Recent reviews by kharon

The UI is just as bad as the performance. Besides that, I am having a good time.

Pretty fun, haven't quite figured out how to get my army up enough before I get ass blasted by raiders in year 2 yet. While the peaceful mode is fun, the combat is really what makes the game worthwhile otherwise it just feels like a generic medieval city builder.

The GOOD:
- Army commanders are the best addition to civ, hands down. It has never been easier to march 30 soldiers across the map.
- Age system is really cool, history is built in layers as they say
- No more workers
- Waging war is actually fun now and I have to stop myself from going turbo warmonger mode
- Diplomacy is implemented a lot better in this game, you can't cheese enemy civs to give you 1000 gold per turn.
- Amazing music and sound design in general
- Graphics are beautiful (but visual clarity does suffer a decent bit).
- I love overbuilding
- Healthy mix of base civs all with varied strategy
- Progression is pretty cool (ie: achieve something in one game and receive a bonus attribute point on your next game). Some might be mixed on this and I can understand why, but I personally like it a lot.

The MEH:

Most victory types are a matter of hitting next turn once you have it all setup. Domination is the most involved but even then it does boil down to hitting next turn once you are setup. Though, this can be said for previous civ titles as well. Once you pull ahead you are basically guaranteed victory.

The only age that matters for victory is the modern age, you can fumble your way through the first two ages, not achieve any of the legacy paths, and still win in modern.

World wonders have been placed on the back burner and it's not worth it to wonder rush.

THE BAD

The UI issues are rough, it is difficult to see critical information. I still haven't figured out how to see how many trade routes I can support.

The ages system where you lose your military units and cities revert to town kinda sucks. Spend a few thousand gold turning them into cities only for them to revert back to towns feels pretty bad, and really just doesn't make sense.

The AI: Oh god the AI. Enemy civs like to try and box your natural borders in by squeezing in a city that only has like 4 tiles available to it just to sandwich itself between two of your cities, or to awkwardly place them behind your cities. Pretty obnoxious AI design imo, hope it gets a serious overhaul. It is also hilarious how ready the enemy civ is to give you their biggest city if you are winning during a war.

The AI is also turbo aggressive for no reason in the antiquity age. It doesn't matter which civ you are next to, they will go to war with you early. For example Harriet Tubman's civ bonus is that she gets turbo strength if being declared war on, and her character traits is that she dislikes civs who declare surprise wars. No worries she will toss her bonus aside to surprise invade you at turn 15-20 for some reason.

The bugs.... oh man the bugs. There is a plethora of game breaking bugs, city states just disappearing from the map for no reason. It's kinda funny until you realize you just spent 300 influence to befriend them. The city states just flat out fall off the map, and are not even viewable in the diplomacy screen when this happens.

Sometimes you are unable to click on your city to see what you are producing or to change what you are producing, the work around I found is to click a different city and cycle through your cities and suddenly the name plate will reappear and you can click the city again.

Enemy civs spam out explorers and they stack on each other, you can see a lot of funny screenshots of this online, quests break - for example on the scientific legacy path there is a quest to have 4 specialists, well I had 10 and it was only registering that I had 2 specialists and it bricked my path for that age.

Counter spying needs some more work, I don't understand why I can't counter spy more than 1 civ at a time, it's rather obnoxious to have 6 other civs spying on you and you can only hamper 1 of them at a time.

Overall I am enjoying it, I have achieved victory on science and domination paths, but there are just too many game ruining bugs, and really bad AI design.

I would recommend this game once it has had some time for all the bugs to be worked out, then it is worth it. For now I am struggling to want to go back to it.

TLDR: If you liked the Dying Light 1 then you will like DL2. Must buy when its on sale (and it goes on sale often).
8/10.

Overall a pretty fun experience, if you liked the first game you will like this one. While the story in DL2 is a bit weak and has some very obvious outcomes you see coming from a mile away, we aren't here for the story. I did enjoy it more than the story of DL1. Mostly because in Dying Light 1 there was a lot of early story you had to grit your teeth and get through before you could actually start playing the game.

I played through the game solo mostly and did do some missions with randoms, but playing this game with a group of friends would be very enjoyable.

Parkour feels nice although it does have some clunky moments at times, I would recommend playing it with physical mode and auto ledge grab turned off as it improved my experience significantly.

It's got everything DL1 had and more. Weapon crafting/modification, resource scavenging, etc. Techland has stated they will be supporting the game for several years like they did with DL1 so I imagine weapons/mods/crafting will be expanded as well.

Combat feels nice, nothing better than chopping through hordes of undead like butter once you have gotten access to some strong weapons and modified them.

In DL1 you could just not interact with the night mode mechanics and you would get by just fine, in DL2 the developers toned down the insanity of night time and put a ton of night time activities that are nearly impossible to complete during the day, which I really liked. It is still an absolute heart pounder getting chased over rooftops by a couple volatiles during night, but nights aren't quite as difficult as they are in DL1.

