Recent reviews by sagan

READ BEFORE: No this isn't just about the servers though I must say that releasing a game with a dysfunctional online, when it's an 'Online only' title, isn't an acceptable practice and players shouldn't tolerate this. It doesn't help that the developers basically lazily released 4 tweets saying 'uhhh we don't know why it don't work but I'm sure it will be better soon'. We're now 4 days after the release and I just checked: the matchmaking still doesn't work. UPDATE: they did just say it's gonna take an even longer time but maybe for the next weekend it will work. ;) BTW. their Discord is in a 5-min slowmode to gate the complaints. :)

Is Payday 3 a very bad game? No, it isn't. It's just not something I'd recommend. In fact if you have never played Payday 2, and you absolutely refuse to play it (even though you can get that game for about 2 dollars) then PD3 might be a great experience to enjoy with your friends over the weekend, but probably not for much longer. If you want a high quality game about heisting you can play with your friends buy Payday 2 first: its playerbase is as big as PD3's and you won't have issues finding a match.


There's a million things this game got wrong compared to PD2 so let me quickly list things that are good (in my opinion):

• Game looks really nice and runs great
  
• Level design is very detailed, the general level of detail feels like an upgrade over PD2
  
• Casing mode (before you start the heist) gained more relevance which is great and you can do more in stealth without putting on the mask
  
• The guards react to noise

Alright now a list of things that I think are straight downgrade (or a missed opportunity to add a feature) with short explanation:

• Amount of heists: while this is a new title that can get updates, there is only 9 heists in game. When Payday 2 was released it also had a similar amount, but PD2 was released 2 years after their first game and the difference in content wasn't large. PD2 to PD3 is going from 87 to 9.
  
• The UI: it's just bad, it doesn't include much information, main menu is difficult to navigate, it keeps resetting heist list to that setting where it shows cutscenes between them (which aren't fully animated btw), instead of a list of heists you can choose its a bunch of pictures you must scroll.
  
• Skill system: There is no skill system, the game only has a 'perk deck' which was an unsuccessful attempt at merging skills and perk deck into one, but realistically it just takes away from the fun and depth of the game.
  
• Leveling system: Instead of an XP system that would scale with how sneaky you are, how many objectives you complete and how high the difficulty is, PD3 only gives you XP for completing 'challenges' which mostly boil down to 'mow AI down with an assault rifle' or 'complete a heist'. This means there is no gameplay incentive and reward for doing actually challenging things and since these challenges are one-time you will often run into an issue of not getting ANYTHING for completing the heist.
  
• Customization: It just isn't really meaningful and it's difficult to gauge: bars instead of numbers. PD2 had a random drop system that allowed you to progressively gain more mods for weapons as you complete heists. PD3 unlocks more mods by killing AI with your guns encouraging doing everything loud and stealing kills from your jolly cooperators.
  
• No chat/voip: Why? I understand 2023's audience hates communicating in video games cause that one person might call them a bad word, but this is a co-op game.
  
• Overkill weapons: I think those simply don't belong in a game like Payday, your primary objective in Payday is escaping with as much loot as possible, not to slaughter half the city. It's yet another thing that moves the game away from its roots. Anyway there's only 2 of them so it's not like there's a lot of variety either.

I don't know who PD3 is for. New players who refuse to play Payday 2 or just don't know about the gap in quality? If that's the case, how did that work out, when they can't even play the game? If you haven't played PD2 and want to try Payday do yourself a solid and get PD2 now. Perhaps in a year PD3 will catch up to PD2 in content and quality of gameplay.

People who give this game a negative review don't understand this is a psychological horror about finding your way through the login screen.
10/10

The time has come: After 1300 hours I have decided to review Hunt: Showdown. You might notice I chose Not recommended despite the fact I am still playing the game and I don't intend to stop (at least in the forseeable future.

This is because at it's core the game is good. The gunplay is ok, weapon choices are interesting and span from medieval weaponry to firearms from 19th century (some aren't actually real but made up to fit the game). The game has got an amazing setting, thrilling atmosphere, cool bosses and the overall design, including the gameplay loop which is cool for the most part.

However I don't want to recommend a game that leaves you in a hate-love relation and frustrates you on regular basis while you wonder if you should still be playing it.


I want to make this abudantly clear from the start: The technical state of the game 6 years after its release is not very good. The game consistently produces more and more bugs which range from mild annoyance to gamebreaking, and they're often not addressed by the developers for months or years to come.

