Recent reviews by random_script

I have around 2000 hours in previous FromSoftware games and I mostly like Elden Ring. I have just finished the game and I think I have done almost everything you can do in a walkthrough. This is spoiler free except some points about difficulty, but always using the spoiler tags.


I have had 4 crashes, none made me loose progress, all were outside combat and all were in different places in Liurnia.
I didn't have issues except in certain places (mostly in the open world), which are problably related to loading areas in the background or a poor implementation of dx12.
This happens every 10-15 minutes if you are traveling the open world almost as much as you can (so in my 85h let's say around 50 times total). In those cases my fps drop to ~45 for 5-10 seconds and very rarely with a half a second stutter.
The only time that has been annoying was at the beginning with the Erdtree Sentinel (everything was ok fighting him up the slope).
The rest of the time I have 60 fps.
I am playing with everything on high except motion blur (off) and these set to medium: SSAO, Shader Quality and Grass Quality.
I am playing at 1440p with G-sync, RTX 3060 Ti 8GB, Ryzen 3700X, 16GB of RAM and a SSD.


The exploration is better than I expected. It never gets boring. This is my favourite open world game, by far.
It is really fun going around and finding dungeons, bosses, vistas, etc but what I wasn't expecting was the world to feel so big, in fact I have lost myself many times even when checking the map from time to time.
I find myself thinking about going this or that way next, exploring this area, going back to fight some boss, checking out mechanics, but (and this is great) without any kind of obligation or stress. I really want to find out, not just in order to get stronger.
Seriously the exploration is awesome overall.


Some enemies feel like they are spamming attacks infinitely.
The game and particularly the PC port some times feels like a beta, like they were lazy at some points.
Even with the points listed below I have been having a blast, but I think many people are going to drop the game early.

• Placing of some enemies that encourage critical attacks due to their large health. In many cases you can't riposte because they are too big and they fall down in some place you can't reach or the ground hitbox is badly implemented and they sink in the textures, so they get a bit underground (this also happens a few times with flying enemies and walls, during their normal movements). It feels like they didn't test these at all.
  
  
• Difficulty.
  
  • Some attacks deal too much damage for their area, speed and hitboxes, particularly instant charges, wind and ground attacks. In particular I think these are broken:
    bear charge attacks (up to 3 times in a row), very big summons until you where their caster is, several grab attacks (as usual), giant hands, glitchy dragons (most of them), snipers in Siofra and giant lobsters, boss on the rot lake, some general gravity and status attacks, the slash combo from bosses like Malenia
    
  • There are enemies with infinite stamina and FP spamming certain abilities without CD, which is a problem in some areas where you can get shot from somewhere you can't reach quickly. In particular I am thinking about a certain mine and a certain river, but this applies to bosses too. This could have been easily solved and can be VERY annoying.
    
  • It seems like their approach here is something like "if it's optional content it doesn't matter", which I find very dissapointing. When you add this to stacking enemies in a closed room you get artificial difficulty, which can be done (for example the big head duo for a greatshield) but it's not good content. This get worse at end game.
    
  • The stance damage for fast weapons is too high, while slow weapons should be much stronger. I have been playing with a fast straight sword and Greatsword and the straight sword breaks stance almost as much, because the R2 bonus (so it is also an issue with the guard counter). Jumping R2 is op sometimes and can look very weird.
    
  • I was a bit dissapointed with the design of some bosses because they didn't feel fair at times. For me there are few bosses with the quality of the best in Sekiro or Dark Souls 3. In particular some attacks are very annoying due to unintuitive hitboxes and in many cases instead of dealing full damage they could easily be a dot hitbox (like there are in other instances).

• I think I am going to miss online coventans...
  
  
• Crafting. I have bought every crafting recipe book I could and still I only use a few recipes, mostly for healing status like rot or poison.
  
  
• Obscurity.
  It is typical in their games, but in this case I think a few hints from NPCs would improve the experience for some blocked doors, how to reach some places or meeting other NPCs.
  A list with the icon and meaning for buffs and open world events should be in the game.
  A bit clarity in mechanics would be nice too, I don't want to check the wiki for everything, like if bonus for charge attacks apply to impaling attacks, fully charged magic attacks, fully charged R2 attacks or ground dragging attacks, or even all of them.
  
  
• The balance of stealth, AI and enemy placement feels wrong. I know this needs a lot of testing in order to feel right, but still it could be better.
  
  • Some wild enemies like wolves in packs stare at you after the combat has started, so maybe one or two attack you out of a pack of 5, I mean in total, not at the same time.
    
  • Wild life only for getting crafting materials should have bigger aggro areas.
    
  • When you enter a room there is a high chance you find an enemy with his back open and facing a wall.
    
  • Patroling is still the same in big castles, only from near point A to near point B, where it would make sense to move them a bit more, nothing game breaking, just a few paces more.
    
  • Some enemies don't care at all about all the fighting going on around them (miners for example), even when missing them by centimeters. I think it would be better if they had a small aggro area instead.
  
  
• My messages get rated all together just after login or none at all, which misses the point of healing you in unexpected situations.
  
  
• Too much repetition for minor enemies and bosses. There are several instances where you meet again a certain boss and it doesn't offer a significant reward (other than runes) and it doesn't make much sense either to have a boss there. I would prefer the world to be around 30% smaller and have better quality.
  
