Recent reviews by JD Vance

i just got a reminder this game existed.

lol

joined 10 games
all 10 games host disconnected
lmao this is trash im going back to darktide

Game sucks.
Boring as hell.
androids constantly chase you but their walk speed is slower than yours, so they are just annoying.
the alien is slightly scary but it doesn't really do anything if you hide in a corner and not make a sound.
you can just get through the entire game by crouch walking .

im going to say this is a very biased review because my friend convinced me to buy this game and i don't like survival horror games. this game just kinda proves my point in general for horror games. once the "scare" factor is over, the game just becomes tedious and annoying.
The alien AI is very good but again, you can mostly just bypass it by crouch walking around it a bunch of times and throwing distractions the other way.
im not going to waste my money buying horror games anymore

I'd like to be up front and tell anyone before they started swiftly typing to defend this expansion; that i have beaten the base elden ring game 4 different times.

now with that out of the way, i want to start off by saying whats been on my mind the entire time i have played this expansion:


This DLC has so many issues, but the main issue that lingers on throughout the whole game is how...empty it is....

don't get me wrong, i absolutely LOVE the environments in this game. this DLC has probably some of the most unique and vibrant environments out of any game i have played. but there is quite literally nothing in it....
half the map feels like they just put sprawling enemies around with a bunch of items and called it a day. there are barely more than 4 caves and barely more than 3 dungeons that i have explored so far. by contrast, the legacy dungeons feel like they got the most polish and care, while everything else is just the same thing over again. there isn't enough sidequests in this game to keep me interested, and the sidequests that ARE there are short, like really short.

There are actually very few bosses in this game, which makes sense since this is only an expansion, but the very few major bosses that are around, are not fun to fight. i can understand the difficulty spike, but it also feels like they went a completely different direction with boss fight mechanics. human-sized bosses somehow have 200 poise and the heavier bosses in the game dont fight heavy. in fact alot of what made sense for bosses in Elden Ring and previous Fromsoft games is gone here. all large bosses now moves as if they have no weight at all. all of the lategame bosses have 5-string combos that transition to a range attack or charge whenever you try to make space or recover. this is mainly due to the system implemented in elden ring where the bosses now read your inputs, but its 10x more aggressive here. this is the where most people, even elden ring veterans, get filtered hard as the bosses punish way more than they did before for simply trying to "get away", which is annoying and not fun to deal with. but the absolute WORST part is the hitboxes. i don't know who programmed the attack frames or hitboxes for these bosses, but they need to be FIRED. alot of attacks that the bosses do have these weird wide hitboxes that make no sense whatsoever, and always somehow hit you even if you try to doge roll or jump out of the way. it gets to a point where you are just expected to trade blows with the boss constantly, make it even more exhausting to fight. because now im not only fighting the hard AF bosses, but im fighting against the games poorly programmed mechanics too. every time i got done with a boss, it wasn't satisfying. instead of feeling like "yes i finally did it!", i ended up glad that i got through it and never wanted to fight that boss again.

the bosses also dont feel satisfying to fight because the only thing you get rewarded with is new weapons. im not saying the weapons are bad in this DLC. in fact, the weapons are the only good thing about this game I LIKE. but it doesn't help you progress your character. having your stats be dependent on an item scattered across the map feels really cheap and annoying to handle. the feeling of being rewarded from fighting a boss is not there, because now the "reward" you get is from trying to find these stat-boosting mcguffins.

The story in this game is my BIGGEST complaint so far. where is the story? its not there. you begin by meeting the oath knight girl, getting to know the other NPCs that serve under miquella. once you get through the second legacy dungeon, miquella's charm spell breaks and the friends you made start trying to kill each other. after you eliminate half the group, you go up to see miquella. only to find out that you are fighting rahdan again...for some reason. and there is never an explanation as to why we are fighting miquella or rahdan in the first place.... also, what was the point of messmer? they put him in the trailer to have him be the main bad guy thats torn up the land of shadows, but he...isn't the main bad guy. after you get done with him, the plot stops making any sense at all. he doesn't make any mention of his brother's existence despite being the next stepping stone to meet him.

What made me want to make this review in the first place, is the ending. i just got done beating the final boss of the whole DLC and what do i get? nothing. litterally ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ NOTHING. you get one pre-rendered cutscene of dear old miquella asking his brother to marry him and....thats it. THATS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ IT. you don't become lord of the lands of shadows. you don't fix anything. you don't make any difference to the world around you. you don't complete any type of quest. you simply kill a god because you do and the game ends there. THERE IS NOTHING ELSE. YOU WAITED HOURS UPON HOURS TRYING TO BEAT THE EXPANSION TO GET NOTHING AND NO EXPLANATION AS TO WHY YOU ARE EVEN HERE. ♥♥♥♥ this expansion dude. this DLC has killed any love i had for this game

I loved elden ring, and after i got done with it, i wanted to try another fromsoft title.

Unfortunately this game is too buggy to enjoy.

