Recent reviews by Xnate13X

Dungeonborne is 100x better and 100% free to play. This game is okay to watch on YT, but playing it is pretty annoying. Monsters are a headache to deal with and everything feels janky like I'm playing a retro game, but I'm not.. It's a game made just recently, lol. I'd say it's good if it came out in the year 2000, maybe even by 2004. Also, they lock you to 1 character on this game, while Dungeonborne allows you to make every class, nothing useful is locked behind a paywall, you can even use the market for free. The only things that they let you pay for if you want is the use of a secondary market to buy specific set pieces(not needed at all), 2 extra bank tabs(4 free anyway) and cosmetics that CURRENTLY don't effect gear from being identified by the style. None of which is even worth paying for besides the bank space if you want more.

Everything Dark & Darker SHOULD have been, but wasn't. Very balanced and it doesn't starve you of supplies every round. It's very balanced with supplies and combat. Lots of fun! Gold gaining/trading/gear obtaining is all decently paced and feels good. Great system. Really enjoy it. Played mainly duo and some trio.

(Review posted before any silly MTX is added, could change in the future and become a crap game, who knows)

-Edit @ 300hrs+ after release- They added MTX that skin over items, so you can't tell what "tier" of item people are holding & They wont remove "Life on Hit" or "Lifesteal" from the game. It's a completely broken meta people found, they tried nerfing it but it's still broken. The only way to heal should be through bandage, potion or a PRIEST. Priests are useless. Today's update made "Faery of the Lake" (a set bonus effect), the only one good for a priest since it can shield allies, useless. It's worse than "tiny torment" set effect that does 50 damage and only requires 6/6 points in the set, while FOTL still requires 10/10 minimum for the same amount of damage, no longer does aoe damage, no longer shields allies(the whole point to run it on priest) and takes so long for the fairy to move between you and the target. Tiny Torment is instant. The set effect is useless now and priests have no job in the game.. It's a dead class, made even more dead by this update.
People are quitting rapidly, the game started off so well, but I'm getting into lobbies with 0 other teams or people sometimes... Most lobbies are only 2-3 other people or teams now, when they used to be full with 7. They're killing the game by taking too long to do anything, and when they do, it's not actually fixing the problem and they're causing more problems/bugs/ruining of the game more.

Very sad because I loved the game, but they're rapidly killing it. You can tell by the fast decline in players and everyone saying they're quitting on the community discord because they're not FIXING/removing broken things.

I quit too. It was fun for 2-3 weeks, over 300hrs.. You've ruined what could have gotten easily better, but ended up going down hill. I'll leave my recommendation as "yes" because it's entirely free and for how good the game was when I originally wrote my review before people found and started abusing meta builds/abilities that are broken and aren't getting removed from the game/fixed.

Pop up window came up for 1.0 release upon first starting game to choose a name.
- Misspelled name but noticed as I pressed accept
- NO CONFIRMATION WINDOW, NO WAY TO CHANGE NAME... Now it wants my email to lock the F'd up name on to my email because it already locked the F'd up name on to my Steam account. Stupidest crap I've ever seen. Who doesn't add a confirmation window or way to go "back" to change what you typed in??

Was excited for this game. Now I'm pissed off as heck as names are one of the things I enjoy about my accounts. So upset. Can't refund it or I lose my pre-order bonus since I bought it the night before release.

Also can't pick what sex your character is, so you're forced playing some ugly af, grey haired old dude as a mage.. I want my hot female mage, what kind of fantasy game is this? It's 2024, how do you not at least have a basic female sex option even with no characterization? lol.. Who wants to play the same looking old nasty dude that everyone else is playing? Yuck. RuneScape, a game made by 2 brothers and came out in 2001 had male/female characters.. It's 2024.