  
• The game feels designed for ranged builds like sorcery caster in many places, particularly in end game content. Playing melee was some times very fustrating. Dark Souls 2 felt exactly like this.
  
  
• I think they could have done a better job with NPCs and lore. NPCs could use more lines, some of them just have a couple and then nothing

The climbing and puzzles usually are annoying and I am not a fan of the combat. Other than that and the narrative being a bit stupid (in order to satisfy a wider audience I guess) I think the game is very good.
I expect this is going to have some replayability in the future with mods and I may play it agan then.
Another thing that was annoying was having to revisit areas after unlocking powers and leveling up more in order to be able to fully clear them, which I expect some mod would get rid of.

I love the aesthetics of the worlds and even though the game areas are not exactly small I would like them to be larger. I guess I would like to keep on exploring them.
I went in blind and was not sure what to expect from the mythology of the game, but I am content. I am not amazed but also not disappointed. I am not very picky on this regard in general. They can take the inspiration they want and build on it and I would be glad as long they make no absurd changes.

I think the team made a great job with this port. The performance was excelent for me and I only crashed once in around 20 hours.

After a few years of owning the game it still feels clunky and nowhere near Smash quality.

I don't think I have had some much fun with a game with turn based combat since FF7 or the old pokemon games. I think this would be appealing for both new and veteran players, particularly those who enjoy board games like Eldritch Horror, because it has a lot of silly yet dangerous moments with your characters quirks and iteractions.

The combat is very good. managing to make it fair and while keeping the randomization entertaining.
The progression is excellent and really got me hooked for a couple of weeks.
The classes at first look like nothing really special, but as you get to try them in depth they prove to have all the tools you need to progress. There are many strong class combinations and you also have to take into account the quest location, quirks and bosses from time to time.

I reckon the interface is annoying and the dungeon movement was very confusing at first. I also had to look up some details on the wiki, because I didn't want to waste a lot of time to figure things out with the records you can access to in town.

Worth playing even if it's still on beta (0.8.3 right now). I have leveled 3 characters to end game now.

Best I have seen in the genre:
The crafting system (combined with the simplicity of the item's mods) is well designed: deterministic with random chance to break or upgrade further and options to change its behabiour a bit.
The classes are interesting and very customizable with simple but effective trees. It's fun to try builds for each class and the respect costs are on point.

Good:
The difficulty curve is good and the class progression is never boring.
The development is going well. They post often on https://forum.lastepoch.com/c/developer-blogs/ so we can follow the progress, the road map and their opinions. They also answer questions often on reddit.
The combat is easy to grasp. In general all strong attacks are well telegraphed using visual hints like circles or lines a few seconds before the impact.
The loot filter is easy to use and quite customizable, which is very useful for the end game.

Neither good nor bad:
Needs performance optimization. It's playable and all, but it could be better for the hardware.
The end game still is not much, it's effective but kind of dull, but there are plans to improve it.

Bad:
In my opinion shards, runes and glyphs are currency and they should be auto picked up from the ground and sent to the forge. Right now gold and potions are picked up by walking, and glyphs are sent to the forge while shards and runes are sent to the inventory. Also the pickup radius should be larger, picking up potions in hard encounters is annoying.
The camera applies transparency to roofs and pillars but in a few places in a certain angle does not, so you just see the roof. Very rare, but annoying.
Needs better search for the stash.
The inventory closes if you move after opening the stash, which is pretty often. The movement and movement paths in general are clunky.
Of course it's still beta, so missing minor stuff.

I found it a bit clunky at times. Certainly it is not as clear as Portal 2 a few times but leaving that aside it's very good and you could think of it as an expansion to Portal 2, like the custom chambers but more engaging.

Better than expected, even the music that I known for years hits different now. I did a neutral and then pacifist run.
The storytelling, story and mechanics are good in general, but what really sold me was how weird and funny everything is while at the same time it fits just right. Worthy game just the fun stuff and cheap too.

First RE game, but I had seen gameplay before from the other games, so I wasn't used to it but I got the hang of it pretty fast. I thought it would be more scary and all but in the end it felt like a meme fest (chainsaw and flamethrower go brr brr). Now seriously, the atmosphere is pretty good, in particular those underground moments with multiple creatures chasing you and running out of ammo.

I played in normal and the bosses were kind of a joke, but it's alright because I wasn't looking for difficulty in this game and in general the attacks are telegraphed ok.

I am thinking of doing another playthrough after some months pass by, just so I don't remember everything and all.

Maybe 18 years ago, when it came out. It hasn't aged well at all, you can still play of course (taking care to find the buttons to progress among the other low quality textures), but I rather play something else, which would easily be better in every regard.

This is kind of 50/50.
I like the first game a lot, even though it is simpler and easier I think The Surge 1 is the best souls like game so far. So I had very high expectations for the sequel.
In The Surge 2 there are many things I dislike a lot:
- The story and the atmosphere is terrible.
- There is a lot of artificial difficulty.
- The game feels even more unfair than the first one. There were many times when I could not tell why did I die or that I died for some kind of op attack spam. The game pretty much forces some kind of playstile against certain enemies, because not taking damage becomes almost imposible.
- The bosses feel terrible the first time you encounter them, their attacks don't telegraph well, which is important because they are very directonial-parry centered. I had a hard time wondering how the hell take down the first boss.
- The world has too many shortcuts and areas that need loading (therefore respawning the enemies).