goofy facial animations. Now release is around the corner, I've watched a few gameplay streams, particularly over on PC Gamer and struggled to stay awake, while the hosts kept saying things like, "I fucking hate this", "I'm bored out of my mind" and other such high praise. It all looked a bit shit. In fact, they released an article, saying that Andromeda does in fact, seem a bit shit from what they've played. And a bit more shit. Rockpapershotgun fully agreed.

It was painful to watch.

Aaaaaand you've probably heard how the internet is currently flooded with memes, because yeah, those facial animations are awkward. I won't lie, I thought some of them were actually pretty funny. Though none of that stuff helped make me want to play this game any more. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Two or three others may have joined the bashing bandwagon.

But here's the thing. Unlike certain publishers, who don't want anybody to see their stuff pre-release, EA lets you play a whole bunch of Andromeda right now, if you're signed up for Origin Access. Doing so cost me literally tree-fiddy, which I'll get back, should I choose to buy the game. Because you get 10 percent off. Should I not buy it, giving it a go will have cost me said 3,50 rather than a full 50 Euros. You can't complain about that.

10 hours with Girl-Garrus.

And yes, after my ten hours I can confirm the horrible faces. I've spent half an hour trying to create a somewhat decent-looking character, but in the actual game he looks like a cross-eyed, goofy-faced idiot. It was the lesser of two evils. The default female character has a permanent, creepy, vacant-minded smile on her face, most of the custom female options look like dumpster-crackbabies. Characters have those oversized eyes, making them look like something made by Pixar, rather than realistic beings. There's also a slightly cringey, suuuper predictable bit in the story... if you don't want ULTRA MINOR SPOILERS for something that happens within the first five minutes of the game, just skip the following paragraph.

Your space-dad is the super duper awesome N7 Pathfinder hero guy, you hardly ever get to know him and then he dies and you're supposed to take his place. That shit was already overused when every console JRPG put you in the shoes of some teenage boy, who picks up his father's sword after he fell in the war or some such garbage. Certain previews are already bitching about it, because "Durrrr, how are we supposed to feel anything if the game didn't even give us the time to build a connection with space dad, the writing is soooo terrible". Right. See how your character literally says "I hardly knew him" when people say they're sorry for Ryder's loss? That's because you're not supposed to feel massively sad or attached. Because you're not. That's the fucking point. Figuring out who your father was, is a massive part of the storyline, which is precisely why the game doesn't establish any sort of connection between you and him at the beginning. SPOILERS OVER!

You can be a hot, sword-wielding Asari ninja in multiplayer!

Without wanting to reveal any more details, I found the story interesting and felt that it drew me in pretty much straight away. I like the voice actors and most of the characters you get to meet in the first ten or so hours and Ryder comes across as a pretty cool guy/dumpster-crackbaby. The one thing I've immediately missed was the cool Mass Effect music. The star chart music from ME1. The haunting piano tune whenever some depressing shit happened in ME3. I've exited Andromeda about an hour ago and I can't even remember any of the tunes from the trial.

Despite all the bitching about the characters, Andromeda's surroundings look great, sometimes amazing. The first two planets I got to hang out on were beautiful and detailed, space looks absolutely gorgeous and while I agree that planetary scanning is slower and even more annoying and tedious than it was in the previous games, I don't absolutely hate it and it's stunning to look at.

Hair, however, looks like somebody drew over a photograph in MS Paint.

Regarding side missions, I've read complaints where people compared them to the kind of quests you'd find in a Korean MMO. And yes, I had the literal "go there and use a thing" kind of mission, but I also had two side quests, which involved a bit of sleuthing and dialogue and stories, which I found pretty interesting. Some guy seemingly shooting his superior in cold blood, while he claims it was an accident. You get to dig around for evidence, question witnesses... heck, it's not the greatest quest I've ever played, but it sure as fuck beats "kill ten space bandits" or "skin six space pigs".

Combat is fucking awesome. I went for a Vanguard build, because that was my playstyle of choice on ME3. Basically, I attack far-away baddies with a spammy, semi-automatic sniper rifle, like so:

If baddies get too close, they get to enjoy some sweet face time with Mr. Shotgun. Right to the face.

