Recent reviews by The Broken God

I recommend this game, not because it's as good as JC3, or because it even comes close, but because it's a good game on its own. There's a lot of fun to be had, but they really just missed the mark with it. They should've expanded upon the JC3 mechanics instead of starting again from scratch. Do not get it if you're looking for another JC3. I'll start with the upsides and their respective downsides before the negatives. There will be some spoilers, and I will be comparing it to JC3:

The map is big and expansive, with varying terrain and points of interests. If you're looking for a certain kind of elevation, flatness, or slope, the map has it in four different biomes. That being said, it feels largely empty. It seems as though they were going with a more sandbox type of map rather than a map made to be explored, which would have been fine if the sandbox aspects of the game had actually been expanded upon. To make up for most of the emptiness they added "challenges" around the map. I'll touch on that later.

Graphics wise, it's somewhat of a downgrade from JC3, but they're not bad per se, just less stylized. The hair on the characters looks really weird, it's all oddly thin.

The new chaos army system is cool, but gets old after the first 3 missions you do to take over a province. There's no real reward for destroying chaos objects and by the end of the game when you've conquered all the provinces and you SHOULD be at max chaos army level, you're not. You're going to have to go through a boring grind to get that achievement. They should've combined this system with the JC3 destruction system. If you had to destroy bases, and liberate cities much in the same way you did in JC3 but to build your army to then do the region's final mission and take over and occupy it with said army, it would've landed much better and been far more impactful.

The story is ok, it's not the best but also not that bad. The story missions are 10x better than in JC3, but only because they're actually unique and build up to the ending of each region's final mission, where you end up feeling like you've just snorted 100kg of coke and decided to go through a tornado at mach 100. I'd love to see this return in JC5, natural disasters were a good addition overall and is probably where a good 15% of the fun I've had stemmed from. The story missions playing into them was a good call.

The hoverboard is a cool addition to movement. I do wish it had an upgradeable booster like the wingsuit, worked a little better when going down hill, and that they would add more rails to grind around the map. Nine times out of ten when using it and going at any decent speed, you end up flying off, or getting stuck on a pebble and losing most of it. I'd love to see it return with unlockable upgrades.

The alien/plant invasion DLC was awesome, it was unique stylistically and they went back to using the JC3 system for liberation within it. I just wish it had more than 13 total areas to liberate.

The car DLC was good. I'd love to see it be expanded upon in JC5.

The negatives:

The menu UI is terrible. Enough said.

They replaced the beacon and flare system with a much worse barely-upgradeable pilot system. The pilots can only drop one item at a time, and the item drop system shares the same pilots as the fast travel system. Each pilot also has a cooldown, and even at the end of the game, there's no way to remove it like in JC3. For a game that's trying to be a sandbox, this is detrimental.

The new grapple upgrade system is ok, but mostly useless. There are many times I wished they had just kept the simplicity of the JC3 system and added on to it instead of replacing it entirely with hotkeys. You still right click to fire the hook, but activating abilities, which includes the previous system of holding right click to activate pulling stuff in with tethers, is done with hotkeys. Still, it does make for some interesting puzzles.

The agent DLC was a good idea on paper, but liberating the submarines was tedious, and the DLC itself wasn't memorable. The hoverboard was the best part of it.

The wingsuit booster from JC3 is back but worse, even when fully upgraded, which is only possible to do if you do wingsuit "challenges."

The optional sidequests/"challenges" that replaced the gear missions are tedious, annoying to get to, and not interesting enough to warrant there being so ♥♥♥♥♥ many. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, there are 10's of, maybe even a hundred+ wingsuit "challenges" that are "go here, fly in a straight line." The special challenges are at least more stimulating, but still just annoying overall. The gear system was fine.
Only 100% the game if you truly, really do hate yourself, I guess.

Even with all of that said, I do recommend the game. It's like a middle child; easily forgettable, barely does anything good, but can be fun if you spend some time with it and try not to compare it to its much more successful older sibling. Overall, it's not JC3. They really should've just expanded upon the JC3 mechanics and slapped those on a new map. I don't understand why they didn't. Doing the same thing again isn't bad, Nintendo has been doing the same thing for 40 years and they're doing just fine.

6/10

Excellent VR game, wish it had more MMORPG elements like actual levelling. It stands on its own, though, and can be further improved upon with mods

In its current state, I wouldn't recommend it. It really doesn't live up to all the promises it makes in the trailers. You aren't really free in the world to do whatever you choose, you have to complete some of the quests to get access to better items.

