Recent reviews by benbit

Very fun especially with friends

Early Early Access Review:

Manor Lords is a great game for people who like City/Base Builder Survival type games. It's like a mix between games like Banished, a little Anno and majorly Tropico with a combat system similar to Total War, albeit a bit more simple. Being a huge fan of all the mentioned titles, this game is right up my alley.

In the 20 hours I've played so far, I've had a ton of fun and I can confidently say that the game has the potential to be one of the best games in this genre. It's highly engaging, immersive and just fun to play.

That said, the game is very very early in development in my opinion. There are many issues in the current version that plague core systems and gameplay which detract from the experience in major ways. Things don't work as they should, QOL isn't very good, the balancing is questionable and a lot of things don't fully click yet. The game is currently most lacking in content and depth though. After 15 hours you've pretty much seen everything there is and there aren't many reasons to keep playing for now.

In my opinion, the future of the game depends heavily on how well, how much and how fast the dev can expand on the bones he has built already. Being a semi solo dev, this might not be too easy of a task.

From a technical perspective the game is much more advanced than your typical early access or even full release nowadays. Performance on decent hardware is very good, although older and weaker systems may struggle a little. There aren't a ton of bugs and I've never experienced any crashing.

If you manage your expactations and look forward to the continued development of the game, I can recommend buying it right now. If you want to have a more fleshed out and polished experience, I would wait probably at least until the end of the year if not longer.

Fun but unfinished.

Overall I really do enjoy my time with the game, especially playing with friends. The base mechanics and gameplay loop of the current version are relatively well thought out and provide good incentives to keep playing. Having a fully malleable world in a survival game is a great feature. The survival mechanics are fairly standard but work ok and cooperative play works very well and rewards players for playing together. That said, there are also lots of design, quality of life and technical problems with the game.

First up, the performance and optimisation is horrible. Even running on a high end system, fps drops below 30 during horde nights and isn't great in other situations either. For looking like a game that was made 10 years ago and not having any other resource intensive features, framerates like these are unacceptable and show either a lack of competence or care regarding optimisation. The game is straight up unplayable during horde nights because you cannot aim anymore with all the lag.

Some mechanics like inventory management are extremely tedious and simple qol features that have been added by the community ages ago via mods would help immensely.

One of my major gripes is how the game feels well over 10 years old. Especially if you compare it to similarly aged survival games like Rust or The Forest that have actually seen major modernisations and development. It feels clunky, dated and unpolished and the devs are constantly changing major features instead of finally focussing on finishing up the game or getting it up to semi modern standards. Working on a project for 10 years get's messier and messier. It would be better to finally release and start fresh with a new game on a current engine and current standards. Not even mentioning how this is completely undermining the concept of early access which should honestly not be allowed by valve.

In the end, the game is still fun to play, so I'd still recommend it.

Great core gameplay but everything else is terrible:

- poor UI
- bad progression system that forces you into playstyles while giving 0 XP for regular gameplay
- worse skill system than payday 1 & 2
- no server browser
- no offline mode
- forced matchmaking
- no way to kick players
- no proper pre planning phase and no way to communicate with teammates during it
- not a lot of content
- CONSTANT SERVER OUTAGE FOR 2 DAYS AFTER RELEASE - LITERALLY NOT PLAYABLE

Decent gameplay but clearly unfinished and lacking polish.

+ Decent mechanics
+ Good difficulty
+ Decent amount of content

- Poor graphics
- Poor performance
- Poor input
- Lots and lots of smaller and larger bugs
- General lack of polish in mechanics (stone spawns, animal spawns and behaviour, inventory management, no real difference between weapon materials, etc.)
- Very basic building mechanics compared to similar games

Lots of potential but not much of it is realised. Feels like a game in early access.

Not going to talk about any pay2win controversy since that is likely to change. The game itself is insanely fun, easily the most fun I've had with a fps game in years. The gunplay and movement feels rewarding while still offering a great skill curve and skill gap. No or light SBMM in casual mode also makes for a really enjoyable experience and that's the main thing about this game: It's just plain fun. You can play it layed back, you can sweat or do anything in between. It's always enjoyable, even if you get destroyed by the enemy team. My main gripe with the game are some of the mobile suits, especially Barbatos and both shield characters, which I find annoying and not very skill based. Some maps could also use some more flanking routes. Otherwise really happy with the game right now and can definitely recommend checking it out even if you're typically not into games like this.

