Recent reviews by Mechanism Y

This DLC is bland, overpriced and very mid overall. The older Chaos Warrior characters in the series are better after the free rework of their faction. The factions in this DLC are just watered down versions of the Daemon factions you get in the base game and lose a lot of cool WoC stuff in the process. Pretty disappointing DLC for what you're spending on it honestly, highly recommend you throw your cash at something else.

Blood should have been in at launch but hey, after many months we finally have it! Nothing but the best low quality ground blood decals and chunks of jam eruptions! Can't believe it actually looks worse than the one in the previous game.
The extra insulting cherry on top is that Creative Assembly had the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gall to try and hype this mess pre-release, like this isn't something they withheld to get TWWH3 a lower age rating and made us wait months after launch for... this.

Don't buy this. It doesn't add anything to the game, it's not even good quality and paying money for what is a basic core feature months after game release is just insulting.
CA think they can sell you anything if they hype you up and jingle their keys in front of you enough. Prove them wrong.

(If you really really want this though, go over to the TWWH1 page and buy the Blood Pack for that game of sale, it'll be significantly cheaper)

When this game came out I didn't write a review because there was a LOT to talk about, a lot of problems to dissect and a whole lot of mess to be cleaned up. Basically I wanted to actually recommend this game and not write a 20000 essay where every good point about the game had a massive asterisk next to it explaining how almost everything about it fell flat on its face in practice. I really do like the series after all, and I was trying REALLY hard to like this game.

We're coming up to 2 years now and the situation has very much not improved. I could probably write a f***ing book on every where this game and Creative Assembly have screwed things by now and somehow every issue I had with the game at launch has either been fixed badly, left abandoned or somehow GOTTEN WORSE.

So here's my short and not-as-helpful-or-in-depth-as-I'd-like review of the game: It is less fun than it's predecessor, more expensive than it's predecessor (and TWWH2 was already way too expensive with all the DLC frankly) and what this game does do right it undercuts with 1000 large and small issues that make playing it a hell of a chore. The game is actually pretty good with mods but that itself is an admission that the base game is not very good on its own (I use 6 times as many mods as the previous game to vaguely enjoy it).

This is just the stuff wrong with the game itself too. Creative Assembly's conduct and handling of the game and it's community over the past 2 years has been, uh, bad, to put it lightly. This might seem like meta drama but it really does affect the game and it's going downhill pretty consistently, so it's absolutely worth taking into account before you spend your money. Their handling the game and its community badly and even if you don't care you will still be playing a worse game than when you bought it a few months down the road because of it.

So I don't recommend this game. There's older, better Total War games you can play (Shogun 2 is pretty nice and TWWH2 is a much more fun game set in the same universe) and just other better made and better value games in general that you don't have to install a bunch of mods or ignore developers doing their best EA impression to enjoy.

If you're still interested in this title despite all this, I recommend waiting to see if the devs fix everything before you try it out. This will likely take years IF they feel like doing that though (which is a very big "if").

Sorry, but this game is kind of a bust right now, and you're better off spending your money on something else.

TLDR: Good world, bad everything else. If this is your first FROM/Souls game, avoid it like the plague. If not, consider it very carefully and stop giving FROM Soft. a pass for bad game design with the justification of "difficulty", it's getting silly now.

To give a bit of context before I start, I've been playing Souls games since Demon's Souls came out and I'm pretty good at them (which it isn't hard to be seeing as they all play the exact same). I'm intimately familiar with all the highs, lows, strong and weak points of the series and I generally love the franchise a lot. My favourite part has always been the colourful, intricate worlds that FROM crafts that are so compelling and enjoyable to explore.

The good news is that Elden Ring has that. The world of Elden Ring is the most amazing world FROM have created for a game yet. It's beautiful, rich and generally very, very cool.

The bad news is that pretty much literally everything else in the game is a steaming pile of giant crab ♥♥♥♥.

