Recent reviews by Smeeb

Probably the first game with "Elder Scrolls" vibes I have played other than an Elder Scrolls game. For better and worse, it sticks to that kind of formula. It is a better story than any of the Elder Scrolls games in my opinion, but it is admittedly more rough around the edges. And in many cases, VERY rough, especially in act 3. Act 1 and 2 show the polish from being in Early Access, but Act 3 didn't quite get the same love.

Magic was a lot of fun, and building a character using the various armor sets and skill trees was a lot of fun. I felt like a spell slinging critical hit god at the end of the game. However, a lot of spells felt underwhelming or simply didn't work as intended. Summons for example, they barely ever fought with me unless I switch to the spell and force them to attack my target, and will still often times outright refuse to do so. They also spawn right in front of you as you are running, stopping you in your tracks or blocking your path in a one person hallway. I will revisit this game after a couple of major updates, and hope the modding scene kicks off.

If you like Elder Scrolls and want more of that kind of game, this is a welcome alternative that shines above the competition in some ways, and remains in the shadows of its inspiration in others.

I think this is one of the best games I have ever played. I could talk about specifics but I think I can safely say that if you like parrying, this is your turn based wet dream. It is a blast perfecting fights, and stumbling through them. The build potential for each character is crazy because of how pictos work, and uncapping the point cap to equip these pictos really offers so much creativity and malleability to an otherwise historically rigid genre.

As for the story, it's best if you just experience it yourself.

Ideas for devs, if you read this:
I would pay good, hard earned, money for a roguelite mode/area and randomizer modes. I would love to be able to start the game over with a random assortment of party members, pictos, weapons, enemies, bosses, etc. Imagine the first boss being Simon. Also for the ultra masochists out there, maybe an Ironman mode.

Anyone who says this game isn't as good as the first is bonkered off their yoinky. It just achieves greatness in different ways. This is my second time ever playing the game, first time on ps4. I really don't know why I didn't play it more. The story might not hit like the first game's, but the game is much more fleshed out and fun to play. The story that is here is just as well thought out and written as the first game's story, it just doesn't have the same high stakes that the first game's story did. Instead this game is more about vengeance, consequences, self control, and longing.

It is a really well made game by a group of very talented and passionate developers.

I have bought this game 3 times, across 3 different platforms, I have played it through 8 times, I have watched the HBO series twice, and it is still consistently one of the best games I have ever played. Every...Single...Time.

I did not have issues AT ALL with this port right up until the last hour of gameplay. I think it ran really well on my hardware, it looked great, felt smooth, and remained pretty consistent throughout. But the only real issue was that in the final area as a whole, ALL screen shake was cranked up to 1000. I would get it shaking the camera so far out of the field of view of Joel that the whole level was visible to me floating in a void for what seemed like seconds at a time, as the sound abruptly cuts in and out as it refocuses on Joel before violently taken away from him again. It happened to me in the tunnels, it happened to me in the hospital. Every single grenade, every single molotov, every time I got shot. It was quite humorous to me but did make the end quite difficult as I had to fire fight in the middle of this.

This is a changed review. I had issues launching the game initially, but it turned out to be the Nvidia App. If you have troubles with this as well, try a reinstall of Nvidia app. Game is a blast.

First I want to say, I freaking liked this game a lot. It didn't blow me away or change my life, or anything like that. It has its own issues, but they are usually outweighed by 2 positives. It was a very fun, and short adventure with a lot of hard decisions and no clear cut consequences that felt like the good old days of RPGs.

Let's get the comparisons out of the way, everyone thinks this is trying to be an Elder Scrolls killer. It is not, but it is also not trying to be. This game is no more like Elder Scrolls at home than Outer Worlds was Fallout in space. The one, and only, game I would say this could be compared to is Outer Worlds. It feels like Obsidian took all they learned from Outer Worlds and improved upon it, translated that to fantasy, and then used the vastly fleshed out universe of Pillars of Eternity as the basis for the setting. It just works.

Can you kill every NPC? No, but also I don't think that is a feature that is make or break for me. Can I steal from NPCs? No, but it is nice knowing all loot is for me to take. Can I romance? No, but romance is just the friends we make along the way. The criticisms of this game are based upon comparisons to other games, and not on its own merits.

So, I say, play it yourself before you judge it.

PS. +1 to the non-existant score for the exploration in this game. I would say 95% of the time, if I can imagine getting up there I probably can. And if I can, there is probably loot. Nice touch, and kept me wanting to fill out the map, when usually I don't in games like this.

In just the first 3 hours of playing this game I saw almost all of the basework for the game, what is here is very bare bones but is also one of the most complex sandbox rpg experiences I have had in a minute. The way you can build your character is amazing, and I can't wait until there is an actual game here to play with it in. Still going to keep playing to figure out fun builds because the system is quite fun and the ragdoll is never not funny. My one suggestion, if the dev reads this at all, is to eventually have passives you can spec into for trade skills, like increasing xp bonuses or maybe even adding a super crit spot for gathering nodes that gives triple xp, so it is not so much a grind in the long run. It is part of the reason I don't think I will partake much in crafting outside of making the town.

