Recent reviews by Tara Halls

You finally got me, Chris. You finally got me.

I've tried this game quite a few times before and it never really managed to stick. After playing through Diablo 4 and learning the basics of ARPG builds and mechanics, I decided to come back and give the game a try again. This time however, I noticed there was a new option for playing since I last tried - Ruthless. Against my better judgement, I decided to give it a go, and it turns out it's everything I initially wanted from an ARPG. I've always gotten choice paralysis from the amount of loot/skill gems I've gotten from the base version of the game, and Ruthless fixed that problem by forcing me to work with what little loot I ended up getting. I found it much more fun and fulfilling, and with PoE2 seemingly following in this direction quite a bit, I'm very glad to say I finally get it, and I can foresee myself sticking around for a very long time.

I'll give more cohesive thoughts later(maybe), just now that this game is very much worth it's price right now. It's honestly theft that the game is this cheap, I was ready to pay twenty bucks for this.

Regardless, this game is extremely good, the movement is solid, the shooting feels great and it's honestly quite challenging.

While I do recommend this game this comes with caveats -

This game is made for a very specific audience, and not everyone is going to enjoy it. If you happen to enjoy very symbolic, bleak stories with an emphasis on puzzles and environmental storytelling, and if you're willing to deal with pretty clunky combat here and there, then this game is for you.

Beyond that, I don't really want to say much, because this game is best experienced blind.

As someone with dyslexia, this game overwhelms me in the best way possible.

So many numbers I can't read, but I sure am doing something.

~Edit Two

Reached text limit, so I'll keep this short - I can recommend this now after more time with the DLC after the update. Learning/playing has made it more enjoyable as time has gone on.

**This review is subject to change based on how the developers choose to update/fix this DLC in the coming days, hence why I feel comfortable giving this a negative review for the time being.I have also not experienced all of the content this expansion has to offer, and as such, I will not be covering anything I have not been able to play around with/experience.

No text will ever be removed from this review. I will only ever add on top of what was already here for the sake of posterity.**

~Edit One

An update was released today(Eleventh of March, 2022), and it fixed quite a few issues I had with the expansion. Notably, Void Seeds, Void Fog, ignite debuff and the momentum bug.

While this is a step in the right direction, there's still some issues I have, those being Blind Pests/Vermin and Larva. To reiterate my issue with them, they're far too common for the damage they can deal and how hard they can be to hit, and they can quickly end your run if three or more of any of them exist at any given time. I can't even be bothered to play melee survivors at the moment with how obnoxious they are currently. If they choose to nerf these enemies, I'll be willing to change my review to a positive one. For now, I can't, given how obnoxious these enemies still are.

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~Initial Review

A lot of the content added through this DLC is very good. Railgunner is a lot of fun, as is Void Fiend, and some of the new items are a lot of fun to use as well. All of the new stages I have been to have been aesthetically pleasing and fun to navigate too.

The reasons I have to give this a negative review comes down to a lack of polish in overall gameplay/balance, various bugs that have resulted in killed runs, and a lack of knowing what was changed about the game as a whole. The following list will go over specific issues I wish to talk about.

~Gameplay/Balance

The main issue I have in this section comes down to three new enemies that were added - Blind Pest/Vermin and Larva. For basic enemies with low health, they do far too much damage for how common they are, and for how annoying they are to deal with. I can't even imagine playing a character like Acrid at the moment because Blind Pests are awful even with a ranged survivor. Also, the changes to the fire debuff makes it last far too long in my eyes. But hey, at least you can make a bit of money with it with Roll of Pennies, right? Finally, the Void Fields/void damage is now incredibly overtuned, making Void Fields essentially impossible for various survivors that happen to lack mobility, like Artificer or Captain, who I might add, is already incredibly nerfed in Void Fields, so going there on certain survivors is guaranteed death.

On the other side, there's a few items that are borderline obscene, the biggest example being Ben's Raincoat. It's a new Legendary(Red) item that prevents you from getting debuffs and increases your max health. The issue that I have with this is that it completely overshadows an item called Blast Shower, which, while generally not useful, I feel that it could be changed to be more useful. If it were to be more useful, there would be no need to have Ben's Raincoat added at all.

