Shadows of Change is a disappointment from top to bottom. Whether it is the price increase to that of a fully fleshed out race pack for only a few new units and a few legendary lords, the numerous bugs both unfixed and newly introduced, or the tone-deaf statement from CA that says 'buy it, or we will pull support', it is hard to find many things redeeming about this DLC.

You can tell the changeling was the lord that received the most care and attention. As detailed later, many of Cathay's reworked mechanics are either lackluster or do not work as intended. As a lord, Yuan Bo also has several issues denoted in the bugs section.

Kislev is missing Ungol units and replaced them with units that, in lore, have no connection to Kislev. Furthermore, we have no lore of hags as a magic type or hag lord, so your armies are being led by Boyars instead of the proper lord. Truly a missed opportunity, in my opinion. The Kislev rework is also very disappointing and does not deal with many of the underlying endemic issues that Kislev deals with as a faction. Why does the new lord start in Dark Elf territory? This is not explained either and is not loreful.

Several of the units in this 'premium' DLC also feel like pay-to-win. One of the big surprises from the DLC launch announcement is that CA has multiple playtesters. If CA does have an actual QA team, how come the bugs listed below is so extensive?

New maps don't work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROM8NihNomQ&t=609s&ab_channel=LegendofTotalWar

Yuan Bo can't hit single entities and sometimes gets stuck in dragon form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QxbKeAStow

The cockatrice had the attack move bug (CA has said this has been fixed many times with other units):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KdHzad5ij4&ab_channel=HumanBoyYesYes

The new battle AI has been lobotomized:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iE0BknWbeQ&t=1195s&ab_channel=OnePitchMan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIJe4If50F0

Rice paddy maps still lowering FPS despite being 'fixed'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLzgdaKKaTk

Kairos still has the old changing of the ways on his skill line, Beastmen red line skills do not enhance their new units. The new war drum unit also has issues with its animations. I could go on.

These are just the bugs we know about right now. Who knows what else we will find?

All in all, this DLC is a disappointment. I have bought every DLC and game up to this point, CA, and I will not be purchasing any more DLCs, games or other products from you further.

What TWW3 needs is a custodian team to give regular, meaningful fixes to the game in between DLCs and proper funding to the development team so that the content matches the price. My opinion of the game is that it is stagnating and not getting better.

Even one of TWW3 greatest supporters is tired of your BS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YduCOrbzHTA

CA, please listen to your community and do better; you are rapidly losing all the goodwill this community has given you all these years. I am predicting Pharaoh and especially Hyenas will not do well; please focus your attention on your one profitable product.

Dead Space is a game series I have many fond memories of growing up. I 100%ed the previous games on my Xbox 360 and was pleased to hear of a remake that was faithful to the original. The remake of Dead Space is imperfect, and I have serious underlying concerns about optimization. However, they did a relatively good job recreating what made this game great overall. It took me 49 hours to 100% this rendition of Dead Space through three runs.

First, the good. The game is recreated faithfully for the most part. The weapons and upgrades are, as you remember, with a much-improved upgrade system so you do not waste power nodes. I appreciated that. The puzzles and changes to the game are familiar enough to veterans while changed up enough to still provide a challenge on higher difficulties. The marker pieces and alternate ending were a nice touch and added more depth to the story. The side quests also stand out to me as well done. Sometimes, backtracking in games can seem monotonous, but getting the master override, finding all the recordings, tracking down all the upgrades and unlocking new details about a familiar story were some of the highlights of my first run. If you do everything as I did, one run should take you 12-16 hours if you are getting everything.

Now the not-so-good. My PC can run Resident Evil 4 Remake fine at 60fps. I can run any of my other 4000+ games smoothly as well. Dead Space Remake is the first game in recent memory that I own that has massive stuttering issues, whether on my desktop or laptop computer. Keeping a consistent frame rate is a challenge. I bought this game for some other friends as well, and they have the same problem. Even sticking this game on an NVME SSD does not eliminate the stutters when going from area to area. The additional traversal stuttering seems to happen at random, though I have found deleting and recompiling the shaders does help, at least for a while. Both of my PCs are well above recommended specs, and my friends have even better PCs than I do, yet they still have the same issue.

