Recent reviews by tho3maxi

The controls are just as ass as in the first one but its still great fun with friends and has some great additions that make the game feel more worthwhile, like unlockable permanent buffs.

Its not bad, if there was a neutral option I would have to use it but I cannot recommend it for the following reasons:

-graphics have issues, assets don't look consistent, visual style is all over the place, it feels weird and looks bad.
-minor issues with glitches and performance, poorly optimized, few options.
-not a lot of content in relation to other titles in the genre and the price.
-half the time i was playing it was fun, the other half I didnt enjoy it. Thats not great.

There are good things about it though:

-gameplay loop works alright.
-definitely fun with friends.
-there always were frequent updates (not sure how it will be now after 1.0)

What I dislike most is the huge potential the game had, until it was suddenly "finished" but it still feels like a beta to me, mostly because of technical reasons and the small feature set. Im happy for everyone who enjoys it. For me it only works if im burnt out with everything else and want to play something that doesnt matter and doesnt need attention.

You will have fun, but I think you will have a lot more fun with other games.

TL;DR: get it on sale, play with friends.

This is one of the greatest games ever developed, as close to perfection as a game can realistically get.
A must-buy, if you like that kind of game or have friends to play it with even if you're not sure.

The Team is great, communication is awesome.
QoL, optimisation and options are far beyond standard.
It looks gorgeous.
There is more than enough content and the price is fair and just.
Game devs and publisher, take notes.
I want to spend more money on something that deserves it that much.

There are still some little things id like to see fixed or added (like rain being reintroduced) but ive had other games displaying more technical issues in a few hours than satisfactory had in my 2000+ hours across all platforms.

TL;DR: 11/10

TL;DR: Not yet

Im sure you wonder how I could judge the game with literally ~5 minutes of playtime.

I cannot judge the gameplay at all. Also, graphics are okay. But in the very little time I had, some pretty major issues hit me:
1. I cant turn off antialiasing (thats a personal issue for me, no biggie, but annoying).
2. When entering a game, the character looks around. The camera moves. You can not override it, cancel it, you have to wait. its motion sickness inducing, totally unnecessary and takes way too long. in my experience, games that force this crap onto you once, will do it again. Please just let me disable/skip it. easy fix.
3. huge issues with window resolution. I cant play on borderless in native 4k, its either smaller in the corner, lower resolution and blurry, not borderless, or has other issues. This is the major reason for my refund of the game.
4. Menu music is LOUD, i turned it to a still loud but okay volume and then the intro cinematic was painfully quiet. fix your audio balance.
5. almost every confirmation and skip required you to hold a button down for at least a full second, more than 5 for the intro cinematic. Let me disable that and we are good. its a totally unnecessary waste of time taking more than a second to close a menu, skip the splash screen, or applying settings. I should be able to navigate through the whole settings panel, change a setting and apply it in less than a second, not hold down a button for no reason.

I assume those issues will be fixed eventually, and I'll be happy to review this game again and change my opinion once this happens. Right now, I cant even play it.

I've been playing Warzone pretty much since it existed (mostly on Battle.net and have about 200 hours in total), it was pretty nice at first, but after additions of more titles it got more and more cluttered and prone to technical issues.

Some of the bugs/annoyances exist since the first version of the game, altogether there has been an increase in bugs. The newest version doesnt even look as good anymore, the maps have little care in them and the menus and UI are terrible to use, even when it works. There are far too many issues to list all of them here, but some are:

Laggy servers, connection issues, bugged social features, terrible balancing/meta, cant turn off AA anymore for some reason, laggy menus, and thats just this game, im not even touching the general Activision/Blizzard issues.

Just play some other games. WZ is free, but not even worth the disk space and bandwith.

usually I had to run the game to listen, now my gpu can relax and I'll probably save money on this

When comparing the base, vanilla games, C:S2 is a better game, no question about it, even with all the performance issues.

But if you compare it to C:S1 with mods, it's tough. You'll probably be better off waiting until most technical issues are fixed.

I have a lot of problems with the game. But I'm also enjoying myself playing it.

You might need the wiki for playing, but there's a lot to do.

Fighting, building, collecting, playing with friends. But come on, you're not reading these comments to evaluate the game, this is like Minecraft. There are so many videos, so much content, so many memes and artworks, you know it's good. Get it.

TL;DR: This game is over, Ill work on another video explaining its downfall.

So, as you can see from my steam profile I played over 1700 hours of factorio but what you cant see are my hours in subnautica and satisfactory I accumulated on Epic games. its a lot, I have played automation/sandbox/automation games all my life, I love to spend days on a factory, yet I got all achievements and end game performance problems in Techtonica after only 20 hours of gameplay. Techtonica is not worth it (yet).

If you want the long version you can check out my video review on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-J_-xAl7AI&t=2s

The Good:
-Music
-Voice acting
-Writing
-aesthetics
-offers fully optional multiplayer

The meh:
-asset quality is hit or miss
-progression is a bit cumbersome
-UI and HUD needs some getting used to.
-slow progression (terrible for me, might be fun to you)

The Bad:
-Bugs
-Performace issues
-Crashes
-lagging music (super annoying)
-massively lacking QoL
-immersion breakers
-input processing/mouse smoothing (cant be turned off)

Now, the devs are actually really nice people and they are super honest, transparent and communicative and I am sure that some, if not all issues, will be resolved in the future (certain changes and updates already have been announced) but its not there yet. I'm happy to change this review once the game improves.

TL:DR: its a decent open world game and very pretty and if that's enough for you It'll be okay for you.

