I wrote a review for this already, originally written for Steam but I want to return to this as I have a lot to say.

There is no other experience like Squad. Teams are comprised of squads with set roles and headed up by a Squad Lead (SL), fireteams may be contained within. Matches are 50v50 on large maps focused on controlling key points. SL's need to coordinate their squads to complete objectives or support attacks, they also must communicate with other SLs to make this work. Voice chat is a necessity for this game.

On the scale of Arcade Shooter to Milsim, Squad leans much further on the Milsim side, not as far as something like ARMA but not as arcady as something like Insurgency or Hell Let Loose.

I don't know why Milsim developers seem to think that slow animations equate to realism. Everything you do can be measured with a calendar. Following a recent update known as Infantry Complete Overhaul (ICO) even aiming down sights requires 3 days notice. I play anti-tank 90% of the time which requires aiming for specific points on vehicles from hundreds of meters away, the openings for these shots can be only a few seconds and with this new update I don't even try anymore.

The entire intention of the update was to promote teamplay and slow the game down. However, the kind of players who went off on their own haven't been affected, because in all honesty they are turbo nerds who put more hours into this game than anything else in their lives, the kind of individuals who say "over" at the end of sentences through VC.

Most games you die to enemies you never even see. With ICO you and an enemy can walk right up to each other, spray like crazy and both walk away like it is a spaghetti western. The recoil and sway is utterly ridiculous. For a game that prides itself on realism all I can say is that it has completely shit the bed when it comes to representing the fighting ability of the average soldier. Sprinting for more than 2 seconds renders your soldier unable to cope with the physicality of being alive.

ICO isn't going away and the most hardcore elements of the community love it, again because they are turbonerds who believe their hardcore military man shooter should contain zero fun and should only be played by people willing to refer to them as 'Sir'.

I miss the highs this game used to offer. Holding a point with a squad of 8 guys against an onslaught, having a single medic be the backbone of the team. Landing a perfect RPG shot to take out a full helicopter. Sneaking behind enemy lines to locate a FOB so command can mortar it. Hell, games where I got zero kills and just did logistics runs back and forth from main were still fun.

Nowadays this game just makes me sad. You can still find some elements of fun but it takes a lot of sacrifice. Playing Squad requires a minimum of an hour of your time, between server queues, match set up, early game and the length of matches, if you decide you had a bad game which provided no fun it came at the cost of your entire evening.

The developers are also frustratingly focused on the wrong things with this game. Please god fix the broken server browser. Please add more official servers. Stop splitting your playerbase across two broken games and keep them on one broken game instead. Please fix the endless audio issues. Have you guys never heard of optimisation? Can you fix the bug that prevents spawning after waiting 90 seconds on the rallypoint? Can you fix the janky vehicle physics?

I don't encourage anyone new to try this game. I just miss what it used to be.

Also the community sucks. Yes please play Yugoslavian war music through your microphone at full volume for the entire game set up phase, hilarious and never been done before. Please do a fake Russian accent every opportunity, it kills me with laughter. I love when you scream racial slurs over and over every time you drive past, it's groundbreaking comedy. Oh yeah, you should definitely not unlock any Squads so that people joining the server cannot literally play the game and get kicked for being AFK due to something out of their control. I thoroughly enjoy getting TK'd because you insist on playing heavy armour but can't identify friendlies from enemies. Yeah bro, Squad was totally as quick and arcadey as Call of Duty before the ICO update and anyone complaining obviously doesn't know how to play, I am sure that earned you a purple heart with your military RP clan.

Yes I am mad, cope, seethe, etc. but I guess a game that forces you to communicate directly with people seriously highlights how obnoxious they can be. Given the small size of the community and server list you do run into the same clowns often.

I love the idea of playing this game much more than actually playing it but it's a fantastic game nonetheless.

The tech here is really impressive, the way things break, burn, smash and fall apart makes a little spot in my brain glow bright red from satisfaction. The most fun I had was loading up a city map and using the AC-130 mod to commit war crimes.

The actual game here is primarily a puzzle game. You have objectives like "steal X item" with a strict time limit once you start, you'll be arrested and sentenced to voxel jail if you fail. I'm glad the developers took the time to find a way to utilise the tech they had and make an actual game, they could have just as easily launched it as a simple sandbox.

The early levels are great fun and really activate your almonds, making me feel like my brain is ENORMOUS. The later levels feel less satisfying to beat as the game progresses. I stopped trying to achieve the secondary objectives and just wanted to finish the game by the end.

I was surprised by the extensive use of vehicles in this game but they handle well and situations like dropping a safe through 3 floors and having it smash through the roof of a van to drive away with are real highlights.

The music is fun, it matches the tone so well. I feel like Eric Andre in his Cat Burglar skit when I run around the map spraypainting the route I am going to take before I accidentally blow up a building wrong and get flattened.

Apparently the studio was bought up by a new publisher who has them working on subpar DLC packs, I haven't touched any of that but the base game is well worth the price of admission.

Multiplayer would go so HARD in this game.
Steam Workshop support is also a major plus.

I believe this game makes for a fantastic introduction to VR.

It doesn't do anything ground-breaking nor does it ask you to do anything too complex in VR. It gives you a simple world with tasks to do and some fun voice acting to encourage you along.

I enjoyed my time with it and it's genuinely funny at parts (something I rarely say for games actively trying to be funny). I would likely start someone off in this game to get them adjusted to VR and see what it is like to interact with items in the game space.

I have a love/hate relationship with Killing Floor 2. As a major fan of the first game I remember trawling Twitter to try nab a closed beta code before bots could scrape them all and I was hooked from the moment I played.

