Recent reviews by nul

All the "finally the cheaters are gone" people are coping.
They'll be back, but this time there's no community server mods that can help deal with them.
Client-sided anti-cheat never works in any game, ever. Kernel level or not.

hey what do you know, the people who raised concerns about gearbox taking over development for the game were absolutely correct.

and for anyone huffing the "they will fix it" cope, read the news post more carefully. they didn't say an update was coming soon. they said there's more info coming, at some point. So you're gonna get info before you even get a patch.

My account simply stopped existing because of some bug some time ago.
Instead of being presented with my character when I logged in, I was asked to enter a new name, and then put into the tutorial, at lv 1, none of my items, none of my collections. The only thing my account retained was unlocked classes, flasks, flask emblems, clubs, and cubits.

I looked up to see if this happened to anyone else, and it did. The posts were a bit old, but they contacted support and were able to get their accounts restored.

I tried that. Took a week to get a support ticket response. Got one, said they can fix it, but they don't know when it'll be fixed, and that I should message them back in two weeks to check in on progress. They also warned me that any progress I make now will be wiped, once the account is restored.

So I waited two weeks. Then messaged them back, only to get told that they tried many different things and could not recover my account. They gave me a bunch of items as compensation, but it felt like pittance compared to the time and effort I spent into my account. A few loot boxes and like, 1 week of premium, doesn't make up for all that investment. But I suppose the gesture was nice.
Still. This leads me to believe that whoever on the team actually knew how to fix these account issues either quit or got laid off. With the number of companies laying off their staff willy nilly left and right, wouldn't be surprised.

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So, I tried starting from this completely new and fresh account with a bit of a boost and... well...
It's exactly what you'd expect from a heavily monetized live service game that's been around for 9 years.
It's been feature crept to hell.

Back when I initially played, Resplendent gear was the best gear you could get, and you were lucky to get it. Let alone one that had the stats you actually wanted on it. Then at some point they also added boats, fishing, etc, to give you more things to do. Then they added shadow gear, which was like... alright, sure, everyone's on resplendent now, I guess the number has to go up a bit. Then there was shadow 1-5, which was already an abysmally long grind. Only to then add radiant right after it, and, chaos chests. That's when I quit.

Now that I came back... There's more tiers on top of that, several new tiers even. S u r e ... Number Go Up. Whatever, game's old. But even other features... Fishing was given a skill tree, with progress speed gated by daily quests. You also have a skill tree thing, I didn't even bother figuring out what I'm supposed to grind/daily for that. Bunch more daily/weekly/hourly stuff, like quests, challenge events, on top of the already previously existing star bar (which used to be the only daily)
And then also a couple of daily stuff that gives you chaos chests, one that has a diminishing drop rate. The worst kind of daily.
And the chaos chest used to be just collection/cosmetic stuff. Now it's mandatory for unlocking classes.
And did you think handling 4 pieces of gear was enough? Well, too bad. Now there's gems. Which aren't anything special, it's just another like, 9 or 10 or whatever gear slots reskinned into a separate system, which has its own upgrade mechanics (a fail chance, with items that can reduce the fail chance, naturally), and best of all, they made this entire system untradable. And it has the same number of tiers as regular gear does. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of time/diminishing gate for earning the stuff you need to level these up, too. I didn't bother.

Mostly didn't bother because I have a job that takes up 8 hours of my day 4 days a week. Boo hoo, that's life but... With all the daily chores you have to do all piled up... I feel like I'm being punished if I don't do all of them. I'm not progressing as fast as I could be. Where before, in the good ol' days, you could just do your star bar, then go and do literally whatever you wanted. Wanted to go mining for a whole day? Go for it. Wanted to go fishing? Sure. Wanted to just sit there building a club? Cool. But now there's, everything, wanting your attention.

Speaking of clubs. Those aren't just social things you use to build things and hang out anymore. They've also been given progression systems. And yes, you can bet there's a daily tied to it. And not only that, but a tax tied to it too. I don't know if the tax scales based on number of members or not, but I imagine the system likely punishes more casual, smaller groups of players.

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There's the elephant in the room. Or probably thousands of them. Increasing at an alarming rate. Because people keep duplicating the elephants.
Any other MMO probably would've locked trading, and put in extra tracking on the server, until they could investigate, fix, and punish abusers of the duplication glitch.
We got:

Dear Trovians,

During the last downtime, our team focused on addressing various in-game exploits and the players engaging in them. We want to emphasize that exploiting any game vulnerabilities is a serious violation of our Terms of Service and compromises fairness and fun for all players. Rest assured; we are committed to ensuring such exploiters are not left unchecked.

To maintain fair play in Trove, we are consistently monitoring and acting upon any instances of exploit abuse. Additionally, we are ready to take appropriate measures against those who participate in such activities.
gamigo has a zero-tolerance policy for cheating and will not condone it in any of our games.

We really value your help in keeping an eye out for anything unusual or exploitative that you might come across in Trove.

We understand that issues like these can be frustrating, and we deeply appreciate your patience and ongoing support as we tackle them!

Best regards,
Your Trove Team.

a month ago.

