Recent reviews by Water Shieldguy

If you enjoy building a dungeon, you may like it. If you enjoy watching numbers go up, or figuring out how to make the most profit as per regular tycoon games, sure, you too.

If you're trying to play a dungeon overlord of some kind, don't bother with this game. The point isn't that better and better adventurers will try and raid you and kill you, the point of this game is to basically make a dungeon theme park where adventurers can get the most loot for the least fighting.

In essence, the game loop goes like such:
-You throw a bunch of monsters together into rooms with chests
-When an adventurer gets hurt or a monster dies, the chest gets filled with loot
-They loot the chest, they become happy, and they continue touring the rooms
-You then have vendors selling potions, buffs, etc to the adventurers in other rooms to basically take the loot they just got from them to fund more rooms.
-You cant just kill all the adventurers because the loot in the chests disappear at the end of the day, unless you spend souls to lock it, and if you kill all the adventurers you get bad ratings and less adventurers want to arrive.
-Later, you get attack and defense buffing totems so the adventurers can kill more monsters faster and safer.

So you're not really a dungeon overlord, and you're also not really a person who wants to help the adventurers, you're just the equivalent of a businessman playing both sides.

7/10 some people may like it ig

FFXIV/MMO raids without the grind for gear that'll get outclassed in the next patch.

also bnuuy

FTL + Sanctum, but without the slog of needing to build all the walls, just the turrets. Kinda chill game. I like it.

Very much looking forward to Co-op. Once that's in, it'll probably be my go-to game to play with friends for a good while. If this game later links with Steam Workshop to allow modded content, it'll be an absolute banger that'll last for a really long time.

@devs: QoL changes I'd like to request; one is a minimap with radar or some other way to tell you if an enemy happened to slip past you and you wont need to run back to check and then run over back to your chokepoint. A second will be a translucent line that tells you which direction the enemies will go in setup phase. A third would be a way to automatically start the mission just before the reward for starting it earlier changes from 75 to 50.

In early May, 2024, Sony chose to force everyone to link their Steam account to a PSN account to play Arrowhead's game.

This made a lot of Helldivers very angry and is widely considered to be a bad move.

Note that this is DESPITE them initially saying that no games will require linking to a PSN account. They changed it on their website, and you can see it via waybackmachine.

Also note that Sony has had data breaches every other year at this point, and is known to scrape information from their players to sell to data brokers.

Meanwhile, Arrowhead likely has their balls in a vice since Sony is their publisher.

EDIT: HOWEVER, THROUGH THE COMBINED STRENGTH OF THE HELLDIVERS, WE HAVE PUSHED BACK THE TREASONOUS "SONY", AND WE NO LONGER REQUIRE A PSN ACCOUNT TO CONNECT TO THE SERVERS.

LONG LIVE SUPER EARTH!

If I could make this a neutral review, I would. This review is mainly for Langrisser II, as it's the one I'm most familiar with.

Game is a lot easier as compared to the original. I consider this a bad thing, but if you're new to turn-based strategy games, it could be a good thing.

-You pretty much never have to care about managing your money. Go ahead and blow it all on the max number of mercs.
-Case in point, you start with 500 gold in the original Der Langrisser, and the merc cost is similar in this game. However, in easy mode in this game, you start with 15000 gold, and on normal you start with 5000. At that point, you may as well have the system automatically buy troops for you, with you only selecting the type of troop you want.
-Gold gain is much higher in this game, as compared to the original.

-You can equip a weapon, armour, and an accessory in this game, whereas in the original, the armour and accessory took up the same slot. This would normally not be a problem, but the items all have similar stats to the original after the number-inflation. So in other words, you'd be doing the equivalent of equipping double the defensive/support options.

-The questions at the start no longer determine your starting class or inherent attack/def/troop count/leadership buffs; they instead give you perks and equipment. A little bit of a shame, since I quite liked being forced to use a smaller number of troops who are quite a ways stronger than other such troops.

For the good stuff, I quite like the remastered art and music, and while I do have a soft spot for retro music, I'd pick the remastered version over the old ones. The cutscene images were a pleasant surprise as well.

