Recent reviews by LumaLivy

It's... A game. Sadly doesn't stack up very well against others in the "survivor" genre. Almost 2 hours into the game and 6-7 runs and there is no sense of becoming more powerful or unlocking anything fun.

All the guns so far just have a variation of the same bullet projectile. You have to waste a run leveling them to the point where you unlock overclocks for them, because those overclocks won't appear until the next run. Balancing is very bad, it takes way too much time to kill bugs even when focusing damage upgrades, meta progression is too small to matter as other reviews have pointed out.

The game is at odds with itself. You're supposed to mine minerals to get meta upgrades, or gold and nitra to buy upgrades between floors. Doing the supply pod event gives you some fairly worthless upgrades. Doing anything but fighting and xp grabbing wastes your extremely limited time on each floor. Same for the bonus objectives, by floor 3 or 4 they're barely worth half an XP level and you've spent the entire time conjuring up a floor full of bugs that you haven't been attacking while gathering things, and you get overwhelmed. If you instead focus entirely on fighting bugs, you end up having to kite massive hoards around to get your XP back, because they're too spongy to shoot through, which is super punishing because you only spend a few minutes on each floor. You might only get one lap in before the boss spawns. The moment the boss spawns, it stays stuck right to you and you're practically forced to kill it, which triggers a 30 seconds timer to leave. The timer is so short that you practically have to drop whatever you're doing and suicide run to the drop pod. Goodbye leftover materials, goodbye big XP pools.

It's impossible to do everything at once comfortably, that the game demands from you. You're just left unsatisfied no matter what you invest time in during a run. Need to mine? You need digging speed upgrades. Now you're short on the already abysmal damage upgrades. Need to damage enemies? Kite enemy hoards to try and grab the xp behind them, and now you get trapped in a bad peninsula of void surrounding you kiting enemies and can't escape at the edges and die because digging is too slow.

It is a bad feeling that your only significant DPS is baiting exploders into chain blowing up a hoard of bugs, and then when the dust settles there's still dozens of praetorians that didn't die, and you can't grab all the XP from the dead grunts without dying or having to kite again. Oh, there's another swarm approaching. Never mind.

This game needs major overhauls to be fun. It feels like an approximation of a survivor game without understand what makes them fun. At launch, I sadly cannot recommend it.

I don't have a lot of playtime yet but I do feel like I've formulated a pretty good idea of what the game is about after going in completely blind (I beat the first key holding boss as of this review). I also received this game as a birthday gift (thank you!!)

To keep things short up front, this game is a love letter to exploration games like zelda while making use of the fromsoft souls formula for a lot of the game's mechanics, in a stripped down way. There are pros and cons to this. The world keeps you wanting to explore for no reason other than "I wonder what lies ahead?" This will be very familiar to fans of souls games, and you may find yourself right at home.

Now, for the long part. A lot is subjective person-to-person so I'll lay out the more prominent things I experienced.

The game has an obscured language that slowly reveals itself as you discover pages of the lost instruction manual. It very much starts out feeling like you're playing a foreign untranslated game and you have to guess and experiment with how items work, and there are many hidden mechanics you'll have to puzzle out yourself. There have already been a few instances where I had to return to an area later because an obscure mechanic or puzzle solution was hidden and only hinted at in a page of the instruction manual found much later. And by obscure, I don't mean hints about a puzzle you could brute force, I mean arbitrarily obscure. As in, hold a random button for 5 seconds in a specific place so something will happen. Spoilers: You can tell the one that annoyed me the most is the prayer mechanic that moves the big pillars and allows fast travel on the golden plates. It is fine on its own but felt entirely random and came out of nowhere.

The combat is really tough and took some getting used to because it is clunky at times. Not DS1 clunky, but actual clunky. Enemies hit like a truck in the early game when you have nothing but a stick and no hp upgrades. Sometimes the lock on makes you strafe instead of rotate to face the enemy. There is little telegraphing in enemy attacks because of the basic art style, save for some of the sword enemies. The big problem though, is the enemies don't really scale up too much once you find the items that make it easier to fight them (getting the shield and wand makes fighting encounters WAY smoother, to the point of trivializing them). This is also not a souls game where dodge rolling is king; in fact I only use the dodging to reposition because of the poor iframes. It's more reliable to focus on positioning and blocking rather than actual dodging. None of this was bad enough to push me away, but it did come close until I found the sword and shield. I can very well see the early game dissuading others.

