Recent reviews by Jakethybro

My notepad has a little over 15,000 words. 10/10.

easily the best lethal company like

love a game that lets a guy be cute

i had fun
however, this game is the story of what could have been - it's mostly a sidegrade to DD1, downgrade in several critical aspects. definitely not worth $70.
i did every quest in the game on my first playthrough bar 4 quests (that all bugged out completely) in approximately 55 hours. for reference, DD1: dark arisen took me 110 hours. i did not speedrun - i took my sweet sweet time exploring - nor did I follow any guides or google search any aspect of the game. I prefer going in 100% blind and remaining that way until the end (where I checked to see if I missed any quests - I surprisingly didn't (bar those 4)).
game is incredibly front-loaded. by the time you reach the second region battahl, you are approximately 75% done with the game (not just in terms of main quest, in terms of exploration and especially side quests). it also doesn't have a story - it just has the beginning of a story and a very rushed ending.
exploration is an absolute blast and a great feeling for about 10 hours, until you realize there are probably less than 15 chests in the WHOLE game that have an item that isn't in shops. it's pointless. enemy variety is not as bad as people say IF you never played DD1 - if you played DD1 then it's exactly the same enemies with almost no new additions. very odd
also why the hell does this game have significantly worse QoL than LAUNCH DD1 (not dark arisen) ???

take away from this game is critics are dumb and itsuno is a bold faced liar, but i still had fun
6.5/10 (not counting performance or bugs)

if all this game had was driving in the stormy rain with the music blasting, it'd be well worth the price tag. the best atmosphere in any game I've ever played.

this really makes you feel like a balatro

waited for heaven & hell before playing. game is unbelievably good... and the dev is dropping 3 more expansions later??? what they hell...

i was gifted this against my will and FORCED to play this godforsaken piece of trash, and ive never had more fun in my life! :3

The weakest bethesda game I've played. One of the best with mods... potentially.
I would still recommend it if you are a bethesda fan (I am)... but temper your expectations. It starts off incredibly poorly, picks up a bit in the middle, and depending on your view of the main story quest either stays the same or becomes incredibly poor again.

In 55 hours, I visited the same ~10-20 "dungeons" on planets dozens upon dozens of times. Exploration is non-existent past the first 10 hours or so. This is the biggest issue, and perhaps the most solve-able with mods, thankfully. Calling this procedural generation is a joke. (I UNDERSTAND that the terrain is procedural, as well as potentially the flora and fauna? But none of the locations are randomized in the slightest bar container loot and valuable floor loot spawns.)

The main story is poorly told, and the "twist" with the starborn is very... silly? I expected more. The mission design of the latter missions within it are great, but the vast majority of the main questline is just going to the same 3 mine locations on various planets (YOU will go to the same exact mine on a different planet, as part of the MSQ) to retrieve the same artifacts.

Some of the side quests are phenomenal, but I found that the majority of them are thinly disguised fetch quests where all you do is go to one city, grab something, and return it to the owner. Still, while half of the side quests could be stripped from the game for almost no loss, the strong ones are good enough that this is an overall positive. Faction quests seem great, and are surely the best quests in the game.

Starship design is easily the best part of the game, whilst outpost design is one of the worst. Just as clunky as fallout 4, but with ridiculous material requirements that request stockpiles of every resource in the game. And the semi-expensive storage containers to hold those materials? 70 max weight. Maybe there is better storage with outpost engineering upgrades, but considering how absurdly useless they are throughout the entire game, I didn't spec into it. Mods will fix this, easily.

Companions are a mixed bag. They're all flawed humans who need you to fix them. Some, like Sam are pretty well done - he has an interesting dynamic and a solid reason for why he needs help. Others, like Sarah are just atrocious imo (although she has a great mission). The dialogue options when they want to talk to you all boil down to either baby them or be a raging ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and then eventually just babying them. It's not horrendous per say, but there are just so many other interesting ways the conversations you have with them could go, but it always ends up just "I'll support you, no matter what!" to nearly every query.

Combat is pretty good, and a surefire step-up from Fallout 4. The reloads in particular catch my eye. They are animated beautifully and have very satisfying sound design. That being said, the amount of times I will reload my gun fully and then go to shoot to find its still empty is absurd. There is some disconnect between the gameplay and the animations/sound design of when the gun actually reloads. As a footnote here, the A.I. is pathetic on both enemy and companion sides. Didn't really expect anything on that front, but unfortunate anyhow. The only improvement with A.I. is the last enemy in a group will try to run to the next group (think, in a dungeon with a series of encounters) to warn them. That's pretty cool, but its about the only innovation on that front.

Performance is pretty ♥♥♥♥. RTX 2080ti and i9 9900k both overclocked and I drop to 30-40 frames on medium-low settings in some locations. Thankfully I've played a significant amount of overly-modded morrowind so my brain is used to 20fps. There are various other things I haven't mentioned that are either decent or good (like the various cities and their designs), but I think I touched on everything I care about deeply. I can't overstate enough how DEAD this game feels once you've experienced most of the dungeons. One of my favorite parts of fallout 4 and bethesda games in general is exploring every nook and cranny of a location. In this game, the amount of locations you can do that is much. much lower and on top of that you are forced to repeat previous locations. The gameflow in most radiant quests are actually worse than skyrim or fallout due to this lack of unique locations. I truly hope there is a significant push in the modding community towards adding new locations and encounters to the game, it's the single biggest issue.

I'm very much open for discussion on this one - I entered this game completely blind and have not read any reviews, discussions, etc. to change my opinions. I was very surprised to see 90% positive when the game went live.

really good but melts ur brain a little bit :/