Recent reviews by LostTfamaze™

Preface: I have played about 3,000 hours of POE 1 and am pretty experienced with ARPGs in general. I played as grenadier merc, and I have gotten to and done some mapping. I am done and will probably not be back for at least 6 months. I do not and will never care about the campaign in an ARPG. It is not why I am playing. I have no clue what the story is in POE 2 and even after 3k hours have no clue what the story is in POE 1. It is simply an obligatory prelude to me getting to the actual part I have fun with - the end game.


Pros:

• The bosses throughout the campaign are very cool
  
• The art and textures are much better than POE 1.
  
• The game itself feels way smoother
  
• WASD movement is fantastic
  
• The game does not hold your hand in anyway. Either look up guides or experiment and find your way through.
  
• Monster variety is very good, and the environments are extremely well made

Neutral - All of these are a some will love it, some will hate it:

• Going through the campaign is much slower
  
• Some experienced players will be able to shut their brain off and zen, but in general it is not nearly as easy to get into a flow state as in POE 1
  
• This is very much EA. Things are changing or improving a lot more often.
  
• Instead of crafting gear using a small amount of currency and the crafting bench to swap around what you need, it is much better to be checking vendors every level and to find a better item or base and just continuing
  
• Crafting in general is significantly less powerful. I am sure some juicers will find ways to consistently craft good things especially in late end game, but the average joe through early, mid, and most of end game is probably going to be getting much less value from crafting things themselves

Cons:

• They did my boy chaos orb dirty
  
• The skill tree needs some refinement. A lot of the various node placements feel... off. Not sure exactly what I would change, but it just doesn't feel correct right now. Maybe just a grenadier merc thing.
  
• Hard nerfing gas grenade because of an unintended interaction actual grenadiers aren't even using is not fun
  
• I do not like that the more in-depth details for modifiers on items have been removed. Not sure if it is more of a low priority thing, but it think it needs to come back.
  
• Various aspects of permanent reservation with spirit feel poorly balanced and definitely need some work
  
• Why was the map tab not ported over for waystones? It actually makes zero sense that several other tabs were but not maps.

Personal Negative:

• This is the first time in my time playing ARPGs where I have been having fun in the campaign and immediately stopped having fun in end game. It just feels much less satisfying and makes me want to go play POE 1 instead.

After thoughts:
The game as it is is not really for me due to the mentioned end game thing. That is alright. Despite the name, POE 2 is not really a sequel to POE 1. Maybe the feel of end game is intentional. Maybe it isn't. Either way, I am not sure I would personally actually change anything about it.

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Christmas wish:
Give me WASD movement in POE 1
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• The game looks fantastic
  
• The environment and sound is extremely immersive. The storms are especially great.
  
• The guns themselves feel very good to shoot, and the actual gun sounds are on point
  
• The world itself is very well constructed, and I have spent the vast majority of my time just happily exploring while ignoring the main quest
  
• There is a pretty broad amount of freedom when it comes to how you accomplish or fail various quests
  
• The game will punish you for being stupid
  
• The stashes do not hold your hand. Many of them are actually difficult to piece together how to get them.

• A lot of the mutants are a little too bullet spongey
  
• There are a decent number of things that are partially locked behind quests but aren't obvious. Ex. I found 3/4 of the psi-blockers in the swamp before the quest, and spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get the one in the church. Turns out you can't until the quest chain because the wall is still up.

• The performance of the game is bad
  
• Humans soak up way too many chest shots. Headshots are satisfying, but 5.56 on low armored targets should still be very deadly center mass.
  
• Enemy spawning is not reasonably working currently. I found a mod that sort of fixed the issue of enemies constantly spawning very close to me in a POI, but it is like putting a band-aid over a bullet wound.
  
• There are WAY more issues after you do the main quest chains in SIRCAA. A lot of optional objectives for subsequent quests start being blocked. Lots of the subsequent side quests that unlock are either incompletable or require repeated loading to try to get working. I have personally paused my playthrough to wait for a patch at this point because I would rather not miss parts of quests.

I am tentatively recommending the game. I personally don't care too much about the story in games I play and am way more content exploring, and I had an absolute blast doing just that. The only reason I even continued the main story line was to unlock more areas of the map. If you are like me and happy to just explore the world GSC has created, you will more than likely easily get 40 hours out of the game even if they never fix the issues people are having beyond SIRCAA. If you are mostly here for the story though, I would recommend holding off for a few patches to get a smoother experience going through.

