Recent reviews by DinnerTimeFun™

The concept of the game is fun. There are multiple modes, and different weapons that make this a joy to play when the lobbies are fair. The problem is two fold:
1. The lobbies are usually stacked with pros, because there's a point in the release cycle of a game where new players stop coming and traditionally decent players dominate the space. This game has probably reached that mark.
2. Cheaters. I have not played a game so inundated with cheaters in a long time. It's to the point where I genuinely don't believe Embark is doing anything, at all, about the cheating epidemic.

Most lobbies go something like 1-1 K/D and then you get someone who joins and they go 13-0 using a weapon they really shouldn't be at either impossible ranges, or just insta-tap headshots or something like this. It's obvious just watching them that they're not legitimate players. DBD, Tarkov, Apex, etc. all have better records than this game in terms of how they deal with cheaters. I like this game, but I've now uninstalled it. You get to a point where it's just not fun. Getting one tapped from across the map is funny the first couple of times, but it's gotten to a point where it's EVERY game. Yeah, it's now an unplayable mess.

I wanted to speak more on the different game modes, but they're not even worth mentioning with the amount of cheaters in this game. Yeah, it's that bad.

1000 ways to die. Falling off buildings, getting set on fire, running yourself over with a car, and that doesn't even get to the 'zomboids'. One random scratch and you're walking around suicidal like you have the germ. Lovely. 9/10.

Somehow this game is way more fun than vampire survivors. It's just the superior game, and it's free. It's both fun and addictive. If you're a roguelike fan you probably already have it, if you don't it's definitely worth playing. I don't know how the genre can stand up against such a game. It is quite possibly the best game of it's genre and it will be the measure by which other titles are compared.

It's better than it used to be. It's still buggy. I still have alot of issues with it, but it's fun.

The game does too much hand-holding demonstrating in a very literal way which pieces need to be plugged in, internally, to make the machine turn on. These are things that new users typically cut their teeth on to get the machine to work. Further it does the watercooling pump testing for you. IRL that's something that you generally do yourself, and if you have to replace pieces beneath the system it automatically flushes the coolant for you. The software side of installs is non-existant. The overclocking mechanisms are toned WAY down. and you don't ever need to access to the bios to initiate boot-priority for the USB instead of the M.2. It'll get you familiar with internal pc components if you have no experience, but beyond the legoy portions of PC building it leaves a typical user stranded in the water. I couldn't imagine truly being ready to build a 25k mark 3D rated rig after playing this game. It has fun moments and it does give you ideas, so I wouldn't throw the game in the trash, I just wouldn't recommend it if you already have experience.

Sometimes you have to admit when a game has run its useful/interesting course. That's where Dead by Daylight is now. It's at the end of its functionally interesting life. The devs are still throwing stuff at the wall to see what will stick, but there comes a time when you have admit that the technical capacity for new content has reached its limit. Playing dress up with killers and survivors just gets stale. Even the new killers feel like dressed-up novelties of things that already exist in the game. The skill curve is such that when you're at the top of the game there's really nowhere else to go.

Yeah, you could go 'comp' but being 'competitive' in dead by daylight is riding the short bus of the gaming industry. This game will never be truly competitive when the development team clearly has no ability to balance the game. Competitive games require a VERY carefully cultivated balance that doesn't exist here. You think at some point they will figure out that a 2000 win streak shouldn't be within the realm of possibility for any killer, but here we are. I guess what I'm saying is that this game can never be truly competitive at any level:mechanical, development, skill expression. etc.

The streamers are starting to leave, but my opinion is that they were always a problem. They pushed the game to be what it is today and it shows. They wanted easy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ killers they could play while sucking off their audience. Boom, they got it. I don't blame streamers for that though, I blame the devs for putting all of their eggs in the streamer basket. I can't imagine that people who aren't streamers were ever in the fog whisperer community or they'd have something to say about it.

