Recent reviews by Joshiling

There's a lot to talk about this game, but I will try to keep it brief (TL;DR at the end for those of you with a TikTok attention span):

- Story is incredible
- Characters feel alive and interact with one another both in and out of cut scenes
- Tons to explore and find throughout the Acts, and a huge variety of magic items to find and use
- Your decisions have actual weight to them (sometimes) and often you are forced to make real moral dilemmas
- The combat feels very satisfying (apart from a few things), and there are a bunch of different ways to beat each encounter (you can use the environment to your advantage or just charge in and pray)
- The world feels alive, NPCs have their own conversations and arguments - and most of them aren't even involved in the story
- The replay ability is insane - there are a bunch of different classes and dialog options to warrant at least 2 playthroughs (my playthrough took ~100 hours so there is at least 200 hours of content)


- Autosaves - This game doesn't autosave frequently enough and you will find yourself in the game over screen, loading back to an autosave from 40 minutes ago at some point in the game. This wouldn't be a big problem if each playthrough didn't have different interactions, which can mean the 40 minutes spent catching up might be quite different from the first time. By the end of Act 1, you will be mashing F5 to quicksave whenever something remotely important happens.

- Summons are Buggy - The NPCs of the world are scared of your summons, which makes sense, but it can make some encounters weird where the BBEG's henchmen start swarming your Ice Mephits because they are scared of them, and the fight hasnt even started yet. This also occurs for your allies (in camps like the grove for example) which can cause really strange interactions.

- Summons are Unfair - I only played on medium difficulty, which might explain this, but for the low cost of a couple spell slots, you can summon an army of 10 relatively strong units to charge into an encounter made for 4. Either I'm a strategic god, or turn economy is a genuine thing because this made the game fairly easy, but only if you could summon the units before the fight started (which is usually always possible). You can just choose not to summon spam and cheese and this problem is immediately solved

- Lag + Bugs - The game is new so this will likely get patched eventually, but (mainly towards the end of Act 2 and throughout Act 3) there were these points where the game became unbearably laggy. My computer is relatively mid/high-range, so the lag felt a bit strange. I found that the only way to stop the lag was to quit and reopen the game. There's also a variety of bugs (Enemies shooting through terrain, small things etc.) but give a month or so I'm sure most will be patched out.


- The Consequences of my Actions - In D&D, you can explain to the DM what you are intending to do with your actions. In BG3, you have to guess what the dialog option means, and what will happen as a consequence. I found myself F5 quicksaving during some dialog options to try every option, and see what they actually did, which is annoying but not too common to be an issue. The main problem is when the consequence of your actions happens 40 minutes after your decision, because you have to live with it, or reload and redo 40 minutes. This may sound like a petty thing to get annoyed at, but when you don't realise what the dialog option means, it can be very easy to do something you didn't intend. This only happened once or twice during my run , but still felt awful when it happened.

- The Lack of Consequence to my Actions - There are some characters that have side-quests, which if you complete them, later in the story they will reference it. However, for some side-quests, if you fail them or don't do them, I guess the references aren't coded in. This means some actions that would seriously affect your relationship with a few NPCs, don't have any affect at all. For those who have completed Act 2 - In Act 1, you can convince Rolan and his family to stay and fight in the grove. In Act 2, the family gets captured as a result, apart from Rolan. You can 'Save the Tieflings' including the family in a quest. I may have not realised that they get murdered (FOR NO REASON I MIGHT ADD) if you dont save them before the Nightsong fight. I ... didn't save the Tielfings. Overcome with grief I avoided Rolan until Act 3 where he can be found in a magic tower. I assumed he would hate me for what I did, but he didn't even recognise me, despite very much recognising me in Act 2. So either he mind-wipe tonic'd himself, or something, but it definitely felt like my terrible decision making didn't mean anything This doesn't happen too often though.

- Combat can feel Unsatisfying - let's say you roll 4 nat 1s in a row, and the enemy rolls 3 crits, you might as well just reload the save and try again without fully committing to the end of the encounter (especially as some encounters can be quite unforgiving). Also, I have a genuine fear of some small dwarf sprinting into my backline and pushing my wizard into a chasm.

- The Camera - It's hard to explain without playing, but I will try. The camera doesn't look up. The camera is also relatively fixed to the height of the character you have selected. So if you want a character to shoot an enemy above them, it becomes a battle to try and see the enemy. Combine this with cover which is very unforgiving with hitboxes, and sometimes it can feel impossible to do.

- Companions in Multiplayer - A huge part of the game is the companions, and their stories, motivations and desires. This doesn't really work for multiplayer, as a lot of the relationships between player and companion are based on your decisions while they are in your party. As you can have at max 2 companions in your party in multiplayer (2-man multiplayer), you can only really experience 2 companion stories during one run (unless you hotchange them around where needed). This isn't at all an issue if you don't care for the companion stories, and just want to enjoy the main story, but you'll end up missing out a huge amount of the game and for someones first run-through of the game I wouldn't recommend it.

It may have looked like I hated the game due to the amount of criticism I gave, but the opposite is true. I cannot recommend this game enough. It feels like the first genuinely good game to come out in years, so much so I sank 120 hours into the game within a week and a half. It's well worth the price, and if you are at all interested in D&D, you will love this game. There is so much replay ability, with side quests, different classes, decisions and companions to choose from, each interacting in a different way. Then, once you finish the game solo several times, you can go on a rampage in a 4-man multiplayer game and bully your friends when they get pushed off a cliff. (It's me. I'm the friend who keeps getting pushed off cliffs for some reason). Most of my complaints about the game are just based off of a few things that will probably get fixed given a bit of time (or not, either way the game's still worth buying).


I would not be surprised if this game won Game of the Year. All gripes I have with this game will likely be ironed out in a month or so. 100% worth the money, not sure if its worth the crippling affect it has had on my social life.

IS SPOOK

It is an absolute banger. But it's also very dead. If you can get a couple of mates to download the game and play in some custom games its great fun.

The most revolutionary game. Super Gnarly. Hyped for episode 2. Much cow. Much wow.

A game that I played a lot when I was younger, and that I still have great fun messing around making phallic creatures. Gud game. But all the online stuff is gone. But who cared about that.

7/10 Would get lost in the middle of nowhere after jumping out of a burning plane, and then get my friend to come pick me up on a bicycle again

This game is aboslutely incredible. I got rejected so many times, just to get every ending, and boy... the final ending...

Lets just say i was speechless for at least 10 minutes, maybe more.

10/10 would be speechless again