Recent reviews by Saladmander

Easiest Recommend in years.
The game is excellent. The writers play a lot of dnd and care about the universe and it shows.
The combat allows for creativity, so you can win conventionally unwinnable battles (or one hit one of the normally hardest bosses in the game). The freedom of choice is second to none.

That being said, the closer you get to the end of the game (and I do mean the very end, about the second half of the third Act) the more you notice that the developers seemingly started to run out of time. The main quests become more railroad-y the ways to trick your way around combat encounters in the way I said earlier become fewer and fewer and one character **cough cough** Wyll, doesn't even get a proper ending to his personal story quest.
Without spoiling anything, the final boss is disappointing by the way of being both uninteresting storywise (the elder brain as a character is introduced literally 30-40 minutes before the fight starts) and an "Absolute" Chore to grind through in the combat system, as if the developers specifically said "We don't want anyone cheesing the final boss, so let's build it in a way it can't be broken", which just makes for a boring fight because you have to run past the first actual real dragon you encounter in a dnd game instead of fighting it because you're on a timer to get effectively wiped. I swear, in every subsequent rund that doesn't require a finished Campaign for achievements sake, I'll just pretend Raphael is the final boss because somehow this sidequest has a much better bossfight than the main story because one can (amazingly) actually kill the thing.

That might have been a longer list of negatives than I've intended to write, so why am I still recommending this game if I seem to think it's so bad?
I do not think the game is bad at all, I just think a player should know what they are getting themselves into before they buy/play. I can say with full confidence that Act 1 alone probably has more unique content than a lot of modern open world titles. When you walk through a forest in which cultists wage a war against druids and you find an injured dog, an owlbear or even an entire goblin tribe in an abandoned village (and you can treat each of these as kind, heartless or opportunistic as you want, provided you have the necessary dialouge skills leveled of course) THAT is when the game is at its best. That is when the game feels like you are actually just playing dnd in a fully modelled map.
And that is something you just cannot find anywhere else in that combination.
You likely can't even easily find a game that offers you the truly staggering freedom of choice Baldurs Gate 3 allows (don't get me wrong, even though Act 3 gets somewhat linear, you still have multiple options for most sidequests).
You could probably find a game which adapts the DnD Combat Mechanics faithfully into a turn based combat game.
You might even find a game that allows you to drive all your companions away in a party based game by being so cruel they don't want to stay in camp with you or straight up murdering them ("Pave my path with corpses. Build my castle with bones.")
But you will not find a game that combines the three to the same extent that Baldurs Gate 3 does. A fair warning though, there is a reason this game is named "Bisexuals Gate" on my Desktop.

I really wanted to love this game.
Don't get me wrong, this game is great fun for a few hours either in Campaign or with friends.
But it absolutely isn't worth 20€.
It has too many outdated mechanics, bad pathfinding and sluggish controls for that. I know there are probably mods to fix that, but I am rating the unmodded game (and DLC) here, and that hasn't aged well at all.
Although I'd like to say that you should absolutely buy it if (and only if at least one is true):
- the game is on sale for 5 -10€
- you are a big Star Wars(tm) fan, and absolutely love cinematic moments, because this game is full of them
I absolutely love how cinematic this game is for something from 2006 (firing the death star, for example), but that sadly doesn't help the atrocious ground combat or the rather slow space combat compared to modern titles.

I don't often write reviews for games, so let me be clear on this in the first few sentences:
Warframe is one of the best games I have ever played.

This game is just a great addition to looter shooters in general and the result of an (back then) indie dev asking themselves: "What if we added this thing? That would make a great addition." and then just releasing a new gamemode for free for everyone with no pay to win added.
So far warframe has (to give an incomplete list):
- 3 open worlds
- Railjack, a ship to ship combat mode
-Archwing, another space combat mode
- Duviri, a "soulslike" mode
- Normal missions, being a Ninja in space
- 1999, a (partial) dating simulator
-Kuva Lichs and sisters of parvos, a rival System
What makes warframe such a great game is that the developers actually listen to community feedback and are extremely careful not to come across as predatory with their monetisation. They have removed pay to win aspects they have added in the past multiple times, both from player feedback and sometimes even on their own volition when players were buying things "too much".
The new player experience is very confusing, yes, but we all went through it, so everyone knows it is confusing and is generally happy to help if you ask in any chat about anything.
The modding system is the most customisable I have seen in any game, ever and the gameplay can be described as simply divine.
This game simply feels like a general love letter to the players, who spend money on the game, not because they have to, but because they genuinely want to support the studio and this great game.

