Recent reviews by Kalergi's Top Guy

Purchase it via Season Pass during a sale. The actual DLC you'll buy that way will be Ringed City. From what I've seen so far Ashes of Ariandel is only worth it if you're really starving for new spells, weapons and armor sets. It also adds some PvP functionality and a decent boss fight with Friede, I guess. Buy it off sale if you genuinely liked the snow DLC of Dark Souls 2 or Dark Souls 2 in general, since this DLC is exactly that - "B team quality" Souls content.

If this wasn't a purchase recommendation, but an actual review, it would be negative. Why? Because this DLC is terrible, of course.

Map design - structure, item and enemy placement

• Most areas feel rather open - you can go out and explore, one path will lead to another, shortcuts are plenty.
  
• The Bonfire placement is extremely weird. Some areas will have you go through many difficult encounters, looping to a bonfire you already rested at or a new one in another area. But then another path will be short and will have extremely weak enemies, low in numbers, yet lead you to a new bonfire in the same area. I don't understand the point of the second type of paths. Why is that even a thing? Why do I get a bonfire when I don't even need to use Estus?
  
• At one point you'll encounter a bonfire that will have 3 points of access - a door(that you will have to open by jumping off a ledge), a ledge right over that door and a roof over the ledge that you'll be able to access by looping around the building. Area around said bonfire will have several shortcuts that serve no purpose as well because the area is VERY small in size and easy to navigate. Its either some pathetic attempt at conveying an idea of convoluted time and space and other crap through gameplay, or whoever was designing said area and DLC in general needs a good ol' pay cut.
  
• You'll encounter floors that crumble below you, obscuring your vision and disorienting you. No, you won't be able to spot them right away and yes, they do throw you into enemy encounters and cut you off from the area you stepped on them from.
  
• You'll get baited by worthless soul items, only to be assaulted by packs of dog type enemies that come out of the woods after 1 of them spots you. Main problem is how worthless said items are.
  
• You'll have to dance on ledges, dodging explosive arrows of extremely tanky archers that are placed in spots that make them almost impossible to spot on the first go through and some you won't even be able to attack back, since they'll be placed higher than you can aim and farther than you can reach.
  
• Game will try very hard to force you into fighting several melee enemies of different types while being sniped by archers and pestered by magic casters. The base game obviously has similar encounters, however, they're not nearly as frequent or as obviously artificially difficult. I say all of that as a player that knows exactly how to counter said encounters, plays patiently and pays attention to his surroundings - its not easy to pull off an ambush on me or force me into a corner. That is exactly why the pathetic attempts to do that feel even worse to me - developers understand that their tactics won't work on most players, so they go for quantity instead of quality. Basically, you'll be able to spot most traps and ambushes, but you simply won't have any way to counter them in a smart way. Get ready to either cheese braindead AI or get dirty.

Enemy design and difficulty

• Enemies have more health compared to enemies from the vanilla game. It applies to all enemy types. This is a very important thing, considering that developers throw crowds of enemies at you, instead of going for "duel" encounters.
  
• I hope you like fighting dogs because you'll be fighting a lot of wolves that summon their fellow furballs and happily run and jump around you. There are also big momma wolves that summon cute puppers to nibble on your nipple. Said momma wolves are pretty fast, cover a lot of ground with every move due to their size and will blind you with all the "snow" effects at their disposal.
  
• A lot of high health heavy hitting enemies can chain their attacks. They can also chain chains of their attacks. They also have longer reach than you and have gap closers. High health, high mobility, high damage - what could go wrong? They also won't flinch from normal greatsword/UGS strikes and will just combo right through them. Maybe its another one of those thematic features - when a 3m gorilla with a 2,5m sledge can swing it faster than you can swing your sword, all while covering all the distance you make via rolls by just walking, you certainly feel like a good-for-nothing weakling in a world of all-powerful titans.

If you're a Warhammer fan and like ARPGs - get "Inquisitor - Martyr" on sale. If you just want a solid ARGP with good itemization and crave some grim-dark - get Grim Dawn instead. Martyr is not a terrible game, its just that there are better ARPGs out there.

I've been playing this game for 30 hours and reached level 45 with my character, a Ranged Crusader - half of the leveling progression, since max level is 100. At that point most games with looting mechanics begin to shower you with high tier items and you begin to see future high-level synergies and find more and more new ways to experience the game. Not in Martyr. And that's exactly why I decided to leave that review. I won't be dropping the game and if it suddenly makes a 180 turn I'll change what I wrote here. EDIT: I will be dropping the game because of the re-roll system and lack of clarity on RNG elements. The game is rigged against the player and I won't bother with wasting any of my time on it, as it will take too long to get anywhere near the amount satisfaction that other ARPGs bring compared to this game. Lacking itemization is made even worse by vile RNG.

Positivity first

• Its a Warhammer game with a Warhammer feel and a Warhammer story. I'm not huge on WH knowledge, but the game doesn't feel like it betrays the universe.
  
• Visuals are great. Skulls and corpses everywhere, as well as daemons, Nurgles flora and huge golden cuboid guns. Game certainly looks Warhammer.
  
• Audio is also rather satisfying and fitting. Especially weapon sounds.

