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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5eYR5Pu4Ioquote:Gears Tactics is the fast-paced, turn-based strategy game set 12 years before the first Gears of War. Cities on the planet Sera are beginning to fall to the monstrous threat rising from underground – the Locust Horde. With the government in disarray, a squad of survivors emerge as humanity's last hope. Play as Gabe Diaz, recruiting, equipping and commanding your squads on a desperate mission to hunt down the relentless and powerful leader of the Locust army: Ukkon, the evil mastermind who makes monsters. Against all odds and fighting for survival, outsmart your enemy in uniquely brutal, turn-based tactical combat. Experience the intensity of one of the most-acclaimed video game sagas in an exciting new way. https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/gears-tactics Gears Tactics is the inexplicable newest entry into Microsoft's Gears of War series, the thinking man's game about steroid monsters chainsawing monster men. It's out today on Game Pass or for sixty bucks if you don't have that! Featuring: - No Microtransactions, Apparently - Customizable units, including skill trees, cosmetics, and weapon upgrades - A roughly 25 hour campaign - Cole the Football Man from the rest of the series if you play by May 4 - Turn based tactics and cover mechanics akin to but distinct from XCOM and friends - The option to turn the gore and gibs off if you find that uncomfortable I'm a couple hours in so far and it's actually a pretty good time. It takes a lot from XCOM of course but iterates on it in ways I think it could take advantage of - Units have three AP, usable for anything (mainly movement, weapon firing, or weapon skills), skills are tied to units and weapons (the pistol can disable overwatches, the Retro Lancer can do a instant kill charge, that's halted by cover or overwatch), loot is randomized by crate rarity (again, no microtransactions, it's just a pickup), and Overwatch itself is limited to a cone of fire that varies based on distance and weapon. The Longshot sniper, for instance, has a thinner overwatch than the Lancer assault rifle. Each character has passive perks, half and full cover is present similar to XCOM 1, 2, and Chimera Squad, but it's a lot more about cover hopping and mitigation than hunkering in. Enemies can go into an execution state that if you move to melee to finish off, gives the rest of your squad additional action points. It feels like a well done translation of the third person shooter the rest of the series is. The UI itself feels way better than Chimera Squad's too - it tells you exactly everything about your stats, why a shot is going to hit for X%, cooldowns and damage, etc. XCOM could honestly learn a lot from it, if it holds up past the first few levels. If you set the language to English it has some nice accessibility features too - it'll read the entire game out to you, which I think is the first time I've ever seen that. Feel free to post about the angry monsters and abuse of steroids in here. RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 19:00
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Does the game require ANY knowledge of the shooty games in the series to enjoy it? I didn't know what a gears of war was until the last month.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:03
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It's a prequel against a newly made up baddie, so no, I doubt it.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:05
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StrixNebulosa posted:Does the game require ANY knowledge of the shooty games in the series to enjoy it? I didn't know what a gears of war was until the last month. Nah, I've never played a Gears game and it seems pretty self explanatory. The game plays a lot like Mario X Rabbids which is wild. Its pretty cool though.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:05
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StrixNebulosa posted:Does the game require ANY knowledge of the shooty games in the series to enjoy it? I didn't know what a gears of war was until the last month. Not really. It takes place 12 years before Gears 1, so all you need to know is that a government called the COG mined Space Earth for Space Oil and maybe committed a genetic abomination experiment or two to make the Locust, the civilization of oil-monster men who are invading from under the Earth who want the Space Oil as well. It's a losing war for humanity so in a last ditch effort to win, Prescott, the Chairman of the COG and noted rear end in a top hat, orders a massive laser barrage on the whole planet, killing most of it but not really doing a good job at killing the Locust, who are still under the Earth. The game begins two hours before that strike. It's never been a particularly good plot lol
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Apr 28, 2020 19:07
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It's getting some glowing steam reviews.quote:WIN 10 ONLY??? ARE YOU F**CKING KIDDING???!!! quote:We will play XCOM forever but not you!This game is only suitable for people with brain muscles, not strategies. Largepotato fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 19:21
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The next time I have a free sixty bucks I'm down for picking this up, I finally beat XCOM 2 yesterday and I'm down for another tactical rpg in my library. It'll go nicely with Troubleshooter and Chimera Squad.
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Apr 28, 2020 19:53
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game is really good surprisingly, and hey only 5 bucks with game pass
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Apr 28, 2020 20:24
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Just hit mission 5 in Chapter 1, game good. Having to juggle dealing with wretch swarms and closing emergence holes has been quite hard, frag grenades are quite handy but not as readily available as I'd like.
