Recent reviews by Emperor Ping Ming

It takes literally 5 minutes to quit the game, and the menus are annoying and non-standard for PC af. It makes me feel like a real console loser, having to shuffle through things as if I don't have a mouse.

It's a really annoying game in many ways, I'm not really that impressed. It has less personality than the first need for speed underground, and well I'm never going to bother to play through it probably. But it's fun driving, it's like GTA, except just the driving part, so at least you know you're not going to get shot.

If you would like to play GTA 5, but just the car part, then this is a good game for you. If you want to be mindblown or something then this game is of absolutely zero relevance to you. Hope that helps.

This is a good game.

But appearances do deceive, the first 40 hours I played was quite bug free, but not bug free.
The next 40 hours I am fighting bugs more than I am fighting enemies. Nice try. It's still good, but I can not believe that this was in early release for years. Well, if they tested only the first part of the game, that shows.
If this game doesn't receive *drastic* bugfixes then I do not recommend it.

The spell slots or whatever is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring, wtf? Never playing as spellcaster as long as those exist, it's not difficult because you can just long rest after every encounter if you wish. It feels more like content-gating than anything else, I don't see the point. Might as well just have mana, or cooldowns, but spell slots is a terrible idea regardless of whose it was, or if "UHH, ACRHCRUALLY THAT IS FROM THE ORIGI-" Oh okay, well that changes nothing, it's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea that makes the game much less fun, and much more annoying.

I rescued the bard, and he was in my camp for exactly 1 camp visit, then he disappeared forever.
I've actually tried twice to get this elusive bard, but alas. Is Halsin a playable character? The only healer I have had the option of using so far after 80 hours is Shadowberry.

Honestly I am unimpressed, because there is no way in hell that anyone can possibly have played this game from start to finish and missed all those bugs. Whatever you did involving testing was a marketing campaign and had nothing to do with polishing the game. If you wanted to polish the game, you would have put 1 person at least to play the game *once*, at least, and then that person would have found about 900 bugs for you to fix.

Next time let me play through it before you release, and I will send you back a 500 page e-book of bugs.

- When current selected character is performing an action, you can't switch character. This is annoying.

- I don't see any option to speed up the combat, it is boring to wait for 500 goblins to do their moves in sequence. Seriously, this is more than just an annoyance, I have better things to spend my time on than to wait 30 minutes for every opponent to make a move, then skip my turn because my characters are feared, then wait another 30 minutes for the opponent to make a move.

- I find myself accidentally clicking my companions since they move around erratically, which triggers a dialogue, and that is quite annoying.

- Can you swap characters mid dialogue? If so then that is not at all obvious to me how

- The pathfinding annoys me more than it offers convenience. Oops, I pressed the lava instead of that tiny tiny chest that was drawn just above the lava, now I am dead.

- It's annoying that there is no confirmation when you're about to attack an ally. It's not like attacking an ally is going to be, realistically, something you do quite that often. But if two characters are standing very close to each other then it's a matter of a 100ms delay in the mouse-over pane, and I just killed my own companion and quickload is the only response, if you're playing encounters that actually challenge you.

- The fact that you can attack ... the ground, mid combat, while it may have felt like a good idea, it is pretty much a mistake 99% of the time. Not because the player isn't playing the game well enough, but because your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ character models often glitch out last split second. This game is way more buggy than it first seemed, you got a LOT of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work left.



- The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Adamantit forge.

I used to play a lot of Stronghold Crusader as a kid, it was a great game.

So I picked up Stronghold Crusader 2 a while back, and it got me hooked. I actually found it to be quite challenging despite being just normal difficulty, but in a good way. The last map on the non-dlc skirmish is absolutely brutal, I almost cried.

I just started the DLC content which I'm excited about. There are some things that I do miss from the original Stronghold Crusader, for example ability to dig moats, and the fear factor for the lord. I liked that you could increase speed with fear, it was an interesting dimension to the game. I really hope there will be a stronghold crusader 3

I always felt that Total Annihilation deserved more hype than it did. I had never heard of it when it came included with our first PC in like 1998. I tried it, and the entire neighbourhood soon played it. It's still a good game, and the music is top notch.

I felt like I was being indoctrinated into accepting the working conditions of an Amazon warehouse, but for free. Well actually I paid for it.. But oh well, it had good qualities I have to give it that. I think "So close, and yet so far" sums it up. Combat was fun, world was beautiful, you had to work a lot as in grind. It didn't take long before my mind started going elsewhere while my body was playing the game, and that is when I stopped.

It requires some effort I would say to get into, if it is the stranger-danger multiplayer experience that you want. That is the only thing I ever wanted from ARK, I would never play it solo but that's just my own preference. I haven't even tried so who knows maybe it's fun. But ARK is really fun at least, it's just the right kind of unforgiving if played with optimal settings. When I first tried ARK I played on a totally vanilla server with the default settings and had a great time, because I was unemployed at the time.

Now that I am employed and do not desperately need a never-ending hamster's wheel to keep me from having to confront the state of my existence psychologically- I could absolutely not play on those settings. Taming certain dinosaurs will glue you to your screen for a literal full day, like 24 hours. Not only that, but it is so boring that you might end up killing your dinosaur by accident as you slowly descend into a mild state of insanity. Even a rager such as myself can not find any anger in such a situation, because the spark that could ignite any explosions was smothered forever in that very moment. You might find that you experience periods of depression and contemplation about life and its meanings, and you will take a break from ARK. Perhaps you even might convince yourself that you will never play this piece of ♥♥♥♥ game ever again.

