Recent reviews by Lucius

I prefer playing more before posting reviews, but it seems i need to start now.

1. The game is not sequel, or in the same world as Code Vein 1, I was pretty sure everyone knows it, but it seems i was wrong. I personally like it, but God Eater fans seems to be pissed. And thats their right, don't get me wrong, i just think its the thing one should know before buying the game
2. Yes, performance is not great. Not as bad as MH Wylds, but it is barely 60FPS on 4070TI in "openworld" secions without DLSS. (On quality DLSS its 80-90). If its a deal breaker for you. Wait for patches.
3. Combat system and movement feels way better than in the first game. Bosses i've seen have seen so far, have more elaborate movesets, though first major boss seems to be kinda overtuned (its way too agressive), tho they still fun to fight.
4. People talk about censorship, but i look at NPCs in the game and all i see is big boobs, and even bigger boobs. Where is the censorship? Imo its another case of major overreaction. That aside, characters seems more stylized than they were in the first game, maybe its because those guys supposed to be actual vampires and not human-turned-by-virus, who knows.
5. I like story and writing in this game way more that in the first one. At least so far. Dialogues still "anime-esque" but more... natural? Make sense?

I update the review as i play the game, but so far i enjoy it greatly.

My friends to convenced me to pick the game up to play together. And i wasn't sure if i would like it or not, but hey, playing with friends makes everything better, right?

Spoilers, as you can see from my playtime, i did, indeed, liked it. Very much so. So here is detailed review:

TL;DR: Great tactical coop to play with friends if you don't want (or have) to spend handreds of hours on more traditional tactical RPGs like DO, BG or Rogue Trader.

The game fells more like tabletop than TTRPG, with chaos keeping constant tension, and leveling up is not a natural thing that happens to show progression, but more of a task you need to achieve in limited timeframe to progress. Same with gear you can get.

Basically general game loop for the mission is:
1. Keep chaos in check
2. Level and gear up so you can handle next locations you need to go to.
3. Progress the story line.

It is a very engaging setup.

The story itself is funny and not that deep, but it is interesting enough. Metaprogression allows to to unlock starting gear, cosmetics and characters to play. But every run is done with new party starting from level 1 and with starting gear.

From things i didn't like:

The lack of character progression. I would love to see more RPG-like vertical progression with unlockable skills or something. But the current system does make game to easy to get into, maybe it was the goal.

UI could be clunky and behave unintuitively, espessially in multiplayer, no excuses there, it just not good (works good enough in solo tho). For example to select character to play, there is not lost of classes, you need to scroll through them using arrows. Another example, when you looking at the market in the city together with another player, and someone closes their market window, it also closes for you. Why?

You also can't use bing characters actions to keyboard keys (1-9 or something), also why? It is not a big deal, but it shouldn'y be that hard to implement...

In the end all negatives are either my personal preferences or simple inconveniences and not enough to change my opinion on the game.

Fun little game, puzzles kinda give keep talking and nobody explodes vibes. But unlike ktane, puzzles are not randomized, which is a real shame and huge missed opportunity. Honestly, the like there random puzzles were ppanned initially, but either dev run out of time ot gave up.

Also, after some time the game just gives you an answer, maybe make it an option in the settings? It kinda kills tension to be honest.

Anyway, despite all that said the game is fun, and it's literally capped at 1 hour, uou wont miss anything by trying it.

One time i wanted to invite a shopkeeper to my base, but my charisma was too low, so i petted her head instead, until shopkeeper laid an egg.
I put the egg into hotspring and the new shopkeeper was born at my homebase, the clone of original one with all stock included.

Another time, i found panties in the dungeon, they did psychic damage when thrown at enemies and always returned back as a boomerang, you could also play music on them.
Very nice find indeed.

If you not gathered that yet. The game is beautifully ridiculous RPG sandbox, those 65 hours i played? All in the past week, my life is in ruin and sleep schedule is crumbling.

Recommend.

