Recent reviews by gruevy

This game looks like it should be really fun, but honestly the combat is just crap. Way too awful to recommend. Here's the problem: All your damage is at the end of attack combos. So like you'll do 6-8 hits or something for 100 damage, and then a smash for 1400. If you can't get the smash, the fight is gonna take FOREVER. And the bosses are all designed to keep you off balance, keep you rolling, keep you mobile, and make sure it's almost impossible to get a combo off. Every time they touch you, you get knocked back. There's no careful outmaneuvering of a boss to line up a big hit, and your regular attacks don't do enough damage to make whittling them down worth it. There are some big ultimate combos you can do from time to time, but the bosses can dodge those too. The field stuff is fine, but the bosses are just a chore. Difficult for all the wrong reason.

Absolutely outstanding. The DLC is so huge it feels like an entire new game. It's an absolute blast. Reminds of me the magic of my first Elden Ring playthrough when every boss was impossible and every dungeon was mysterious and deadly and I had no idea what was going on at any point.

Lots of people upset about difficulty but I suck and I'm doing fine. Skill issue. Cry more. Prepare to die.

I tried playing pve/pvp once, and it sucked. Same problems you find in every other game of this type: the other players are all more dedicated, knowledgable, and skilled than you, so why bother?

Solo is more fun but you have to tweak the settings. I got rid of item decay entirely, sped up crafting 5x, enabled teleporting with restricted items, few other things. I left the hp/damage/etc intact, just got rid of the tedium. Honestly, they should just have an explicit "Single Player" mode that does all this for you.

And it's pretty fun. Castle management is alright, plenty of stuff to unlock and build as you progress through the game. I don't find it too grindy, and each boss is interesting but also kinda easy once you figure him out. Which is nice, since there are a lot of them and you have to hunt them all. Kind of a casual map exploration/base building/monster hunting game with decent RPG elements. There's always one more thing to do, and it never seems insurmountable or a waste of time. As long as that's all you want to get out of it, I recommend it.

Shaping up to be an excellent sequel. Only a couple hours of content at this point, so buyer beware, but those are two excellent, well-crafted hours

No performance issues of any kind. Game runs smoothly, the character designs are charming, the gameplay is fun, and the desert landscape is gorgeous.

It's kinda chill and low-key, clearly aimed at children in terms of difficulty and subject matter. But it's pretty fun, and I haven't found any characters that get on my nerves. I like it.

It'd say it was worth the $4. Could probably beat it under an hour if you knew how it was supposed to work first, and some tips on what will never contain an anomaly. I liked it.

Everything up to the first real boss (you'll know him when you see him) is deceptively hard and bad. Your gear is constantly broken, you never have enough stamina, every enemy takes forever to kill, etc.

But after you kill the boss and get to the main city, the game changes. You can fast travel now, which means repairing gear is always simple. You get access to crafting and enchanting and all sorts of other things. You've leveled up a few times and fights are getting easier overall. In short, just about everything that sucks about the first few hours of the game goes away, and the real game starts. The real game, it turns out, is a blast.

I've been really chewing on whether I'd give this game a thumbs up or down and I think I have to say, it's gonna be a thumbs down. But it was close! Honestly, the game got me to play it for 60 hours and I was tempted to start another playthrough just to max out my last few vocations. I had to uninstall lest I be sucked in again.

I didn't have any technical issues besides frame rate drops in major cities. Those were annoying but not showstoppers.

Positives:
-The vocations are interesting. They all play very differently and there's no real harm in mixing and matching however you want. There's not really a 'meta' you have to hit. Just do what's fun.
-The graphics are largely pretty good. Magic effects look great and the monster animations are solid. There are some nice vistas in the game, but most of the time is spent in the dark or in forests or canyons where you can't see much.
-Taking down a large monster feels like an accomplishment, especially a drake.
-The hidden world at the end was a nice touch, even if it was also kind of a letdown.
-Upgrading your gear and getting new skills to use and master felt great the whole way through. It was fun. Addicting enough to get me to keep playing despite my constant state of severe frustration.
-I liked Sven. He was interesting and had a fun character arc.

