Shadows of Change is a disappointment from top to bottom. Whether it is the price increase to that of a fully fleshed out race pack for only a few new units and a few legendary lords, the numerous bugs both unfixed and newly introduced, or the tone-deaf statement from CA that says 'buy it, or we will pull support', it is hard to find many things redeeming about this DLC.

You can tell the changeling was the lord that received the most care and attention. As detailed later, many of Cathay's reworked mechanics are either lackluster or do not work as intended. As a lord, Yuan Bo also has several issues denoted in the bugs section.

Kislev is missing Ungol units and replaced them with units that, in lore, have no connection to Kislev. Furthermore, we have no lore of hags as a magic type or hag lord, so your armies are being led by Boyars instead of the proper lord. Truly a missed opportunity, in my opinion. The Kislev rework is also very disappointing and does not deal with many of the underlying endemic issues that Kislev deals with as a faction. Why does the new lord start in Dark Elf territory? This is not explained either and is not loreful.

Several of the units in this 'premium' DLC also feel like pay-to-win. One of the big surprises from the DLC launch announcement is that CA has multiple playtesters. If CA does have an actual QA team, how come the bugs listed below is so extensive?

New maps don't work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROM8NihNomQ&t=609s&ab_channel=LegendofTotalWar

Yuan Bo can't hit single entities and sometimes gets stuck in dragon form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QxbKeAStow

The cockatrice had the attack move bug (CA has said this has been fixed many times with other units):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KdHzad5ij4&ab_channel=HumanBoyYesYes

The new battle AI has been lobotomized:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iE0BknWbeQ&t=1195s&ab_channel=OnePitchMan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIJe4If50F0

Rice paddy maps still lowering FPS despite being 'fixed'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLzgdaKKaTk

Kairos still has the old changing of the ways on his skill line, Beastmen red line skills do not enhance their new units. The new war drum unit also has issues with its animations. I could go on.

These are just the bugs we know about right now. Who knows what else we will find?

All in all, this DLC is a disappointment. I have bought every DLC and game up to this point, CA, and I will not be purchasing any more DLCs, games or other products from you further.

What TWW3 needs is a custodian team to give regular, meaningful fixes to the game in between DLCs and proper funding to the development team so that the content matches the price. My opinion of the game is that it is stagnating and not getting better.

Even one of TWW3 greatest supporters is tired of your BS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YduCOrbzHTA

CA, please listen to your community and do better; you are rapidly losing all the goodwill this community has given you all these years. I am predicting Pharaoh and especially Hyenas will not do well; please focus your attention on your one profitable product.

To start this review, I am level 107, and truly enjoy this game. This is my first live service online game, and I have played with people from all over the world.

With Sony's announcement that a PSN network is required, some of my friends can only play the game with a VPN. This includes friends I added from the Baltics and the Philippines, to name a few.

Per Sony's terms of Service here:

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psn-terms-of-service/

3.1. All information provided during Account creation, and during the use of your Account, must be accurate and complete. We reserve the right to suspend, terminate or restrict any Account (including as stated in Section 12.2 of this Agreement) that uses or was created using false information, or that we determine was created or used for a purpose that violates this Agreement.
3.2. During Account creation you must select the country or region of your residence and in which your account will be registered in. Once your account is created, you will not be able to change the country or region code associated with your account.
12.2. Suspension or Termination by SIE. With or without notice, we may restrict, suspend or terminate your PSN Account and PlayStation Device, or indefinitely restrict, suspend or discontinue your access to or, or use of, certain PSN Content, offerings, features, products and services, if you violate this Agreement or we have a reasonable belief such a violation has or will occur, or as otherwise may be reasonably necessary to protect our PSN users, our partners, our platform, or other SIE interests.

Sony can terminate your account and any games anytime it wants for using a VPN. The Playstation Network is not present in all countries worldwide and requiring it post-launch is a scummy move.

Here is one player from China being banned while on VPN.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjic6m/someone_has_already_gotten_banned_for_trying_to/

The developers have made some interesting comments about this nonsense:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjcyuo/the_real_reason_behind_this_recent_controversy/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjbguv/arrowhead_community_manager/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjb63e/community_managers_position_about_the_new/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjeygm/so_according_to_the_moderator_we_were_the_ones/

This is a very poor attitude to have. This is on top of the previous inappropriate comments a community manager made previously.

https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1776398416819724799

They have also forced people to verify accounts with mobile numbers, which means they can limit people from making their concerns known.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjnh03/helldivers_discord_has_just_enabled_mobile/

Sony, for their part, has changed their wording about PC games requiring PSN.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjk9r4/playstation_just_updated_their_official_site_on/

Finally, in some countries, it is not just a throwaway email like certain discord moderators nonchalantly say.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjc5kw/just_use_a_throwaway_email/

Overall, it was a very disappointing move, and I hope Arrowhead pushes back against Sony. I theorize Sony has done this to improve their subscriber numbers for the next earnings call. There is no logical reason why a Steam ID is not enough to play a game.

