Recent reviews by RyeFye

Bullets. Flamethrowers. Bombs. Lasers. Democracy. These are the weapons you wield on a battlefield covered in horrifying anti-democratic bugs, robots, and more.

Challenging, chaotic, fun, tight gameplay in an interestingly evolving open world map. Battlepasses that you can engage with any time instead of relying on FOMO. Awesome responsive dev team.

This is the best co-op game that's been released in ages. Strongly recommend.

PS: Sony did the right thing by not pulling the rug out from under people.

Visuals, setting, characters, writing, voice acting are all top notch. Gunplay feels good. Hacking someone's nervous system to shut down so you don't have to deal with their crap feels better.

Honestly one of the best games I've played in ages.

Note: Only played after 2.1

My god it's...it's glorious. The new gold standard for CRPGs. The game people will compare other RPGs to for decades. The game I'm actually going to replay several times. I've been waiting for this since I trashed Irenicus 20 years ago. Now I can't stop playing.

TL;DR: A no brainer purchase for any CRPG or D&D fan. It's flawed, sure, but the combat's just too good. It feels so right that every other complaint I have feels nit-picky and can be blamed on "small indie studio with big dreams". Almost every facet of the game is customizable to the player's tastes, from fine-tuned difficulty, stat-choice, party composition, or even what color your dice are. And when the adventure's over? Make and share a dungeon.

The Good Stuff
* The combat is marvelous. It feels just like playing 5e. It makes Baldur's Gate 3's combat look janky by comparison. Reaction pop-up windows when they're needed (unlike BG3's whole...thing). Couldn't ask for more. Truly perfect "just one more turn" combat.
* You pick your whole party. Want to theory-craft a rogue-only party of haflings? Be my guest.
* Overland travel is interruptible and not treated wasted time. Travel between two places in Baldur's Gate or Pillars? Mind blanking teleportation. Here? You can craft. Forage for supplies. See how your party interacts with one another. It's a really nice touch.
* Every roll is explained and accounted for. The rolls all occur on screen. Bonuses are explained. Why you have advantage or disadvantage is explained. There's even a dice roll sound and you can customize what your dice look like :D
* Difficulty customization. Play how you want. It's a big deal. Turn somatic components on or off. Ignore the need for rations. Give a global boost to enemy rolls for added difficulty. Turn encumbrance off entirely. Ask the AI to go straight for the casters. Tell material components to go to hell. The developers don't tell you how to play and that's the way it should be.
* You can roll for your stats, use the standard array, or do point buy. Giving players the choice to do all 3? Bold. I like it.
* The dungeon creator. It's only in beta at the time of this review...but it's really good. As a DM this feels like doing a prep session for my players. Where to put a trap? Where are the enemies? Where are the light sources? Etc.
* The Scavenger's Guild. Letting them go to your old battlegrounds, loot the place for you, and give you a cut of the profits so you don't have to debate lugging 30 maces back to base? Awesome.
* The combat. Did I say that already? It's...it's just so good, y'all.

The Debatable Stuff
* I quite like the 4 main characters all chiming in during conversations and how the personality tags you added during character creation influence what they say and how they speak. It does lead to some odd situations where you'd like your party's face to be doing the persuasion, but only your fighter has a "good" option.
* The story. Mass Effect this ain't. It is, however, exactly as campy and simple as the last home brewed campaign you played with your buddies who are also not lead writers at Bioware. If you expect a B-movie fantasy plot, you're in for a much easier time. If you expect a memorable plot, you won't.
* Crafting and enchantment rules are poorly defined. You need a "primed" weapons to enchant them yourself. You have to consume a recipe in your inventory first.
* I wish it had co-op. But I can't fault the developer for not being able to make that work.
* You can't edit your character's appearance in game after initial creation. You can't modify a character you've created or use them to seed a new character. No respecs. True to D&D but punishing to new players.
* Why won't the goblin in the bestiary stop slapping his butt at me? It haunts my dreams.

