Recent reviews by Larry

Huge quality of life improvement over the first game and much easier to understand crafting/endgame mechanics but gameplay wise, it's quite different compare to poe1. Shortest way to describe it, it's the dark souls of arpg. So it won't be for everyone especially those expecting an easy game or poe1 copy. But majority likes it including myself

It's Elden Ring

This game had a great concept, but poor execution. No idea why there is SO much emphasis on hit chance which is a mechanic that you rarely find nowadays in any game because game companies know that missing attacks takes both the strategy and fun out of the game and instead, replaced it with luck.

You can be the greatest tactical player in existence but if rng is not on your side, your entire run is over not from mistakes or poor decisions you make, but 99.9% of the time it's because of luck. Something I've seen over and over again even with streamers who did everything right have thousands of hours into this game.

Now, there are a few ways to mitigate the miss chance but again. That just removes the strategy from the trpg because it's the same 2-3 strategy you'll be doing for the first few hours at the start of every run.

Extremely easy fix is reduce the damage taken significantly and get rid of the hit chance mechanic. This game has a pretty in depth armor mechanic except you'll never realize it because it's overshadow by the fact you don't even hit anything.

And for those who never played the game, you have roughly a 30-50% hit chance at the start of the game. It's the actual number. Not an exaggeration. There are swords and spears you can buy that brings that number up to 60-85% and again, limiting to just using 2 weapons or have a very rough and slow start, just takes the strategy out of a strategy game.

A lot of QoL improvements from World

Cities are designed much better for traversal
Dogs are nice mount to boost your speed
Wirebug and skills are a great addition to the game
Not having to find the monster is another QoL improvement because that gets boring and stale overtime. Plus with huge mobility and monster tracking, the monsters constantly running away isn't anywhere as annoying as Worlds.
A lot of weapons has gotten a counter/parry abilities which makes combat more fluid

But overall, the essential gameplay is still god awful. I'm going to mention FromSoft games a lot as they have nearly perfected what an action game is suppose to feel, which is why they have become one of the top selling games despite coming from nothing and no marketing.

Weapons are still extremely clunky and not smooth at all in this game. Most of their attacks has been copy and pasted over from World with almost 0 improvements. For the most part, you don't ever feel the weight of your swings, either your character seem to over exaggerate the weight and other times, they suddenly swing like it's a 2 pound stick. This is almost whatever if it wasn't for the fact that it is also true to monsters. Their attacks are scripted, they would skip several frames of their animation to force an attack out which most of the time has almost 0 weight behind it and suddenly, they body slam you without doing any of it's charging motion. In FromSoft games, when you see big monster do an attack, you can see them swing their body back to get better leverage of their heavy weapon before the swing comes.

Hitbox is another huge issue in this game. In FromSoft games, you would only get hit when the actual weapon makes contact with your character. In this game, the monsters entire body becomes that hitbox when they do most attacks. One example is tigerex doing a bite attack where he leans forward and bite but you would get hit if you stood next to his feet because the game is scripted that the entire monster becomes the hitbox. This is lazy programming. Another good example is the amount of times you would get hit when you're way above the monster. Thanks to wirebug, there's many jump abilities and even when you're high up above the monster's reach, their attacks would still connect because your character hitbox is still down on the ground or it's significantly bigger when you're in the air. Again lazy programming.

iframe are inconsistent in this game. Certain attacks you would have a huge iframe to dodge while other attacks you would have no iframe. iframe is extremely important in action games because many times you would be up against a monster 10x your size and it's swing would cover half the arena. But this inconsistency becomes extremely frustrating as you play through the game because you are punished for timing your roll.
Now, iframe could be consistent in this game and the source of the inconsistency could come from my previous point, terrible hitboxes where it's larger than the actual monster.

Another issue that still persist from world is the monster's relentless onslaught. They do not stop attacking and rarely give you an opening for a combo as a solo player. Now, I understand they were designed for 4 players but the constant onslaught prevent you from doing everyone's favorite thing in the game, smacking the monster. The game can easily just slow down their attacks and increase monster hp to compensate. Not only will it feel more satisfying because we get to attack more but it becomes a lot more manageable for solo players.

There are ways to solo players to get around this, just search any speed run with any weapons and we have these players beating monsters solo in 4-7min. But notice how they always abuse the crap out of 1 move for every weapon. And this move is usually a way to counter the constant attacking from the monster. Long sword for example, 90% of the long sword speedrun fights is just spamming the counter attack. I don't know about you but that's awful game play experience just spamming 1 move. Or for lance, they're just spamming spiral thrust/parry 90% of the time.

Overall, combat is awful and frustrating in this game, same as the previous game.

This is the only review you basically need. You playing on old console or a low end pc, game gunna suck. But if you got a medium range to high end pc or current gen console, it's one of the better games in recent years,

Hands down, the best single player campaign for a fps game. Every mission is unique and has game changing mechanic such as time travel and a device to manipulate the maps. Although the campaign was short but it'll quickly bond you with its characters.

Multiplayer, extremely fluent and feels very fun to play, no clunkiness like in CoD's exo suit/wall running. There is a very high skill ceiling so it's very satisfying to see yourself improve and be able to see the result of the effort you put into the game. Despite a high skill ceiling, having titan in multiplayer makes this a heavy team orientated game. A lone titan will get taken down easily by the enemy team, while a lone player will get taken down by a titan easily no matter the skill difference between the two players. This adds a lot of tactic and teamwork require to win a game but unfortunately, for the most part, everyone is kinda on their own and goes gun blazing.

As for layout customization, the variety is huge. There is a certain layout you can make that can appeal to all type of play style, whether you like to camp, be stealthy, go rambo, or even a healer, there's a layout possibility for all of that.