Recent reviews by Dydzio

"Decent RPG, bad soulslike" - i played game on version 1.6

I played most of soulslike games (ds1/2/3, old lords of the fallen, lies of P, sekiro, part of Elden Ring - need to return someday)
Overall rating is positive but it is just slightly above neutral rating for me, with extra appreciation of free patches and fluff stuff like new starting classes after beating game. It took me 60h to beat without any achievement hunting and doing extra quests. I think this game won't be worth non-discount price for many people.

Pros of the game:
- Complex and interconnected world
- easily accessible and useful ranged weapons
- possibility to repeat already beaten bosses from the menu, existence of boss gauntlets with item rewards
- core system for character stats and damage/defense scaling is decent
- sometimes extremely funny enemy ragdolls and their weapons spinning in place like crazy
- bunch of side paths to explore
- not too short, though not as long as dark souls games
- graphics are good overall, but I do not play games for graphics

Cons (oh boy, this will be long)
- details/balance of weapon stats - in dark souls IMO there is no real problem with "trap weapons" when upgrading because weapons with bad stat scaling got other advantages in form of high base damage boost per upgrade or they have good base properties such as range, speed etc. In this game I fully upgraded Pureblade Mace to +10 and it was WAY worse than greatsword that I tried later, called Justice - better strength scaling made Pureblade Mace have 0 real benefits, whether paired with shield or dual wielded
- details/balance of movement and combat system - it has multiple janky/unfun elements or those that require relearning after other soulslike games due to having own quirks:

1. perfect block seems to have "startup delay frames" that require timing it before enemy attack rather than together with said attack - based on what I read it depends on lefthanded / dualwielded weapon type which is like dark souls 3 parry timing but both mechanics have way different reward in both games so it is awful design IMO, when paired with another perfect block quirks listed in "2."
2. perfect block is going rough on eating your stamina, lowering its reward, which is already low due to critical damage after staggering enemy with bunch of perfect blocks being relatively low and there are a lot of boss attacks that you cannot perfect block - so this is reverse sekiro where rolling worked rather well for me and timing perfect blocks was not very good way to go
3. character movement and friction feels like walking on a bit slippery surface - maybe not exactly a con but some people are used to "exact movement feel" from dark souls that is also more faithfully recreated in Lies of P, rolling makes your character move 5 meters in roll direction
4. same weapon types all have same moveset, character moves forward like crazy when combo-ing hits on many weapon - also maybe not exactly a con and it is nice against enemies dashing backwards but it does not feel like classic soulslike and it is fairly easy to fall out of a ledge when attacking
5. interrupting enemy hits seems to be a bit weirdly balanced when it works with what kind of weapon, seems it is harder to interrupt enemy who is in "just before his hit lands" animation phase - logic for that felt more fair in Dark Souls and Lies of P

- locations are the real boss in this game, there are tons of mobs, locations are long, sometimes with complex navigation to go forward, bosses are cutscene simulator compared to dumb idea to have elite mob every 20 meters in late game, that are recycled "minibosses" from earlier parts of the game, often with awful annoying oneshoting hits - when i was getting to bosses after fully exploring locations i was already tired and not willing to fight the boss, though most of bosses were really easy and took like 3 tries for me, so this is location traversing game rather than boss fighting game
- if you want to explore 100% of the world and minimize chances to skip any item then prepare to be tortured by this game by revisiting every single corner while in Umbral mode (good luck getting all healing item upgrades and not skipping any "undead bellys" by just shining the lantern now and then) - there is also slightchance that you will miss some corners when visiting in Umbral mode and not in normal mode, due to umbral filling some passages/holes with goo
- there is a lot of enemy 3d model recycling so through the whole game there is no big variety of monsters, some get recolors and slight look changes for more variety but base model and animations remain the same
- little con: it is kinda stupid that amount of "souls" gained from every killed enemy does not scale much through the whole game, so starting game locations may be better place for potential farming than late game ones due to enemies being way easier, though it does not feel like bad thing since scaling of required "souls" for new level is more linear rather than exponential like in dark souls
- umbral is not toilet AFK friendly
- no "easy modes" for non-boss parts of the game in advertised gameplay modifiers from patch 1.5 - so probably no replay for me
- IMO main problem with the game based on some stuff I wrote above is that pairing of large locations with large amount of monsters that overwhelm players who try to navigate around rather than rush path forward they already know make locations very tedious to do and even more tedious to fully explore

if I am to replay the game I absolutely need some mod or new setting that will remove 75% of elite trash mobs, and nerf attack/HP of every single monster left (except bosses) by 50% - I am surprised that this kind of stuff is not in advanced game modifiers

