Recent reviews by Log Halley

Damn, what a game. I've recently finished doing my last remembrance quest and i have to say i really, really love this game.
It's not perfect by any means, there's plenty that could be improved. But the criticism it got at release was totally blown out of proportion and filled with misinformation.
It's actually the most fun i've had with a videogame in years.
Yes, there's reused assets and it's not the standard Fromsoft game where you customize your character and build him from scrub to god.
For the first time ever, there's a set cast of characters and they all have their own story and playstyles and they're all full of heart and soul.
If you play this game you'll get to know all of them, but not in the usual fromsoft obtuse style.
These characters have a diary, they have dialogues and cutscenes. While there's still plenty of mistery, you will feel like you understand their motivations and their goals (mostly).

Beyond the story though there's the gameplay, and that is so much fun.
While Elden Ring had you spend hours exploring for small rewards you didn't even need or want, Nightreign gives you 35-45 minutes of the most dense gameplay you've ever had in your life. Over and over.

You have a central hub that will feel like home, with rooms for customization, progression and testing stuff.
From the main room, you'll start the expeditions against the nightlords. Every time you'll start from level 1, and will have to quickly route and fight to both level up and gear up your character.
There's plenty of skills to learn; at first you'll feel like you don't have enough time, and by the end as you learn what each locations offers and what your character needs, you'll still feel like there still isn't enough time.
This might sound stressful, but it's actually what makes this game most exciting. You run and fight and make choices as fast as possible. You make mistakes and learn from them to improve your next run.

Remember that this is a roguelike; every run is an adventure with the goal of getting ready to fight the nightlord you selected at the beginning. This is true for both you and your teammates. So you'll help each other, fight together and cooperate; maybe you find a weapon that is useless for you but great for them, you can drop it for them and make them much stronger.
You'll be surprised by the level of cooperation strangers manage in this game. There will surely be bad experiences on the way, with people who have yet to learn the game, but by the end, when doing runs against the final nightlord (or the weekly everdarks), you'll really experience how strong the characters can get to.
Even then, the game will always be a real challenge and test of your knowledge. If you abused and cheesed and exploited your way through Elden Ring, you won't (shouldn't) be able to do the same here.

As someone who always loved the coop experience in Dark Souls, both for the boss fights but also for "beating the path" from bonfire to fog walls, this is it.
It's a fast, intense and fun cooperative experience that i didn't expect but i'm very grateful for.

Finally finished the game, finally able to give a fair review.
It's where fromsoftware fight design has started going bad.
The setting, the music, the story the vibes are all fine, nice even.
It's the combat system that sucks, and it's funny that it gets so much praise.
While the posture system is a nice idea on paper, the execution here basically means that you literally cannot deal damage if the mob doesn't feel like taking damage.
Dealing damage isn't earned, it's actually the mob lowering their guard and letting you get hits.

If you haven't played the game, enemies basically have 2 separate healthbars.
1 Classic health bar
2 Posture health bar
To kill a boss, you have to either empty the health bar, by doing damage, or fill the posture bar, by attacking the enemy while he blocks.
So where's the problem? Deflections.
A Deflection is a perfect block. When mobs do this, they won't take either health or posture damage.
A small stupid random mob can take ages to kill if he so chooses. You can attack as much as you want, and he'll keep deflecting.
You are forced to deflect yourself, because your deflections hit his posture bar.
Problem solved, right? Not yet.
Because while health doesn't recover, posture does.
If you stand around, he'll recover posture and the "progress" you had made in the fight all comes undone.
This especially sucks on bosses, because the rate of posture recovery is tied to their amount of health.
This means that a boss with a full health bar will recover an incredible amount of posture in the smallest amount of time.

All of this summed up means that you literally cannot decide to hurt enemies.
You can try, and then it's up to them to decide if they'll take damage or not.
With some bosses this becomes astoundingly stupid and pointless.
I still remember vividly the Owl boss fight at Hirata estate, and how he would deflect everything i threw at him, it was like hitting a wall.
Then, for no reason at all, he would neither deflect or block, just stand around and let me smack him in the face.