BOOM... um, bitch!

Anyone sits behind cover and never comes out like a total pussy, I teleport right at them and give them a pounding. Like so:

And if none of that helps, then I just beat the shit out of them in melee. I did that to a ridiculously huge monster, which easily filled up all of my screen. It takes some Krogan-sized balls to do that. All four of them.

I killed that thing with my hands is what I'm saying. Then motion-blurring ruined the moment.

Yes, the AI is as braindead as in every computer game, ever. Baddies sit behind cover and occasionally show their stupid heads, so you can shoot them. Your teammates may be helpful or they may just get stuck in the scenery. There's absolutely nothing to say here that hasn't been said about every other game with a combat system.

My ten hours are over, Claire is nearing the halfway point and we're both sitting here, grinning to ourselves like idiots. I'm giddy. We're playing fucking Mass Effect. We're buing the damn retail version. Claire is running this thing on an old Bulldozer CPU and an HD 7950, with settings on high, averaging somewhere around 40 FPS. That's pretty amazing performance for such a dated machine, considering the high requirements. There are occasional slowdowns, even on my i7-4790k running 16GB RAM and a GTX 1060, but it's all playable and stable. We had no crashes here, I can tab in and out all the way I want and the game keeps happily chugging away.
Look, if you're on the fence, just give the fucking trial a go. Costs next to nothing and if you hate it, all you'll lose is tree-fiddy, rather than AAA-money.

Roses are red,
the Normandy is grey,
I'm buying Andromeda,
we'll bang, okay?

WH40K: Eternal Crusade - Enjoying an Awful Game

Once upon a time there was a crowdfunding campaign, which promised a large-scale Warhammer 40K shooter. Literally hundreds, if not thousands of players were supposed to be fighting over territory on gigantic maps. Planetside 2 in the 40K universe, they said. Then the lead designer quit his job halfway through the development process and people got an arena shooter with a maximum player count of, um... was it 40? 60? Something considerably less than a thousand per map.

The new game director said this was just work in progress. Work out the combat mechanics, get the shooting right, then they'll scale things up a bit. Except that never happened. In fact, most of the stuff they promised for this game (large persistent world, meaningful campaigns, proper pve content, thousands of items) never happened. Which didn't stop them from showing gameplay that didn't actually exist in one of their launch trailers. They also promised non-existing features until literally hours before release:

Immediately before release they changed the infographic for something far less impressive:

There is still no "persistent" world and the alleged "campaign" was added months later and boils down to "win 5 matches in a day for a reward". There are no 1000s of weapons. Not even close.

A week after launch, the game had a peak player count of something around 1,300 players, struggling to maintain 800 users at prime time. They charged 60 Bucks for this game and people felt ripped off, lashing out at the developers. The community manager responded in kind:

We were all a bit stressed. We are all better people now.

Add constant lag, performance issues, messy graphics and complete and utter lack of balancing to the game and I've bashed Eternal Crusade with a well-deserved 40/100 over at GameStar.

I kept an eye on the game over the following month or two, occasionally firing it up here and there to see if there were any interesting changes. But apart from a rapidly declining player base and tons upon tons of promises by the new lead developer, there was really nothing going on. Until now.

2D sun prite, ultra settings.

I checked the game's stats on SteamDB and suddenly, Eternal Crusade had a peak of 2,800 players, as well as over 1,200 active players in the past 24 hours. That's still abysmal, but it's considerably more than I had ever seen on there before. What happened?

As it turns out, the game is getting a F2P option. Or "Free 2 Waagh", as they call it. You can now play the game without paying anything, albeit with a bunch of restrictions. Progression is slowed down to 1/3 of its normal speed and you only get to play orks. Once you've unlocked the full version by spending 20 Bucks in the cash shop you get full access to all content and features. Meanwhile, people who purchased the retail version get 40 Bucks worth of premium currency to spend as they please. On top of that, they get an extra retail version of the game, which they can freely sell or gift to an unsuspecting victim on Steam.

Main menu looks a lot nicer now, too.