PS. Yes, I had no such "trash mob density" problems in dark souls 2 - also in there I could at least grind Iron Keep or pathway to Sir Alonne to make monsters not respawn

Great classic game that i played for first time when I was 9 years old, spent like entire 2 years dealing with marvin mode, bruteforcing letter combinations to find new console and summoning autocompletions, told parents to buy polish-english dictionary also when i was 9 to try guess monster names for console autocompletion with help of it, i spent like 1000+ hours in this game and i was absolutely addicted

One of best RPG games in history

It should serve as reference for other RPG games in:

- how difficult is "medium difficulty" for RPG game
- to what extent should RPG game give hints to players
- to what extent freedom of exploration should RPG game have
- what amount of replay value is nice to have in RPG games (mods not accounted for)
- how to set high standard when it comes to game moddability and amount of additional sandbox fun with very functional game console

Combat system served its purpose when the game was not so old, it did not age very well but IMO it is supposed to be like 25% about skill and 75% about character development + passing minimum acceptable threshold for progress in game world + making good decisions in the past. Some people still enjoy mods that rely on combat skill where you need to grind repetitive monster AI for many minutes without mistakes.

In the past this game was one of precursors for my interest in game development, now i work as game developer. I grinded countless hours with game console, modifying properties of living stuff and items, playing as non-human etc.

PS. downvoters who cannot run game just have "skill issue" of modern gamers having absolutely crap level of being tech-savvy / "PC power user" compared to people who played games like 15-20 years ago. I do not use Windows anymore but when I did and played CD version of this game 2 years ago then I ran totally unmoddedd classic edition of this game on modern WIndows after some tinkering.

Deleted my old positive review to create negative one for now due to scummy practices of upper management from Bandai Namco. Battle pass and tekken shop are not big deal for me but for fully priced game that also has ultimate edition etc. this does not look good. I would rather see them spending manpower on fixing annoyances first. But the real deal is Namco copyright striking game modders on youtube, twitter etc, some got their youtube acounts banned from copyright strike bombing multiple mod showcase videos. Today i decided to change review to negative due to starting copyright strikes against tekkenmods.com website. I am not very motivated to play this game for now, i barely launched it in last 2 weeks. Shame because i have 2500 hours played in tekken 7 and expected to have even more in t8.

Anyway, gameplay is good but there are some more or less annoying stuff in this game:
1. no automated points loss for people intentionally disconnecting during games
2. no infinite rematch in quick match and 1vs1 lounge
3. no tekken ball matchmaking accessibility from main menu
4. no ability to chat in lounge while using arcade machines
5. I play on linux and there are problems with PS5 crossplay matchmaking for linux/steam deck players atm
6. why cant they give proper hard bots to fight against - "AI trained" super ghosts suck at defense - Namco did it correctly 25 years ago when tekken tag 1 arcade machines had ex super hard difficulty mode

"Game itself is good" - so people looking for 'objective reviews', here you go. To add more - I would enjoy having mokujin back but i guess can't have everything, announced content for release, and starting roster count with DLC1 (36 characters) is good. Many people who overly care about "easier execution" or something like that probably underestimate overall complexity of game, and characters with piss easy execution also exist in tekken games and allow you properly focus on learning fundamentals, matchups & stuff. People whined about Akuma in T7 that godlike execution is not excuse for 170 damage combos so tekken team listened and you got what you wanted, so nobody will whine about kazuya or whoever's execution as excuse that character is OP. And console players trolling that they wont allow crossplay with PC due to keyboard macro users will have 1 less excuse, when macros will be redundant.

I give negative review because was unable to properly play closed beta in current state so for me and people similar to me experience is negative (wow, what a big surprise). The problem is the closed beta test version of the game does not work properly on linux as there are gamebreaking issues when playing with other players. I use linux exclusively. First beta (CNT) worked well, so for first beta there would be thumb up. For full version of game I purchased ultimate edition and hopefully devs or valve will fix it for linux, then surely my game review will be positive.