This makes no sense and it sucks. It's inconsistent.
While i'm familiar with the "learning the boss" process in Fromsoftware games, what happens here is that the boss will deflect everything and then let you win for no reason.
You haven't changed the attack pattern, they just decided not to block nor deflect.
This is also exacerbated by the fact that this is where Fromsoft has started their trash input reading.
Enemies know perfectly when they can hit you for free, they know perfectly how to deflect your attack.
Everything you do needs to be done inside the designated windows.
You'll have a designated window to heal, a designated window to hit.
Do anything outside the designated window? Get hit, get killed.

To win you have to do everything the intended way. You can't attack how you want, you have to "react" to what it wants.
The supposed "parry system" is actually a glorified series of QTEs. Except the button to press isn't shown.
Enemy attack? PRESS L1
Enemy thrust attack? PRESS O
Enemy sweep attack? PRESS X
You want to attack? Wait the designated window and pray to Miyazaki that he won't deflect.

If i can't do anything my way, if i need to play the intended way, then i might as well watch a movie.

Game has bland flat humour IMO. If it makes you laugh, then it'll be fun.
I got wary at the first "YIKES". Kept going, and my gut feeling was verified.
Not for me, sorry.

This game absolutely does not deserve such negative reviews.
It’s not perfect, every game has weaknesses, but it’s without a doubt an overall 8/10 game and a 9/10 game of its genre.

The gameplay is great, the pvp mecha fights are well done and a lot of fun.
It’s great for what it offers, I know no other game like it, and it does so for free.

It really does not deserve such an incredibly low score, which is usually reserved for broken games filled with bugs.
This is not the case. This game works. It’s not only playable, but well polished.
I have not experienced any bugs at all.
There were issues with servers when it started out, and that’s when a bunch of angry monkeys left that huge amount of negative reviews that do not reflect the state of the game at all.
Right now It’s a beta that works well, and will get better upon release.

I’m not saying this game is perfect. It does have issues. I’ll list them out:
- Bot games.
there are some bots in place of real players from time to time.
it happens more when starting out, but after a while it doesn’t happen anymore.
it’s not a big problem.
it’s probably done so that you can learn the game with ease.
- Server issues when logging in (BUT NOT IN GAME!!)
the only connection issues I experienced happened at login.
and they’ve been easily sorted out by retrying, or quitting and re-opening the game.
they are not a big issue at all, and they’ll surely get fixed at full release.
- Account level ups tied to achievements
this is actually the biggest issue I have with the game.
you can play hundreds of games, but if you don’t get achievements your account won’t level up.
level ups are tied to actually important stuff to unlock.
you’ll need to specifically focus on doing achievements for leveling up, and it does matter.
- Monetization, but it’s actually not that bad
it’s a free to play game, so there’s obviously going to be some form of monetization.
This does mean that you won’t unlock the most expensive mechs right away.
It’s going to take a while to unlock them all.
But it doesn’t matter much, cause most mechs are cheap and they’re very good.
IT'S NOT PAY TO WIN.
THE BEST MECHS ARE NOT THE MOST EXPENSIVE.
You get plenty of different mechs, all very interesting and strong, for little money.
They all play different and they’re all interesting.
They have different weight classes and roles and weapons and abilities.
All mechs are worth it. I have yet to try out all the ones I unlocked, but so far they’ve all been strong and fun (and cheap).
- Unskippable VERY LONG tutorial.
It’s like 1 hour long, maybe more. Very involved with lore.
it’s not hard, but you’ll want to start your first experience when you can spend some time with it.
It’s also incomplete yet. It’s literally missing voice acting.
So it’ll probably change and improve.
- Confusing mod system that forces you to play the PVPVE extraction mode.
I don’t like extraction games, I don’t like the feeling of losing progression.
the extraction mode is the place where you collect mods.
these have different qualities and can get sacrificed for better qualities.
these mods are equipped on the mech, and they change it’s stats.
there are a lot of them.
They’re all “trade off” mods. They have a positive and a negative.
I haven’t engaged much with them, I’m still having lots of fun without them.
- Kernel level anti cheat.
I don’t really know what it does or why it’s needed, but I haven’t noticed any issue about it.
I know it’s a dealbreaker for many so there it is.

