Recent reviews by Zel

wo hanchiwen bing chilling

Great story.

The relative lack of plot armor (because the story isn't linear and anything could happen) keeps you "at the edge of your seat" during tense moments for the main characters.
Even only doing a single playthrough without checking out any other story branches, feels great because of that.
And your choices actually matter, which is a breath of fresh air compared to all these other games which promise meaningful choices but fail to deliver.

It's also very cool being able to see other peoples plot choices and comparing them to your own.

Trash.

What genius thought that:
Dragging the player away from whatever they were doing
Into a cutscene
Into a forced firefight
And then dropping them off in the middle of nowhere (instead of at the place they were at previously)

Was a good idea?

If you want to show off your villains i'm sure there are dozens of better ways of doing that, than basically taking control away from the player and forcing them into a cutscene at "random" non linear points in the game.
And this ♥♥♥♥ happens on multiple occasions.

Like, i'm playing an open world game here, mate. Let me do whatever the ♥♥♥♥ i want. If you're going to kidnap me, do it at some specific locations and not when i'm minding my own business. Or if you're going to do it randomly, don't have it happen more than once or twice in the game.

Worst of all, when it happens (atleast the first time) they send a goon squad at you. But even if you mow all of them down, nope, you still get thrown into a cutscene.
At least put in the effort to make the event somewhat believable.

Also if you're familiar with fps games and are playing co-op you'll be clearing outpost in <30 seconds, and the rest of your time you'll spend driving to the next outpost. The game was not balanced around co-op at all, it feels tacked on.

I've felt no character progression whatsoever, i could've done everything i did 4 hours in, at the start of the game.

Seriously, just play FC3/FC2 instead, and if you really wanna play coop, play something else, this is terrible.

Way way way too highly praised for what this actually is.

I've heard about the lack of content this had on release and skipped it, then when it launched on steam and I saw good reviews and thought "hm, let's give this a shot, maybe the hate for it was unjustified".

Well, it was more than justified.

Imo this is basically a paid, good looking version of VR chat, and that's what it's best at, just chilling with your mates, or banter with strangers. That experience is really cool. Random PVP combat is also awesome.

And that's where the good things end, PVE is absolutely atrocious. Story is non existent, majority of the quests are fetch quests, you spend 80% of combat time killing skeletons, increasing your reputation with factions that only grant more cosmetic unlocks.
And that's it, that's the game, very fun for the first couple of hours, until you realize that there's nothing more to it. You don't unlock more tools, skills, anything.

And seriously, ok, I understand that there's no loot/upgrades for balance reasons, but come on. If the story is non existent and PVE gameplay is uninteresting after the first 2 hours. Some kind of progression needs to exist to keep people interested, it doesn't even have to be something combat oriented, it could just be new types of vanity items and not reskins of things you get on hour 1. And once again, lack of progression wouldn't even be an issue if they somehow managed to create an engaging story with meaningful quests and fun combat (no, killing the same boss over and over, or killing hundreds of skeletons with the same 4 weapons isn't fun).

As it stands though, only recommend this as a chatting/chilling simulator, most fun i've had was just bantering with strangers in the arena pregame tavern. If we talk purely PVE gameplay, it is trash, the fun doesn't last more than a couple of hours.

Or summarized in even less words, pirate game where loot doesn't matter, and PVP (the only memorable thing) is frowned upon by many in the community.

Sadly doesn't live up to the original remake, the visuals and combat are good, but the game is pulled down by the looter shooter mechanics. If you want to try this one because you've enjoyed the original, don't bother.

If the game had to be summarized in a couple of words, i'd say, nothing you do feels impactful.

The enemies take way too many hits to kill and it takes away from the feeling that you're a bad-ass.
You constantly get showered with loot, but vast majority of it doesn't offer any substantial power upgrade.
Your weapons have 3 gem slots and these gems that you get hundreds of are most of the time things such as +%crit, +%attack speed, +%fire damage. And as you might imagine, all of those are tremendously boring.
Sure there are some unique gems but they're spread too far apart and often times have a negative effect to them which often makes you wonder if you got any stronger than prior to equipping them.

