Recent reviews by smolbon

I thought this was a farming game, but it turned out to be an emo boyfriend simulator.

Experience playing this game:

Starting combat encounter you're supposed to fail, where you start surrounded by 5 dudes while naked and unarmed. To add insult to injury, your character keeps their AK unloaded and well out of reach for no reason whatsoever, and in the cutscene leading into the encounter, they go "Wow, what a beautiful night. Nothing could go wrong!" like the game is trying to rub in that they arbitrarily made your character act like an idiot. You can beat the encounter, but its very frustrating. If they wanted you to get ambushed and lose your gear at the start, they could have just had it happen in a cutscene rather than make your character act like an idiot and throw you into a frustratingly bad combat encounter. But this sets the tone for things to come. The developers seem to just hate the players and want to make the experience of playing their game as bad as possible in baffling ways.

The travel system is a great example of this. It takes you irl minutes to get from one place to the nearest adjacent location on the map. It could have been instant, and it would change nothing, except that it wouldn't waste as much of your time. And just to make sure that players really have to suffer through the slow-motion walk animation all the way through, they made it so you can't even alt-tab. Doing so causes the whole game to freeze until you focus the window again. So there's no getting around it. You've got to sit through the several minutes of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nothing every time you want to go somewhere.

Well, after getting over the god-awful start, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around in the starting town, maybe doing a somewhat enjoyable quest or random encounter or two, and coming to terms with how much of your time is going to be spend staring at ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nothing on the map screen, you'll get to your first location on the map save for the starter town. When I got there, I was laden down with loot and looking forward to reaching a trader because your movement while slightly encumbered makes getting around a local map even more sluggish than """fast""" travel. Well, I go up to the guard at the gate, and he demands 1000 rubles to get into the town, which is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ridiculous amount. But hey, I'm playing a diplomatic character and put almost every point so far into speech. I have a speech of 90, so I should be able to weasel my way past this sleasebag, right? Wrong. You need 121 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ speech, not to bypass the ridiculous bribe, but only to slightly reduce the amount that you have to pay. Now keep in mind I could pay the bribe if I could get into the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ town to trade my items, which I can't do because of this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying game design. But the real frustrating part is that there is no way to bypass this. You have to be a little ♥♥♥♥♥ and let the guard extort you. You can't report him to some other authority figure. You can't wait until his shift ends and talk to a different guard. He's on duty in that exact spot 24/7 apparently. You can't find a weak spot in the wall to squeeze through, or a place to climb over. And if you do scrape together the cash and pay him, there's no way to get back at him. Nobody inside the town to report him to. A good rpg would give you a variety of ways to tackle this problem. But not here. Here the only way to progress is to let some no name guard extort a massive amount of money from you and get away with it.

In summary, ♥♥♥♥ this game. Play Fallout 1 or 2. They are infinitely better as RPGs, and this game will only ever be a pathetic and obtuse imitation.

You can summon skeletons
10/10

So I used to have a negative review of this game, but I feel like the state of the game has been improved so much its time to change that to positive.

SUMMARY OF THE GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE
Darktide is a co-operative horde shooter in the style of Left 4 Dead. The gameplay is immensely satisfying. Aiming melee strikes for heads, hitting half a dozen enemies in one swing, dodging a sniper shot and whipping out a ranged weapon to shoot them from across the map and then smacking the guy who's about to hit you with the butt of your gun is all super gratifying and fluid. This is the strongest point in favor of the game, and its about the highest praise that I can give. Moment to moment gameplay is the foundation for this type of game, and this foundation is rock solid.

The visuals are stunning, and capture the atmosphere of 40k beautifully. They capture a variety of environments from grand gothic palaces, to the ramshackle rat-infested walkways of a grimy neglected undercity. It captures the splendor and excess of imperial architecture while also making it feel real and lived in. I remember stopping for a few moments to appreciate the model for a trash bin of all things. Even a humble trash bin had arches with gothic tracery along the exterior and fit right into the setting. The attention to detail is incredible. 40k is a hard aesthetic to nail, but nobody has ever done it better.