Raytracing in the game is broken and causes crashes. So imagine that the option does not exist and you will have a great time. (It seems Raytracing does work on some configurations, but be aware nevertheless). But even then its inexcusable that the issue wasn't fixed in 4 years.

The game is kinda like a fun mix of tower defence, base building and ARPG (kinda). Runs smoothly even on a Steamdeck.

Previous review:

Constant crashes are honestly killing the desire to play.

There is an official workaround from developer for "swapBuffer" error. It requires editing windows registry, and while it reduced amount of crashes (maybe), they still there.

And the worst part? It was a known issue since 2021!

Again, the game looks and plays fun, but picking it up in current state is risking encountering the same problem as me.

As basically everyone says the game take inspiration from ARPG and Souls-like games.

The core gameplay loop is closer to Souls games with looping level design and a lot[/a] of shortcuts and with the boss at the end of location. Combat is also heavily souls inspired.

The ARPG is mostly in the POV and loot system, with random gear and affixes which could be modified.

But thats where similarities end.

Big part of core gameplay loop is resource gathering. You need resources for healing items, gear upgrade and upgrading the town, which opens more options for first two.

Especially noteworthy

The game artstyle is gorgeous. Music is fantastic.
And don't skip the story, unlike cryptic plot slouls games are known for, the story here is well told, well acted and extremely good (i literally cried several times, well those are the Ori developers after all)

Controversial(?) systems

You see a lot of compaints about cragting healing items and gear damage, but it worth mentioning that gear damage is the only penalty the game give you, no exp lose, no enemies respawn (enemies respawn after a pretty generous timer) and the price of repares is negligible once you passed few first levels.

If you grab everything lying along the road you won't have issues with healing items. But! Only if you have recepies unlocked, for that reason do the quest for "saving husband" and upgrade his shop ASAP, he sells the recepies. (Is latest patch devs made a chenge so that this quest unmissable, but still).

Combat is hard, as a rule of a thumb, shield attacks are unparriable but everything else is. If you want to rely on dodges go for light equip load, if remeber, heavier weapons have slower parry animation.

Another thing that affects difficulty greatly is gear upgrades don't skip on them. The difference you see between lvl 1 gear and lvl 5 gear is huge.

Also Fallen Enlmbers, the game does bad job explaining it, but they are crucial! You can use them from the inventory to add and change affixes on the gear.

Once you start upgrading your gear and affixes you start wipe the floor with basically everything within your level.

About the death, again. And locations

As i (and many others) had mentioned, once you die you teleported to the last checkpoint, with some gear damaged (unless the gear has "indestructable" affix). Enemies do not respawn apon death, and no experience or items are lost.

But you will need backtrack back where you were, and here is the important point: Look for a shortcuts. Locations themselves are very compact in their core, but at the beginning most paths are blocked, and level design is not simply looping, there are loops withing loops. Shortcuts are the main way to "checkpoint" in this game.

This was already mentioned before twice, but while enemies respawn on timer, its not the always same enemies.

You see the game seems to have hidden faction system, and each time you visit any zone you can encounter entirely different sets of enemies. Basically one faction can push another from the zone and take control, making the experience of revisiting those zones (which you will do often) kinda unique. Chests will also respawn BTW.

Problems

1. It short after the update launch, but gamed do be crashing from time to time.

2. Respec system is there but very hard to access it locked behind roguelike mode. And it not need to be. The gear here have hard stat requirements, and becomes available only as you go through the game. So in the beginning you forced to basically blind guess. It would be nice if some.base weapon times were thrown player's way at the very beginning, so they could decide on a playstyle. Tho, dev's did mentioned they are working on some sort of archetype system, as a quick fix some weapon examples at the very start would help.

For now my recommendation for new players. For the first playthrough pick a single combat stat (str, dex, int, faith) and don't touch the others. Level up health, staming and equip load (yes its a stat) as needed, but no more than needed. Level cap is 30 by the time of writing this review/rant.

