Recent reviews by BardFromEntry

it turned out to be slightly political

ROCK AND STONE

I have 48 hours in this game and I still haven't beaten it because I am perpetually cycling through playing it addictively, dying around floor 3 or early on floor 4, and uninstalling only to reinstall and try again

EDIT: I have now beaten it. Several times. Somewhere around the sixty hour mark, something just clicks and you can beat the Gungeon several times in a row, easily. Good game.

At last, sex

I have been looking forward to this game for a year now, and I like to think my expectations were pretty low, considering I participated in the open beta and thought I knew what I was getting into.

But holy ♥♥♥♥.

Let me paint a picture of how bad this game's UX is. Bear in mind, I meet all of the recommended specs, per the Steam page.

When you launch the game, you don't. You launch a secondary window from which you launch the game, a wonderful holdover feature from the grand old days of 2011. You want to make a majority of your graphics decisions, you do it here, where you can't see the effects at all. Having played the open beta and knowing better, I open the options and select 'low'.

After a horrendous load time on the start screen, you are popped into the character creator, which is actually pretty good, albeit burdened by the inexplicable requirement that any character you make necessarily have the face of an undercooked homunculus. Whatever, it's 40K and your character's not supposed to be top of the pile.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game had replaced the tutorial dimension found in the beta with a diagetic tutorial tied into the story. I was unpleasantly unsurprised to find that the issue where the game freezes all of its audio at random and then causes voice lines to play over one another in an attempt to catch up to the characters is not at all resolved. After clearing the tutorial mission, I was then unpleasantly surprised once more to find out that no, that first surprise was fake, and I was required to do the tutorial in the tutorial dimension from the beta.

A second tutorial. On the basic functions of gameplay that I had to learn to clear the tutorial mission. I am obligated to do this. Every time I make a character. If I want access to each class in the game, I have to clear eight tutorials. If I want to use the inexplicable fifth character slot, bump that up to ten tutorials.

Game design.

The game also gleefully crashes any time it has one of its inexplicable visual freezing fits, or you alt-tab, or you breathe the wrong way. It also still doesn't store control-related settings, so, because I am a not a sociopath and want to toggle sprint, not hold it, I am obliged to go into the settings every time I launch.

I also learned the fun way that if Darktide crashes in a story cutscene, (For me, the story's introduction where I'm supposed to meet the Inquisitor I'm going to be serving the rest of the game and learn what I'm doing on Tertium), it skips to the end and plops you where you're supposed to go post-cutscene. The game decided at random that I am not allowed to know the story, unless, of course, I want to go through the trouble of remaking my exact character and playing through the two mandatory tutorials again.

By the way, did I mention that the loading times are horrendous? Because they're horrendous. I actually went to the trouble of launching the game with a stopwatch so that I could see just how long it takes from the moment I click 'Play' in Steam to the moment I am in the lobby. Not a mission. Not the game part of the game. The lobby.

Rounding down, 1 minute and 30 seconds. If I log in on 200 days, assuming no crashes, (a bigger fantasy than a Dark Mechanicum army) that's 5 hours of my life. Getting to the lobby, not the game. Bear in mind, if you alt-tab to do something else during this loading period, it's gonna crash and make you start over for your insolence.

So, if I want to play every character I have to play eight tutorials, the story decided I don't get to know it at random, and every time you launch the game, that's a minute-and-a-half life tax. Oh, and also the servers are trash. Why isn't it P2P like every other horde co-op game in existence? ♥♥♥♥ if I know. The gameplay is good, too. Just good luck getting to it through all of that volatility.

40 dollars, ladies and gentlemen. With $20-$25 DLC, out now.

The colors are good, but they're nothing new. The advertising leading up to this was hella misleading. ArcSys made it sound like this was gonna be new color sets, not just the old bonus colors for more characters.

I got jumpscared by a game about children's menu mazes

Like, successfully

It turns all your bad feelings into good feelings. It's a nightmare!

It's real good

EDIT: It's gooder than I even thought

This game is suicide fuel with the occasional side-splitting laugh. I highly recommend it.