Recent reviews by invertedteapot

How hard is it to do some bug squashing on a game you have not fundamentally changed in 10 years other than bolt-on additions? Never had a game crash on me so many times and the fact that we're approaching a month without any acknowledgement, much less any patches is a kick in the teeth.

Literally been playing these games since EDF 2017 came to the Xbox 360 almost 20 years ago and this is the first time I've ever regretted giving these devs money.

EDIT 7/5/2024: Whatever FromSoft cooked into the recent patches has dramatically improved my experience with the DLC in terms of performance issues like hitching, stuttering, and crashes... DLC is chock-full of new content with definite highs and lows.

The highs first:

-Crazy amount of new content with new weapons, armor, lore, etc. I'm 40 hours into my play-through and still haven't worked my way through everything. Absolutely worth the price of admission.

-Map is huge, atmospheric, and does a great job showing off future locations right from the get-go without letting you get too far ahead of your self.

-I actually appreciate their approach to the DLC's difficulty scaling with the fragments and spirit ashes as it promotes exploring the map early. Would have been easy to just let players steam roll their way through the DLC with their existing end-game builds, but they clearly put some time into making sure this was still a challenge for longtime players.

-New bosses are unique and mostly hits without too much repetition outside of a certain dragon encounter that you run into a few too many times in my opinion.

Now for the lows:

-I wish the NPC quests were just a pinch more obvious about what you need to do (or not do to avoid breaking them). I went into exploring the various areas headfirst and found out post-hoc that I had unintentionally locked myself out of a lot of this content.

-Navigating to certain areas is incredibly obfuscated... like across the map, hidden by a dungeon, non-obvious pathing in legacy dungeons, or in one case locked behind an emote in a hidden location.

-Splinter Souls section in one part of the game was obnoxious.

-Also, f*** Commander Gaius. This guy legit needs either a nerf or a lot of work on his hitboxes... damage is also totally inconsistent and defeating him pretty much comes down to luck from what I've seen.

----------------------------------------------------Original Review--------------------------------------------------

Game hitches, stutters, and crashes constantly in the middle of boss fights, which is especially frustrating considering that everything in the DLC hits like a floored truck without brakes going downhill. I'm still having a good time, but I would be having a better one if the game would run consistently (even if it ran worse on average overall). Base game ran fine on a much older GPU, but the release patch for the DLC just absolutely chugs on a card that's less than a year and a half old at this point.

Punish me for being bad at the game, not because the game is failing to run properly. Git gud & patch/optimize your game, FromSoft.

Just finished my first playthrough (Clocked in at about 45 hours for a first run; based on what I've seen so far, subsequent NG or NG+ runs will go much quicker) and it's Puppet souls-- what more can be said? Okay, maybe a lot can be said.

Probably the best non-From souls-like game mechanically and aesthetically, even with what is going to sound like a lot of complaints-- but want folks to know what they're getting into. For the sake of comparison and a bit of a tl;dr: big Bloodborne vibes environmentally, similar story combat wise, but with a strong emphasis on parrying like in Sekiro.

Combat felt mostly fair with several encounters requiring trial and error prior to mastering them, but there are a few pain points. Trash mobs are mostly insignificant as they should be, the mini-bosses range from being pushovers to being tougher than some of the early game bosses... but a few of the late-game bosses are absolutely punishing damage sponges. One boss in particular (the "last" boss outside of an optional boss fight afterward) was particularly frustrating to manage due to how their AoE/ranged attacks and physical attacks could be chained together with virtually no down-time in between them. This may sound nitpicky, but easily the boss that took me the longest to beat based on having to dodge multiple simultaneous ranged/AoE attacks and wide-sweeping blows all at once. I barely managed to scrape my way to victory on my final attempt by spamming upwards of a dozen throwable items at the end.

Parrying (called "perfect guarding") for all the emphasis it is given can also feel a bit inconsistent since many enemies can and will mix-up their attack combos and timing... make sure to leverage blocking and dodging as well; all of these mechanics are essential to making it through to the end with different enemies forcing you to approach each situation differently.

Level design overall is fairly linear with decent environment variations throughout. There are some fun nooks and crannies to explore, but would not have minded more involved side-quests (almost all consist of stumbling upon random mementos and suddenly having NPCs jibber-jabber at you, sometimes without you realizing why) and meandering side-locations. Gravity is also not your friend either and this recurring boss will frequently rear its head throughout the game with hidden enemies knocking you to your death on many occasions. Additionally, there are certain arenas that could have benefited from fewer items to clip on; it is disarmingly easy to end up stuck on an environmental asset only to get gutter-stomped by a boss or horde of enemies.