There are many hidden paths and rooms all over the place, which is neat and rewards a careful eye and exploration. That said, there is definitely a pattern of "if a corner of a room is obscured by the walls/camera angle, there is at least a 60% chance something is hidden there" which, again, is a little cheap but at least consistent. Illusory walls in souls games are pretty much an immersion breaking meme but at least this game integrates secrets a bit better into the game world itself.

Visually, the game looks great. No major comments here. I especially like the art style of the instruction booklet. Very nostalgic!

This game is a tough recommend unless you're used to the game language of souls games and don't require much direction to feel fulfilled. Exploration can feel rewarding despite knowing nothing about what you're doing or why you're doing it. You will have to want to play the game to enjoy it and uncover the mysteries held within it. I haven't even beaten the game and I have no idea if the ending will even be worth it, but its been fun so far. If this doesn't put you off, I would absolutely give this game a try.

It's a good idea for a game and I enjoyed the first few puzzles, but I feel like the game would be a lot less annoying if the pieces didn't have to be placed/undone sequentially or else fully reset. Sometimes it's not clear where the problem is in the puzzle until you have almost all the pieces out, but at that point you have to completely deconstruct everything to replace them (especially if the one piece you misplaced was early in the sequence).

If there was a way to freely drag and drop pieces to swap each other and let you optimize the puzzle without destroying everything and having to memorize/keep track of what's going on, it would have been a LOT better. I burned out in less than a half hour when I realized that getting gold in some of the levels was extremely tedious rather than challenging, simply because you have to "guess" the correct solution right from the start instead of building it as you go due to the placement restrictions.

Music and sound effects had to be turned off almost immediately, not my cup of tea. Very stock/royalty free sounding to a fault. It can be done properly with some diversity but the game is pretty lacking here.

Overall I would say with a few tweaks to the game mechanics like mentioned above, this game would have been an easy recommend. Simple and charming with a unique idea but way too annoying to actually play because of poor UX.

The mass praise for this game must be lost on me unfortunately. My play time shows about 8 hours but I left the game running for 4 hours in the background at one point because I hadn't seen a checkpoint in half an hour and didn't want to retrace my steps all over again when I came back.

Sure, the music is great and the main character designs are nice, but that's about where it ends. There is almost no substance to the game, from the bland, massive empty grey environments to the brainless button spamming combat that forces you to basically press every button on your controller at once. I made it to the castle in the forest with the forced 2D perspective and called it quits after wandering around in a platformer for 10 minutes making no progress. The carnival was the most visually interesting environment along the way, but it was tiny. From what I can tell I probably completed that whole area in less than 20 minutes. I have no idea if you end up going back.

Pointless PS2 era fetch quests "fill" the rest of the game world in ("I need 4 robot parts from this area you've already been to!", "Fight me for a reward!", "Race me over there!"). I give games like borderlands 3 an excuse to allow these, because while designed lazily, they're usually at least mildly entertaining in a side-story sense, or self aware. The rewards for side quests seem alright (either currency and items or unlocking functionality for a shop etc) but it's incredibly boring running around numbly whenever you're not being beaten over the head with heavy handed "HUMANS USED TO LIVE HERE/ROBOTS HAVE NO FEELINGS" dialog along the main story path. I've heard you really need to play the story multiple times to appreciate it, but if there is barely anything motivating me to keep playing almost 5 hours in then what's the point? It's written like an incredibly shallow 14 year old's interpretation of the apocalypse. They literally used the "ah, humans used to call these places [name], how weird" line like at least 4 times to establish each area I entered, completely destroying the atmosphere.

You're supposed to upgrade your gear with materials found around the world, but the system is meaningless and reduced to grind when I realized that items respawn when leaving an area. There is almost no reason to pick things up, ever (because you can just come back if you find out you need it). The upgrade system is interesting, finding and combining chips, then having to slot them in for physical space. It forces you to sacrifice some bonuses for others, but the novelty wore off when I realized all combat scenarios are most the same anyways, with the same enemies almost every time. I found the menus are extremely clean and polished, which is quite jarring considering the overall quality of the rest of the game.

