Recent reviews by SkacikPL

Poor networking, poor balancing, poor anti-cheat kicking me randomly claiming "irregular data activity". Not going to stick around to eventually get banned without even knowing why.

If you like SE5, then just get this one via gamepass, there's no point for paying 50 bucks for something that was already sold to you three years ago.

Other than that it's literally SE5 with its own missions and different set of weapons, some of it is better, some of it is worse but it doesn't inherently change anything meaningful from its base proudct.

What is the same:

• The engine itself, exact same features from a product that was already late to the party back in 2021. No temporal anti aliasing, no raytracing, nothing.
  
• Animations, sounds, models, textures - vast majority has been built from assets already made for SE5.

What has changed:

• Texture resolution has been increased noticeably, in essence nothing that couldn't be a free DLC to SE5.

What is new

• Weapons
  
• Campaign and story (shorter than similarly priced on launch SE5)
  
• Main character
  
• New voiceovers
  
• Some music?
  
• Some multiplayer maps (whilst others are reused from SE5 but have different time of day)
  
• Gestapo and SS enemies but they have no real functional difference from commanders/soldiers from SE5 besides the model.
  
• Separate propaganda mission mode

Quite sure that the spinoff deliberately focused on separate character to somehow justify it being a separate product but all it boils down to is a new main character that looks like the chinese gopher meme, starring in grand total of 2 visibly hand animated cutscenes.

This does not mean it is inherently a bad game, it's about as good (or bad) as SE5 is but it's clear it's not worth 50 bucks when it's free on gamepass. Unless you're hardcore series fan, there's no need to spend this much money on something that probably costed pennies to produce and was mostly built off an older product that you have already bought.

• Performance is atrocious even on top end hardware.
  
• A-Life is absolutely busted
  
• AI can range from absolutely braindead to laser accuracy mid combat.
  
• Balancing, weight and item economy are stitched to be baseline functional and not much beyond.
  
• Lack of patrolling stalker squads with guides like in COP makes fast travel available only in most of hub areas, everything else is a tedious foot trek.
  
• Mutants are bullet sponges that serve as ammo/health/gear checks with nothing to give back in return.
  
• Quests are progressively worse in stability the further you go in the game.

And that's about it for the moment, if you absolutely love the series and mostly care about moment to moment free play (or were hardcore GAMMA player with no fast travel etc) AND you own top of the line PC - go ahead. In every other case, you'll probably have to wait a year or so for it to be in fully playable state.

Let me get this straight, the game is so single thread CPU performance bound that 7800X3D cannot maintain 60 FPS in cities.
RTX 4090 is just laying about, doing nothing because it does not get fed enough by the CPU.
DLSS implementation is plain horrid, also no DLAA. Frame generation and RT reflections are also nowhere to be found.

Other than that i's a real fun game, if you liked the original, you would like this one as well but there's no way in hell i could recommend getting it right now.

The basics:

• It's not even a souls like, it's an outright 80% dark souls clone with couple twists of its own.(Not a bad thing i guess)
  
• It has barely anything to do with original 2014 game besides taking couple lore concepts.
  
• Features actually enjoyable "arcade" coop with no invisible walls or kicking of clients when failing or killing a boss.

The good:

• Probably prettiest souls like so far.
  
• Fair amount of equipment.
  
• Decently open environments.
  
• Ammo design for ranged weapons is way more fun.
  
• Sound design and area reverbs are pretty great (except umbral thing - who thought having child cry on loop was a good idea)

The neutral:

• Combat is quite floaty, relies on unique parry/stamina system for best results.
  
• A lot of world/lore/NPC handling is taken straight from FROM software games, at least NPC mouths "move" when talking but they still only move around when resting/warping.
  
• Super weird handling of area names, only couple of areas really have names and they are only displayed in specific spots.

The bad:

• Even on a beefy hardware, there are spots where performance takes a nosedive, especially with whole umbral thing.
  
• Umbral thing is a gimmick at best and quickly becomes super tedious with how relentlessly it spawns enemies, even at zero "dread". There are times you cannot interact with environment, since it has low priority lock-on and constantly spawning zombies will steal the lock-on from those objects.
  
• Progression path is not obvious, two rooms next to each other can have same enemy types where ones are manageable and others will wipe the floor with you.
  
• Not too many enemy types.
  
• Point above is usually combined with encounters designed around hiding enemies behind objects/corners to push you off ledges and/or having a lot of ranged enemies to spam at you from KILOMETERS away.
  
• Dark souls jump mechanic sucks - there's a reason even FROM gave up on it with elden ring.
  
• Doesn't use UE5 up to its potential, absolutely no raytracing and texture quality could be
  better.
  
• Human character models, especially faces/eyes/hair are absolutely atrocious.

Overall it's a competent game that's fun most of the time but it has its incredibly frustrating moments. With time and some patches and balancing passes it could really be one of both better looking and better playing soulslikes and i really hope that happens.

Idea sounds nice on paper but it doesn't work on multiple levels.
Firstly, why bother customizing units that you're meant to very likely lose as core design element of the game.
Secondly, available customizations aren't anyhow meaningful as they're mostly color pallette swaps.

The DLC is mostly just a paid appreciation token for the developers but at the same time the game is not being patched any longer so you're not getting much in return either.