There are a few novel mechanics mixed in here as well with the two best being the legion arms and weapon assembly systems and the least useful being the fable arts system.

Legion arms allow you to swap out the playable character's mechanical arm for one of a different flavor, including ones with elemental effects, ranged/mobility attacks, or defensive properties. These can be an absolute lifesaver mid-encounter and your experience will vary dramatically depending on how you do (or don't) utilize them. These are balanced out via either a charge-up time or recharge period and by utilizing a charge system that is not easily replenished without reaching a stargazer.

More impressive, in my opinion, is the weapon assembly system which allows you to swap out blades and hilts of any non-boss weapon in the game to change up weapon animations and special weapon properties. If you want to use a certain weapon, but it either doesn't scale well with your build or perhaps you just hate the move set-- you can change out parts on a whim to remedy that! My only gripe is that the game does not explain or really call out specific qualities that may limit the effectiveness of certain weapon combinations.

The final more novel system in the game are Fable Arts... I don't have much to say on these as my playthrough did not incorporate them often. These must rely on having both a favorable build and weapon combination to take full advantage of and in my playthrough they felt more like a free hit option when you're low on stamina than anything else. It felt like there were relatively few options to utilize these as shown in many of the trailers. If anything were to be patched (other than a slightly wider parry window and some sort of rebalancing for the aforementioned boss), it would be to either expand options in this system or at least explain the hidden mechanic that governs their effectiveness because it apparently eluded me for the entirety of my time in-game.

Imperfect as it is and brutally difficult at times, this is not for the faint of heart (even if you've enjoyed other games in the genre) but utterly worth it at full price if you have the willpower to dig into the deep in-game mechanics and keep pushing when you hit a wall.

Will update review when the game gets a patch that performs as expected and is stable, but this gets a solid yikes from me in its current state. The corpo-sycophant ghouls lamenting the negative reviews of people warning about the performance in the reviews can kick rocks.

From what I've played, the game seems like it's going to be great-- combat feels crisp, platforming is solid, and exploration is rewarded (cosmetics, area maps, and in-game currency for a specific vendor thus far). So, it's a damn shame the current build of the game isn't stable enough to allow for more than extrapolation.

8700K and 7900 XTX... 5120x1440p monitor and getting 50-60 FPS with FSR on and settings at high or better. Manipulating any setting besides RT does not improve performance as one would expect either; the frequent stutters become less apparent, but the performance gains from lowering settings are marginal at best.

Low CPU/GPU utilization while in-game (30-40% and 50-60% respectively)... even setting my GPU minimum clockspeed higher couldn't get the engine to budge. The menu's are not FPS capped, which isn't specific to this title, but still an annoyance. Seems most devs can't be bothered to at least provide this as an option given the controversies over GPUs nuking themselves with voltage, so pausing the game for even a few minutes will send your GPU hotspot temps through the roof.

Current build of the game definitely has a memory leak somewhere as well; VRAM upon launching the campaign was sitting around 8.5-9 GB, but throughout the hour or so I played, it kept sucking down memory until the game crashed due to memory allocation issues at over 21 GB of VRAM utilization.

Is the game buggy as hell? Yes.

It the optimization questionable unless you have an unobtainium 3000 series card? Definitely.

Did I enjoy the hell out of the game, despite the issues? 100%.

May be worth it to wait for a sale if you're nervous about the current state of the game, but I was not disappointed with this purchase at all and have every confidence that CDPR are going to do their due diligence to amend the current standing problems with the game.

Good fun-- has some kinks that need to be worked out and it does get repetitive after some time (although the game already has a fair number of mods to switch things up), but would definitely recommend to anyone looking for some quality co-op fun.

A truly great game marred by poor optimization on launch, though it runs much better now.

The gameplay is fantastic, but is really tailored towards the run and gun, frenzied style of The New Order & Doom. The stealth elements are nice every once in a while, but overall may have been better off left out for the most part as it leaves plenty to be desired.

The story is interesting, though it does traverse into the uncanny valley more than once and some may get butthurt over the incidental political undertones.

Something to look forward to for fans: Machine Games seems to have a fair amount of substantial, post-launch content coming with the season pass compared to some other recent titles and it doesn't come off as a senseless cash grab.

It's Counter-Strike...That's it.