Recent reviews by bobisyag

I'm happy to see that the dev recognized a lot of problems with the base game and improved upon them in the DLC. From major issues like interacting with the crystal system to minor things like putting the green arrows other doors had on doors that are in the wall of a building and not rendered, the dev seems to have taken feedback seriously and acted upon it. I hope he has access to more playtesting before releasing his next project but seeing the improvements in this DLC have definitely raised the odds of me buying another game from this dev in the future. Now on to the DLC review.

Fishing is a new minigame and is fun. Like most things in this game a better tutorial is needed but once I got past the barrier I liked what I interacted with for the most part. As an example of the initial barrier, when I missed a fish on my cast, I was reeling in the bobber all the way and trying to recast all on the same button, which lead to some frustration with mistaken casts. It took a bit to realize pressing another button--the same button that the game tells you leaves the fishing hole--pulled in the bobber instantly, speeding things up and avoiding that overloaded input situation. The button mapping is intuitive but I had to actually consider that the unadvertised functionality existed instead of the game telling me. For a frustration that did not go away, it is pointlessly difficult to get fish on the hook. They see the bait, they get near it and they just... don't do anything. If there was a nibbling system it'd be easier to accept this situation but there is not. Overall I enjoyed getting each fish to max weight, though I wish the system was deeper to make interacting with fishing feel less like busywork.

The new character feels undertuned. I was not able to get him to surpass the damage output of Mikah in reasonable scenarios. I add this qualifier because he does have a strong move that consumes his buffs to do big damage, but in practice the party compositions that enable this move just don't stack up against having more damage dealers. It also just isn't very fun to spend so long doing nothing to set up his damage, regardless of which build you choose for him.

I had a low opinion of exploration in the base game but I have an even lower one of the DLC. In the base game, exploration felt fairly inconsequential outside of the reward board due to the extremely linear power progression systems. The DLC swings too far in the other direction: there are so many key items hidden in the world, barring further exploration until you find them. It really sucks to find the hiding spot of a hidden boss and realize you didn't loot some lonely chest out in the middle of nowhere in another zone to make the potion that would let you fight it. Also many locked doors all with unique keys that only unlock a single door that all need to be found in random chests. Plus it's frustrating that the map doesn't indicate what doors you've unlocked or what you have keys for. All of this creates a mad scramble of recombing the entire world every time you discover something to learn what it does and get the reward. Thankfully the DLC world is small so the game can get away with this design, but I would go mad if this were the case in the base game. In addition to all this, player power is linked to exploration via pools of power. I really love this concept, but the preceding issues makes the implementation in the DLC fall short.

Combat itself feels good and improved over the base game. The crystal system experienced a massive collection of quality of life improvements and a reduction in power of the system itself, meaning it no longer feels terrible when you have a weapon upgrade you'd have to spend 5 minutes to use on just one character and you no longer need to comb the world for crystals. The difficulty of the combat in the DLC matches Acts 2-4 of the base game, so don't expect too much challenge. All of the hidden bosses fell to me in one try, but judging by conversations I've had with other players I'm the exception rather than the rule. A healer is actually useful on some fights, unlike Acts 2-4 of the base game where you just buff your damage dealers and kill everything before you need to heal. To add onto the difficulty point, there's an area with chess enemies where they move around the battlefield and can get promoted to queens if they make it that far. There are reward board items to kill queens. I had to google what these queens even were because the chess pieces were just dying before they got promoted and I didn't recognize the chess movement had that kind of consequence (the pieces also move on the board to attack). The issues with overdrive persist despite the upgrade you can get to it in this DLC: it works until it doesn't. The upgrade does nothing about unlucky streaks stranding you in overheat begging for an ability type on a character that actually does anything in your situation. Overdrive as a system is fun until you've spent your third Sienna turn in a row stealing from a single mob just to reduce the gauge. At that point it's a burden on the player rather than something interactive. The game's hate system also still sucks but enemies don't do enough damage for that to matter.

The story is nothing to write home about. There are attempts at additional character development, but this is a microcosm of the base game in that not enough time is spent with these characters to care about them. Especially in the DLC but throughout the game as well I found myself wishing the skit system from the Tales Of series were used here. It would maintain the pace of the game for people who care about that while providing depth for the people like myself that crave it. The plot very much feels like a DLC plot in that there's a world-threatening event happening before the final boss. It's hard to justify this plot not being part of the base game. As a consequence it's hard to care about the stakes because you know you're going to resolve things. Nothing that happens in this DLC can affect your struggle against the main enemy of the base game. The DLC also suffers from not addressing the main threat of the universe just like the base game, instead dealing with a proxy. I'm not sure if this is a statement about imminent doom or a promise for a sequel or just poor writing. Either way, nothing is resolved in this DLC story wise.