~Bugs

The main two bugs I have experienced are a momentum bug where if you fall off of a stage/get pushed off, your momentum will carry over to when you teleport back, which can lead to an infinite loop of falling off of the stage. The second bug is in Simulacrum, a new side gamemode where you're confined to a section of a map for five waves, and then you have to move to a new section for the other half of the map for another five waves, after which, you move to a new map and the cycle is repeated. The bug happens to be with the zone that moves after five waves. The pathing it takes can be atrocious, and at worst, it takes paths that the player cannot take, leading to a death that isn't the player's fault. I have lost a few runs to this bug, and I'm not exactly willing to play this gamemode until this bug is fixed.

There are more than likely other bugs that have popped up for others, but these are the primary ones that I have experienced.

~A Lack of Patch Notes

While part of me feels for the devs for the amount of people dogging/harassing them to release patch notes for this update, I can't help but feel that there should have been notes considering the sheer amount of changes this expansion brought. So many things were changed and sometimes I can't tell if something was changed or not. My hope is that they release patch notes at some point, but I'm not holding out hope for them to do so.

But I will say, please do not harass the developers for not releasing patch notes. Doing so is not going to make them release them any faster, if at all, and you're only going to make their job much harder to do.

~Void Seeds/Void Elites

I want to make this its own section, since talking about it in the gameplay/balance section would have taken up too much space.

Void Seeds are areas of the map that have been corrupted by the void, and in order to cleanse that section, you have to kill Void Elites and the parasites that corrupted them, as well as any regular void enemies that happened to spawn from the seed.

The main problem I have with this is that finding/killing all of the enemies required to collapse the seed is obnoxious. There's no way to properly find and locate all of the enemies that are keeping the seed there, so an enemy could just hide itself across the map from you and you won't be able to locate them, making it far too much effort to make dealing with the seed worthwhile. The biggest issue with this comes down to the fact that in some cases, you have to deal with the seed in order to make it to the teleporter safely, since the seeds can spawn on the teleporter. Another issue is that sometimes you can spawn into a stage in a seed, which in a lot of cases, will lead to instant death.

The second half of this issue comes down to Void Elites, which are enemies corrupted by void parasites. When you're hit by a Void Elite, you're given a stack of collapse, which deals 400% damage after the debuff wears off. If you're hit more than once, you're given an amount of stacks equal to the amount of times you were hit, which can lead to instant death if you're unfortunate enough to be in an open area with a Void Stone Titan. The debuff on players deals far too much damage, since only two or three stacks is enough to kill a player at early stages of the game, which can happen quite often if you're as unlucky as me.

Another thing about Void Elites is that they can be created from your own allies/drones, which, depending on what was corrupted, can lead to instant death as well. Squid Polyp is now actively detrimental because of this, since it can one-shot you if one of the turrets gets corrupted, as are various other drones/ally AI.

~In Closing

As much as I want to like/keep playing with this expansion, these issues are keeping me from doing so. I'm hopeful that they will, since the devs seem to be listening/taking feedback and are actively working on a patch to address the issues that have arisen from this update. Sadly, the release version of this expansion has shown that they needed more time to work on it before it was released, as there are problems that make playing the game extremely frustrating.

For now, I cannot recommend purchasing/playing with this expansion until some of/all of these issues are addressed/fixed.

The core of the game is very good, although the movement feels too slippery. The level design is overall good, but the main thing that makes me not recommend this game is the enemy placement. It feels extremely lazy and cheap, and a lot of the time there's going to be an enemy or two hiding right behind a doorway, or somewhere where you can't initially see them when you look around. When it comes to large open areas, it feels like they just slap a bunch of enemies around the area and call it a day. Is it challenging? Yes, but I wouldn't say for the right reasons.

If they can make the enemy placements/engagements better overall, I will change my review, but with the current state of combat encounters, I cannot recommend this game.

I backed this game on Kickstarter years ago with sixty dollars, and that choice has been haunting me for two years now, since we haven't recieved any updates about development or anything else from the team. Development is almost certainly dead, which really hurts, given that this game had so much potential.

TL;DR - Be smart about what you back on Kickstarter, because sometimes it may end up like this. Don't be me, be smart.

God help us all.