Recensioni recenti di Detective Mekova™

I'm playing all of the Dragon Age games up until Veilguard. The first DA game was the game that got away since by the time I played it, I was more interested in ARPG games. Now I want to see what I was missing.
I decided to finish DA:O and Awakening along with the DLCs before this game in order to experience the transition from a semi-isometric RPG into a third person ARPG.
It's jarring, to say the least. It's as if the developers wanted to imitate The Witcher, of all things, and it doesn't really... work... not with how the previous game created such a great open world RPG (or semi-open world.)
The best explanation I can give is that the game feels framed around tactical gameplay but it lacks the tactics needed for it. Bosses aren't hard per se, but they will destroy your entire party because of an unpredictable AOE attack and your companions lag behind while you get to cover. On the flip side, I don't see how the boss fights would even work in a isometric real time RPG like DAO either, so it's kind of stuck between stations. It is neither a good ARPG nor a good RPG. It's just... fine.
The characters and setting (albeit the latter is quite repetitive) are the best part of the entire experience. I genuinely hate the prologue, and the time skips annoy the piss out of me. The time skips between DAO and Awakening make sense because it's such a short period of time and it's not like your Warden was doing much more than just culling darkspawn; and the period between that and Witch Hunt makes even more sense since it was also such a short period of time.
Here... a whole (spoilers) year passes as an indentured servant (which you have no say in the matter despite already meeting folks who would likely pay for your way into Kirkwall without what is essentially being enslaved.) and you've made a small name for you- wait no, that was Hawke. He made a name for him/herself, not you the player.
So then there's a another time skip OF 3 YEARS. So many things can happen in three whole years and YOU don't get any say in what those things are. You bought a mansion, and made a name fo- oh wait, it was Hawke who did that, not you the player.
And that is where the schism of the series started from my now first hand experience. You're not playing as yourself as a Warden or as a Champion, but instead you are role playing as Hawke. This is Hawke's story, and you kind of just get to make decisions about how he/she acts. There are consequences, yes, but none of them feel earned when your character doesn't even say the words that you chose him to say in the dialog wheel lol.
I'm onto Act 2 right now and will update this review once it's finished. I genuinely hope for some sort of payoff, or at least that the game ends quickly.
From the direction that this game took the series, the next game really needs to double down on the ARPG aspects and improve the RPG parts so that you have more agency. Otherwise, I feel like it'll be a mess of ideas with no clear direction.

Edit: I apparently missed a very important companion and I didn't find out until something like 3/4ths of the 2nd act. I'm not wasting 10 or more hours replaying the slog of a game.
I understand in certain games like Baldurs Gate (the OG games) how this could happen, but those characters aren't really necessary like they are in this game. Bioware in their infinite wisdom made it to where the game gets pouty at you for not fixing everyones problems because the developers made no indication that you needed to backtrack to a place that is fairly arbitrary in the grand scheme of things.
Wild.
I'm flat out going to skip the rest of the game because I cannot for the life of me bother with playing through the game with an important part of the story never being able to be resolved because... I missed an 'optional' companion in act 1.
The story is honestly good (A bit too hyped in my opinion) but everything else is so damn annoying or just bad game design.

Good soup.
Even though the game shows its jank so many years later, it's still an amazing experience. Top tier characters, fun classes, and a really good story that is inspired by but is a natural progression of Lord of the Rings and even The Wheel of Time.
I recommend playing it with the unofficial patch that you can find online, especially if you're not going to play it on a PC made in the early to mid 2000's. The game crashes quite a lot without it, and a lot of it is to due with memory leaks and the 2GB RAM limitation. Once the game uses up the 2GB of ram, the game crashes to desktop.

Awakening was fun but really janky. Lots of bugs abound.
Despite that, the campaign was really fun overall. I wish there was more to do regarding dealing with the arls and working on bettering the city but overall it's a fun experience. The loot was surprisingly... mediocre. I don't think I used anything from it besides a robe I picked up (I'm a mage) and a full set of armor from an enemy for which I gave to a companion to use.
FYi when entering the Architect's ruins in the woods, unequip your gear. Yes, all of it, then enter. There's a nasty bug which causes your equipment to magically disappear forever. It's very frustrating.

The only performance issues I've had is when in safe towns. I don't know why, and it's frustrating. It must be either a memory leak or the AI is causing the lag. Otherwise, the game runs very well, and I have literally 0 issues with the performance unlike 90% of the PC titles that came out this year for PC.