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The Bad

Technical:

Hogwarts Legacy runs POORLY over all, I noticed a lot of smaller bugs and glitches like lighting being weird, camera angles having seizures, nothing game breaking but annoying things. However, I also had my fair share of game crashes, sometimes even locking Steam so I'd have to restart my PC. Worse is the configuration.
While I praise HL for most of its accessibility options, a couple of basic things are missing. FOV is limited and camera distance is not adjustable. After only a couple of minutes I'll have a headache and become dizzy. I managed to increase the FOV beyond the norm by editing the config file but this made the game run very poorly in many situations and the compromise still made me dizzy after only an hour.
Even worse, you can not turn off antialiasing (something that would improve perfromance drastically) and the only possible AA modes for me are DLAA (which sucks) and TAA (wich sucks even more), both methods leave artifacts on the screen that just don't look pretty at all.

Storytelling:

I will not spoil anything, but it sucks. The story line itself might be okay in the end since I only played about half of it but there are serious deficits here. First, it doesn't quite make sense to me. Now, I read 5 of the books, saw the 8 movies, and I still don't quite understand whats going on. It all seems random, dull, and worst of all: slow. Quests are extremely linear and when I was exploring and doing side quests many dialogues or voice lines didn't make any sense (referencing characters I hadn't met yet, telling me to do things I already did, getting thrown into an advanced side quest I stumbled upon with no idea what to do, that kind of stuff) and the characters and how they act don't seem relatable or believable.
Also a lot of the quests start with following a NPC to a certain spot after teleporting to the NPC. Following slow moving NPCs isn't my idea of fun or immersive storytelling.

The worst part is that you are forced to complete tons of story and quests before you can actually progress further in the open world. If I could have skipped the story and just walked around doing wizard fights, that's what I would have done and I would probably not have refunded the game.

Character:

While visual customization is a strong point, I could not connect to my character at all. Visuals is all you can choose. The dialogue options, The way my character talked, it all alienated them from me as the player. Its so frustrating because it seems so superficial. If you're making me create my own character, and then force decisions and personality on them, that feels strange. Either let me have control over who my character is or have me play someone who fits the story you want to tell the player.
Also, for some reason, we are the innately super special magic awesome person and everything revolves around us. Never have to ask for a favor, always being offered help, everyone always has time exclusively for us or cant be interacted with at all. Just feels very synthetic.

Controls:

The standard layout is a bit weird, but you can reassign and customize controls so that's not the issue. My biggest issue here is feedback. Combat feels great in general, but sometimes I don't know why I died. I played on hard and most times it was perfectly fine, even taking out bosses beyond my level. But in other fights I was dodging, shielding, and then died. normally when you die, the character falls to the floor. I got death screens with my character running and jumping and rolling that very moment on multiple occasions. With no idea what killed me, or when. I am not sure if this is actually a serious bug but it got really annoying.

Music:

It does not include quite the same soundtrack from the movies, its very different, albeit a similar theme. That was disappointing for me. The music in the room of requirement is actually pretty annoying, but that's just a matter of taste I guess.

Graphics:

The overall gameplay graphics are good, see later. However, the cutscenes and "cinematics" are a joke. Cutscene animations are terrible, sometimes not even starting in the uncanny valley, most are far from out of it. The textures and models are perfectly fine but there are always some details or animations or effects that shed light on the worst possible parts of the cutscene. The cinematics are just plain bad. I play on native 4k, 60hz and the short season change movie is highly compressed 1080p 30hz garbage. From a full price title in 2023 I expect far better.

World Objectives:

There are a lot of things to do in and around Hogwarts and that's good. Sadly it's a lot of copy and paste. I loved doing the Merlin's trials at first. Mostly because they can increase the gear inventory size. But every time one of them is completed, its the same unskippable (and far too long) cutscene that doesn't even render the player character when its standing there. Most enemies and puzzles do reset completely when you go away too far, and by that I mean about 30 meters. I've seen a Troll actually vanish and respawn on the hill behind it. I've seen puzzle elements do the same thing. Its annoying and wastes time, breaks immersion and adds nothing to the gameplay. I cant multitask, I cant kite enemies. Why build a big, detailed open world if I cant interact with the world and the entities in it simultaneously?

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The Good

Graphics:

It. Looks. Stunning. The atmosphere is pretty on point and the models, textures, effects and assets all look great. The world is beautifully put together, expect for a handful of objects clipping weirdly, being misaligned, hovering or having transparent edges (which is sure to happen in all open word games to a certain degree). But most of all I am impressed with the VFX artists, they really outdid themselves.

Hogwarts:

The castle is breathtaking. All the rooms, the details, the corridors, the ghosts, the paintings... beautiful. All together it is a very accurate representation of the castle as known from the books and movies. The surrounding area and Hogsmeade are similarly well made. The ambient animations are magical and the world is filled with interesting collectibles.

Combat:

This is the strongest point of the game for me and even if the whole games was ultimately not for me, I enjoyed most of the fights. It's fast, intense, beautiful, snappy, the sounds are great, it's easy to grasp but hard to master. Fights were always a challenge for me, but never too hard.

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Summary

The game is not for me. For 20 bucks or less, I guess its fine. But its so damn disappointing. It is weirdly inconsistent with some parts of it being absolutely the best things I've ever seen in gaming and others being done better in 5€ trash games. It is an excellent showcase for an interactive Hogwarts, but it was not immersive. The first 5 hours were interesting, the next 5 confusing, the last 5 annoying. It's hard for me to find the right words. I hoped it would become better but it just became worse. It feels tiring and bothersome to advance. Ultimately, I found no more motivation to play. When I avoid playing a game because it annoys me, its a bad sign.

If you love HP, Hogwarts, and some casual fun, and don't take this game so seriously, you'll probably have a good time. I hadn't.