3. There is no free fast travel in the game. You can teleport from the current "bonfire" to the city and back, but thats it.

I do understand why devs did that. Revisiting old zones are a big part of a gameplay loop, and i have fun doing it. But! there are several locations in the game (which i wont name to avoid spoilers) that actually would have more sense to have permanent teleports to. Devs said they'll think about it, and i hope they'll do.

4. Gear crafting and upgrading need more active on-boarding. As i mentioned before, it easily missable, but if you don't do it, the game does become very noticably harder.

This game does run on steam deck out of the box. No need to configure anything, more so on a mix of mid/high settings it plays at 30 to 60 fps.

Important note, it does not support cloud saves (maybe because it inheritantly myltiplayer game) so if you plan to play on steam deck and PC solo, i suggest running a dedicated server.

This game is what i imagined Awoved would be after watching the original trailer.

Dark and gritty version of Oblivion. And it's even more dark and gritty.

I am not even sure where to put it? Dark fantasy? The world is what would happen if you take Arthurian legend and dip it into the cauldron where Miyazaki brewes his Souls games.

Art style is fantastic, the game is very atmospheric. Music is stellar (Dev's please sell us the OST).

Combat feels great so far, both magic and melee. Tho for those thinking about bying the game, the health pool is not very big, so facetanking is not really an option, the game expect you to block, parry or evade attacks.

Quests i encountered so far were pretty good, both story and approach wise.

* Summoned skeletons AI is kinda junky, they are usable, but do not expect them to follow you obidently.

* Intro section is great, but does a bad job showing you different kinds of weapons, especially magic ones. Which makes it hard to choose how to build character on first few level ups.

* i encountered few sound and ui bugs. One time fire spell fizzle kept playing, and other ui become unclickable (dont know how to reproduce). In both cases restarting the game helped, and i only encounterd 3 of them.

* While the game uses ES style skills like "light armor" and "heavy armor" the amor itself does not have such classes, the "lightness" of armor is determined by your total load (like in souls games), which is not a bad thing, i like this system. But it is confusing at the beginning. I kept looking for armor class or something. Maybe i missed tutorial popup? But if not adding one explaining how armor system works would be great.

* I am not sure how often this happens but rewards for solving quests in different ways are not always equal, in a bad way. Though so far i encountered only a single such quest: (Spoilers!)Necromancer in the crypt (dont remember the name). If you kill the ne romancer he drops his gear and spells, and those are first summoning spells you can get, which is, imo, pretty important.
But if you talk your way through. He turns into a zombie and all this loot is essentially lost. Ir kinds incentifies killing him (which i did after reloading, i needed those spells)

I am struggling on how to review this game, I'll go with bulletpoints to describe my experience:

1. Spent 3 minutes in game just pressing up and down in menu. Why is it so satisfying? 10/10 would recommend.
2. Lore is suprisingly intense.
3. Game is very pretty to look at.
4. Tried to run away 3 times, was caught by the bartender.
5. That one heck of the tea kettle.
6. I think those birds are stealing stuff from people for ransom, and bartender is in cahoots with them.
7. Very deep Stop Sign lore.
8. Found cool cup in the pile of leaves.


Runs 30-40 fps on a SteamDeck on high settings. Struggles on very high, the kettle action is too intense.

Very enjoyable and relaxing game, and surprisingly thought provoking.

I will pitch my part here.
First of all, this is DEMO / Open Beta Test.

