Recent reviews by Gosling

Incredible. One of the best games I've ever played.

Positives:

- The narrative is extremely impressive - each story is well crafted and shaping your own story through choice is very satisfying.
- The character growth in the "good" arcs were very well written. I'm excited to try out a more "evil" run to see how it impacts not only the characters themselves but the progression of the larger narrative.
- Combat is fun and can be quite challenging at times (highly recommend turning karmic dice off as you become more powerful), but finding non-combat ways to solve an issue is refreshing!
- The overall freedom of what's possible allows for a huge variety in how a given play through will play out. I managed to pass a dc 30 persuasion check near the end of the game that ended up resulting in a neat change in that character's story ending. I'm curious how many more variations like that exist that I totally missed out on along the way!
- Visual character customisation is incredible. You have the tools to make a character look exactly as you would like them to.
- It's so refreshing to buy a full game without any sort of dlc/microtransacitons. After nearly 80 hours I almost feel like I underpayed for this game given the fact I still have unexplored solo-playthrough options, multiplayer runs with friends, etc.
- It was a good idea to allow characters to change their classes in-game. I did my playthrough without changing anything, but it was nice to know the option was there.

Criticisms:

- It's hard to know exactly when characters are ready to progress their story through new dialogue. Sometimes it is obvious, like when you complete an objective related to their story, but other times you'll get seemingly random cut-scenes in a long rest.
- Trying to cast a spell on the ground can feel a little janky; the spell-cast circle snaps just a touch sometimes that makes it quite hard to target exactly where you want (in tactical view and normal view). An extension of this is that inevitably you will misclick a target by a couple of pixels and your character will melee an ant on the ground next to your target. This is a user error, of course, but it's still relatively easy to do if you're just trying to get through a combat session.
- Tav's need more voice options. The voices in the game are great, but it's a little jarring to hear a dragonborn/dwarf/half-orc berserker barbarian sound like a distinguished scholarly gentleman.
- It would be nice to have an in-game ability to see what classes gain as they level up.
- Running the game for a long time ends up having a memory leak that makes the game unplayable. I assume this will be fixed relatively soon, and it goes away if you close the game and reopen it, but it's still worth mentioning.
- Baldur's Gate 3 set the bar for future RPG's. Where do we go from here???

The appearances look great.

The melee system is excellent. Different weapons have different swing properties; mastering individual combos to maximise damage feels awesome.
My biggest gripe is the way that power is tied to character levels. That said, playing with friends and trying to succeed in higher difficulties with lower level characters can be a fun challenge.
Overall, Vermintide 2 is a great game and well worth the money!