Recent reviews by FoolishOne9k2

Summary
I got a lot of fun out of this game at the beginning. However, as we progressed, I found the things I wanted to do and the things we needed ended up not lining up. We beat the last boss around 15 hours in, but we messed around for a few hours doing other things. We gave up on achievement hunting at about 30 hours as some of them required specific cultivars of plants and we could not find the natural ones after about 30-40 minutes of searching, with two people.

If you just want to get to credits and do some gardening along the way, this game isn’t terrible. If you want a farming game with combat and story, this isn’t really the title. I do not feel like my time was respected when it came to gardening.

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My thoughts in no particular order.

Exploring and finding things initially is fun. In our playthrough my wife went and hard pushed story and quests. I tended the wellsprings and plants. When she needed materials, I started to plan things so she would have them.

What ended up happening is that by the time the plants I planted grew, she had already gone around and gathered the materials she needed from the dead plants around the map. Basically, the only thing we found worth planting is food, and even then, we didn’t need a ton once we got things rolling.

We realized we needed a bunch of a certain seed to finish some of the quests, so I planted a bunch of that plant well ahead of when we would need it. While waiting for the plants to grow I went off to gather more seeds to plant. I ended up gathering all the seeds we needed in just a few minutes. Making my previous efforts meaningless. That happened repeatedly, I built a garden, grove, forest, whatever and then later we found I had wasted my time.

For a game where the second major feature on the store page is gardening, I ended up unhappy with the gardening mechanic.

The memory (skill tree) system is standard fare for a game like this. We ended up only actually utilizing a few of the memories. For the early game we just spent most of the night hunting ghosts and graves and ended up completing most of the memory trees early on and wrapping up the final few just before the last boss.

There wasn’t a lot of a tutorial, and we ended up figuring out a lot of basic mechanics through trial and error. Not the worst, but also a bit frustrating.

In multiplayer only one person could get certain achievements. Also, only the host gets attacked during wraith attack events.

Organizing chests and your inventory is a PAIN. There is no quality-of-life mechanics for dealing with organizing and depositing into chests.

Selecting specific things in a cluttered area is nearly impossible. Two chests next to each other require conscious effort to make sure the correct one is opened. Vines make selecting the tree they grow on difficult.

Certain accessories have durability. Not sure why, as they are cheap to make and the durability lasted our entire playthrough.

The game offers a ton of features, but they aren’t expanded upon or even required to complete the main quest or side quests.

• A lot of the wellsprings are useless. Basically, we found we kind of built up one wellspring per region for the special biome type, then just ignored the rest. I ended up opening all the wellsprings because I was bored, but only a few got any gardening effort, as it was not beneficial in any way to do so for the rest.
  
• Combat is just pointless. The enemies did not really offer much of a threat and were easily dispatched the whole game. My wife ended up dying a few times, but mostly due to environmental poison effects whittling down her health before we had good poison clearing items. She still plowed through the main quest. Once you unlock the fissure ability, you can just use that to kill pretty much anything in the game. It does tons of damage and hits multiple times. Really simplified all the major encounters and final boss.
  
• There was no reward for clearing the map of wraith outposts past what was required for story.
  
• We weren’t sure what walls were for as the enemies weren’t much of an issue and the wind was just an annoyance. They did not stop tumbleweeds or tornados from just spawning inside the middle of the garden.
  
• There are only 2 useful sigils. There is one that waters plants, and another that increases the speed and yield of plants. I never bothered with the rest as they tended to be based on combat and weren’t needed there.
  
• Restoring the various areas by using a special item on the wellsprings is poorly implemented. Basically, you gather some seeds, flowers, and other materials and talk to the regions god to get the item. Then you just use it on a wellspring. You don’t need to have grown anything or upgraded the wellspring at all. Again, gardening not required.
  
• The shovel item. You can upgrade it, not sure what that does. Once you get fissure the shovel was mostly a cleanup tool.
  
• We didn’t use sickle much past the initial stages of the game.
  
• Some of the seeds are only found in the environment and apparently only like 1 or 2 patches of them spawn. We spent a lot of time hunting for specific natural plants. A late game plant finding skill or ability to just make the other natural plants would have been nice.

Overall, I had fun for the first half, but once I wanted to complete the game it just got terrible to play.

I went in expecting D&D 5e with a few modifications to fit the CRPG experience. What I got was a Licensed Mod to Divinity: Original Sin 2. Most of my complaints are mechanics. I found the story, characters, and encounters very enjoyable.