I just remembered content so bad I had blocked it from my memory already: excavations. Now don't listen to other reviews, these are not hard at all if you recognize what the game is asking you to do. I didn't have to retry a single excavation and don't know why anybody would. It's just so damn tedious. Hit radar, mash A until you get three beeps, then mash A until you get the item. Repeat twice and collect your overpowered class emblem. The dev really missed the mark with this one, not much to say here.

Ultimately I had a good time in the DLC but the exploration aspects did overstay their welcome. If I were to play it again I'd probably just rush the story and be done, which is sad considering how awesome the reward board progression system is. If you're a regular indie game enjoyer, $10 might be hard to justify for this DLC, but if you're used to more expensive games it'll definitely be worth your money. Big fans of the base game should buy this regardless.

When I saw how many systems there were in this game, I got excited. The gear customization looked interesting, the overdrive system looked good, and the characters--I thought--had enough variety to both all be interesting and all interact with these systems in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, the game's extreme responses to rng made all of these things meaningless to me.

For starters, where I'm at there are no defense buffs. None. So when my only single target healer gets targeted by 3 consecutive single target attacks and dies (and this happens WAY MORE than chance would suggest), I legitimately feel like there's nothing I could've done to prevent it. Standard enemy damage values are way too high. And considering resurrections spawn you with so little health that the character dies to a single whole party attack and you don't know when that character will get a turn after the resurrection, it's tough to escape the conclusion that resurrections are useless without great rng. At that point you're faced with two options: do the resurrection, hope you get the good rng and waste all your TP healing back up and rebuffing and refreshing the enemy debuffs that are about to fall off just to be left with nothing afterward; or continue on with the battle leaving that character dead. At this point, I've discovered the latter is almost always correct. That's right, I have higher success rates simply leaving characters dead than resurrecting them after their frequent deaths. Of course, I have the highest success rate simply ending the battle and restarting, hoping the awful rng won't strike again. It's hard taking the mechanics in this game seriously when you feel like you're playing XCOM rather than a JRPG.

Did I mention this mainly applies to the standard encounters on the map? Bosses are a complete joke. I don't think I've ever seen difficulty inverted like this in an rpg before. Playing on the highest difficulty, I enter boss fights expecting to die once or twice to formulate my strategy, given the difficulty of the encounters prior. Instead, by the time I've settled into a good pattern for the fight, the boss is already dead and I'm left expecting... well anything, really. In a world where standard encounter enemies are capable of one shotting squishy characters with certain moves, bosses do nothing. There was a boss on a mine cart, where you had to navigate the mine cart through the mine during the fight, and if you reached the exit before the boss was dead it presumably automatically died or something. I killed the boss less than halfway through the mine on the hardest difficulty. My complaints about standard encounters are clearly not skill issues then, but complaints about disastrous combat balancing. If this game retunes some numbers and gives enemies more interesting movesets to compensate it could be great. As it stands it is a frustrating excursion against rng which at times feels more like XCOM rng than advertised odds.

EDIT: This review was written during Act 1. I am now in Act 3 and the game is far too easy. The climactic boss to end Act 2 fell over before I even had to heal my characters. An Act 3 boss just used two turns to heal himself for 2000 damage... which is less than what I do in two moves. Now the issue is that the game is too easy. I don't know how the dev managed to miss the mark on combat difficulty so badly, but this is a very serious impediment to my enjoyment of what is otherwise a good game.

This review was going to be about gameplay, worldbuilding, story, balance, etc. Instead it's going to be about laziest, lowest effort ending I have ever seen in a game of this scope.

First off, let me lead with saying I got the bad ending. This is fine, bad endings exist for a reason. In this ending, I got a 1 minute cutscene of Geralt resigning himself to death, and a 1 minute cutscene wrapping up the political machinations of Emhyr after he won the war.
...That's it. That's all. Nothing else. Triss and Yennefer? Nothing. Lodge of Sorceresses? Nothing. Friends in newly restored Temeria? Nothing. Zoltan, Dandelion? Nothing. The other witchers of the Wolf school? Nothing. Avallac'h? Nothing. The Baron's family? Nothing. Crach's death? Nothing. The aftermath of killing Madman Lugos? Nothing. What decisions I made that lead to this bad ending? Nothing.

