Recent reviews by AngryDragon

Beware, this game is highly addictive. Before you know it, you will have spent hundreds of hours building and optimising your build.

I've played a lot of buggy games this last decade, they are legion, but this is my first time in a very long while that I've played a game that crashes twice within the first hour of play. I really want to give this game a thumbs up, but I just can't. I expect better from a studio like Ubisoft. There are other things that motivate my thumbs down.

The initial story narrative does not feel good at all. It could have been entirely omitted up to the moment where we wake up in the pod and I feel that it really wouldn't have changed much to the narrative.

The Navi Instinct effect is trash. It is clearly meant to be an Avatar version of the instinct mechanic found in all Assassin's Creed games, but it is worse. The graphic overlay of this effect is way over the top. I wish I could just get rid of it.

The one thing where Ubisoft does deserve credit is the environment. It is absolutely gorgeous. That's about all that I'm willing to credit them for so far.

This game is very much a pet training simulator. If that's your kind of thing, then you will find something for yourself in this game. Otherwise, you are likely going to find that some of the game system get tedious after a while.

There's way too much hand holding in the tutorial. Otherwise, I really enjoy the game so far.

I find that the game is quite enjoyable. Hogwarts is quite big and you can easily lose yourself in the castle. You can spend hours running around in Hogwarts before seeing the rest of the world. I'm still finding areas of the castle I did not know about. The amount of time that they spent crafting this is very obvious. There are dynamic events in many areas of the castle. If you go to the great room early in the morning, you will find students eating their first meal of the day.

The game is set sometime before the events of the books, so you won't find the characters that you know, but you will find their ancestors. There's a certain poltergeist which is an exception to this. There are a few subtle winks to the books and movies.

One of the thing that this game does very well is have simple yet engaging game play. I find that way too many modern games try to one up each other by increasing the complexity of the gaming loop. Often, that complexity ends up getting in the way of my enjoyment of the game. Hogwarts has a simple and yet elegant game play loops. They went back to the basics and it works really well.

My one complaint has got to be the tutorial. I just hate the very specific format that it used to teach you the basics. Don't put me in a loop. If I succeed at beating the initial fight without doing the one thing you wanted me to do, just let it be. It is much more organic to just let me learn and perhaps fail at my own pace.

Graphically, it can be a bit demanding. If you are using a higher resolution, you are probably going to end up having to use DLSS. Fortunately, it appears to be working quite well in Hogwarts Legacy. There's no real difference visible, but the frame rate is definitely much better.

There's a few settings that I would have expected which are missing, such as the ability to mute sounds while in the game is in the background. I haven't found any option to quickly hide the interface to take a quick screenshot. Otherwise, the settings and options are quite comprehensive.

This is easily one of the most well crafted game of the last decade. It is beautiful, the music is great and the gameplay is extremely fluid. There's only a handful of games out there that manage this level of polish. It is a true gem.

This isn't a game for everyone. You don't have the freedom you would expect in a typical RPG. There's lots of dialog text, a lot of them with Japanese voice over. This is a game for those who enjoy Japanese anime and that kind of art style. This is a game for peoples who like to immerse themselves into a story.

The interface is missing a few functions which I've come to expect of Monster Catching games. Otherwise, the art style is consistent and very well done. It is my opinion that the followup game, Nexomon Extinction is better.

The game mechanics are rather simple, but the higher your score goes, the more difficult the game gets. It takes a lot of planning and proper execution in order to increase your score beyond a certain point.

I bought Temtem during the holyday period. It was interesting early on, but the more I learned about the game, the more disenchanted I became. It is an RPG that has the pretention of being an MMO, does the monster catching part quite well, but other than allowing players to communicate, it completely fails as an MMO. MMO by their nature need to have mechanics to retain player attention. Temtem does this rather poorly by any kind of standard.

One of the big discussion that kept coming back in global chat was the Luma rate. It is so high that finding one by normal means is not worth the time investment. Instead, there is a gimmick called Saipark which has increased rates, but only for a select few monster which are rotated every week. If you missed your chance at the monster you wanted, then you are out of luck.

Breeding is even worse. At most, you can only breed a monster 8 times before it runs out of fertility. If you get a male instead female when you needed a female, then you might have to go back to square one and start over, effectively throwing all of those hours in the dumpster. It is a horrendous mechanic by any kind of definition.

The fact is that the end game of any monster catching game tends to revolve around breeding and battle with other players. The amount of time that one must take to breed a team with perfect SV is so high that it puts it out of reach of all but the most dedicated. Even for someone like me who can spend several dozen hours a week playing games, this is far beyond the time commitment that I am willing to give. For anybody who is a casual player, this effectively kills any kind of end gameplay that Temtem has. The achievement statistics reflect this: only 0.1% of users (1 out of every 1000) have the Temtem Up! achievement.

This mechanic exists only because of a little something called "the economy". This is a monster catching game. What economy? The devs felt that the game needed a money sink and created one which takes the form of items which you use to guaranty the transfer of good stats during breeding. Why does this game need a money sink? Could it be that the faucets aren't tuned properly?

Most MMO have some kind of money sinks, but the way that Temtem does this very much feels like they are trying way too hard to turn this game into something that it is not. Temtem is not an MMO by any kind of traditional definition. It does not need those kind of mechanics. As it is, Temtem is not worthy of being called a competitor to a better known monster catching game.