Recent reviews by Mepho

Yes.

Apparently a good game made by accident, developers have been trying to destroy it for 2 months without fixing any issue, some as basic as having a functioning friends system, in a coop game. I presently still can't play with any of my friends on playstation because of this, while just today they incurred big drama for making a PSN account mandatory, Textbook definition of irony.

Game's becoming worse and worse with every patch under all metrics (balance, infrastructure, performance, bugs, you name it) and the interactions with the playerbase from the dev team have been following the same projection. In fact they didn't even care enough to properly write the latest patch notes (if they ever did at all) requiring them to elaborate further over discord.

Loved the game at release. As it stands it's a mediocre game held together by duct tape with an antagonistic and disrespectful team behind it.
For this reason alone I'm writing this review, which I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.

I'll be short, the game released in a broken state, two years went by and despite releasing a number of sub-par DLCs at inflated prices the Studio did not find the time to fix any significant amount of issues among the plethora that plague this game (they managed to introduce new ones or dig back up issues resolved in game 2 somehow).

On top of that the company itself made some public statements that ranged from "We know the game is in a bad state, but buy the DLCs or we won't even try to fix it anymore" to "the right to discuss is a privilege", also straight up confirming they just slipped into a, I quote, "Mask off moment".

If you really need to buy a Total War game get Warhammer 2 or Shogun 2.
Even better stay away from a company that has no issues telling their playerbase to shut the ♥♥♥♥ up and pay so brazenly.

I waited 2 years to write a review, I really hoped to have something good to say but instead what transpired is that the game not only will remain ♥♥♥♥, but the company that sells it actively despises you.

Stay away from Creative Assembly.

Not sure how people managed to put hours in this.
I had it lingering in my library for years having bought it due to a friend's reccomendation. Which I think might have trolled me, now.
I've played up to the first boss in chapter 3(I think it might be considered the second, since there was "something" that might count as a boss in chapter 2) in this 0,7 hour spent and what I had to do was, in order:
- Walk down a hallway and press R2 while watching hints of some kind of story to come, getting my eyes destroyed by the extreme contrast of the graphics locked at 30 fps and enjoy lots of shots of static cellshaded half-faces with bright eyes staring yonder. That's chapter 1.
- Walk down a short corridor, mash 1 button (the only one doing something at this point, btw) on 3 dummy enemies, backtrack that very short distance, mash X in some kind of quick time event. Chapter 2 gone.
- Kill about 10 more dummy enemies in a single room unlocking something more than just "square spam to win" as in a form of dodge (which if timed properly, over a seemingly pretty large time window, let's you "counter" by spamming attack some more), clear a very basic "puzzle" (shoot 4 lights on the walls) which is a tutorial for your ranged attack and face a boss with repeating phases that involves, you guessed it, spamming attack (while easily dodging its single attack if you didn't fall asleep yet) in one phase and shooting at it in the other, rinse and repeat a few times. It also spawns adds during "shoot phase" since your gun gets ammo by defeating enemies and it's required to do damage in that phase.
And that was chapter 3 for me, it could go on but I just quit there, I had enough.
As you may figure out all of that didn't take almost an hour. In fact the gameplay has been something like 5 to 10 minutes (being generous since I didn't time it), the rest has been meaningless cutscenes that revealed nothing except "there's a group associated with the government that kills monsters and the protagonist just joined".

I'd say this is bad for when it was released, in 2020 I could compare playing this to being a self-injuring emo.

I resent having spent almost an hour on the game.

On the positive side my PS4 controller was immediately recognized (I'm using DS4 Windows, not the steam native support) and the dubbing is decent, for what few lines of dialogues I heard in almost 1 hour. I can't think of anything else nice to say.

Memorabilia.