The rest of the game is aggressively OKAY

Its as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle
If you've played Martyr for 2 hours you know what next 20 hours will be.

• As nice as the visual and audio elements of the game are, the gameplay side of the world design is mediocre. You either have corridors or vast open areas with visible and invisible walls both outside and in-between. I don't say that as a zealous open-world fanatic - I have no problems with running short-duration missions in confined areas if said areas are well-crafted. But Martyr has neither. There's no verticality and even cramped corridors manage to feel empty. Destructible cover is extremely under-utilized, so are the ambushes and enemy placement. Exploration doesn't feel rewarding, there are empty areas that serve no purpose everywhere. Most maps have next to 0 interactivity. Developers seem to have all the tools neccessary to make the world feel alive but didn't do it for some reason. You end up running through same maps with same encounters and it gets old real fast.
  
• Most variety when it comes to itemization and gameplay that I've seen so far comes from the quantity of weapon and equipment types. You have shotguns and rifles, swords and axes, crowd control auras and grenades, to list a few. Problem is - they all have limited functionality. I've been using shotguns and heavy bolters for my playthrough and haven't found even 1 that had a different mag size. You'd think developers would use core random stats, such as spread, reload speed, range and mag size to diversify the gunplay(because over half of the weapon you'll find are GUNS), but instead Items receive miniscule 1-15% modifiers of various stats, such as damage/defense/crit/proc chance/etc depending on the rarity. That should spice up the gameplay, but they feel so unimportant that in the end every weapon in its category behaves the same way. Some items also receive DOWNSIDES as you level up - longer cooldowns, lower charge recovery. The only relatively interesting items are super rare relics that, if you're lucky might have 1 insane stat. Compare that to other ARPGs that have several per-class sets of equipment with active and passive abilities that drastically change the way you play and Martyr doesn't look as appealing.
  
• Character progression doesn't help the situation as most of your power will come from passive effects such as 1,5% more damage or 1% more crit chance. You don't get new moves, just get to have 1% better functionality of your starting kit per level. After you spend 3-4 points on tiny % increases you get to pick a comparatively powerful passive, like health regen on critical attack. I tried creating another character with a different class to see if perhaps my "dumb meat crusader" is the problem, but Assassin has same weapon skills and same passive trees.

IN THE GRIM DARK FUTURE, THERE IS ONLY ONLINE

• The game is always online. There is a passive-aggressive post from a developer that you can find at the games Steam community page that tries to explain the reasons for it. Your characters are stored on servers, so if the servers are under maintenance you can go ahead and play some other game HEH.
  
• Martyr feels like an MMO and it will really take you out of the grim-dark mood. Its hard to enjoy the universe because every time you finish a difficult mission you get to open a lootbox and a UI pop-up reminds you of daily and weekly challenges, as well as timed missions lmao. What's funny is that developers worked pretty hard to create all the immersive ways to access functionality of your home-hub, such as mission select screen, profile customization and so on, yet you get this dumb DAILY CHALLENGE thrown at you at the same time.

The grind for the sake of grind

• Grind in ARPGs is the part of the gameplay loop and it'd be stupid to say that you should get all the best goodies with best modifiers from the very first attempt. However, in martyr you don't grind for the sake of getting new gear, you grind for basic functionality, such as weapon augmentation, item quality re-rolls and mission modifiers. There are so many currencies and lootbox(exactly what they're called in the game btw) types that I seriously feel like at level 80 game will award me with access to WARHAMMER POINTS e-shop. It reminds me of Korean MMOs where you have to buy CONDOMS for your weapon so that they dont BREAK when you upgrade them - and that's not a good thing. I wouldn't mind if I at least got some "SICK KUH-RAZEE" stuff out of that, but as mentioned before, grinding just to get a 5% increase for a stat you don't care about doesn't give me any joy.
  
• Item "re-rolls" are rather costly and are not completely random in the worst way possible. Every item has its own limited set of bonuses that replace one another. Meaning, that you can get an item that will be useless for your character no matter how many times you roll it, because ALL of its possible stats are useless for you.

Sponges, sponges everywhere!

• Most of the missions allow you to select difficulty levels. On normal difficulty the game is rather easy, not even boss-type enemies pose any threat. But naturally, with all the modifiers, RNG and grind you pretty much have to play on higher difficulties. Game forces that idea down your throat early on, because even your items will tell you to "complete 5 missions 4 levels higher than yours without suffering melee damage" to unlock their functionality. Once again, its fine by itself, but the way developers tackle the difficulty is your usual enemy sponging - you just have to shoot longer while being more careful about dodging attacks. You can also get stat modifiers for enemies. Basically, don't expect something ground-breaking like improved AI or even different enemy placement when it comes to difficulty.

"Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr" is an alright ARPG, being set in the Warhammer universe gives it an advantage, but aside from that its nothing new or special. It has potential but it doesn't seem like developers are interested in using it and would rather make another Diablo clone.

I'll explain. AoM felt like a legit good ol' expansion. New vast areas to explore. Continuation of the original story. Great atmosphere and great quality overall. A lot of new content that fits very well in an already great game.
Forgotten Gods, on the other hand, falls short on multiple fronts. While it's not terrible, to me it felt "meh", when compared to AoM. So I can't call it an expansion. It feels more like a modern era DLC which is somewhat disappointing.