It would've felt much better if you got 5 gems an hour but all of them provided meaningful upgrades that felt both powerful and unique. As it stands right now you spend 10 minutes after every quest browsing through your inventory comparing gems, which are in the end, totally irrelevant.

The game tries to be a mix of a traditional arcadey FPS and a looter shooter, but manages to fail on both fronts.
Which is a shame, because if this was just a linear game like the original, it could've been amazing. Or even if it stayed a looter shooter but at least had mechanics that were much more interesting and deep.

As it stands though, if you want to play a looter shooter, play something else, borderlands or something. If you want a good linear experience stick to the first one or wait for the third one which will hopefully be similar to the first one.

P.S. what's the point of adding sprinting to the game if you're going to let people dash across the map at 5 times the speed with no cooldown?

Simply amazing.

This is a prime example of what a great, generally frowned upon, "walking simulator" (at it's core) should look like. While i personally very much enjoy deep stories inside rich worlds usually i stay away from this genre if the game at it's core has 0 gameplay apart from moving around and reading.
This is most definitely an exception to the "rule". Because even though, yes, you kinda "just walk around", there's a couple of things that make this game rise above it's peers.

(It's best if you don't know anything when you start playing, but if you really have to know something, this is a short summary without any story spoilers.)

The world doesn't revolve around you, it changes even if you're not present. If you're not there, you will miss out on it (which is a nice break from games where nothing happens unless you're there to see it).

The environments are breathtaking, they're nothing like one another and the events that take place in them make you go "wow" regularly. On top of that, the environments are dynamic, they change over time in ways which you would never expect.

The game is a physics simulation so even things like just moving around in your spacesuit/spaceship are more fun than usual.

There's barely any explicit puzzles, finding out/deciding where to go next to progress the story IS the puzzle. And you don't get any explicit rewards for it, the knowledge about the world/story and seeing these amazingly crafted environments IS the reward. (which is once again a refresher when most games throw pointless and useless loot at you just to give you a feeling that you're getting something).

IMO it overstays it's welcome by a couple of hours, but the constant feeling of amazement throughout majority of the game (apart from the 20 min intro) absolutely makes up for it.

So yeah, for most, playing this will be a very unique experience. Highly recommend to people that have doubts about the genre. And as everyone else is saying, stay away from spoilers, the less you know the better.

Still worth playing after all these years, the visuals actually hold up surprisingly well, the soundtrack is amazing, movement is great (although not as refined as in mirror's edge catalyst).

With that said, the story is hot garbage and the combat is ...........let's just say that the game would've been many times more enjoyable if the combat was scrapped altogether. In short, the melee system is bare bones and the gun play is the most basic gun play i've ever seen in a game.

Thankfully you spend the majority of your time parkouring so you don't have to suffer through combat often.

If you've played some game with great parkour (like dying light or something) this might not "wow" you at all. But if you've never played a parkour game before i think this will leave a good impression on you, at 4-5 hours length it also won't "waste" your time too much.

So yeah, definitely worth a play, although it didn't leave that "this game is unique" (at least to me) impression that it did when i played it for the first time years and years ago.

Great game with the most atrocious menu UI and in-game HUD i have ever seen.

The menu UI doesn't make any sense, you can get into the same options screen in at least 4 different ways, and i'm sure i could find some more. It's as if the developers kept testing different designs but had alzheimers and hence weren't capable of undoing any of the previous iterations so they kept on plastering new ones over the old ones.
For some god knows what reason, you can "swipe" parts of the UI with your mouse, and you'd think ok, maybe the game was made with phones in mind so that'd be an explanation, but it hasn't. So...? Why?! Some parts of the menu you can ONLY reach by swiping.
You can also launch some other games through the game menu?? They(it?) are not even related to racing in any way.
Finding out things about the menu feels like uncovering secrets in a game, i'll give them that.

The in-game HUD can be compared to a terrible WoW raiders UI, there's random pointless ♥♥♥♥♥ cluttering the screen everywhere (gets better or worse depending on the server you're on). It looks as a billboard would look like if it was sold to 10 different companies simultaneously and they'd all fight by placing ♥♥♥♥ over each others ♥♥♥♥.
I've played trackmania nations forever and thought that the HUD was bad/filled with ads because the game was free. But this wasn't free and it's completely the same?

