Recent reviews by BirdtheHorse

TLDR: First 20 hours are fun but gets repetitive quickly. Open world is (not joking) 3 tile sets copy pasted over and over. Bosses are full of ridiculous one shot mechanics. And the game crashes constantly. Final straw was losing four hours of progress due to a crash.

If you've played any From Software game you have played Elden Ring. Combat is fun, when against the few enemies who don't bypass iframes, but mostly just spamming jump attacks. Boss fights are almost great, but the devs have been playing too much mmos with the amount of just plain stupid mechanics. I'm talking stand on X spot or you instant die, attacks that are just RNG if they kill you, (see dark knife king or whatever his name is jump attack) and even HEAL CHECKS. In previous titles when you took damage it was due to a fault of your own, missing a parry, or rolling at the wrong time, and it amazingly tracked your growth as a player. But in Elden Ring you just take damage because the devs have decreed it so. See lord of bloods phase change if you dont believe me. Several notable bugs take out some of the more fun options of combat for me too. Parrying is glitched and sometimes when I parry an attack nothing happens but the enemy attack goes right through me and does no damage. Effectively just wasting time or leaving me open to the next hit in the combo. Ive also had several enemies continue to attack me after death if I kill them mid attack. They will finish their attack animation and freeze for a couple seconds then die. Causing me to play super passive against stronger foes in fear of still dying after having killed them.

The open world aspect of the game is laughable. After you've explored one of the few preset dungeons you've seen them all. Bosses are recycled so much its sucked all the excitement out of their initial encounters which is supposed to be the core draw of the game. I fought the same dog boss at least 5 times now. Even the mega bosses at the end of some of the games largest quest lines are copy pasted into random open world dungeons. It feels like Skyrim if every encounter was a cave full of mudcrabs.

Performance was actually fine for me and I only dipped below 60fps in the stormy areas. My main problem was the constant crashing. I've played this game every night since release and only stopped playing because it crashed every night. Every single night. My final straw was tonight when it crashed and backtracked me about four hours.

Its not a bad game, just very repetitive after a few dungeons and needs a few bug fixes. Most boss fights I found myself saying "this is so close to being really fun." But some over the top mechanics ruin the entire experience. I wont be touching it again for a long while in hopes the devs manage to get it consistently playable and fun. I will redo this review down the road if I can be convinced to play again but until then its a no from me coach.

TL:DR Game will not be playable for years at the current rate of development. More bugs than enemies.

In my 4.5 hours playing this game over the last two days I have had, three crashes to desktop, two blackscreens, three invisible walls which required a restart to fix, and two boss fights (out of a total of two boss fights) have bugged and the boss didn't spawn. One of those bossfights even had it happen twice. All of these crashes/bugs forced me to restart the game. At least 10 restarts over the course of 4.5 hours is absolutely ridiculous.

Whats even worse is I briefly played the game on release back in May and encountered the same invisible wall bug in the same location. The game is definitely more optimized than it was back then and I went from 40fps to over 100fps. But that is all the change ive noticed. Looking at how the devs have utilized their time post release, with 4 cosmetic dlc, while the base game is still infested with more bugs than Nercomunda itself, its going to be at least a couple years before the game is playable.

Even my love of the 40k universe could not get me to keep playing the game. Ive spend close to $1000 on warhammer content from minis to books, and the $40 I spent on this game is the purchase I regret the most.

Game is over 3 years old and I still cannot get past the first boss fight without an infinite white screen, and I am not alone.

I pre-ordered this game when it was first available and played quite a bit of it at the time. Because of hackers, a general lack of balancing, and just terrible base mechanics, I stopped playing about a week after release. Now, 4 years later, I boot up the game again in hopes of change. First 6 matches I have 2 leavers on my team in every match, and autofill does nothing, instant loss. Second set of matches is met with hackers blatantly aiming at me through walls and getting ridiculous prefires. I cannot play ranked because of the insane unlock level, and I cannot gain any decent XP because all of my games are filled with hackers and trolls. Its just an endless loop of prostrating myself to Ubisoft while their marking representative tries to sell my skins.

Meh

194 games in my steam library. 2500 hours in ARK, which is almost a copy paste of Atlas. Now all of a sudden this game leaves me with a error message on launch that ive never seen before and is supposed to be caused by my graphics card being outdated and not supporting DX11. Which both of my graphics cards do. Great game 0/10 would refund again.

Rend is a fun game for anyone who likes to grind endlessly and do the occasional bit of PvP. I have reccomened it to several people who I know enjoy similar games, such as ARK: Survival Evolved. However I cannot reccomend it to anyone else in its current state. When the game was released I was able to go from my steam library to swinging my hammer at boulders within two minutes. After the first major content patch, which added nothing of real worth just emotes, my process is as follows. Click Play in steam library, stare at small launcher box for 4-6 minutes, game opens, stare at initial loading screen for 4-6 more minutes, finally get to main menu, join my server, watch small loading icon for 4-6 minutes, get kicked back to main menu, attempt to join server again, watch small loading icon for another 4-6 minutes, I can now play the game. Whatever the game is EA, putting 2000 hours into ARK I am used to long loading times. Second patch comes out , which added a new system for getting rid of trolls and griefers, and now the game crashes an extra time before I am able to look at the main menu adding about 10 minutes of waiting to the already extensive wait. I love this game and its content but I will not recommend it to anyone until the devteam stops ruining the playabilaty of the game just to add emotes.

Imagine a giant turd with a tiny gold nugget in it. That is this game. Bugs, glitches, and lag, then every once in a while you will have a good firefight. Quit the game for a long time because I couldnt handle the constant pile of trash it was showing itself to be. Getting stuck on invisible walls, cars hitting a pixel of terrain and blowing up, desyncing characters across the map, the list goes on. After the new map came out I was hoping the game was changed for the better. Played one game, got no rifles despite looting half of the largest town in the game and getting 2 kills. Then died from someone I couldnt see because I was not blessed with any form of scope. Whatever everyone has bad RNG, maybe it was just a bad match?? Queue for another one, again no rifles in the huge factory and surrouding buildings. Armed with my Tommy Gun and UMP I set out for the circle. Which was of course on the complete other side of the map. Car flips on nothing in the middle of the road. Barely make it outside the blue using my only meds. Looking at my map, the circle is AGAIN on the other side of the map. No cars along the several minute run and I die to the circle. The game claims to be a PvP arena but is really a slot machine where you either get EXTREMELY lucky, or die to random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
0/10 Impossible to have fun

Had a colony of a few hours. Pyromaniac started a fire in the bedrooms and burned all of my colonists alive in their sleep.
I regret every minute but cant stop playing.
17/17 game

Game is incredibly fun if you can get a few friends together to play. Complete time sink tho, you can easily get lost spening several hours in it.