Recent reviews by ☩Dark_Warchief☩

This game is beautifully made with it's low fidelity and has a fair learning curve, unfortunately the dev has long since abandoned it and the dev themselves haven't show activity since 2022. It's beta abandonware, I don't know what happened and I hope the dev had a good reason. 19 bucks is way too steep. Get it for 5 tops if you can.

Game was gifted to me.

Get this if you like 4K games and like the fantasy format. Lore and ''feel'' of the game seems to be inspired by warcraft and lord of the rings. If you played 3, you should've gotten this yesterday :D

I only played Dark Souls 2 and this one, so I will be using Dark Souls 2 as reference point.

THE GOOD

-There are all new armors and weapons out, but some spells got removed. Overall it still got more things added than taken out

-Better level design than dark souls 2, seriously. More detail in the areas, more varriation in enemies.

-Better covenants, mound makers is a real solid idea and fun to be in. However, no more blue eye orbs and no more sin system for punishing people that invade alot.

-Weapon skills, but most of them are boring like giving a flat damage buff. The few good ones create cool things like explosions

THE BAD

-Magic got drilled into the ground damage and speed wise. You also need to sacrifice some estus flask charges for a mana potion thing. Refer to video to see how bad hexes are in this game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E-BPcc4kWc
Hexes are not even a spell catagory anymore. They got split up in dark pyromancy, dark sorcery and dark miracles.


-No Powerstance, you got some weapons called ''twinspears'' or ''swords'' that you can 2 hand and will act like a proper dual wield, but outside that you are screwed.

-You cannot infuse boss weapons. Seriously.

-Annoying areas, there are MULTIPLE areas where you take poison damage for being in toxic water you HAVE to go through.
Multiple times. Dark souls 2 had one poison area. One.

-Invading got ruined, phantoms too, all in one go. Phantoms don't fullfill their duty until they beat the boss. So most of the people will have phantoms on them when you invade as they only go away after the boss

Generic RPG is generic.

THE GOOD:
Not much, really, the music, visuals and historical aspect of the game, which is provided by loading screens and intersting quotes if you discover a tech. The militairy triangle what counters what has been done well so war is somewhat balanced.

THE BAD:
DLC's, really, DLC's for everything. With the workshop around you can easily circumvent buying these but it's still alot of money if you want to buy the whole thing, which still is very lackluster.
Percieved micromanagement, I say perceived because basicly you have advisors which tell you waht to build. One for each area, cultural, foreign affairs, scientific, militairy, economy and whatnot. They basicly advise you what tech or building to create to advance their respective field. Except that most of these decisions have zero impact - you'd expect you'll be wrestling bigger things than choosing wether your town constructs a wind mill or barn.
Terrible terrain regeneration, now, this is can be only offset a -tiny- bit by choosing ''balanced resources'' but even then you find more often then not that the enemy has a huge early game advantage over you because the RNG favored him more than you.
Dumb mechanics, this game's idea of ''more difficult'' is not a smarter AI with better tactics, it is throwing more resources to them while penalizing you, so your dumb brute enemies just get more guns instead growing brain.

THE AWFUL:
Tedium, all victory conditions outside militairy are the same. You wait, skip 9 of 10 turns you get -even on ''normal'' speed to only click a building or tech to repeat the whole process. It's a snorefest to the maximum and if you want a war game you're better putting your money elsewhere.
''Diplomacy'' Bipolar Personality Disorder would sum this up well, leaders can go from angry to friendly to scared within a few single turns and end or declare wars on you out of the blue too. Even if you managed to make a BFF with these mentally insane AI characters, it doesn't count because you CAN'T WIN WITH THEM. No, you have to backstab them and go for it alone, but, let's be real, they'd do that before you much sooner.
Imbalance, some civs are so ridiculously more powerful it's not even funny to say the least. You can play as them and set the enemies to ensure a win, or make yourself and them average, but where is the fun of exploration and diversity this game tries to offer if you have to split up civs in groups like that?

Overall, don't get this game. Don't make the same mistake I did. Even if I can stop one person from buying this overrated excuse of a game, I will be happy that they don't have to pull their hair out in psychotic rage while attempting to play this.

THE GOOD:
Loadout is a unconventional shooter game set in arena style maps with a third person perspective.
The game tries to innovate with weaponcrafting, a feature that lets you slam parts together to make your own guns. There are four weapon types and while there are less viable builds then the game praises itself for. However, the amount of viable builds is still large enough to deserve praise. The combat is very fast paced and the controls respond well and feel really nimble as you can jump really high, allowing more diverse combat than usual in this sort of game.
The cartoonesk visuals are not the best graphics but fit the spirit of the game very well while making sure even older machines can still run the game. The level design features funny details such as a sign stating ''0 days since last accident'' or a pair of underpants in a brewery to filter beer.

THE BAD:
The community, really, these people love to accuse you of hacking, call you names and so on. Personally I find this really humorous but I am aware I am a minority in this aspect. The bad matchmaking does not help either, the game states how it has good matchmaking capabilities but then decides to mix up newbies and top-tier players in a match without evenly distributing the different skill levels well, this is a dealbreaker for new players. The lack of maps does not help either. It is too common to get into the same map game after game.

THE AWFUL:
The company behind it, very rarely new weapon parts or maps get added to the game and the promised PVE campaign still isn't released after the beta test for it went down - it been a half year now. New players only got the tedious ''vs bots'' options to gain experience but this is really lackluster as the bots got an Iq lower than your shoe size, so the contrast is enormous and there is no true low level PVP in the game.

HOWEVER, it is a free and innovative game and if you are willing to get in the steep PVP curve, go ahead.