I genuinely did not believe it possible for an ending to be so bad as to sour my entire experience with a game, but here it is. Witcher 3 has an all time worst RPG ending, and I have a significantly lower opinion of the game after spending many dozens of hours in it and ending this way.

I had a feeling this dlc's story would lower quality than the base game when I arrived and was given a vineyard... for showing up. A vineyard that you keep even if you screw everything up and get thrown in jail for your decisions. It's a major plot point that a noble serving the Duchess herself can not afford to buy back his family's vineyard, yet Geralt is given one for making the horseride over, on top of the considerable fee he gets for actually doing the contract.

I did every single piece of content available in this dlc, and the only content I remember are the things I disliked. The tournament? Awful gameplay and uninteresting story. Hanses? Trivialized by mutations, more on that later. Corvo Bianco, your new home? Surprisingly shallow progression system and rewards. Choices mattering? Not really. Music? Utterly forgettable except for when the ambient music has a weird immersion shattering crescendo. If not for Regis I probably would not have anything positive to reflect on. Thankfully he is a well written and voice acted character, though more build up is needed to justify his decision to assist in the final fight.

I encountered many gamebreaking bugs in this dlc, definitely worse quality control than the previous and the base game. My favorite was when I was sliding down a building and was forced to continue sliding after I landed, sliding down a cliffside into a narrow space between the cliff and a house, at which point I was in a perpetual falling motion. The base game handled this by forcing you through terrain after a certain amount of time and then teleporting you once you were out of bounds but I suppose the dlc environments want you to stay and enjoy the view.

After landing inside yet another fantasy land to interrupt the climax of the main questline, I felt what little patience I had left for this tedious story fade, so I checked the wiki to get the good ending. I started checking boxes. Yes, I'm going to complete the relevant quest. Yes I listened to a certain character's story while in the fantasy land. Yes I investigated the 5th victim and selected the correct responses in the resulting conversation. I arrived at the last box, a curious one. "Read the first 2 entries in the Governess's journal." Well I didn't select these dialogue options, but all they did was read aloud verbatim entries in the journal that I had and did read in my inventory. Surely there's not going to be a problem here right? Wrong. Apparently the murder knew I did not read those entries aloud in a cutscene that she both was not in and revealed nothing additional that reading the journal in text form would not. So my choices are either load a save 6 hours back or just move on. If the storyline of this dlc was any good I would probably have reloaded, but 2 hours before the end I already found myself skipping tedious dialogue and hoping I could be back in the base game. The bad end will be canon.

The combat was tedious. A new character upgrade system is introduced and the very first thing you unlock completely trivializes even Death March. With it I get a free 150% attack power and extra ability slots, yet for some reason the designers did not compensate for this with harder fights. There's a new question mark type on the map called Hanses which are bandit fortresses teeming with bandits. I died a couple of times doing these solely because I got overconfident and declined to use healing potions when my health got low, thinking the content too easy to do with healing. I certainly did not need to employ even close to all my tools to beat them. The boss fights in particular were poorly designed, HoS definitely has a leg up there. Really the only resistance I encountered in the boss fights was in the final one, where the boss fires a giant cannon-like attack of birds, the timing to dodge which is unclear to me. This attack brought me close to death but did not kill, and since my damage was high enough I simply killed the boss before he used it enough that I'd be out of supplies.

Overall, my feelings about this DLC vary from mediocre to poor. As a cap to Geralt's journey him retiring to make wine would certainly be a good ending, but the DLC did a poor job of telling this story. If you want to see Geralt's story to its end, pick this up. If you're just expecting more Witcher 3, this DLC is a departure from the base game in many ways, consider carefully if you want it and definitely get it on sale. If you weren't too sold on the base game but were told this DLC is an improvement on it, look elsewhere.

I am honestly astounded at how bad the controls are in this game. The Sonic series has always had a controls issue but I think this is the worst entry in the series in this respect. Just now, two times in a row, I activated a power up that let me attach to walls and move across them. Two times in a row, I held the analog stick to the left when the wall was to my left, which incontrovertibly means to players they want to scale the wall. Instead, right afterward when I pressed the spin button, Sonic scaled the wall downward to his doom, and I could do nothing but watch for 3 seconds as I futilely pressed the analog stick in the other direction.

