Recent reviews by Waffle McSpicy

For the longest time I thought this game a circus, and its creator a clown (despite his stellar, past achievements), but I realized in the end, I was actually the clown.

Putting hours into it did not change my opinion back then, I even considered a refund.
Fast-forward a year or two later, out of boredom, I randomly stumbled on someone else playing it, and this most random, non-story related sequence in the game had completely redeemed the entire thing for me.
It was the most profound thing I've ever experienced in a game.
I then understood why people were never able to objectively and precisely describe what made this game so good for them, because it's not a thing that can be explained, but only experienced.
Classic example of something that can only be "shown, not told".

I just wish I had more patience and time to experience this myself in-game, because the game IS quite literally a drag.

Currently I feel like I had a better time with Saber Interactive's other game, World War Z, but this game has the WH 40K advantage to it, which should help it sustain itself longer than WWZ.

The environment design, as far as Warhammer 40K environments go, is nothing short of amazing.
Movement and combat feels good and weighty, as it should be with space marines - think WWZ but with space marines.
Music is unremarkable - even Darktide had more memorable ambient and battle music.

As with any game, it is only as good as its control interface(s).
The default keyboard & mouse control scheme feels awkward, and ultimately feels like it should've spent more time in the oven.
To be fair, yes, the newer mechanics in this game are new to these developers, but not to other games in existence that have had the same range of actions too, but mapped them to fewer, more concise controls (melee, ADS, shooting, sprinting, dodging, blocking/dodging, abilities).
There is also a dedicated 'sprint' key in this game, which feels redundant since they could've just made a 'walk' key and have everyone sprint all the time instead - like I said all this could've been resolved if they gave it more time to cook, maybe had a few more rounds of quality user testing and feedback, etc.

Mechanics like parrying/blocking could have also been explained better, especially since they can change with weapon upgrades/perks, which could also use better explanation in-game.

The perfect parry window doesn't feel intuitive - it works similar to dark souls where you need to begin the parry earlier and you get punished if you're late, but the saving grace is this game instead forgives you for late parries by turning the parry into a block (that still blocks all damage).
Parries in this game are unlike in Sekiro where your parries are best initiated right at the point of impact/taking damage.

Progression - just like World War Z, the one turn off I have in both games is the amount of grinding you have to do to unlock the better variants of your weapons, skills and equipment. World War Z had the same progression design and at some point they released a bundle of their game with a lot of the equipment already unlocked with extra (progression) currency to boot, probably in hopes of sustaining their dying game. So I imagine this game will have the same bundle released eventually, so if you don't want to grind, I suggest you wait for that to be released and buy that instead.

There are also dumb issues with key rebinding in this game where, for example, if you wanted to rebind the 'E' to 'F', and 'E' was mapped to 2 actions, the game would block you from binding the second one to 'F'.

lmao

I really wanted this game to be good, but what you get is an uncooked meal, sold as cooked and ready to consume (not).
It also seems like the devs (not owners) were overworked to hell and back, so please take it easy on the actual programmers and designers.

A very smooth, enjoyable game with very distinctive visual style and audio design.
Overall a very polished game out of the box.. if it wasn't such an intentional grindfest.
If there was an award for 'best adopter of ingame grinding mechanics' this game would be the top contender for 2023.
That said, this is still a better collectathon than Assassin's Creed games.

The game is full of unnecessary mechanics that force you to replay the game multiple times in order for you to just have a CHANCE at obtaining certain items. There are also MULTIPLE in-game mechanics that are hardcapped by the passing of real-world time to force you to play a lot, and play often.

And then imagine a slightly buggy, unoptimized game, and the first patch that hits you is one that removes an XP farm and balances (i.e. nerfs) weapons/abilities.. in a PvE game.

This is my personal opinion but the developers absolutely do NOT respect your time and this is made clear to me by how they go out of their way to inflate players' playtime hours by prioritizing the elimination of "farm shortcuts" and "OP builds" (or "exploits") ahead of even basic bugfixes - those who have followed and played the game since launch would be well aware of this.

The game is also not at all optimized for older systems and is constantly and consistently CPU heavy, so forget about getting this for the Steam Deck or similar.
DLSS/FSR/XeSS is also required to comfortably run this, even on high end GPUs (RTX 3080/4080).

TLDR; only buy if you have lots of time to kill and do not mind grindy mechanics - this IS a cool action game with lots of cool build synergies and very little statfa-.. stat minmaxing involved, relative to games like Nioh (no rarity mechanics or stat RNG - all players, items, weapons, abilities have the same stats).

GOTY, massive upgrade for someone who came from the PS1/2 era HP games.

This game was downright disgusting back when it was riddled with bugs and suffered poor optimization, but with the help of technologies like AI Frame Generation, FSR3/DLSS3, and years of patches, I admit I can see a little of why there were so many people who truly loved this game and its setting.

While it is true that CDPR has lied to everyone on release, they've made a lot of changes to the game since, culminating in the latest 2.0 patch, which sees the game vastly improved in many aspects, on top of a new (paid) DLC.
The most significant change to me is that 'regional enemy NPC levels' are no longer a thing, and literally every enemy NPC will scale to you. You can visit literally anywhere at level 5 and not have to worry about being gatekept by level requirements.

TLDR 2023 Q4: Worth it if your hardware has access to GPU AI Frame Generation tech, and FSR3/DLSS3

Only out for a week and already there are AFK bots, hackers, unfixed bugs all the way from beta where you can move before the round even starts (you can move during the initial round timer) giving you an advantage.
Maps like broken arrow where you can sit in one corner and none of the spectator camera angles can see it.

It's rare these days to see a game actually feature complete, stable and optimized on release. Well done FromSoft.
This reminds me of the level of polish put into games like Ace Combat 7.

Classic AC fans should note that this does not play like older PS1/2 era AC games, blade attacks have cooldowns, enemies have a stagger/posture bar, and AC turnrate is no longer a thing.
AC4/ACFA levels of breakneck speeds are also no longer the focus (though you can abuse Assault Boosting to achieve the same thing).
Permaflight is also sadly no longer a thing, though hover/quad legs allow you to sort of do the same thing.

fight me coward