Recent reviews by KneeKo

It's an expansive game, it's very tempting to get engrossed into, but the wording of of the description of EVERYTHING is just plain bad. The budget for translation is so low that they had to hire a half-competent translator resulting in run-ons, redundancy, and just plain poor ability/mechanics/lore descriptions that will have you read long-ass text repeatedly.

If this game was much smaller in scale in terms of things you can do, and the amount of mechanics or whatnot you can utilize, this'd be very forgivable. But when an EXTREMELY SIMPLE PASSIVE SKILL THAT HAS 3 LEVELS that has 8px Arial font takes very close to 1/4 of my 1920x1080 screen for desciption because of how much jank the description has (due to aforementioned run-ons, redundancies, and just outright poor word choice), then the game is NOT ENJOYABLE AT ALL.

The balance of this game is all over the game. And it requires too much inventory micromanagement. Too many resources to manage, requires alot of back and forth because of lack inventory space.

It feels like those "Survival" mobile games that limit inventory space and caps the stacks of each resources, whilst giving you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of item types.

For example, in one house, with an 8-slot bag, and a car with an empty trunk, it would take around 1-5 minutes to get to a single unlooted house. It will then take about the same amount of time to fill up your inventory, your companion's inventory, AND your car's trunk. And then you drive back to base, because you still have items you couldn't pick up but need.

See, limiting inventory and stacking of items is great if you're not building a base, and maintain upkeep, AND make sure you have enough supplies and manpower for your exploration. But then you'll find that you run out of ammo or anything in a single travel, and it's extremely tedious.

The above cycle is the literal gameplay loop, and it takes out so much engagement out of the game. I sincerely do not recommend this sorry excuse for a "survival" game.

Aside from being a loading simulator like their other games because of poor asset compression, the game stutters badly for its age, and the sound effects are all over the place. I wish I could refund this and buy another game instead, but here we are.

EDIT: I want to recommend the game for the sole reason of how open to critique and professional the developer is, as you can see by how he responded to my harsh review. But I want to be objective, and I think it's only fair that I do not recommend the game yet with majour features missing 5 years after development. If this game involved high-fidelity graphics, a very complex engine (more than what it currently uses), then I would probably still recommend it, but at this point in time, I want to be fair to the end users and not recommend it yet.

The game plays very well, but when there are questionable mechanics that scream incomplete and totally gimp other classes, then I can't recommend it at this point. The game has been in EA for a long time now, and if the duration was lower, I'd probably forgive it.

My favourite class is the rogue for these types of games, and the ruleset for flanking to activate Sneak Attacks is extremely strict. This literally gimps my rogue and just makes him a niche character for exploring dungeons and opening lockboxes.

At this point in time, I'd expect atleast the basic systems to have been tweaked properly, and would just lack content. But it's not, and over 70% of intended skills and gameplay elements are still missing after being in EA for a long time.

A roguelike should not have you attached to a character, not with every piece of item you find that literally defines if your run is going to be decent or bad. This game is 90% luck, 10% skill. Tactics can only take you so far when RNG decides your only weapon or a part of your build is destroyed and you are rendered literally useless.

It's definitely ok to have RNG suddenly make things hectic, not because it decided to destroy your build in one single RNG shot that renders every other piece of your equipment useless.

It's a decent game with good production values for the asking price. The gameplay loop is engaging enough, though the AI can be real idiots.

GOOD:
- Great English voice acting on other characters. Can't testify for Russian, since I am unsure of how it should sound to be "decent".
- Good graphics. The fidelity is quite great, textures, filtering, placement of foliage and clutter makes sense, And with the recent Enhanced Edition update, Ray Tracing was implemented together with DX12, which makes the game look nicer.
- Nice gameplay loop. Gathering items, doing missions, discovering clues are quite fun.
- A decent story with choices that actually matter and affect everything in the game.

BAD:
- Awkward English VA for MC. While the quality is definitely there, he sounds a bit... awkward because he is too enthusiastic or expressive in a lot of situations.
- Dumb AI. The AI is not that bad, but they can be very dumb when they decide to just stand in an open area to shoot you. They are not very good in utilizing cover.
- Very bad optimization. I am unsure if this comes with the recent update, but the game's optimization is all over the place. With Ray Tracing on max on my AMD card, the performance impact is very low, but some areas have less than 30FPS even if I tone down the graphics settings of everything.
- Low selection of tools. While the price means you get less options to tackle missions, it can be quite underwhelming to only have a few number of weapons/tools to use in your disposal.
- Some items are straight useless. In harder difficulties, Gardens for example are literally useless and detrimental because of how low resources can be gathered versus the cost and the output. Traps do not serve any purpose at all, and some guns are just useless.