Negatives
-The way this game pads its playtime is with endless amounts of stupid BS. So many fights just felt cheap and frustrating because they're designed to be obnoxious. One example: I'm on a game-necessary important escort quest. On foot, of course. A random encounter dragon shows up and kills the vital NPC. Quest is now ruined. Game unwinnable. Mostly. You can revive dead NPCs with rare items, but I was all out of them. I had to scour the map to find just one more, rush back to the corpse of the NPC, revive her, and hope the quest could continue. It did. This took hours and I hated every minute of it. Nothing adds to the joy of an escort quest like an NPC too stupid to hide from a dragon. And they are ALL too stupid. They're also usually slow, too, meaning you can outrun them and fail the quest.
-But that's not all. Monsters tend to come in packs and they're absolutely everywhere. Every twenty feet it's another fight. Wolves. Harpies. Bandits. Wolves again. Goblins. Bandits + troll. On and on and on, the same tiresome fights, dozens of them any time you have to walk somewhere, which is always. That's all this game is, long walks through murder tunnels.
-Speaking of stupid BS, every time you take damage, your max health goes down a little. This gets really old when they dump a boss on you during the first 3rd of the trip, then another one near the end that you can't fight anymore because after 30 encounters, your max health is like 15% of normal, and same with all your pawns. It even does this if you die and reload--you reload with less max health. It adds difficulty, sure, but mostly it just adds stress and makes the game feel like more of a chore than it should.
-The map feels small. No matter what color they make it, it's just a long series of tunnels. There's nothing open here. No wide fields and forests, just roads and caves and canyons. It feels incredibly constrained. Sure, it's large in the sense that it takes forever to run from A to B, but that's because there were 20 fights and the road was lined with short-cut preventing cliffs at all times. It feels constrained the whole way through. Claustrophobic, even.
-You only get to use with 4 skills from your class, despite a big list to choose from, so pick ones you want to use 100,000 times.
-Wayfarer vocation is bafflingly stupid game design. Equip many weapons, only get 3 skills total. So don't bother with another set of weapons, just be a 'worse archer' or whatever if you play it.
-The pawns never shut up. NEVER. They're either complaining or repeating unneeded advice, always.
-So many of the NPC faces are terrible. 100% of the children look monstrous and deformed, like the game devs have never seen an actual living child before. Most human adults are weird and ugly. All the cat people are fine but they're just cat faces.
-Incredibly disappointing romance. Sure, you can be very good friends with any npc in the game, but you can't actually have a relationship. There's no love cutscene. No marriage. No, your reward is an escort quest. That's right. They come and ask you to take them somewhere. Once you get there, nothing happens, they just say thanks. This aspect of the game is so pathetic I don't know why they even bothered. Don't get me started on the brothel.
-Not that many big monsters. You run through the list real quick and your 50th cyclops isn't a very interesting fight. And the boss fights tend to be long, too, which is cool until it's your 10th dragon or 20th gryphon.
-Weight and inventory management. I know, this is in every game. But they have a tradeoff. If you play as a small character, you're faster and nimble, but you can't carry more than a deck of cards before you're dragging your feet and begging to rest. Worrying about being overburdened every time you pick up a flower is not fun.
-The music is boring. Dragon's Dogma had outstanding music, esp Bitterblack Isle.

Overall, it feels like this game was close to being really good but falls short in so many ways it's bad overall. There were just too many times where I was actively angry at whatever I was doing for me to recommend it.

Worth the wait. An improvement in every way.

I really liked the game for my first half hour, despite its wonky controls and collision detection and all that, because it was lighthearted and does a good job introducing you to the various systems without it feeling like a boring tutorial. The game also looks pretty complex, with tons to do. But then I discovered that the game is a series of smaller maps with load screens to travel between them. Completely killed the magic for me so I'm pretty disappointed. I like 'see a mountain, go climb a mountain' and that's not what we're getting. They might have indicated somewhere that that's how it works, but it didn't even occur to me to check because when you say 'open world fantasy' that's not what I'm picturing.