Recent reviews by Reindolf

Imo, pretty much every installment of Dynasty Warriors before Origins can be considered Dynasty Warriors 1, this is Dynasty Warriors 2 as far as I'm concerned. Graphically the game looks great, gameplay is the best out of the installments I've played by far, zero performance issues/crashes (didn't know that was even possible nowadays), and plenty of fun, interesting characters and storylines to explore.

There are a variety of weapon types, skills, equipment pieces, and loadout options to mess around with. The weapon types themselves play somewhat similarly but they're distinct enough given the button mashing nature of the genre that they're fun to experiment with. Given that Koei loves to release the same game year after year, I'm hopeful that we'll get a handul of additional installments with DW: Origins as the base that'll include things like a strategy element or character creation that we've seen in previous titles.

Overall though it's a great game and likely a must-buy if you like the musou genre.

Fantastic survival and co-op experience with a unique ambiance and setting. In particular, if you're a fan of the SCP Foundation stuff you'll probably love this game as many atmospheric notes are the same.

There are a variety of creatures that you will have to contend with and they all behave in different manners which keeps things interesting. You will have to setup a base, find/craft food and beverages, setup electricity, and defend your base from periodic invasions while slowly navigating the massive laboratory you find yourself in. There's a leveling system similar to Bethesda's games where you gain levels and perks in skills by using that particular skill. To give an example, you level up the ability to aim by using ranged weapons which will dramatically reduce your weapon sway and allow you to use more advanced ranged weapons.

Of note, the game is not procedurally generated and there are many components of classical level design where you'll go through a section and it'll loop back on itself to open up a shortcut. Navigation can be confusing at times but it was nice to see an aspect of level design within a genre that typically favors randomness over hand-crafted locations.

Abiotic Factor is a survival/crafting game that plays like an adventure game and between the gameplay and fairly unique setting I can't recommend it enough. As of this review the game isn't complete yet so bear in mind that, if you choose to purchase the game now, at some point you'll hit a wall and won't be able to continue. What's currently here is more than worth the asking price though imo and I think it's a must-buy if you like this genre.

Great game but can't possibly recommend it in its current state. Multiple freezes, crashes, FPS drops, stuttering, and performance issues on high-end machines. I'm running an RTX 4080, an I7-13700KF, and 64 gigs of ram on Windows 11. Not sure which of these things is causing the issue, it seems many people on older machines are having no problems. Either way, I don't feel the abysmal performance on modern machines is excusable. This review will remain negative until the issues are fixed or until an explanation is given.

It's a surprisingly decent MMO, while it's true that it's essentially pay-to-win you can also earn the payed currency for free in a manner very similar to games like Warframe. Probably worth checking out if you're craving an MMO, it's fairly trivial to earn enough currency to purchase the battle/leveling passes so don't feel pressured to spend any real money. Dungeons have mechanics that will easily wipe the party if not played correctly, though currently we're at the point where many players now know the mechanics and are in the rhythm of running the content as quickly as possible.

If you're primarily a PvE player, be aware that there isn't much content after the completion of the story, dungeons, and guild raids that isn't just world PvP. Harder content is allegedly on the way but, for now, there isn't incredibly difficult or challenging PvE stuff to gear up for yet. You're mostly going to be farming a bunch of lucent (the payed currency) to buy cosmetics, gear out your character, or purchase future battle passes.

If you're primarily a PvP player, be aware that you will periodically get absolutely rolled by people who spent a ton of money or people who played nonstop and spent all of their earned lucent on their character. In particular, a handful of best-in-slot items are extremely rare world boss/guild raid drops and can only be acquired reliably by purchasing them from other players for egregious sums of money. If you'd like every fight you have to feel fair, I strongly recommend you look elsewhere for your PvP experience.

Overall, despite some periodic Amazon/server jank, I think Throne and Liberty is a pretty good time if you're not looking to sweat over being the most competitive PvPer, and it's even better if you've got some friends to play with.

It's sort of like a mediocre version of Destiny 2 combined with a mediocre version of Warframe. I'm not sure exactly why you'd play this instead of those, unless you really want the ability to dress your character in lewd outfits (which, of these three games, appears to be the only feature unique to this one).

The typical Nexon predatory pricing is here so, while the game might be free to play, additional characters are going to be locked behind high prices or what appears to be a very long grind. While some might try to compare this to Warframe, it's important to note that with Warframe you can acquire the payed-for currency by trading with other players. This theoretically means practically all of Warframe's cash shop can actually be acquired for free, and it actually isn't that tough to get into currency farming if you already have some decent gear and a completed star chart. The First Descendant does not appear to have anything akin to this system, I took a look at some of the things you'd have to farm to F2P additional characters and it appears to be a fairly immense grind and brutal RNG. I'll leave comments open so, if some First Descendant diehards want to contest this, they can let me know and I'll update this section of the review. As it stands, I'm not willing to invest more time than the 6 hours I've played to verify how bad the grind truly is.

