Останні рецензії користувача Daerel

After having lots of fun with the Borderlands 2 campaign and some of the DLCs, my friend and I were very excited about Borderlands 3. Not excited enough to pay full price for it mind you, but the kind of excitement where you look forward to a Steam Sale. When that Steam Sale finally came, we were more than happy to dive into Borderlands again. However, our playthrough was plagued with big enough problems, that I’m considering never playing a Borderlands game again. Beware of spoilers for the rest of the review.

First, let’s talk about the story, cause it’s a gigantic mess:
The story follows a group of new Vault Hunters and their quest to stop two evil streamer twins from bringing about the end of the universe. It starts ok-ish: You are on Pandora (yes again) and there are some cultists (or more accurate wasteland twitch viewers) that need killing. You meet a bunch of characters from the previous games to support you on that quest.

The first time we had that ugly feeling that my enjoyment of the game was about to nosedive was when we prepared to leave the planet: The Pandora portion of the game had been described as “a pretty bad part of the game” immediately followed up by “just stick with it it gets much better afterward” by multiple friends and so that was our attitude in that section. Finally, the “good part” was about to start when we readied our spacecraft to start. Following that was a cutscene in which Lilith, who’s a pretty powerful “magic user” in the setting, was utterly defeated by the twins, while we, the supposed protagonists, apparently stood still behind a closed door.

Things didn’t get much better from there. Imagine a DnD campaign if you will, where every time something important happens, the DM throws the figurines of his players off the map, only acting out the scenes with his favorite NPCs and you have pretty much the experience of a typical Borderlands 3 cutscene. In the world of the story, the player seems to suddenly disappear, frozen in inaction, ignored by friends and foes alike, and even becoming truly incorporeal in some of the later scenes. And while the player characters are frozen in that state the villains get free reign over everything. It feels like winning the fight but losing in the cutscene, not because the foe had some trick up their sleeves, but rather because the characters decided it was time for a lunch break.

This, combined with a story that isn’t interesting in itself, resulted in absolute indifference to anything happening in the plot.

But only idiots care about the story in a looter shooter, so what about gameplay? Well, it is the game that tried its hardest to put me to sleep, indeed the biggest struggle I faced during gameplay was keeping my eyes open.

Because the gameplay is exactly this: You enter a new area, enemies spawn, you kill them, you search through their loot, and you move on to the next area. The guns feel good to shoot but you never have to use any tactics, never need to dodge, never need to think, never communicate with your partner, it feels like you are playing on autopilot after a while. After the first few planets, I struggled to keep my eyes open during combat. Bosses are mostly the same, with exception of the final boss, which at least has the mechanic of climbing on it for easy crits, all the others died within 30 seconds to 2 minutes of combat of just walking in circles and keeping the shoot button pressed.
You could use the Mayhem system after the main campaign to provide mechanical challenge, but we both felt no desire to do so. Challenge in the main campaign is what we wanted after all.

Last but not least: Cosmetics and DLC implantation: Cosmetics started promising enough, there wasn’t a lot to buy, but some were pretty neat and we were sure that more interesting cosmetics would unlock as the game progressed. They do not. What you see at the start is pretty much what was available for purchase at the end. We did find some cosmetics in the wild, but nothing as good as the starting cosmetics we already purchased and most of them were for characters we weren’t even playing. Then again why even bother with cosmetics if the player characters never appear in a cutscene?

The DLC implantation is complete garbage. After we played through a series of middling to awful DLCs in Borderlands 2 we vowed to only buy DLCs if we liked the main game enough. But unbought DLCs show up as quest markers in the game, covering the entire ship in quest markers, that just stay there. It is by no means game-breaking but it is a constant annoyance. Judging from the reviews most of the DLCs aren’t worth the cost so we dodged a bullet there.

A brilliant game that is more than it first appears to be. If you have any interest in card games I highly recommend playing this one.

Originally I thought about buying this game when it launched but was convinced otherwise by some bad reviews following the release.
I should have stuck with that, but instead decided to buy it at discount for me and my friends Lovecraft evening on Saturdays.

The game starts promising enough with you entering the city of Oakmont and some decent storytelling surrounding the murder of a member of the city elite. We had lots of fun in this first section and while we were constricted to the small section within the city harbor the game seemed flawed but ultimately decent.