Honestly i think i'm not well-spoken enough to put into words how ♥♥♥♥ it is.

Will it affect your enjoyment of the game itself...eh.... no? Hence the thumbs up. I just felt like mentioning it because the UI here just stands out from anything i've seen before.

Aside from that, i'd say having friends to banter with and fight over the better finish time, increases the enjoyment of the game tremendously. Besides, you won't be beating almost anyone else : ), since the game has a very experienced community.

This game is very grindy and gets old quickly. What's there is good, but really, keep that in mind before buying, odds are you won't do a full playthrough of this.


It's a tough one. The game isn't bad, it is beautiful and the gameplay loop is fun. But with that said, it is just extremely grindy and gets old relatively quickly. After playing it for 10 hours (and honestly probably half that amount or less), you've basically seen most if not all of what it has to offer and then you'll just be re clearing very similar dungeon layouts over and over and over and over for at least another 30 hours. Just check the completion rate for this game in the achievement section, it's criminally low and that explains why.

On top of just the grind of re clearing dungeons to get to the next boss, you have to deal with the fact that unlike a game like XCOM you can't reuse the same party of 4 characters throughout most of the game, even if you do everything correctly during a quest (because of a "stress" mechanic which automatically accumulates). So you'll have to be constantly switching between multiple "squads" (or better said between your good and your ♥♥♥♥♥ squad). Well great, it's nice that the devs make you mix things up a little bit and try different characters. Except that you'll have to level up all of them to make them ready for high level quests you should be doing, and guess what, you can't send your high level characters on low level quests to help them out. And if you send the low level ones into high level quests to speed up the process, the odds are that they're going to die. Which in turn means that you'll be leveling up even more characters.

Sure, at some point you'll get upgrades which might speed this up a little bit, but by that point you'll be bored out of your mind.

The class variety and mechanical depth & complexity is there, the game is hard (partly because of unforgiving RNG). But at the end of the day, when you've cleared a couple dungeons you've seen it all. The game just doesn't have the "lasting" appeal imo. Nevertheless, giving it a negative review just for being entertaining only for a short period of time isn't really fair i believe.

If you like grinding in your games, get this. If you don't, stay away, otherwise you'll be entertained for a couple hours at most.

A must own rogue-lite even more so if you want a quality 3D rogue-lite which this is a rare example of. Skip if just endlessly powering up and killing monsters through the same ~10 areas without any reason or in-game goal, isn't your type of thing.


One of the rare examples of a game which lets you stack and combine as many items and as many times as you want with absolutely 0 restrictions imposed upon you (apart from having them drop), resulting in many hilarious and "wow, did you see what i just did/what just happened" moments.
Want to jump as high as the map height? Sure no problem. Want to summon hundreds of drones and make the game freeze? Sure, no problem. All while keeping the game hard enough for you not to get bored in 95%+ of the runs.
This combined with 9 distinct characters (+ different spell combinations for said characters) to choose from and solid enemy variety, really does add a lot to the replayability of the game.

And yes, the loot drops are random, but there are some systems in the game which somewhat mitigate the randomness and help you stack specific items.

Not many negatives to be found here honestly, some i could think of are:
The gameplay starts a bit slow in the first 2-3 zones which makes some people lose interest either after having a very good previous run or before ever getting any further (first time players).
The prismatic trials "challenge your friends" mode is very dull, you compete inside only one level which takes 2-4 minutes to complete, which isn't enough time for the game to become fun.
Playing with random people can get frustrating because of how someone can just yoink all the items.

Apart from that, other complaints would be be regarding the inherit characteristics of the genre, such as:
There's some item/character unlocking to do, but in case you're impatient you can skip that by altering the game config file.
You will die a lot and bad item/enemy rng will be at fault.


On top of the good game we have here there's also mod support, although there's no steam workshop support so it's not "plug and play" and it might put some people off, but still it's there for those that want to alter game features.
And the devs are really nice, game gets a big patch every 3 months and a couple of bug fixes after each one. Everything that they've put on the roadmap so far they've implemented on time. In addition to that, they also listen to the community and implement changes requested by it.

So yeah, for fans of the genre this is a must have, and it plays even better with friends. It definitely has that "just one more game" addictive feeling that keeps you playing.