The game rewards taking risks, but often times the rewards are dubiously worth it.
You'll pass by a farm house on your way to a contact, and in other games like fallout you'll likely think "I'll just slip in, clear the house, and get some loot probably."
In this game, the farmhouse has maybe a bottle of beer, and a single bullet if you're lucky... oh, and a dozen wild dogs.
On the other hand, it could have a fallout shelter that has a bunch of ammo in it (even if it's ammo for a gun you don't have) and meds.
That's probably both a good and bad thing since it makes taking risks or exploring random POI's a gamble, so you'll either rarely take any risks because they're usually not worth it, you'll only hit one or two locations on your way to your destination potentially missing out on sweet loot, or you'll end up getting frustrated as you deplete your ammo just before you make it to your destination.
Anomalies are scary, dangerous, and very powerful tools. Never underestimate positioning, because you can lead most non-human threats into anomalies and kill or maim them. It's such a huge win, especialyl when you're getting overwhelmed.
I am used to playing the classic STALKER and even Tarkov for a while, so the game doesn't feel too difficult. The only frustrating thing is getting yoinked by an anomaly I missed, or being unlucky in a gunfight where my gun jams or a dude throws a grenade that I run away from only for it to hit a wall and bounce towards me.

Beyond gameplay, the atmosphere is stellar as always. Whatever the first STALKER did, this one did better in most regards. The world is huge, and there's a lot to explore. I appreciate how the PDA shows the entire region without goofy fog of war, so you can spend minutes just marking locations that look interesting. It provides a lot of info too like the locations of supplies, hideouts, and loot.

Lastly, I think the voice acting on the english side is pretty good. Yes, it's better in Blyatanese, but in the middle of a gunfight you're not going to catch me reading subtitles.

TLDR
The game has some rough edges, but if you liked the first stalker then this is more of that but sleeker, better looking, and with a less frustrating UI.

Add Triangles.

EDIT:

Add half walls.

As a straight white male, I find this game to be incredibly woke. They even made a title called straight that is ridiculously expensive compared to the LGBTQ titles. I can't believe they'd do that!!!

10/10, would fish again.

Overall it's a 5/10.

Edit: So their game plan due to rapidly dropping player numbers is to add FOMO in order to get whales and streamers to buy their skins and bundles.
As my review below said, it has the foundations of a solid game. However, if their plan is to lean even more into microtransaction hell this quickly, then I don't see the game lasting much longer.
Even Ubisoft learned from its mistakes after Outlaws was a bust.
Season 1 of this game was worse than season 1 of Diablo 4... and that's saying a LOT.
I changed my overall to a 5/10, and I do not recommend this game.

I haven't played too much, but what I have played is pretty damn okay, and sometimes it's even pretty good.
Those are indeed compliments, because in truth I don't like grindy games like Destiny, or The Division. The latter had really good lore and atmosphere, but the grind just isn't my thing.
This game has a lot of grind. It also has the tendency to make you feel sooooo close to unlocking a part or research ingredient but it ends up taking up a half hour of time for you to even get it... then you have to research the whatsitwhosit which literally takes hours.
I get the purpose is to make it so damn annoying for those who want to breeze through the game so that they feel compelled to buy the dumb characters or weapons... but come on now. I guess it's not as annoying as it could be since I do have a full time job so I can grind a bit before bed, then when I get home from work all of the stuff is researched, but eeeh it still feels scummy.

The story feels almost ai generated, along with many of the characters and layout of Albion. It's too damn clean and corny. The lore is legit interesting and I do like the different locations. Don't get me wrong, I love corny science fiction. It's my bread and butter. When I saw that the first mini-boss was named Greg I literally couldn't stop laughing throughout the fight. It was very entertaining.

The objectives are pretty uuuhhh... generic and repetitive. They all consist of "kill these guys", "defend this terminal", "Escort this bot" and the worst of them all "Collect the orbs". The game needs more variety, especially since there is no actual endgame, so the grind is about just collecting materials and unlocking characters. Even the battlepass is pretty mediocre with only a few really interesting unlocks.
Which is wild to me since it's meant to bring in money, but how do you expect to entice people into buying the battlepass if it takes hours to unlock the levels and the unlocks are pretty "okay" overall?
I guess the focus is to get people to buy the characters, as I mentioned before.

If left to cook a bit, I think the game could actually do some good things. I've mostly complained so far, so here are some really good positives:

I genuinely like the boss fights. It's one of the strongest aspects of the game in my opinion. I like how their weaknesses and strengths, along with the fighting patterns emphasize planning and teamwork. Both are aspects that many other games of this ilk kind of lack.
I like how easy it is to pick up and play. The benefits of having a fairly generic story is that I don't have to worry too much about the dialog when grinding for loot.
The different Descendants are enjoyable. Yes, there is a meta, but from my understanding the meta is mostly about speeding up the grind over actual numbers so it doesn't feel like my starter character is any less capable than Bunny or Valby.
The lore is pretty interesting, and it's neither obstructive nor too hidden. The world is generally explained through the dialog and story, but there is in-game information you can learn yourself if you want to actually know more about the game's setting which is fun.