Unfortunately, after this section, our opinion of the game continued to drop until we finally reached the end.

The city itself is the first reason for its ultimate demise. I was under the impression that it would be a mysterious place, sparsely populated after the calamity that had befallen it, with some survivors either trapped or too stubborn to leave. However, the game seems to spawn people in front of you wherever you go, the barricaded "dangerous areas" being the one exception where the streets are truly abandoned. While there are quite a lot of different kinds of Oakmont residents, with different clothes depending on the district, you will see so many people/twins strolling around at once that you wonder if anyone actually died in the cataclysm.
The buildings themselves are another disappointment. In the beginning, we were following a side quest leading us around big parts of the first district to gather notes about some weird occurrences that happened there.
Here we happened to notice that most of the buildings are just copy-pastes of each other, with just some furniture moved around. Later we learned that this was not only the case for side content but the main content as well. Not even the impressive villa of the most powerful family of the city gets a different treatment, its clone is just on the opposite side of the street. And why do we need three nearly identical bars, when one interesting one would have sufficed?

The next problem is the game’s story: I don’t think it’s very compelling.
In their effort to have as much Lovecraft in the game as possible, a trap that a lot of Lovecraft games seem to fall into, the story ultimately feels very generic and barely worth your time. They go as far as having a gang called “the yellow kings”, whose leader messes with you for no other reason than to be mysterious. The related quest is a gigantic waste of everyone’s time, its main purpose is apparently the statement: “Isn’t Hastur mysterious and weird?”.
“Giant waste of time” is a reappearing theme within the game’s story, with many decisions being made by the time the game finally ends being entirely or at least in part pointless except maybe for roleplay reasons. Do you kill this guy or his son? Does it change anything significant going forward? Not really, but hey one seems to be kind of a ♥♥♥♥ so you might as well. Do you side with the obvious Dagon cultists or with the dude causing a bunch of collateral damage? Well even if you side with the cultist, which by the way due to a bug was the only option for us, the alliance lasts for an entire staircase before ending in gunfire.
Here less would have been more: Have fewer choices but have them make a bigger impact.

Good gameplay can balance out a mediocre story, but here the game fails again. The gunplay is absolutely dreadful and unresponsive. With every mouse click for a shot, the game takes 1 ½ seconds to decide if you actually fire your gun. This, combined with the need to craft most of your ammunition, makes you waste a lot of your bullets just shooting walls or the floor.
Frequent combat is indeed a problem in itself, while the creatures, even the non-aggressive vermin in the street, were interesting, even scary, at the beginning of the game, the game pushes combat on you during every quest making them very unthreatening and boring after a while. The typical case goes like this:
First, you are given some sort of hint of how to proceed, the solution being to travel to one of the many “archives” in the city, for example, the newspaper archive or the city hall, going to the desk with the symbol and matching the story with categories like time, people and places. While this may sound fine at first remember that you will have to do this at least once per quest just with different desks and categories. Even the most interesting “archive” in the game, the library, is just another place for the matching desk and the changing categories don’t make up for the frequent visits.
After that, you will receive a clue that the place you are looking for is in Lovecraft street, between Yellow King road and Arthur Jermyn lane. You look at your map, mark the spot and begin your travel.
The travel takes you through streets being entirely populated by twins, canals that are entirely safe as long as you stay on your boat, which will always spawn on the nearest shore, and maybe some “danger zones” where monsters exist. You don’t need to engage with the monsters as there is more than enough time to loot some of the area’s chests and then just climb over the nearest barricade. In fact in my experience actually fighting the beasts is just a waste of bullets as the whole area doesn’t give you enough resources to make up for the tedium of combat and the bullets wasted.
When you make it to your goal look for the one door marked with signs and enter. Once you take a few steps you can hear the maddening sound of non-optional combat. After you fought through however many enemies spawned from the ground, keep in mind that this is neither fun nor rewarding, you will then interact with clues in the room. We once got stuck because we missed a bottle in a corner of the room that added no additional information, so you have to be very thorough. Then you will enter “spooky vision” where your piece together which of the shown scenes happened first. This normally results in the next clue, rinse and repeat until you get to the decision of who you want to kill this time.