And because this is one of those games where the higher ups use support, community managers, and moderators as a barrier for contact to more internal team members... There's just been complete radio silence. Even community managers have gone quiet and stopped talking, aside from posting events. I can't say I blame them. Community-facing positions can be a nightmare when things out of your power start to go wrong.

edit: nevermind lol

10/10 would play through tutorials while being locked at 30 fps (can change AFTER, at least), jump into a very mobile game main menu with millions of nothings to buy/claim, then crash on my first match again

Didn't take long to realise that certain champions are basically mandatory, and these aren't the free ones.

Sure, I could've just read up on who's good and got me and my friends to just buy those with the event 15k gold. But we didn't because we didn't think the balance in this game was that off. I don't expect to win with only 2.4 hours of experience, not by a long shot. But I expect to not just get deleted by people we only took 25% hp from when we worked hard trying to upgrade everything we could as fast as possible.
Sure, I could just not play the game till the 'good ones' are in rotation. Or grind out losing streaks till we can afford them. But even then, what's the point of having a choice? I'm not asking for perfect balance, but something is clearly wrong here.

This game doesn't mess around. You are given glorious walking simulator moments. Far better than any other walking simulator game. The theme is great. The dialogue is great. The music is amazing. The scenery is intriguing. And the way he walks feels empowering. And then after these moments, you're thrown right into a 'boss' fight, no 'minions' to warm you up. And they aren't short nor easy. A full relaxation straight into stress inducing tight 1 on 1 combat. I haven't been able to beat it yet. In fact, I shouldn't be trying at the moment considering I'm supposed to be relaxing. Yet, it's so great that I want to keep coming back to it. I'm only 2 hours into it on writing this but yet I feel this game is already deserving of my effort to go out of my way to give it that thumbs up.

Edit: I beat it, and my opinion on this has only become stronger.

Edit 2: I got all the achievements, finally. Now all that's left is the DLC fights.

Valdis Story is a game with a bit of a misleading store page.
Not in the sense of No Man's Sky trying to show off things it doesn't have. But it actually undersells itself.
It says assume the role of Wyatt, and then later says that there's two characters to play as. There's actually 4 and they're all unique in their own way, as well as allowing you to play those said 4 characters in a variety of ways. It also doesn't mention the arena or challenge mode.

That being said, it has amazing combat, story, and music, and quite a bit of replayability.

The combat is very solid and heavy, but not slow. Everything you do in combat feels very responsive and rewarding. Hitting an enemy feels like hitting an enemy. Unlike some other games that are significantly too fluid to the point where you're just a river of damage and physics need not apply other than your own inputs.
This means you need to plan out and adjust your style in order to overcome different challenges. Maybe one boss is better faced with something that can give you some breathing room, or another requires you to be able to time your skill cancels correctly.

The story is very interesting, and if you want to know more than what the game tells you through normal play, there's the lore tomes on top of that. And they're different for each character. Giving you insight on the world itself instead of just the current events unfolding. I would love to say more but I fear anything else may be viewed as a spoiler.

The music. It's one of the few games I bothered to go and buy the soundtrack for. Even though it's less accessable than others seeing how the soundtrack is not available on Steam. It's great, I love it.

Overall, this is one of my favourite games on Steam. And it's not even that expensive. I would've paid at least $10 more for it.

It's a pretty solid twin stick shooter. Has cats. It's got pretty nice graphics. Has lasers. It's pretty damn fun to play. Has space.

I'm not exactly sure what the 'casual' tag is doing on there, as 0% of the players have passed wave 50 on any difficulty. There's also a wave 100 achievement. The game is pretty intense and fast paced, and can get pretty frustratingly difficult in some situations no matter what difficulty you're playing on. That's not to say the situations were unavoidable. They were definitely punishing due to my own mistakes.
And while the available upgrades per wave are randomized, each one of them feels useful. In no right of mind would I take chain lightning over the crit simply because the crit is better, I would still take the chain lightning if the crit were not available and still be able to make use of it.

I just gotta keep aiming for the top, I just need to stop falling for stuns and remember to take vampirsm at least once.

Don't go in expecting any sort of depth on par with other mech combat games. There really isn't any strategy here, just lock on and shoot. There's only 3 situations where you have to move:
1) Forward. Because you're not close enough to lock on.
2) Left and right, rarely backwards. Because something outdamages you.
3) Somewhere, because tiny things behind god knows how many obstacles.

You can hit F to never take damage from missiles, too.

The projectiles are god awfully slow and there's no way for you or the enemy to hit anything other than locking on, unless you wanna struggle with melee. The problem with locking on is that any change in trajectory after the projectile is fired is a miss. This goes for both you and the enemy. However, the enemy will not actively dodge. You can A/D+Space for godmode.


So how does this differ from games like Armored Core?
Because in AC, you have significantly less room to outright spam your mobility. Boosting around a lot will leave you empty and vulnerable. In PN however, even if you run out of booster (somehow.), if you're far enough back, the enemy will still miss from normal movement.
AC had limited ammo, and in the later games, different damage types. This means you have to conserve, and make sure you're using the right weapons on the right enemies. Or pack a sword, which, felt much more clean to use, however, drains your energy upon use. PN you can just fire everything as they reload. Nothing is being wasted, you're just clearing faster. And none of the enemies seemed any different from each other. They were too small to notice any visual difference, and the only seemingly functional differences were the speed their healthbar depletes, and whether or not I need to press F. Thankfully, the speed of healthbar depletion means nothing, it'll be dead when it's dead, and the game constantly reminds me of when I need to press F.

Press F to pay respects.