There are, of course, also negative aspects to be talked about. The game is often buggy in some aspects (though I have yet to come across a bug that is actually gamebreaking and not just funny), as well as some very strange story decisions (if you know about jade you know what I mean), but over all I would say that you should try this game if you like looter shooters and shouldn't if you do not.
Overall it is a very solid, well made game with a nice community and completely free progression outside of some cosmetics and a reminder of what games used to be.

This is a very cute game with a lot of attention to detail and good stealth gameplay. It's also free, so you lose nothing except some time if you don't like it. My advice would be to just try it.

What can I say. It's great. It used to be just a survival game before the automation update came out.
With that, the devs refined it to be an automation game too, if you wanted it to be.
Updates are big packages of good content, events are semi-regular and the in game store only sells cosmetics (some of which you can also earn by playing the earlier mentioned events).
The game itself is very casual, you should not play it if you are looking for a challenge.
Most challenges in this game will be set by you, because your base can always be bigger and your Nano-Alloys could always be more. Also you can make a very big boom out of extracted atmospheric hydrogen.
Speaking of which, your main tool throughout the game will be a giant brush with which you can edit the terrain however you like. Aside from the production devices, there are no preassembled things, you have to brush your house yourself if you want one.
All in all 9/10, some missed opportunities with additional challenges , but the game has developers and a community that both actually care about it.

Overwatch 1 was by no means a perfect game, but it had potential.

They burned that opportunity along with every bit of goodwill any Overwatch player ever had for them when they made Overwatch 2 and cancelled the thing that actually made it 2.

I am not going to write anything about the pricing of this DLC, just about the gameplay itself. I just hope CA doesn't think people don't want more expensive, but more in depth factions in the future, because that would be a shame.
I have played my campaign on very hard difficulty.

I have just completed my first Realms of Chaos Campaign, so I can only really speak about one of the three legendary Lords this DLC contains.

In general, Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs is (in my opinion) the most in depth Faction in Total War: Warhammer to date and I hope CA expands on the mechanics of future factions.
Right at the Start, the Dawi Zharr have a rather complex Ressource management system (for a Total War Game), so the Paradox Player inside me felt right at home.
Since the Chaos Dwarfs are on the Knife's Edge of Extinction, they do not have a Growth Mechanic as every other Race in the Game, rather they only require a large amount of a certain Ressource to upgrade Buildings.
In General, you create 3 Types of Settlement: Outposts, Factories and Towers.
Outposts are where you take your Labourers to labour, creating Raw Ressources. Raw Ressources are used to upgrade Settlement and Infrastructure, as well as defensive Buildings.
Factories use Raw Ressources, creating Armaments which are used to build Military Buildings as well as gathering Upgrades and Unit Capacity in the Hellforge.
Bretonnian Cavallery is the best on the field, but their front line is just fooder. Nurgles front line is great, but he literally does not have anything else. And Chaos Dwarfs? Chaos Dwarfs excel at everything. They have a great Gunline, the second best Artillery in the Game, stupid good Cav and tanky as well as strong melee Options. So what is their weakness? It's actually getting their god-tier units that make every aspect this overpowered. Because of cost alone, they will be forced to either use far less units than their enemy or use as many garbage tier units as their enemy in multiplayer.
In Singleplayer Campaigns, there is the hellforge mechanic. This mechanic enables you to buy upgrades for your different Troops, but these upgrades cost armaments and require armament upkeep multiplied by the amount of troops you are buying the upgrades for. The main usage for armaments is buying Capacity Upgrades, since you cannot recruit many of the good units without these increases. As far as I can tell the cost increase after buying a capacity Increase is exponential, meaning that you will eventually hit a ceiling where increased capacity is no longer feasible.
This is why I would claim the dawi zharr to not be overpowered. They are strong yes, but almost any enemy will have a numerical advantage.
The base mechanics of the Hellforge, Labour economy and forced confederation are inspired by other factions, yes, the Beastmen, Dark Elves and Empire, but clearly CA did not just copy paste these mechanics while adding in an additional slave economy system, Conclave Influence as a currency and Armaments production instead of simple razing. I personally think this DLC is well worth the money (22,50€), because it does bring a lot of value if you are a fan of the game.