Final Edit:
Take another 6mo+ to release the game and actually create a user friendly system for account name creation and changing, character creation and modifying and allow people to be whatever sex they want, for gosh sake.. I finally got online after 9hrs of trying. I played for 20 mins and the old man mage that I named "IdentifyAsFemaleMage" for the meme of gender locked but for some reason a name selection, wouldn't shut up. He keeps talking to me in his old man, annoying voice constantly and making all these noises. It was driving me insane. Top that with my crappy arse account name that shows publicly, completely disregarding the character name that I made specifically for being a meme in public chat, I pressed ALT+F4 to come type this. I'm done.
I am REFUNDING the game and losing my pre-order pet. Horrible for people who actually care about names/character identity as a large part of their RPG/online RPG experience. What a let down after so many years of waiting for the release. RIP all the IRL chicks that main mages and have to listen to that too. I'm a dude and it annoys me beyond belief, never mind a chick listening to an old man talk in her ears all day while she's trying to relax and game. XD

I have 239hrs in this game all from 14 days of playing on VANILLA SETTINGS, and the game has only been out for around the two week mark. That's 17+hrs/day. Therefore I thought I know enough about the game in it's current state to write a review. I have spent time on all versions of the game: official servers, multiplayer co-op and dedicated servers.
EDIT: 309hrs and I completely beat the game in VANILLA. ~140hrs was spent breeding total. Every alpha pal boss & every tower boss is killed/caught. Never changed settings once. Expect at least 200hrs to beat final boss and complete all achievements in pure VANILLA(normal).
Pros:
- Fun, I'd say about 75% ARK-like, 25% Pokemon-like.
- Plenty of choices of Pals to use for all things needed in the game.
- Breeding system takes on some idea's of ARK with stat transfers, etc, but at a more child-ish level. (Pretty straight forward). Although, if you try to transfer EVERY stat level & EVERY passive & a Lucky spell from a lucky catch across multiple different species to keep what appears to be an invisible ~5% multiplier on attack damage, then it will take a LONG time. It took me ~100hrs of breeding to do that transfer across 5 different species. Hundreds, or thousands of eggs were hatched. If I could attach SS's, I would. I've done very extensive breeding testing. This was all done for fun and testing to see if my hypothesis was correct while also making the most powerful "Rooby" I could make. It appears to be. Not sure if anyone else has figured this out yet, but that's my breeding review.

Cons:
- An immense amount of bugs. (As expected in EA)
- Official servers are a disaster. I played official on Day 1 and Day 2. They crashed and reset twice, I gave up on them. They are also insanely laggy. It feels like you're playing an even more buggier/laggier ARK. Also, people are hacking (or were) quite often.
- Dedicated servers are less unstable, but still prone to hackers and from the vanilla ones I played on, and require rollbacks often unless you're playing on a private one of course.
- Multiplayer co-op is probably your best choice for now. There is 0 lag as the host, but you get to experience all the bugs without being able to think that maybe it's the lag causing them. As the co-op friend connecting to the host, I was told that there is minimal lag, but not much of any issue. There are in fact some new bugs that appear to only happen to the connected co-op player. Ie: getting stuck in walls of buildings and the host having to break them out. Name separating from player model and player interaction area/hit box. Other bugs here and there.
- Building Con would be that there is no "upgrade" or "build over" lower tier of building parts. You MUST destroy the floor, wall, ceiling, stair, etc.. before building the new, higher tier. This is extremely annoying. I would not have even released the game into EA until this was created. It is arguably one of the most annoying things in the game atm. You end up spending ages slowly rebuilding your base every single upgrade tier. This includes removing everything from chests and replacing them down after to transfer everything back in to them/organizing. It's horrid. If you don't upgrade, your whole base will burn down if it's wood. If it's stone, it takes some hits but will eventually break if you don't keep it repaired from the consistent "raids" on your base.
- Consistent "RAIDS" feel like they happen every time I come back to my base. I can be away for 5mins and go back, and there's another raid. Sometimes I teleport to a second base I own just to get away from the first raid. Then after that raid ends, I get a raid on the second base, then have to leave that too. It's also extremely frustrating because the enemies damage/break all your things constantly. If you don't keep repairing them(which is really slow to do for each item) they'll end up breaking entirely. If one thing catches on fire that is wood, everything touching it will catch on fire and none of it will stop burning until everything wood is destroyed. If you have Pal's that have the "water" skill, they can put out fires, but it's not very fast at all, and if multiple things are on fire, when they move to the next thing, it'll be too late and it'll catch the first thing back on fire.. lol..
- Leveling up is Fast from 1-20, 20-30 is alright, 30-40 is when you hope that it doesn't get worse. 40-50 VANILLA is when you start to question why there's no other way to level up besides catching 10 of each type of pal in the game. It starts to get extremely boring/slow in this range. This is where I decided to start breeding for the most powerful "Rooby" (a specific pal) and experimenting with the breeding system.
- While being forced to catch 10 of everything in the game to level up between lv 40-50 and it being slow as heck, you realized that you threw 15 of the best "balls" in the game and have failed 40-96% catch chances repetitively on the same pal. This happening every time/day is the part of the game when you tell yourself you'll never gamble IRL ever in your life. I'm convinced catch rate percentages are bugged.
- Sometimes the game corrupts. Keep a backup of your save file. This was SUPPOSEDLY fixed, but so was the breeding area's which turned out to fix the old issues, but create new ones which are arguably more annoying(pal's constantly falling asleep now and non interact-able, which stops breeding, causing you to have to refresh them and add them to the pens over and over).
- Achievements did not unlock in official servers.(They may now, not sure, but they work in co-op multiplayer/singleplayer at least.)