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Apr 28, 2020 20:29
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queeb posted:game is really good surprisingly, and hey only 5 bucks with game pass Agreed- So far, so good! I have never played a gears of war game but I like this. It’s over the top with gorilla-looking men and normal(?) looking women. Skill trees give you 4 archetypes to put points towards, so I’m going with the free action skills that seem to break any tactics games. Also said the 1060 max-q in my dell Inspiron 7577had a known issue and I should update my drivers, but for some reason this is a special dell driver that shouldn’t be upgraded with “normal” drivers. Whatever, but the game still loaded after a minute or two, and plays fine with no issues. Super thread title!
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Apr 28, 2020 21:41
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Alamoduh posted:Agreed- So far, so good! I have never played a gears of war game but I like this. It’s over the top with gorilla-looking men and normal(?) looking women. The funniest part of Gears 3 is that after the big climactic fight, the two leads take their armor off and sit down for a moment of pathos that never ever works in Gears. The woman looks like a normal human being, the man still looks like a giant gorilla-thing. quote:Skill trees give you 4 archetypes to put points towards, so I’m going with the free action skills that seem to break any tactics games. I don't know that any of these games will ever get away from that. It's always better to get more free moves/shots/actions than basically anything.
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Apr 28, 2020 22:18
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This game is really good so far. There's some things I don't like about it... kind of wish the main dude wasn't a Support. Sid and his Vanguard class is really drat good. The highest strategy of this game seems to be chaining executions together to give everyone free action points. I really don't like how many active abilities are risky as all hell, though. There's a ton of abilities that snowball one unit completely out of control but require gambling if another unit will succeed on something. I can see the potential in stuff like: -> This unit gets 1/2 AP if the unit you target kills a thing -> Use that unit to Execute a guy -> First unit then gives a free AP to another guy who is in danger with a different ability etc. Some of the class trees seem really bad though. And stuff like "-10% damage" and stuff is terrible. I'm playing on "Experienced" I think and have had to restart a few missions. Each mission has easily had 20+ enemies, sometimes over 10 at once that charge you and throw you out of over and execute you from full health in one turn. I do like the difficulty but it can be a bit trial-and-error to set up proper overwatch cones to emerging waves that you know are coming because you lost previously. Graphics and sound and music are really good, story is serviceable, customization is just okay, and the equipment system is tedious as hell swapping everything around between units but not a dealbreaker. Sid's voice actor seems hilariously miscast.There's some weird coincidences like the frequency in which "Shepherd" appears as a last name. It's weird to have permadeath on goon units but they are free and come in at whatever level you are.
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Apr 28, 2020 22:22
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Speaking of overwatch it's a little fiddly how stepping out to shoot is at the very end of the cone. Depending on exactly where your guy decides to put his boot down he either is about to get shot in the face or be perfectly fine.
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Apr 28, 2020 22:26
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Apr 28, 2020 22:36
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Ugh, got to the first boss battle and the controls are bugging out on me. After the first turn I can't use tab or click on a portrait to swap units which means I can't really interact with the boss gimmick.
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Apr 28, 2020 23:42
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Already had a soft lock on the third mission. One of the bad guys got stuck in a loop sliding into a waist high wall over and over. Is this a metaphor for Gears of War? This game is mostly making me wish XCOM had AAA money. Everything FEELS really meaty and smooth, and the moment to moment interaction with the game is really nice. I'm already fed up of the menus though -- the "customisation" of your gear is largely busywork that involves going like 3 menus deep to improve your damage by 5% or something. Saying that, I've specced Sid into a purely bayonet-charging man, with gear to support it, and it's absolutely delightful. The game feels like you're meant to overwatch a LOT though -- I'm spending a lot of turns trading overwatch layers with the enemies, because the AI will often do stuff when under it. Edit: Beware of the hardest difficulty in this game -- it seems to completely disable bleedouts, and makes most enemies do seemingly twice as much damage. Wilekat fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 01:08
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Wilekat posted:The game feels like you're meant to overwatch a LOT though -- I'm spending a lot of turns trading overwatch layers with the enemies, because the AI will often do stuff when under it. The power of overwatch is honestly the biggest turnoff in the game for me so far. It feels like the optimal play in the vast majority of situations, at least early on, is to just spam overwatch against enemy overwatch until the enemy AI makes the dumbass decision to blink first and trip yours.
