Recent reviews by b0nes

Let me preface this by saying I love shooters, melee games, ARPGs and Soulslikes.

This game is actually terrible.

Levelling is extremely boring and weird. The enemy count increases a lot while you only get a tiny bit of HP and/or stamina if you choose optimally. The weapons do not deal more damage while levelling, yet the amount of enemies on the screen increase 3-5 fold while their HP also increases.

I had a 'long range' bolt-action rifle and could not do more than 5 damage to enemies far away. Enemies took about 300-600 damage. Consistently shooting headshots up-close with it still required 5 hits to kill most enemies at Level 11/12. What the...

I don't see the point in levelling, nor do I see the point in playing the game at all, with skills and melee on such massive cooldowns and weapons shooting wet noodles.

It honestly just feels like such a huge slog. There's so many weird design choices in progression that it actually makes me feel annoyed just writing this feedback.

Imagine levelling Souls gain 10 times, gaining no character power and like 20% extra Souls gain, while scaling the total enemy HP per map to like 9x. This Souls can then be spent on... Making the game even harder while not gaining any weapon damage? I don't even know what devs were thinking with this weird enemy scaling.

The game itself feels very floaty, slow, arcadey with huge AUDIOVISUAL indicators for enemy attacks.

I don't recommend.

Same stuff that's been put out for many years... Games like Far Cry, Assassins Creed - a world filled with garbage tasks to do to unlock things you should be able to unlock without turning the game into a job. If you enjoy those kinds of mindless games, you might not see this as a negative.

The stories are weirdly timegated and you keep having to travel/explore again to continue it. It's a weird gameplay loop which disengages me from the game. What happens now is I don't finish the game and I keep putting off playing it again because I keep getting disconnected mentally and it's hard to get back in.

Swordplay/combat mechanic-wise, you have to juggle between stances when there's a mix of enemies just feels weird, having to remember the 1-4 buttons and which button corresponds to which enemy.
Otherwise, just spam a bunch of those consumables and everything dies.

Some duels are fun/good though but they are few and far between.

Also, there is an insane amount of visual clutter in the game. Literally constantly crap flying past you/around you. It's really off-putting and ugly. People also talk how visually gorgeous this game is, but I keep seeing smoke from campfires that looks like it came from Half-Life 1. That's also off-putting. Just make everything ugly or everything pretty, not in between.

I went in blind, played the game, the story, gathered the materials, built my build and killed all the bosses and finished all the dungeons. Before I knew it, I spent (apparently) a 100 hours and had fun while doing so.

Progress is gated through 'Starchrom', and weekly timings. That's annoying. It does give you a reason to sign in again the next week, I guess. For the more die-hard gamers with lots of time, you'll be bored quickly in this game. There's a thing called 'controllers' that you use to get full loot from a boss or dungeon. If you don't have any controllers, you get no loot. So progress is not only time gated but also simply limited by the maximum amount of controllers that you can get.

Right now, I don't have a reason to sign in anymore though. Wealth/farming means nothing in this game. I am sitting on a boatload of 'money' (Energy Links) that nobody cares about. So I'd say the current longevity is quite limited compared to some other games, but 100h for a free game is still a good deal.

I haven't seen any p2w mtx.
Try it, if you don't like it, you lost nothing.

tl;dr: Very tedious, repetitive, slow grind.

The days take a lot of time with really nothing interesting happening.
Income is slow. I priced everything +10% market price as the game told me and experimented with different values. It's still slow going.
You have to buy licenses that are very expensive compared to your income stream, to even be able to expand the shop with 'fun' new items.
Honestly, it feels like an idle game with how slow it is, but you have to tediously take care of every single transaction.
There is nothing idle about it, unfortunately.
Your main gameplay loop will be opening packs that you don't give a **** about while looking at the bottom right corner for a 1/500 chance of getting a >$100 card, or turning into a cashier while manually giving change to customers that are barely worth your time. Sometimes customers would buy something worth $3.40 and they bring $20 and you have to take care to give them the correct change for that small amount of profit.

This happened so often that I can't help but feel like the game does not respect anyone's time, unless they love spending their time working, of course.

I reached level 9 before giving up and writing this review. If I have this many negative thoughts before being able to automate the checkout, I'm sorry but I simply cannot recommend the game.

I guess for its intended target audience, the game is fine for what it is. But to me, it's simply super boring.

Me and my friend enjoy playing new titles together, especially games in this genre.
We have played our fair share of them and think we have a fair understanding of what is out there and what is possible.

I'll say it upfront: this game has been released too early - It's TOO Early Access. I cannot recommend it in its current state. There is a lot of content missing and it's just plain boring. To be fair, if you need something that is extremely low dopamine/input because you're exhausted IRL, this would be a game for you.

Pros:
- Graphics are OK
- Theme has a lot of potential
- Can craft from surrounding chests

Cons:
- Gameplay is bland
- Quests are bland
- Walking simulator through blandness with the caveat that the monotony is broken by hunting for 3-star carcasses
- The upgrade/progression system is absolutely silly. You can oftentimes skip entire tiers if you had certain knowledge beforehand and get the best gear in the game.
- No challenge. The aforementioned gear is not needed, as there is no enemy diversity nor density so no use for the gear, no dopamine hit.
- The stamina loop is just extremely tedious after a couple of hours. No matter which potions or food, it's just boring.
- The powers you get are cool on paper, but boring in execution. You fly and it feels 'empty'. There's also no reason to have them. For example, it would be cool if you actually needed to proficiently use the flying/dashing/aerial attacks to be able to even beat enemies.
- Crafting/refineries need a proper inventory system. I cannot remove ore from a smelter. I cannot change what ore I put in, it's dependent on what I'm carrying. This part especially just feels lazily coded/thrown together to get the game out of the door and grab some cash.
- No inventory expansion that we could find.
- Terrible, terrible QoL. There is a stack button now - that literally doesn't do anything and has no purpose. There is no inventory sorting, no auto stack to surrounding chests. We tediously, manually managed and sorted all our items.
- Not enough content to justify the price, we did not play quickly AT ALL and finished all the quests we could find in about 12h. This means I paid more than the golden rule of 1eu/1h spent in-game.
- Third island not accessible, no boss fights.

Note that this review is not bashing on the devs or the game. I am simply stating what we have observed, what can be improved and why I would not recommend the 'game' in its current state.

Door-budging simulator.

We played this at our LAN party. One of the best games we've played and the most fun we've had in a long time. Highly recommend for that purpose.

For purely online play with randoms, I cannot necessarily recommend it at this time due to the low amount of people online.

Edited for the third time. What a rollercoaster... Apparently Sony has removed the game from Steam from 150+ countries, because of PSN link not being available there.

Absurd. An insult to gamers, to Steam and to Arrowhead.

Do not support Sony by buying this and leave a negative review until this non-sense stops.

Edit: Finally, Sony decided to not continue with the PSN acount linking. But for how long? I don't know.

Updating my review:
The game is fantastic, I can heartily recommend it. Best co-op fun I've had in a long time.

Game feels hollow and soulless. Like a mobile game.

It is actually a great game.

It is quite quick to beat though - I usually expect an hour of entertainment for every euro I spent. I pretty much did everything in 18 hours on Hard.

There is one item that is quite OP, and that is the thing that gives you extra damage upon killing an enemy. There were multiple points in the game where I 2-3 shot a boss.

Luckily, this doesn't apply to the final boss so at least he took some hits to die.

I wish there was an unlock after beating the game: a way to customize your own builds. Choose your weapon and tarot cards for the floor and see how funky you can get.

But I understand why that's not in the game.