Tl;dr: good game in general sense, can't enjoy personally due to technical issues so "bad" for me personally

Except that it was only game I had to play with pad (and buy pad for it) due to crappy mouse support... It was nice to play back in the day, I molested the game more in Remastered version.

Not really fan of shooter games, played it spontaneously in the past now and then. I spent most of the time on rocket jump servers and those are really good fun

Good game with amazing bossfights and mediocre replay value. One of not many games that are worth buying in modern times, where most games are too easy and made for casual scrubs, rather than people who can dedicate few hours a day learning games. Got platinum trophy + I beat Owl charmless, but then I decided to speed up my platinum run rather than mastering true monk fight while charmless.

Mods that make game harder are additional benefit that add some more longevity to the game.

I have over 5000 hours in this game outside steam over years and while I did not play all main MMO games on the market, I think this is one of the best possible picks, taking into account active population, no real "pay to win", amount of content (though amount of hardcore content is a bit lackluster compared to casual one, still can deliver a lot of fun), there is also optional grind for convenience or cosmetic stuff (getting rich / crafting legendary items which allow you to change stats and do not provide strength advantage over non-grindable version, I personally went for that) that are not deal breaker for people who do not want grind stuff. Without grinding you can enjoy all sorts of content without being weaker than others, you just need ascended quality gear which is not a big deal to get. Some semi-proof that I know what I am talking about - one of my characters: https://gw2efficiency.com/c/Dydzio

IMPORTANT: Note that the game in reality is "buy to play" which is still very fair way of monetization compared to monthly fee that grows into huge costs over months/years.

Also take in mind that all MMO's take some design choices, some cater to some people, while choices in other MMO's can cater to other people. There is no open world player killing in PvE, there is no constant gear grind (max level doesn't get increased over time by design), in competitive pvp matches gear strength is temporarily buffed/nerfed so all players have same strength etc. There is no "holy trinity" split of character classes (heal, tank, dps). Leveling is easy and serves as sort of tutorial, vast majority of activities are designed for max player level.

I bet over time there was/will be minority of negative comments about "elite specialization that requires expansion is stronger than base game ones" or "raids / selling items / map-wide chat are hidden behind expansion purchase paywalls" - I would ignore these, anyway amount of content to try before buying expansions and living world is fair enough.

PS. purchasing pretty much everything except expansions can be done via grinding gold if you are stubborn and do not want to spend money for living world episodes etc. Still, I think the amount of content in this game is huge and worth the money

EDIT: if I got to nitpick about something then this game is sorta "chaotic" and "confusing" as it doesn't exactly tell / hold your hand and explain what you should do or not, so new players tend to do stuff thet they may not enjoy because they do not know if "it's better to do it" or not. I answer this right now: you can safely skip, stuff will not get locked out as you level up etc. Pretty much everything is optional, including "heart missions" and "story missions" with green markers, though story tends to give fair amount of non-grindy experience for first time players, and sometimes decent rewards. And the game doesn't exactly tell you what do you need and what are your options, so you browse various gamemodes, events, crafts and achievements to see ways to get ascended gear and other useful items. The upside is that community is very friendly and you may be able to get your question answered by other players when you ask in steam wforums /gw2 reddit, some decent ingame guild, or maybe make LFG advertisement in mentoring tab (or however it was named) that you need some sort of help.
There may be other beginner player "confuse points" like LFG for dungeons being fairly empty p tl;dr answer is that they are oldest and now unupdated content, their rewards are poor and there is no big interest from veteran players to regularly do them + many beginners have social awkwardness for starting groups etc. If all you see is "speedrun" group then create own "beginners, no rush" group etc.

"Walmart Souls" would be proper title for this game - stats / gear progression is not interesting - basically you rely on finding more and more OP weapons compared to what you have ATM and use that - there is no big effort put to adjusting weapons to your playstyle. Enemies balance is sorta weird. This is not good for gameplay-driven game that is inspired by Dark Souls. Some stuff you are supposed to avoid / dodge are badly tuned and certain locations may be too complicated to navigate for some people. Maybe i will play it again someday when I will be bored but to do 100% of achievements in this game i would need to be paid competitive salary. The game is not so bad, especially when bought for discounted price but some things are really poorly done and game is more shallow than it could be. I also remember that some shielding enemies were pain in the butt to deal with without really skillful ways to beat them other than repeatedly relying on AI flaws or some strong mechanics / attacks