Recent reviews by Swansonhart

Truly a time waster. All those reviews telling funny engaging stories are squeezed out of five-minute situations that you'll experience once or twice in fifty hours of regular gameplay. A mediocre book is still more interesting and captivating than this.

In other words, it's a sandwich with one green lettuce leaf in-between. It's unique, but it's not enjoyable in the way that you think it is.

Word of caution to new buyers: don't buy any DLC even if you like the first twenty hours or so; give it more time to think over. I wish I did anyway.

Update: So I'm going to mess around with some settings and the initial setup to see if that improves the stories and reduces time-wasting.

Caesar salad, here we go!

The crashing and visual glitches make it impossible to play this technical "marvel." Avoid at all costs.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/swansonhart/screenshot/2265938781810850288/

The positive reviews couldn’t be further from the truth.

What kind of garbo do people read that the writing in this “game” feels like gold to them? Usually, I can appreciate good writing regardless of whether I like the story, but this is just a glorified fan-fiction level of writing. It’s wordy where it needs to be short, and short where it needs to expand, but most of the times, it’s wordy everywhere…

Although the Pillars of the Earth was largely disappointing for me, it does a much better job in being a game, visual novel and book. My advice is, play the demo and don’t expect it to get better.

P.S. (to myself) If it's a visual novel, don't put off playing the game soon for at least two hours. Otherwise, it'll be too late to return it. I was too late with this one...

The gameplay consists of two things: card collecting and fighting scenes. The former serves its purpose well, but the latter is atrocious. It feels like a mediocre PS1 action game, where you struggle to even turn the character in the right direction. All of the fights are just padding to extend the playtime.

Moreover, all of the quests you play are irrelevant and pointless. For example, as a player or even a character, why would you care about accompanying some random farmer to some random village? His background is nonexistent, he’s not being developed during the quest and the ending is meaningless. And of course, this quest is not connected to the next quest.

It’s a big time waster, that fails both to challenge and intrigue the player.

My biggest complaint is that the punches and effects lack the oomph, and the whole experience is highly polished in a bad way. It’s like going to a theme restaurant that’s clearly faking it, versus going to a theme restaurant that makes it a very believable experience. Aside from that, it’s a typical beat-‘em-up that you’ll probably enjoy.

It’s a visually intriguing game that falls flat in all other departments.

The dialogues in the game are not enjoyable to listen to after the first hour or so. They are well voiced but written blandly. This point applies to the whole story as well, which is a bland cliché.

The gameplay mechanic of connecting the dots on the detective board is quite uninspiring. You’re not allowed to make wrong conclusions, which would steer the story in a different direction.

The whole game is hard on rails and leaves little to imagination.

First, it's simply a challenge to start this boy. You have to install a couple mods so it launches properly. I've done that. Checkmark. Next, setting up your wheel through an in-game wizard is not possible. It doesn't allow you to complete the last step, so you have to go manually through all tabs and reassign controls yet again. It's the clumsiest wheel setup.

Alright, how about picking a car for a race? Well, you have an incoherent menu of cars, many of which are displayed as unrecognized models -- they are covered with car covers. To make matters worse, some of the licenses have been revoked (BTCC), and there's no certainty that it won't happen again; so you might lose what you've paid for. Want to adjust difficulty? At low difficulty, the AI doesn't even start off from the grid! Want to exit or restart a race? Good luck with that, because once you press escape, you can't click on anything (and no, the option to allow the usage of cursor in menus doesn't work either).

I've managed to muster some patience only once to see what the "glorious" tire model is. The best I can describe it, it's akin to riding a bicycle where you feel very accurately what the wheels are doing and where they are facing. However, just like with the bicycle, where you don't feel what the frame is doing, in the similar manner you don't feel the car's weight and suspension at all. It's somewhat of a surrealistic feeling in quite a bad way.

For all the trouble you have to go through to set this brick of a software up, and then to constantly fight the game again and again, I don't think it's worth neither your time nor money, of which the developers are asking unjustifiably a lot for.

There's AMS2 for a better single-player experience, and iRacing for competitive people. Both of them will be at least worth the money and the hassle.

I've already played almost 3 hours, which is astronomical compared to the 94 seconds Aaron Rodgers played this season. Highly recommend!

I wish to draw your attention to one essential function. Font size. It is extremely small. The game has recently received a font update, for which I'm grateful. However, it hasn't solved the problem with numerous other elements of the UI being unreasonably small and still having tiny font pop-ups.

It varies from person to person, but the size of the font for most elements is probably far from being acceptable. Personally, I have to constantly use windows magnifying glass to see what's on the ground and to browse through the inventory, not to mention the description pop-ups etc. Whenever I start the game I realize that I don't want to deal with that and give up.

Being in EA, it's natural to have various problems. However, I believe the font size and accessibility shouldn't have been ignored to this extent. Until the issue's gone, I'll leave it a thumbs down.