Bottomline: It's free, and it's a run n gun kinda looter shooter. It's a certified brain off, guns out kinda game imo. Yes, Nexon is pretty much a leech on the industry, but as long as the game is still given love and care overtime, then it can be more than the sum of its research parts.

Updated:

The issues below remain, but also archers are still actually never worth it. You're better off investing in spear infantry over archers.
You can literally have 50 archers against 18 brigands (some without shields) and those 18 brigands will survive multiple volleys of arrows while sprinting at your archers/frontline. Occasionally they'll pause and go "Whew, I think I broke a nail!"
I get the importance of the dreadful word "balance"... but medieval times weren't balanced. There is a reason that medieval england literally had every male possible from about I think 8 years old practice archery for an hour after church on sundays.
Archers. Are. Effective.
Especially in huge numbers. It's also why the crossbow became such a huge menace when its production reached larger heights. Now you don't need people to train very long every sunday morning or afternoon. You can give a man a crossbow, and he is just as likely to fell a lord as a lord is to him.
So why is it that 50 arrows barely even bother unarmored brigands? It makes as much sense the context of the period as having a baron force everyone to only harvest berries from a small patch.

Alrighty. So the game itself reminds me a lot of the Hegemony games but with an emphasis on village building.
It is a fun game with pretty serviceable combat, a gorgeous design, and a pretty simple but fun gameplay loop. You build up your village from scratch and it's very rewarding to see your smol work camp become a small village as your citizens start becoming specialized and trade flourished.
However.
Food production is actually a nightmare. Berries in real life aren't just... in a patch in the middle of Ohio. Berries and foraging was generally a passive thing that peasants did organically for survival. Ergo, the idea that a medieval village is micromanaged to such a controlling level is pretty silly in my opinion. Many people fail to realize just how important gardens and land management was in medieval times. As such, it's astonishing how so many games of this ilk gloss over that important detail.
There's also the farming which is atrocious. The numbers are literally wrong. I had 5 fields of wheat with high fertility and during the Harvest the game said that each field had about 800 wheat each.
The wheat was harvested, and the yield was... 50... What? That's an incredibly bad oversight. Especially since the conversion is 1 wheat turns into 1 grain. Which means I have a whole 50 food for the winter months coming from a field the size of a village itself.
I get that the game is in early access, and that there's a single dev working on it... But this is a huge oversight that needs fixed asap. Also, the farmers tend to sow the fields... during late august/early winter... That's hilarious to me.
I'm not recommending the game until the bare necessities are in place such as actual deplomacy, the farm yields issue is fixed (which if you google the issue, is a recurring problem), and smarter AI that actually does their job instead of wandering around in the field aimlessly for a whole winter season lmao.
I want to be more positive, but the game can't improve without people giving valid criticism. I'm not "hating" on the game. I actually quite enjoy it overall. It's just that the basic mechanics of a functioning town are literally broken.

It's pretty fun so far. It's like the first Dead Island except it's... not on an island... and it definitely feels like a sequel in terms of graphical and gameplay improvements from the first game. I've played as Ryan so far, and he's a perfect balance between serious and comedic. Some of his lines are genuinely funny and they don't feel as forced as some of the other characters.
Also, yes there's Gen Z humor here... but a lot of it is obviously poking fun AT the cringe instead of Embracing the cringe. So as long as you go into it knowing that it's not serious, then you'll have fun. AKA the opposite to the twins in Borderlands 3.
The epic stuff is annoying, but only if you don't pay attention lol You literally can just... skip the Epic integration. I have an Epic account, and my Epic Account is synchronized with steam and I still skip the integration. I haven't had to download any launcher or whatever else.
For a game that's been delayed for as long as it has, I'm pretty happy with the final product. It's sad that the game was stuck in limbo for so long that many of the gameplay elements feel dated, but it's still genuinely enjoyable.
Overall, I'd give it a solid 7/10 so far.

TLDR: It's not much different from the first game. It's better looking and it feels very good to play. However, it runs like garbage and there are pointless Microtransactions.