Let's not forget that Behavior has had YEARS almost a decade now to fix some of the problems with the game that have been there since the beginning. It's a mess and I'm at that point where it's only fun to troll people anymore. I don't even have fun in the game. I have more fun just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on people in the end game chat with kirbies <(-_-<)<(-_-)>(>-_-)> ez.

You really can't beat the price on this game for what it is. I will say that playing with a group is enormously more fun than doing pug matches, but pugs are still pretty fun. I wasn't expecting a 6 dollar game to be so enjoyable. The gist of the game is one or two people, depending n the group, are imposters whose goal it is to kill everyone else. Everyone else is trying to do tasks to fix a spaceship or repair a research facility and try to figure out who the killers are. The matches can range from short to longish, but don't really go above 10 minutes.

TL;DR So, I have nearly 260 hours in this game, and I have quite a few gripes. This game feels like it wasn't originally designed for online play. I mean they threw the online in as an after-thought then came up with a model for making money. The single-player campaign is great. The online play is honestly fairly worthless.
I'll try to cover the highlights of the bad, because it's mostly bad. Alot of the online play is repetitive, and grindy. Rockstar have rigged the experience to force people to buy shark cards because everything, including the shark cards are so expensive. You think, "Well I'll just buy businesses and use the revenues to buy stuff" but, the businesses themselves can actually cost you more money than you can make on them. I'll give you an example: The weed-farm in Paleto Bay only pays about 212,000 each mission. You may not be able to run the mission yourself forcing you to restart the game to get a different mission that you're capable of soloing. Each time you do this you lose a little supply. To fully upgrade the weed farm to maximally generate revenue takes about 1.3 million. The farm itself costs about 800k. which means you need 2.1 million. If you do the Math, just to earn enough to repay the cost of the weed farm you need to complete at least 10 missions. HOWEVER, there are hidden costs, one: each time you get a mission you can't complete, like the bike missions, because you NEED 4 people if you're going to do the bikes from paleto to LSA you have to restart. you lose about 10% of your total haul each time you restart the game to do the mission. that really means that assuming you only restart once and you get the full haul you really need about 11 missions JUST TO REPAY THE INITIAL COST. It takes about 2 hours of real time to fill the weed-farm and it only generates while you're in game. What that means is it takes 22 hours of TOTAL time to repay the weed farm. NOW, you also have to pay employees of the businesses you own. If you max it out the actual cost of employees for the farm is 4kish a day. That means you CANNOT earn enough money from the weed-farm without other players to be able to pay it back in under at least 15 runs. 15 runs is about 30 hours of real in-game time. That means the only businesses that will EVER generate an actual profit are the cocaine facility and the meth facility. Any of the other biker businesses will just end up costing you money if you're a solo player. Most people are. Rockstar isn't stupid. They do these things on purpose. It's to lead you on believing it's possible to earn money instead of just buying shark cards, but in reality you're not actually earning money. They added in a completely overpowered vehicle that has chaff, target lock, and shoots missiles called the Oppresssor Mk2. People have said this is Rockstar being clueless, but they knew what they were doing. They hate the idea that people are grinding money in the game on the few profitable businesses: Cargo, Import/Export, Cocaine Lockup, VIP Missions, and the terrorbyte diamond heist, so they intentionally put in a vehicle that griefers can use to prevent people from being able to make money other than shark cards. Also, you will need to grind cargo, VIP, and terrorbyte missions because those are the only real profitable things you can do. Paying for businesses is expensive too. You have to pay upkeep. The missions themselves are repetitive and kinda boring, and the only vehicle you really want or need is the oppressor mk2. Yes, you ca get the buzzard and the armored kuruma early on, and they're useful, but at the end of the day there's only one vehicle that mattters, and it's the oppressor mk2.

I would not recommend the game as it currently is.

It plays like a total war game with a few additional mechanics, a neat art style, and quite a few heroes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I'll go over some of the positives and the negatives, and why I'm not recommending this game as it currently stands.

