Recent reviews by Jartor

The game *could* be fun, but it isn't, and it's actually so unfun in that capacity that it feels intentional. The idea that this could basically be Runescape except the players are the ones building the cities is a classic draw. That SOUNDS awesome, and it could be, but it isn't - not yet at least.

The game doesn't need RNG crafts, I'll say at least that much. It's just a hamster wheel, a cycle of same, same, same, same. I feel like Django (before the German).

I feel like Djartor.

Djartor Unchained.

If you've played any tier-based progression system 'survival craft' you've played this one, and that's all there is, there's nothing else to the game except the grind. I actually don't think I've ever had an irl job more tedious than this. I've played all the sloppa, my brain was conditioned by the World Government to be the greatest survival gamer ever born, and while I'm thinking about it - I really cannot think of a single survival craft more tedious and pointlessly irritating.

I write this as I'm sipping a peach mango v8 (energy), staring at the river I cannot cross, in my wagon full of tier 3 metal that I traveled three hours to locate. I found this metal so that I can make tier-3 ingots (which require t3 wood as well), so that I can make tier-3 tools and then go farm tier-4 resources.

I am doing this for no reason. There's no pvp or any content in between besides getting attacked by jackals in what, at best, can be described as being mechanically as exhilarating as an Evolution of Combat Runescape 1v1. Jackals and other overland predators (monsters?) should drop corpses that can be processed into leather. They don't. They drop more arbitrary items (fur, or if lucky, fang) that feed into the Slayer skill.

But I digress.

I did not play solo but I do feel the need to express that this game is about as far from solo friendly as anything could possibly ever get. And the more you progress into the game (on account of the XP grind), the harder it then becomes as there are way too many skills and therefore people you have to constantly rely on to feed the process.

There could be an argument made that it's intentionally designed for you to slot into a community, which you can do - as every town is accessible by any player (even other player claims) allowing you to use their bank and stations (this doesn't mean you can grief, bare minimum access is just shared) - but that argument wouldn't exactly save the game

You will be forced to work no matter in what capacity - and I'll repeat something I'll say a billion times - that's all there is. Work. Work that leads into more work in a giant branching tedium tree of get this material to progress this thing, and get a lot of it, and spend 1 hour on a bench on every single step of the process too.

It's like Slavery - the Video Game.

All survival crafts have a grind, that's kind of the shtick, but this one is just... not good. It presents itself as comfy and chill, and it could be one of those games, the art style makes you think it might be, but it's not comfy and it's not at all chill. I think if someone with OCD were to even sniff this game's fumes they might actually combust and/or turn into some rabid ghoul-esque creature

A hilariously frustrating grind that intentionally makes every single stage of it as painful as humanly possible, with almost Runescape levels of focus necessary on skills except there's nothing else to the game to even make that grind rewarding. You can spend 40 hours to get level 50 in a skill (this is not max level, and even then...) and it'll just throw you on another arbitrary wild goose chase for the next tier.

And the game will wipe eventually, even if it's in six months, it's still going to wipe and annihilate what would reasonably be 100's of hours of progress to get to a decent stage of leveling

The game is almost built like a lazy idle game except you're not allowed to be lazy, and you're not allowed to be idle, the crafting times (sometimes upwards of 20 minutes to an hour) are just long enough to be exhausting, and just short enough to require you to babysit them.

Keep in mind that there's a stamina and hunger system that will stop you from crafting when stamina runs out so realistically it's not even like you could leave your PC and go do something else while it takes place. There aren't even decorative / RP items in the game, so these cities you can build (positive aspect) can't really be customized.

Overall it's just an intentionally frustrating experience built out like Runescape (except with hexes instead of grids) and infinite labor for very minimal reward. There aren't quests in the traditional sense outside of one that involves you upgrading your stamina meter, there are tasks but they aren't very interactive and realistically just more grind. No profession or the skill in the game involves anything other than afking JUST long enough to be bored, but not long enough to allow you to relax.

If you have a 200 man group that's organized maybe it wouldn't be so bad, but everything just takes too long, and too much work, for one thing and one thing only:

More work.

Everything requires 10 materials which require 10 materials which require 10 materials and a 100 hour grind and a boat ride that will keep you constantly churning away instead of stepping outside to find out that there's really nothing there.

There's no magic, no real combat, none of the fun sort of grinding, no bosses (that I've found), no drops, no pvp, or even competition, everything is gated behind really long craft timers and really long circuitous grinds.