With all that said, you probably wonder why this review is positive. Well, that's because it's not really a review. It's actually a purchase recommendation. Steam doesn't ask me whether I LIKE the DLC or not. It asks me if I can recommend it. And while I dislike 80% of content in that DLC(well, dislike is a strong word, I just find it mediocre), I still consider it to be good enough to be worth it's money.

TL;DR:
If you're a fan of the game, buy it now. While not as great as AoM, it's still a solid piece of content. QoL additions and gear transmutation will greatly improve the game overall even if you won't get a kick out of the story or new crucible Shattered Realm.

If you're low on cash/came here just because you saw that this DLC got released AND have other games to spend your time/cash on, just wait till it goes on sale. You're not missing much. And if this DLC receives updates just like the previous one did, you'll get a much better fresh experience later on.

Negatives:

• Short Campaign. You can run through it in 3 hours or so. I accidentally ran through a half of the expansion map in an hour or so because I missed the location of the first quest lol.
  
• "Taken, how many Gods have you killed?"
  "How many breads have you eaten in your life?"
  Story of the campaign feels like something I've gone through many times, even in Grim Dawn itself.
  
• Not Grim enough. Applies to story and locations. Sadly, compared to Ashes of Malmouth this DLC has almost no "grimdark" to it. It feels as if you suddenly went on a trip to Egypt. All that reminds you of the horrors of the base game and AoM are the names of gods and NPCs wearing black and brown spiky armor, that contrast with bright and soft colors of new areas. Remember how you had to burn down that one area in AoM that had hundreds of malformed pregnant women being forced to give birth to zombies, and among them were daughters and mother of a quest giver? Well forget about anything like that happening here. You'll need sunglasses because your future here is as bright as the sun lmao.
  
• Shattered Realm is baiscally Crucible with randomized locations. Seems very low effort to me, especially because Shattered Realm doesn't really use unique locations and copies already existing ones instead.
  
• Mobility augments feel underwhelming. If you want to get any kick out of them, get ready to grind for legendaries, magic and epic rarity ones are so weak that you're better of just running. They're also clunky to use depending on your playstyle and can kill you from time to time - you can get stuck in some piece of geometry, turn at a wrong moment and teleport in a wrong direction(disengage augments), etc. Disengage augments have a delay too. Imagine having a delay on your defensive option that is already on a cooldown.
  
• Majority of mini-dungeons or side-quest locations are very small compared to the base game and AoM. They're either over-simplified Skyrim caves or just rooms lol.
  
• I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

Positives:

• Even though the campaign is short, it has more replayability than previous campaigns. Major characters are voiced and you receive new quests depending on what faction you side with, so you get more fun out of it in each playthrough.
  
• A LOT of lore notes. If you're into that, you'll probably be happy.
  
• New items to dress up your characters. Get some trinkets in Egypt to look fabulous.
  
• Set item transmutation. We can finally transmute duplicate or unwanted set items into ones we need. It's still RNG based, but at least now said random numbers are locked into 1 set(if you use a duplicate). It's a great improvement and one of the main reasons to purchase this DLC.
  
• A new Class Mastery and 9 Constellations to experiment with.
  
• Difficulty Merits allow you to skip difficulties and are rather easy to obtain.
  
• New factions provide new augments to improve your characters.
  
• Increased stash size, duh.
  
• There are new secrets to discover, so I guess you can have fun overcapping your resistances to fight some DevilGod of Death and Destruction to get a mediocre item out of it and a sense of pride and accomplishment.
  
• Potential improvements. The Ashes of Malmouth expansions received some improvements after release. Same can happen here. It's kind of sad that we have to use "It will get better later" as a positive, but it's gaming in 2019 and at least this DLC is not some 60$ lootbox simulator.

Okay, so I guess I've played it enough to write a review on this version of Hellgate. To be clear, so far I've played through following iterations of this game: Hellgate: London(original release), Hellgate: Global(korean release), Hellgate: 2038(multiplayer version ran by fans of the game) and, of course, Hellgate: London(korean steam release).

In this "non-recommendation" I'll look at the Hellgate: London as a product. So even though I don't recommend it for purchase, I like the game. It just doesn't hold up as something majority of people interested in the game should spend their money on.

• Atmosphere of post-apocalyptic world. If you like stuff like Metro, Fallout or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you might like the mood this game creates. Even though it's not as good looking or detailed. It still gives you that "I'm one of the last 30 people alive!" feeling.
  
• Classes and skills. This game has 3 class groups, each packing 2 sub classes. Like guns and explosions? Go for Marksman. Like guns, explosions AND robots? Engineer is your choice. Like magic? Pick the Evoker. Like magic AND controlling demons? Summoner does just that with an added bonus of turning into a demon himself. Like smashing things with heavy blunt/sharp objects? Pick the Blademaster. Want to feel like a tank? Pick the Guardian.
  
• Gameplay loop. Pretty much what you would expect from any MMORPG - kill stuff, get xp and loot. Do that allover again but with new toys and skills. Next point on the list improves it by spicing the "item" part of the loop a little.
  