'Campaigns' are a thing now, though they hardly deserve their name. Basically, if you manage to win five matches within a certain amount of time, you'll get a bunch of premium curreny. If your faction outperformed everyone else, you get a bonus. That's it. For what it's worth, you can now earn premium monies for the cash shop without actually spending anything and there's a bunch of cool-looking new customizations. Check out my wolf priest above. I think he's adorable! ♥

I played for a few hours and actually had fun. Balancing is still chaotic, but in a good way. I've been one-shot by guys with plasma cannons and orks with claws and rocket launchers. With that said, you simply shouldn't try punching somebody who aims a missile at you. And the clawy ork had such a massive windup time on his heavy attack, I should have seen it coming from miles away. Teamkills are extremely frequent and players aren't shy to throw grenades, rockets, plasma and other shit into a room full of enemies and friendlies alike. Ingame chat rarely reached CoD-levels of toxicity, but things are only about as friendly as you'd expect in a competitive shooter.

Cutting a guy up in an execution attack is still very satisfying.

The game is so chaotic, I had some genuine laugh-out-loud funny moments, where I tried to heal a wounded team member and accidentally threw a grenade instead. Such happy little accidents aside, I actually enjoy playing a healer, which is something I've never done in any game, ever. I don't even consider rolling one. But in Eternal Crusade I get to poison enemies (or friends, if I'm not careful), beat the piss out of them, revive fallen comrades and shoot people's heads off with my unique bolt pistol, which comes with a really handy burst mode. I've unlocked it through a reward crate, which you can frequently claim just by playing the game. 90% of the stuff I get from there is useless for my class, but it feels great when you finally get some good new shit that makes your character feel more powerful.

The game awards points just like Battlefield, so you get rewarded for defending objectives, supporting other players, spotting and highlighting enemies and just about every other useful thing you could do on top of killing stuff. And I won't lie - throwing a grenade to take out three players (on the enemy team, for a change), then chopping another guy up and finishing him off with an execution whilst reviving the occasional fallen brother in the middle of things did make me feel like a total badass. Squad mates follow me, I get to keep them alive, but at the same time I'm powerful enough to kick some serious ass. Granted, I won't be blowing up tanks or sniping enemies from halfway across the map, but I can hold my own in a mid-range gunfight or a melee encounter.

Friendly fire is a thing. Imagine what a grenade could do here.

I've played against orks, chaos and eldar as a space marine and won and lost matches against all of them. Faction balance seemed much better than it was at launch time, where eldar dominated absolutely everything. Map timers and spawn tickets were well-balanced. If you check out my video on top, you can see the space marines narrowly winning a match at what's literally the very last second. We would have lost, had the orks managed to interrupt the final capture one last time, but they ran out of lives just a few moments too soon. It doesn't get any more close and exciting than that.

Performance is still a mixed bag. On the plus side, you now get to choose whether you want to play on EU or NA servers. And the game now actually shows a ping of 200ms and up when things get laggy. In the past, you'd never see your ping go above 40, even with players visibly rubberbanding and teleporting all over the place, so things were clearly considerably worse than 40ms. And what do you know - said teleporting and rubberbanding never happened once when I gave the game another go, so there's that.

Now I get to hammer these bitches before they magically appear behind me.

Actual game performance still ranges from playable to shit. On smaller maps with 16 or so people on both teams, things remained smooth and relatively stutter-free. On some of the larger maps I get stutters and freezes. You can see it in the tank gameplay starting at 3:26 in the video at the top of this article. Freezes, hitches and hiccups, making it almost impossible to aim at a moving target. At its worst moments the game froze when I came across an enemy, remaining frozen until I was greeted by the death screen. These moments were rare for me and only happened on the larger maps with lots of vehicles and 50 or so players, but they happened. It may not be as awful as it was, but it's still a problem.

If I had to rate this game today, I'd probably give it a mid to high 60, based solely on my most recent experience with it. And, obviously, ignoring all the broken promises and blatant lies made by the developers. If they ever manage to eradicate the annoying performance problems and stop pretending there was actual fun PvE content happening (I didn't get to try it, because it's completely dead), it could even be a 70. It's still a somewhat ugly, small-scale Battlefield clone set in the 40k universe. It's a chaotic, violent clusterfuck, where the next death is just one stupid plasma cannon wielding teammate away. I'm not proud of myself, but I'm enjoying myself on there. For the first time.