Recent reviews by Pickletoes

6.5/10

The dialog and cinematography is better than the last game which is a huge improvement. The story line and characters are better too although I really hate games with the stereotypical HURRAH-ing jar heads that make mountains of mole hills and always see everyone as the enemy. And you have to acknowledge the tremendous amount of long hard work a game like this would require. So hats off for the effort and hard works by the DEVs

But there's real problems here for me. The inconsistencies in the sequences for example:

Everyone in the game has flashlights all over their bodies, but in many cut scenes one of these soldiers will walk into a dark corner of the cave and all of a sudden they have no lighting no flashlights, it's just solid black and they say "who's there? I see you. Say something. Is someone there?" So do they have flashlights or do they not?! You can't try to add fake suspense to a scene by suddenly saying 'there's no light, but I sense danger in that dark corner...I have 3 flashlights but I'm not going to use any of them as I slowly walk into the darkness.'.

Another one. Something Hollywood loves to abuse. A creature will be almost completely immune to gun shot fire, there will be several scenes where soldiers dump 100 rounds into it and nothing happens. Then in another scene 1 or 2 bullets will kill the creature. Absurd and kind of offensive intellectually.

Another one. A creature will be so powerful that it can 1-shot a human easily decapitating it or ripping it in half with little effort. But when the hero (or one of the heroes) is being attacked he's able to overpower the creature or defend himself against it long enough for help to come. Again...the creature can burst through locked or reinforced doors with ease shredding them into splinters in one scene but in another scene the door is blocked with a well placed chair making the door impenetrable.

These type of things happen SO MUCH in this game that it ruins it. When you build fake suspense you get little out of it on the back end. The gamer is smart enough to see what you're doing. And after 1 or 2 of these events you won't even be able to build fake suspense because you broke an unwritten contract between the DEVs and the gamers...which is -- I'll go along with you on this journey that you've created (the game) and buy into your story BUT you have to convince me that it's real along the way.

It's a bad 5 hour movie.

The dialog is like a room of 60 year olds tried to come up with how 20 year olds talk. Or like 10 year old AI created it.
Actor #1 "We need a ladder dude"
Actor #2 "Lets get a ladder"
Actor #1 "Go get a ladder bro"
Actor #2 "Should I go get a ladder before dark?"
Actor #1 "You should go get the ladder so we can use it"
Actor #2 "Is it ok if I go to find a ladder without you friend"
Actor #1 "Yes, go get it bro"
Actor #2 "Ok, im going to get the ladder now"
It's just so bad.

There are so many video cuts, there's a video cut every 5-10 seconds for the entire game. It feels so unnatural and half baked. You sometimes see this in bad movies, but it is usually only a few short times in an entire movies.
The jump scares are pathetic. This isn't scary at all, however it does have a level of creepy to it.

The voice acting and graphics are the high point here. At times, the faces and emotions look very real. I think it's the best I've seen to date in a video game.

thta

EOS

Very buggy so far. I wish I would have waited 6 more months. Games shouldn't annoy the gamer, it should be fun.

UPDATED
There are still annoying bugs everywhere and occasional crashes that make you start ur dungeon from the start. This lag has to be fixed soon. Often times u can't get anything done in town w/o yo-yoing over n over.

The first 50 levels make sense to me, I enjoyed the questing n grinding. The progression felt relatively fast and there were many types of skills and passives to play with. New things to learn and to play around with, never a boring moment. This was a real solid HnS title that could easily co-exist with Diablo and POE.

The next 50 levels feels like they gave up. The progression on ur skills and passives completely changes, it slows down by 10-20 times. It just feels like the DEVs made a decision to stop making quests and force you to just grind out this 'End of Time' content. It really blew my mind that they would stoop this low and just bail on the 2nd half of the game. Also, my character has turned into a 1 skill button mashing machine.


This game is a ridiculous endless mindless grindfest. I'm not going to grind 100 hours for 1 bis gear.

If I said I didn't like it, someone would hunt me down and cut my thumbs off, so Ill say it's good. I guess the game has 2 game modes now - roguelike and action? Both are platformers but neither allow the character to duck...seems odd for a platform game. I think it's the only platform game in the 2000 years of gaming history that doesn't have this feature.
It seems fun although the combat and the rpg elements seem very simple - upgrade a melee, ranged or throw...that's about it.
Overall, both modes held my attention for about 5 hrs. I'll probably pick this game up again in a year or two bringing my total game time up to 6-7 hrs...hopefully.

10/10

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Wow. Really good.