At the time of writing this, I am towards the end of my act 1 cruel and I have a love hate relationship with this game. On one hand, I think this is one of the deepest ARPG experiences you can play, and on the other I ask myself why I am enjoying bashing my head against a wall. It's brutally hard, and often times not fair (a lot of one shot non-telegraphed deaths from random white mobs when otherwise you've been crushing content), yet I keep coming back. The build diversity is great, but the devs were not completely truthful in saying that you can "build however you like, there are very few wrong choices." Well I can confidently say there are millions of wrong choices. If you do not have a meta build, you do not complete later content, period. You need to meet or exceed damage checks and defense milestones or you will be killed in one hit by whites (more than you usually do, that is).

The ascendency mechanic needs reworked. The trials with honour are fine, difficult but fine. The trials of chaos are complete dog water, and the only way I personally could complete the level 38 one is by being level 51 to the point where enemies pretty much couldn't hit me because my evasion was so high. But this aside, the one glaring problem with both trials is that neither is particularly fun. And both often require RNG to succeed.

I think the campaign is fine, but I definitely don't want to complete it ever again once all 6 acts are in. Please add an adventure mode so we can skip campaign. The campaign is too much of a slog to want to do it again every league start, period, hard stop. It's the main reason I played PoE 1 exactly 3 times through the campaign and never again. I hate doing the campaign over and over again. Of all the mechanics and QOL GGG took from every other isometric ARPGs, Diablo's adventure mode is always the one that gets skipped and is arguably the most important isometric ARPG mechanic to ever exist besides the dawning of the genre. Let us skip the campaign GGG, it's a must. The game loses tons of replayability without it. I'll change this when/if campaign skip ever gets implemented.

Edit: I have made it to endgame and it is nothing but misery, there is barely any fun to be had. The endgame frame that is there is great, but the endgame is far too punishing to be considered fun. This is usually how a run of a map goes for me. I spend a waystone, I go through the map crushing it, I get zeroed by a random who knows what (there is no kill feed so there is no way to really know), I lose my waystone, I lose the map, I lose the events and modifiers on the map, I lose 10% of my xp, and now I am at the point I cannot continue the endgame because waystones drop so infrequently that I literally have none left. This needs fixed or no one is going to play this game past the campaign.

All in all, this is a great game that I know is in early access and needs some touching up, and there is very little in this game I personally cannot overcome, but they need to explore options to pad out the difficulty curve, or they will not retain players. Especially the ones on the edge or that don't normally play this kind of game.

A flawed but engaging masterpiece. It does so many things wrong, but in my opinion gets many more things right. And let's be honest, GSC has developed their game during an active invasion, it's bound to not all be right. What they are doing is actively patching a game days after launch with big fixes that have personally helped me with some bugs I was experiencing. I just think that's pretty cool, not many devs are this fast with fixes.

But onto the game, I think the game excels when you're forced to adapt. There was nothing more thrilling in this game than shooting my way out of a multi level apartment complex with my my backpack filled to the brim with guns and armor I could sell for my next upgrade, only to be found pincer attacked by a bloodsucker....there is no other game out there I can think of that offers this kind of experience with as much realism as possible given the medium, only to come out victorious and saying "I won that fight, me."

The game does a great job in immersing you in the role of a roaming merc who hunts for artifacts. The sounds are gritty, the guns are detailed and sound punchy, buying and selling (after the patch) became pretty fun, trying new weapons didn't feel like I was at much of a disadvantage for using something that wasn't upgraded. It just felt good, man I dunno what else to say.

Now for the bad. On several occasions I had to use console commands to fix a quest I was on, a main quest. I also feel like durability even after the patch is a bit whack, I understand wanting to make the mechanic impactful but I dunno, it feels like its still a bit fast for my liking. Enemy health pools can be insane sometimes, I could shoot a guy 6 times in the head before he drops, guy next to him looks at me funny and drops. Mutants have way too much health, and drop nothing so they're just a waste of your time. No real reason to fight them unless the game makes you, and there are unfortunately a lot of mutants. I had a lot of crashes in the final levels, and gauss rifle damage is just crazy, I had to peak, shoot where I thought they were, and pray I hit them at least a little bit. It took probably twice as long as it should have for me to finish the final level under those conditions on normal difficulty.

All in all, it is a great masterpiece someday, but for now it's a really good game with some flaws.

This game is everything they have been learning about Persona and SMT for years, culminating in a fresh take on the same formula. If you like those games, or even a single game from those series, then this game will give you everything you want and then some.

The fights are intense, the difficulty is steep at first until you understand how to manipulate turn icons in your favor, the soundtrack is slapping, the archetype system allows for extremely flexible build customization, the characters are nuanced and grounded, and ultimately Atlus breaking out of their safety net brought us such a unique world and a GOAT villain. Now that we got their fantasy story, I would like to see a sci-fi one.

The game is a bit long, though, maybe a tad too long. I clocked in at 88 hours on my steam time, but the demo does not get added to that time, so I actually finished the game in 94 hours. It's an unfortunate fact that persona games can get quite exhausting exponentially as time marches on (see what I did there?), and this game is no different. It is a long one, I am afraid.