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Apr 29, 2020 02:55
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That's why Heavy is the best class in the game. You use anchor - which rewards you heavily for standing still - then you get the perks that give you extra AP (essentially an extra shot) on your next Overwatch, coupled with weapon upgrades that push back to interrupt attackers. I will say I do like that you need to set up an overwatch cone as opposed to just coming within line of sight like XCOM. The optimal play is absolutely chaining executions together, though. As good as overwatch is, you can and will get overwhelmed. You simply don't have enough AP or ammo (especially if you miss) to get through the waves of enemies that will hop over your cover and curbstomp you. I think aggressive play is more rewarded, but the overwatch stuff can be easier IF you know where the enemy is coming, have saved enough AP to get a few shots off, etc. The berserker shotgun dudes can easily eat 4 AP of overwatch and run up to you and down you. Then a wave of the little melee guys come in and some will get through y our other overwatch zones and execute you. Firstborn fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 03:18
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Yeah, you absolute can't turtle up on most of the non-story missions either. They have either increasing waves of reinforcements, time limits or literal walls of death that chase you. Some of the later enemy types will also absolutely gently caress you over if you try to overwatch creep. I've just had three introduced that all gently caress with it in some way (Boomers are big boys with grenade launchers who don't need LOS and tend to hide behind full cover walls while blowing you up, There's hunter dudes with explosive crossbows who aggressively flank you and my least favorite are assholes who can buff enemy defense by 70% then hide behind swarms of little dudes that you need to aggressively take down or your overwatch just tickles them). The team that designed this definitely built in a lot of anti-overwatch stuff.
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Apr 29, 2020 04:38
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The plotline of Gears is across the board awful, especially because unlike Halo which kinda realized and accepted it was camp, it continues to try and take itself seriously. With that said though, I'd love to see the Gears games on PC, so I bought this. I also like Xcom so ymmv.
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Apr 29, 2020 04:40
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I remember watching a "random facts about Gears" video a while back because I'd bought Gears 4 but I had no idea about the overall storyline since I only ever got to chapter 3 in the first game. My main takeaway from that video was that Cliffy B. was a huge idiot. Like everything from "oh this picture is based on a picture of me and an ex, also Anya is based on another ex of mine" to "oh yeah rape camps are something I want in this game's backstory"
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Apr 29, 2020 06:08
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Zore posted:Nah, I've never played a Gears game and it seems pretty self explanatory. I always avoided turn based strategy games growing up but god drat did I love Mario & Rabbids. This game is scratching a very familiar itch which I love.
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Apr 29, 2020 06:23
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but its much more violent.
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Apr 29, 2020 06:42
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Polygon gave it a pretty scathing review saying that the action when you're in it is phenomenal but the game itself outside of it is finicky, bogged down by awful UI choices and is just a chore to slog through. Then again Game Pass is $1 CAD right now so that's technically even cheaper than Chimera Squad.
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Apr 29, 2020 07:34
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Rookersh posted:With that said though, I'd love to see the Gears games on PC, so I bought this. I also like Xcom so ymmv. 2, 3 and Judgement remain trapped on the Xbox 360, but at this point I don't think that's going to change.
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Apr 29, 2020 07:44
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Eej posted:Polygon gave it a pretty scathing review saying that the action when you're in it is phenomenal but the game itself outside of it is finicky, bogged down by awful UI choices and is just a chore to slog through. Then again Game Pass is $1 CAD right now so that's technically even cheaper than Chimera Squad. There's barely anything TO the game outside the missions, it doesn't really have a strategic layer or anything (at least so far, dunno if one unlocks later, still in Act I). Gear customization is mildly fiddly but not that bad. I had fun realizing the secret to Berserkers, which is shoot once then bayonet/chainsaw. Makes them SO much easier, to the point where I now reserve my bayonets and chainsaws exclusively for them. I'm playing on the second-hardest difficulty, whatever the gently caress it was called, and while I've had some close shaves I've mostly managed to bumble my way through so far. I'm sure when harder enemy types start popping up I'm gonna be in hell but for now things are mostly fine.