• Armor, weapon and mod variety. Any item that you get will have random qualities. So for example, you can get yourself a gun that will allow you to use a skill that you didn't spec into, or boots that will improve your movement speed or duration of some skills of yours. This applies to mods as well. The better your item quality is, the larger and stronger it's additional effects will be.
  
• Mini-games. There are 2 so called mini-games in Hellgate. One asks you to kill enough monsters on the location and "rewards" you by spawning a mini-boss enemy. Another requires you to do certain tasks, like "deal physical damage 10 times", "pick up 5 swords", "kill 15 demons", etc. and rewards you with loot upon completion. While not ground-breaking in any way, they still make the game feel more fun and rewarding.
  
• Quality of life items. Newcomers probably won't know that, but original game had no radar, item dismantler items, or respec tockens available at traders.

• Poor graphics. Now, I understand that this release is not a remaster, issue is, it looks WORSE than the original.
  
• Poor performance. Yep, it looks worse AND runs worse. Top-rig users report sudden FPS drops that appear to be connected with ragdolls and enemy pathing.
  
• Poor attribute scaling. Experienced players are probably fine with that, since they have already went through it, but newbies should know - game goes bonkers with stat requirments on gear after level 32 or so. Why? Because after that level you pretty much begin to encounter max level gear. So it expects you to have max level stats. And you would think that it's fine since level 55(max level) is so close, but nope, it's not. Since stat scaling also considers attribute points you gain from 50 ranks, which you can gain after reaching level 50. So yeah, good luck earning additional 50 levels to wear those level 40 pants. Also, have I said that ranks require much more xp than levels?
  
• Gear upgrades and mods. Both of these systems are still linked to the cash shop. Your upgrades have a chance to fail(this tactic is used a lot in korean MMOs) and same can be said about modding your weapons. Since cash shop is gone and you can't buy "condom" items from NPCs or get them as drops, you're pretty much screwed. Only way to deal with this issue right now is to save scum your way through it. What's worse, mod system is currently bugged and instead of extracting the mod you need game begins to extract ALL mods in order from left to right, breaking them in the process. Imagine how fun it is, having to copy-paste your save files again and again to get 1 mod out of your weapon. And that's if you're lucky enough to have a weapon with all mod slots open. Since yes! There was a cash item for doing just that, which is now gone(mid-December update added cash shop items that increase augmentation quality, allow to preserve weapons while upgrading them on nano forge and open locked mod slots).

• Poor translation of certain parts of the game.
  
• Quality of life items are a huge pain to buy.
  
• Limited stack sizes for consumables and resources.
  
• Extremely limited inventory and stash sizes(fixed).
  
• Stonehenge bosses drop NO loot.
  
• Field reset function doesn't work properly.
  
• There are still achievements and UI elements connected to multiplayer.
  
• Transmogrifying cube doesn't work.

So yeah, even though I like the game myself, I can't recommend it to anyone who is simply "interested" in the game and haven't played it before. Save your time and money and go play a better game. If you're a veteran and know how much "suffering" Hellgate, as well as it's playerbase, have to go through - go ahead and make this purchase. You'll get some nostalgia kicks out of it, as well as some self-loathing and sadness.

Maybe this game is not for me, maybe you will like it. Whatever it is, I cannot recommend it.
I have heard a lot of good things about this game and somehow managed to avoid spoilers, so when the latest update/DLC - Godmaster, came out, I decided to buy it. Hoo-boy, I shouldn't have done that.

Story, lore, characters, world and art of Hollow Knight are amazing. It has it all.

• Bits of information scattered around numerous locations allow you to learn the story of the world and what caused it to be in it's current state.
  
• Charismatic characters with interesting backgrounds, personalities, and laconic, yet interesting and beautiful desgins. This is applicable to bosses as well.
  
• Biomes are stylish and have their own feel, as well as set of biome-specific enemies. Certain areas of the game are awe-inspiring, carefully-crafted experiences that can't just be called "locations".

OST and sound-design are very good.

• Even though I wouldn't listen to OST on it's own and don't plan on purchasing it, I still enjoy it very much. Music FITS the game. It never feels as if music is out of place and it greatly improves atmosphere and tense gameplay moments. Final moments of the game transcend AAA games in terms of quality thanks to that.
  
• Sounds of enemies, enviroment and interface are just as good as OST.
  
• Voice acting is incredible. Even though characters speak in a made up language and their lines are rather short, delivery is so good that it immediately bonds you with the NPC in question.

Charm system is interesting and highly customizable.
Charms are upgrades that take up limited slots and can be discovered throughout your journey. Some of them just improve your stats, but some bring new gameplay mechanics and even synergise with each other.

Gameplay is atrocious
By the time of creation of this review I have finished and 100%-ed the game. Unless you're some crazed fanboy(which there are many) that will defend his favorite game to death without paying much attention to details of the criticism, you're probably wondering, why I dislike the gameplay so much. There are numerous points:

• Poor pacing and scaling.
  If you've played any metroidvanias you know, that usually you don't have all of your tools available from the get-go. In Hollow Knight you will have to work for upgrades as well. It doesn't sound bad at first until you realize how vast the game is, how easy it is to go in the wrong direction and how limited your beginner-toolset is.
  It takes way too much time to acquire all upgrades required for comfortable play and game constantly mocks you with unreachable rewards in the distance.
  It affects combat as well. You have to realize that enemies and bosses have to be weakened around the player that has limited arsenal and that hurts the game a lot.
  Only "real final boss" and "Colosseum of Fools" provide challenge where you can use all of your tools to the full potential in a meaningful way.
  Game is a grindy drag till you discover proper mobility and combat upgrades and a walk in the park after you do.
  