I absolutely detest the constant perspective changes too. They are surprising at best and detrimental to the game experience overall. It makes you feel locked in and claustrophobic. The boss fight with the singing robot in the carnival was infuriating having to fight the camera and never see what's going on because it keeps going vertical every time a bullet hell pattern happens -- AND ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS JUMP OVER OR SHOOT THE BULLETS ANYWAYS. All while being shot from behind out of view because of the super narrow FOV when the camera goes vertical. I also couldn't believe the tutorial boss had been reused fully as one of the story bosses not even an hour after finishing the tutorial, with no additions. The most interesting boss was the one that kept evolving better abilities... and then they made the rest of the bosses have these awful perspective changes or 2D combat. I just don't understand how it's supposed to feel good or satisfying, especially when every fight also boils down to "dodge when you see red laser eyes, spam light attack while holding shoot, use your pod ability when it's ready".

To be honest, I'm not a deep and long time fan of action rpgs, only really dipping my toes in the past couple years with fromsoft's games, and previous experience being looter shooters like borderlands; but these games have spoiled me immensely. I played elden ring and the souls games to 100% besides DS3, along with sekiro most recently and they are incredible. They offer satisfying combat and compelling story and environments (sure, poison swamps and lore in item descriptions can be whatever). But that's what's missing here: there is nothing compelling me to play or push further. The world is bland and unoriginal. The characters are one dimensional and copy pasted all over. It feels like a complete chore to feel "progress", unfortunately.

I received this game as a gift a couple years ago, so thankfully I'm not out any money, but I feel bad about not enjoying it after hearing so much praise over the years. It just doesn't click with me at all.

Very long review, but I feel like my review might offer a slightly different viewpoint from some of the others.

-- Background --

I very much enjoyed ATV Offroad Fury 3+4 (had 2, didn't really click with me as much) on ps2 when I was a kid and they were a couple of my favourite games ever. I spent so much of my free time playing these games inside out and it's a gaming experience I don't think I'd be able to replace with anything else. That said, MX vs ATV legends certainly doesn't replace them.

Now, I haven't really played these kind of games since then. I got ATV OF4 on my steam deck last summer and had been enjoying it thoroughly, nostalgia and all it still held up great. But a few weeks ago I got looking around at what had really happened since then with these kind of games, and I was led here. I saw plenty of terrible reviews of this game's launch but a few had said it improved greatly, so I watched a few videos and decided (while the game was on sale for a large discount) to pick it up with the track DLC and all the bike/atv etc DLC.

-- General thoughts and setup --

After beating the MX career in around 31 hours (and most of the achievements along the way) I have some mixed opinions on my experience, but overall, I enjoyed the game! I am basing my experience off of the ATV OF games from ps2 era as well, so I don't really have the same attachment to games like reflex that other people mention often.

The first thing I did was change the control scheme to single stick because I was struggling with the double stick (default), separating bike steering from rider leaning just because it's not what I'm used to. After that, the game became a lot more familiar feeling. Other reviews mentioned the AI is way too easy so I also set it to G.O.A.T (hardest difficulty).

-- Career --

The MX career starts you off on 125 bikes and feels very awkward, the bikes are underpowered for most tracks even after getting all level 3 upgrades and you'll have a hard time flowing over jumps smoothly. Getting to 250 almost completely alleviates this problem, but you'll still have to ride well to make some of the bigger jumps. 450 made me realize that the tracks were designed around it, everything just started flowing naturally and felt right. Overall, the career was fine except for the pointless forced "return to compound" where you have to ride up to an npc in the lobby map and listen to 1 line of dialog (usually amounting to 'great job kid!', or having to take a sponsorship for a few thousand credits). The interrupts were tedious and added nothing at all to the experience, they would have been better to not be there at all. Sorry to the voice actors.

-- AI --

As far as AI goes, they are complete garbage at the highest difficulty. I haven't played a single other atv/mx type game since like 2007 and I crushed them easily, except for a few maps in the 125 category where it feels genuinely impossible given your weak bike. It feels like the AI cheats in those events and gets far better air time. Except that once you hit 250 and beyond you will have massive 30-60 second leads by the end of the race even with semi sloppy riding (crashing here and there). Compare this to ATV OF4 on expert, you have to drive near flawlessly and dirty to keep the AI from catching you -- it felt like a genuine challenge and was far more enjoyable.

Additionally, in some tracks the AI is completely broken. Rawlings invitational comes to mind when you unlock the upper sections with birch logs everywhere. The AI will just stop dead and do nothing at that part. Some supercross tracks are also dangerous, the AI will fly everywhere or not turn for corners, tossing blocks everywhere and missing the track. This isn't incredibly common but you do notice it when you return to certain tracks.