Finally, the sound design. Weapon sounds are satisfying. Different enemy types have distinct weapon sounds, battlecries, howls, and groans, often letting you know what's coming just with your ears. And the music is phenomenal. Every track is a banger. Even if you don't purchase this game, you should absolutely look up the OST. Nothing gets me pumped up to purge heretics like a choir and pipe organ playing over grimy industrial synth.

One minor pet peeve is that laser weapons have recoil... Why?

One other minor pet peeve. The main narrative is kinda' terrible. The intro mission and cutscenes at the start are great, and there's some very interesting lore you can dig into if you want to, but the actual narrative is really weak. Basically, the narrative is that there's some traitor on the ship. At the end of the narrative, its revealed the traitor was some random person aboard the ship you've never interacted with. They get shot. Its totally irrelevant to you. The End. This type of narrative isn't really important for this type of game. The intro is strong, and contextualizes everything you do going forward on its own. Its just that you could cut out the rest of the narrative entirely without losing or changing anything. Its just some meaningless underwhelming cutscenes that the game would probably have been better off without.


COMPARISONS BETWEEN LAUNCH AND NOW


ITEMIZATION AND PROGRESSION
This is easily the biggest improvement since launch. There used to be a massive grind to get new weapons, with several layers of exponential RNG and 98% of your drops being actually worthless and the only meaningful way of getting new gear was sitting at a shop that refreshes every hour in the hopes of one good item finally spawning. This felt really bad because the missions you went on largely felt pointless. Most times you wouldn't get any item from completing a mission, and if you did get an item, it was basically always trash. Well, there is still a shop that refreshes every hour and most of your drops are still worthless, but you get one every successful mission now. More importantly though, there's an actual crafting system in the game now which pretty much completely solves the problem. You might not randomly get that god roll item you want, but you can get a decent item and use the resources you get from missions to transform it into an excellent one. Now, every mission that you go on feels like it matters and is meaningfully contributing to your progression towards better or more diverse gear. Its still a massive grind, but in the good way where it feels like you're constantly making incremental progress and getting a meaningful reward for completing missions. The itemization system is in a really good place now.

THE CASH SHOP
One of the criticisms I had at launch was the cash shop, and that still remains a criticism to this day, but to a lesser degree. The cash shop doesn't provide anything that can give a gameplay advantage; only cosmetics. The cosmetics rotate every so often to a new set. The big criticism at launch was that there were very few decent free cosmetics. This is still the case to a lesser degree. I don't have a problem with the sale of cosmetics in a game like this, because it helps pay to keep the servers up, but I don't like the rotating nature of the shop. It would be much, much better if you could just see all the cosmetics at once and pick the ones you like from the back catalog. I would be more enticed to spend money on cosmetics if I had a greater degree of control, rather than this manipulative FOMO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. As it stands, I refuse to ever purchase something from a rotating shop.

PENANCES
Penances are what the game calls achievements, and completing these achievements is one of the few ways to unlock decent free cosmetics for your characters. As such, people are highly incentivized to complete them. The problem at launch was, many penances required you to behave in a really toxic way, actively being a detriment to your team. This is less so the case now, but its still a problem. The worst penance I've completed so far is "Make Every Shot Count", so lets use that as an example. On launch, it required you to end a mission with 100% accuracy and no remaining ammo as the Veteran on a high difficulty. The Veteran's job is to eliminate dangerous special enemies from a distance with ranged weapons to keep the team safe. On higher difficulties, your team can get absolutely shredded by ranged units if you're not doing your job. However, actually shooting at priority targets is a terrible way to retain 100% accuracy. If one of your team mates also decides to shoot the dangerous target, the shot on the dead body, even if its still standing, will not count as a hit and ruin your penance attempt. The only real way to complete this achievement was to spam shots into hordes of weak enemies (the enemies that you really shouldn't be wasting ammo on), refuse to pick up any ammo, and refuse to ever help your team by shooting specials. Close to launch, every other game you would run into a Veteran trying to do this penance and being a dead weight to the team, and often leading to a total team wipe. Ruining the game for three other players a dozen times in a row until a team manages to scrape by despite you not doing your job does not lead to a sense of accomplishment. In the modern game, most of the notoriously "toxic" penances have been toned down. "Make Every Shot Count" for example, now only requires 80% accuracy, which allows you to actually try to do your job during the mission (albeit while also refusing to pick up any ammo, even when your team mates offer you an ammo crate, and leads to you doing your job much less effectively, but hey, at least you're not a complete dead weight.) Ultimately I'm still not happy with this system, but its not actively ruining games and encouraging toxic behavior nearly as much as it used to.