The Positives:

Alot of unique heroes with special abilities, ancillaries, weapons, and mounts.
There's alot to customize for each general.
Two different game modes make the game more interesting for players that prefer a more historical, or records mode gameplay; or for people spoiled on the Warhammer games in Romance mode.
There are alot more gameplay mechanics which allow you to use subterfuge and diplomacy a bit more to a more meaningful effect.
The art style is different and kinda neat.

The Negatives:

The multiplayer combat is a stacked deck. People only host 1v1s if they're either cheating the map to make sure the terrain features favor themselves, or if they have a decent team that's really with it. There's no point to playing a multiplayer pub match unless you are hosting. It also explains why there are very few online matches going for a game like this that just released.

Some of the gameplay mechanics render others useless. Spies for instance are able to carry out assassination missions if you have the cover cost. However, the way the game works assassination is fairly worthless because each action that your spy takes increases the likelyhood they'll get caught by an enemy faction. If you don't utilize them for too long they'll convert to the enemy faction. Meaning you have to use them and the likelyhood of success for most any operation is very low. You probably won't be using spies very often just because the operating costs make them an expensive gamble.

Building on the previous issue, there is a difference between coalitions and military allies. It's almost NEVER in your interest to enter a military alliance. In a coalition you can pick your enemies and reject war against some while still maintaining your diplomacy rating with coalition members. Since diplomacy ratings build, mostly, based on how much you damage enemy factions of coalition members there's no reason to ever enter into a military alliance, and you can confederate allies based on your power level and diplo rating. To summarize this means that you NEVER need to enter a military alliance to confederate another group. The mechanic is thusly worthless.

Records mode is incredibly dry. It isn't just dry, it's bone dry. Because every faction more-or-less shares the same units The heroes being as toned down as they are provide no real advantage. They're just another unit.

Each faction only has 1 unique unit. It's not like in other total war games where the factions had multiple unit types and unique traits.

The AI really needs work. I beat the game as Zheng Jiang, the bandit queen in normal difficulty by using prodigious use of ambush. I hardly had to fight many battles because the AI walked into nearly all of my ambushes.

The battles aren't won by tactics, they're mostly won by positioning. If you sit yourself on a hill with trebuchets you may as well just put "GG" in the chat before the game starts. Positioning on high ground for trebuchets and archers is pretty much an automatic win, in either single or multiplayer. Running almost any kind of infantry against archers, even heavily armored ones, is like walking into machine gun fire.

There's no blood. I know they'll probably release a blood and gore pack that they'll charge for, but the game is a bloodless affair.

The dueling mechanic is kinda useless except to tie up good generals. If you have a good duelist it's better to just target other generals on the field rather than actually duel them. They can still harm enemy troops while fighting the generals and if you know you're going to win you can keep them out of the battle anyway. So why duel at all?

They tried to make it so you need to trade and conduct more diplomacy to get more money, but that's easier said than done. Some factions have it alot easier when you can intimidate more of your enemies like CaoCao, but for others like the bandit faction, you can NEVER make alot of money because most factions will NEVER deal directly with you, which means even with raiding you're always going to be broke.

I noticed this explictly with Zheng Jiang, and perhaps it's the same with others, but her notoriety decreases once she declares herself empress. There's no way to bring that faction currency up. It just slowly decreases no matter how many ambushes you pull off or how many armies you route or how many commanderies you take.


Overall Thoughts: This game feels a bit lazily put together compared with other titles, and I'm somewhat disappointed with where it currently is. I have over 100 hours in this game, so I feel qualified to say you can take it or leave it depending on how much you like the Total War franchise.

There just really isn't enough content to keep this game interesting. You spend alot of time crafting, but you don't really need to, and it requires no real skill. You can put your skill points into anything and it all feels the same. This game goes too long with no real update, and it stops being fun once you've spec'd your character with the best weapons and it just turns into a 'wait to murder another player' game or a grindy run and hide type game.