If you are looking for a turn based game to just fool around with, this isn't it.
The premise of the game and the core idea are interesting but the execution revolves around (very) punishing difficulty and forcing the player to constantly retry missions or entire story segments.

Past certain point it just feels like forced padding to compensate for low amount of content the game has, if it was played linearly, start to end without any retries.

There's no way of avoiding unit losses or defeats as enemies will cheese you mercilessly, sometimes a lower difficulty mission will be an order of magnitude harder than supposed higher difficulties and it's hard to predict.

I really tried to like it and give it a chance but i don't really appreciate being cheesed only to repeat same segments with extra crutches to simulate some sort of power curve.
I wouldn't mind a sequel but not with this design.

There are also bugs which were never fixed from release, ranging from getting stuck in UI to some random gameplay issues.

It has that specific Tango DNA where core game is relatively short and it relies on side content to pad out the gameplay time.

The issue is that besides side quests, there's an absurd amount of collectibles that don't really do much.
Main offender are the spirits, which are spinned up as a main plot point and saving them all is a gargantuan task that takes by itself several hours of blindly running around the city.
Once you achieve that, lo behold - it changes nothing, the ending is unsatisfying and mediocre and all of your effort changes nothing in that regard. You get a bunch of cheat items for NG+, if you decide to do a NG+, except you already 100% the game so what's the purpose?

The combat loop incredibly sucks until you reach near max level and get all damage upgrade items, so rushing main story is not recommended.

Beyond that it's an okay game, probably best replication of Shibuya to date with decent graphics and raytracing support. Performance can be all over the place at times but is nowhere bad as The Evil Within 2.

Story is okay but it's an one shot with none of your actions having impact on it. You could rush it within 5 hours or less or try to 100% the game and forget what the story even was about.

Overall not a bad game but i wouldn't recommend paying a full price for it.

Frankly - i don't even know why it got delayed for a year and i don't even want to wager what was the state of the project a year ago.

Simplistic to the bone, 5 minutes long deathmatch rounds with a minor twist. Characters deliberately control very poorly to compensate with nearly godlike doges - with other end of the spectrum being stunlocks which will cancel whatever action you were doing.

Very little content, very few maps, but hey - there's a battlepass!

On top of that it requires you to make a Capcom ID account which is a hassle of its own.

TL;DR don't bother - it's a waste of bandwidth, it's not worth the effort even if it's _free_ alongside RE8.

As a baseline the game is conceptually nice, however it needs a solid round of patching and QOL improvements.
TL;DR If you enjoyed every SE game prior to this one, you can get this one as well, in any other case i recommend waiting for patches to bring the game up to quality standard.

Graphics haven't changed much, rendering is mostly same. Assets have been upgraded through use of photogrammetry which greatly improves look of everything except foliage, shading is bit outdated and antialiasing is non existant. Performance is also mostly okay although much like SE4, lack of benchmark on game launch makes synthetic testing and fine-tuning harder.

Gameplay is about as good as SE4 is, couple of things got streamlined for better or worse. My biggest issues are with how clunky player handling is as every interaction seems to have a hefty delay before it's actually executed, turn radius is huge and causes issues indoors.

Level design seems to be sidestep from SE4, levels are slightly bigger than in previous game and more detailed (especially urban parts) but they also rely on having a lot of areas that aren't technically accessible to the player, very often you cannot travel from point A to point B in a straight line as you'll encounter large patches of inaccessible areas in the middle, sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don't, like patch of farmland fenced off with hip high rocks and bushes.

AI i don't particularly mind, it's also an improvement from SE4, stealth is even more viable although enemies are easy to pick off outside actual combat and even if combat breaks out it's easy and way more preferable to run away and come back once they settle down. As far as actual combat is, they are way more deadlier than in previous games.

Audio is also a genuine improvement, it doesn't blow competition out of the water but there are now way more distinct weapon sounds, for up close and distance shots plus some nice reverbs which are sometimes used in interiors.

The new featured gamemode of axis invasions is a mixed bag which sounds great on paper but doesn't play out half as fun in practice. Majority of the time people either are ignorant of the fact that they're invaded and you can pick them off with ease while at another end of the spectrum people will stop dead in their tracks and entrench in one position for as long as they can or outright commit suicide or kick you out of their session. In general the mode has very, very little to do with sniping duels as majority of kills will be in close quarters range.

This also leads into topic of netcode for peer to peer modes like Invasions and Survival/Coop, which is atrocious (and has been for many entries in the series now). It flat out doesn't work, there's a huge delay on everything and players/enemies teleport every now and then. In coop modes this is perhaps a minor annoyance but in invasions it means difference between victory and defeat.

In terms of bugs - there are several, none of them gamebreaking but they can prevent you from completing achievements and getting weapon rewards. On my machine performance and stability is OK.
Perhaps biggest and "wonkiest" change in my eyes are new ragdolls which seem to die in very similar but also very unlikely gymnasitc positions like frog squats, heads between legs, trying to suck themselves off and so on and so forth. The frequency of how often each of those repeats is so consistent i consider it a deliberate feature at this point.

In general the game isn't a necessarily a huge evolutional step for the franchise, it has a potential to be a much refined version of SE4. Provided the develoers sit down on it and implement several much needed features and fixes to further polish the experience.