Senaste recensioner av Majestic

Not thrilled about PSN being mandatory this time around. But that's not on Nixxes, that's SONY. I also had to switch my region to "Slovenia" to even get the website to work. Almost had to refund it...

Two features that should, in my opinion, have added were transmog and a fixed camera position. Would be nice if they could add these.

The graphical overhaul is sufficient enough to warrant the $10 in terms of effort from Nixxes. Though some of the artistic vision of the original gets lost. For better or worse, you be the judge. Like the blue hue being mostly removed, some foliage replaced with bright green ones where they clash sometimes. The lighting and shadows, as well as texture quality, have been greatly improved, and some of the improved assets (outfits, items in the world). It is an overall more striking game now, but it also puts it in line with FW in terms of system requirements.

It puts it more in line with Forbidden West, so anyone playing the series for the first time doesn't get such a stark contrast in visual style. Going to thumb it up.

I always play games a year or more late. Then they're usually patched and less buggy, and at a discount. It also means I can give a review during a time its not either being showered in praise or review bombed. However, I think they abandoned this fairly quickly. Because its still riddled with gamebreaking bugs, most noteably being the one where all your inputs stop until you restart the game.

The Pro's
There's not a lot, but when the inputs work, most of the mechanics were serviceable. Its just basically SR3 under the skin, so they probably copy-pasted the things that already worked. If it didnt have the bug where inputs would fail, it would be an OK time-killer.

The Con's:
*Where to start. The bugs... from hidden walls, terrain that sends your car into orbit, flickering textures, poor gamma and colorgrading, input failure, button prompts that dont respond or at huge delays, it feels very unpolished and technically inept. Like this was either worked on by incompetent people or rushed out the door.
*Then there is the potemkin villlage aesthetic. The graphics aren't horrible, but the level design, asset placement and overal mood creation is off. It looks like you're driving in some potemki village/movieset.
*Then there is the minimap GPS that spazzes out all the time, making you miss exits or take wrong ones.
*Recycled Engine: You can tell there was a lot of copy-pasting from SR3/SR4 engine. They didn't even bother to rename the guns. And they are all present. Including the sniper, the 3burst rifle, etc.
*Costume variety is very poor. SR3 and SR4 had a lot of wacky customes, but here most shops have like 8 items and its mostly facepaints, rings of accessoires.
*Very small map, you can basically drive from one end to the other in <5minutes.
*Male and Female animations are the same. SR3/SR4 had a specific female and male gait, especially when slowly walking. Here they both use the same animation. Very lazy, especially since it was already present in the old engine.
*Understeering cars, unless you constantly use the slide mechanic, your cars dont steer for ♥♥♥♥ and will just understeer into everything.
*Absence of Humor. It was always pretty campy, but it worked through the delivery of the voice actors, and the doubling down by the developers. Here, all the edge is taking off, and replaced by reddit-tier millenial writing. Which mostly consists of social ineptitude, awkwardness and toilet humor. In fact the writing is probably what killed the game the most. I didn't laugh or chuckle a single time in 7 hours of playthrough.
*Voice actors: Well... the 4 ladies voicing this are definitely not Laura Bailey... Especially the brit who voiced Morgan in Starfield was a miscast. Maybe they had very little material to work with? Because some of them are pretty well acomplished, but it just wasn't landing.
*Rubberbanding AI, during chases they have the Cyberpunk style of just rubberbanding and teleporting behind you, forcing you to use the extremely annoying sideslam ability that alwyas results in you spinning out.

Thats about what I could stomach, and what my list of annoyances was what I wrote down in my playthrough. The reason it failed is not because of the Burger King Kids club diversity, SR3 and SR4 already did that with Pierce and he was funny in that game. The reason it failed is because incompetent people worked on it with no vision, or a funny bone in their body. And that IS probably moreso a result of ESG hiring practices.

It's a neat little game, with some pros and cons. Voice acting is hit and miss. With the the lovely Amelia Gething doing a great job, but some of the side characters are either overacting or phoning it in. Graphics especially indoors are great, some of the long-distance shots I have seen better in games like Horizon Forbidden West. However, there is definitely a bug with the gamma and color correction. There is a green haze over the screen and a fair amount of shots are overlit. I'm sure its to do with the engine being both SDR and HDR capable and the profiles got messed up. I do think for the PC they could've revamped the spellbars a bit as well. Only having 4 spells on a keyboard with 104 buttons is just not ok. Same goes for the broomflight, having a button to go up or down feels like you're playing Twister on your keyboard. Storywise, I find most of the major sidequests to be quite fun and the sidecharacters dont feel like cardboard cutouts, but the mainstory so far seems to be a bit of a McGuffin. A lot of attention to detail was put into the game, from the students, to the assets, the characters and lore. It's probably the closest a game is going to get to put the player in hogwarts.