The combat gets incredibly repetitive, and the enemies I found were quite generic and either too easy to kill or hit-sponges. The magic is meh, and despite there being an "assassin" branch to the skill tree, there weren't any daggers, and said branch was dedicated to explosive arrows, because assassins are loud and blow people up..?

While I know it's more realistic, mining and tree-cutting takes stamina, and it ruins a lot of the flow to the game. It'd be better if it took less stamina, or maybe even none at all, to perform those actions. It's a gripe I have with Valheim as well, but it's bearable in Valheim as mining and cutting trees are absolutely necessary for progression, and it gets easier fast as time goes on.

The glider is boring to use, and is just barely better than running. It only allows for downward movement. The leveling is far too slow which makes the game very slow paced. I did like that it merges mechanics of a slew of games, but they're still quite primitively implemented.
The game also doesn't have a hook to keep you playing, it just throws you into the world and tells you to go do boring quests.

It's not worth the money, it's way too expensive for what it really is. I just hope I can actually get a refund... It might be worth it in the future, but since they claim that they are planning on raising the price I highly doubt it. I will be keeping an eye on it though, it has a lot of promising qualities, but it just isn't fun for now.

I remember running around for a while, before finding this exciting looking camp. "Finally, enemies to challenge, a camp to conquer!" I thought, and was immediately immensely disappointed to find there was a hit-sponge enemy, some easy-to-kill generic bandits, and an archer inside the camp, which I got into by climbing above the fence/gate which was blocking the entrance. I was able to kill everyone inside the camp and felt no reward for having done so. It was tedious, and I got nothing from it.

Moving on, I found an NPC inside a cauldron or furnace or something, and my friend and I went to set up camp somewhere cool. We chose a spot close to the middle of the map, a little off to the right, right above the shroud. The building mechanics were boring, and the enemies in the shroud were stupidly weak, though they had an advantage in numbers. How is a player supposed to defeat hordes of enemies with melee? We kept dying to them, and decided to head off to a small island in the middle of the lava lake. Somehow we killed a blob and dispelled some of the shroud or something, I don't get what we did.

Once on the other side of the shroud, we found wolves that were at most like 3 levels higher than the ones we fought before, which means they had more health and dealt more damage... yay, that's fun, hit-sponges that will three-shot you... My friend and I went to some ruins we found, set up spawn, and tried to kill enemies in a tower. We died, and decided that we'd had enough of the game. Nothing was rewarding, nothing was fun for us, we wasted two hours of our lives and were luckily refunded...

Additional note: I got my money back, and bought sons of the forest instead. Enshrouded is far too expensive for what it is, I still stand by that statement... I also added some examples of my experience with the game.

Very nice for checking your abilities but if you're using this to practice... Just play the game you want to git gud at, you'll have more fun and you'll get better at it since you're playing it. Aim Lab is a cool gimmick, not a good tool for practice.

Blow

Beatsaber is perfectly ass, 100/10 1000% perfectly ass

After playing for 37 hours straight, building a giant ♥♥♥♥ as a base and making a toilet around it, I decided to go down and greet the combine, this was a huge mistake as they decided that it would be nice to shoot me, after destroying them by dropping a big fat air balloon on them, I accidentally took a dump in the water and fell over, my entire base proceeded to collapse as I died, after this experience I have come to the conclusion that this game is really badly optimized and it's also 100% without a doubt for sure perfectly ass.

After 30 hours straight of playing Killing Floor 2, 1 million Zed's decided that it would be funny to make me dance for dosh so that's what I did and after that I discovered and came to the conclusion that this game is 100% without any doubt whatsoever and absolutely no regret in making this conclusion, 1000% perfectly Ass

After playing for 46 hours straight and seeing all of the dumps everyone casually takes in garbage cans, I decided that it was time to go take a in game dump for myself, it went horribly wrong and I somehow managed to open a portal to the toilet, I fell through it and realized that I had just taken a ♥♥♥♥ on my head, after which I fell through the wall, I have without a doubt discovered that this game is 100% absolutely without a single doubt whatsoever, perfectly ass

After playing for 69 hours straight I decided to say UwU to piss off the ghost because it was being an annoying little 𝙨𝙝𝙞𝙩, do not do this as the ghost immediately forced me to take a dump in the sink and proceeded to target me for the remainder of the time spent in the house, when I was just about to leave it locked the door in my face and murdered me, overall, 10/10 game, never ever say UwU to piss off the ghost as it will find you and it will kill you, this game is without a doubt, in every way possible, with no doubts whatsoever, perfectly ass.