The only good part of the game is the pet owl because at least he (or she, or they) was there for me when the hunt for emarium brought me to my knees

Short:

Visual good. Gameplay okay. Loop good. Story above average. Voice acting great. Aesthetics great. Faithfulness to canon above expectations. I buy breastmilk for roughly $50/ml given a guarantee of freshness and quality. Survival systems unremarkable. MMO systems about average for the genre. Could be better. Good enough to game.

Movement good. Most mechanics good. Melee suck. Shooting okay. Game good. Like game. Play game 16 hours one sitting. Have problem.

Long:

It performs well on my PC (i9 11700k and a 3080), I've experienced practically no performance issues on this rig. I crashed once, in a cutscene, but haven't crashed since - whole group hasn't crashed. Even if this game *was* terrible, Funcom, considering who they are, deserve compliments for that.

This is the smoothest Funcom launch in the history of their being a studio, and it doesn't even comes close, as this game actually works on launch day (for most), and that would be a first for them. If you've been playing their games since Age of Conan, like me, you probably know what I'm talking about.

The pve combat is mid, it's not very complicated but it still managed to be difficult and *almost* riveting, that is probably the weakest point of the game - but it's also not the point of the game in the first place. It can get lonely, it's grindy but not nearly so much as most other survival games.

It's not perfect. There are some things that could certainly be fixed, but overall, you'd like this game if:

If you like Dune, this is a fairly faithful adaptation at least in terms of getting the vibe right
If you liked Conan Exiles, this is that but better is most areas, and certainly outperforming
Liked OnceHuman or other hybrid Survival MMOs
Like survival games in general
You enjoy good world design - Dune is a very pretty game, even though most if not all UE5 games like exactly the same, and the map design succeeding in making this desert planet look diverse is nice

You won't like this game:

If you hate a 'grind', MSQ path can easily take 20+ hours, this game takes the survival resource treadmill and combines it with an activity / rep system from an MMO, it's not diabolical, it's not KRMMO bad, it's not even WoW bad, but some people who follow these games might not be about that
If you expect Rust or another FFA KoS survival game, pvp early is rare and all late PvP is 'consensual' by default of the game's mechanics
The building system is okay, but it's not winning any awards, so the RP options are limited and far more limited than Conan Exiles was, it's more like OnceHuman in that way that you build inside a plot (or many plots, as you can have like 6 or 7~). I think this is worth noting, the building system is perfectly fine and the pieces look good, but it's very brutalist with limited upside for micro-aesthetics and things like that.

Most of Dune's mechanics, following that last point, are very vanilla survival game. This game is a hamburger in the genre, we've all had a hamburger before, we know what it tastes like and what to expect, a hamburger is unlikely to really shock and awe us, but a hamburger can also be exactly what you might want or need on any given day. All of the ingredients have been used before, and these ingredients work, i've not found a single system in the game that doesn't. Yet.

The success/failure of this game relies on the Inter-faction community and engagement, which is tricky and might not perform all that well given low population caps on servers and no server transfers, but it remains to be seen how people will engage with the Landsraad. This game is built on a system that requires people to be social, and if I had any massive critique, it would be the fact that it's unlikely to succeed in that as is intended - or so goes my unsolicited opinion.

Don't come into this expecting to interact with thousands of people, you won't because the map is so massive, and in that sense I guess you could say it sort of feels like Destiny at times. You're in a lobby with 40 other players max, until Deep Desert which can be up to 100 - that's what the game is meant to support.

So far it hasn't done anything special or tremendous, it has no real gimmick, the thirst mechanic and sun exposure mechanics make me want to skin myself, the worm can eat my ass, I can't find Zendaya (they based this game on her movie, which they wrote a book about), there are 19 tools when there could be just 1-4, the inventory has both a weight AND slot limit, and there are so many more things. I hate durability permanently decreasing the gross longevity of an item over time, forcing you to constantly be crafting new things long term, and the melee combat is pretty ass

But I like the hamburger, it's not the best hamburger I've ever eaten but it was worth the bag and I'd eat it again

THIS IS FIRE !

Really odd experience here, I heard about this releasing into 1.0 which I thought was very fast, so I decided to check it out.

I heard this was 'just like Kenshi' from like 50 people, these people are morons, this is nothing like Kenshi so if you heard the same thing - that's not correct. I'm not holding it against the game, but I did keep hearing it.

This is not a 1.0 launch, it wasn't ready and the claim that it was 'finished' (for a real launch) was disingenuous at best. Half of the game just straight up doesn't work, the features are there, but they do not work.