Story and interactions were great and memorable. We had many encounters we chatted about the next day and still shared a week or two later. The branching quest lines made spoiler'd discussions with friends great. I will never forget moving around narrow ledges shoving goblins to their doom.

The resting system seemed very forgiving, allowing you to long rest at any point for minimal cost, I think we ended up with 20-30 long rests saved up partway through Act 1. The story does somewhat progress through long resting, so going as long as possible between rests as we did is not ideal.

Sneaking around was a lot of fun. The game implemented directional sight, with sight cones. Which is a great break from full circle vision in Table Top D&D. My partner played a rogue and had a blast getting in and out of areas accomplishing goals such as stealing and scouting.

Exploring was a blast, we searched every nook and cranny we could and found some secret things that really made the experience better. We loved getting a rare magic item or encountering a secret cult in the cellar.

Combat encounters had some fun strategy components in which initial positioning and movement could very much dictate the outcome of the encounter. The encounters usually had a variety of mechanics that made them more of a puzzle. Not a lot of just standing next to each other swinging every turn till someone hits 0 hp.

Played at launch which was riddled with bugs, and even when it was working things were wonky. I will forgive some bugs at launch, but we found them one after another.

My partner and I save scummed many fights due to mechanics not working right. Sight and target lines are "flexible" on when they want to behave as expected. In many situations my rogue partner could ranged attack something, but not ranged sneak attack the same target.

Similar to D:OS2 your mouse cursor's position on the enemy determines if you can hit or not, pray they don't do an idle animation and change where your mouse is as you click.

Jumping, you and enemies can jump very far for just a bonus action, from standing. This makes mobility in combat very high, but makes control spells like grease and web worthless as they are just surfaces to jump over. I tried to play a control wizard and found the best control spell I had was to just cast Darkness on my own party. You can also jump through opponents to avoid attacks of opportunity, making the front line Fighter less of a wall for the ranged, and more of a thing to wave at as you fly by.

Traps were not fun to deal with, either we spotted them and the rogue just instantly disarmed them (we failed 1/50ish checks), or they just did 1/3 of someone's health. However, spotting a trap doesn't interrupt your movement action, so you just go "Oh there is a trap" and then step on it. So we ended up doing the "move 5 ft, check for traps" strategy of a crappy D&D table. Your following characters would also just walk onto the trap if it was the shortest path even if already detected. So every trapped section was manually moving 4 characters through. The worst was we found a trap, that was a deliberate mark on the floor, but didn't detect the next mark on the floor, we could manually walk around it, but still the characters should know "Hey that's a trap, we shouldn't walk there."

Inventory Management, my bane from Larian games. I frustratingly got through Divinity: Original Sin's inventory management. Divinity: Original Sin 2 made me quit with all the inventory management. Baldur's Gate 3 fixed many issues, but still had tons of problems for me. In Table Top D&D when you search a room, you generally get a magic scroll, some gold, and maybe a few mundane items. In BG3 you pick up 6 plates, 3 forks, a broom, some armor, 2 potions, a poison flask, 3 more forks, 2 cups, an empty bottle, someone's journal, another 2 cups, and an explosive barrel. Each one of those has to be clicked on and sorted. Now I know I'm being a bit of a loot goblin here, but why are those items in the game if not to pickup and sell. The forks have a 10g/1wt ratio, which is better than most mundane gear. It is just extremely tedious. We bought some of our gear by selling forks. plates, and cups. Thankfully they seem to have simplified the crafting system so I'm not worried that I'll need a random mundane item later on to make good gear, like I did in Divinity: Original Sin.

Karmic Dice, it's on by default and is supposed to even out the successes and failures. What it seemed to do for us, was make things harder. Enemies with 10 DEX saved consistently against DEX save control spells. Our 17 AC tank was getting hit by +2 to attack enemies frequently, even though that should be 30% chance to hit. We also seemed to miss frequently even with all the odds in our favor. We turned it off and had a much better time, in that enemies failed saves more consistently, and our high AC party members could last longer. And we tried to not have a perception bias of noticing the outcomes we least desired, as it happened constantly. For example, we went into a fight against a bunch of high STR low DEX enemies, I cast Grease on them, they all saved. We redid that fight a few times due to other reasons, and that strategy failed pretty much every time. I just stopped trying it in our later attempts. I'm not sure what Karmic Dice was supposed to accomplish, but it failed hard for us.

These all may be minor issues, but when taken all together it ruined my experience. I just couldn't get through a play session enjoying the magic of Faerun and encounters with the inhabitants.