This game is bad, simple as that. This game is not fun, satisfying or fulfilling in any way and has worn me out to the point that I don't care anymore and as well crafted as it is, the setting and world of Elden Ring is not enough to justify how miserable this game is to play.
I just can't recommend this to anyone. I look at the gorgeous environments and areas and I want to but I just can't. It got to the point I could literally feel it suck the life out of me and knowing my "reward" for progressing was to deal with even more insufferable gameplay I couldn't go on. This is coming from someone who's used to the Souls series ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ as well. The threshold required for me to stop playing and go "no way, this is too much" is VAST. If this is your first "Souls" game, you will HATE it.
I don't even have room here describe all the problems this game has (and many of them are problems the other games had that FROM is too self-assured to even admit are problems that BADLY needed fixing years ago) so I'll stick to bulletpoints, but some of them include:

-A horrendous camera that deserves a whole section on its horribleness just to itself, but has been saved from that here by review character limits. Short version: It's BAD.

-An atrocious lock-on system that does more to get you killed than the enemies and only works against single or small groups of roughly human-sized enemies on level ground in open areas with no clutter, environment hazards or lethal fall areas. Those very specific circumstances were 90% of Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 but only maybe 5-10% of Elden Ring. I bring those games up because the camera/lock-on in Elden RIng is identical to those games but in a game where it can't handle what's going on.

-A clunky quick inventory that needs to be cycled through one item at a time manually. It's identical to Demon's Souls, a game that came 13 years ago and was considered dated and poor quality even then.

-You get a horse but mounted travel and combat but he's crap. Your horse has a separate health bar to you. You do not get to see this health bar passively, only when it takes damage. You also need to dedicate an item slot for its healing items and the item to summon it (you'll be using these a lot), so your awful quick inventory is now even more cluttered for items that are only useful in the overworld.

-No helmet hiding option. Come on FROM, this one is so easy to do. If Nioh figured it out so can you.

-You can alter armour now. Sounds good on paper but you can only alter a few and something as simple as removing a cape actually makes the armour weaker somehow, literally punishing you for making cosmetic changes.

-You can't open your map in combat. At all. So you need to kill everything hostile near you to know where you're going. Enemy too tough to kill, glitched into a wall or half a mile away? Tough ♥♥♥♥! No map for you.

-Can't roll-cancel out of animations anymore, or any form of cancelling it seems. Use the wrong spell by accident and you're stuck in it and it's used. This becomes especially frustrating when using your healing flask as you're stuck in the animation of using it for a second after it's finished healing you, so if you heal against a boss at anything but the perfect time (and sometimes even that doesn't work) they'll catch you at the end of your healing animation while you're helpless and knock your health back down again. I swear this one is intentional.

-Enemies in this game are horrendous. I genuinely don't have enough room to describe how ♥♥♥♥♥♥ 90% of them are. One of them emits a blinding flash that hurts my eyes when I kill them. Fun! Suffice to say enemies are designed to be frustrating first, cheap second, challenging a very distant third and fun never.

-Bosses are even worse. How they managed to take a highlight of the Souls series and make them this unfun to fight is a miracle in awfulness. I've fought about 50 bosses and only 3 were even remotely approaching enjoyable.

-Reskins, reskins, reskins! Many animation rigs are recycled from Dark Souls 3 and earlier and put on different models. One boss (cloned like 10 times of course) is literally the Asylum Demon from OG Dark Souls. Same attacks and all, I even recognise the timings and frames on his swings. A new exciting world to explore means little if we see the same stuff we've seen for years everywhere in it.

-When you die you have to stare at your character slumping over for a good 15 seconds before you even get a loading screen to wait through. This is just obnoxious timewasting, especially coupled with having to shlep your way back to where you died after you respawn. It adds up. Considering how often you die in this game (often in one hit from a cheap shot) this is particularly insulting. I swear the other games weren't this bad for it.

-Stop making me run to where I died in boss fights to pick up my stuff! Nioh fixed this, you just get them back instantly as soon as the fight starts, just let me focus on the fight!. It doesn't help that many of Elden Ring's boss arena's are absolutely massive and require a ton of running to get around.