Example: You can have children and build a sect. Okay. Your children just magically appear one day, they are completely useless and don't even dress themselves. They don't arm themselves, and you'll be lucky if they do anything at all (they won't). The game is built in such a way to advertise that having this family/sect is important, but it's really not, the party system and all that other related business is absolutely worthless.

All of these NPC's get bugged into rooms or places or beds, in some instances, so I had all of my children just trapped in a random hut. They were useless, they don't do anything and won't even gather resources. Nobody will, although if that's your terminal goat the sect does 'automatically' gather things somewhat reliably.

The construction system is cool and the aesthetics neat, but none of this really matters because worlds break often and cannot be salvaged. They run into what I can only imagine is a very large dump of broken triggers and the world becomes empty with the only interaction being the actually unhinged amount of people trying to pickpocket me, because they hate me (I've never ever interacted with them, even once), or people begging me to gamble (like rock paper scissors I guess...?)

The MSQ broke on me like 6 times and I had to repeatedly restart the game and reload to get the triggers to work. If I had not been forced to grind this out, trying to use the tier-0 translation quality to figure out what was even going on, it might have taken me all of 4-6 hours the beat the entire game.

There isn't really a power progression system in this either, there is a dantian / meridians grid for 'cultivating' but it's just a really obtrusive and irritating worm puzzle pattern matching minigame. I came into this blind, in any case, and was 'Transcendent' (the highest rated power level) within a few hours, it was so random and poorly thought out that I literally had no idea what was going on and just happened to accidentally fall up into this tier.

You can min-max / build beyond this, but let's be real, this is a single player 'RPG' (barely) that had maybe two builds at most.

The combat system is also like stop motion combo minigame, almost like a card game, it is not live action and you basically match shapes (like fist, kick, palm etc.) into guitar hero combos that open up special moves. It was boring after perhaps the third repetition, the animations are all the same, the camera angles kinda suck too.

I found it to be very shallow from start to finish, and it's bizarre that this is the case when the game has an entire material grind behind the gameplay ladder too. I was chopping trees for this. They got my ass again man...

The narrative and story is pretty unhinged and illegible even by WuXia standards. The translations were probably at least half done in google translate so this doesn't help, it is a small dev team and I've heard these translations are done for free by fans. Can't really hate that, but it made the game hard to get any sort of mental grasp on. Otherwise this is about as ambiguous and nightmarishly whimsical as any other WuXia or Xianxia story.

There is a recipe for a very interesting game here, but it's not even frozen or undercooked, if this game was a plate of bacon - the pig is still alive and it's 2000 miles away dual cultivating in the middle realm

Schizophrenic Japanese StarDew valley JRPG

It's already this great and it's in Early Access, if you take your time with it, I think this is a real sleeper, I did not expect to like it.

No idea how I didn't review this sooner. If there was a top 5 all time list for all games, all genres, all everything, this would be perhaps #2 or #3 for me.

I want them to play the Kenshi Theme OST at my funeral.

It's alright, doesn't do much that separates it from the city-building genre and you still have to deal with all the asinine minutia of a world where people could literally not survive without you. Deals with Areas of Influence, still structured around building certain structures every so often (humanity has not yet invented the concept of walking down the street to get a sandwich in this era).

It all revolves around the tried and true needs of the settlers just like any other colony sim game, don't mind me, I'm just refusing to work while a giant dragon gorilla murders my entire family because milord didn't provide me with the exact right number of couches, by the way I go through four pairs of clothes and sixteen couches per day, this is peak human performance, without my couches I have to go on strike.

As per most of these games the simulated entitlement of these digital villagers makes me was to dip my coinpurse in boiling peanut oil, but it's not unique in that regard, like I said.

Combat is very basic RTS with the dumbest AI priority imaginable, trying to micro is insanity bait and there's no 'disposition' for troops (like aggressive mode), and they'll really just shoot at a wooden barn while barbarians are chopping them in half. Targeting an archer on the walls for example is an exercise in futility.

Some points are frustrating, the game is very buggy, AI needs a huge amount of effort to fix, your city pathing can break, builders no longer building after a point, stuff like that. Very early access, near title and concept though so I look forward to seeing what comes of it. It had a neat little empire building metagame and I very much like how the world map is THE world map and you can travel between points.