I bought this game after a few patches and thought it might have been fixed, but it has not. More worrying is how there has not been a patch for a long time. Why is this game so poorly optimized? Has development stopped, as rumours say? These are some concerns I have. I hope it gets fixed.

Also, I don't particularly appreciate how this game has become another front in the culture wars. Were the changes to the female characters necessary? Did we have to have characters expressing their sexuality multiple times during the story as well? The answer is a resounding no. Neither were necessary additions and take away from the immersion and overall experience. I game to escape from all the politics in real life; please keep classic, loved franchises like Dead Space politics-free.

Shame on EA for what they did to Visceral. Shame on Motive for delivering a product like this.

Overall I give this game a 7/10. It would be an 8.5 if needless politics were not injected into it, and it was better optimized. I hope the devs fix the issues so that this game can truly give players the experience they deserve. At the current price point, with the issues I have mentioned, I would only recommend die-hard fans buy the game. Wait for a sale.

TLDR: I think the game still needs some optimization work. The framerate on some levels drops as low as 10 from 60 during the enemy turn in particular. I have a suspicion this is Denuvo related. Further, even for minor wounds, the wound recovery time is way too long and needs to be balanced better. I have had some at 40+ days for minor wounds. This means you cannot use the same character and build them up as per the RPG element of the game. The audio in-game is very good, but not outside of it. The story doesn't make much sense lore-wise either. So while the author is, in my opinion, qualified, I am left wondering if it was double-checked by somebody more familiar with the lore? The interactions between the Imperial factions stand out to me as lore-breaking in particular.

Special mention to the outrageous price for two items, one character and all the twitch loot you can get by watching streamers for hours on end. I think they need a better marketing department, to be honest. Charging people so much for things that should be in the base game is not acceptable.

Full review:

Do you like X-COM? Do you like 40k? On paper, this should be the game for you.

Overall the gameplay is good, though wound recovery time needs balancing. 40+ days for minor wounds isn't acceptable. I mention this as even weapons that lore-wise would damage Aegis Armour rarely do so regularly. This would be forgivable if wound recovery did not take so long. Some of the abilities that show up at random are either useless or absurdly powerful. Due to being randomized, they often affect mission outcomes greatly. Imagine fighting through a mission that was super hard, only to know you likely have to reload and hope that ability does not spawn again. This is incredibly frustrating. Otherwise, I think the game is very good; though I'm not too fond of cover being up to 100%, I think it should be capped at 80-90%.

Sound-wise, the voices and battle sounds are great. Honestly, they are some of the best I have seen from a 40k game. Outside of battles, minus the voice acting, it is subpar. This takes away from the immersiveness of the setting. I had hoped for better.

Story-wise, I think several missions come across as filler and do not contribute meaningfully to the story in any way. When you have the Inquisitor, Astropath and other characters written so well, it sucks having to grind through meaningless missions that do not contribute overall. Dawn of War 2 at least had missions that were grindy, but there was a purpose overall to do them. Here it feels like you get a small reward, but that is all. I would like to see that improved. The interactions between the Imperial factions also needs to be improved as well.

Performance-wise, it can be all over the place. My system is high-end, so getting frame rates as slow as 10 on the enemy's turn is not great and takes away from gameplay. I note this only happens on some maps, whereas others are near perfect 60 across the board. I would hope the developers optimize it some more and hopefully remove Denuvo.

Finally, one cannot neglect to mention the marketing team deciding to make players watch over 10 twitch streams for items. Who thought that was a great idea? Further, the items + characters in the special edition could have easily been included in the base game. Neither adds anything meaningful to the experience, as far as I can tell.

In conclusion, I would give this game a 7 overall, but it is a 6 due to the crappy marketing and value for DLC proposition. I hope the devs know that this would be a solid game with more optimization. Perhaps market it better next time? Buy it on sale.

EDIT: The Devs were kind enough to give the community the twitch items in an upcoming update. I am bumping my overall score to 6.5/10. It is good to see devs listening to the community. Now please remove Denuvo.