Besides that, it's a fun game and would recommend playing. As much as official servers seem like a blast, I'd stay away from them for a while or your experience will be worse than mine because you're probably not as tolerant, lbh. I'm pretty resilient to game torture and usually only don't continue if my progress is being deleted multiple times(as it was here.)

Started playing 2 weeks ago, at ~200hrs and feel comfortable leaving a review since I've beat the game PvE wise and almost done with every achievement in the game now. Basically no negatives for PvE besides some bugs here and there. The majority of these hours are online co-op multiplayer. Nearly no issues with that. Rarely a disconnect/sync bug maybe once a day or two, but that's it. I'd say 70% of my hours are co-op and 30% is TRYING for PvP invasions. Keep reading for the full review.

Fun game for PvE and then quitting. NG+ goes from 0 to 100 in difficulty, so be careful with moving on to +1 too soon, you can't go back. My main issue is that PvP is broken as heck and they don't appear to be fixing it. I'd say about 9/10 PvP connections to random players lead to disconnects. The opponent can use a "mirror of protection" to cancel an invasion while you're mid-loading screen and disconnect you while loading in. You can basically get as many as you want of these for the cost of a grain of sand at the beach, pretty much. The mirrors shouldn't even exist. You can only invade people in a few spots in the game, so there's no reason for them to exist at all. If they don't want PvP THAT much, they could just play offline..

I spend countless hours trying to PvP and "invade" people because the combat when you ACTUALLY find an honorable opponent that will duel you properly, is SOOO fun. The actions are so well worked and makes for awesome game play. The issue with that is within a 2hr PvP session, you'll be lucky to find maybe 1 person out of everyone that you manage to connect to that will be like that. So you have 9/10 connections disconnecting stacked on top of that 1/10 connections most likely being someone who's going to kill you near instantly with 2 broken spells and you basically can't do much of anything to avoid death. It feels like everyone and their gosh dang grandmother is using the 2 actually PvP game breaking radiant spells:
- "Orius' Judgement" which they summon first and it chases you around the map so you can't do anything but run around and TRY to avoid it.
- Then while you're running around, they cast "Lucent Beam" which is a channeled beam attack that is OP AF because they need to hit you for about 2 ticks of the game and you go from (soft cap) max health to 0 instantly. Literally nothing you do can avoid the damage besides "user error" and them not pointing it at you while you're running around like an idiot.
- Sometimes you run into cheaters that also dupe exp so they're a level that's so insanely high that it's broken and you hit on them like you're using a feather and it'd take 5 minutes straight of them afking for you to even kill them.(Idk who plays a game like this) They say PvP scales but that's obviously bogus because anyone with eyeballs can see it's not scaling anywhere near even, especially on the exp dupers. I wouldn't be hitting like a feather if that was the case.

