Dakka Squadron is a fun, small game, that offers a day or two of entertainment. You are playing as a Flightboy and make your way up to the position of Waaghboss within 22, give or take, levels. All in all, Dakka Squadron is an arcade game, with controls that take a while to get used to. For example, using a gamepad, there is no way for you to control the tilt of your plane and the R stick is used for evasive manuvers and to acc- and decelerate. And depending how sensitive your stick is, this might result in unintended movement. What also doesn't help are what are most likely the deadzones of the sticks. You either fly straight forward or make a sharp turn, there is barely any inbetween, which results in some very bad aiming. Now, the game has some sort of autoaim, which does help, but you can't do any precise movements. And while you may could argue, that you shouldn't expect anything different from an Ork aircraft, the two looted vehicles you have don't perform much better. As for the aircraft, you get three types. Regular fighter craft and two types of bombers, all with three or four ships that are basically variants of each craft. For example, one fighter has four gun slots, one has two gun slots and one for missiles and the third one is good for ramming. There is a good selection , although maybe not a well balanced one. Often, I felt that the bombers where simply better than regular fighters, especially once you unlock energy weapons. And speaking of balance, Dakka Squadron might be an Arcade game, but you have to keep track of some mechanics. For example, firing your weapons fill up your Heat meter, which decreses over time, but you cool down much faster when you use your boost. However, boosting uses up fuel and you constantly have to balance these two out, especially when using a fighter. As for enemies, you obviously face other Orks and some Necrons, but you also have a small stand off with the Mechanicus, which results in funny story bits.
While BFG 2 has much more playable factions than BFG1 and multiple campaigns going for it, I feel like everything else is just a big downgrade. For the campaign, I play as the Tyranids and it's just boring. The story is told from the eyes of the Imperium, you don't get to see the conflict from the eyes of the Hive Mind, which makes the whole thing feel really detached from what you are doing. There is also no game mode variety, all you do is doing Cruiser Clash (basically TDM) and Domination (Take and Hold) over and over and over again. There are some maps with environemntal effects, like asteroids appearing on the map, but those don't break up the gameplay. Secondly, the UI is horrible and unintuitive. Just some example, but you can't move around the sector map by your mouse, you have to use WASD or the arrow keys, you need to click through several sub menus to see the 3D model of your ship and it is only on this screen, that you can change your flag ship, ship yards are never explained at all and if you want to add a new you ship to your fleet, you don't click on the ship itself, but a small + icon next to it, to replace a loss during battle, you have to select one of the flashing ships and instead of it simply appearing on the map then, you have to give it a Move order as well and so on. It just feels clunky. An other blunder is that you can't auto cast abilities, which was present in the first game. Which resulted in me spending most of the time in slow motion micro managing my ships, especially in lager battles, instead of letting the AI do most of the heavy lifting and simply enjoying the show. It is managable, but also distracts a lot from enjoying the game. I will say that the moment to moment gameplay is still fun, but BFG2 has done so many weird design decisions, that I can't really recommend it.
Nothing less, but unfortunately nothing more either. Which is sad, because I think it wouldn't take much to make this game feel good, like having proper music during the action sequences and more allied NPCs to give you a better impression that you actually are in a battle. Both are there, but the soundtrack consists of ambient music and AI teammates are few and far inbetween and most of the time, they only join you for a short time or get killed right away. Which somewhat ties in to the "Fluff" aspect of the game. This is a mixed bag and while I understand that they can't stay 100% true to the lore, due to balance reasons, some of the stuff in the game just feels wrong. For example, a normal Imperial Guardsman can take up to 15 hits from a Pulse Rifle and a Seargent takes a full magazine before going down. And Pulse Rifles are supposed to be among the most deadly weapons in the galaxy. An other issue is that the Pulse Carbine, the second Tau weapon you get, is horribly inaccurate and acts more like an SMG than the middle to long range weapon it is in the lore. Both weapons can be "fixed" when turning on auto aim, which makes the Guardsmen die faster, too, but you shouldn't resort to auto aim to make the game feel closer to the fluff. I also think that the Tau military is pretty underrepresented in the game, because the only units you actually see in combat are Fire Warriors, but none of the others. No Stealth Suits or Devilfish transports, although both are mentioned in the tutorial, no Crisis or Broadside Battlesuits, no Drones, no Kroot, no Vespids, nothing. So, what does Fire Warrior actually do right? Well, there is a good amount of weapons and aside from the Tau ones, feel actually reasonable. Lasguns and Autocannons are worse than Tau guns, Plasma guns burn the enemies and Bolters make the enemy go up in flames or make make them explode into little gibs. Equally, there is a good amount of enemy varitey and later levels touched by the Warp look nice.
So, after roughly fourteen hours, according to the ingame counter, I finished Lego Star Wars 3 and jhad a lot of fun with it. While I have to admit that the game makes a rather bad first impression, it opens up later on and reaches the fun and quality of the previous two games. The story itself covers the time between Episode 2 and Episode and has basically 3 story archs you can follow as you please with 6 story missions each. These missions vary between the good old linear levels, space battles and the new assault maps, where you are placed on a large battlefield and can build structures and order and drive vehicles, like the ATTE, AAT or Hailfire droids. On the bad side, unless you've watched the TV show I guess, the story seems kind of random with no red line connecting the individual scenarios. Despite of this variety, the missions themselves are a mixed bag. Some of them are pretty good, but most of them are either mediocre or even boring. The reason for this is that some of them are pretty repetitive, especially at the start and end of the game. For example, there is one missions which consists of planting an increasing number of bombs in a droid facility and ones that's done, the mission is finished. The same goes for the Assault missions, which you unlock after finishing the story line and which can be plaid either on the Republic or Droid side of the war. The problem with them is, that they only consist of Assault maps, with their capturing of command posts on the map and building structures and calling vehicles, and only offer two different objectives, which gets repetitive pretty quickly. An other negative point in my opinion are the space levels, due to the simple reason that you barely encounter any enemy fighters. Unlike in the previous games, the enemy barely engage you when in you when in space, which makes these missions feel a bit dull. But despite all of that, Lego Star Wars 3 is an enteretaining game andI can recommend it.
Urban Chaos is a very well done free roaming action game mixed up with mythical elements. You play as officer D'arci Stern and fight against the street gang Wild Cats while the situation in the city becomes worse and worse. During the missions you can kick down you enemies and arrest them, shoot them or punch them to death, which gives you the choose which playstile you prefer. Aside from the main objectives you also can trigger some small side events when you explore the streets of the city, which makes them feel more alive in my opinion. The only bad side of the game is that you can barely drive any car, which is pretty sad, because of the free roaming aspect of the game, and there are no checkpoints inside the levels, which means if you die close to the end of a mission you have to do it all from the start again.