If you are particularly unlucky part of your quest will involve “underwater fun time”, where you dive with your diving suit. Even disregarding that the same cutscenes play every time (who thought that this would be a good idea?) “underwater fun time” is where the game shows how bad things can be. The ground is littered with small geysers, your movement is even more unresponsive than during combat, making it hard to avoid the damage. Climbing up rocks is a nightmare, especially if there are geysers nearby, as it’s hard to judge what part of the climb is just for show and which one is the one you actually need to climb.
Underwater combat at least gives you infinite ammunition and it works a lot smoother. This may be because the game doesn’t need to calculate damage because shooting a monster only stuns it for a short time before it will follow you again. So it would be a good idea to look behind you while you sprint away if your way here hadn’t taught you about the geysers.
I would have loved for those underwater walks to just being mysterious sections of the game without enemies, where you take in the sunken parts of the titular Sinking City and wonder what the strange shape in the distance is and whose tentacles are waving over there. Sadly it wasn’t meant to be and so underwater is like land but worse.

It’s no wonder then, that even finishing the game is worth a golden achievement, but that seems to go for a lot of later quests. I was hoping for it to all be worth it in the end, having an ending that would either leave us with some dread about the cosmic horror lurking between the stars or at least be so bad that it would be entertaining. As the 5-second ending cutscene played we realized that this was neither, just disappointment.

TLDR: I didn’t like it very much. Neither the story nor the gameplay nor the city itself wowed me and our excitement about this game dropped at every turn.

Easily my favourite XCOM game for the following reasons:
+Named characters with background stories and all that goof stuff instead of self created ones
+Alien teammates
+Enjoyable police task force story in the XCOM world post Advent
+Small seperate encounters instead of a gigantic map
+Interesting alien factions
+It's neither too short, nor too long

-The game isn't very stable, it crashed at least once every hour (only game to do that for me ever) even without any mods.
-Some maps do repeat and I found those to be the least fun ones of the bunch
-Most weapons are upgradable / have some epic variant, but somehow that doesn't apply to Zephyrs fist weapons. So even though she was my favourite character her damage was really low in comparison in the endgame. I fixed that with a mod but I shouldn't really have to.

A truly wonderful game. Everything I expected a tactical game about the Adeptus Mechanicus to be and more. The sound design deserved an extra praise as it is simply superb, just the sounds of the Tech-Priest talking alone gave me chills.

Endlich ein Ds, was mir so gut wie das Erste gefällt. Nachdem ich nach dem Zweiten eigentlich nie wieder DS spielen wollte habe mich dann irgendwann doch selbst dazu überredet es "zumindest mal zu versuchen".
Das Ergebnis war überraschend gut: Schöne Level, schöne Waffen/Rüstungen und endlich wieder (im Gegensatz zu Ds2) interessante Bosse.
Kurzum: Das richtige Dark Souls 1 Feeling ist wieder da! Man hat Einige der wenigen guten Sachen von Ds2 übernommen und damit eine sehr gute Kombination geschaffen mit der ich sehr zufrieden bin.
Dass die letzten 2 Bosskämpfe jedesmal ein komplettes Hochheilen des Bosses enthielten fand ich jetzt weniger geil, aber es war noch im ertragbaren Bereich^^
Der Port ist dem von Ds1 übrigens meilenweit voraus und bis auf ein paar Netzwerkfehler und einige andere wenige Bugs habe ich deswegen von der technischen Seite nichts zu bemängeln.
Von mir also eine klare Empfehlung für Neulinge sowohl Ds2 Enttäuschte.

Vorteile: Das Spiel gibt einem ein tolles Space Hulk Gefühl und vermittelt allgemein eine tolle Atmosphäre
Nachteile: Das Spiel ist komplett verbuggt: Vom Tutorial bis hin in fast alle Kampagnen sind nette Bugs anzutreffen, die es unmöglich machen das Spiel weiter zu spielen. Durch ein Durchlesen der Foren wurde mir klar, dass es sich hierbei um bekannte Probleme handelt, die aber nicht gepatcht werden, da sich das Entwickler Team aufgelöst hat, es gibt anscheinend einen einzigen DEV, der das Spiel ab und zu patcht, aber die Effektivität seiner Arbeit ist sehr suboptimal. Da die Kampagnen den Hauptteil des Spiels ausmachen und nicht spielbar sind bzw. nur in sehr begrenztem Maße, ist das Spiel insgesamt nicht spielbar. Heißt also: KAUFT ES EUCH AUF KEINEN FALL!