I also want to list the positives:
- The game is very good. The gameplay’s good. You’ll have fun.
- Graphics are good, game is fluid, performs very well
- The mechs are very varied, they play pretty differently from each other, they’re all fun and strong.
I’m sure you’ll find your favourites.
- There’s good looking customization for both pilots and mechs.
You can make pretty good looking characters, which isn’t common these days.
- It’s free

As I said before, the game is an 8/10 when compared to others outside the genre.
And it’s a 9/10 game in the mech fighting genre, which is pretty niche.
Play it and see for yourself how much the reviews for this game are wrong.

I loved Final Fantasy Tactics as a kid, and have always looked for similar games.
While this game may seem similar in gameplay, the feeling isn't charming or fun, and i don't recommend wasting your time on it at all.

I'll make it short.
The game is pozzed with modern writing.
The main character is an ugly insufferable Mary Sue. She's been made so ugly and masculine, i didn't even realize the character was female. I genuinely thought it was a dude with long hair.

I thought ok, i loved Lyn from Fire Emblem, maybe this will be like that.
It isn't.

20 minutes in, i get to the feminist dialogue where the evil noble calls the 2 characters little girls, and the strong warrior woman owns him, asking to explain how such a powerful lord was captured by a pair of little girls.
That's when i closed and uninstalled.
(my game time is buffed by steam card drops)

I'm not interested in playing your ugly feminist power trip.
Understand, i'm fine with playing female characters, i'm fine with female warriors.
I loved Lyn, i loved Ritz, i loved Tifa, i loved Aqua, and many more. I have never had an issue with them.
It's a fantasy world and i'll believe it. I wouldn't even notice it.

But YOU started the gender conflict. YOU made me notice.
You had to ruin what could've been a good fantasy game by putting in focus the stupid modern gender issues.
And i'm not doing that. I'm not reading that. I'm not participating in that.

Games are entertainment. Take your politics to twitter or anywhere else.

Palworld is a very good and fun game. As the tags says, its a open world survival creature collecting game.

Now nintendo is suing Pocketpair on the basis of PATENT infrigement. NOT COPYRIGHT; patents.
They're not coming for the Pal's design, but for gameplay elements.
In the last year, they filed patents for many of these gameplay mechanics.
And now they're coming to sue Pocketpair.

While this game has magic creatures, it mostly resembles a classic open world survival game;
you collect wood, rocks, everything to craft armor, weapons, equipment in general.
You build yourself, your base, and your team of magic creatures to fight bigger and stronger enemies.

What's there that is in common with nintedo games? The creature collecting.
But Creature collecting isn't a gameplay mechanic; it's a GENRE.
Digimon, Temtem, Coromon, Cassette Beasts, many more; these are all Creature Collecting games.
A genre cannot be patented.

If the developers of the first survival games had patented their systems, none of the great survival games we know would have been developed. Stuff like Minecraft, Terraria, Subnautica, and many more.

This game doesn't play like nintendo games. It's an action game, it's not turn based!
You also fight as your character himself, not just watch creatures fight for you!

What nintendo is doing here is evil and greedy.
They're abusing the legal system to try and take down someone that isn't even their competitor.
Palworld doesn't share a platform with their games. They're literally on separate markets.

This game is a good game, and it's very different from those others.
It's much more of a survival open world game, with Creature Collecting and base building and resource automation.
Out of all the creature collecting games that cloned nintendo's games, Palworld really isn't it.

But it's a good game, it's fun, it was ever since its first release. It's still in active development, and gets updated regularly. Its developers focus on the player's fun, and have greatly succeded.
I trust them to keep doing a good job, if they're not stopped by this legal abuse coming from greedy old talentless people that have kept making the same stale game for decades.

I would only recommend this DLC to people who have time to waste.

The experience is more of the same with none of the fixes, and actually more of the bad design choices.

The content stopped being original, and just a copy/pasted recyclement of assets a long time ago.
Taking the same items, giving them a new colour and a different affinity isn't making new content.
Building extremely big map areas and copy-pasting enemies here and there isn't making new content.
Then you waste time exploring that big area only to be rewarded with another damned Spirit Ash, and just come back with a bitter taste.