I'd recommend this game if they released a hard mode that maintains the original game's difficulty.

headbob still gives me motion sickness
if theres a "no vote" option id pick that, but i cannot recommend the game thanks to the motion sickness

review made on 6/12/2022
once again Fatshark ignores the feedback from their old Vermintide players and screws over their playerbase
you'd think after their bs Winds of Magic changes that dropped their playerbase by 90% they'd, you know, not try to pull it all again in a brand new game

case in point
-Even die-hard ogryn players cant play ogryn in difficulty 5 thanks to how bad both ogryn ranged and enemy ranged is and how to deal with them. Try it, ogryn is an absolute load on your team: Shield stops ranged hits but even blocking two people's shots churns your stamina like nobody's business. Swing speed was stealth nerfed from the beta. Grenadier gauntlet nades don't instantly kill shooters on high difficulties, even on direct hits. Machineguns are fun, and have the second-best accuracy for ogryn, but you wont be able to deal with the sheer number of shooters at the range they spawn at. Let's not even talk about shotguns.

I love playing Ogryn, but no matter how hard I try or what weapons I use, I feel like I'm a load on my team on anything higher than difficulty4+lower enemies.

-no private lobbies. really??

-in VT2 difficulty 4 and 5 gave you better gear. Theres no point in playing difficulty 5 in darktide because the weapon shop refreshes every hour anyway and 90% of it is trash... if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, 100% of the weapons in the shop is trash.

-Enemies spawn directly behind you in sealed rooms when you're not looking - those rooms that need you to have 4 people together and they scan you? try reaching there much faster than your teammates, clearing it, and turning your back to the room. watch yourself get stabbed in your back.

-Crafting is basically not in the game yet. there's upgrading, but no crafting. But hey, cash shop is working fine and well, isnt it??

-Vermintide 2 has some weapons horrible on high difficulties, and the rest are viable. Darktide has some weapons be viable on high difficulties, and most are horrible. The best comp for difficulty 5 right now is 4 sharpshooters.

-People keep complaining about the health system, but the truth of the matter is Fatshark needs to stop nerfing dodge, it made the game feel like ass in WoM, and they did it again. Couple that with the whole "fire breaks all your toughness" bs, with the "pour in the ranged enemies" bs, and with the often-complained about "melee damage goes a little through toughness" thing (that i personally dont see too much of an issue with)...

right now the game is being carried by their art team. kudos to the art team.

heres a prediction. With the way Fatshark is, most of this isn't going to change unless many of the community leave, like the winds of magic fiasco.

ill enjoy the machinegun while it lasts, because im fairly certain itll get nerfed for no reason

The good:
-It's an FF-Tactics-like turn-based strategy that you can play with a friend. It's probably one of the only few, if not the only one where you can play it with a friend.
-So far looks like there'll be a lot of depth
(I've not played it for too long, so I'll be updating this review eventually.)

The bad:
-All the controls are told to you as if you were playing with a controller. On PC. bruh
-You can't access the menu while selecting units. Also, you can't save until you finish the second level.
-Playing with your friend is literally just passing him control over specific characters that you select, which, I guess? At that point you may as well play FF Tactics or something and then pass control over to your friend manually?
-It may be a personal preference, but I've always hated the pixellated-3d-model artstyle, it looks horrid. You have to go 2/2.5d pixellated or stick with 3d, don't do that thing where you make a model then pixel everything. I love retro artstyles and pixel art, but I have to request, please let us choose to unpixel everything, or at least the characters.
-Please let us rename our units, it's such a simple thing and so many turn-based strategy games don't let us do it, one that lets our friend control characters should have had this from the start.

"Ok, so I don't really wanna go into an MMO right now, but seeing health bars go up and down is a lil calming so lets play this a little bit."
...
"Ok, so I got a regular heal. Ah, yes, health bars."
...
"Ok, so I got a regen, that's cool."
...
"Ok, so I can move and stuff, that's cool."
...
(30 minutes later)
...
"But if I use this skill, I might not have enough mana to keep everyone alive thanks to the boss' AoEs, though to be fair, I need to get used to his rotation, seems like he casts a DoT or something I need to remove before I heal-"

- Me, playing this game

I legitimately would have been ok if each of the sections were their own game.
As it stands, I really wanted to play a lot more against the first guy. Like having a whole list of bosses or something.

Still a good game though.