It is fun to combine spells and juggle opponents. Distract them with all sorts of potions and plants. A lot of variety and room to experiment. But it can become difficult sometimes to track enemies outside of FOV, which they then tried to fix with the symbols above your head, but not all attacks are telegraphed. (like the stone guardian jump).

However, I do think they went overboard with the collect-a-thons. Which is ok if its completionist stuff, but locking the lockpicking mechanic behind one is a bit cruel. You can get a little lost in the sidecontent, and I do think it hurts the pacing of the story. There is no sense of urgency anymore that way.

Performancewise its "OK", in towns and in Hogwarts it can microstutter a bit when quickly running or traversing. But in combat situations its never an issue. Was able to run it on 1440UW, no upscaling highest settings on modest hardware (5800X3D, 6800XT, 32GB RAM), and the fps mostly stayed above 60 in the most taxing scenes (towns at night). With upscaling around 80, but I really dont like upscaling. And ever since VRR came onto the market, having a fixation over fps seems pointless.

I'm about 50 hours in, and at times the sheer size and depth of this game is rather daunting. I still feel like a noob at this game, and I probably am. That said, I am enjoying my time. Had a fair few chuckles at the dialogue, voice acting is great. All the team members bring something to the table.

Combat is .. how to put it. You have to think ahead and min/max a lot. I wouldn't suggest doing everything what the wiki says, but atleast look at the statusses that you can receive and devise a counter for everything. Have rain ready for lots of fire, vaporize for clouds, clearmind/enrage for terrified, first aid for knock down, etc. I'm playing it on the middle difficulty, and I know i'm probably missing a whole bunch of tricks, but I'm getting by without having to savescum fights. It definitely rewards players combining spells, using the elements, using the environment. As other said, spreading your team out before a fight helps a lot with initial start. Having a high hydrosophist mage that can restore magic shields, put people in cryo if they take too much damage and throw around heals has really helped me survive even the fights where i got caught offguard. Some aerothurge to boot helps aswell, so you can teleport dangerous enemies away, swap out that archer high-up with your own ranged, etc.

Also, the solutions to problems and riddles in quests are usually fairly straight forward if you think on them, and you know you have to have a good mix of stats on your characters to not miss anything. Bring a shovel, have someone with high wit to spot all the hidden objects, have sebille with high thievery to rob everyone blind and break the economy :D

There is so many layers to this game, i'm amazed they finished it in a lifetime. There is some jankyness and I imagine some quests can break at times. But it being as relatively painless at it has been for me is a feat in itself, given the size of it. It is a proper RPG though. It's for those with lots of patience and willingness to learn the mechanics.

Basically a real-time XCOM, but with a higher emphasis on Stealth. Which was hardly a thing in XCOM past the first stage.
Highly reliant on motion trackers, and planning ahead to not get blindsided by roaming/patrolling enemies. Despite the jankyness of some of the bugs and mechanics, I am really enjoying my time with this game.

Pro's:
- Decent voice acting, especially the cast of the otago.
- Different classes actually have some unique features that you're often using. (sniper, drone, etc)
- Graphics are more than decent. It's enough to be immersive.
- Once you get the hang of it, can be quite rewarding to have an inb4 for everything the CPU tries. By setting up choke points, Forcing the enemies into a single file by laying down fire in the alternative options, and/or sniping that patrol before he has a chance to call for his mates.
- Actually have no issue with the save system. Manual saving would make it incredibly trivial and prone to savescumming.
- Lots of content, especially if you try to be as stealthy as possible and gather everything in a single run, the gametime can be quite extensive.