In terms of performance, on my RTX 4080 and i7-13700kf, the game didn't run great. There were frequent frame drops and hitches and something about the aiming/gunplay felt off. The gameplay and graphics just felt kind of jank throughout my time with it. I don't think there's much to see here unfortunately, I don't think the characters and weapons feel as unique or fun to build with as Warframe and I don't think the gunplay or bosses/levels are designed as well as Destiny 2.

It's worth noting that, aside from cosmetics and unlocks being on the expensive side, the bundles of cash shop currency themselves are blatantly predatory. The currency doesn't easily divide into anything you might purchase, so you're forced to buy multiple bundles of currency to afford something and then you're left with extra currency you didn't really want or need afterwards. The idea behind this is that, later on, you'll want to take full advantage of the money you've spent and, to do so, you'll need to spend even more in order to properly utilize the spare currency from your first transaction. Alternatively, you'll realize that buying two smaller bundles of currency isn't optimal and, instead, opt to purchase the larger bundle of currency for even more money. Both situations lead to you spending more money than you otherwise would have. This has been a trick these scummier "free to play" games have used for a long time and I don't think we should condone this.

If you're going to play this, please at least play the game for a few days before swiping your credit card. Don't be like the players I saw day 1 with their french maid outfits and premium characters.

Incredible visuals, great world building, super satisfying animations and combat. I will eventually change this review to a positive one, but for now I'm recommending against purchasing it as I feel several performance improvements and promised features are still needed and I suspect many potential buyers are better off waiting for the full experience at launch. If the devs follow through and treat this game the way Larian Studios did with Baldur's Gate 3, I feel like No Rest for the Wicked will be an easy GotY.

That said, I think it may be worth revisiting some of the marketing and presentation for exactly what this game is, early on I had a ton of misgivings due to comparisons I was making between ARPGs like Diablo and Souls games like Elden Ring when this game is very much trying to do its own thing. There are a ton of gameplay systems like housing, gathering materials, daily/weekly quests, a special vendor that appears on weekends, etc. that I was not expecting and I think prospective buyers should approach this game with patience and an open mind for what it's trying to achieve.

I hope many of the gameplay systems are fleshed out just a bit more, in particular several of the stats you can allocate on level up exist solely to increase the damage of their corresponding weapon types. It'd be nice if those stats had a bit more of an identity. I love what they've done with heavy armor encumbrance giving a shoulder tackle and it'd be nice if light encumbrance gave something like passive focus gain, enabling a mage/ranged playstyle much earlier in the game. Introducing the player to a slightly broader array of weapons and options in the early-game would probably be a good idea in general.

I'm looking forward to see where this game goes, the foundations here seem really solid and I think this one has a good chance to be something special.

Not a bad game but unfortunately just not worth the asking price. Maybe pick it up on sale but what could've been an amazing game has been severely hamstrung by Bethesda's insistence on marketing progressively "bigger" worlds despite the community repeatedly saying that's not what they want. Loading screens and procedural generation are pretty much everywhere the second you step off the path of the main storylines, things like base and ship building are fun to mess around with but ultimately serve no purpose. Exploration ends up being a slog once you begin to see the same rehashed content and the inclusion of Skyrim's Dragonborn shouts in the guise of empty space temples is just weird.

One of the fun things about previous Bethesda RPGs is rerolling a character to experience a different storyline or playstyle but unfortunately the appeal of that was gimped both by the lack of unique gameplay style options and the inclusion of an endgame system that incentivizes you to put all of your playtime on one character. Starfield was marketed as being this massive experience and ultimately fails to deliver imo, while the core storyline was fun at times the overall gameplay ends up feeling shallow and bland once you realize Starfield's version of space is about as empty as it appears to be IRL.

EDIT: I've solved all problems by using Throttlestop to underclock my processor. I've had issues with other games as well, this solution has worked for all of them so I believe there's some issue with the I7-13700KF. I took a look at other, similar builds and people seem to periodically have all kinds of problems with the same or similar setups when playing modern games. Swapping this review to positive as, aside from the issues I was having, Phantom Liberty seems great.

Original Review:

I'm glad so many people seem to be able to play and are having a great time with this expansion but there's just no way I can recommend it right now. My experience has been plagued with constant crashes, I've tried everything from reinstalling the game several times to updating my BIOS and graphics drivers, disabling cross-platform saves, and modifying my Nvidia shader cache settings.

Unfortunately nothing seems to work and, at this point, I don't care to troubleshoot further as I've spent more time trying to fix the game than actually playing it. Seems like it's a lot of fun if your machine doesn't have any issues, I'll check it out again in a few months when hopefully the devs have sorted it all out.