Half the bosses are badly designed, being either overtuned or undertuned.
The stupid habit of adding "spell after effects" to every single melee swing is still here and more bothering than ever.
You dodged a sword swing? There's an explosion right after.
You dodged 8 sword swings? You're going to have to dodge 8 explosions too. Then you're allowed 1-2 light attacks, maybe.
Don't you dare heal yourself cause bosses track that and immediately 360 no scope hit you.

I would say there's only 1 boss that was actually fun and well designed and memorable.
Frustrating, but rewarding when you do get it.

Also learn to make cutscenes and actual NPC quests. It's stupid that to progress through quests i have to reload the area every time. Just make a damned cutscene.

In short, what happened in Elden Ring happens more in this DLC; Fromsoft got so lost into making "lots of content" that they didn't put much attention to detail.
There's too many weapons, spells, spirit ashes, buffs. When you put so much into the pot, balancing gets harder cause tracking what the players are capable of becomes impossible.
You come to expect that every single player uses Golden Vow and Flame Grant Me Strength and just stacks all the buffs.

The map is so big, exploring becomes a chore that you still have to do to get the scadutree blessing. You either explore, or play suicidal difficulty.

Given the bad problem of recycling content that Elden Ring had, it's also extremely ironic who the last boss is. No spoilers, but lol. I liked his phase 1, then phase 2 came with classic Elden Ring bs.
It's extra ironic if you played Dark Souls 3 and remember the Twin Princes. IYKYK.

My wish for the future is for Fromsoft to make a smaller game with more focus.
We don't need 100 different swords, just less swords with more interesting combat.
Less bosses, more interesting fights.
Smaller map, better content density. More castles, less open fields.
And for content to be actual content, not recolouring with different affinities.

Overall a really great game with some flaws.

Positives:
The art is great, the setting is great, the characters interesting and the gameplay enjoyable. Never before has fromsoft made all playstyles so viable.
Most of all, the sheer amount of content; weapons, armor, spells, bosses to fight. Even at full price, the amount of content in this game is uncomparable. The weapon's customization is very open. The crafting is very simple, and there's many tools to craft; not all equally useful.

Neutral stuff:
They finally added easy mode. Using summons makes this game as easy as watching a movie.
The only people left who still struggle with elden ring are literal children and videogame journalists.
If you add to summons the OP spells and weapon arts and the tens of buffs you can stack, this game really is you just walking around and sometimes pressing R1.

Negatives:
Balancing, both of player and bosses, misses a lot. The player has been powercrept so much since previous fromsoft games.
We used to be a lowly knight, thief, mage. Now we're basically demigods, with too much powers. To counter this, some bosses have been made stupidly unfair. You either walk through enemies and dont even notice them, or they start a 10-hit AoE full arena bugged combo attack. This makes easy bosses unsatisfying, and hard bosses boring and unfair.
The few bosses that are correctly balanced are enjoyable. First encounter Margit is my favourite, strong but fair.

This also made PvP very boring to me. Everyone is spamming AoE attacks. I loved melee fights in Dark Souls. Now almost all swords are magic, and even strength or dexterity weapon arts have huge hitboxes. Most people like this, i don't.

The open world is the worst, the biggest problem. So much time spent walking around useless places, cause sometimes you do find hidden stuff. If we sacrificed both the horse and the map size, we'd get a much tighter and better experience. Same amount of content but denser. More good stuff, less bloat. And less time wasted.

Dark Souls 3 had the perfect formula and rhythm; please go back to that for next games.

I’m done with this game until it gets a reasonable amount of updates.
State it is in right now, i do not recommend it.
You’ll spend your time in it and have fun, yes, but the way i see it, there are similar better games in a better state out right now that you can play. (see Deep Rock Galactic)

This game is a mostly third person pve coop shooter. (You can switch to first person to aim)
You fight hordes of enemies with enough variety.
There are colossal enemies but once you figure them out, they’re not significant like boss fights in DRG.