But as you find new value and purpose in life, and the traumas of the past are confronted and tamed, and time heals your wounds, you will return and this time you will know better and your spark will be smothered by other humans instead of by yourself and that is progress.

There is one more aspect that I would like to address, that somehow my brain erases from my memories with time. In terms of ease of use and reliability of its installations .. it feels like an abandoned university project. You may need professional help to be able to access the game, unless you are playing single player without any extra mods. It is of course based on the unreal engine, and for that reason many things do work very well. But I can say with 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% confidence that the developer team that started the development of ARK ontop of the Unreal engine learned to use the Unreal engine as they went along, and I also believe that they did not have any experienced software developers onboard at this point because they must have engineered a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a foundation that the next 15 expansion packs would be built ontop of, that now hinders them from really polishing the game beyond its current state because doing so would require a complete re-write (If you are curious what I mean, check out Conan Exiles which uses the same engine, but it does absolutely not feel like it). Thus ARK 2 has already had its cinematic teaser release and will hopefully be of a more "install and play" nature.

And for the same reason that they managed to produce a (golden) horse wagon powered by 8 insane and blind horses out of a state of the art spaceship engine, metaphorically speaking, they also managed to somehow make the BattlEye integration a potential disaster if you ever do find yourself in a BattlEye install loop then.. Well like I said; ARK 2 is on its way.

It still needs polish, there are some bugs but it's a fun gaming experience at this moment. I would say that it is worth the current price for early access, it is still better than many finished releases out there!

The storytelling seemed pretty nice, I got excited for a minute. However, how anyone can justify this gameplay and 1996-got-it-in-a-magazine coarse annoying controls is actually beyond me.

It plays like fallout 1, except that it's like you're always in combat and the environment looks ♥♥♥♥. Did they figure that they did such a good job on the cinematics that they could just throw in whatever? If anyone enjoys this gameplay then good for you, but I know not a single person that I can imagine would like this. It's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ slow and clunky, and after 2 hours of playtime the depth of the combat is: Click your unit, then click enemy unit, then click fire.

That's all

I started the game on 'True' difficulty, and it was definitely hard enough. Really fun, a lot like Hotline Miami but it adds to HM's gameplay with more stealth mechanics. Haven't finished it yet, because I decided to restart on the hardest difficulty, as I do like to get a bit frustrated. This is the good kind of frustrated, you always know what you did wrong, and what you need to do better next time.

I like the achievements a lot, they offer some pretty fun challenges to pursue. Before each level except the first, you get to choose your weapon layout, and you can focus your equipment for stealth or for combat, or striking a balance. The game feels very different depending on your play style.

I already know that this is going to be one of my favorite singleplayer games ever. I haven't encountered any major bugs, I can't say I remember having encountered any bugs yet. The UI is also well made, and easy to use. It fully supports, and makes it easy to switch to your preferred keybinds.

I found it a bit confusing with the saving and loading at first, I ended up somehow accidentally switching from True to Normal first time. But otherwise there's no problems, and real men don't need to save or load.

The game description and labelling is humble but appropriate.

This is going to be a 10 / 10 from me, best game of the year.

The first thing that really broke the deal for me was the fact that you need to create a ubisoft account to play a game that you've bought on steam. I want nothing to do with Ubisoft, and had I paid attention to the publisher I would have never bought it. They know that they are hated, because as soon as you launch the game you are peppered with lots of "Take care of yourselves and others" BS, that someone clever and LIT from marketing came up with. I don't mind some positivity, but I do mind if it is unskippable and I certainly mind when it is stamped onto something as ugly as this resource-dumpster.

As you may notice by my mere 30 minutes of playtime, I have not actually tried the game itself. This is because the game is not finished, and you will need to resort to minor development work to get it going. The reason I say development work, is that there is no functionality developed by Ubisoft to make anything easier than it is to program instructions to a computer in a modern programming language. There are about 10 different tabs of keybindings, defaulted to QWERTY. If you do not use QWERTY, then you will have to go through each of those 10 tabs to change the WASD bindings to, for example, WARS.

The big problem comes with the fact that in doing so, you unbind the functionality bound to R and S (in the case of WARS). Not on the respective tab alone, but on all tabs where R and S are used. Ubisoft offers absolutely no tools, helping hints, or anything to help locate the bindings that are now unbound, and you do not get to try the game until you have figured that out.

The game launches right into an in-game tutorial, that gives no help with keybinds. You simply have to read up, now this is probably not a problem if you still use the 1800s typewriter method of typing, but if you use anything else then well.

This is the most pathetic game I have ever encountered, and I will go to the greatest lengths legally possible to get a refund although I expect that it will not be a problem.

Ubisoft is a cancer of the gaming industry much like most bigger publishers and developers. But unlike most bigger publishers and developers, Ubisoft somehow manages to go the extra mile in terms of utter ignorance of design and user interface. Everyone involved with the final compilation of this joke should definitely quit their jobs and start doing something much more practical and hands-on. The game of thrones series writers look like the first Astronauts to land on the moon next to these untalented apes.

By all means buy the game, but I strongly advise you not to. Even if you should find it entertaining then you need to call professional help.