List of issues i have had that have basically ruined the game for me:

1. The iframes in this game do no work half the time
2. The graphics settings will crash anytime you open it on anything above 1080p
3. The lock-on camera is super buggy. Somtimes it will spin you around randomly. Other times it will just completely unlock for no reason in the middle of a fight. This is probably the most annoying bug as it happens at crucial moments in a boss fight and then you die because you could not see anything
4. The controls are really janky
5. Sometimes the red kill dot doesn't implement properly during fights and the game does a double-finisher or just cancels out the kill altogether. This is really annoying when fighting bosses or higher tier enemies

Most of the bugs have been around for years with no patch or fix. I can understand trying to get good at a game. But i cant understand trying to play one of the hardest fromsoft titles out there, and it being broken with game-breaking bugs for this long

modern western game # 58747

> ugly character models (most of them looking female of course)
> bad netcode
> a tutorial that requires you to connect to a server to play it
> tons of microtransactions
> a battlepass
> a leveling system designed to pitch you against players who have way more stuff than you
> bad optimization; relying on FSR and other AI-oriented graphics implementations so you don't have to optimize your game
> buggy
> hyper-competitive multiplayer orientated gameplay with unbalanced game mechanics

this game sucks and this DLC sucks.

every time there is a major patch to this game, more things become broken and unplayable.
more balances to a game that was never needed in the first place.
and half the perks in the perk tree either are utter garbage, or so constrained to one type of build that it makes the fun of making a "build"...well not fun.
the old perk tree was more flexible.
"mitigation chance" just does not exist in my game. i have all perks in mitigation chance, yet the mitigation just does not activate at all. every single resource i have looked online does even know what mitigation does. why couldn't we just have simple "evasion" back?
stealth builds are useless now, as half the "cool" perk tree is 90% either sniper rifles or throwing knives
not to mention that ever since the 2.1 patch, NPCs will randomly just spawn right infront of you. yea good luck hiding from that
there is so many issues with the game now that it makes it almost infuriating to play
im dropping this for good.

since i didn't buy the expansion on steam, im making a review here.


ive been playing GW2 on and off since the beta in 2012. i skipped EoD because i knew it was hot garbage from the trailer. came back to this game and installed it on steam to check on playtime for the most part.

SotO is the by far the worst expansion in this game to date. far worse than EoD. EoD at least had content for you to actually play on. SotO is 3 small-ass maps with super-long grind sessions to padd out the runtime of this expac.

let me first list out the positives of this expansion:
- you unlock dragon mount (only in the expac maps)
- you can now use weapons from other elite specializations freely
- some nice callbacks to the original guild wars game, which im a big fan of
- its not EoD

now on to the bad:
- this is an unfinished expansion where they have to give out a patch schedule to tell you when to play the expansion...and each update is a longer wait than the last one....
- game straight up lies to you saying you need to complete the flight training mastery in order to use the skyscale in tyria. again, this is a straight up lie, and the game doesn't actually tell you until much later on in your progress that you need to complete a bunch of achievement collectibles to do so
- the process of acquiring a skyscale for tyria through the achievment, is also padded by time-locked currency (provisioner coins) that locks you out of acquiring it every 24 hours
- half the story missions in this expansion are exposition dumps
- ALL kryptis enemies are quite literally re-used assets with a new coat of paint on them
- this expansion breaks lore at every point in time. several instances of NPCs talking down to you like you know nothing even though you're the PACT COMMANDER. the guy (or girl) that has killed 5 elder dragons, and stopped numerous world-ending events from occurring, only for a couple of hippie wizard ♥♥♥♥♥ to tell you that you aren't hot ♥♥♥♥ anymore
- the characters in the game call you a "they" rather than your characters gender, which is lazy writing and also bothers me since im not non-binary. ♥♥♥♥ off with that ♥♥♥♥ Anet.
- i dont like the fact that i have to be zojja's therapist through the entire story. though that's a personal gripe of mine
- the masteries in this expansion suck. as they provide little-to-no value to the actual gameplay
- there are no new elite specializations
- the *new* weapon specializations they are advertising are again...a bunch of reused assets from other classes or enemies
- all thew new armorsets in this game are locked behind masteries.
- the new light, medium, and heavy class armors in these sets are completely identical. basically outfits that are locked by your class. also they all look ugly af
- the new maps are very unoptimized and tank your fps by like 50% compared to any other map (except for the cantha maps)
- expansion is riddled with bugs

thats all i could think of at the moment as every time i play this game, it gives me a new thing to be disappointed by. if the expansion can't top Path of Fire (the BEST expansion in the game), then its not an expansion worth trying.

the community is still as friendly and helpful as ever, and i still somehow find something fun to do with players here or with some of the guilds that im in. hopefully in the next update, Anet can pull themselves together, but im super hesitant at the moment

Since no one likes to listen to my opinion, ill just cut to the chase:

- Story mode is 9 hours long, and invasions are also 9 hours long
- Story made is great, Megan Fox is not
- Invasion mode is basically a bunch of repeated fights in a mario party board
- Game runs at 60 FPS MAX (I assume for fighting game reasons)
- Menus, Fatalities, In-Game cutscenes, and invasion board all are locked at 30fps and stutters alot
- Fatality distance is written incorrectly (close is actually mid, mid is actually long, long is actually longer)
- Season 1 invasion cosmetics for all characters look like garbage
- Story mode is great tho
- Either multiplayer is full of lagswitchers or the games are generally super laggy online
- Game is not polished (no starting character interactions, some character models would float in the air during brutalities)
- The company has not made any patches or feedback to the kommunity in this game since its early release in September
- Every time your game crashes, the game creates a crash report that consumes 1GB of storage
- Kombat pack is a DLC "season pass" without telling you its a season pass, which is deceptive marketing

SIDENOTE: Alot of people on Windows have reported having numerous crashes and bugs in the game. I play on Linux with an AMD graphics and CPU system, and i have not had a single crash or bug playing this game. Your experience with the games performance might vary wildly at this point.

Game isn't worth $70; Isn't even worth $40. The general lack of polish and care for this game makes it maybe worth $15 dollars at this point. I don't play fighting games that much, but this pretty much soured my taste in them for awhile. I'm going back to play injustice 2 or something.

Its pretty good