Recent reviews by Shamrock

Naraka is a sick game that is held back by what I can only assume is a severe difference between what two video game communities want from their experience. I played a lot on launch and came back for around 5 hours after it went free to play and what I'm about to talk about was a problem back then and is an even bigger problem now.

As I think a lot of people have pointed out in the reviews is the bot issue. What an average game to me and my friends looks like is walking around bored out of our minds massacring bots for like 10 or 15 minutes, then suddenly finding a fight of 20 people and getting instantly massacred by those people. In the last match I just played I realized why. The game has an actual MINORITY of real players. My friend and I found this out and I have a clip of it recorded because we walked around and killed some random team and then we started to walk away from their loot and a group of 6 bots spawned in literally directly in front of us. Then the bots instantly parried me by reading my inputs and reacting to them in an inhuman amount of time because the bots were on a harder difficulty. I know this because these bots only spawned in when there were 12 players left. That's right, TWELVE PLAYERS LEFT and at LEAST HALF of them were bots that hadn't been spawned in yet, so you couldn't interact with them until that point. And since they were in the final 15 or whatever, they had purple armor, purple weapons, and the ability to instantly read my inputs and parry me. This was in a RANKED match too.

So if anyone read this and felt vindicated by this feeling of "why am I just walking around and finding NO REAL HUMANS" for like 10 to 20 minutes at a time, now you can understand why.

In this part of my comment I'm going to speculate a bit so bear with me and try to understand I could be wrong about this. The reason I think this is happening is because the majority of the player base is from China, and in their culture being bad at ANYTHING is heavily stigmatized. They don't want what Americans want, they want to load in and feel good about being able to smash bots into pieces and tell their friends "yea I'm super good at this game check it out I have a high kill/death ratio" whereas us as westerners are told that being good at something isn't virtuous, but overcoming a struggle is virtuous, and we want to go in to a ranked mode and fight other players and win some, lose some, learn, and improve over time. That way if we get good, we EARNED it and it's something noteworthy and cool to show off to your friends. This whole problem has caused all the North American player base to abandon ship, and only exacerbates the problem since now there are almost no real players to put you against when you do queue up. Chinese players LOVE that about American servers, because the more bots the merrier. Expect to load into lobbies with about 15 to 20 real players, half of them will be Chinese players with VPNS connecting to US servers. Ever wonder why Chinese players cheat so much but Americans HATE cheaters? Maybe my speculation can give you insight as to why.

As a final note, I wanna say I actually love this game. The core combat mechanics are pretty cool, simple enough but with enough depth that it can feel pretty good to mess around with. The graphics are awesome, I personally love the style and outfits and weapon skins and I loved making my character, Tarka Ji (the drunk guy) look like Jackie Chan so I could pretend to be the drunken master. The characters and unique abilities are fun to use, they genuinely feel interesting with different play styles. But all of that aside, you're being sold a battle royale with a ranked mode, but you're fighting almost exclusively bots disguised as real people, and the only reason is because the devs are a mobile game company who designed every facet of the game to squeeze money out of you. Give it a try since it's free to play, you'll see what I mean when you open the game and get bombarded by a litany of menus that all lead to some obscure microtransaction. It's overwhelming and annoying and ruins the very solid game beneath it all. So don't spend money on this, and probably don't even bother playing it.

Hold B to extend recovery up to 69 frames for no reason other than because it's funny to see Neco face down on the ground for a full second.

Wouldn't spend money on this game anymore. Too many problems to count. Every update feels like a downgrade and getting good at the game just feels like a punishment. Not recommended, too late for me but not for you. Don't play it.

It's okay