• Bad enemy and combat design.
  While bosses provide fun and challenge, have interesting movesets and can be dealt with in numerous ways, normal enemies that you'll meet during your adventure will usually act like ultra-instinct braindead zombies.
  --Lack of brains can be easily seen in ground enemies when they forget about you the moment you jump on a platform over their horizontal line of sight. And in flying enemies when they just hover above you without even positioning themselves properly in order to attack you, yet stay out of your reach in large rooms. I kid you not. You just stand there, thinking about what you're doing with your life, waiting for them to at least get on the same horizontal plane as you so that you can get them with magic.
  --On the other hand, shielded enemies can block all of your melee attacks even if you combine horizontal and vertical attacks. They easily perform 180 turns to protect their backs and are always ready for aerial assaults. What it is if not ultra-instincts? You can bounce on them, sure, but it's not safe and magic is not always an option.
  --Combat design itself is rather underwhelming as well. Your sword - "nail", has a knockback, you see. So it's very easy to keep distance from majority of enemies while dealing damage. Enemy rushes at you - you attack, it get's knocked back and damaged - rinse and repeat. Flying enemies are just as easy to control, only challenge of fighting them is the area where combat takes place and their numbers.
  Some enemies can't be knocked back and have actual attack animations, but it doesn't improve combat, since instead of just smacking them to death you have to bait them to attack AND... smack them to death. It just drags combat out instead of allowing you to swiftly deal with the "threat". It's "fixed" later on with certain magic and mobility upgrades that allow you to bypass enemy invincibility and JUST kill them, but it's too little too late(as stated in "pacing" paragraph).
  --There is also damage on touch. Even on enemies that have attack animations. Makes parrying useless and allows you to cheese certain enemies and bosses by procing invi frames for lower health cost.
  --Nail arts take years to charge up, are interruptible and useless in most combat encounters.
  Basically, combat against majority of enemies is either bland or tedious. And since you have to travel and fight a lot, it really piles up. Enemies just become minor annoyances instead of a fun challenge or a threat.
  
• Quality of life tools and a quest item from one of the DLCs take up charm slots.
  Want to see yourself on that huge map - get an upgrade and waste a slot on it. Tired of jumping into spikes to collect geo and losing it because it fell of the map - get an upgrade and waste a slot on it. Want to do that DLC quest - waste 2 upgrade slots on it. It's simply bad design.
  
• Platforming.
  I'm not a huge fan of platforming in games because it's usually clunky and annoying. Platforming in Hollow Knight falls into that category. Most of the platforming "puzzles" are not challenging from structure-perspective and repeat each other. You just learn what kind of move to use in certain situations or spam downward attacks on enemies that move or stand in line to "hover" above spikes/acid.
  Bad checkpoint placement in certain platforming areas combined with the fact that you get teleported back to the starting position after making even a single mistake doesn't improve the situation and makes traversal through them tedious and dull.
  
• Exploration is mediocre at best. While world is amazing from art and story perspectives, it's boring and samey in terms of gameplay and construction. All levels are made of boxes and cool art-style can only get you so far. Game constantly mocks your lack of tools by placing rewards behind mobility features that you have not discovered yet. After you do discover said tools, locations become shallow and still manage to feel like a drag to go through.
  There is a fast-travel system(2 of them actually, or 3 if you count exiting to main menu and spawning at the bench with all of your geo and health, heh), but it's implementation is mediocre as well, since it still forces you to backtrack a lot.

This game tries so hard to be difficult and true to it's roots, but it misses the point. It creates artificial difficulty by limiting and inconveniencing the player, instead of creating challenging well-designed enemies(this is not true when it comes to most boss enemies, since those are usually fun to fight against) and situations. I could go more in-depth about all the issues I have with this game, but I won't. Because I'm not even angry with that purchase, just disappointed. Art, story and sound are the only points that I could praise. And you don't have to purchase the game to enjoy them - just watch a playthrough on YouTube.

If you like sandboxes - buy this game when it's on sale, if you only have money for this or Terraria, buy Terraria.

Pros:
--Infinite amount of worlds to explore. Planets with different climates, weather conditions and dungeons, populated by NPCs that interact with players in many ways.
--Race specific armor sets and weapons that can be crafted and randomly generated melee, ranged and "magic" weapons that can be found while exploring the world that can make every single playthrough unique and allow you to build and customize your character the way you want to.
--Some planets require you to have special equipment just to be able to survive on their surface.
--12 types of Techs - equipment that allows you to dash, double jump or turn into a sphere that climbs walls.
--Story mode, tied-in with your character progression, lore that can be found through exploration.
--Unique Boss-fights.
--Build your own space-stations, colonies, upgrade your space ship and assemble your crew.
--Build your own mech and use it to raid bandit ships or mine asteroids in open space.
--Incredible variety of vanity items.
--Incredibly variety of building blocks and decorations.
--Multiplayer.
--Steam Workshop support.