STABILITY
On launch, you could hardly complete a mission without lagging out, desyncing, and getting disconnected. Sometimes you could reconnect. Sometimes you couldn't and it was 20 minutes down the drain. Thankfully, this doesn't happen nearly as often now.

Pros:
- Time traveling trolley ethics with mechs
- Fun puzzle game
- There's more of it now

Cons:
- I wish there was more of it

Used to be a good game. Most of the things that made it good were removed or overhauled with updates. The reason for this is that the greedy scumbag "devs" exploit people by saying they "pay them in exposure" and then don't even give them that. Thus, the people doing the actual work get churned in and out regularly and the game never has a unified vision from a consistent team. I would give this title a pass for ethical reasons.

Fun flavor. Great art.

That's where the praise ends for me. Granted, I've only put 6 hours into the game, but I feel like I've already seen everything the game has to show me, and that's not a good thing for a 15 dollar game. Worse, all the game has to show me is an extremely tedious gameplay loop based on item durability. Your equipment breaks. Constantly. After a single fight, brand new gear will often be at 50% durability, and repairing it costs maximum durability. This is just a terrible gameplay loop. There is nothing redeeming to say about it. Its not fun micromanaging and replacing like 12 items every couple minutes, nor is it fun walking several minutes back to a village to use the repair stations. (No, you can't repair anywhere.) You will spend probably 60-80% of your time micromanaging and repairing items, and 20-40% of your time actually playing the game. Wish I hadn't bought this.

THE WOLF BOY IS PRECIOUS AND I WANT TO LOVE AND PROTECT HIM FOREVER
That is all

Stellaris is a fantastic roleplaying grand strategy game that lets you experience the science-fiction story of your empire's rise, or fall. It has countless well-written miniature stories, and tons of engaging mechanics and things to discover.

Lets start with the negatives though, because people should know what they're getting into. The first and most obvious is the DLC structure. I wouldn't blame anyone for getting put off by the massive DLC price tag. You could buy several triple A games for the price of Stellaris and all its DLC. While Stellaris is an amazing game; one of the best in the genre, its still impossible to justify that price tag.

But here's the thing. You don't need the DLC to experience the majority of what Stellaris has to offer. The only DLC I would consider mandatory is the Utopia DLC. Get the base game and Utopia and you're set. If you end up sinking a lot of time into the game and decide you want to play as a megacorp or a machine empire or experience the content in Federations or Apocalypse, here's a little secret. All the old DLC goes on a very steep sale whenever they release a new DLC pack. Something like -50%. Pick up the packs you're interested in exclusively when they're on sale.

The other thing to note about DLC in this game is that the profits from the DLC support the game being actively developed. Even if you're not a diehard fan who's going to buy every pack, you'll still benefit from the base game getting active updates. They even have a development team adding new content to old DLC, so if you do have some packs, you'll likely get some new content for free. With all that said, the game is still very pricey, but I don't think the developers are scummy for their DLC model.

The main gameplay negative is the amount of micromanagement involved in the game. Particularly if you're playing an empire determined to conquer every planet in the galaxy, you'll quickly find yourself with dozens of different species with different planet preferences, half a dozen building slots that need to be filled, unemployment problems, stability problems, border problems, trade route problems, etc. etc. etc. It can be quite overwhelming, and the automation features in this game are notoriously poor and inefficient when they even work in the first place. Be wary of overextending.

That said, if those two things aren't deal breakers for you, everything else about the game is top notch. The stories are incredibly numerous and well written, and the amount of customization you can do for your empire, ships, species, planets, etc. is stunning. You really feel more like you're playing through a deep, rich, and interesting story than just playing a typical 4X game. If you're at all interested in Sci Fi, I would highly recommend Stellaris.

Why does this show up in the "Souls-Like" category?