2025 - May

I won this game in the amazing 17 days of Conti event, and as usual I've gone straight at it.
Right now I can say I understand why it was in his "dissapointments" day, and agree wholeheartedly with his assessment on the first level being really good and the second level really sucking. I'm hoping it gets better again soon.

I did it! I figured out how to progress, and I must say, I think the level design improved? It was certainly more fun now in this half of the game. I'm happy I got to beat another one of my steamgift wins, briefly making me all caught up :)

I must've played through the game like 80% the last time I played it - and that wasn't the first time! Really good game, maybe it's time for a new attempt at a sequel? Please?

Honestly this game disappointed me a little. I understand what it's going for, and I'll even applaud a lot of its like meta narrative. A lot of what I find annoying seem like they're annoying on purpose. But I just really don't connect or even like any of the characters in the story. Everything is very much like a hollow parody. And again maybe that's the point, guiding the player into becoming a dialogue skipping story-skipping run and gun sort of player.

But that's not the kind of game I generally look for.
I did watch a whole really bad movie in a virtual cinema though, that was pretty cool…

Playing this game was a chore, not because the game is bad, but because of constant de-syncing issues, causing us to get disconnected, having to replay sections of the game every ~30 minutes.
It was so bad playing through steam, that we in desperation tried to play it through EA servers. So I sign up for EA, link my steam account (through a process that took 70% more steps than it should have). And what do you know? Game works fine! Excitedly we play through the rest of the session.

The next session we start the game again, and, my EA account is suspended? I check my email, and sure enough I've gotten an email saying:

"We wish to notify you that we have found your account to be in violation of our User Agreement or our Terms of Sale, and due to the nature of this violation we are left with no option other than to permanently close your account with immediate effect."

I feel like that's a pretty heavy handed kind of ban to give out to someone (like one day later) who has literally only signed up for an account to play a casual co-op game with a friend. For no discernible reason. Logging into their support portal, I can't file a ticket, since my account is suspended. But I can fill out an email form - specifically for appealing these suspensions. Every week since April 30th, I've filled out this form, asking for why I'm banned and if they could fix what must obviously be a mistake…

I have never heard back from them, not a single email, not even an automated "thank you for submitting an appeal". I must assume these emails just go get voided somewhere. And since I've linked my steam account, I guess that's it, I guess I can't use any online functionality in a whole host of EA games.

So back to slogging through the game over steam, dealing with these disconnection issues.

Oh and I guess despite these issues the game is pretty good