Cons:
--After you've visited each planet type once your twice you realize how samey they are. Each planet is basically a single biome in a game like Terraria or Minecraft. Planets themselves have biomes too, but they're limited in numbers and located underground. Dungeons have the similar structure. There is a huge difference between Ape dungeons and Avian dungeons, but 2 Ape dungeons are pretty much the same. NPCs have interactivity levels of Fallout 4 settlers. Variety of quests that they can give to you is rather limited.
--Weapons suffer from being similar to one another as well. There are different types of both melee and ranged weapons, however, you will probably find most of them to be ineffective/clunky and just ignore them. To make things worse ranged weapons are much weaker than melee weapons. Not only stats-wise, but also in terms of their sprites and sounds. Crafting is tier-based, there are no side-grades between tiers, each weapon and armor piece made out of a new metal will be better than the one you have. Pretty much all races have same weapon types and identical armor and weapon stats. After you beat the game once you realize that it has 0 diversity when it comes to armor and weapons. Only legit unique weapons are Legendary weapons but they can be rather hard to find.
--Special equipment required to survive on planets with extreme heat, cold or oxygen conditions is crafted through quests and suffers from same problems that armor does. At some point you will just be immune to everything, no need to swap equipment or make choices. Boring straight upgrades.
--There are 12 types of techs, 4 for each of following categories - head tech, body tech and legs tech. Out of these 12 only 3 are truly useful. All the others can easily be discarded, some of them are so bad that they can kill you if not used correctly. As a side note, in previous versions of the game you had to look for techs in dungeons, but now you can just buy them by finding blank tech modules all over the world or receiving them as quest rewards. A lot of techs were nerfed hard as well. Instead of finding a perfect balance between discovery and rewards devs took an easy way out. One more simplified feature.
--You're forced into story-mode and quests(at least during the begining of the game). I realize that it was made that way because some players can feel lost, since using brains is oh-so-hard for some people, but I think developers overdid it a little. You can't do what you want to do in a sandbox game unless you go through story missions, thanks to tier-based crafting system and crafting components locked behind storyline that I don't care about.
--Bosses are boring, clunky and weak. If you're looking for challenging boss-fights you're better off just playing Terraria. Vanilla or with some mods installed. Bosses in Starbound only challenge your ability to collect materials to craft yourself a new armor and weapons to be able to take a boss on, and even that is optional if you have enough patience. Bosses in their majority have a rather limited move-set which you'll learn during the very first encounter. Their attacks are easy to dodge and their main strength is a large health pool that urges you to find or craft new weapons, just so you could finish the bastard off quickly.
--Space-stations and colonies are copies of NPC settlements, but you're the one in control. Space-ship upgrades just give you more place on your space-ship and increase number of crew members that you can have. Crew members provide miniscule short-term bonuses that you don't have to care about. You recruit crew members through random quests on random planets. So yeah, no Mass Effect/Fallout companionship to be found here, unless you consider giving names to your chairs or spoons fascinating. You can also take 2 of your crew members with you to explore, but combat is already pretty easy if you know what you're doing so it's useless as well.
--Mechs feel weak and clunky. You get your first mech for free through a quest, it's slow and boring to use. To build a better one you need to get new parts and build them. You can find blueprints of these parts on pirate ships and blueprints that you get are random. Unlike techs mech is your only way of traveling in open space, but you have to rely on good ol' RNGesus here, instead of being able to just buy the damn parts. And considering how rading works this process can get rather tiring especially because of how unrewarding it is. Mech parts have some side-gradiness to them, but there are parts with perfect stats, so it doesn't matter.
--Overall clunky combat. Combat in this game is boring. Very boring. If your gear is low-tier its tedious and drawn out, if you have proper gear you will usually just one-shot everything aside from humanoid NPCs. Mini-bosses are rare and bland. Nerfs of Techs and weak ranged weapons only make it worse. With good techs you can have good mobility but it's mostly used for boss-fights and planet speedruns. Melee weapons have some interesting abilities, but it doesn't help much when you fight some boring predictable ball of fur that sometimes spits acid. Enemy variety is lacking.
--Poorly optimized. I'm not kidding. Even my friends with beefier PCs have experienced weird freezes and lags out of nowhere.


You might like this game if you like to build and decorate. Or if you're some hardcore Sci-fi maniac. Starbound has a lot of fake variety. It shows you 7 races, but then you realize that there is very little actualy gameplay difference between them(Novakids are an exception, I guess). I found story to be boring and drawn out. Combat is so unsatisfying that you might as well just run past all enemies unless you need crafting components. Survival elements are dumbed down, same can be said for progression system. And world doesn't pack as much surprises as I thought it would when I launched the game for the first time.
So, overall, it seems like I shouldn't recommend this game. However, it has 1 redeeming quality for me personally. Mods. Just like modding community saves Fallout again and again, same is true for Starbound. Some mods change world generation, some add proper mechs, some add leveling system, some add weapons from Dark Souls, Warframe and Borderlands, some give you a way to increase a tier of your favorite weapon, or use sprites of this weapon on a newly crafted one, some mods even add vehicles like helicopters that can hold up to 5 players and be piloted by 2 players.