Update: After 200 hours, I've beaten the game. Granted, some of those hours was due to the game's executable running in the background randomly after I accidentally caused the game to crash.
I actually was en route to get the true ending on accident, so my review is based on that experience. The game is honestly great. As someone who enjoys traveling through Morrowind, Oblivion, and then Skyrim on foot as opposed to fast traveling.. I fell in love with this game instantly. In the endgame portion, I was impressed at how much and how little things change. Without going into spoilers, I feel like the endgame portion makes the experience worth it, if only because the difficulty spikes up, and now you genuinely feel like you have a purpose as opposed to just wandering around the world looking for upgrades. A lot of care was put into the world, and you can kind of tell simply by exploring the locations you used to avoid previously in order to reach locations that were previously blocked off or impassable. However, I honestly feel like the weakest part of the game is the story. Like yeah, it's a great story on paper, but its execution felt rushed and befuddled. Honestly, there were two points in the story which made me have to go online and look up what the hell I was actually doing because a character would say "Do ABC", your objective marker will say "Do CBA", and then the overall plot implies that you're doing "BCA". It's honestly annoying and I do not believe in the excuse that "It's an issue with translation." Nah, that's just poor quality control and execution. The story has potential, but it feels like your actions as The Arisen literally doesn't matter until the endgame. Your subterfuge, your actions, and the romance in this game feels like it's just set dressing. It feels like the Bethesda games where you've literally killed god, and bandits still go "Dang, I need to loot your corpse." You've become an unstoppable force, yet the plot pretends that you didn't just travel across the continent killing ogres, dragons, and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Medusa before you reach the endgame. It's a typical problem with these kinds of games, but I feel it especially here. I will 100% buy the DLC when it comes out, because if it's on the same level as Dark Arisen then please, take my money.

I've only "played" for about an hour.
My first thoughts were negative because for whatever reason every game since 2020 needs to compile shaders before you even play it which is wild to me.
After I got past that, I loaded up the character I made using their character creator.
I can totally see how poor the optimization is, despite the fact that I'm running the game on the highest possible graphics and the game's buttery smooth due to a pretty damn beefy PC, though the processor and RAM is last gen. You can tell because when I dropped certain things like the shadows or even the textures DOWN to low, my frames go haywire for 10 minutes until the FSR levels it all out.

The gameplay itself is so damn good though. It's almost *Witcher 3 level combat*, but it feels more fluid.
The boss fight had so much going on made it hard to see what the heck was even going on, but I think that's just due to the setting and location.

The graphics are actually really good. I do believe that this industry has officially hit a roadblock in terms of graphical innovation. Games will only be able to go one of two ways now: More hyper realistic, which means uncanny valley and really noticeable flaws in facial animations, and character visual fidelity; or more stylistic, using modern graphical breakthroughs to compliment current graphical abilities to provide more interesting and unique visual representations of every day things.

The sound is good. It's a Capcom game, so they usually have this down.

Microtransactions: They exist, and it's embarrassing. It's a 70-dollar game. DLC it a Capcom staple, but adding dumb gems, shards, or other stupid currencies is a Certified Shareholders Moment.

Overall, it's a solid game, as long as your computer is up to snuff. As the TLDR said, just wait for an update that fixes optimization, as ridiculous as that is. Once again, mainstream publishers drop the ball on optimizing their damn games before releasing it.

*This was a dumb comment. It's more akin to the True Directional Combat mod for Skyrim. Take that how you wish.*

Update: I've played this game way too much, and I haven't even beaten it. Never have I had this much fun playing a game since Monster Hunter Worlds or even Skyrim. I will 100% admit that the game is terribly optimized, but if your computer runs it fine then you'll have fun.

This is less of a full review and more of my experiences with the game which might help others who feel just as conflicted as I do. I tried not to spoil too much, but the general idea of the game and progression IS brought up.
This is the best RPG that I'll likely never complete.
It has similar issues that I had with Divinity 2: Original Sins.
Like, an example is that I'd think that trying to heal someone would make the most sense for a high charisma character to do in order to help. As if it's literally their job to do it, and they are, theoretically, a professional at it. I roll to complete the thing, and get a natural 1 on a 5 or above charisma check. My suspension of disbelief is ruined. It's like going to tie your shoes and you end up redacting yourself with the laces.
And that's why DM's often use a screen so they can fudge rolls so that things happen which make narrative sense.
It's a similar issue with most games of this ilk, where you are at the mercy of dice rolls, with the only solution being save scumming if you get frustrated with the quirks of the D20 system. It's an illusion of control that I take issue with since I'm technically driving the narrative. Everything literally happens when I, the player, says it does. Nothing in the main story progresses unless the player does it... which is another issue I have...
So having the control taken away due to dice rolls and my character having high wisdom and charisma, but somehow lacking the ability to learn the context behind a certain religious plot element that he should know as a religion figure himself is baffling. It's like asking a priest "Hey, why is the upside down cross associated with Satan" and the priest going "Dunno man, probably because it's the opposite of an upright cross lol"
That being said, it is a fun and enjoyable game. I'm giving a positive review because my own issues with the game, bugs aside, aren't the fault of the developers or the game as a whole, but an issue with trying to take the RPG/DND medium and putting it into a game like this and my own personal expectations and unrealistic desires.
It's really fun in multiplayer though. That is a good enough reason to get it, but it'd be cool if there was a DM mode where a dungeon master player can play "against" or "with" the players to change the narrative and spice things up.