To give you an example: Not so long ago a 'reload bug' existed, which meant your gun would simply not reload despite playing reload animation. It was pretty gamebreaking and obviously disrupted a core gameplay mechanic. This was not addressed for over half a year. After that period the developers addressed it in a youtube short promising a 'workaround' in the upcoming patch. The workaround was never delivered and the bug was fixed few months later in a different patch, effectively leaving the bug in the game for over a year.

This isn't exactly an isolated incident as bugs like this or worse have been or still are in the game that lead to following funny features existing in the game:

• Revoler functioning as a semi-automatic shotgun
  
• Shooting and seeing through walls as if you were inside the building (while you are not)
  
• Derendering half of the game world effectively making some walls/cover invisible
  
• Player being completely disarmed
  
• Bleed not functioning (player isn't taking damage from bleeding)
  
• Permanent poison vision

Every day I open Hunt thinking I've seen it all but this list isn't all of it. Within your first 100 hours you WILL die to some kind of technicality/bug. This is extremely frustrating and Crytek can't/don't want to/don't have the resources to fix it.


Problem is 2-sided:

1. The servers themselves/service provider/network implementation is very poor. For some reason rubberbanding/high ping/disconnects are somewhat common - there are days when it's gonna be 100% fine, but there are days when you regret opening Hunt. If you don't believe me (which is fair, I could be biased), check their Discord announcement channels! Every time the network/connection problems get so bad it's nearly unplayable Crytek will restart the servers which they post about in said channels.
   
2. I don't like the term but I'm gonna call it the 'netcode': This is everything from managing connection (and reconnects) to how the game handles online play. In result connecting to the game or reconnecting can be a long and unreliable process. The game 'agressively' syncs you even at very low ping meaning walking over uneven ground (eg. forest) might cause server 'correcting' your movement even when your ping is under 30ms. For similar reasons game will allow people who are already dead on your screen to kill you (there is some network buffer put in place that allows people with high ping to perform actions even though they should already be dead).

This together makes the experience that much worse. To be honest sometimes this will affect you and other times it won't, but when it does it makes my blood boil.


Hunt Showdown is mostly a functional game, but some design/balancing ideas I will just never get and I haven't found anyone that has wrapped their head around it. I don't want to start a controversy (because about every decision Crytek makes is controversial), but here's a more agreeable example:

Crytek team did an analysis on which guns are used more and then updated their price. Prime example being the Uppercut - most popular revolver going from 275 dollars to over 415 (or so). If you haven't played the game you have to understand: there are no wipes in it, game just continues to print money for you (free hunters, money you get even if you die, dark tribute, challenges etc.) and there are easy ways to get a lot of money and infinitely stack it. Crytek's idea behind this change was: 'if we increase the pricing of our best gun less people will buy it'.

Now how do you think this affects the game? Is there less Uppercuts in the game? No. You still see Uppercuts every game. When someone dies and loses a good gun it stays in the economy because someone will pick it up and bring it into the next game if his goal is to play the good guns. So who do you think this affects the most? People who struggle with economy - so mostly new players. Wanna hear the best part? They added this gun as a FREE world drop, so this whole change was just a kick in the balls of new players and didn't affect how many people play the gun.


This is the main reason that pushed me to write my review as I think it is the straw that broke the camel's back. Before I start talking about this, I want you to know: I am a filthy capitalist myself - I have NOTHING against companies selling content post release. I have purchased a lof of the DLCs for Hunt not only for myself but also for my friends so I have no expectations of content being free etc.

Now ask yourself: what would you do if the climate changed, inflation struck etc. and at some point people decided they don't want to buy your product (DLCs anymore) or at least not as much. Hinting in reviews you're releasing less and less content at higher prices then ever and you release too many DLCs. Take 1 minute to think about the answer.

If your answer was: 'rebalance my in-game premium currency so that people can get less of it, increase the prices of said premium currency, and immediately release the most expensive (premium currency) content oh and make sure players can buy it only for a limited amount of time to capitalize on that FOMO' you should apply to Crytek NOW, cause that's exactly what they went with.

Now, people say 'but Blood Bonds were supposed to be a premium currency from the start', to which I can only say that if on release BBs were like this, Hunt would receive a lot of flak for being a game that relies on microtransactions while being a full price game.

My issue is the same as with any premium currency: you never know how much you're spending, you can't buy 'an item' you have to buy a specific amount of currency instead. Eg. the new FOMO hunters cost 1200 and 1500 BBs. But you can't buy these amounts of currency. You would have to buy 1150 or 3000+.