If you can get past one of the worst control schemes in gaming, the game is pretty good. I like how this game shifted the emphasis in stage rankings from going as fast as possible to actually engaging with the stage. There's a lot of gameplay variety in the different powerups and good reason to revisit earlier stages. Rival Rush is cool but a bit undertuned. I'm beating them first and second try. The music doesn't standout but it isn't bad either. Most of all the stages look cool and do cool stuff without depriving you of control for a minute per stage like Shadow Generations. If you're prepared for the controls to frustrate you, this is a good game.

I had fun with the game but it has some very serious control issues that frequently lead to frustration. Button reassignment appears broken and locked the game when I tried using it, the direction the player is facing and sometimes committed to is not always intuitive, and the camera is one of the worst I've ever dealt with in a platformer. However the world is well crafted, the story is minimal but the dialogue is well written and funny, and ultimately it felt like I was playing a good tribute to Super Mario Sunshine.

Mod support initially looked like a plus. But when I actually tried some of the community-made levels that are spotlighted I didn't find a lot to like. Currently there's a Beach Bash mod that's featured and that level is great. The rest? Varies from solid but forgettable to low effort to downright player hostile. I'll never forget being stuck on one, having to google a video to figure it out, and that person using photo mode to ignore collision just to understand what the level even wanted us to do.

Anybody claiming the game is in a worse state than it was prior to recent updates simply hasn't played the game. Gearbox certainly dropped the ball with the dlc launch but bug fixes have continued to build upon the base of the game. Just yesterday I encountered a situation that crashed my game when sotv dropped that only resulted in a big frame drop this time. However base game bugs have nothing to do with this dlc and frankly don't belong in these reviews.

Many of the reworked items have worked their way into my favorites. Are the new survivors fun? In my opinion no. The stages are except Helminth Hatchery which has been rightfully panned in these reviews. But I wonder if the same people reviewing negative now also gave Survivors of the Void a negative view for Siphoned Forest which features all the same problems. I'm guessing no, partly because Gearbox hate is coloring their response. Don't let the company determine how you feel about the game. Let the game do that.

Tl;dr: New players will likely prefer Remaster. Veterans and fans of older RPGs will likely prefer a modded original game.

For a plug and play experience most people will recognize Remastered as an upgrade over the original, and among those who don't the primary reason will be the frequent crashes. A closer look reveals many changes other than frequent ctds and they are hit or miss. The page of bugs unique to the remastered version is also extensive. Fans of Oblivion or older RPGs will be better served by a modded original game (Most mods are compatible with Remaster but it's not readily apparent what will and what will not break it or cause unintended changes).

All menu actions are accompanied by an extremely loud and grating beep sound that is causing me headaches. I couldn't find any mods that address the issue and the only post I could find that addresses the issue has instructions that no longer seem accurate. Turning sound effects down to 5 out of 100 is enough to prevent splitting headaches but the sound is still grating and who knows what sound effects I'd be missing out on.

EDIT: I forged ahead and I'm not really sure what the hype around this game is for. I frequently have no idea what to do to progress and the combat is nothing to write home about. I saw the story is why people love this game but I'm 3 hours in and haven't encountered any yet.

I picked this up for a bit of nostalgia anticipating a high chance I'd refund. What I got instead was a game that is just a straight up good arcade racer. Let me start with the bad though because it's there.

First up, you will almost certainly need to use google to get this running on a W11 machine, and likely for W10 as well. Linux users also reported trouble. Thankfully the fix is easy, just download two files and drop them in the game folder. That said you will likely still have some crashes during gameplay. Normally this is a deal breaker for me but there are three key points that kept me playing:

1. The crashes only happen during menuing (or when you leave the window), so races are never affected.
2. The game's autosave feature is the best I've ever seen.
3. The main causes seem to be scrolling through menus too quickly or attempting to skip a cutscene after the race. The solution is to simply not do these things. As I mentioned above alt-tabbing is also a big nono and also easily avoided.

The positives? The game is an all around quality arcade racer. There are shortcuts to discover, the upgrade path for your vehicle feels good, there's dynamic vehicle damage, the tracks feel great (except the bonus 4 races), and there's lots of parts and vehicles to choose from. My only real complaints are the game is too easy and too short. The former issue is not big if, like me, you enjoy racing for the tracks and time trials rather than the competition. For the latter issue there are plenty of tracks but the game doesn't use them enough so your progression path and main campaign are short. At the price I paid I think the 4 hours I got out of this game beating the campaign and extra content is a good value (wait for a sale!), but a time trial enjoyer would get even more than that out of this game.