Recent reviews by Xeno

W A S D was the best thing to implement into PoE 2.
Bosses and even blue and yellow mobs that are tought to fight rather then anying bullet sponges like in PoE 1.

In PoE 1 it was all effect spam, trash mobs did barly give any XP and the only chalange was to kill them within 1 second.
Here even a blue mob group can take you a minute depending on the modifier and yellow mobs are mini bosses of their own.

Yes the game is very hard compare to before.

fighting style balance is non existent.
Ranges = Very strong.
Magic = Strong
Nectomancy = Strong with Raging spirit and weak without
Totems = medicore
Melee = terrible

The Bosses are good.
Melee sadly isnt made to keep up with the pacing of the fighting.
Melee is not tanky enough to deal with the massive damage everything deals.

But ranged is fun and i think they will rework melee to be fun as well.


So Thumps up right now if you want to play a ranged character.
Thumps down for True Melee.

actual not pay 2 win.
Current meta means that the free 2 play nation is the strongest.

To eloberate.
All nations have strengh and weakneses.
The Abstract Free to play nation has no weakness but also no strengh.

Example.
Germany has very strong units but they are very expensive.
Germany has no anti air until endgame.
Abstract has no super arty, but arty is very cheap.
they got much sooner.

Germany can easy be counterd by air from abstract.

All nations can be earned ingame.
You can pay for them but you can also just unlock them by playing the game.

After finishing the story one i can say i had a lot of fun and will try new game+
The combat is good you dont need any of the microtransactions.
You get all the items ingame in good number. No idea why anyone would buy them.

Perfomance got better after i activated AMD fluid motion frames.
Got the FPS in the city from 25 to 40.
Then put anti alysing off and shadows to low increased the fps even more.

All in all i can say super fun game with performance problems.
So i recommend this if you have a mid to high end PC.



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old review bellow here.
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is the game fun?
Yes if you have a high end system.
Otherwise expect abysal FPS.

DLC stuff can be ignored and looked more like a tag on that the devs had to add after the game was done.
It looks like some marketing boss decided they needed more money and forced the devs to add stuff.

Alternative use mods to get the items you need. THe worst they can do it ban you from using the multiplayer component (pawn exchange)
You can always use the single player pawns.

best game ever.

wait...
What do you mean this is just the character creation?

EDIT 3:
Here we are again.
Arrowhead beeing stupid.
Or more Purplepigon one of the mods acting like a god and pushing forced diversity.
Someone made a LGBTQ+ Fanart.
And anyone who reacted negative to it got banned.
Also anyone saying "Identity Politics" will now also be banned.

Arrowhead should get rid of all the mods who push this nonesens.
But offcourse that wont happen.
So uninstall and let it die,



Edit 2:
Sony went 180 and its no longer mandatory.
At least on twitter.
The CEO of Arrowhead also used the tweet as proof.
Sony will not change it for that would truely be a massive pr disaster.

So thumps up again.
We won Helldivers.
The power of the comunity.

EDIT:
It is no MANDATORY to have a playstation account to play.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid.
Uninstalled.

Also who hired the idiot Comunity managers?
Both keep insulting the playerbase, telling people to leave the game.

Never Sony again.


----------------
TLDR at 2Hours: Before i knew it time was over and i got a mix of fun and frustation as i also crashed 3 times.


Current state 5/10 with a 7/10 if the crashes are fixed and a 8/10 with friends.

It took them a couple hours to fully fix the matchmaking problem.
If there where crashes on startup, then they are not happening anymore.
So they are fixing Stuff real fast.
I dont doub that they fix the crashes as well.

Missions are fine at the start but i can see the objective getting repeteive.
The sometimes minutes running from point A and point B are kinda borring.
I get that its part of the randomized generation of the maps but sometimes the main objective and the extraction zone are miles apart.
On the other hand, there are tons of enemy patrolls, some you can avoid if you want to.
Or orbital bomb if you not.
It might be more fun with futher strategem unlocks but the basic 2 + the first one you can unlock straight away are well, basic.
I got the turret as 3rd and its a mix of super usefull and downright wiping your team as friendly fire is always on.


2 Hours of playtime spend:
First try on the tutorial bugged for me.
Went back to ship and back into tutorial.
Now worked just fine and a good tutorial that is short and funny, while explaining basic game mechanics.

Tried quick match and worked just fine.
Would be nice to know if my mic is muted or not but nobody said anything.
You start on very easy and the mission was over in 2 min.
Next one crashes after landing.
Next one went fine but took 10 min.
Went into a challange dificulty game with 2 randoms.
Died often but got the main and 4 side objectives.
On the way back a crash.
No way to reconecct.
I know from the other crashes that i get no reward for crashes missions.
So 25 min wasted.

I leave today with a bit of a bitter feeling, but i knew this could happen. I read the reviews and the steam forum.
So i try tomorrow again, most likely without crashes then.

On topic of reviews many complain about crash on startup.
I never had one.
Maybe they have one or mabye the just review bomb becourse the game uses rootkit anti cheat, the most effective anti cheat way possible.
They complained about it weeks before and now i see the same people complaining, writting negative reviews after 0,3 hour play time.