BB economy also affects you getting QoL improvements such as Hunter and Loadout slots and because of how inventory system works in the game, getting more hunter slots will actually affect your economy. There are still ways to get BBs for free if you want these QoL features but I think they should just be unlocked or locked behind a non-premium currency for transparency.

My problem is quite clearly the fact that if Hunt doesn't sell enough DLCs you can try to fiddle with the pricing, release schedule, size of the DLCs, maybe make them bigger or smaller, try releasing them less frequently. Try to get more players so there's more people interested in spending their money on your content?

Making me do math to figure out how much I'm paying for my skins and hope you don't make the next hunter cost 2000BBs making my leftover BBs from the purchase worth even less is really not the way.

If I had to sum up this game in 1 sentence I'd call it a 'high production value kusoge for initiates'.

• Very nice graphics
  
• Newbie-friendly mechanics
  
• Very accessible and reasonable tutorial
  
• Straight to the point game - starts up quickly and in 30 seconds you're in a match

• Roster of generic characters (unless you're a DNO player)
  
• A lot of characters' identity is replaced with mid-range zoning
  
• Terrible story mode you have to play to unlock final character (god forbid you enjoy playing story modes in fgs)

I'm gonna be real without any more lists:
When you open the game it feels sorta good, it's snappy, moves and combos feel good, rollback is great, online works flawlessly. That is until you realise almost every single character in this game has got a full screen special, a lot of normal hits combo into random stuff and a lot of usual depth in FGs was replaced with very hard hitting combos from random situations.

If you haven't watched any footage, this is often how DNF games play out:
You and opponent start in neutral.
One of you get hit and gets dropped down to 10% hp.
Now, the next hit will in 90% of situations lead to kill regardless of which player gets hit.
That's right.

DNF removes a lot of decision making, a lot of mixups were also removed so if you're looking to play anything that isn't basically full screen 'footsies' where you're allowed 2 hits, this really isn't the best game.

Mind you I omitted the fact this game released with a bunch of infinite combos where at least 2 of them are 1-button.

I can see this game going through drastic changes and being playable but I cannot recommend it as is, it's like that Sailor Moon kusoge but with a much bigger budget.

This is Arcsys' worst game since cross tag.

Caves of Qud is one of those games you might look at and think: 'why would I play this in 2021?'. I can assure you it's a very playable title that provides a lot of value other games don't. Have a read:

♥♥♥ is a roguelike game, but not one of those roguelike-likes, it emulates the oldschool Rogue/Nethack experience in terms of it's formula. It is however rendered in Unity which gave developers options to enrich the classic roguelike experience.

You get to play as a mutant or a truekin (human), both these genotypes provide a different experience and give access to different mechanics. As mutant you will mutate (duh) gaining new abilities, or limbs, or organs, or photosynthetic skin or... an ability to open a space-time vortex that will manifest itself and obliterate everything it sucks in. As truekin you enjoy higher stats and gain special abilities by modifying your body with cybernetic implants.

The gameplay of ♥♥♥ consits of sandbox and the main storyline. Storyline doesn't have to be followed at all, playing in just the sandbox is equally as fun. There is a whole lot of lore in the world, randomly generated villages, quests, dungeons, items, legendary NPCs and so on.

Game is quite difficult - you will die, learn, repeat. Even once you master the 'start' of the game you will die in the future. Qud throws a lot of challenges in your way, they often have to be learned, analyzed and only then braved. You will be dismembered, mindcrushed, beaten up by banana trees or stoned by baboons.

What makes Qud unique is that thanks to its simple form, it was given a countless number of interactions. Once you get a grip of things, every playthrough is a story worth telling. You're given many opportunities to make mistakes and then find your own solutions nobody's ever thought of before. You can interact with your character, items, enemies, environment, abilities, in million different ways. I don't want to spoil too much, but ♥♥♥ is a game in which you can get a fungal infection that turns your head into wax, dominate another person, destroy your former body and reside in your new body for the rest of the game.

Every playthrough is a story, every time you learn something. You start having to survive the game, you end with the game having to survive you.

Vallheim (in it's current state) is one of those games that blow up over night, you see everyone play them and your friendlist has got everyone playing it. For a week.

I don't wanna go to hard on the game, it's an early access survival/adventure kind of game that draws from most of the classics of the genre. You have your building, foraging, scavenging, crafting, combat etc. I think there's a lot of stuff this game does right, but there's even more stuff it does wrong which is the reason I'm not recommending purchase at the time of writing this review. That being said it's an Early Access title so it might get better at release.