In case anyone is interested or has similar issues, here are my system specs:

Nvidia RTX 4080 w/ 16GB VRAM
Intel I7-13700KF @ 3.40GHz
64GB DDR5 @ 5600MHz
Windows 11 Pro

Game is stored on a 2TB NVMe M.2 SSD, no mods have been installed to the game and no overclocking has been done to the system.

Essentially an isometric ARPG MMO with all the story, bells, and whistles stripped away. I understand the purpose of the game is to be a sandbox but there just doesn't seem to be much to see here. Progression is extremely linear, the game is essentially a massive grind that doesn't have a payoff at the end like the culmination of a story arc or some crazy raid, and the game is very eager to throw you out into the world so you can get to grinding without identifying something to grind for. As far as I can tell, the only reason to bother with the grind at all is if you really want to PvP.

If you find yourself spending hundreds of hours on relatively simple games for the joy of clicking and watching numbers slowly increase then I expect you'll like Albion, provided you also like the emphasis on group PvP. For me personally, I just don't see why I'd play something like Albion when I can play things like PoE, Diablo 3 and eventually 4, Last Epoch, Lost Ark, or FFXIV that all seem to offer better gameplay components.

2024 Update:

I've changed my mind. With the recent release of Palworld I've thought a lot recently about creature collectors and every time I've thought about Temtem I've been extremely irritated. The dialogue is cringe-inducing and the game is balanced around PvP, while I think the game does a number of interesting and objectively good things the quirks of the game/devs and the awful writing have pushed this game into the negative for me. If you love the Pokemon PvP experience and are fine with poop jokes and a grindy endgame, Temtem might just be for you. For what it's worth I think potential buyers would be better off closely looking at a number of other games like Monster Sanctuary, Palworld, or Cassette Beasts before purchasing Temtem. I don't think Temtem is a terrible game but I do think for many players it might be a frustrating one.

Original review:

TL;DR: Solid battle system, good creature design/usability, decent player customization, stylistic storytelling, several annoying/frustrating systems.

For those looking for a Pokemon clone with a more interesting/strategic battle system, there really isn't much better. Almost every monster is usable in some way and AI can be quite challenging at a couple of the fights. There's also a player housing system and clothes/dyes which which players can customize their character. I think these merits make the game worth a positive review, though myself and many others have quite a few grievances which I'll list below as that's my way of coping with my frustration with the game.

LIST OF GRIEVANCES BELOW
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- The dialogue is very...stylistic. It's something I'm sure many will like, for me trying to read it was one of the most cringe-inducing things I've ever done. I do not believe whoever wrote it has touched grass or held an actual conversation with a human being before and, to make matters worse, many quests require you to be paying attention so you can select the proper dialogue prompts to progress the quest/conversation. It's an awful system, I mashed through as often as I could and found guides for the correct dialogue on the occasions I couldn't. In particular I'd like to apologize to any real-life sets of twins: there are tons of twins portrayed in the game and every last one of them is the "spazz out and finish each other's sentences" character trope. Most other characters are quirky and annoying in a way that I absolutely did not enjoy, though I'll admit this is largely subjective. If hyper and quirky is your thing you'll love it, I most certainly did not.

- There's a battlepass, after progressing through and beating the entire game over the course of around 25-30 hours I'm a little over halfway to level 2 of the pass. It's terrible, all of the battlepass xp is loaded into the weekly tasks and those tasks can't be accessed until the main story is complete. To make matters worse, those tasks are extremely tedious and most rewards are extremely underwhelming. There's no reason a "catch 40 Temtem" quest should be locked behind story completion and it's frustrating to not be able to progress the pass by playing normally.

- Certain convenience features such as fast travel are locked behind side quests that I think many players will miss entirely. I am one of those players. I dedicated several hours to trekking across the maps before googling to see if there was a fast travel system and when it'd be unlocked.

- For many endgame activities such as breeding, currency farming, and weeklies you're expected to dedicate a significant portion of your time each week. I understand it's an MMO and they want your attention but Temtem is one of the clingiest relationships around, endgame systems seem so unfriendly that I'll be surprised if there's much of a community left in a few months.

- The length of the game feels pretty artificially inflated imo, the battle system is one of the most engaging in the genre but, because of this, having to fight battles consecutively is a chore and I found myself constantly making treks back to town to heal between battles. There are tons and tons of trainers to battle to the point where I frequently found myself becoming annoyed. If they removed around half of them, made the remaining slightly more challenging, and doubled the currency reward I'd probably have been much happier with it.

- There are two endgame fights that are significantly more difficult than the other content in the game. This is because the AI is willing to switch monsters around almost haphazardly and abuse certain battle conditions or abilities. I actually don't hate this but it's irritating that the difficulty spike is so sharp when there are other opportunities, such as dojo master battles, to introduce the player to these concepts more gradually.
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END OF LIST OF GRIEVANCES