Recent reviews by Mike

For 3.50 EUR (my regional price) it's worth it to boot up a few games and mess around.
But as a Battlefield game it's probably by far the worst one. The weapons feel terrible, they have no customisation or attachments. Everyone is using the same two weapons for each class.
The conquest maps are all horrible. It's either open fields or chokepoints only.
Tanks completely dominate every lobby. Think you can sneak up to it and kill it? Spawning as assault you have 2 Rockets, 2 C4 (dynamite) and you can choose an Anti-Tank bundle grenade. If you connect all 5 of those, you barely do 100 damage. And tanks have an instaheal button, so they have about 140 ehp.
So far in 20 hours I've seen about 5 hard cheaters (LMG headshotting rage hack type ♥♥♥♥), god knows how many more non-blatant ones.
There is literally no progression, pick what you want and play. All weapons have the same dozen "perks".

But ♥♥♥♥ it dude, for 3.50 EUR grab it, play a weekend with the boys and never come back.

A wonderful thing to see on steam for many who played Ratchet & Clank in their childhood, but had to part ways with their PlayStation.

It just has that perfect nostalgia and feels just like the games I played 10+ years ago on my Ps2, just picked it up and it's like I'm back.

The game is quite short ~10-15h it seems, but a blast all the way through.

Some people report crashes, I turned off DLSS and Nvidia Low Latency mode and I haven't crashed in the last 7 hours of my 10 played, maybe it helps someone. The performance is acceptable (5600X/3070 on High 1080p ~100fps), but there are so many particle effects that using some of the weapons once fully upgraded unironically drops my game from 100 to 20fps, which maybe should get addressed.

Spoiler Free. Finished the game in ~50h, nearly 100%, some achievements left, but mostly trivial collectables, all the stories are done.

There will be 2 types of people playing this game which will result in two completely different experiences to you, here's how I see it:

If you're a Harry Potter fan - phenomenal. The Wizarding World has never been done this well. The scale of the school, the sheer amount of detail, tiny nuances and painstaking attention to detail you would never notice unless you know what to look for. It really feels like the school was a passion project, not a business project. The characters have been done incredibly well, voice acting is top notch (with some exceptions). There is a lot of fan service, a ton of customisation. Everything is going to look great, feel great, play great and you are guaranteed to be hooked. Not much else to tell you, buy it, have a blast and absolutely enjoy the experience, however, please don't read below.

If you're not a Harry Potter fan - it falls short as a video game in a lot of aspects. As I'm personally not big on the HP universe, I don't look at the game with rose-coloured glasses and it really shows that the game is lacking. The school is great, but if you were to remove the collectables from it, it's empty. Very few quests will actually make you interact with the school in a more nuanced or deeper way. Basically, it's as wide as the ocean, but as deep as a puddle. There is no curfew, no way to interact with the students. No real school-system, you do whatever you want whenever you want. Even the "Unforgivable" curses are, as someone put it nicely, very forgivable, and you can use them next to your professor and they don't react to it. Your common room exists for about 3 times in the game when you wake up there and has nothing in it. The world around Hogwarts has been beautifully crafted, but again there just isn't much to do, despite looking loaded with markers. There are a lot of collectables scattered around the world, but you soon realise they're copy pasted. I did all 95 Merlin trials (as of now steam shows 0% global achievements so I'm one of the first), and there are only 7 types of puzzles in them(maybe i forgot one idk) and after you do the first 20 you realise they have been just placed all over the world for no reason other than to inflate your playtime. The mini-bosses and camps scattered through the world just give you some blueprint for furniture or a piece of gear. There is a beast capturing system, but in the end its only needed for materials that you use to upgrade gear, which you really don't need to do at all. There are potions in the game, but throughout the whole game playing on the hardest difficulty I used ~20 healing potions total (17 of those in the final fight) and 0 of the other potions as they feel useless.
The room of requirement is cool and decorating can be fun, but practically speaking you can plant a bunch of Mallowsweet for the Merlin Trials and that's about where its usefulness stops as you dont need anything else.
The enemy variety is lacking. There are mongrels, goblins, humans, trolls, spiders and few suits of armour. They just have a different colour of clothing or some more plates, but they all feel and look exactly the same to fight and get very repetitive very fast. There is also no quidditch, but it makes sense as it would most likely be too hard to make. The main quest is very generic and really not the best piece of writing and there is no choice. Sebastians side story could have been the main quest and it would make more sense. They also advertised Simon Pegg as he plays the Headmaster Nigellus Black, however, the headmaster appears about 4 times total in the game, and only once for more than two sentences, missed opportunity there.

That's how I would sum up this game - a missed opportunity to be so much more.

I don't mean to dissuade from purchasing the game, I still had fun with it myself and would probably recommend to play through despite all the shortcomings.

Fatshark has accepted that their game is good enough.
I have accepted that my review is good enough.

Basically you're paying money for improved graphics and god-awful framerates.
The recommended specs are just wrong. I'm playing with a GTX 1080 and I cannot get my FPS above 40 on stations, or above 30 on planetary settlements. If its a crowded place, I get 19-25fps.
The added content is very meaningless and I barely even bothered getting into it because the difficulty spikes not from 0 to 100 but from 0 to 500 instantly and there's no real point as it's a content island.
Unless you want to go explore and scan plants. I guess? The plants also for the most part look artificially forced on the planets. No fields or forests or anything, just a patch of 3 random mushrooms that all look identical and to scan them you have to scan them a few km apart, just because.

The only real value this provides is a better galaxy map and graphics. Fortunately I didn't experience bugs, but maybe because I just didn't do enough of the content.

Maybe if they work a lot on it, but at this state you're paying for early access, even though it's been out for over half a year.

Don't spend money in the store. Otherwise its a good game.

This game is getting more and more EA written over it.

Great at first, good events, fun gamemodes, fun mechanics.
Now - no events, more and more bugs, real issues not fixed for seasons, server problems all the time.
But hey at least the new event has 40 new skins that you can buy (not earn) and no real event included.

Don't bother.

eh

This has more content than Cyberpunk and most of it isn't even released yet.