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Apr 29, 2020 11:20
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Playing for another few hours, if I have a big, overwhelming criticism of the game it's that enemies can take full actions on spawn. Don't have enemy spawn points memorized and moved up a little bit too much? Have fun with a 3x Grenadier pod dropping out of the sky, double moving towards your dudes in cover, kicking them out of cover, and shotgunning them for 90% of their life(and coincidentally leaving them in point blank with enemy who will kill them with a reaction shot if they move or do anything, thus demanding someone else free them from their predicament)! It's honestly pretty trivial once you know where and when things are going to spawn(because the spawns are scripted), but it feels EXTREMELY heavy on the cheap gotcha moments if you're ironmanning it unless you commit to a very, very slow and measured crawl until you're reasonably confident every single reinforcement wave for the current fight has spawned. There's a big reason why XCOM has enemies take a warning turn where they don't loving suicidally run in and shoot you instantly on discovery, even on impossible! That said, when things click in the game the combat systems feel pretty nice. My opinion on overwatch has mellowed in that it's a useful tool that you're expected to use a whole loving lot(which is amusing because of design trends in other games in the genre moving away from overwatch as a mechanic) but aggro play is rewarded too. The audio/visual design is fantastic - when someone gets loving riddled it feels super chunky, and popping someone with a sniper bullet and watching their head explode feels great. So far I'm hovering around a 7/10 where there's a ton of good ideas here wrapped up in great production values but the implementation feels kind of whack. Kanos fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 11:45
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7/10 feels right. I'm hoping they make a sequel. As far as story, Gears to me has always been action shlock, and it should take itself less seriously, but it's kind of... fine. My wife was friends with Cliffy B's wife before they met, and I can confirm he's kind of a jerk. Remember when he announced he was making Overwatch with Mortal Kombat gore? Did that ever come out?
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Apr 29, 2020 13:15
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I don't play many of these games and like that I can really just focus on one side of it with this game instead of having to deal with a strategic layer too. XCOM was always a little... much. Maybe I'll try going back to it after this.
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Apr 29, 2020 13:23
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Azran posted:to "oh yeah rape camps are something I want in this game's backstory"
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Apr 29, 2020 13:33
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AndrewP posted:I don't play many of these games and like that I can really just focus on one side of it with this game instead of having to deal with a strategic layer too. XCOM was always a little... much. Maybe I'll try going back to it after this. Some of my favorite SRPGs in the PSX era went more or less straight from battle to battle with just cutscenes and item management, the strategy layer stuff is almost explicitly X-Com. Games like Vandal Hearts, Disgaea, Kartia, Saiyuki. Others only incorporated a world map/pointcrawl system like FFT, Fallout Tactics, those sort of games. One thing I can say about the difficulty and pacing of this game is that your party's power level is pretty much known and built around the whole time, unlike in (my favorite, to be fair) FFT where you can unlock end-game classes and abilities after the first random battle.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:06
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Firstborn posted:Remember when he announced he was making Overwatch with Mortal Kombat gore? Did that ever come out?
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Apr 29, 2020 15:20
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The Kins posted:Lawbreakers? It came out, was mediocre, and flopped with a rarely-seen level of intensity on account of "What if Overwatch, but with realistic graphics and maps have low-gravity bits like in UT99?" being something that nobody was looking for. His studio made one last grasp at keeping their doors open with an attempt to hop onto the Battle Royale bandwagon, but it was too little too late. Lawbreakers>Overwatch
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Apr 29, 2020 15:29
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How on rails is this?
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Apr 29, 2020 15:30
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malhavok posted:How on rails is this? It's a linear campaign. There's not really a "geoscape" concept like in XCOM.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:38
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malhavok posted:How on rails is this? Completely. You have some wiggle room as to which characters you bring to missions(you have a roster containing both "game over if this character dies" named heroes and generics who can die permanently), and the loot is randomized(it's all attachments for the fixed equipment each class is carrying), but in terms of campaign structure, it's a linear story with scripted missions. There's no strategic layer like XCOM.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:39
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Occasionally you can pick between a couple side missions! That's about it though. Edit: Between the lack of a strategic layer, the fixed missions, the standardized main character units and the pretty unexciting equipment system this is definitely a one-and-done, not a forever game like X-COM. Not that that's bad or anything, just worth noting.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:43
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So what you're saying is i should get this on sale because i'm not likely to replay it?
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Apr 29, 2020 15:52
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dogstile posted:So what you're saying is i should get this on sale because i'm not likely to replay it? Either that or just grab it on Game Pass for a buck. By the time the one dollar month is done you'll either have gotten all you care about from the game or have beaten it and no longer need to own it.
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Apr 29, 2020 15:54
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This game is like the definition of "just try it on gamepass".
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Apr 29, 2020 16:10
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