Recent reviews by 〖Rowan〗

Brother!

Magnifico

-Generally-
The difficulty is unforgiving but fair. In a similar fashion to souls games, upon defeat you have a singular chance to reclaim your dropped experience points. Progressing through the levels is revolved around unlocking shortcuts for the 1 and only point of the level, where you start out. The progression through the maps and attaining upgrades feels natural and well-paced. Weapon upgrades may feel un-impactful at first try but as you play, you discover different usage possibilities for each.

Game also revolves around finding hidden areas throughout the levels, of which the game keeps track as completion of said level. There is also a level of re-play ability with 3 different game modes.

-Design-
Art direction is majestic. Everything from level designs to enemies have a Greek inspired sci-fi temple setting with a tense, dark atmosphere. Sound- & visual effects feel impactful and as a fan of ragdoll-physics, its fun to see occasionally enemies launching everywhere :)

I also want to give credit to the music. It varies from dark ambient melodies to faster techno boss battle music.

-Combat-
The combat is centered in fast paced movement and attacking mixing melee and ranged fighting equally. Enemy designs and variety are to my liking. Most needing a different approach in combat, which you have to keep in mind when taking on a squads of different enemies at the same time.

And as a bonus, Avernus managed to pull off something rather unique regarding progression as you can unlock different effects you can inflict on enemies or de-buff them permanently by killing them enough, preventing you from not growing in power at any time.

Finally a game where I can get a positive KDA

From Software promised us most refined and vast souls game experience yet, and they delivered. They clearly have been taking notes on good game aspects during past 10+ years, just mashed everything together from their previous titles and added an open world to it. The new gameplay mechanics, aesthetics, soundtrack, characters, their stories & quests and of course enemy and boss designs are just so well executed and the way they intertwine with each other is just genius.

There is always something to do. For me, the biggest problem of most open world games is when you are given the biggest world to explore and then find it almost completely empty. Elden Ring is so filled with dungeons, areas and enemy encounters to the point, where it got frustrating to discover something new and almost instantly get distracted by another thing to explore. Then there are all the new different builds you can do with all the new weapons, equipment’s and magic. Re-specing has also been made more accessible for you to try out different build faster and more frequently.

1 main improvement I want to highlight is the fact that after completing the main story and getting the ending, doesn’t mean you are done with the game. After you complete the game, you can still go for most of the side- and optional quests from their very starting points and discover all the missed dungeons and caves, try out the PVP and Co-op. I think I have done nearly everything I can on my first playthrough with exactly 100 hours of gametime with having tried only 1 build and soon jumping to New Game +.

There are couple of clear themes going for the new enemy designs. I think Elden Ring encouraging to block more often rather than rolling with Elden introducing the new mechanic of guard countering (allowing you to quickly retaliate after a successful block), and with enemies having a lot more combo- based attacks which make the fights being way more fast paced (compared to the soul’s series).

I did not come upon any performance issues on my 100h playthrough apart from some sudden brief frame drops and jitter and I believe those are being, if havent been already addressed by From Software. Tho I am running Elden with an AMD Ryzen™ 7 5700G -processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. There are some minor bugs like some enemies and bosses just accepting their fate and freezing mid fight but that was almost expected from a game of this scale.


Some minor teeny tiny slightly annoying features

Elden rings Statues of Marika (Respawn points for boss fights for you to go have at them again quickly) are a great feature. But why on earth are they either completely forgotten for some bosses or put a mile away from the boss, where running back to the boss takes ages. There is no Marika for the boss "Maliketh the Black Blade" and running back to the arena takes around 30s. Repeating that for 25 times was fun.

Then there is the recycling of bosses like "Ulcerated Tree Spirit" which is my least favorite boss of all because its enormous and usually takes half of its fighting space. You can barely tell what it’s doing because of how messy and complex (tho cool as hell) its model is.
Those were about only thing vexing me about the whole experience.


Elden Ring is a celebration to everyone, who love RPGs and will most likely form the new base template for new open world RPGs in coming years.

Oh boy. Cant believe the 5 year wait is finally over. There goes my sleep schedule, mental- & physical health, career and social life... again. FOR KISLEV

Wobbly warfare makes me lol.

Despite me having over a thousand hours invested in Chivalry, personally I cannot recommend this game for new players for its current prize.

Chivalry may have been an genre-defining title in the early 2010's but It has long lived past its prime. The game has been long forgotten by Torn Banner, who could have kept it going with further maintenance and content updates. The combat system, despite being incredibly dynamic and complicated, is also janky as all hell, thus easily abusable. This may scare off most of the newer players in an already dying player base. Chivalry also suffers from plenty of game breaking bugs, glitches, unbalance
(debate me) and clunky hitboxes in various maps.

The sole reason I have spent all this time in chivalry over the past years is thanks to the single best dedicated community in any game. The biggest community (Sneaky Monkeys) are filled with enthusiastic, wonderful people, who arrange community-events regularly, and the ongoing modding- side of the game, are the only reason Chivalry hasn't been thrown to the burning pile of dead games. Second part I can appreciate are the visual- & audio work. Chivalry has one of the best graphics and sound-design I have encountered, which easily holdup with other current medieval warfare- titles.

Fun, Intense & unforgiving rogue- like bullethell shoot em up with gorgeous visuals and soundtrack. Nearly every aspect of the game has to be unlocked which sets the player a goal after another which gives Risk of Rain 2 immensely more re- playability. The classes are unique, fun to play and very diverse. Online multiplayer works well with minimalistic latencies.

is good. best review