Years later, I look back on this with a bit of sadness. It was one of the only games I was dedicated to enough that I actually joined the official game forums. I was excited for everything the devs were promising.

Early on they said the game would never get any kind of paid DLC. That was a lie.
They said the game would be one of the most moddable on the market, from the ground up it was being designed with mods as a core tenant. That was somewhat of a lie, modding does exist but it's less accessible than the first game and they had a convoluted voting system for mods to be officially added.

They promised a new perk which took many forms and was eventually retooled as "survivalist", which took the best elements of every other perk without the negatives, AKA busted.

The game today is a shadow of itself. Development was outsourced to another studio a while back who made subpar additions. A big marketing element was the fact weapon animations were filmed at 200fps so that during slow motion you could see the sights wobble, or the bolt warp, etc. This other studio added guns with flatout broken animations.

The best maps in this game are still the ones it launched with. The community made some great ones but the official maps never got any better.

Today, it has a bloated and flatout broken (as in, servers for this do not work) in game item economy. It works via Steam marketplace but not in-game.

The gore system is fantastic though, Nvidia Reflex is cool, the persistent blood stains still wows me and the multiple points of dismemberment is still impressive.

It goes on sale crazy cheap now so it is worth playing for the guns and the gore but there are better co-op shooters that have come out since this game's launch.

As an aside, one of the studio heads made a ridiculous post related to abortion rights and was utterly shocked when asked to step down. It doesn't affect the game but I feel that the talent and charm of earlier Tripwire games is long gone, and can't help but feel a bone headed move from the studio head may indicate the kind of work environment at the studio that could have caused that. Entirely speculative on my part with no evidence but he did the studio no favours, except maybe winning attention from terminally online losers who wouldn't have played their game anyway.

Killing Floor was something really special back in 2009.

As the second game I ever purchased on Steam it has the honour of being burned into my frontal cortex. It was a game built by a team of about 9 guys in less than a year. It's extremely low budget, pretty ugly, rough around the edges but utterly brimming with charm.

The core gameplay is most like CoD zombies infused with Left 4 Dead. Arguably, L4D took inspiration from several enemy designs (from the original mod). It's round based, 4 player co-op with a final boss.

What made this game so much fun was the weapons had a level of polish not prevalent at the time. Guns hit hard and had detailed reloads. Combine this with a perk system that buffs specific playstyles and games would quickly descend into 4 players fighting through particle effects on their screen while spamming voice commands.

The low budget nature meant there were only a handful of voice actors (mostly the developers themselves) and a few lines for each character. These lines became iconic within the fanbase and spawned countless memes.

The repetitive nature of the game means that you'll know very quickly whether you enjoy playing this or not. Nowadays it feels very clunky, luckily there is a sequel from 2016 which feels more polished (and a third on the way).

The developers got a lot of flak for introducing paid weapon packs, however given the tiny budget for this game and the fact the developers supported it for almost 7 years with seasonal updates, I think it's understandable they might argue for some additional income. They were generous enough to allow any player to use these DLC weapons if any other player in the lobby had them unlocked.

It's definitely a relic of a game now, not many players any more, but I think it is an important title for co-op shooters on PC.

This might be my worst take.

Metroid Prime: Hunters is my favourite Metroid game. Please god hear me out before you beat me to death with hammers.

This was the first game I got with my original DS in 2006 and by virtue of growing up in a situation with not a huge amount of money I learned to make games last. I played more Metroid Prime: Hunters than any kid should ever.

Prior to Hunters, I had played nearly every previous entry in the Metroid franchise, including the NES game ported to GBA, but not the Prime games as I did not get a GameCube until later on.

What blew me away about this game was the Nintendo DS single-card multiplayer. I had a big group of friends, all with a DS, so for us to sit around playing the handheld equivalent of a LAN party in 2006 was mind-blowing to my child brain. The online play via the DS WiFi adapter was also one of my first online experiences and I will never forget being shit-talked by someone via the god-awful microphone on the DS.

The game itself isn't really anything special, it's a first person shooter on the DS that would cripple my big, old hands now, to move and aim in this game takes the dexterity of a bomb defusal specialist. However it is fun, there is nice variety to the Hunters you can play as and there are weapon pickups scattered across the maps. I think the developers took a big inspiration from Quake when designing this.

If I played it today for the first time I would probably laugh this off but I am 100% letting my nostalgia goggles stay glued on my face for this one.

One of my favourite VR games ever.
The attention to details on the weapons is fantastic, things other games wouldn't bother to worry about this game prides itself on showing "yeah we know this obscure firearm has this tiny operational quirk and we're gonna let you mess with it".

There's great variety, early 20th century guns, TF2 inspired weapons, modern guns with rail systems, obscure guns you'd only see on Forgotten Weapons, rocket launchers etc.

It doesn't strictly adhere to reality however, yes you can stack several M203s onto each rail of a HK416. Yes, you can put four 2x magnifiers onto a Glock with an extended rail.

The developers also account for accessibility, allowing you to choose either a more realistic reload system that requires precision to load mags, or a more simplified system that lets you throw mags in the general area of the gun to automatically reload. On the ranges, you can use a floating table which you can adjust. You have several points on your "rig" to attach weapons and ammo to, and you can enable a feature that makes them snap into place if you drop them. You can even change things like the gravity. All very thoughtful.

I only wish this game had more modes to use these weapons in, it excels at being a range shooter but anything involving enemies is messy and doesn't play particularly well.

Extremely fun.
When you realise the developer used to design the UI for digital slot machines it makes complete sense and elevates this game to gamblecore GOLD.

Do NOT stop betting on black, you're one spin away from everything you dreamed of.

My only complaint for this game is that some maps are enormous to the point of tedium when trying to traverse them for specific unlocks.