-- Vehicles --

For vehicles, the base game offers almost no bikes to you (you get a 125, 250 and 450 from Rainbow, THQ and "Gold Edition", these are the only manufacturers). All the vehicles in a class are indentical in stats before tuning and exist purely cosmetically. The DLC bikes are the same, but they are all unlocked immediately when you own the DLC. I would have preferred to buy them with ingame credits during career because the career currency became meaningless from the start when I realized every bike I would ever want to use (branded ones) were already free for me to use and they all ride indentically. Compare this to ATV OF4, different bikes/atvs in a class would have different stat spreads that would favour different kind of tracks, meaning you could still get use out of multiple bikes.

-- Customization --

For bike customization (both parts/visual customization) there is very little here as well. Compared to ATV OF3+4 where you would buy parts for your vehicles to raise/lower their stats, and tires for different terrain, MXvATV L simply splits bike stats into "tuning" and "parts", where parts are entirely cosmetic (offering around 6-7 parts for each category, half of which are generic THQ/Rainbow etc). Tuning is a 3 level system to the left and right, but in my experience I found that upgrading everything 3 levels to the right made the bike the best in basically every scenario. Compared to ATV OF4, where tuning allowed to adjust max speed at the cost of acceleration, suspension hardness at the cost of stability, etc, where you could configure your bike differently for supercross vs high speed flatter nationals etc. In MXvATV L, you pick what bike you want and buy all the lvl3 upgrades and it's the same with every other bike, and you crush the competition in any race.

It is possible to colour parts of your bikes and some clothes on your rider (depending on what ones you buy) but it is very limited here. Don't expect anything like ATV OF where every colour can be customized to anything. Often times the only thing that changes on the bike is an accent colour, and the rider can generally change any colours, but there are very few cosmetics that allow this. Most are color locked. This isn't really a massive drag but I enjoyed customizing all the colours of my bike and rider to match in ATV OF, it's not really possible in this game and will look messy.

-- Tracks --

I can say I generally enjoyed the tracks the game offers. The DLC tracks are great but aren't included in the campaign -- there is a mechanic where some events along the way can be swapped between two series and you only have to complete one to progress, it would have been nice when owning the DLC to see a DLC series alongside these if you wanted to swap them in, but for now you can only play the tracks in exhibition mode, or online.

The terrain deformation can be a bit jarring to race over in some tracks, it's like the ruts are made out of cement and you bounce around everywhere once they're set in place. I'm not sure if this is the usual for the other games that had it too, but ATV OF had none and it was something I had to get used to, but otherwise wasn't too detrimental.

Some of the pathing on tracks is broken (random full respawns riding close to obstacles without crashing), sometimes you get told you're "off track" right in the middle of the track, but this wasn't game breaking, just a minor annoyance.

-- Other --
The physics feel fine to me, some recent reviews hate them but I don't understand the issue. Unlike ATV OF you preload jumps by pulling down on the stick and releasing, instead of pulling down and pushing up. After getting used to this I honestly preferred it because it was easier on the thumbs.

Performing tricks is pointless, because during events you get 0 points or rewards for doing them and it doesn't even say the name of the trick on screen or any indication of a combo. Your rider just kinda... does the pose. I can only trigger 4 air stunts (R1+stick+L/R/U/D), I don't know how to do more or if there are more. There are ground stunts too, but sometimes tricks just don't work at all or instantly crash your rider.

BRAIN IS MELT

This is hard. I cannot in good conscience recommend the game at this time.

The game itself is fantastic. The idea is fresh and the aesthetic is perfect. It's easy to play casually and a great way to have some fun with friends. However, glaring technical issues and mismanagement, lack of updates and server latency makes it all but unplayable.

- Update as of 2020-09-15: Today an update was given to change up the courses by adding random elements. This is relatively low effort but has added a fresh experience to the existing gamemodes. The rest of my original point pretty much still stands, as given below:

Lack of updates (even just for bugfixes). The game has been out for over a month at this point and only a very small handful of exploits (such as grabbing some ledges or clipping through moving walls to shortcut levels) have been patched. There are so many more issues that have apparently been fixed internally but no update has been sent out. Where are fixes for clipping through the tiles in hex-a-gone, tripping on seams in the geometry between flat pieces of ground, falling over when jumping on the stairs at fall mountain? Jump inputs eaten on jump showdown? Costumes having ambiguous pink colours in team games? Gaps in costumes making your player see-through? Hidden player names (why is this even an issue)? Trying to voice concern over these issues that should have been week one patches is frustrating because nothing has been done. Many of these issues could be solved by an intern. Get it together.

