Recent reviews by squarto

I love Atlus games, Persona in particular for its vibes, and I've played them on and off for ~7 years but ultimately never ended up finishing a single one, for various reasons. This game finally broke that curse for me as it took every aspect of Persona that I really liked, de-obfuscated mechanics and made the combat more satisfying, and didn't make me feel like I was losing out on half of the game because I missed some random calendar or hangout event that opened up some hidden story chapters.


Characters : Far more enjoyable and mature than your typical Persona characters. I have not found a single character to be insufferable and I enjoyed travelling with all of them equally, there wasn't a single character I disliked.

Worldbuilding : I loved the intricate attention to the lore and worldbuilding in the game, the tribes were interesting to learn about. I wish that there was a bit more focus on the individual tribal cultures/identities though, the game pretty much only focuses on the macroscopic/big picture story, but that's fine since the story is presented as an epic anyway, where the clashing of ideals takes the stage front and center.

Story : The overall story was satisfying to experience. It's nothing groundbreaking, but sometimes it doesn't need to be. It's very straight to the point and works perfectly for the established setting, the aforementioned clash of ideals that shape the world going forward. My only complaint was that the pacing seemed to be all over the place, particularly towards the latter half of the game. Specifically right after the Virga Island story chapter, it feels like I experienced a rough rollercoaster of bursts in story moments and awkward pacing all the way to the final deadline.

Soundtrack : A hit or miss at some parts, a lot of the tracks are well orchestrated but then there are some outliers that sound like cheap MIDI tracks. Combat music was also quite repetitive.

---
Overall I'm extremely pleased with the game and I'm happy that it more or less perfected a lot of the issues I personally struggled with regarding Persona, to the point where I actually finished the game for once, on Hard difficulty at that (can't be asked to do Regicide). I really hope this becomes a long running franchise in the near future as I actually prefer this to Persona in almost every way, it feels like a natural evolution in mechanics and storytelling.

Game does not appear to run well on modern hardware for whatever reason. Am on i9 13th gen and on a RTX 4090, game installed on an SSD, and it takes ~3-5 minutes to launch the game every time. On top of that, there's an occasional stutter that I've noticed when I actually did manage to play the game for a bit. I should not have to jump through a bunch of extra hoops to enjoy a game in this day and age, so I'm refunding.

Staggering in terms of amount of content that it offers, and overall well worth the price. Took me about 2 weeks in total to finish. Most bosses are fun, a bit overtuned in some aspects. Final boss is by far the hardest FromSoft boss across all of their modern titles, and took me around 2 nights to beat - at the time of writing there have been no actual boss adjustments yet, just a patch released that makes the first 10 Scadu blessings stronger in scaling.

----------------

Starting with the cons:

Biggest gripe is the fact that the NPCs once again get waylaid per usual FromSoft style, but in a more egregious way considering they seem to play a more prevalent role at the start of the DLC (you encounter them at sites of grace and it almost looks like they are meant to accompany you for the journey) but that VERY quickly unravels and they end up splitting up and eventually the quest lines and interactions fall apart completely and they're all but forgotten until a certain event.

Another gripe is the fact that this DLC is basically only approachable once you're at the absolute near or actual end of the game, meant to be taken on at ~ lvl 120, and effectively is just a huge content island with absolutely no crossing over into the base game. If you want to use any of the cool new stuff you get in this expansion in the base game, you pretty much can only do so in NG+. This as well as the fact that there's no practical ending or resolution after beating the final boss, save for just a little (but arguably important?) story point, the lack of resolution almost makes it feel like everything is inconsequential and isolated entirely from the rest of the game, and could have probably been shoehorned into a bespoke sequel for Elden Ring rather than be a content island.

Lastly, the Furnace Golems are absolutely bottom tier enemies and whoever designed their fight mechanics needs to play the game again start to finish and re-evaluate their design choices.

----------------

As for the pros:

The weapons, armor, gear and equipment are all phenomenal. Light Greatswords are among my new favorite weapon type, the hand-to-hand (martial arts) weapon type also is fun and works quite well, and overall there are a lot of cool new toys to play with here.

The level design is remarkably well done and is to me one of my most favorite aspects about this DLC, the entire open world zone ALMOST feels like a legacy dungeon in its own right with how some of these subregions are well hidden or accessible from points of entry you never even thought to check. There's one area, the Abyssal Woods, that is probably my absolute new favorite area in the whole game in terms of how well hidden it is and in terms of its unique mechanics (and the area's boss being really cool too is icing on the cake).

Even the legacy dungeons are amazing too, Shadow Keep is effectively like the Grand/Duke's Archives but taken up by several notches and is super easy to get lost in if you lack a sense of direction.

And of course, the music and art direction are as always on point, From never fails to deliver on these fronts.

-----------------

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my experience despite the handful of annoyances, I hope that in a subsequent patch or two that the devs can finally fix some of these overtuned bosses (particularly the final boss) and also address some performance concerns.