And many more. Oh so many more. Even trying to cut my points down I don't have enough room. If it wasn't for Steam's review word limit I could write a bloody dissertation on how bad Elden ring is to play.

Regardless, the bottom line is this: Elden Ring is Demon's Souls. It's got a much cooler world and looks a lot prettier but it plays. Exactly. The damn. Same.
Same problems, same basic combat, same clunk. They've had 13 damn years to streamline the series but they haven't been bothered, and as long as their games get unanimous praise from their increasingly weird, elitist and cultish fanbase they never will, and you'll end up with another Dynasty Warriors: a series with a strong premise and many flaws that go unfixed because its loyal fanbase will eat it up no matter what anyway, copied and sequelised without meaningful change or improvement to oblivion.
The ugly truth is that part of the blame for the way Elden Ring ended up is ours, the fans of Dark Souls. We took the stupid "git gud" memes and the unconditional praise of the series too far and FROM took it too far right back. Many Souls fans may not like my criticism here but it's absolutely needed. The games they make won't get better unless we challenge them for what they do wrong, otherwise we end up with a stagnant series abandoned by all but a few salty elitists in denial, which is exactly where FROM's Souls-like games are heading.

Elden Ring and Dark Souls are not perfect. The series had excuses for its problems when it was new but now it doesn't. This game is the result of being unable to to learn from them and how an amazing world and setting suffered for it.
I don't recommend this game, especially if you're new.

As for me, I'm gonna wait for a mod to lower difficulty before I play Elden Ring again, because "git gud" isn't good enough anymore.

O.k, WTF CA? Wasn't enough for Skaven to have gatling guns and sniper rifles and Doom Flayers, you just had to give them f***ing root vortex drills and the living anime rat blender that is Snikch and his gang of sneaky rodent weeaboos as well! Nearly all have Stalk and concealment bombs too, just in case you wanted to hide an army of rat assassins behind a lamppost or something. This DLC is ridiculous and the new Skaven units are overpowered bullsjljh'ijhloio;mk,p.'l/#@'#####'''

Ignore that. Best DLC yet-yet. New Skaven units very balanced-fair and Clan Eshin is greatest clan in game with a mighty-strong lord in Deathmaster Snikch and interesting stab-sneak gameplay that makes Ikit Claw and his stupid engineering workshop look a malnourished and beardless dwarf-thing with a cheap-bad cuckoo-clock repair hovel, yes-yes.
Definitely recommend for loyal supporters of Under-Empire, Clan Eshin and their peerless sneak-spying skills and mighty cadres of gutter runners that are absolutely not watching you at this very minute to ensure your purchase of this most excellent product-pack (don't turn around and check, you'll just feel stupid-silly, yes-yes).
10/10, worth every warp-token, praise the Great Horned Rat!

Also contains edgy elf-things for Doomwheel-hating cat-fondlers that are pretty alright too I guess-guess.

-An honest and definitely alive manthing

O.k, I imagine we've all seen a lot of those "slap in the face" and "ruined it for me" reviews so I'm gonna cut straight to it.

F*** the Old Blood update. It is perhaps the least fun I've had with a game and I've played some godawful trash. The Warframe endgame has no respect for your time or patience and is terminally grindy and unappealing. Avoid it.

The Old Blood update really showed up some of Warframes flaws I'd been ignoring as well. The game gives very little feedback when you're taking damage amidst the action and explosions and enemies teleport/spawn behind you frequently even in areas you've cleared.
Combined, this means that you can be surrounded and shot from all sides very often, and in high level content unless you are using one of a handful of durability powers or sturdy Warframes you can and will be instantly or near instantly killed.
I have been killed many times for the crime of having a heavy gunner spawn behind me or been evaporated in one hit by a random mook with a boxing glove that I walked past trying to defend an objective. Then the objective exploded in a literal second. This is horde shooter/slash-em-up, so every single enemy being able to do this produces expected results.
The main way to get around this is by running around and dodging everything, but half the enemies in the game have either knockdowns or a difficult to anticipate form of crowd control to shut you down and give everything else nearby the 1/2 second needed to kill you unless you went in beefy or have some sort of optimised blender build.
That's not even including bosses or the enemies like bursas that are designed to piss you off either. This is just regular high to highish level gameplay.
As it is, the only way to win those engagements is to go full meta and have absolutely no fun with a meagre handful of Warframes and builds or not play endgame at all. I recommend that last one, especially with how long it takes to upgrade your stuff and grind the stuff to upgrade your stuff, and grind the stuff to grind the stuff to upgrade your stuff (no really, that is a very common occurence).