- Server latency. Desync makes it impossible to perform consistently in over half the games. Any mini game that requires player-on-player interaction (games like fall ball, hoarders, egg scramble, tail tag, team tail tag, grabbing the crown in fall mountain, and nearly everything else) has you at the mercy of the horrible desyncing that has existed since day one. There is almost no connection between what you see clientside with what's actually happening. You lose your tail from 20 feet away (sometimes even off screen) because an opponent grabs you on their end but you're far away on your screen. You grab onto the crown in fall mountain and the person behind you gets the win when they grab it after you. You jump dive to hit a ball in fall ball and it teleports behind you or you bounce off because the ball was moving in a difference place when you impacted it. The latency is horrendous and is by far the main reason I stop playing this game each time. It's inexcusable. The only game I play that has worse multiplayer is Mario Maker 2, and that's a VERY low bar. In fact, the latency is what really drove me to write this review. It's completely unacceptable having a 100/50 mbps down/up connection with a 20ms ping and having people win games from 10 feet behind me.

- Update as of 2020-09-15: a proper anti cheat was implemented (easyanticheat) which has worked so far (have not seen any hackers in my games yet). This does mean the game stops working in Proton which means I cannot recommend this if you are a linux player, the game did work before flawlessly but now does not work at all. Regardless, this solves my issue with cheaters.

In conclusion, the issues I have mentioned are so, so easily solvable for a game that has sold over 7 MILLION copies on PC alone, in 2020, where these issues are non-existent in other games. Mediatonic employs over 200 people and are by no means a small team. If you make a game this big, people are going to expect these things as a bare minimum and I think that's acceptable. All we get is talk that "this has been resolved internally" or "we're working on it!" but it's all empty promises until something is done. I will certainly change this review. But until then, I'm sorry, I cannot recommend this game.

Update as of 2020-09-15: The game is getting closer to recommendation-worthy, but 2/3 of the big problems still exist. If we start seeing fixes for the bugs outlined in point 1 or the latency issues rectified in point 3, I will change my review to recommended.

If you've played the first game, you're going to love this one. The transition from 2D to 3D was amazingly done. Plenty of challenges to keep you occupied, with a scheduled content update roadmap that delivers. Despite the game being early access, it's almost always been incredibly stable and I've had no issues playing with friends in multiplayer.

Visuals and art style are stunning. They stay true to the theme and feel of the original game while remaining simple, rugged and consistent. The game performs great at 4k on my PC (RX 580, Radeon R5 2600, 16GB Ram). I spend almost the entire time with 60fps, experiencing slight slow downs or drops during moments of complete insanity (but these moments are few and far between unless you spend hours in a run, or stack together like 20+ of an intensive item, but that's very, very rare).

Keyboard and mouse + gamepad (tested on PS4 controller) both feel very good to use. Some characters like Commando can be tricky on gamepads though because of his lack of homing attacks. That said, steam's controller binding allows you to make a gyro config if you're dead set on using a controller for everything and it works very well.

While unofficial, mods have brought me right back into the game to experience new content again until the August update comes. I suggest using r2modman! There are mods that add in PvP, Item sharing for multiplayer, new survivors (even Goku), a bunch of QoL (better pings, chat messages to let you know what items you traded at a printer/crucible), and one of my favourites, the classic items mod that adds in a whole bunch of the items from the first game that didn't make the cut (yet?) (the game is still actively adding new content)

Very, very solid 10/10 experience for lovers of roguelikes, shooters, and of course, Risk of Rain.

This game is a treasure.

From the moment I began playing this game, through finishing the story as well as every single achievement (besides workshop ones) (and trust me, there is still plenty more to discover, collect, and do), it was a joy to play this game. That is growing increasingly rare for me to say nowadays. I played with a controller and the controls were tight and felt good. The platforming is on point and takes much inspiration from the best of the N64 era platformers, so it felt familiar to play while also expanding on the feel and style of 3D platformers of times past. The characters and style are unique and memorable, and the music and level ideas/humour was on point all throughout. I wish more games would reach me on the same level that this one did! I'd do anything to play it for the first time again. You're doing yourself a serious favour if you pick this game up and try it.

That was absolutely fantastic. I can't say much without exposing the story, so really, do yourself a favour and just play the game blind. I would pay attention to the various warnings though, and keep them in the back of your mind while playing.