The bloody ties DLC has been trashed on but I do enjoy it, a lot of the bugs people complained about appear to have been largely fixed.

wtf did I just play

honestly, i used to recommend poe2 but with the 0.2 update damage has been wiped out entirely slowing the gameplay down even further.
if i could refund this game i would. if you are on the fence about buying it, just wait like a year and it will probably be a lot better.
pressing more buttons to kill trash mobs is not fun and engaging gameplay imo

move along stalker
I have an additional 9 hours on xbox gamepass and just transferred my save over. Stalker 2 is good, missed some opportunities but that can be expected when a lot of the dev team had to flee Ukraine due to the war. Does have some UE5 jank going on but overall very solid game. I look forward to future updates and bug fixes. There aren't many in the first half of the game but the 2nd half is when the bugs really start to show their faces. If bugs put you off then wait a bit to buy the game. If you don't mind dealing with them then this game is worth the money.

Play the game on veteran difficulty as thats really how this game was balanced. Enemies go from bullet sponges on Rookie/Stalker difficulty to easy 1 tap headshots. Granted, you also become very fragile as well so beware.

Game is beautiful, sound design is amazing, gun play feels very good. Beware though the game is not in an optimized state at the moment so your PC will need to be a bit on the overkill side to get a relatively smooth experience.

My system:
AMD Ryzen 7 7800x3d
AMD Radeon 7800 XT
32GB DDR5-5200MHz RAM
Playing at 1080p resolution (Don't have a 4k monitor lol)
Playing at max settings

Game is buttery smooth out in the open world, but in settlements I often get serious frame drops.

If you are a fan of the older entries of the series you will be a fan of Stalker 2.

Everything I say here is only relevant once you get off the starting island as that is when the game "starts".

My first impressions of the game are very positive, but things start to unravel a bit once you get a few hours into the game. The world design, the art direction and sound are immaculate, there is clearly a ton of work and passion here and I love it. The gunplay is satisfying, sending enemies flying with the stake gun is super fun. The little magic you have is often very powerful and will get you out of sticky situations. I do hope this game gets a multiplayer patch as I do think this game would be incredibly fun with friends.

I want to like the game, but the difficulty spike once you unlock Gnosis I is actually insane. The difficult curve is non existent. I'd say wait until it has had some more time in the oven for the difficulty scaling to be reworked a bit. "Low" defenses has me dying on probably 60% of attempts.

The combat pacing is also all over the place, even in low risk combat encounters you will find yourself quickly surrounded by 10 enemies. Sometimes an encounter will be a couple of enemies. Sometimes the regular encounters feel like highly dangerous encounters. The difficulty scaling just isn't quite there yet for me (though maybe I am just bad, I will accept that). When you combine 10 enemies that often do around 20% of your hp bar in damage, with only 2 starting heals (if you get lucky you will find another heal on the map, but often times its just poison mushrooms so it doesn't feel worth the gamble).

While we are on the subject of difficulty tuning... the calamity events are summed up like this: how close to the extract portal are you? if you are not able to reach it in about 20 seconds your run is dead, and so are you (also the extraction portal is often surrounded by enemies with an elite or 2 tossed in there for good measure lol).

I guess my next question is: why is healing tied to its own stat? I am not a fan of that choice personally. It is important to remember that leveling up increases the witch strength so... level up carefully.

The game really wants you to unlock Gnosis as it dangles things in your face that require it, but as soon as you unlock it all hell breaks loose. Prior to unlocking Gnosis, I found the runs to be challenging, and often had me sweating but I could extract with my loot more often than not.

If you are a glutton for self punishment then everything I have said can be viewed positively I suppose.

I also find the roguelike elements during the runs to be of low impact, really the gear you bring into the run is the most important. So far I haven't had any rune pickups that changed how the run was going to be played. I hope that future updates add some exciting powerups instead of the generic: more stamina, better healing, more witchfire drops, etc. Those are boring and are of low impact. The secrets offered by Gnosis I feel pretty underwhelming, its basically just more ammo chests and occasionally a door that will have an item that sells for some gold. I wish it was more impactful, considering how hard the game gets after you unlock it.

Maybe I just botched my character though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I got this game around 1.5 years ago or so, really enjoyed it a ton then but wanted to wait a bit longer to start pumping hours into it since the game was still in early development. The devs are dedicated to this game and in its current state the game is super fun and addictive. A very fun city builder with well implemented roguelite mechanics, and it has some pretty tough moments in basically every play through. You will have to make tough decisions often, but it is oh so rewarding when things come together in your favor. This is also one of the few games that I keep the sound and music on. I remember the first time hearing the music and just being blown away. Art style is very unique and a pleasure to look at. Seriously devs, if you see this give the music person/people a raise.

Keep in the mind the game is still in active development, so expect some minor hiccups here and there, but I have not encountered any serious bugs at all tbh. This is what an early access game should be.

If you like: city builders, roguellite(like), resource management then this is the game for you. Absolutely worth the $30.

yes