There's more of course. More frustrating timewasting cheap difficulty gameplay, but that's enough to set the tone for now, because this is all just the groundwork for the bed of crap that is the Old Blood.
So, quick version: in the Old Blood update they introduced a Nemesis System. Shadow of Mordor it ain't trust me. They also introduced a bunch of cool weapons. Naturally, as I like Warframe's weird gun porn vibes, I try to get the coolest and dumbest looking one I can see, a burst-fire pistol that looks like a ♥♥♥♥. This is where we run into problems.

Now, in this nemesis system you get assigned a nemesis with stats determined by the Warframe you first encountered it with and a random gun. They not have the one you wanted? Oops! Have to kill them and cross your fingers the next one has it! Duplicates are a too thing btw, so good luck.
This nemesis, or "Kuva Lich" as it's called in game, then stakes out a portion of the map as its territory and steals a percentage of your stuff whenever you do a mission there (fun stuff already). The Lich has thralls in these regions, and killing them gives you info on what runes you put into your little Assassin's Creed arm dagger to perma-kill them. You get these runes randomly from new relics (think loot boxes you don't have to pay money for) that you also get randomly from certain existing missions.
Then once you have these three random runes (that expire after three uses so there is no escape from the relic grind) you slot them in your arm dagger thing, go into a nemesis mission (that you hopefully still have open because you can actually do them all and lock yourself out of ever killing your nemesis because they only appear in them) and stab them with it, fingers crossed the runes are in the right order.

Oh yeah. The runes need to also be in the right order in addition to actually having them in the first place.

No, the game doesn't tell you the order either. You have to figure it out by trial and error. And every time you do that and don't get them wrong the Kuva Lich kills you and levels up, making it harder to kill next time. You are punished for failing something you couldn't have possibly known for no reason other than to waste your time.

So to summarise, when you spawn a Lich you have a chance to hjave it have the gun you want. Once it's spawned kill 150 thralls that spawn maybe 5 times a mission to see what runes you need to kill it. From there spam Kuva missions for a chance at the relic that has a chance at containing the rune you want. Neither or those odds are particularly high. From there slot them into your arm-dagger-thing, go to a Kuva Lich mission and hope you're lucky. If not your Nemesis does their best Bane imitation and breaks your spine, levelling up. Back to square one. Time to kill 50 more of those thralls and try again. This all takes hours btw. Persevere though and at the end they die and you get a gun! Huzzah!

Also the gun has random stats. So the gun you get could be really crap compared to another person with the same thing. Not to worry though! You can always just DO IT ALL AGAIN and hope it's good this time!. Better hope that gun comes up on the Kuva Lich roulette wheel!

You can also convert Kuva Liches into allied summons after beating them but they are ♥♥♥♥, can't be summoned when you want them and last like a minute, so never ever do this. They are utter crap.

Also the Kuva Lich weapons you get are a massive upgrade sink, requiring you to reset their stats with Forma FIVE TIMES to actually fully level them. There are 13 of them. If you want full mastery on all of them not only do you have to jump through all the above hoops and hope you get them, but it'll cost you 65 forma. That's about £40 worth if you buy it with plat from the in game store or 1560 hours if you make them one at time like you have to otherwise from the in-game workbench, and that's not including farming the blueprints for them.
For those new to Warframe all other weapons except one require zero forma or stat resets to gain full mastery, and that exception is treated as a very strong unique end-game weapon. Gaining mastery on weapons and Warframes is how you level up too. It's a f***ing pisstake.