Rating as of review date - 3/10


The graphics are pretty good, but any "bad" looking spots are masked by the camera filter that smears things. I am a firm believer that graphics mean literally nothing though. The sounds are overall good. The sound placement is alright. Both the firearms and how you handle the firearms feel very bad even in relation to "realism". There are tons of options and menus that do literally nothing. It is 2024. Even just looking from a security perspective, we should not have peer to peer matchmaking as the only option. If you want to put money into the future of the project, go for it. Otherwise, check back in on the game in a year or two.

• The Graphics are pretty good though the bad portions are hidden by a pretty strong camera filter that smears your screen in Vaseline.
  
• The sounds overall feel good, and the weapon sounds themselves are good though a tad too loud by default (can be individually changed). This loudness can be explained away by your character appearing to not use ear pro (very stupid).
  
• The lighting is overall very good, but I suspect much if it is just handled by UE5's built in systems.

• I am not a fan of the blurred faces personally, but I get that it fits the "aesthetic"
  
• The maps have no soul. They are extremely bland and generic, and I hope they take a pass through and actually do something with them.
  
• The game modes are what you expect. Nothing special going on.

• Matchmaking is awful. The change to no longer need to ready up is a good start, but it does not solve the overall issues. This is a symptom of an issue mentioned later though.
  
• The menu's are quarter baked with many options that do literally nothing.
  
• I cannot legitimately tell if the game means to have push to talk all the time. The option is there, and it seems to work in game, but in lobby it is open mic for some reason.
  
• The game should not last to 10 round wins especially in the current P2P state. Just set it to 5 or 6 rounds to win.
  
• The way the guns move around and feel is atrocious. No one is swinging so much with their arms especially with a rifle (for many reasons). Also, the time it takes to acquire a sight picture makes no sense.
  
• The amount the firearms recoil (especially the handguns) is so far removed from reality that I can only conclude that the developers have never fired a firearm in their lives.
  
• There needs to keep you firearm in a ready position and fire without fully aiming down sights. No one clearing a house is walking around with a UMP at basically under your arm level. They also aren't going to swing a corner into a room bothering to fully ADS.
  
• The weapons are extremely poorly modified. An example is that a large portion of the long barrel weapons have lights setup in such a way that most of the barrel is within the light beam. Not sure if this is a bug or "intended".

The game exclusively uses P2P matchmaking. This is 2024, and it is a paid game. You can use the excuse of this being early access if you would likely, but peer to peer matching is not only bad from a general gameplay perspective but also a security one. Your IP will be available to everyone in your match unless you are behind a VPN or proxy. This is not an "if there is a vulnerability found situation". It is a required aspect of P2P networks. Things are only worse if there are any vulnerabilities discovered in the game. If there was somehow a remote code execution vulnerability discovered, it could easily result in malicious code being executed simply by playing with the wrong person. IE old school Modern Warfare max level/prestige and all skins lobbies but used to do bad things on your computer instead. Exclusively using P2P networks especially for a game where you are expecting to constantly match with random players rather than people you know is unacceptable in my opinion, and this should be one of the first things looked at.

Score: 7/10

Summary: If you are looking for EFT in space, this game is not that. If you are looking for a relatively simple extraction shooter with unique gimmick (space combat) and fast paced PvP, this may be the game for you assuming you are willing to deal with some bugs and some toxicity (go figure).

Pros:
- Combat as a whole feels pretty good
- I really have not ran into any people I can definitely say are cheating, and the devs seem to take it seriously. I am not sure what other reviewers decrying cheaters have been running into, but I suspect is is just some very experienced players running very good gear for the most part.
- Relatively easy to get into as far as extraction shooters go, and you can stay relevant in the game playing it a few hours a week.
- Gear disparity exists, but not to an insane extent
- Quests are straight forward and kind of just part of playing the game
- Lots of apparel in a variety of colors that stand out to make it easier to differentiate teammates assuming you coordinate apparel