Game needs:
-AI aggro dispositions / automation, even if that's just letting them go crazy and prioritizing other hostile units rather than buildings
-Cat girls with really large boobies
-A way to sincerely automate colonies
-Clearer labeling of POIs (like other npc villages and barbarian camps) on the minimap, I'm trying to figure out where these other villages are to trade and I can't.
-Perhaps more streamlined resource needs, the minutia of managing these into the endgame is quite crazy, but like other games of this genre people like doing that sort of thing, I just don't. And by this I mean requiring a gorillion (real number fr) resource inputs for your later tiers of citizens. They require SO MANY items to stay happy.
-I'd also like to see areas of influence expanded a bit on the stockpiles / granaries, they are so small currently that it's insane. Every cluster of ten houses does not need it's own 7/11 my guy, these people have feet, they can walk

I liked it, it was fun, but I wish the devs that make these colony sims would come to some point of allowing people to be at least somewhat autonomous rather than relying on me to do everything for them just so I can make a single bottle of baby oil.

I don't typically like reviewing games negatively but perhaps I will save one of you from suffering. I've put a few hundred hours into this not including my time training in the Korean hyperbolic time chamber so I feel like I've done enough to justify an opinion.

Pros:

-You can pet cats and dogs in certain towns.

Cons:

-The PvE is okay but not nearly enough to engage anyone beyond a few hours of it, the dungeons are pretty sleepy, the problem being mostly that it relies on currency that only refreshes daily. OR, alternatively, it relies upon you going to lizard island and getting chests every night which only happens for the zerg guilds at the top. I have belonged to this zerg, nobody 'casual' is every touching these, and it's unfair, not because I haven't gotten them but because you probably won't if you're still wondering about playing. If it were up to me, and I was the emperor of the internet, I would give you these coins so you can do your dungeons little buddy.

-AGS (Amazon Game Studios) is Satan

-Skill expression is about the bottom of the barrel out of any mmo I've ever seen, this entire game is dominated by CC, which is really common in KRMMO's, except there is absolutely no CC immunity mechanic (it does not exist), copers will mention an item you can craft (it immunes 1 CC, does not give a cc immunity for 5s, etc.). After all these hours I still have not gotten that item via normal means btw, it's a p2w CC cleans trinket.

-Melee sucks, if you're a melee gamer you will probably not enjoy it, and when I say that I do not mean melee cannot kill people. Small scale / arenas it's actually pretty overpowered, but in the content that matters? It is miserable, only works as a tank, and only barely. It's a melee class with all of its real damage being tied to very long animations / CAST BARS (on melee btw) that do not allow you to move during said ability, which requires you to be entirely reliant on CC which is just another one of many problems.

-Every server is earned by a zerg willing to do anything to win, this game is all about the money. Conventionally you'd expect 'cheaters' ('''cheaters''') to be banned, they are not banned in this game. There's an auto-block client that exists that can be configured to block anything based on custom orders, it is packet injecting, it reads what an ability is and chooses what you block without you ever even needing to pay attention. It's more common than you'd think. They've not banned for it ever, even on KR. Instead of banning people who RMT'd (bought 'illegal' Lucent cash shop currency), they've not banned anyone but forced these people to pay money to THEIR store to recoup the balance, many find this creative / amusing but it's not. It's just greedy, and it solves few issues short term.

-This is an addendum to my previous point. I am not against RMT necessarily, I've spent money on this game so I want to express this so as not to be hypocritical. This game is p2w to an extent, any claims it is not p2w are pure and utter cope, perhaps 30% of your character's entire power is bound to traits which you can pay for without ever playing, that is p2w, people without traits? I one shot them.

-AGS / Amazon will ban for EVERYTHING except for cheating. Exploiting bosses on cooldown? That's fine. Using 'the client'? That's also fine, apparently. But if you use the name of a player in the game, which ends up being a slur, you'll be banned for 3 days. Just like New World except even worse they pass out chat / game bans like candy, they didn't ban people that spent hundreds on illegal lucent, but they'll ban you for calling someone 'stupid' or whatever else. Perhaps this is cope, but my second ban was for joking with a guild member about 'eating them' (GONE EROTIC), 7 days. That's their prerogative, it's their ToS after all, but observe all points and tell me that this is okay. It's weird.

-The game is pretty but it's soulless, you can see the asset rips in some of the terrain installations and especially around towns. At the edges you can see houses just floating on a cliff / with doors in the stone. They look pretty but are not custom designed whatsoever, little care is given to the less easily seen parts of the world making sense.