One of the very rare few games that I've played that genuinely feels like it ruins almost all other video games for me. The sheer amount of player freedom, choices to be made, build variety, character dialogues, moral dilemmas etc. that the game features just leaves every other game I've ever played in my life in the dust. These days I have very little patience for newer experiences and I have a rather unreasonably high bar for what I consider to be a game that I place in my favorites, but BG3 has shattered all expectations - even moreso considering the fact that prior to this, I wasn't even a fan of CRPGs or D&D in general. Unlike most games I've played in recent years, this game genuinely feels like a labor of love by dedicated and talented devs, and the fact it received GOTY and is recognized for its achievements gives me hope in the midst of a rather bleak moment in the games industry.

I recognize it's sometimes unreasonable to say this considering every developer and game has its own strengths and uniqueness to it, but I do hope that developers and designers will look to BG3 as a lesson and inspiration for what a game of this scale, depth, and dedication looks and feels like.

P.S.: pls add Minthara as an Origin character :c

cool cloak

For the love of all that is good, STOP UPDATING THE GAME. Devs seriously need to respect the fact that the game's not supposed to follow a live service model and get frequent updates (or integrated paid mods) - with how complex Skyrim modding can be (which paid mods DO NOT account for) and with how deep the roots of the modding scene stretch, all of these updates actively hurt everyone collectively on the platform, alienating a vast majority of the community that mods the game. It was bad enough where we had to differentiate between 2 different game versions to mod it properly - now we have FOUR as of this review, with seemingly no end in sight.

What can I say that hasn't already been said by many - the game's boring, and badly outdated. Visually it looks alright, I love the inclusion of PBR and higher quality materials (for the most part, do NOT look at planet textures though), and the interior spaces (when you ignore the fact most of them are copypaste) are very well decorated and lived in. But mechanically this game is shallower than a puddle, and does not capitalize on ANY of the things it tries to sell you. An intuitive and actually good ship builder just so that you can fly your ship in low-stakes orbital combat... Planetary exploration that's utterly pointless... Outpost building with worse controls and jank than Fallout 4's settlement system, for the sake of gathering resources that you can easily just buy... The list of grievances go on and on, if you want a better explanation of it all, check out NakeyJakey's video on it that otherwise perfectly sums it all up at the time of me writing this.

Unless Bethesda straps down and seriously overhauls the game, which I highly doubt they can accomplish, especially with Emil Pagliarulo still being at the helm, I have severe doubts for the future of this developer, even previous red flags aside.

Revising my old review to more accurate reflect my thoughts on the game a year after I finished it:

The game is beautiful and massive with lots of unique approaches and refinements to the existing Souls combat formula, but with some glaring pitfalls that ultimately somewhat diminish my enjoyment of the game as I played it. Namely the extreme majority of all dungeons were largely copypastes of one another, with again the majority not having what feel like meaningful rewards. Typically in games like this, I like to spend each playthrough doing a full and thorough combing of dungeons to hoard rewards and do quests - but the vast majority of dungeons usually reward nothing but pointless materials or spirit summons, as opposed to unique gear or weapons (read: most, not all dungeons) and also tend to have the most boring bosses, usually just a supercharged (if at all) variant of unique existing enemies. Hell, even one of the dungeons literally copy pasted an existing otherwise UNIQUE "story" boss into a regular dungeon for seemingly no reason at all but to populate the cave with a challenge.

Beyond the dungeon/reward dilemma, there was also the issue of having to scour the map for bell bearings and knowing specifically which dungeons to target *on repeat playthroughs* (NOT NG+, which lets you keep your store upgrades - but new characters altogether need to find them all again.) Because of the vastness of the map and how far spread out all of these copypaste dungeons are, it makes repeat playthroughs of the game extremely unenjoyable and feel like a slog, especially because NG+ doesn't even offer anything unique at all, unlike say Dark Souls 2 which at least had a unique approach to NG+ and offered unique gear for existing repeat boss encounters.

To wrap this up: the game primarily feels most enjoyable only really on the first playthrough (or several if you aren't like me and like to cram as much content as humanly possible on one playthrough), with replayability being arguably the weakest out of every modern FromSoftware game (from Dark Souls to current). I hope their future titles don't suffer from this.

Spoiler free review:

This is one of those times I *really* wish Steam would allow a "maybe" option instead of a yes or no recommendation.

Dying Light 2 doesn't quite feel like how Dying Light 1 did at all, both in terms of scale and atmosphere. I can honestly hardly call this a sequel. It feels like it's trying way too hard to be a CDPR game while at the same time also trying hard to be Dying Light, as opposed to a fully fledged sequel to the latter. Chris Avellone's presence in writing the core of the game's lore and world building would've required at least another 5, maybe 7 years of extra dev time and FAR more resources and manpower to develop than Techland already has. His departure from the team and subsequent rush to finish the game had led to extremely huge plot gaps and pacing issues. The following will sum up the things the game does good and bad, especially as a sequel to it's rather sublime first game.

+/- The game's map is gargantuan, easily dwarfs Harran and then some. Plenty to explore, feels like a giant Mario level, tons of secrets and easter eggs. Downside however is that just about every dark zone is a literal copy paste, and there are also no Volatile nests at all barring maybe.