If you're just looking for a viking-themed survival walking simulator where you build a lot of bases and explore a massive world while appreciating beautiful landscapes it might just be your thing.

My biggest problem with the game is it's size and scaling:
Your gameplay in Valheim consist pretty much of gathering resources, improving skills, crafting new gear, building bases and trying to tackle new challenges. Progress in the game however, is very inconsistent. You do most of exploring on foot or by ship. The world is basically divided into a bunch of islands with different biomes.

This becomes problematic when neighbouring islands only have 2 biomes and world is absolutely massive. Developers also made it so that fast travel and means of travel in general are heavily limited which often inhibits your progress. This also wouldn't be bad if there was filler content or rewards for doing excessive amounts of exploring. This is not the case, considering the size of the maps you often have to commit to very uneventful journeys on your feet.

As is Valheim is great for building/creativity (those have great mechanics), or just chilling and appreciating the visuals (despite the lo-fi stylized look), but many of its best or most appealing mechanics are underutilized due to how little content there is or how scarce the unique content is considering the volume of the world.

Just like me most of my friend enjoyed a lot of the mechanics and were really hyped up during first 20 hours of the game and after that the enjoyment started waning away.

UPDATE: The new patches (1.04 and 1.05) improve performance and stability of the game to an acceptable level, but the game is still bed ridden with glitches and bugs, I have now finished the game and I had to load an old save/restart game about 20 times to prevent gamebreaking bugs.

Ok, so I've played 30 hours of this, it's not a 'bad' game, but I can't recommend it.

I wanna get this out of the way: Yes, there are bugs and poor performance still, even after the patches and drivers, it's somewhat better than the 1.0 version though. Most of the bugs are Bethesda-style (glitches, not very obtrusive, not persistent), however about 10 times I had to restart the game or load an old save to fix something, this included my hp being stuck at 0/0, being stuck in a wall, absolute lack of lighting in rooms, etc. Overall it's bad but not to the point where the game is unplayable. Recommended specs are a lie, don't believe it, if you're on GTX 1060 6GB I doubt you can run this game even at stable 30fps at 1080p high. I recommend at LEAST having a GTX 1080 to play at medium 60 fps.

Other than that the game is somewhat fun and is a nice filler for people who enjoy playing GTA. Cause that's what it is, it's a GTA clone with poorly implemented RPG elements and crafting/inventory. The game has got a very nice story, even though at times the pacing is absolutely insane, new characters are being introduced, you're supposed to care for them, but you don't know anything about them and then they're removed from the scene and that's it.

Missions in the game I could divide into: main story, side missions alpha and side missions beta (such divide proposed by me). Main story is mostly fine, I'm not one for nitpicking and finding plot holes. Side missions alpha are the ones I would consider polished that have a lot of dialogue, animation and unique objectives/gameplay mechanics. Side missions beta are the ones you mostly find 'randomly' in the open world (dont mistake them for random activities), they offer 1 line of monologue after which you do very boring, repetitive stuff which is reminescent of MMO quests.

Just about every gameplay element in the game is pretty much average, this includes gunplay, driving, crafting, loot, sneaking. Everytime you engage in something you think it's cool and then you're reminded of all the flaws. Eg.: Sneaking seems ok at first, but then it becomes very repetitive and enemies hardly ever patrol even so their initial placement is often detriment to your success (unless you're using quickhacks), silenced weapons suffer penalty to damage so unless you heavily invest into perks the enemies will just alert after tanking a headshot. Driving is cool, but then your car becomes light like a paper box and goes airborne or gets stuck somewhere randomly. Also buying cars is not a great/viable idea for 90% of the game, there's also no garage or way to just steal cars. Crafting is ok, but you mostly only use that for healing items, cause random drops from enemies are often better and/or easier to obtain.

The open world part of the game is just very weak, there's hardly anything to interact with. There IS a bunch of endearing side quests in the open world but it's only a handful - other than that the Night City is somewhat dead, streets filled with paid actors. I'll be honest, most of the time I didn't even know where I was, there are like 4 locations in the game I even recognize, but that's only because they're central points for plot/side missions.

Lastly: the graphics aren't very 'next-gen', they're ok. I'll be honest I haven't used the ray tracing, but environments, models, characters aren't mindblowing. At no point did I feel like we took a huge step forward. This being said: AI of enemies, physics are ALSO not next-gen at all, AI in fact is dumb as hell and reminds me of scripted enemies 2000's games. Facial expressions are great though, to CDPR's credit.

