Recent reviews by your local grass eater

Is it a good game? Yeah. Would I recommend it? Not really. Marathon is uniquely frustrating because losing feels completely miserable, unlike other games where you can still enjoy a match even in defeat.

It markets itself as a hardcore extraction shooter, but that "hardcore" label just translates to pure frustration, failed runs, and massive time-wasting.

The game heavily pushes you into trios. Duos are locked behind a time-based rotation, and I'm obviously not going to wait around just to play with one friend.

This forces you to look for teammates in LFG servers. Spending 10–15 minutes just to find a squad is a total time-waster, and god forbid you lose a run—people will just rage-quit and abandon you. It happened to me constantly.

The Time-to-Kill (TTK) is incredibly low. Defenders claim a blue or purple shield stops you from instantly dying if an enemy spots you first, but the reality is you rarely have time to react.

The moment a teammate gets downed, a sense of impending doom sets in. You know you're about to lose all the valuable gear you spent hours looting, forcing you back to a basic sponsored kit to start from scratch.

Equipment like grenades is also way too overpowered. They either leave you on the brink of death through a decent shield or instantly kill you if you have a low one. In Apex Legends, ordnance is useful, but it doesn't entirely decide the fight's outcome.

You die—a lot. The game hides behind the excuse that "dying is normal," but there is a limit to a player's patience. It feels incredibly unfair to get sniped from afar while wearing a grey shield by a team kitted out in full purple gear.

Progression is painfully slow. To actually complete contracts, you practically need an unemployed phase just to grind the game out.

While the core loop is frustrating, the game does have undeniable highlights:

1. Satisfying Audio Design
With good studio headphones, the soundscape is mesmerizing. The soundtrack is fantastic; I constantly listen to the OST—especially my favorite track, "Stars That Bleed"—on my daily commute to college.

2. Great Gunplay
Every weapon has a distinct purpose and feels great to control. Engaging both AI bots and real players is genuinely fun.

3. Captivating Atmosphere & Graphics
The simplistic, brutalist sci-fi aesthetic is stunning and instantly hyped me up before launch. The atmosphere creates genuine tension, keeping you on your toes the moment you hear distant gunfire.

I’m sticking to Apex Legends. It feels much more fair, lacks gear fear, and respects your time. Balancing modern 3D shooters with aiming, abilities, and complex maps will always involve a luck factor. If I wanted perfect balance, I'd just stick to chess.

I bought this game because I like the rush of fighting people while having loot to lose, but unfortunately the PVP in this game leaves to be desired and it feels underworked.

The game's prototype originally started as as PVE co-op game and slowly became an extraction shooter where it feels like they added the PvP as a last feature.

These are the grudges I hold against the PvP and can confidently say they will annoy newcomers who wants to fight:

1. Enemy visibility is poor
Apex Legends and Battlefield 1 does a better job than this. You could cactually compare Battlefield 1's color palette to Arc Raider's since both games have a realistic enviroment. If the enemy has a sniper rifle, it's very hard to pinpoint them if they're shooting from inside a dark building. Because the shadows in this game are very dark. Got killed by someone waiting for me to come and I could've never predict they were there because they blended in perfectly with the dark.


2. Getting shot out of nowhere
Since the player can move fast and can blend right into the enviroment, you will be hunted and die before you know. It doesn't help that when getting shot, your shield depletes very fast since the shields in this game have low shield capacities and if the enemy has a fast hard-hitting weapon, you can guess you will die before reacting back for retaliation. Speaking about weapons...

3. Weapon beats skill
Say you have an average weapon and the enemy is kitted and has a better weapon than yours, you'll quickly realize that whoever has an already better weapon will always win no matter w if you're more skilled than the other enemy unlike the enemy who aims like a grandparent who has parkinsons but just because he has a tempest he can erase your ass.

4. 3rd person advantage
You can camp a hallway and hide behind walls while a player will run through the hallway and surprise them. All while making no sounds. That doesn't sound fair. I got jumpscared alot of times because of this.

5. The arcs intervene mid fight
If you're fighting and mid-battle an arc hears you and decides to lock unto you, they will SOLELY concentrate on you and not the enemy while they're also creating noise because they're fighting you. You can use lure grenades (grenades that target arcs and explodes on them) but i'm solely talking about situations where you run out of lure grenades.