Negatives:
- Idle chatter that you cannot turn off. For a game highly reliant on sneaking around, waiting for patrols and setting up ambushes. Having marines blur out the same 4/5 lines of idle chatter was a really bad idea. And you cannot turn it off. Seems like something that should easily be patchable.
- A bit janky. I've seen enemies stuck in walls, drones show up in a hallways where I did not see them on the tracker. Several game breaking exploits you can use. It's stil playable, but be sure to save every so often. (autosaves on elevators, and "resting")
- Unsure if respawning enemies was the best approach. Especially if you set up motion trackers everywhere, it makes it a bit immersion breaking to mow down a group and see them respawn across the map.
- No individual unit control. This is probably my biggest gripe, maybe they add it in this game or perhaps a future sequel. But the sniper is almost essential for stealth, and you cannot individually control him to snipe an enemy. You have to move the entire squad and hope you can get a line-of-sight. Funnily enough, you can individually control the drone. It's a bit baffling.

I hope they fix some of the issues, atleast in a sequel. Especially individual unit control would make this time 10x better. But it might force players into pausing during tactical view, otherwise you might not have the time to individually move everything. Still, great fun for the price. Can recommend.

At times a really competent shooter, but hamstrung by its indecisiveness and over-emphasis on compensating for subpar AI by increasing their numbers. I guess since Dark Souls 2 we've come to accept this as a positive feature, rather than a negative, the "git gud" mentality. Whereby someone's ego is hijacked to justify and rationalize poor gameplay decisions.

Gunplay: Woefully inacurate weapons, that are then compounded by inconsistent level design that has no complexity to it or ability for you to manouver around enemies. They work very well in small confines, but large atriums, courtyards or outside they simply dont. The sound design is really good though. Movement however, is painfully slow, which would have offset some of my gripes with the gunplay due to atleast being able to quickly close the distance. But patient 106 is asthmatic, and needs his inhaler every 5 seconds of sprinting. Before defaulting back to shat-pants-waddle speed.

Enemies: They are braindead. They hardly flank you, they run at you single-file, get stuck on scenery, shoot into walls, dont even notice you when you run around them. But they are deadly accurate when your guns at similar distances are not. They also have enemies that charge at you, exacerbating the annoyance of the sprint meter even more. Almost like salt in the wounds. Their only strength is their numbers, and hitpools.

Leveldesign: Simply isn't good enough. It doesn't balance the gunplay sufficiently, and it rarely felt satisfying outmanouvering the enemy. Often you are just playing peek-a-boo until your powers recover. The levels are fairly linear, doors close behind you, it leaves you very little oppertunity to Line of sight enemies and you often get stuck on the scenery when evading. Contrast this to Fear, where you could flank the enemies, just as much as they could flank you.
Some of the levels have no intro, especially the side missions feel like demo levels you're dropped into like a level creator. With the hacking missions literally being arena's where enemies keep walking through the doors.

Graphics: It's alright. It looks fairly sharp, assets are decent, lighting is decent. Perfectly serviceable, and honestly we've reached the point where graphics dont need to improve much anymore. It runs OK from a few framedrops here and there. Played on a 5800X3D, 6800XT, 32GB of RAM, WIn10.

All in all not a terrible game, but not worthy of the hype, and it also looks like zoomers haven't played the classics to know how a good FPS should play and feel like. This is an inconsistent game that can't pick a tone, and can't decide on a playstyle. And often creates difficulty where there shouldn't be, because of this. It's frustrating when you fail because you can't move away fast enough, or dont hit an enemy you were clearly pointing at the head when pulling the trigger. Probably more fun if you ignore the achievements, and just turn on the cheats to overcome some of the questionable design decisions. It also loses steam very quickly due to its limited gameplay options, and turns into a grind. Since the game is balanced around throwing numbers at you, it cannot escalate its difficulty because you run into hardware limits on user PC's.

Positives:
Great aesthetics, very vibrant and clever usage of lighting/shadows makes it look nicer than it should, given the sometimes less-than-stellar assets. That said, Kena herself, the rot and the other characters are well made. But the environment sometimes has visible compromises to lower system load but most likely also cut back on development time. Foliage in particular. Very pixar-like cutscenes. A bit cutesy sometimes, but it's consistent in tone.
Decent voice acting and a compelling/touching story about ghosts trapped in limbo that have trouble letting and moving to the afterlife. Combat is a bit simple, but with some upgrades you have a decent enough toolset to quickly dispatch of enemies. Parry is decent outside the bossfights (see negatives) but I've made the most usage out of jumping around with the bow and tagging aerial enemies to shatter arrows onto. It reminds me a lot of Horizon Zero Dawn in gameplay (traversal, combat), and some elements of Pikmin when moving items with the rot. But that should never be held against a game, if they take elements and integrate them well. Bossfights are the typical soulslike, which can be both a positive in terms of challenge, but also a negative (see negative points).