Cyberpunk 2077 is good, but it shouldn't have been marketed as RPG (poor character customization, very little rpg elements, choices in conversations barely matter) or Open World (very little interaction), as a linear story game with side activities, it's pretty great in fact if you can give all the technical difficulties a pass. All that being said this isn't close to quality or content of an average AAA game and I would recommend you buy this during a sale as this really feels like 25 dollar indie game, not a 60 dollar electronic masterpiece.

I am only reviewing this game because I've noticed some of my friends have it on their wishlists.

Sundered is a procedurally generated metroidvania clone. It has been recently updated as well. Is it worth your time and money? No. Long answer?

Don't get me wrong, the production value in this game is absolutely fantastic. Great animations, great visuals, climatic audio. In fact, when you start the game for the first time it makes a very good impression. Everything is very smooth, atmospheric and immersive.

And then it stops doing all that after about 20-30 minutes into the game. You are sorta stuck in that weird limbo where you're convincing yourself the game will get better. Beginning was so well made, there's no way nothing else happens, right?

No, past the initial impression you're doing the same things over and over again which consist of: running around uninspired, procedurally generated environments; fighting the same enemies over and over again. Sometimes they're recoloured, sometimes they ain't. I think there are about 3-4 themed areas with different enemy sets. Each area consists of about 3-4 enemy types, so yea there are about 10-16 enemy types in the game.

Yes, you do unlock new powers and you can 'build' the character the way you want to, but that will NEVER be relevant, NEVER. Mostly because challenging enemies or bosses are a scarce resource in Sundered. 90% of the time you will be running around badly designed levels (very generic, uninspired procgen chunklets) and hitting enemies that mostly requires you to just mash buttons with occasional jumping. I wanna say: there are two paths to power development and the powers mostly look and feel great but no enemies are designed in a way that would force or encourage you to use them.

Game contains 4 bosses that aren't very challenging. There are no secrets, there is little to no replay value, even though there are alternative endings. The gameplay is piss-poor and the amount of lore/atmosphere/story by no means makes up for it. It feels like it was made to be a cherry on top of a good product. Except the game isn't good at all.

There was an update in June. That update doesn't eliminate any of the fundamental flaws of the game. 0/10, barely playable. I finished it so you don't have to be disappointed like I was.

I have been playing Quake series since the first game and it's online modes since Quake 2. While I'm by no means a pro player or even pubstomper I've enjoyed the series since I can remember. Some people say the FPS genre is oversaturated with so many popular shooters, however I think there is a place for a fast paced arena shooter in 2018. Not in the shape or form Quake Champions is in right now.

The main reason why I'm still playing the game is that Quake Champions is still what the game was since Quake 3 Arena, at least at it's very core. It's a fast paced shooter that, while keeping things simple, makes great use of the physics engine, level design, weapon design to create a high skill cap first person shooter. It is not an easy game and I would argue that one of it's fortes is the online gameplay that requires raw skill, experience and knowledge. Nothing else is getting in your way, well... almost.


I don't usually review F2P games, I don't usually review Early Access games. This one however is pretty unique, because it seems as if it's development is going in reverse. Over last year we've seen dramatic drop in game's performance, removal of gamemodes, longer queue times, login queue, a revamp of the lootbox system (for the worse), introduction of aimbotting AI players into TDM queue. There's been many more questionable decisions made by the dev team, however I will not mention them as they were only recently removed.


I was worried about introducing such a modern (FPS) element into a classic game that is Quake, however at the start most if not all champions had abilities which had moderate impact on the gameplay and most of them functioned as utility to gain information, let the player move faster through the map, access some areas from different positions. However that has dramatically changed over the last year, when Sabre started introducing new characters with abilities which basically serve as burst damage options.

I would assume this was designed so that newer players who struggled with killing more experienced players or even veterans would at least get a fighting chance every 30s or so. This is however (in my opinion) an extremely bland and uninspired design and I would rather not have abilities at all at this point. Quake is a game about good aim, good movement and map control and I'm convinced a 'press F to kill' option simply doesn't fit in it.


Quake Champions has seen a decline in performance over the past year. That degradation is consistent across all machines and makes the game feel very choppy and not smooth at all. While the game is 'playable' it is important to note that Quake in particular is a very fast paced game with a history of players sacrificing ALL eye candy and even textures/resolution to achieve the highest FPS possible. The game 'as is' now suffers from major performance drops regardless of the settings, frame times are uneven, it really does feel like a much slower game just because of that.