Wait at least 1-6 months before you even consider buying this game. This is in a worse state than even BF4 at release.

Update#1 after 100 hours:

The game has marginally improved some of it's bugs but neither missing content nor community requested """legacy""" features have made it into the game. Most major flaws like bad map design, 128 players, horrible performance, hitreg, mouse input, specialists and more are also yet to be adressed. While both rush and 64 player Conquest and Breakthrough have been added, they're planned to be only temporary, repeating one of the biggest mistakes DICE made during BFV's lifecycle.

Currently I would advise against buying the game for another few months.

Update#2 after 165 hours:

3 months after release and we haven't seen any major improvements to the game. Other than small bugfixes, absolutely nothing has changed and there's no salvation in sight: The first season has been delayed to "early summer" and no real timeline for updates has been given. The community is both furious and dying off at an alarming rate. Even negative opinions are getting rarer since people just lost any crumb of interest there was left in this game. If the season 1 update isn't basically a full relaunch including major design changes, even the most resilient people are going to leave the sinking ship.

As usual, I would advise against buying the game for another few months at least until season 1 launches.

Update#3 after almost 400 hours:

Season 1 was extremely disappointing and has officially set the game on the path of complete death. With only 1 map and 1,5 new guns after over half a year of waiting, this is the lowest amount of support any game in the franchise has received. Even Battlefield 4 which released in an even worse state than 2042 saw 3 full dlcs delivered in this time frame on top of already offering more content and more refined gameplay than 2042. This has set the stage for the coming seasons as well, clearly showing DICE's lack of commitment to the game and the franchise. This game will not and can not recover with this extremly limited support and I would not recommend anyone to buy this if you can't get it for spare change out of pure curiorisity. If you still can, refund it and definitely do not support this studio in any capacity. They have betrayed the community's trust and literally scammed people out of their hard earned money yet again. Don't trust a word out of their mouths, not now and especially not when the marketing drums for the next title inevitably start to sound again.

For people that played and modded the original Skyrim and are considering to buy this:

I had around 250 Mods installed for LE and it ran relatively smoothly with occasional crashes maybe 2 or 3 per session and performance around the 40-60 fps range with a 3700x and a rtx 3070. I decided to switch over to SSE since a lot of new mods were being exclusively released for it and performance seemed better to me. It was a lot of work to install all the new mods and work out the new ways of modding this game but it is worth it in my opinion. In 173 hours of playtime at the time of this review, I had maybe 2 or 3 crashes and pretty much constant 60fps with all kinds of high end graphics mods installed. The stability and performance of the game is pretty remarkable and it can also look better than LE even with the best graphics mods.

I highly recommend switching over from LE if you're still considering it.

Review after first 50 hours

Delay Your Purchase

After 7 years of waiting for this game, it finally arrived. To the surprise of many though, it didn't arrive in the best condition. For anyone that was following CDPR for their last releases this wouldn't have been surprising at all. All the previous Witcher games released in a bad technical and very unpolished state. But as we can see with The Witcher 3, they managed to iron out the kinks and deliver one of the best games of this generation. I firmly believe we are going to see a similar development with Cyberpunk 2077. First up, let's take a look at what makes this game good, and then what makes it such a frustrating experience for people that awaited a perfect game.

+ Great graphics: This game can produce some of the most impressive and scenic graphics in the industry,
rivalling titles like Red Dead Redemption 2. Especially if you can turn on raytracing features the game can
look incredible.
+ Story: The story is expertly crafted, the dialogs are interesting and though provoking, characters
are multilayered and feel very real for game characters, the themes the Cyberpunk genre is famous for are
thoroughly explored while also offering new perspectives on the dystopic future.
+ Quests: While they are often carried by the amazing writing, the quests in this game are still some of the
best in the industry especially considering the size of this game. Each bigger quest feels handmade and has
lots of effort put into it to deliver a small story with interesting gameplay. While they can sometimes get
slightly repetetive gameplay wise, the story makes you overlook this issue easily.
+ Music: The music is very well made and very varied, featuring songs from many different genres and artists.
They fit the setting very well and can help immersion a lot.
+ World: This has to be one of the best looking and most detailed game worlds ever. The city is huge and
perfectly captures the Cyberpunk aesthetic. Nothing seems copy pasted, every corner of the map is
detailed and has lots and lots of character. You can spend hours just walking around the city taking in all
the work that has flown into it.