The Bad Stuff
* No barbarians, monks, warlocks, druids, or sorcerers. Almost half the SRD classes straight up missing.
* No variant-human. Base 5e human is just awful and variant human I think is even SRD. Don't play with a human.
* Missing gnomes, half-orc, dragonborn, tieflings. Almost half are the SRD races straight up missing.
* The character models are bad up close. This would be fine if it were like Pillars of Eternity, where you're always in 3/4 view and cut-scenes happen in dialog boxes. It's fine in combat. But you cannot escape your weird plastic-haired dead-eyed characters. Characters in Neverwinter Nights 2 looked better and that was during the George Bush administration.
* Your character's voice options are "options". Voice 1 and 2 for females seem to be the same voice actor. Voice 3 is very clearly a masculine voice not even trying to code as feminine.
* Things that are obvious to 5e veterans are not obvious to new players. Not knowing you need to Detect Magic + Identify on new items is an easy way to sell valuable treasure for 1/50th its price.
* Bugs. Nothing game breaking for me yet. But incorrect tool-tips or spelling and grammar errors are most common. Item stacking only works sometimes on certain items. Some spells not working appropriately (Spiritual Weapon nerf, anyone?).

As of Shadowkeep, this is easily the best looter-shooter I've ever played. Every rough edge D2 had on launch has been smoothed and polished to a ridiculous degree. Everything is tight. Everything is gorgeous. The shooting mechanics are as good as you'd expect Bungie can make them. The loot explosions tell your brain to make the G O O D C H E M I C A L S.

I honestly think you'd be a nutter not to try it out. There's enough F2P content to keep you busy for ages.

An excellent card game that looks like Hearthstone buy plays like a streamlined version of Magic the Gathering with some of the more interesting elements of Hearthstone.

The F2P model is so generous I actually felt guilty and spent money on it. Guaranteed pack of 10 cards after your first win every day? What? Really?

This game is honestly pretty damn good. If you took pieces of Dota 2, Borderlands, and TF2 and mixed 'em together in a big pot, you’d basically get Battleborn. Matches are intense and require strategy and communication to really kick ass. When you get the hang of it, hard fought wins really feel like an accomplishment. PvE mode is fun, light, and feels like MMO raids. The game does have its flaws (information density, it's "unlock system" for heroes, and it's new-player experience, etc), but I can still honestly recommend it to anyone who has dabbled in multiplayer shooters and/or MOBAs. It's a blast.

• Higher time-to-death makes you less likely to die suddenly by surprise/cheese like in arena shooters.
  
• Character design is varied and interesting. All characters seem useful.
  
• Surprisingly complex multiplayer maps and modes call for strategy and coordination in a way many other shooters don't.
  
• Matches are chaotic and fun. They seem like less srs business than Dota 2, which is a nice change of pace from other MOBAs.
  
• PvE mode is a MMO-like "raid" mode which I've not seen in any other MOBA. It's actually pretty fun, even if it's not revolutionary. Almost feels Guild Wars 2-ish.
  
• The writing is irreverent and funny. I laughed out loud quite a few times during the campaign.
  
• Gear system is neat. Scratches that itch for loot that Borderlands scratched. Give you a reason to raid with people in PvE.
  
• Gearbox seems to be doing a pretty good job of communicating with the community about balance changes and upcoming content.

• Tutorials for Incursion and Meltdown modes are lacking. It took me a few matches to really understand what to do and when to do it.
  
• The progression system of unlocking new heroes by challenge / Command Rank seems arbitrary.
  
• Matchmaking at lower levels can be rough. It gets better as you get better, but the lack of ranked mode means you sometimes feel like it's just not fair.
  
• Many people buy this game expecting a twitch shooter, get disappointed with the MOBA-part, and seem unfairly angry at the game because they didn’t realize what they were buying.
  
• Forums and comments sections are inundated with comparisons to that Blizzard game. It gets old (I realize the irony of me saying this).
  
• User interface is "meh" and doesn't provide all of the information I wish it would provide. How many seconds left on that debuff, mate?

* High visual effect density during major fights can make it difficult to know what's going on, especially if you're a melee hero.

TL;DR: This game was everything I wanted out of a Magic the Gathering client. Then it added a boatload of MMO and RPG elements to the mix. Now it's something I didn't even realized I wanted out of a TCG.

Absolutely well worth a try.

PS: One day I will kill those bloody pirahnas...