+ Story and sidequests are quite long and girthy, my first playthrough of the game thus far where I chugged through the story and did a fair amount, but certainly not even half of the side content, took me 65 hours. I had assigned all of the utilities to the factions and done all the bandit camps, and a handful of dark zones and anomalies.

+ Soundtrack is great.

+/- The parkour. I'll go into this in a little bit more detail further ahead.

+/- The combat. Again, will go into more detail ahead.

- The main story. Without spoiling anything, the story is decent in premise, but executed horribly. As mentioned before, there are plot gaps, and horrible pacing issues, especially evident in the epilogue (which sucks MAJORLY by the way.) The core narrative of the game that Avellone tried to establish felt way too ambitious and Techland did not have the manpower or resources, or time to realize its full potential.

- The dialogue. The voice acting isn't bad for most NPCs, though it felt like they got some rather average or below average VAs for a lot of their NPCs, it was largely due in part to the script writing in general for the NPCs that sucked. Dying Light hardly had this issue, but with how DL2 is trying way too hard to be an RPG without actually being an RPG, a lot of the NPC dialogue has been really poorly written, almost as if the person spoke very little English at times. (Yes I am aware Techland is a Polish game studio.)

- The atmosphere of the game and world. Dying Light had a much more gritty, horror theme to it with an atmosphere more appropriate of the period the game world was going through. This sequel meanwhile feels more or less like how Bethesda handled Fallout 4, it's not gritty anymore, it has far less horror in it, and is more fantastical (especially thanks to the more saturated color pallet) and makes it truly feel like it isn't a sequel to Dying Light but rather either a soft reboot or spiritual successor to it.

- The skill and world progression. This is partly tied into how the parkour is in the game, but the skill progression in DL2 feels way off and you get access to some really odd skill choices early in the game. What's even weirder is that the main character supposedly wandered the European wasteland for 15 years and knows almost no parkour or advanced moves off the bat. Part of this makes sense for game reasons, but narratively it makes no sense whatsoever. As for the world progression, the cool thing DL1 did was that it started off with some light, easier infected and slowly the world around you became more dangerous as more people got infected and turning, with more monstrosities being introduced over time. DL2 just throws everything at you right at the beginning. In this case, narratively it makes sense because it's some time since the world succumbed to the infection, but from a gameplay perspective it just feels wrong.

+/- As mentioned before, the parkour. They refined quite a lot of elements and made climbing a lot more fun and fast, as well as riskier + more reward thanks to adding in a stamina system, compared to DL1, and is the most fun I've had in a long time with a game that has advanced movements, possibly the best I've played thus far, trumping that of Breath of the Wild and then some. Downside however is that the jumping and movement also feels a LOT more floaty. The first ability you unlock is an increased jump height, and you can also unlock an unrealistic double-jump as well as an ability to turn 180 degrees mid-air. DL1 was a lot more like Mirror's Edge with regards to parkour and jumping, but DL2 basically turns you into a discount Spiderman, in all the best and worst ways.

+/- The combat. For the same reasons as the parkour, combat is better and worse at the same time. There is far less gore, and they removed the cool X-ray animation that DL1 had when you landed crits on anyone, and it feels a lot floatier as well. On the upside however, fights against human NPCs and zombies are a lot more interesting because you can chain some neat and effective parkour attacks and stunlocking isn't an issue anymore.

-------------------------------

Overall, the game is very enjoyable if you don't care much at all about the story and you haven't played the first game to base a lot of this stuff off of, it might do quite well as a standalone game, but as a sequel, it suffers from a LOT of drawbacks. This is essentially what is in my eyes:

The perfect 7/10 game, no more and maybe room for less. A sidegrade, rather than an upgrade or a downgrade, with lots of nuances that set it apart from the previous entry.

EDIT: Included a bit of formatting for easier reading.

Really amazing game that's unfortunately, as of now, mired with various issues and bugs. Gameplay feels really good but some features are hidden behind areas or mechanics that you wouldn't otherwise think to enter. I only found out about mantis blades like 30+ hours into the game for example, had no idea you had to buy them off a ripperdoc. Which I only went to like three times in 60 hours of gameplay. Balancing is also definitely weird, the Witcher 3 formula of balancing just doesn't work too well for this game, hopefully mod support will fix that.

Major positives go to:
The atmosphere and visuals are astounding in this game, provided you've the hardware to see it to its fullest potential. I'm running this on a GTX 980 on mostly medium-high with not too many issues and it still looks fantastic. Lastly, the story and dialogue between basically all of the quests and sidequests are really good and very well done. Hopefully CDPR continues to update the game and add more content in, and who knows, maybe restore cut content. Hopefully the DLC will be good too. And hope that this review ages well in regards to that.

Bottom line: As it is right now, maybe best to acquire this game probably half a year to a year from now when things will be all patched up. I wouldn't really say it warrants getting it on discount (once it gets all fixed that is) because the quality of the game is just *that* good and for me personally, it was worth every penny so far, as I can clearly see that CDPR pulled through and did an otherwise amazing job at delivering this game, minus the obvious issues that it launched with and the fact that they shot themselves in the foot by overhyping the game. Night City Wire was a big mistake.