Think I've written a lot? This isn't even half of it. There's more. More and more crap to wear away at you and utterly waste your time.
I don't know what's going on over at Digital Extremes with this poor man's Shadow of Mordor crap that somehow outdoes Warner Brothers in making grindy unfulfilling gameplay and treating the player like a bloody chump. I have a job and ♥♥♥♥ to do DE! I don't have forever to spend monotonously trying to farm unnecessary runes and beat up some bland, uninteresting enemy in my very limited downtime to *maybe* have a little fun with a gun that'll take me 5 days of building Forma to master!

If you are gonna play this, avoid the endgame like the plague and don't invest too much into the game itself either. As it is right now, you are not gonna get a good investment of your time and potentially money. The game's still fun when it lets you actually have it, but it's mired in grind, frustration and boredom.

Warframe is one of many "time sink" style games going right now. Bear that in mind going in. It's still better than most, including the paid, full price ones, but it's not playing fair right now and you're not gonna get much out of it, especially endgame.
As it stands right now, I'd look elsewhere.

TLDR: Boring, grindy, f*** the Old Blood. DE, fix it.

Edit: DE have now added the ability to buy the relics and runes with their in game currency in the store! You know, those free loot boxes you acquire in game? You can pay for them now! To "save time".
Amazing. Create a problem and sell the solution. Not cheap either! Did EA buy DE when I wasn't looking?
I said avoid it before, double avoid it now.

Don't buy it.

I actually had a huge, enormous review filled with thousands of angry words about how the game is torturously grindy, full of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, rife with unfixed technical problems large and small and very numerous and how utterly demanding of your time, life and attention it is and how it does nothing in return but give more demands. Then I decided to do what ARK won't do and respect you and your time enough not to waste it on trivial bollocks stretched to breaking point and keep it short.

Don't buy this game. It's not worth your time, it is DEFINITELY not worth your money and it will never be worth the feeling of wasting hundreds of hours of your life you get when you look back and see how little you have to show for it. At which point you will do what I did and write a review much like the others here telling people to avoid it as well.

So do yourself a favour: Don't buy this game and spend your £50 and hundreds of hours on something else. Just not this. Because you'll just end up back here doing what I'm doing right now in a few months and it will NOT be worth it.

A good game ruined by a vindictive bunch of executive foreskins that prioritise shutting down mods (which are a huge part of playing GTAV on PC) in a blind and childish attempt at dominance. I was already annoyed about an online mode full of hackers and cheats and Take 2 treating their customer base like cattle and trying to milk us dry with microtransactions but this is just over the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ limit. I hate giving this game a bad score but damnit GTAV's publisher seems hell bent on ruining it for me and, really, this ♥♥♥♥ is not okay. Shutting down over a decade of hard work by modders (encouraged and PROMOTED by Rockstar themselves much of the time) with spurious and poorly written legal threats is not okay.

Don't buy ♥♥♥♥ from Take 2. They're a bunch of greedy delusional ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with no respect for the people that buy their damn games and see you at best as a cow to be milked for money or as a renegade not under their thumb, in which case they'll send a cease and desist and a team of lawyers, even if you're helping sell their games.

Not gonna mince words here, Nier Automata is experience like none I've ever had before in a game and you should totally play it, because holy ♥♥♥♥ it is worth playing.
If I had to nitpick then the map takes a bit of getting used to and the graphics are a tad washed out and crap. It's not very hard to ignore that stuff though as the game is just so damn good. Pretty much everything else is excellent as far as I'm concerned and the music might be the best I've heard in a game yet.
And if you do play it, go into NG+. I'm not gonna spoil but there is a LOT more stuff after you "complete" the game the first time.

TLDR: Waaaaaaaay better than the first DLC pack. Still a little bare on content but what's in there isn't bad at all. Whether it's worth the money or not is up to you but it's certainly not a complete waste either. Pick it up in a sale if you're on the fence.

