Recent reviews by Orums

I've owned this game on two different platforms so feel confident that everything you're about to read is going to be accurate as it relates to both my time on console (300 hours), and my time here.

First and foremost this recommendation is made purely out of bias regarding my love of the IP.
-This game is a microtransaction black hole, new jutsu release broken to push sales then get nerfed
-life without DLC purchases could be compared to hell, but at least in hell you occasionally would catch a break
-the community collectively has about 7.3 braincells resulting in matches where folks more or less throw because they're not playing to the game's mechanics or team centric meta (healers...go heal plz)
-the servers are absolute nightmares
-Cheaters run this game not the devs
-let's not even get into the scrolls or their drop rates, but suffice it to say you will empathize with the cheaters once you realize you can drop 100 esoteric scrolls and get not one featured item; the game gets to a level of grind that borders on nonsensical...no it is indeed nonsensical
-have I mentioned that the game has been out half a decade and no Kiba, no Shino, no ten ten. wtf???

suffice it to say that purchasing this game will result in a toxic relationship that you won't want to leave just because you get to create your own Ninja, pick jutsu, and really have some amazing fights once you learn what you're doing and you ignore the meta gamers. You will hate the vast majority of your playtime but even then there's amazing moments of socialization and teamwork on top of weeb actualization that will keep you playing each day hoping that it's a good one. Again, I'm not recommending this game bc I wholeheartedly believe it's good. I'm recommending it as a fan who's always wanted to put himself in the ninja world which I'm assuming is the reason you're here. Again, this game is a black hole that you will never leave, so do not expect to have warm feelings at least 5/7 days a week. Do not play this game thinking I'm lying and that you're going to have a different experience. each and every single NTBSS player is most likely a chain smoker after about hour 30; and especially during the ninja world hero festival. Do not get invested unless you're a Die hard Naruto fan who's emotions flair up everytime you see the swing; without that level of emotional investment to the IP you're going to have a rough time. Because it's our memories of the series and the connections we've made to our characters on top of our expression and builds that genuinely keeps us coming back every day.

There is probably the one thing that gives this game replay value into the 1000s, and that's the raw amount of build potential across the 4 classes of ninja. once you've gotten all the jutsu (DLC XD) you can occupy yourself for weeks just making builds and outfitting your ninja with the absurd amount of drip available in the game. one week I'm orochimaru's hidden black son, the next week I'm a fire spewing Uchiha, week after that I'm the healingest healer who ever healed this side of the healy river.

There, I feel I've warned you properly whilst simultaneously plugging the best parts of the game. Good luck whatever you decide. Just know that if you do purchase, make sure you warn your therapist.

As someone who's constantly complaining about how modern games don't offer depth or challenge their audience, This game made me eat my shoe.

Game's a ♥♥♥♥ show, Don't ever expect it to be balanced or even remotely stable. But the fun isn't from this being a fine tuned piece of gaming. The fun is in the choices and plays you make, the builds you create to terrorize your opponents or undermine the killer. There's going to be whole libraries you could write about the flaws in this game that still haunt it from beta, And you'll keep playing. Because you had a bad run of luck, or there's builds you want to make, hopefully you're like me and just want to become better at what you do in the game. Each match can either be a steamroll session, or a by the skin of your teeth adventure the likes of which would Harrison Ford's career look boring. There's been enough releases so that there's a killer/survivor for just about every aesthetic you could imagine....except Africans for some reason?

Either way, buy the game, you'll hate it, but it's still fun.

Disclaimer: my recommendation is with great hesitation as of patch 1.0.1. However this hesitation is slightly tempered by knowledge via research of CA's previous practices (they're consistent...kinda) and their seemingly rabid desire to bring the world of warhammer fantasy to life on our monitors.

I can recommend this game because despite the absolute horrid campaign experience it delivers, and despite giving me my 1st grey hair it's still an extremely, meticulously well-crafted game with battles being bigger and more over the top than ever. I can recommend this game because I know that this campaign WILL be altered at some point. I'm also comfortable doing so because I know that immortal empires will be nothing like the realms of chaos campaign. if you get the game now I have different messages:

those who played TWW2, imagine the vortex campaign except everyone's basically in naggarond and compare the realms of chaos gods to simply fighting a war in Norsca. magnify those campaign frustrations by about 4x and you'll have an idea of what to expect.

to those that never played a total war game before, now's a good time to get stuck in when things are nice and crappy. because you're never gonna abandon the game for all time. you may get mad and stop playing for a bit after a bad loss, but once you play something like this it's hard to find something else as engrossing. Trust me, this franchise poached me from Vermintide. join us in the mud now, so that when CA pulls the pearls out, you'll know what do with them. Take this time of early craptitude to learn how to play total war and git gud because when immortal empires drops and you know what you're doing, I can't describe how good you'll feel knowing how to build a healthy empire and your dream army ahead of time.

Another game so good that I felt it necessary to buy it again and grind up my build from the console.