6. Why fight when the profit is low?
There's no incentive to fight when you bring a kit with a huge sellout value when these things happen. I've been finding myself running more free kits than my own loot since the stuff i've pinpointed actually ruin the game's fun factor for PvP'ing. I don't find PvE that fun where you just loot and fight arcs without getting close to the flame and by that I mean fighting players . And even then you can still get randomly shoot when you just finished killing a giant ARC and lose everything by a random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

It looks the extraction shooter genre has alot of problems since I played Marathon, Arc Raiders and Tarkov and there's alot of frustrating points that outnumber the actual positives. I'll stick to chess since it's literally the most balanced game.

This game has one of the most satisfying and unique mechanics I've seen in a game: a dynamic cutting physics engine where you chop enemies into bits in real time.

The attack moveset is interesting, and you get 2 additional characters to play once you finish the main story.

There are, however, some cons that I wish could be fixed:


They're annoying to fight, and when they're together in a group, you'll get stunned a lot and then hit.
This may deter people in the early game, but as they continue playing, they will find out you just have to parry a lot to stun them and then insta-kill them.


The game doesn't explain the parrying mechanic very well.
You have to hold the directional input toward the enemy that is attacking and then press the attack button to parry.


I love completing my favorite games to 100%. When I finish the main story, I’ll play side missions or collect collectibles to squeeze more fun out of the game after I’ve finished it and loved it.

But this game is frustrating to 100%.
First, there are the VR missions. There's an achievement where you need to gain the highest rank in ALL VR missions, finishing them within strict time limits. This requires perfect precision in gameplay, and it becomes tiresome.

Also, you need to complete the game on Revengeance difficulty (the highest difficulty) with all missions at an S rank.
If you want to get an S rank, you can’t get hit a SINGLE TIME in any FIGHT .

These challenges are very annoying to complete.


When you get hit by the same enemy a lot, you'll sometimes get "dazed." You stay put, unable to attack, and you have to shake your left stick to recover.

But no matter how much you shake, you still remain stunned, and enemies always hit you in that vulnerable state.

This made me wonder if I'm not shaking my left stick hard enough, despite shaking it uncontrollably a lot.


In conclusion, it's a fun game, but some things could have been easily fixed.
I'm also confident in saying that this game is a near-perfect hack 'n' slash and easily in my top 10 games, but I wish they had fixed some of the nitpicks I've listed above.

Terrible optimization and performance. And it's a shame because Vermintide 2 runs really good.

The concept of RTS games has always intrigued me — having to strategically make your moves and progress by building your army and settlements.
But I’ve never liked the slow gameplay where you have to wait for your buildings to upgrade, and in the meantime juggle other tasks to compensate for the waiting.

I wanted to give Natural Selection 2 a try since it’s an FPS game, and I love FPS games. Combine that with RTS elements and you get an interesting genre.

But the game is a high-skill, competitive game with a niche (almost dead) community. The game may be interesting, but the entry barrier feels like slamming into a wall, especially when the player base is small and mostly composed of veterans.

Randy: True fans will download this game and have their personal information sold to data brokers.

The amount of predators and furries in this game is unbelievable and there's absolute no moderation.

If you want to get a VR headset solely for this single game, then just join a local club and you're gonna have a better time with actual normal people.

Addicting. Relentless. Unstoppable.

I can't recommend this game anymore whatsoever since there's few servers with a good ping (I'm from Europe) and there's only tryhards who have 1000h into the game playing.

Recently, they added a new update that expands the room size to 16 people and since that, every room that I'm playing has alot of players making the game chaotic and unbalanced.

Play something else.

Garbage optimization and performance.

It's like the programmers were coding with their feet instead of hands. I get constant stutters with a 6600XT and 5700x3d at 1440p.

The constant stutters renders the game unplayable, it's distracting and ruins the game's flow.
The game's graphics are okay-ish but it can't be fully enjoyed since it's not sharp due to the forced TAA. Games with TAA needs to be stopped and I recommend everybody who likes 3D graphics in video games to visit the subreddit r/F##kTAA to see how they can disable forced TAA and raise the bar for graphics.

The new character model and voice acting for Isaac Clarke is generic opposed to the OG.