You can customize your character, primary and secondary weapon, grenades, armor, and of course stratagems. All of these though need to be unlocked, and honestly the start of the game doesnt feel that good.
Some players enjoy progression and unlocking stuff, but here it ends up being an issue: early you wont have the tools you need to solve problems; later the progression becomes useless cause what you already have solves every problem. (i played all difficulties)
The good thing about it is the “battlepasses” are in game permanently, to be unlocked through the premium currency that you can earn in game. It takes a while, but its doable.
You can spend money to unlock a battlepass, but you'll still need in game currency to actually unlock the items inside the battlepass.

My biggest issue in this game is PERFORMANCE. This game came out 2 months ago. I have a 4060, and am playing on a 1080p monitor. This game often dips below 30 fps, sometimes even below 20 when there’s lots of stuff happening.
It might seem reasonable in higher difficulties, there’s big hordes right?
But it isn’t. Why would you develop a difficulty that tanks the game's performance so much?
At some point, helldive will become your standard difficulty.
You’ll have good equipment, know how to shoot enemies, and it’ll be the only interesting difficulty to play.
But it FRAMEDROPS SO MUCH. It runs terrible. I swapped around the graphical settings until i ended up setting everything to low, and i still got those terrible numbers.
This game SHOULD HAVE HAD DLSS. It’s super dumb that it doesn’t, cause the performance is terrible. I know they commented about “having more content over DLSS” but they’re wrong and its dumb to answer so, seeing the situation.

I’ve no idea what this game does in the background. All i know is that even before starting a round, just staying in the ship and watching in the same direction without moving, i regularly see FPS drop from 60 to 50 to 45 and back to 59. Why? What is happening? I’m not even moving.
Other than these framedrops, the game still crashes from time to time. Which is a big waste of people’s time, especially cause this game asks a lot of it.

I tried verifying game files through steam, and it OFTEN replaces files.
There is something wrong there.

Problems beyond performance:
Games take too long.
Operations are made up of 2-3 missions. The time taken by missions is based on their kind, but most missions take 30-40 minutes. Doing a full operation will take more than 1 hour, maybe 1 and a half.
That’s too much. If it were made up of playing, shooting, dodging, doing side missions i’d get it.
But most of your time will be spent WALKING. Going back to extraction made me feel like i was playing Dayz. A full 5 minutes of just walking back there.
Obviously you’re supposed to plan the path you’ll take so that you go through every side objective and end up at the extraction, but you still end up having to walk back and forth often.
This is boring and wasting time, in rounds already designed to be too long.

Community can be toxic, but it’s mostly fine. I’ve had a few experiences of friendly fire, or everyone being kicked before the end of the game. Something should be put in to prevent this. Right now you’re better off hosting your own games, and then you’ll have no problems.

Most stuff you unlock is useless. You’ll end up finding stuff you like, and then 80% of the unlocks you’ll never use. Once i found a primary i liked, all the others became pointless.
Same for stratagems. I ended up doing everything with a quasar cannon, so that always had to come. The rover guard dog too, as it would kill small enemies while i ran. That left only 2 slots for stratagems. Of course, that’s my preference, but i still think most people would agree that 50% of stratagems are very situational or straight up less useful than others.

The tutorial is very lacking. I had to discover the different gun modes and the communication wheel by myself. I think this is a issue for many, cause in my experience i found maybe 2 players using comms.

The “match browser” is terrible. You can’t tell me there’s 20k people playing on a planet and then show me at best 20 games total across all difficulties, with so many of them having japanese or chinese players. I’ve nothing against this people, but there’s too much lagg playing with them. This game needs a refresh button, cause right now it feels like there’s maybe 40 people playing.


This is my wall-of-text review done. The game is fun and memey, but it does have many big issues that other similar games don’t. The game will probably get many updates and fixes in the future, but right now it’s been the umpteenth game that releases with bad performance on launch.
This is not fine, and if your game runs so bad nowadays, then you should have DLSS.
It shouldn’t be like this but it is, and “focusing on content” isn’t a good answer for not having it.
Do both.

Release date: 20 September, 2022
Shutdown date: 29 November, 2023
gameplay was good and fun
f2p progression was super slow
monetization was super greedy, which drove players away, and killed the game.
congratulations on a year well spent; wasting time, money and a valuable IP.