I still need to play the pitt but as of now this is the best fo3 dlc and even then it's still just ok lol

I really like the setting and the new weapons but that's kinda it tbh. The story just doesn't do it for me. I felt zero reason to actually side with Calvert since all he promises is "power!!!" and never elaborates further then that. I'll take money and whatever else I can get my hands on over something you won't elaborate further on, thanks. Also the whole Nadine subplot is so nothing because it literally solves itself by the end lmao.

Only other thing I'll say is I like the whole tribal initiation sequence, it's easily the most visually interesting and weird I've seen a modern fallout get and I wish more of this was like that lol.

A much better put together game than the first one but also a lot more streamlined compared to the first. Where 1 feels like its throwing darts at the wall and sees what will stick. 2 is a lot more of a straight forward Point A to Point B action game. There isn't anything particularly wrong with that but its an observation i want to make and keep in mind with my replay of the series and see if the memory of "the series slowly devolved into and lost its identity to the pop culture idea of itself" is actually true. Gears exists in pop culture and memes as the dude bro action game for beer guzzling frat boys but you see in the first two games they are trying to be more than that. Sure its still filled with stuff put in the game because the devs thought it was cool, which is a design philosphy i am all for. But it tries to have more of a story than but some of it goes by so fast that it comes off comedic.

You spend an entire game trying to prevent the sinking of a city only for Marcus to hear a single voice recorded sentence of his father saying they should sink Jacinto and he is now going "we have to sink the city before they do." It looks and sounds stupid because its a complete 180 in a matter of seconds after hours of build up in the opposite direction. When you stop and think about it the idea makes sense. Marcus is a man that has been consumed by a world at war for 15 years and if this is the hail mary to stop it in one fell swoop he is gonna take it, for the good of humanity even if its a very difficult decision to make. As said by Adam Fenix in the game "end the war at the cost of humanity's last refuge"

To go back to the topic of Gears slowly leaning in to the memes of itself and morphing into the games everyone thought they were there is no better example of this than Marcus's voice performance by John DiMaggio. This was one of if not the biggest thing parodied at the time of the series peak in cultural relevance. In this first game his performance is a lot more subdued but in 2 DiMaggio is a lot more gruff sounding. He is putting a lot of tension on the muscles of his throat to give his voice this gravely texture to it which results in Marcus sounding a lot more aggressive. I can't say for certain what was the cause of the change in direction and if it caused more parody and memeing than what already existed but it definitely felt like it didn't help and was a sign of where the series was being steered towards.

Overall a good game if not a little bit more forgettable in areas than 1 because its mostly just hallway fight after hallway fight. Excited to replay 3 which was my favorite

aka "the enclave continuing to get their shit kicked in"

Tesla Cannon is fun and op as shit but that's about it. Another 1-2 hours of things for you to shoot topped off by another meaningless decision that makes no impact on your actual forced status as a hero in the game. I'll always find it amusing tho that the only reason this DLC exists is because fo3's launch ending was just THAT massively disliked by people lol. I can't imagine how much shit BGS would've gotten if they tried making people pay for a better ending nowadays LMAO.

My favorite FPS of all time and my second-favorite game of all time (and that's only because of nostalgia).

I was so hyped for this game. Doom 2016 managed to be even better then I envisioned (and I never lost faith in the team mind you, despite the MP reception, I was still there for the campaign from day one), and I couldn't wait for what id was going to do next. It was all I would ever think about from when it was announced all the way to when it released. I would follow every piece of news, every interview, every analysis of footage, it was the reason I even built a PC. I had fucking dreams about playing this game. A game with that amount of anticipation has some big shoes to fill. How can it even come close to what I expected?

Somehow, it did.

My bias is insane, I'm aware, but I don't care. DOOM Eternal is FPS perfection, and my favorite id Software game from their entire 30-year-long run. Any issues I have are so minor to the point where it just doesn't matter. It takes everything 2016 did right, tweaked and trimmed the fat, and changed the rules just enough that it demands more from the player, while also not getting in the way of what 2016 did well, which was raw combat, creating one of the most challenging and engaging shooters I've ever played.

It really bugs me when people call Eternal's combat and enemy design "square peg in square hole", because yes, while the game does tell you outright certain methods on how to eliminate certain enemies or weak spots, those are not the only way to handle them. There's tons of ways to handle enemies or specific weak points, from frags/stickys in cacodemon mouths, arbalest rounds, lock-on rocket volleys, and much more. I could go on with all the ways to take on enemies in this game. Anyone who says this game has no playstyle variation clearly hasn't tried experimenting with their tools or really tried to understand just what the game was trying to get them to do. You have 9+ weapons in your arsenal, and like the classic duology, the game expects you to use them all. All of the new additions, from the enemies, weapon mods, armor abilities like dashing/bloodpunch, and much more all come together to create a game so good that it honestly makes it's predecessor hard to get back into. Not that it's bad, but these additions just make me wish they were there earlier, yknow?

The atmosphere and visuals are just the icing on the cake. I know not everyone is a fan of the current direction of this series, and how it seems to want to do more then just orange and red-tinted techbases on mars and hell, but to that I say that this series is 30 years old, and it should be allowed to evolve and push itself to new places. I don't see anyone complaining that Sonic isn't in green hill and nothing else in terms of location variety (quite the opposite actually), and the same goes for story. I will admit this game does have a problem with having things told instead of shown to the player, and with certain things really being left to the imagination creating a lack of connection to the events going on in front of you (something I believe the next game will address), but I love how much this game pushes the story of the doomguy forward not just towards being a silent, big-muscled killing machine, but a human who genuinely has lost himself in his never-ending quest to save the people he loves, and will stop at nothing until it is complete.

My only other issue is really how this game just feels... incomplete post-launch. Not that there isn't enough content to satisfy most people as it is, and I can't blame the team for this as this game did release right at the start of the 2020 pandemic so it really put a wrench in their free post-launch and paid dlc plans, but it always feels like they wanted to do more but just wern't able given the circumstances. It'll always burn me a bit how we only got 5 out of 10 master versions of campaign levels, and only 1 DLC master level, on top of things like Horde not being the best replacement for 2016 Arcade imo. Really, all of this would be negated if we had actual modding and level design tools, but with id and Bethesda putting more future efforts towards idtech7, maybe it's not a pipe dream.

I don't know what else to say. What are you even doing if you haven't played this.