What could be fixed to help? Fix the disconnects/remove the mirrors from the game. Also, nerf all spell damage by somewhere around 80-90% in PvP. Those two aren't the only ones that are OP AF, they're just the 2 that everyone and their grandmother uses because they're basically unavoidable if you have at least 1 brain cell to cast them. Basically a guaranteed win. Why not use it back on them you ask? Well, let me answer that for you... Because I'm trying to have FUN, not a "who can cast get 1 spell off the fastest" contest just to skip the entire player interaction. It's killing the PvP community/end game. It could have so much more people still playing/PvPing if it was fixed. I know it for a fact, it's THAT good when you can get an honorable fight. You'll be smiling from ear to ear and dying for another.

Excellent game. Worth every penny. Just realized I never wrote my review on it because I had quit suddenly due to work picking up to 80-100hrs/wk from 40hr weeks. That being said, I never finished my last 11 achievements needed for the game. I believe most, if not all that are left are Hardcore achievements I was working on with my Hardcore run before not having time. I'm too rusty to go back and play HC since I haven't played in 1.5yrs now. Maybe one day if I play through normal again and feel confident to finish my HC.

Worth a buy and all expansions. I give it a 9/10 because some people figured out a way to hack their save files and cheat stats/dupe items. If that wasn't possible, it'd be a 10/10. Still, worth playing 100%!

I'm not normally a fan of games that DO NOT save.. That's kind of forgiven by the very active online multiplayer that allows you to just hop into games of your choice whenever you want and play. I was hesitant to purchase this game due to the fact that there's no save options, but I'd say it's worth it. I would not recommend playing it unless you have around 3 hours to play each time. You may not get into a solid group for a little bit and you don't want to have to go in the middle of a run.

Things I would add:
- A save option that cancels your ability to unlock achievements/characters for that round if loaded from a save. (Basically for learning how to play purposes/people just trying to have fun and beat the game with/without friends without having to have long game sessions/someone having to go. Make it so that anyone can save it that's in the game, and if you save it, you can load it open at any time but only if all the original players are in the lobby, locking you in to where you were in the game, a 3 second countdown and then everything spawns in exactly were it was. OR Spawn everyone at the start of that level, just having to restart only that level.)
*- Being able to pop your cursor out in game by holding a button, hover over your items above and they state what they are/do. When you let go of the button, your cursor would disappear and turn back into normal control. (Just QOL to be fair for those that are new/don't no life the game and frequently forget what item icon does what)

*(Edit: You can press "Tab" in game which open's a small window of people's items. This unlocks your mouse to allow you to hover over a list of your/other's items. Exactly what I said should be there, is there. One problem being when have the "artifact" on that allows you to choose an item, hovering over those items do NOT tell you what they do while in item selection, there are only the item icons.)

I got this game when it got released to Steam. After building my base and having some random arsehat kid dig up all the ground around my base so it was floating and looked stupid, I met a guy who had the biggest castle/mines/building on the server and he taught me a bunch. I enjoyed the game and want to go back, but there are 0 things to do in the game if you play a PvP server, and PvP also is nothing but killing people for basically no reward. There's no end goal like MC and many other games leave you, just build/kill people is basically all there is to do but the maps are so large you can never find people except rarely at spawn areas. There's also no way to change your character's name unless you email them, which isn't a big deal but should be made a lot easier if this game doesn't die out.

Garbage game, it's dead 24/7, not a single soul online except for possibly when they do community events. No one online makes you unable to play the main part of the game because you want around 8-10 players or it's lame. The only reason I have 45hrs instead of 2hrs is because I figured out how to abuse a mechanic and get max character level without having to physically be at my computer.

6/10 Concept for original multiplayer vs though.

Got the game as a gift from a friend to play. It's alright to mess around on with a couple people for some fun but other than that, I've left it on during mid day and haven't seen more than 1 or 2 people log on (since it tells you). Those being people in a private match that is unjoinable. The achievements also don't work. I've done almost all of them and have not received them. Also, you can see globally that no one has ever gotten one which means they're broken. I also figured out a some bugs that give my team the win every time on a certain map. I don't recommend this game if you're planning on playing just yourself as there's 0 players online 99% of the day. If you have friends to play against, sure, why not.. lol

The santa's house map, you can spawn an infinite amount of monster robot mice by picking up and dropping the cheese in front of the hole. It's quite funny but breaks the sound and stops bots from spawning. XD