-Unless you belong to a zerg, you will be zerged, because every server is boiling down into a server of one alliance, 4 guilds with 70 members each. If you're familiar with other MMOs this promotes a system of 'all calling'. Take New World for existence, imagine a siege level event happening not once per day but at least 4 times, forcing you to 'trim the fat', so to speak, enforcing an attendance policy, and that is exhausting. Casual players, which I am not one of, are offered no place to swim in this environment.

-RNG is absurd, but that's the krmmo standard so it's not like it's new. However, if you got a lucky pull on the first few weeks you now have more lucent than you might ever need (400-500 dollars worth) thanks to the RMT. This could be seen as 'good for f2p players', but I don't think it is, because you are not the only people out there in the jungle and it all relies on an economy of that same currency.

-Bots are everywhere, they do ban bots but they're still extremely prevalent which makes very day-to-day genre activities difficult. Contracts occupy some of your dailies (basically kill quests) and some of these locations are still swarming with bots, it's not insurmountable but it IS annoying and immersion destroying.

-This game is dominated by very bizarre and obfuscated statting systems. In your typical MMO you wouldn't see the ability to build specifically for one sort of 'evasion' over any other, that's almost unheard of. but in this game you start minute and second one stacking evasion (or endurance - which is just flat out inferior because of the itemization OUTSIDE of being a tank), and you have that. So when someone says this is NOT p2w, they are wrong, because if I wanted to I could build a new character right now, with a few hours of mental, and pay for all my traits allowing me to be functionally untouchable to other people. You can do that with money. It is p2w, son.

-The PvP is boring and relies entirely too much on very long CCs that you'd only typically use when someone is CC'd, which as anyone might imagine is an entirely terrible way to develop a game.

TL;DR

This is a game that masquerades itself as more casual than it is, it is a grind every day, every hour, sort of game. If you do not do that and you are still being successful it might just be that you're carried by people doing it in your place. Everything is CC. Everything is AOE. We have not gotten a balance patch even after a month, there are bow and staff (or otherwise) players with 10,000 kills after one month, that is 333 kills per day and this isn't even counting assists which are also a factor. Solution? An incumbent nerf to tanks and melee, this is biased though so we can just ignore that. Your kill ranking allows you the ability to functionally lock out pve bosses and dungeons, so it's important that someone in your guild be the top fragger. It's a neat idea but it doesn't work in all reality because GM's use it to threaten smaller guilds into merging / submitting and the drama (in classical MMO fashion) is contant.

It's possible to have fun, especially as a small no-ego player just playing games to play games, but I have this many hours in it, and the only reason I'm playing still is because of loyalty and sunk-cost-fallacy type mental. Do something better with your time that makes you happy, the era of MMOs in general is over, but especially KRMMOs.

In proper conclusion:

This is Archeage 2 but lacking every single thing that made Archeage fun in the first place.

I also hate Halloween, and they have a Halloween event, which should have been enough for me

After spending ~3 hours stuck in a mission, a TUTORIAL mission by the way (the first fish mission) - I can't really see this going anywhere. PvP might be good, the game's premise is good but at this point I'm having trouble finding a mission I can actually complete.

You expect a certain level of RNG in any card game but at least for my initial (and obviously short exposure), I feel like that RNG is too much.

Note: I am not LOSING in these missions, I was INSIDE the mission for 3 hours because I could not pull enough of an army to beat the enemy base. I had built so many towers that I no longer had any room to build on, so I was stuck with my hand, 1 discard per turn, and that's it, there's nothing else. Infinite water mortars, no room for any econ, spent cycling as much as you can in an attempt to get new cards, it just doesn't work - and I'd even reckon that if you don't get extremely lucky and wipe the enemy within 3 turns it's just impossible to finish.

All predicated on getting the exact cards you want, the AI is not required to build and it cheats, the tutorials allow for no deck customization and seem rigged against you. Making 'tutorial' missions that tight if not flat out impossible seems like a poor decision in a game where after every single phase the enemy base repairs itself completely, everything you broke comes back. I killed over 1 million units, I was on turn 40+ before I finally realized that I was cutting it close for a refund.

Tutorials should not be so frustrating or tuned to such an extent that it feels 'hard', and it's not like I was on the final boss of the campaign or whatever, this is like the 4th mission. The problem stems from being forced to use your cards which terminates in your card pool getting diluted the more the game goes on, that seems to be a feature, but it's poorly balanced regardless.

I tried, I like the vision, maybe I'll come back to it if it seems like the concurrent pop is enough for a long term pvp scene to develop - even though I would have liked to stick with pure PvE. Also: Day 1 DLC, though people have already mentioned that.

I'm festering my gel