-Amazing balance:
Every class is useful and powerful.
Every weapon is good, viable and has it's own role.
All enemies are fair and balanced. Even robots that shoot rockets and lazers.
-Amazingly deep upgrade system that allows you to use a variety of weapons instead of buying same weapons every time you play because of the tier system.
-Amazing feedback response from devs.
-Amazing community that wants you to keep playing the game and interacting with other players even if you have a different opinion about certain matters.
-Amazing lootboxes that have amazing skins, outfits and hats.
-Amazing 10$ DLC that adds 1 character.
-Simply amazing!

So, here is a quick review:
1)Adapted weapon box - worst part of it. Really. Maybe I know nothing about this game, maybe I am very unlucky, but the weapons that I got out of it were pretty "meh". Just epic weapons without any sort of synergy or good bonus rolls. At least you can claim these on multiple characters, you can't sell them though.
2)60-Day PP - good stuff, I guess. Boosts everything - you lvl up faster, you gain rep faster, you gain more resources. It's good, I don't have anything else to say about that.
3)50 Inventory Slots - having 50 additional inventory slots is amazing. Really. Now I don't have to use my weapons to store mods, I don't have to destroy or sell equipment just because I don't have enough free space in my backpack.
4)1 Pack Rat Boost - having more ammo is good, too bad this item is time-limited, so I guess it's not that great.
5)5 XP+ 50% Boosts - Pretty self explanatory. I have these in my claimable items. That means you can use them whenever you want, on any of your characters(I can't be sure though, as I had my inventory filled up to the brim with items when I bought this DLC, but I am pretty sure this is how it supposed to be). Each of these lasts for 2 hours.
6)+1 Loadout slot - more variety in terms of builds is good. Now I don't have to switch my skill set's just because I want to use Blur instead of Cloak, or Decoy.
7)2000 Arkforge - feels as good as it sounds. Especially if you consider recent ark forge prices rebalance. That was the initial reason for me to buy this DLC(I am not really into grinding co-op missions and global events with 3 other guys that cause seizures with VOT Mass Cannons).
8)Unique Title: Apex Ark Hunter - I guess it's good. If you're into that stuff. For me, personally - meh, because in my opinion, title means nothing if you bought it.
9)Velociraptor Vehicle: Unique Raptor with Improved Speed and Control - just an improved version of another raptor. Also, it's red. This is probably why it goes faster. Still not as good as other vehicles that you can get for free. But of course, if you have friends who play Defiance, you can all hop in into this amazing Raptor, because it has enough space for 4 players. I usually play alone. And last time I played with my friend, he, or I, would fall out from the vehicle because of the lags. So this one is up to you and your Internet connection.
10)Ark Infiltrator Outfit - Red, Iron-Man-looking reskin of Collective Infiltrator outfit, has some sweet looking lights on it, also has "Von Bach" imprints on it. Looks sweet. Nice alternative if you are too lazy to farm up 50000 kills to get Collective Infiltrator suit.
11)Legendary Jackpot Weapon: “Apex Sludge Hammer” Big Boomer - I can't say that this is a bad weapon. I like it myself, even though I am not the biggest fan of grenade launchers. It has a nice AoE radius of 7, and decent bonus rolls. At EGO level 5000 it deals around 30000 damage per grenade. It has a limited clip of 2 grenades, but reloading time is very short and you can mod it to have larger clip anyway. But there are a lot of better alternatives out there.
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For me this DLC is just 2000 Arkforge and inventory slots. That's it. But, this is just my opinion. I recommend it to any player out there that enjoys Defiance and wants to get a boost in terms of Ark Forge and XP, and of course, is ready to pay for it.
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P.S. I got this DLC for 1600 rubles(25 dollars/22 euros), because I live in Russia. So basically, for me this DLC was a much cheaper alternative to buying Arkforge with Bits. Thing is though - if you live in Germany, you will probably have to pay around 90 euros to get this DLC, so it is still up to you to decide if you should buy it or not, because in my opinion, you shouldn't spend 90 euros or 60 dollars on this DLC.

It's free to play. You will understand how much you like it in the first hour of the game.

Steam page already has thousands of positive reviews that do nothing but recommend the game and praise it. I'll recommend the game, list off some positives, but I will also warn you about it's negatives. In detail.

Positives:

• Well optimized.
  
• Fast paced, fluid, intricate gameplay. That includes movement system, gunplay, melee and Warframe powers.
  
• Hundreds of weapons and dozens of warframes to acquire and experiment with. Thousands of mods, including special weapon specific ones, some of which drastically change not just the stats, but the way weapons and warframes function.
  
• Multi-layered appearance customization system.
  
• Proper quest-lines and deep dark fantasieslore.
  
• Fair monetization system. For the most part.
  
• Constant updates that improve the game and add vertical and horizontal progression.

Before you read through negatives I should mention that some of them will only become apparent after hundreds of gameplay hours. That means that when you begin to notice them, it will probably too late for you, since your love for this game will overpower all the negativity. Also, I'm not going to talk about general grind or farming. Because it's literally the game and 99% of it is RNG. I will mention it in it's specific ugly forms though.