Negatives:
Controlling the rot did not translate well from controller to KBM, as was said by other people. It means you gotta drag your mouse across the pad as if you're playing lowsense CSGO. Easily the biggest gripe I have with the game.

The bosses have the Dark Souls trait of adding difficult to avoid tracking grabs and each telegraph having a unnecessary delay after it starts. Meaning you expect an attack and try to parry, but the delay makes you undershoot the window. In essence, if you want to parry, you need to memorize all the timings, in stead of just reacting the a cue/blink on time. This has always irked me in Dark Souls since 3 and onwards, and it's not a design element they should continue to copy across other games. And they also have the "I'm gonna do a triple sweep across the entire room ♥♥♥♥ you if you dont know the delay to every attack and roll your way to victory". Every bossfight becomes a slog like this, because its not intuitive, its grating and only tests your ability to remember timings, not instinctively respond to something, or skillbased because you have to hit something precise. Not every stolen Idea is a good one Ember Labs. It seems people only further move away from what the itentions of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were, and seemed to only have remembered people really liking spazzing out sweeping attacks because it got so many people to rage on social media. Not once reflecting on whether its FUN or not. It isn't.


Performance
I did not have any slowdowns or framedrops, even when a lot of particles were flying. That said, I do run games with Variabel refreshrate and Radeon chill (vrr range 48-144) to not have any V-sync related issues (stutter/input latency). System: 5800X3D (PBO tuned), Radeon RX6800 XT, 32GB CL16-3466, Samsung Evo 970 NVME. There is however, an ever so slight traversal/asset streaming stutter when moving between zones. Which could be worse for people without X3D CPU's or NVME drives. For me, it was only very minor.

Overall a nice little gem, and a decent new IP.

May have been a trailblazer in the past, it certainly doesn't age as well as Quake or Quake2 did. Enemies have no kinetic response when you shoot them, and they're bulletsponges too, so every encounter you take significant damage because you're just firing at eachother until one of the healthpools depletes. Platforming is jank, because the geometry clips the textures, and you're standing on iceskates going 25mph. And the excessive amount of meatgrinder encounters where every avenue you're expected to take is filled with cynically laid traps makes this a slog to playthrough.

The atmopshere is really good, and for it's time it did some really clever tricks to convey the story. But the gameplay just doesn't hold up as soon as you remove the nostalgia glasses.

You will eventually slog your way through, but to quote gabe: "is it any fun?" No i wasn't having fun. I'm going to play quake again instead. Surface Tension had just a bit too many cheap deaths for my taste.

I wrote a whole review about all the mechanics of the game, and complaining about the loadingscreens etc.
But I threw it out because I just wanted to drive the point home how terrible the writing in this game is.

The problem is that this game was written by incompetent, ideologically confused miscreants that view the world through the lens of capeshít movies. There are no amicable solutions to wrongdoers, there are no morally dubious characters whereby you understand their motivations despite their misbegotten methods. No, its you either shoot the capitalist, or you have to grovel to apologize to the companions over your 'poor choices'. There was no option to leverage the person out of their position, no dialogue checks, no middleground. And then to pour salt in the wounds, the companions then regardless of whichever of the two poor choices you were handed you pick, one of the companions will dislike it. Eventhough the solution they say they would've gone with instead, isn't available in the game!

I have rarely been this insulted by a game in a AAA release. Both through the forced diversity, and for the player's hands being tied behind his back, given poor dialogue options and then being grilled for making the poor choices handed to him. It's the most aggrevating experience ever. This game is a litmus test, if you can play this without being insulted or aggrevated at the lack of options you're given to finish the quests, you're unsalvageable.

This is such a nice sanity check to confirm that; yes, modern shooters are utter garbage. Without exception.

This plays so fast, runs so smooth, the hitboxes work so well. It's an utter joy to play.

EDIT: the expansions have the dark souls 2 vibe of being needlessly more difficult though. Especially since they changed some of the enemy attacks they had to look if the balance was still right (like giving brains ranged attacks). I think on hard its too difficult without cheesing it.