First ranked game.
2 new players vs 2 Silver 4.
Team mate left right at the start.
Ai Takes over.
Ai is better then the siler players.
Ai wins the dam game.
I get an archivement for winning 1 vs 2.
10/10 would chose Ai over real people again.

After 498 hours i think its good?

9/10 Absolut fun.

So i got now over 40 hours of playtime in it on a PVP server.


TLDR:
It has potential but needs some big adjustments.
IT is a PVP game. PVE is mostly just preparing for PVP.
The Griend is Real. It takes a Ton of stuff to make anything.
The game is in need for balancing on all aspects.
Wait until its fleshed out to try.


The good:
-High stake PVP.
-Solid Gunplay (in my opinion)
-Lots of different guns for everyone. From a Bow to a Rocked Launcher.
-Base raids only during a 3 hour window that you can set.
-Groups limited to 6 so no massive Zerg without FF.

The neutral:
-Map is to large for only 40 people.
-You nearly never are going to see other players unless you are activly looking for them or they for you.
-Vehicles driving is solid but costs an arm for fuel.
-Player Armor is Paper. The Armor helps, but doesnt do that much.
-Player Health increases as you level. So high level will always have the advantage over low level but you can start new far more easy if you are high level.

-The Ai is bad but they improve it with every patch.

The Bad:
-Massive Resource Griend.
My team of 6 spend a total of around 200 hours to build our base and set up half solid defenses. (Its not finished)
That is with only 20 shots for each of the 12 turrets. They are that expensive to make.
Rockets are even more expensive.

Right now i would say they need to up the resource drop rates by at least 3 times to compensate.
Its like the grind is made for 20 people teams, not 6.


-Ammo costs to much.

-Building and repair of rarity Blueprints costs to much.

-The Wave based event is not like it is in the Trailer.
You build a Monster Lure. They spawn from it.
The Monster lure has to be pretty close to your base core.
So stuff like hordes of enemys coming over the hills and your base shooting at them doesnt exist.
Our Core is at max level and they spawn right outside our walls.



So As stated abouve.
I would maybe buy it now as the price is reduced and play it after the patched it.
Then again 20€ is not that big of a deal.
But right now i just cant recommend it due to the way everything is

TLDR: 4/10 Vannilia , 6-7/10 with mods.
Buy at 50% Off.
Its not worth the current price and if i did not get the game as part of buying my new pc, i would have refundet this.

The good.
-solid Storys, both main and side.
-its massive. (I can see myself spending 100+ hours in here)

Neutral:
Ship combat.
Its bare bones but working.
Yes you have your energy to weapons, engine, shields but that bearly does anything.
At least i dont see my dmg double if i put everything into my weapons and my shield doesnt regenerate any faster if i put everything there.
The max shield goes up but i am screwed anyway once the its down.
Not once did i manage to regenerate my shield mid combat.

The Grav drive is obsolut.
You auto put points into it to jump.
Absolutly pointless.


Negativ:
FOV:
There is no FOV slider in the game and that is not ok in 2023.
Mods easy fix this, but it should be part of the standart settings.

Menus and inventory:
The menus are awfull.
There is no better way to say it.
It takes far to many clicks and butten presses to get anywhere.
And no you can not just double klick with the mouse to do something.
Hell the mouse is half useless in the menu.
Everything looks like it was made for consol with 0 effort for PC.

And then there is the inventory.
It looks to me, that whoever made the inventory, never played a game in their life.
Its absolutly garbage and needs a full revamp.
You spend nearly as much time trying to figue out how to do anything with that terrible inventory, then actually playing.


Quests:
You can only have 1 quest active at a time.
Thats normal, but in other games you still see if you have other quests in the same area and where they lead.
Like having the active quest yellow but the not active one blue.

Here i do the qust in an area.
I go check the map and see that there is another quest in the area.
But i can not click it to activate it.
It shows not even the name of the quest, only the current objective.
The quest menu is not sorted by areas either.
So i have to manualy open each quest to find the one with the right objective.

Again whoever made this, never played a quest in their life.


Then There is the fact that you auto go into new game+ the moment you finish your last story mission.
Not even asking if you want to keep playing your current game.
No, everything aside from your skill points is reset.



Another terrible thing is building outposts.
Its terrible.
easy to start your setup but storage and linking them is awfull again.
I cant for the love of me figuere out how to transfer items from my outpost storage into my ship.
Without leaving my ship.
I build the transfer storage.
I build the large landing pad.
I landet my ship on it.
I can acress my ship inventory from the transfer storage but i can not send anything direktly into it.
The entire menu is ♥♥♥♥ and belongs in the dam trash.


Last is the dam Loading screen simulator.
Thats what i call this game.
land anywhere = Loading screen
Enter a building = Loading screen
Want to move from one planet to another in the same system = Loading screen.
Want to enter your ship ? Again loading screen.

Every little thing in the dam game is behind a loading screen.
So much for "open World"