Скорошни рецензии на BEEF SWELLINGTON

A game that wears its influences proudly: d2 roots, grim dawn passive trees, path of exile-style active skill trees, and really makes the best of each one. Build diversity is robust even within individual subclasses, and respeccing or changing focus is non-punitive. Highly recommended; one of the best iso RPGs I've played in ages.

It may sound like damning with faint praise, but darktide is hands down the best 40k fps out there. There are absolutely some misses: lack of a full crafting system at launch (or maybe just not as friction-free itemization as I would prefer), sometimes the game director gets a little weird with spawns, and a story that (being generous) does not showcase Dan Abnett's full talents. I would also like movement to be a little smoother: sometimes vaulting over objects doesn't happen as seamlessly as I would hope, and there are some pieces of terrain that have non-obvious collision

All that said, the actual gameplay is stellar. Classes feel differentiated, the gunplay is nice, switching between ranged and melee is snappy, and weapons are varied. The level design is cyclopean and genuinely feels like a 40k hive city. If you enjoyed the vermintide games but wanted more shooting, fear not: ammo supplies are plentiful. The music slaps way harder than it needs to, as well.

There's certainly room for improvement, but unless you're the sort of person who lives or dies by achievement acquisition the game is absolutely worth your time.

It seems like somewhere buried under a mountain of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and bad ideas, there's the potential for a reasonably fun game in here: at its very core, the combat system seems pretty okay. This is unfortunately marred by a collection of remarkably terrible design decisions and oversights.

First off, the good:

• The combat system is mostly passable. It's not without flaw (more on those later!), but at its heart there's an okay system in there.
  
• The controls are surprisingly good. M+KB is smooth and not too swingy. Headshotting enemies with the bow felt natural, and it didn't seem like I was fighting the game to make it happen.
  
• Graphic settings are great for PC. Smooth 60fps with no screen tearing at the highest quality.

Unfortunately, there's the bad:

• Enemy level scaling is all over the place. The game has no mechansm for telegraphing the strength of any particular non-boss enemy until after it's killed your whole party in 2 shots. This is confounded by the game's frustrating tendency to place enemies that are visually identical to others about 200m away, except this other group will run roughshod over your whole party. While I'm not necessarily a fan of strictly level-based success in any "open" game, at least others will tell you the respective levels of enemies so you don't waste your time.
  
• Enemy AI is dumb as rocks. Even with the ridiculous level disparities described above, you can MMO-pull individuals away from their friends (after a bit of jogging) and kill them pretty easily. If I wanted to play a dated MMO, I have plenty of other options than this.
  
• Friendly AI is dumb as rocks. The Pawn system is extremely interesting, but ultimately failed for me. You level quickly enough that keeping your pawns current (your two recruitable pawns don't level with you) feels like a chore, and if you don't keep them topped off they tend to get dropped even more than normal (which is a lot).
  
• The entire day/night system is an interesting concept executed gracelessly. The lantern you can use illuminates a small area of otherwise complete pitch black, and covers about 50% of that area in a washed out lens flare. You can mod this to be more manageable, but doing so reduces the lighting radius of ambient lights in an already sparesly lit game. There is no "wait" function in the game outside of going to an inn in one of the towns, so you might find yourself needing to make a 10+ minute jog back to town to rest at an inn, only to have to make another 10+ minute jog back to where you were (dealing with all the respawned enemies in the process). This feels more like a chore than a gameplay element. Allegedly there's a reusable fast travel item that's supposed to be in your inventory, but I never saw it in my stash. General advice from the internet is "don't travel at night", so you either get to either make the 20+ minute roundtrip at a sprint as described above, wait in place for ~45 minutes, or stumble around blindly until a chimera finds you in the woods.
  
• The UI was designed to cause humans pain. Would you like to quicksave? Press escape and then hit 'i' (i is for "intuitive", I guess). Would you like to open a map? Even though nothing is bound to the 'm' key, press escape and then manually click on the "map" button instead. Would you like to manage your stash? There are TWO separate interfaces for depositing and withdrawing each. Transferring items between party members takes a frustrating number of clicks. You cannot equip gear from your inventory screen, but must open an additional "equip" screen from the context menu on equippable items. There is really no redeeming quality to any UI design decisions in this game--this is probably among the worst I've encountered in years.
  
• The world is crushingly dull. The game features a Gothic-style "open world", but I can't for the life of me tell you why they even bothered. From the starting coastal town all the way to the Capitol city hub area, I cannot name even a single location or encounter off the beaten path that made me think "hey, that's interesting".
  
• The game is ugly. Despite the healthy graphics configuration available, there's not really anything you can do to help the visual style of the game. Dull, washed out browns and greys dominate the 5 or 6 textures that get copypasted across the entire world. Armor and weapon designs are boring, npcs look boring, enemies look boring (with some exceptions made for the larger boss-style enemies), environments look boring.
  
• The crowning features of the combat system just don't work that well. The whole "climbing" mechanic falls flat for a number of reasons. It's very difficult to control WHERE you actually climb to on enemies, your character twiches and judders like crazy as the enemy moves, and you have to fight the camera the entire time to even see what's going on. If you try climbing on an enemy in a forest, the camera will pan out into the overhead canopy and it becomes almost completely impossible to see anything at all (none of the leaves will go transparent if they obstruct the camera view). In theory there are supposed to be robust combat options with non-bosses, but attacks that aren't just straight damage seem to be of extremely limited utility. For example: There's a stun/juggle ability striders have access to relatively early on. Unfortunately, this only works reliably against enemies it's not required against. If you try to use it on a sword/shield human bandit (apparently one of the most powerful creatures in the universe), it will successfully stun around 33% of the time (and they 2-3shot you the other 66% while you're animation locked in your ineffective attack)
  
• The sidequests are MMO-inspired drivel. "Collect 300 Macguffins." "Kill twenty dongsmashers." "Deliver my mail."
  
• The voice acting is trash. I hate that I feel like this is to be expected, but it's still worth mentioning.

Between the high expectations I had for this title and the incomprehensibly frustrating time I spent trying to make it fun, I feel like this may actually be the worst game I've played over multiple years (and this is including gems like Orion: Prelude). Not fun, not pretty, not interesting. I wouldn't even buy this on sale.

I guess it's fun for a little while.

If you liked zeno clash and you want more of that, then you'll probably dig zeno clash 2. It's a bit more narrative-heavy; you uncover the history of Zenozoik instead of wandering mostly aimlessly looking for fights, but the story is satisfying and the environment/character design is still satisfyingly weird.

Then again, there was a real appeal in zeno clash (1) in that nothing in the world had any sort of explanation. It was a weird place populated by weird people(?) doing weird things, and it was up to the player to just accept it. The setting I felt was diminished somewhat by making it (marginally) "realer".

Also the sun and moon gauntlet completely trivializes combat. Try to avoid using it.

Fun game with a great aesthetic, but the multiplayer component is completely broken. Desync city with more than 2 players, and even 2 players is pretty sketchy. If you want a game to play with friends, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. If you want a game to play solo, it's pretty alright for that. Unfortunately for me, I bought the game for multiplayer so I don't feel I can recommend it.

You will die a lot. That's kind of the point. One of the better 2 bucks I've spent, easily worth the full $5 price.

Gorgeous game with gorgeously weird art direction. Competently melee combat-heavy, which is unusual for a first person manshoot.The punchin' dudes mechanics are exactly deep enough for the length of the game. If you're on the fence, you should probably just buy it already; you won't be disappointed.

Funny, interesting graphics, kind of brutally difficult. When you ♥♥♥♥ up everyone will die in delightful ways.