Whether or not Steam will refund people after they have played more than two hours due to this change remains to be seen.

What do you get when you take a beloved game that holds so many memories and is the gold standard for the video game industry, and try to add modern writing, modern monetization, modern gameplay design, and modern game development methodology? You get the ironically named Halo: Campaign Evolved, which should really be named Halo: Campaign Regressed, as there is no evolution over the original or the Master Chief Collection versions of this game. For the TLDR, buy the Master Chief Collection, as it is, in my opinion, a far easier entry point to the series than this is. The only downside is that the graphics may not look as nice in some places, but at least that collection still has most of Halo’s soul, whereas this remake is soulless for reasons I will note below.

Firstly, I do have to ask, why do we have to connect a Microsoft Account to our Steam Account for a single-player game? I do not understand why this was seen as necessary in any way, other than to harvest our data or some other nefarious reason. I kept getting errors 400 or 500, which, from what I've read online, indicate an account session issue or an Xbox Services issue. Why was adding another point of failure necessary to a single-player game?

In terms of pricing, with the premium add-on, which are just skins if that is your sort of thing, it comes out to almost 100 CAD before taxes, and the base game, without any multiplayer, is nearly 70 CAD. This is all for a single-player game. Compared to the entry point of all the games in Halo MCC, they cost 50 CAD, or, for the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition, a mere 13 CAD. Who thought these prices were reasonable?

From a design standpoint, the soul has been unceremoniously ripped out of this remake. You cannot just make a game under the Halo IP without giving it the proper respect it deserves and having it made by people who understand the setting correctly. The game babies you every step of the way, and makes it so that even when you are fighting stealth elites, they have to be pointed out on the UI. You cannot explore anymore, as you will often die or get an out-of-bounds warning, which was not present in the original. I remember exploring and discovering new ways to approach missions when I played the original game when I was younger. Such a shame that experience has been stripped out.

The game experience in meme form: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3776908332

I really did not think the writing would be this bad. Yet again, 343/Halo Studios continues to impress me with the unnecessary additions to games. Lieutenant Williams stands out as the worst addition by far, and I noticed she was suspiciously absent from all the marketing materials for this game. Basically, she goes around the whole game as an ODST ‘girlboss’ trope-type character talking down to Master Chief for nearly all of the game. I have seen people say it's because it is a loreful ODST/Spartan rivalry, but if you truly know your Halo lore, this is not true. In the novel Fall of Reach, Master Chief did injure two and kill two ODSTs when he was boxing, but the event was covered up so that it would not breed animosity. My opinion is that her insertion into the game was just an excuse to add another unlikable girlboss character and shows how little Halo Studios understands or respects its audience or setting. This game is one of the best examples of toxic feminity in recent memory.

I found the whole Triumph Of Tolerance to be way too on-the-nose and unnecessary as well. The replacement of characters with women was unnecessary, and I saw some videos where you can kill the male NPCs but not the female ones. Some say it was hitbox-related issues that were patched after the preview. I find that very curious. They also replaced some of the characters that were facial scans of the original developers with more ‘diverse’ choices. Did I mention more than 50% of marine NPCs in this game are now women? How is that change aligned with existing lore? I do not understand why, from a lore perspective, any of the changes were necessary, or how they contribute positively to the game at all. It is just shoehorning modern sensibilities into a game to try and placate a modern audience that does not exist.

The cutscenes have lost their magic and seem drawn out. I do not understand who wrote the lines and why so many lines were changed. The changes were unnecessary and take away from the setting and world-building Halo is known for. Cortana now has male facial features as well, which I found odd. What was wrong with the more feminine Cortana from the original games? Another strange choice.

Performance-wise, my keybinds would never carry over from session to session. If you turned off DLSS, you would get ghosting. I had one crash as well, which I could not replicate. On Steam Deck, even with tweaks in ProtonDB, getting it to run at 30 fps was difficult. It ran at around 40-50fps on my 3070 on my other PC. Why was it released this buggy? Why are the developers that Halo Studios outsourced to relying on DLSS to pick up the slack on their inability to optimize UE5 properly?

Also, shout-out to Microsoft for not refunding people like me who couldn't access the game during the paid pre-access period due to the server-related errors I mentioned earlier. Thank goodness I bought it on Steam. Lots of people on other platforms are SOL.

Overall, I give this game a 2/10. It looks a bit nicer in some areas than the MCC collection, but is worse on every other metric. I have heard they are planning more remakes like this, and that Halo 2 is supposedly next. I hope they do not outsource so much and instead get competent people who will port the original over without making any unnecessary changes or unlikable character inserts. Even at a steep discount, this is garbage in gaming form.

Do not buy this game, and support Halo Studios and their destruction and disrespect to gaming history. It will poison your childhood memories of what is a great game originally before this garbage remake.

Some videos for you to watch with more details:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiJLKMN_wjI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tksxmWQNIyI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXmOIBSwSLc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__aC9FQ5YRw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxm8SwPaobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noV78cLkyJo