Let me preface this review by saying that I am by no means a good player, but I do know what I am doing.
You will suck at first if this is your first experience with the total war franchise. Do not get discuraged by these starting hours, it will pass (eventually). And once you get past the admittedly steep learning curve this game offers, it is a lot of fun.
You can (if you own the dlc) play as many factions from the warhammer fantasy universe, with every faction having a fairly unique gameplay style to master and improve at. Since I do want this review to stay at a resonable length, I will limit it to the Warhammer 3 base game factions only, that should be enough for an overlook.
Warhammer 3 is centred around chaos, which means the 4 great chaos gods are front and center of the base game. So let's start with them.

Nurgle
Nurgle plays like you'd expect the god of decay, rot, rebirth and plagues to play: slow
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Nurgle is meant to work in cycles, since his buildings do not constantly recruit armies and cannot be manually upgraded, but work in cycles where you have to time your military excursions with a cycles highest point for the best results. Further you can brew plagues that buff you and debuff your enemies.
That probably makes nurgle seem weak by comparison to the other factions, but he is a lot of fun because most of his units incorporate another very important aspect of him. Yes, they are slow enough for a snail to overtake them at any point in a charge, the armor on their units is probably a grapics bug since they don't have any in the game and to name their damage dealing capabilities as low would be overly kind, but the entire point of a nurgle army is that they will never ever die. Canonically speaking, of course. In game they can die, but probably shouldn't with the giant amount of healing and melee defense improvements the Lore of Nurgle brings.

Slaanesh
Slaanesh is all about ambush. Their warriors are fast and their cavalry is faster. They are very easily able to outmaneuver the enemy and deal high damage as well. The only drawback to this is that most Slaaneshi units are glass cannons, meaning they can't take even a fraction of what they deal out, which is probably lore accurate for Slaanesh *wink*.

Khorne
Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne! Khorne is all about just charging headlong into battle and never ever stopping. His campaign map movement mechanics are made so you profit from consecutive wins and destroying everything in your path, his battle mechanics are made so you profit (again) from charging your heavily armored slightly-lower-health than nurgle marauders direktly into the enemy. Khorne is considered overpowered by many players, as he has some of the best frontline in the game.

Tzeentch
The lord of sorcerers and change is geared toward a playstyle based around and of magic and ranged attacks. A thematic opposite to nurgle, tzeentch relies on pelting the enemy with strong archer units as well as high damage spells. The lore of tzeentch being primarily based around fire damage, which makes it a nice counter to nurgle, since fire counters healing. Still, his frontline is weak and it is rather easy to flank or overrun his armies.

Legions of Chaos
There is not much to say here. Legions of chaos combines the different mechanics of the monogod campaigns into one, although you get less of the individual mechanics, to not take away from the other demon Campaigns.

Grand Cathay
The first of two non-demon factions, Grand Cathay is a fantasy version of ancient china and is basically the empire 2.0.
It relies heavily on missile and artillery units to support its mediocre frontline against stronger melee infantery. It also has a special Yin-Yang mechanic, in which melee units posess Yang and ranged units possess Yin, giving buffs in damage and leadership to all different "polarities" around themselves. They are a good starter faction, but nothing groundbreaking apart from (maybe) the great bastion mechanics, which I will let you figure out yourself if you decide to play.

Kislev
The bulwark against chaos has a very good unit roster. So good, some people argue it is just as overpowered as khorne. Most of kislevs infantery are hybrid units, meaning they both have a melee weapon as well as a missle weapon, which then again means that they are able to better defend from ambushes than most other factions. To balance this out, kislev does only have one rather weak artillery unit, which makes its main weakness to engage from afar and blast their armies with artillery until they die. Not the most engaging to play against, but certainly fun to play as.

And that is every faction in the base game of Total War: Warhammer 3
Thank you for reading and feel free to correct me if I got something wrong.

Before I begin the Review, I want to tell any potential buyer, that this game is hard.
Every death resets EVERYTHING. Completely. You have to restart the entire run if you die and your enemies are a force to be reckoned with.