1. Kernel level anticheat and therefore broken Linux support. While kernel anti-cheat is not a good thing, its not some sort of evil virus either. A lot of popular games use it. And devs said they will be fixing SteamDeck support (and i assume linux in general)
2. Mechs being progression locked aka you need to buy them with ingame currencies. Honestly, while having all mechs open from the start might've been better, i don't believe that it that big of a deal. At the moment of writing this review i spent 7 hours in the game and i have unlocked 3 new mechs (in addition to two unlocked from the start). To be fair, this part of progression seems to be somewhat timegated behind weekly quests, which is a dubious decision. But as far as i can see not completely.
3. "Mandatory PvPvE" this one is fair criticism. You see, the fastest and not time gated way to get currency for mechs and gear for them is to play the new Extraction mode, which quite a lot of people in comments don't seem to like. But regardless of what you think about the mode, it does make 6v6 pvp mode feel like second class citizen. I personally would prefer if players could earn rewards equally in both modes. Because PvPvE mode is more time-efficient and not limited.
4. The biggest one potential P2W. You see, there is a battlepass in the Demo, which you cant buy, but it does lists what you would get from it. And one of items is a Mech, expensive one (meaning you need to play quite a lot to unlock it). Which, while small, is still pay to win. Will it be there on launch or what else be monetized is still unknown. It also seems you can buy ingame currency with cash one.
But to be completely clear, the only thing you can do with ingame currency is unlock mechs and cosmetics like paints (which are very cheap), you can't buy modules, which is basically a mecha gear.
I left it for you to decide how bad it is, everyone have different levels of tolerance toward microtransactions.

i dived little deeper, the mecha mentioned above, Inferno, can only be bought with Merit points (if you don't buy battlepass), and Merit points while is ingame currency, can only be obtained in PvPvE and in very small amounts. For example i played 3 extraction missions and gained ~200 points, the Mecha costs 18k so with rough calculations, and if there is no more efficient way to do it, it would take 270 runs to buys it. Or swipe of credit card for a battlepass. Which does make it worse.

Still, i won't change my review, yet, the game is fun and it doesn't seem to be game breaking yet. But i would recommend to be cautious on the game release. If the game will have time-limited battlepass exclusive Mechs on release it will be a deal breaker for me. I really hope that devs review their approach to monetization, if the game is good, people will buy cosmetics en-masse without need to deal with P2W.

1. Cutscene in tutorial (extraction) not giving back controls which locked the game, restart returned me to the checkpoint.
2. Splashscreen "match found" freezing up not letting me do anything (happened twice). This and previous one is minor bugs
3. PvPvE mode having wild lag spikes sometimes. One time i was having 50-70ms, which is normal for me, another 200-300ms which is not normal for me, and 3rd time i was having over 999ms (not joking) and game became unplayable, a single tap on keyboard teleported me 100meters away after 5 seconds of nothingness. IDK if the game uses P2P for this mode, or server was overloaded (unlikely, other players didn't seem to be having problems), but they better fix it. It is unacceptible in PvP game.

The game is fun, different Mech gameplay is pretty unique. Combat is fast and fun, with a lot of movements, which you would expect from mecha. Though it is nowhere close to dedicated mecha games like AC6 of course, it does feel good. Additional note, it is fully playable on controller, whats more the way game works even using controller you pretty much not disadvantaged at all, mainly because basically all attacks work via target lock.

People compare it to Hero shooters and they not incorrect it is very close to one. Mechs have different weapons, abilities, moveset. It currently unavailable but it seems you'll be able to swap all those parts in the full version (there is UI for that).
Combat feels fairly balanced, but in kinda rock-paper-scissor way. Mechs have counter mechs and without the ability to swap them mid match i feel the hard meta will apprear pretty fast.

As mentioned there two main modes in the game currently 6v6 pvp with objectives, and 3 player PvPvE extraction mode. Both are quite fun, but has a limit of one type of mech per team (one of similarities with hero shooters), i am not really sure that limitation is really needed there though.
Extraction mode is not full loot, none of your gear is lost, only things you picked up on the mission. You also have 3 rockets you could use to send up to 3 items to base, making them "unloosable". Its pretty casual compared to other extraction games i have played.
As i said, mech unlocking progression is seems well pased, so far my experience was: play one mech enough to get accustomed to it, while doing so you earn enough credids to unlock the next one. Mechs at the end of the list cost pretty penny though and will require more time to unlock. I think devs should change that, while it wont take unreasonable amount of time, it does feel like its made to motivate players to spend real money.