First off, I have a funny feeling that the first DLC pack and this one were both part of the same package at one point before getting split up. Cabba and Frost feature heavily in the story content of this pack, but are only actually playable if you bought the first one. Combined with the general lack of content, Cabba and Frost's movesets being heavily based on Vegeta and Frieza respectively and the general lack of balance in the first DLC lead me to suspect that it was originally part of this pack before being split up and rushed out the door, either due to time constraints or just to make more money. Can't say I approve either way. This leaves both packs a bit bare on content and the inescapable feeling that Bamco just want you to pay for two halves of the same thing. A pity really, because it overshadows this pack and it's actually alright. What's there anyways.

The two new characters are pretty decent. While Frost in the first pack was a very clear moveset clone of Frieza and Cabba played near identically to Vegeta, Vados and Champa have enough differing them from the rest of the cast to feel like their own characters. Champa plays like a weird combination of Beerus and Mr. Satan with several attack strings of his own and a couple of new (if a little underwhelming) moves, whereas Vados plays a lot like Whis at first glance but has quite a bit to separate her when it comes down to gameplay.
In general, while Champa is a bit meh (and I kinda wish they'd gone a bit more Danny Devito with his english VA) Vados is a lot more fun to play. While her moves are pretty impractical, she has a unique setup based gameplay style none of the other characters share and her attack strings are pretty fun to use. Most importantly they're not just a copy-paste of an existing character, so thumbs up there.

The new chapters in the story are likewise pretty okay. While I would have liked Botamo and Auto-Magetta to be playable, I'm not too broken up they didn't make the cut (Botamo's stone wall abilities would be difficult to balance in gameplay and Magetta straight up can't fly, which is kinda necessary in this game). Basically you get drafted into the universe 6/7 tournament and the usual Xenoverse shenanigans happen. Their handling of the player fighting in the tournament isn't bad and they handle the majority of the events of the tournament arc pretty well. It's short but really not too badly done. It's on a par with the original Xenoverse story DLC if nothing else and manages to do things better in some cases as well. All in all, fairly decent.

The parallel quests introduced here are thankfully way, WAY less ♥♥♥♥ than the ones in the first DLC pack. They're difficult in the standard XV2 way but nothing I felt the urge to jump up and down and yell "This is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!" at. Honestly, they could have used more than just 3 (almost like the content was split up or something), but there's nothing offensive about them (for me anyway). So another improvement there.

The moves in this pack are probably where the DLC is at its weakest. Champa's moves are kinda meh. Not bad, just not really useful either. While Vados' moves are a lot of fun to play around with and are definitely nothing like any other characters, they're not too useful either. I mean, they're strong, but a little gimmicky. Fun to play around with, but not exactly "I need the best moves in the game to beat that utterly broken Broly expert mission" material.

Then there are the new equipables. I really like the Android 13 movie gear. It's actually new, and gives me a chance to fly around yelling "look at my trucker hat" in online missions. The super souls are also good without doing something that other super souls do better/worse to some extent. I mean, it's just cosmetics and buffs, but they're not bad. I like them anyway.
Bearing in mind you do need to beat the new PQs a few times to fully unlock that stuff, it's not just available at the start. While I don't like that approach (I already paid real money for it, why do I need to jump through hoops for it?) the PQs aren't painful to the point that I'm hating the game for it. Just be warned.

I summary, DLC2 is a lot better than DLC1 (then again so are a lot of things). The stuff in there is honestly pretty good and I don't have much to complain about really, especially with new story content at long ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ last. HOWEVER I do think that there should be more in here. Just because it's all fairly good doesn't mean that you get a good amount of it. Whether or not DLC1 and DLC2 were part of the same package at one point, it still feels like I'm getting a bit less than I should be here. It's a pretty good package, but I would not fault you if you didn't consider what's here to be worth the asking price. It's on a par with the XV1 DLC anyway, even if it does feel a little lacking.
If you're in doubt there's no shame in passing on it (it certainly won't change your life and how you play XV2 anyway), but personally I found it alright and give it a tentative recommendation. As above, maybe wait until it's going cheap if you're undecided.