While this is a common complaint within the community, let me have my 2 cents. I think that the format of picking 3 champions and basically having 3 lives is terrible for following reasons:

1. Only three lives makes the duel format much slower and forces players to play extremely carefully. There is also a snowballing factor where sometimes by getting a bad spawn you can just die 3 times in a row and the round will end. Seen at Quake Con.
   
2. For an aspiring duel player who has to pick 3 characters it makes the game overly complicated while teaching him little too nothing about how to better his gameplay, because of short, yet slow paced matches.
   
3. The game sometimes results in weird/random champion matchups leading to even more stalling until sudden death.

I don't know what was wrong with the old format. Why can't we just play with 1 champion each to 20-30 frags? It's possible to prevent unfair matchups by having players select 3 champions they would like to play and then have the other player ban 2 of them.


QC sounds are all over the place, and while I wouldn't complain about weapon sounds or most sound effects, the voice actors for characters are mostly really annoying and you have to listen to them. But the real issue is that you often cannot hear where enemies are! While on flat ground the sound is projected properly, whenever you're on a vertical map and someone is one floor below you, it really sounds very confusing. This is not something I can describe, you would have to hear it yourself. Game is free now after all, so if you really wish to, you can.


While I realize the game is in Early Access and I wish the game would come out of it being a huge success, the development has taken too so many wrong turns, I'm not even sure if the game will be playable by the end of the year. Bethesda studios keep giving the game CPR by removing the entry fee and making the design more noob friendly, however at some point even they will run out of fuel and the game will simply die.

A quick TL;DR:
1. If you don't own the game: The very game itself is very good, for that I would recommend.
2. If you already own the game: Only consider buying the remastered edition if you'd want a highly active online experience or initial port quality (fps, keyboard settings, being kicked to offline) made you ditch the game.

I have played all the Dark Souls games and finished them many times, except for the first one, solely because it just wouldn't run well for me, even with DSfix. It felt like a chore playing the game. After exploring all possible areas available at the time, when I first got to Blighttown I was getting kicked to offline mode on top of terrible fps which completely ruined the fun for me. Even the DSFix never really fixed the controls or performance, or quality for that matter. The game was barely playable (to me).

For those who never played Dark Souls:
It's a third person RPG game with a meaningful combat system. It is a pretty slow paced game where your timing, awareness, reflexes and resource management matter. It also has got a lot of content to explore and cannot be easily compared to any other game. It also introduced some new to the genre mechanics (PvEvP) that made it a very original masterpiece worth paying attention to.

Keep in mind that while every DS game was built upon the same foundation, they differ quite a bit, so if you've played another one and liked it, you might not like this one. That being said, it is still a very solid game.

For those who played Dark Souls:
The 'remastered' version is really how the game should've been released in the first place. There's no real 'hd' improvement over the original port. There is some small adjustments like lighting or particle effects, however most of the graphics weren't really altered. Some voice lines are pretty low audio quality as well, as they were never altered.

What was actually improved:

• Game runs in HD+ resolutions out of box at stable 60fps.
  
• The online matchmaking is a bit more balanced and doesn't use GFWL (that was changed in a later patch in PTDE)
  
• There is actual full keyboard+mouse support for this game. It's the first DS game to fully support it. (previous iterations tried, and DS3 was almost there if it wasn't for controller button prompts)
  
• UI was very slightly improved and you can actually scale it down which is a nice touch.
  
• Tiny amount of new settings such as password matching etc.

Everything else is as it was in the base game. There is no new content, don't expect it. The textures and models were not drastically improved. It is hard to even notice.

If you are worried about the early reviews saying you can get softbanned. Yes, it's true. It is the same exact issue from DS2 and DS3. You cannot get softbanned by just getting killed by a hacker, however picking up items dropped by other players can get you softbanned. I know this might be a dealbreaker to some people, but this has been in the series for such a long time know I don't even consider it something worth worrying about.

So why do I recommend it? Why did I not refund the game?
Because this actually allows me to play the very first game of the series I really like.

The 'recommendation' is quite personal, but if you read the review and struggled with the same things as I did, you might enjoy it, even for the ridiculous price.

If the PTDE worked fine for you with DSfix and you never had anything to complain about, don't get this, unless you're looking for a more active game.

If you don't have this or PTDE at all, consider buying it, as it is a very good game. The current price tag ($40) for players who don't own DS:PTDE is ridiculous in my opinion, however now that Fromsoft removed the initial port from the Steam Store, it's not like you have much choice. If $40 is too much to spend, consider waiting a bit until it drops.