So, it's hard. Yes. You get that. You still want to buy the game? Yes? Looking for a challenge? Good. Noita should be perfect for you. While finishing the game is "easily" (relatively speaking) completable, there are so many secrets and hidden things in this game, that it puts a triple A game to shame.
Ok, let me just make 1 example If you go to the far left of the overworld, you'll find a giant tree. Dig inside it and you'll discover a flute-staff thing and all the note spells you need to play it. Then go to the snoy depths stage underground and you'll find a barely readable record on the background wall of the cave. Play it, and a portal opens right above you. You can only use it once per world and it leads you right back to spawn. I think the Youtuber FuryForged describes it best in his Videos about Noita:"But does this have any higher significance? . . . This is Noita. Of course it does." I wouldn't even be surprised if there were some secrets not even discovered yet.

Second big point about why this game is so great:
It's made in the falling everything engine. That means it has physics. Not your everyday "Minecraft falling Sand pseudo physics", but the real deal. Roll a thunderstone into a liquid and it'll deal damage upon tuch, because duh electricity. Put water on top of Fire and it'll create steam. You can even create potions by combining the right ingredients. A pile of sand or coal will flow naturally if it's moved. Every single Pixel has it's own specific weight, density, and gravity.

As you may have seen, this game only has one achievement, but don't let that fool you! There's a lot more in this 2D pixellated world than it let's on.
You can say you completed the main part of the game when you've done the following:
-Reached the moon AND turned it into void liquid/whiskey
-Completed the Work without dying
-Complete the Work with dying
-Reach Hell
-Beat the Tower
-Brew Lively Concotion
-Brew Midas Potion
-Open the Flute portal mentioned above
and even then, you aren't really done completing the game.
"Oh! What happens when I put this crystal all the way up on the altar?"
Go find out! Explore! Find infinite parallel dimensions. And most important: Have Fun while doing so.

Also may I very quickly mention that this game is still EARLY ACCESS?
The devs aren't even done with adding stuff. Not by a long shot!

Okay, after playing this game for a long time on battle.net , I feel kinda obligated to do a review on it. Reviewing each of the dlcs seperately. Also, massive story spoilers ahead if you care about that. (I personally wouldn't because the destiny stories aren't that great to be brutally honest.)


I have heard lots of people say this story is terrible. In my opinion it isn't, it is meh. Not good, not bad, just meh.
Basically there is Ghul, who wants to destroy humanity, because humanity has the traveller and he has Light (the magic one, spelled with a capital L) which can make people immortal and gives them cool abilities (aka space magic). Got that? If not, you should go watch a lore video before continuing to read this. So Garry attacks the Last City, last safe harbour of humanity because he wants the Light of the traveller. To capture the city he uses a special ship that wraps around the traveller and cuts every guardians wifi access to him, which means they're mortal. Many guardians die except you because you fall down a few hundred meters and somehow survive but only wake up 3 days later. You immidately go on a mission to get your light back, which seems a little bit too easy, but bungie is right, playing without abilities is annoying. To sum up the rest of the story, you infiltrate Ghurruhs Death Star super laser thingy called the almighty, destroy it's core to stop it from blowing up the sun (even though asher said it's connected to the sun in a way that blowing it up will destroy the sun too, why would blowing up only the cannon inside the ship change anything?), you head back to retake the Last City with Vuvuzela, Ikora Gay and Cayde-6 (only good character in the entire game btw. that's why I'm not making a joke here) and challenge Ghool. So you get onto his command ship, which has it's upside misteriously shaped like the perfect boss fighting area and challenge him. But "oh no" he has allready soaked up Light which means he is now a god. A very easily killable god at that. He is literally the easiest Boss in every campaign if you ask me (except Xol maybe, but we'll get to that). Then he transforms into a beam of Light juice to tell the Traveller how "it has failed" and it shoud "witness the dawning of a new age". The Traveller sais no though and just sucks juice Ghaul into itself to regain its stolen light. Everything in the city returns to normal. Still a better Story then MC Story mode though.

The Endgame in D2 Vanilla mainly consists of grinding god rolls of the 3 wepons that exist and farm the 3 exotics which all suck btw. Luckily the DLCs are the saving grace of this issue, because they bring in lots of new loot to the lootpool.