For its asking price, the game is actually a great bang for the buck. Can confidently say the full price (undiscounted) is justified, and with the updates still coming to the game, it's a great way to support the developers.

The game is good, but the difficulty is just artificially crafted against you.

Good:
- Decent graphics, animation
- Excellent voice acting.

Bad:
- EDIT: The game's length is absolutely too short. The game is close to 1.0, and only 3 chapters with no other variants of the main quest, or perhaps other "custom campaigns", the game is way too short. I just finished it and there's literally just 3 maps, padded by unfair difficulty. There is also no incentive to play repeatedly when you can only influence your playthrough with very limited variations, but the whole main quest is just one and the same. How you get there just makes it just a little varied by either lucky or bad side events.
- EDIT: VERY, VERY little incentive for multiple playthroughs. The only "roguelite" upgrade you get is a cube that has about 4 levels, each with about 3-4 spells, of which you can only carry 1. This spell can be casted on anyone's turn with varied effects, and aside from unlocking 6 more classes that are slightly different from it's main branching one, that's it.
- EDIT: Small ability variation. There's about 3 subvariations per class, and there's 3 main classes, each with 4 abilities (counting the basic "attack" ability), and each character "ranks up" (levels up) to a max of about 5, and each skill can be upgraded to 2 other sub-branches that offer extremely little difference. The skill might add a little debuff, or it might get stronger in power, but that's it. There's very little variation in builds that doesn't motivate multiple playthroughs.
- EDIT: Very little enemy variation. There's the abominations, which has a long-range attacker, a melee attacker, a "mini-boss" behemoth, a quick, four-legged semi-range/melee hybrid. And then there's the humans, which has archers, "mages", and warriors, very similar to yours.
- Unintuitive UI. Everything is all over the place, and there's a severe lack of intuitivity and descriptions on effects of buffs/debuffs. It has to be inflicted first before you can find out the fine print of the actual effects.
- Combat is artificially rigged against you. Enemy numbers, positioning, and damage is stacked against you to provide an artificial difficulty that's not at all challenging, but simply annoying.
- You can't reposition your units. A common, "easy" encounter has your units placed in a wide open area in the center, with your attacks literally always a square away from being able to reach your target. Meanwhile, enemies will always have you in range, are always a square or two away from cover (if they are not automatically in cover), and deals the same, if not greater, amount of damage as you.
- While enemy stats are lower than you, their numbers always make up for said lack of stats. It is manageable, but only because you have brains, and the AI is just braindead and is made up with the unfair said mechanics above to make it "difficult.

I don't see the difficulty improving anywhere in the future, since I think this is what the devs think difficulty should be like. It's manageable, but unfair, and is not challenging at all, just extremely annoying. Lack of player agency is what makes the game difficult in terms of placement and movement.

If I could refund this game, I would. With content padded by difficulty, only 3 chapters, 1 main quest with just varying "events", very little class options, very little ability variations, this game is just... I don't know, not worth it. Maybe buy it on sale, or play a game it's extremely similar to called Trials by Fire which has far, FAR more build variations, equipment upgrades, equipment slots, and lots of campaigns you can play through with large maps, and varied enemy types, AND interesting events. The initial position of your hero is also not predetermined that you are automatically in a bad position.

EDIT: DLC review.

Base game's story was good. But this...It peaked at Messmer, but suddenly went downhill very fast.

It almost feels like some DEI team took over, made Miquella an overpowered LGBT (LITERALLY) that charms people, and somehow think that kind of evil is cool and relatable. This forced LGBT thing would've been good if there was some good pacing, but there was some issues in how certain story elements transitioned into the next.

This is why you don't hand over your game to LGBT DEI woketards. They don't know what makes games good, and they will try to force these BS despite it not properly fitting into the lore.

Optimization issues, and some bad texture pop-ins when the level loads is atrocious. The game crashes worse than me after drinking 10 espresso shots in a day. The also has some serious issues with the clunkiness of hitboxes and attack action queueing is not a thing. I should be able to DODGE after a COMMITTED when I hold the attack button because you force me to do it lest I attack slower by clicking manually.

At this time, these should not be existing anymore. But alas, the mixed reviews definitely deserve it. Adding content but not addressing the clunkiness of combat and the optimization issues is NOT excusable.

As promised, even if I don't play the game anymore, I bought this DLC just because of the sheer love the developers have thrown into this game.