Negatives:

• Optimization might break at random after some big update comes out. Also, get ready to have lower FPS on some tile-sets after developers decide to rework them. And if you can't access open world maps - oh well, buckle up, it's time to purchase everything related for platinum. It might also lock you out of doing certain endgame missions, so you better have a good PC even though optimization is great lmao.
  
• Gameplay:
  1)I don't think than any of the developers know their game as good as most Warframe streamers/YouTubers or even experienced random players do. Be prepared for unreasonable nerfs(to both non-meta and meta weapons and warframes) and soulshattering gameplay changes that no one asked for and majority of the playerbase will hate, followed by promises that everything will be fixed "soon". Bonus: weapons and warframes that stay outdated for YEARS. And that's just small things. Entire TYPES OF DAMAGE are absolutely useless. Half of the developement team still thinks that they develop the warframe of 2013.
  2)AI is pretty much braindead. After years of updates warframe transformed into a crowd shooter. You'll be killing 20-30 enemies in seconds. At that point you'll be able to slaughter hundreds of enemies in seconds actually, but to your disappointment, game simply won't spawn as many at once. Not only that, the ones that did spawn might just freeze up at some random corner of the map, waiting for you to find them. Ever ran 700 meters through an empty location just to find some dude squatting behind a rock? I did. After some time you will realize, that even when you play on an arena where you're supposed to be hunted by high-rank assassins, you're the one doing the hunt. You literally have to search for things to kill, and when killing takes 0.00000000001 of a second, the whole "cat and a mouse" thing becomes a chore. Also, imagine having game modes that depend on how quickly you deal with enemies, but their spawns and AI are so bad that you lose because half of the spawns are asleep on the other side of the planet lol.
  3)Enemy scaling is broken. It works great for a couple of days, depending on how fast you acquire weapons and mods. After a certain point you will RODAROLLADAsteamroll anything that stands in front of you. That is, until you decide to do high level content. You will realize that cheesing the game is the only way to survive. About incoming damage - you will melt, unless you use something with stealth or damage reduction. You can always roll and jump around like a monkey too(like, I'm not kidding, some people out there call it true endgame, they just jump and roll constantly to reduce enemy accuracy because at some point enemies deal so much damage that you'll die no matter what lmao), it's a choice. Corrosive projection will become your cool friend and no one will want to see you without him. Viral, gas and slash will become your family. Then you'll see some guy sliding and spinning on the floor, slash-procing everything around you with some poop-smeared stick. Everyone will use same 5 weapons in each category. And at this point game will lose all of it's magic for you, when it comes to using weapons.
  
• Out of thousands of mods only hundred is useful. 99% of the weapons of all categories use same builds. Other are gimmicky at best and absolutely useless at worst. Oh, and weapon specific "riven" mods are a separate issue. But you should know that they get the same nerf-bat treatment as the one mentioned in the first paragraph of the gameplay negatives section.
  
• Fashion frame is endgame. And as much as I like my dummy-thick Nidus and Nezha, it's not a good thing(it's basically another jab at gameplay, customization is good). Be ready for your favorite weapon skin to break one day and to get fixed only after some lonely dude on forums posts about this issue for 500 times in every single dev post over a span of a year.
  
• The way we perceive stories is subjective. For me Warframe quests were painfully boring and too cliched. And not in a good way. Gimmicky and grindy objectives didn't improve the experience either.
  
• A lot of people praise the way Warframe is monetized:
  1)Loudest voices, of course, are streamers/youtubers that receive gifts from both devs and their fans. Read that sentence again and think about how much you can trust them.
  2)Many players will tell you that you can just trade for everything. Well, I hope you're ready to grind for hours, sell things that you need for yourself and use third party websites. All Warframe has is a trading chat and a trading hub. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Imagine how much fun you can have with a chat where hundreds of people make offers at the same time or in a hub area where random players sell random stuff. Because auction system is not good enough for us lmao. You'll need platinum for stuff like weapon and warframe slots ffs. Game will constantly remind you about it. You'll be lucky if you catch some event that provides time-exclusive rewards that you can trade. You will also be lucky if you get them to drop.
  3)At certain point you will discover riven mods. Welcome to Warframe lootboxes. These are completely random. Weapon category that this mod is for is random. Weapon that this mod is for is random. Up to 4 stats on the mod are random. You can reroll stats for a certain resource - Kuva, that is easy to obtain(best way is to do Kuva-specific missions). But reroll price scales up and cap at 3500. That translates into 6 runs of low level, or 3 runs of high level Kuva missions. You can't lock any stats, but game is generous enough to let you decide whether you want to keep an older version of your mod though. You can't buy them from devs, but you can buy them from players. You don't really need them, but they can greatly improve the performance of your favorite gun. Prices range from 1 plat up to 3500(and higher, depending on how stupid you and the seller are) plat for "godly" rivens. And platinum doesn't grow on trees. Someone feeds this market. Devs refuse to increase kuva rewards or do anything about riven RNG. You don't have to be a genius to figure out why. Everyone likes their toys shiny and powerful. And devs know it.
  4)Devs tampered with drop rates of newly released items on multiple occasions. Just buy it for plat, amirite.
  
• It turns out constant updates also break the game and devs are not too keen on fixing minor issues or majority of issues. But you probably figured it out already.

But hey, at least frames have nice peachy bums.