Overall maybe a 6/10


Curse of Osiris is a Vex Based DLC. I personally enjoyed the short Story, but I see if someone points out it's flaws. Basically the Vex have some simulation machine on mercury and they are trying to convert the entire universe. No Light, no Dark. Just Vex and nothing else. To do this, they constructed Panoptes, a mind that controls the simulation engine to find the correct reality outcome the vex want. And the entire plot of the story consists of you going inside the simulation to stop Panini in time. That's it. That's the entire story. Find big robot. Shoot big robot. You win! Though simple I like the idea of a planet sized simulation engine, that's able to show anything that's not Light accurate enough it can kill you. Did I mention that Penicillin is the only new enemy in this DLC? There are new Vex types of course, but those are only Reskins of the ones we already had.

Even though the story is short and not that great, the endgame makes up for it. Beiing able to farm prophecy weapons enriches the endgame a lot and there were a ton of new exotics added. Also Mercury as a planet is tiny, but still big enough to make you wish you had your sparrow, which you can't call on mercury for some reason. (Edit: They fixed it) A lot of the CoO exotics are still useful today, even if not for Raids, they can still be used for a nice farming experience.

Overall, I'd say a 7/10


Some people say this is by far the worst DLC of all of them. And while I agree that 1 hour of story missions, is really bad for what it cost at realease, it's free now and I just have to say that most Destiny players don't stick around for the story and there are some really fun things you can do on Mars. For example you can hunt data nodes, hunt sleeper nodes or you could kill giant demonic fishing bait.

The Story is short and bad. There is a worm on Mars. There is a AI called racist Putin on Mars. Worm wants to destroy Putin. Worm bad. Kill worm. Also Xol Will of thousand fishing baits is the easiest boss ever. Even easier than Dominus gul. You basically can't miss him and he is a stick with a crit spot at the end of it. Jesus christ just shoot the big yellow thing already. After that, there are a lot of really really really OP exotic quests (Sleeper Simulant is Great, don't tuch Whisper of the Worm tho, that thing got nerfed into the ground) and things to do on Mars and that's it. No great story, no great Endgame. Also AGAIN, every enemie you will encounter in this expansion except Xol is a reaskin. And no, the hive knights with shields don't count, that's just switching out weapons, not a new enemy. You don't need months of development for that.

4/10 I'm done with this


This DLC singlehandedly restored my hope in Humanity, ended every war on this planet and made candyland a real thing.
For real though, the only flaw I could tell you about this is that Cayde-6 dies. It's a heroes death and everyone treats him like one.
In this Story, you are sent to the prison of elders to contain a breach that has happened. You get help from Cayde-6 and Petra Reference, who both do nothing besides sniping >4 enemies. Cayde then gets his ghost sniped, so he is mortal and then gets shot by Uldritch SUV, who escapes from the prison moments later. After nobody in the city deems it wise to attack the reef to avenge Cayde, you fly there personally to go on a murderous rampage against Kylo Uldren and his Barons, which all have unique ablilities and AI. Oh ho ho do I smell good content? There is also an entirely new faction, called the scorn, which are partially fallen reskins, but also bring new units to the table. I can live with that. After you hunted down everyone of his Barons one by one, you go on to confront and ultimately kill Ultspam, just to find he has been swallowed by a taken chimera, which you have to kill in Order to get to him. After you do that you, well shoot him in a very emotionally heavy morally questioning cutscene. And with that Forsakens story ends. What about the endgame? Well it's larger then the other 3 DLCs combined, with an entirely new area, the dreaming city, a new raid, new weapons, dozens of new exotics and quests, this is guaranteed to keep you busy for at least a few months. If anything in this game deserves the title "masterpiece" it is this DLC.

Generally, 9/10, because there are sone slight issues I have with the dreaming city, but those are personal preference.


Waste of time. The cookiecutter story takes around 2 hours to complete at most. Reskins of the hive. Again. They even reused the loot from the prophecy weapons. My only hope is that the new raid is good, but as it stands, this story is literally so bad it almost killed the entire destiny experience for me and almost made me not recommend this game.

1/10 punch in the face for everyone who is a long time destiny fan

I didn't review the Season Pass because it is included in Forsaken now. Season of the Drifter sucks, the other two are good.



Game turned to a bounty simulator with FOMO included as you can only play each season for a month. Made me quit.