Recent reviews by Faeth

Campaign is fine, but this game is built upon the late-game mechanics. As such, I can't recommend it in it's current state. On-death effects (nearly all of which are explosions) are far too prevalent in this game, and it's extra punishing for any class in melee. I played a sorc and didn't notice it, but decided to swap to a monk. I constantly lose maps due to a ground effects I either couldn't see through ground clutter/corpses/similar colors or didn't have time to dodge due to animation lock. It just feels like lazy way to claim they are making things harder, but not in a way that's meaningful. This is also a common bit of feedback on their forums.

I really enjoy hard content that makes me feel good when I plan or play better to overcome it. This game does have that, but sort of mechanic is the opposite.

I grabbed this to play with a friend on a private server, which removes a lot of the gripes I've read about official servers. While taming dinos with friends has had its fun moments, especially at the start ,it has too many bugs mixed with weird decisions on mechanics that ruin the fun. New content drops seem to be far more important than fixing even simple things, like being able to stand on a slanted greenhouse without your character model stuttering around randomly. I know new content sells, but there are some long standing bugs and complaints that have gone unheard/ignored for years.

If you don't care about the list of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that come to mind, skip this next paragraph, but it does give you some of the spectrum of frustration that comes with the game.

Trying to tame things is a slog when hit registry flat out refuses to work. Lead a target to account for lag, then see the blood splatter and the tranq dart in the dino? Didn't count. Shoot thin air, and suddenly it hits with no spatter. Come out of a cave run and sometimes the gamma gets messed up or the textures for the rest of the world get extremely dark, nealy black. Some enemies *cough* golems *cough* can chain punt you 20 yards every hit. Loss of control actions like fear last 20s+ where you just get to stare at your screen and wait. Torpor buildup from dinos doesn't reduce with armor/level/fortitude like their damage, so when you have thousands of health and armor means you can stay unconscious for several minutes while they do <1 damage per hit. Dinos in any stance that will attack other creatures while you're not mounted on them ignore follow whistling and cannot be stopped unless you can manage to hop on their backs while they move around, which is an absolute pain with birds. Increasing speed on a dragon does nothing for its handling so you can't turn in the tiny arena with the Wyvern boss. I also died from full health in that arena for colliding with the force field's edge somehow. Clipping issues galore, one of the most annoying of which is when you get stuck INSIDE your dinos that are on follow and have to relog to free yourself. The list just seems to keep growing every time I log in.

At the end of the day, I would trade the next new season pass content for more bug fixes and tweaks to functionality to stabilize what could be a really great game.

Between one-way network errors trying to play with a friend and losing 7mil souls even though I reclaimed them (save bug when exiting a game session), this game was a terrible waste of time. Needs several more bug fixes to live up the souls games it tries to emulate.

Played through the first half of the game before I stopped enjoying the novelty of a sci-fi soulsborne. The gameplay and level design feels very unpolished. Combat is incredibly repetitive. Bosses were only somewhat interesting. Character progression is slow and almost entirely based on dropped item farming, which doesn't feel rewarding. Level design felt okay until the 3rd time I returned to Central Production to advance the story to find they just kept changing enemy types in the zone. I wanted to like it, but I honestly couldn't.

Minecraft meets MMO, except the MMO elements are very poorly executed. The game becomes a woeful gear grind after about 6 hours of play. You're essentially stuck doing lower levels of content until you can upgrade your items, which increases your effective level. It's similar to the WoW item level system, but poorly implemented as the grind gets exponentially longer, but the material gathering does not follow suit in the slightest.

Moreover, for an MMO to be playable, you need stable servers. It has been years since I've had such terrible rubber-banding and random "teleporting" because of the server's inadequacy. I've died many times to easy content because hitting the potion key didn't result in driking a potion for >6 seconds, or because the server believed I was standing in fire. If the server-side is the source or truth for player positionig, you'd better have much more stability than the Trove servers are capable of.

I'm also quite disappointed in the difficulty scaling. Moving from Uber 3 to Uber 4 (essentially tiers 8 and 9 in the difficulty) causes every boss fight to be a minion fest. The bosses start spawning minions at an alarming rate, which makes the fights require AE abilities to deal with the rapid spawn quickly enough to not be simply overwhelmed.

The game, while entertaining for a while, has lost all of the MMO appeal, and now it's just another Minecraft clone in my book.

Fighting seems very slow, like playing Smash Brothers Brawl, then trying to play the oringal N64 game again. It's very cumbersome and finicky, and too many enemies move faster than your character. It is also difficult to understand whether or not you are actually progressing toward unlocking the other two classes as you start restricted to one.

Even without the curse debuff, I felt that my character was covered in molasses and could not act as quickly as many of the mobs, and when surrounded my 3 quicker mobs, I was quickly outgunned and simply died regardless of my health.

For reference, I played up to level 15 before losing interest in this game. While pretty and audibly pleasing, the gameplay lacks direction and polish.

Fun for the first hour or so, but as the game progresses, levels layout, enemy design, and general gameplay start to feel like they were not created with good gameplay in mind. This leads to a lot of small fustrations that make the game difficult to describe as "fun." Instead, it feels like the game is designed to simply punish the player for anything less than the developers' ideas of perfection.