Quite possibly From Soft's best game yet. The open world feels big, yet compact enough to be interesting. It is fun to explore and find things and figure out where to go. I "finished" the game then spent another 20 hours looking up and doing zones I missed and wrapping up achievements.

The bosses tended to either be a cake walk or straight bull crap. Open World bosses felt neat, and provided some character to the world. Most of the bosses just died in a few hits and didn't feel satisfying. Quite a few of the bosses were very mobile and felt like they would've fit better in Bloodborne than a more souls-like game.

Overall I recommend the game, especially without using a guide. Just be prepared to invest a hundred hours or more.

The sequel to one of the better games to come out in recent history. The experience and knowledge of the first game I think had a negative effect on this game as the sense of exploration and discovery wasn't as pronounced.

The overland parts were a fun change of pace, they provided new mechanics that didn't feel terribly out of place. Though the game is not a good 3d fps platformer. The more direct story elements felt nice, but removed the "alone on an alien planet" aspects of the first game. Since the map is significantly smaller, various resources are clumped together. Which made exploration more of a feast or famine approach. You either have found the spot with a variety of mid-game resources or you haven't. The seatruck felt pretty good, but felt like it had a lot of pointless modules since each module made it slower.

I ran into a bug and got stuck at one point, using console commands to free myself disabled achievements for the rest of the game. Not a huge deal, just frustrating.

Overall I recommend the game, but play the first Subnautica before this one and only play this if you fall in love with it. There are some minor changes that I feel made this one the lesser of the two.

Original Review Below. Played it through to completion with a buddy. The game is pretty simple and there isn't a lot of depth. We felt encouraged to split up for getting resources and generally didn't do a whole lot together. The final sprint to the end was a bit anti-climactic as it didn't require much beyond the things we unlocked in the first few hours. Was enjoyable overall, if a bit tedious.

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Great concept, just feels tedious. Never really felt like I was getting anywhere. Soil Centrifuge makes starter resources not-a-problem and is super early, then its just "go here, build a mini-base, mine the new resource, fly it home"

Multiplayer was kind of a miss once we realized a rocket only holds one person. Meaning we couldn't explore together without building and fueling multiple rockets. Supposedly the medium rocket can have another seat attached at the cost of reducing its hauling amount.

Tutorial just covered basic controls and concepts, could have used a bit more guidance for our multiplayer group.

Overall the game is just meh. I really wish there was a sideways thumb vote. Not sure I want to dedicate more time to this.

tl;dr
First time playing I picked up a few friends and randoms in discord and went to town. Had a blast, even though we only won a few times. Crazy strategies and builds and learning how to work together are the key points. Also "accidentally" blowing each other up.

Multiplayer:
If you are looking for a game based on teamwork and coordination, this game will work great. It is always fun to watch someone plant a bomb to kill something big, and someone else runs onto the bomb and goes boom. It is also fun to coordinate who is handling what and watching that same bomb kill the threat while everyone else is shooting to cover.

Campaign:
Campaign so far (3ish hours) has been "meh" its a nice addition to the game, but the lack of initial guidance on what to do just left me clicking on things until I figured it out.
I have not tried coop campaign yet so I cannot comment there.

Overall:
I got close to 1300 hours out of the first game. I'm 11 hours in to this sequel and looking to get a ton more. A good group makes this really fun.

Side Notes:
If you can't or won't do voice comms, I'm not sure I recommend this game to you. It is critical to be able to communicate with your allies.

Some day 1 bugs were annoyances and many were quickly patched. Still ran into issues on day 1 & 2, but again patches are coming. Game has been generally playable so far, just with a bit of working around the issues.

Fun adventure into the unknown where exploration is key to progression. I did find that partway through I started loading up a map and looking up where specific things were as the novelty of exploration wore off. The end feels great, but it kind of drags on. I highly suggest this game for at least a partial play through. 36.5 hours from start to finish first play through, with map usage starting around 13 hours and wiki usage starting at 15 hours.

Factory sim with quite a few mechanics and rewarding game play. The biters can be annoying at first, but provide a break from planning and development.

Well worth the money for a decently novel experience.

Provides a means to challenge your assumptions about the world around you and consider alternative avenues for success.

It does have some downsides, that when the rules of the game aren't known it is a bit more trial and error instead of building on older concepts.

Again, well worth it. It took me 3.5 hours to complete it blind, and there are simple looking achievements to go back and collect.

Great game that has a ton of depth and difficulty but doesn't (usually) feel unfair. Takes a bit to get into it, but once you get it the game promises hours.