RPG Mechanics: Don't go in this game expecting a "hardcore" rpg like Kingdom Come Deliverance or a Larian
Game. I would describe this game as an rpg lite action adventure game more akin to games
like Fallout 4. It feels a lot like a mixture between Fallout, The Witcher, GTA, Watchdogs and
Deus Ex. Sadly the game is somewhat lacking in rpg mechanics. Looking at the gameplay:
Skills are often just numerical improvements offering very little motivation beyond an easier
experience to level up and skill. The slews of armor and weapons that get thrown at you feel
very lacking, the only difference is a bit higher stat and maybe a couple mods but that's it.
There's not really specific gear for what class you're trying to play. Now that I mentioned
classes, this is easily one of the biggest negative points here. Initially the game was
supposed to have 3 classes, which is already a huge step down from the original Cyberpunk
pen&paper. During development they decided to scrap another class leaving us with two
choices, stealth or not stealth, that's about it. Sure you can choose what weapons and skill
to use but that barely changes the gameplay. This plays into the larger issue of lack of ROLE
PLAYING. In The Witcher 3 you were role playing AS a character, which is fine and worked
really well. When CDPR deciced to let use customize our character and based the game on a
pen&paper rpg with Cyberpunk 2077 though, this really isn't a good thing. Lifepaths boil
down to giving you one dialogue option that usually doesn't influence much. There's not
much choice in dialogue that allows you to roleplay as a corpo for example. Even though you
are supposed to have been a player in the corpo game living a high class live. You still talk
and behave like a street kid no matter what. The role you are given as a player is that of a
street kid, tough guy mercenary type with no option to really deviate from that role. This
game would have probably been better off without a voiced main character allowing for
more role playing in dialogue.
- Technical State: The game runs badly in any sense of the word. Optimisation is lackluster, the game barely
utilises both gpu and cpu resulting in very bad framerates in certain areas. The community
had to figure out that CDPR didn't bother to use all cores on amd cpus. I'm expecting for
more and more mistakes like this to show up over time. It's not acceptable for this game to
run under 60fps on pcs that are worth thousands of euros.
The bugs are even worse. No 5 minutes pass by without some major bug occuring.
Anything from pop in issues (despite being installed on a high end samsung ssd) to a
nimation problems, to physics problems. The game is riddled with bigger and smaller bugs
that really pull you out of the immersion. It feels like playing a Bethesda game without
community fixes.

- AI: Easily one of the worst points of the game. The AI is quite frankly said ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Games from 20 yearsago
had better AI than this. Cars don't actually seem to have an AI, they simply drive on predetermined
routes, knowing no interaction with the world besides stopping and driving. NPCs on the streets simply
walk around, to only dissapear or pop up as a different looking character plain the players sight. When
you shoot a gun in public and do a 360, all NPCs are gone all of sudden. Other times they just cower on
the ground for minutes in a hundred meter radius because you lightly touched the sidewalk with your
wheel. Early GTA games had better AI than this. This is generations behind 7 year old games like GTAV,
and light years behind games like RDR2. The AI robs so much of this games immersion and makes the
world feel like a facade that quickly crumbles as soon as you poke it a little.
- Interactivity: There is barely any. There are only very little shops, there are no mini games, you can't sit
down on a bench and relax, you can't customize your character beyond clothing, you can't sit
down at a restaurant or food stall and eat. It feels insanely restrictive and makes you painfully
aware that the game world is not real.

Verdict:
This game is very clearly unfinished and was pushed out way too early. It probably needed at least another full year of development. While many aspects and the foundation of the game are simply put amazing, the unfinished and unpolished nature of the game holds it back greatly.
If you want to play the game I'd advise to wait at least one or two months for patches to iron out the biggest bugs and performance issues, or wait until the first dlcs start to roll around.