Cons:
- The standard AI is usually brain dead. On the rare occasions it isn't, it is just a god and insta taps you. Very rarely in between.
- Some of the larger ships have very annoying breach points - Ex. A class of ship has 2 possible breach points directly looking at the ship engine where someone would likely be to repair directly on spawn.
- You will sometimes die to really desynced stuff. Usually it isn't bad, but it does happen from time to time if either you or your enemy have a very bad connection
- Organizing stash is a pain made even more of a pain by the fact that things with container space can't go in other things with container space. You must fold bags (they must be empty) to put them in to other bags or containers. Even then, the bags then take up exactly the same space as they did unfolded.
- The inability to put armored rigs in bags (because they have container space) is very annoying. If you kill a few people with the best armored rigs, you are only taking 1 out and you must wear it.
- Sound can be very wonky sometimes. Sometimes it will sound not even remotely close to where it actually is. Sometimes it will just straight up not play at all.
- General bugs. My god, they are kinda everywhere. Lots of dupe issues related to ship storage. Lots of random crashes. Sometimes falling through the map on spawn in. Sometimes black screening on spawn in forcing you to hard close the game and hope you didn't lose your kit. Sometimes your gun will not actually shoot full auto even when holding down on a full auto weapon. That is just naming a few. They aren't insane, but they are definitely there. You will encounter them. You will have to live with them like everyone else.
- Shadow quality does weird things to maps. It is best to leave it on low on most locations as it just kinda deletes fog for some reason, but on terraformer you have insane fog unless you turn shadow quality up to at least medium.

Personal cons:
- I hate most of the iron sights in the game. And basically all of the attachable sights in the game are awful. That is kinda the aesthetic, but damn do I hate using them.
- I like guns. The amount of firearms in this game that have inaccurate information bugs me. PPSH-41 is 10mm for some reason. MP40 is 10mm for some reason. The SVU uses dart ammo instead of 7.62x54r (an ammo already in the game) for some reason. Yes I know some of these are supposed to be modified versions and what not.... but could you at least name them something different then?

The elephant in the room:
A non-negligible chunk of this community is very toxic. I have been called a ni****, a fa****, heard a lot of sexism towards a female friend, heard a person just flying around in space shouting ni****. Seems like some people just make it a full time job to be racist/sexist/etc people. Not sure how much is really done about this as I typically encounter these people at least a couple of times a night.
I would also recommend ignoring like 90% of the official discord if you even join it. It is mostly drama and ♥♥♥♥ talk.

For anyone trying to run this still, I would greatly recommend installing the wabbajack modpack called the vault courier. It is a modpack setup for a tale of two wastelands (basically combines fallout 3 and fallout nv into one game), and it makes the game run very well. Still some small hiccups here and there, but it is a very playable experience. Oh, I would also recommend installing a program to keep your mouse locked to 1 monitor if you have multiple monitors.

This is a fantastic 2d rhythmic platformer, especially for the price. I have beaten the first 3 levels. All of which were fantastic. I'll check back in after I beat the 4th.

Pretty short game, but it is an interesting concept and fun game.

Pros:

- General silliness (Stripping people, taking their guns straight out of their hands, etc.)
- A few levels are actually somewhat difficult
- Charming graphics despite being blocky
- Good level design overall
- Gory fun

Cons:

- Rather short for the price
- Interaction with some objects is lacking (Can't shoot guns)
- Objects are oriented exactly as you pick them up. If you pick them up sideways while your controller is straight up, you have to rotate the controller sideways to get the objects straight up.

Overall: If you are looking for a polished, goofy, gory game then you have come to the right place. Sure it isn't super long, but screwing around on this is pretty fun overall. It also just released, so I do have hopes that more content will be added in the future.

Suggestions:

- Content creation. This is pretty much a necessity, and a good content creation area would make this game so much better.
- Maybe add some really hectic levels where you start with weapons instead of having to find knives or catch bullets (Kinda like the grandpa bonus level, but with even more craziness.)
- Just adding some more levels in general.

Pros:

- Actual movement is required to dodge projectiles among other things
- The trap system is good
- The graphics aren't bad either

Cons:

- Ai for the protection mode is kinda meh. Enemies attack what you are supposed to be protecting until you hit said enemy. It immediately comes for you afterwards.
- The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ arrow physics.
If you are used to the labs arrow physics or are interested in anywhere near realistic physics, you will hate this game. The arrows travel completely straight for about 30 feet and then just drop. The arrows also seem to go a little higher than where it appears I'm aiming.

Overall: I cannot play this game due to the arrow physics. It makes the game unplayable for me. If there was a setting or something to switch between more realistic physics and the current physics, I would likely recommend this game.

F'd a tank with huge ammo racks. 11/10 would definitely play again.

The plot is most definitely shallow, but that being said, the game is incredibly fun. Most of my time in the game has been spent messing around, and I actually enjoy taking control of everything. Unlike what a lot of people have said, the game does not crash for me. I also have no issues with fps even on max settings, but I have a 5820k, 2 980's, and 16 GB of ddr4 ram. There is no SLI utilization yet though.