A game where you have the freedom to truly play as you wish, albeit with some grind attached to that claim.

loot system that is only irrelevant if you aren't using the Y/▲ button.

Challenge that increases not just damage values, but enemy abilities and attacks as well.

There's much that Nioh 2 does right as a game, and I highly recommend this title to anyone due to the fact that it is a highly customizable experience that allows you to truly take your experience in your hands. If you stick through the pain of learning combat, each scenario becomes a thrilling fight. If you master the game's systems and mechanics, you'll never be starved for loot. further mastery of that and you'll become a sheer force of nature only stopping to record cool moves. The only people who pick this game up and are good played through the 1st one, half of them were Dark Souls players, a quarter of those quit the game before reaching the final boss. It is difficult, it will put you to task, and even test your knowledge of its mechanics. It is worth the gajillion deaths.

Honestly the only reason to play as the tomb kings are for their gorgeous and powerful end-game units. I love being able to field large and free armies but Without spamming or cheesing various exploits (autoresolve missles, sack cities):

-their economy is absolute crap in the beginning and is almost entirely reliant on trade (doable but annoying)
-their traditional units are absolutely useless in every regard other than waiting for the contructs to get there. Cav is slightly redeemable but mainly because I use those types of units in an ok manner so I'm a bit biased.
-constructs are locked behind settlement levels (duh), but those settlements experience some EXTREMELY slow growth. I thought Norsca was bad, TKs are an absolute grind to Tier 3

*bonus round : their book of magic is designed to offset their unit's overall not-goodness except the catch is that they have one or two AoE spells, so good luck with the micro of deciding who gets buffed and who doesn't while the Bretonnians are playing red rover with the one construct you start with.

Tomb kings can indeed be a powerhouse faction...after spending about 100 turns just clicking end turn over and over waiting to get your settlements to build up. on top of that, their lords are slightly overwhelming. Settra is great for cav and stabalizing rapid expansion. Arkhan is a powerhouse of a mage, and (I forget her name)'s skills and campaign effects make fighting as the TKs slightly more fun. All in all, the biggest thing that will ruin the TKs for you is their slow growth; you legitimately need to raise armies for the purpose of subverting their innately slow infrastructure development. You, as a player need to think about what kind of time investment that is. That's a lot of turns to create a 'campaign army' for the purpose of getting provinces developed fast enough to compete with a fixed Malus Darkblade. How much do you love the egyptian motif? How often do you want to hear settra talk about the desert heat? The answer for me is "wait for a sale and take a week off from work"

Edit: I completely neglected to mention their item crafting mechanic. it's awesome to be able to deck out all my lords and heroes with what they need to be great. but without expansion, you really will forget it exists until you go through and start spending money that's already not so readily available.

I'd describe my first interaction with B4B as the following:
-A Gorgeous tree with a strong and healthy trunk, deep roots, but it's branches are touched by Nurgle himself
-"The game's amazing but the little flaws...it's like death by 1000 cuts"
-Orums like dakkas.

I'll keep playing because I have ADHD and hyper fixate, you on the other hand should wait for them to do one of those revolutionary game changing patches that fixes 99% of the gajillion QOL issues within the game. Let me be the salty fan who debates whether or not they should have bought this instead of you. When they finally decide to actually make B4B, this review is gonna change because the potential is here, Turtle Rock Studio is still flying halfway across Namek to get it unlocked.

-tells you that you'll be detected if you step on red square

-no red square on wall

-enemy spots you through wall

There are dozens of other reasons why this is just a fun game trapped inside a bad game's code but that should give you a good picture of some of the frustrations you'll deal with. If this were a table top game, it would dominate the market, but sadly people go to college for years to become programmers to create games in which you're fighting the mechanics more than you're fighting the NPCs. There really wasn't a lot of thought put into things such as pathing or detection so good luck navigating through the levels how you want, the game will decide whether or not your approach will go as planned, not you. If you can put up with the game not behaving as advertised in its tutorial, 10/10 game. If you're looking for a refined version of XCOM You won't find it here, they just added more stuff to play around with

Great for players, bad for gamers.

This has easily become one of my favorite crafting survival games of all time. There's much in the way of building and customization that you can create some of the most elaborate bases that your imagination can unleash. weapons each function differently and require a bit of practice to get the hang of. Don't believe the hype, it's not a hard game to learn. Loot is everywhere and there's a million ways to get it. Sadly you'll be fighting other players tooth and nail as the vanilla version is an open PvP environment. It can be fun and stressful, ultimately infuriating because there's little stopping the various cheats and scripts people use to give themselves an edge. You're faced with the ugliness of our species on a daily basis which adds a sort of twisted comedy to the game. There's plenty of good folks, but much like IRL you can't throw a rock in any direction without hitting three bad guys, and that's what can ruin the game for you. Luckily there's a gajillion servers out there all catering to different types of players.

I recommend Rust primarily because it's such a malleable experience that even if you want to take a break from the constant toxicity that's become the vanilla Rust experience and find a quiet place to put your feet up with a bunch of people who aren't sociopaths, you can.

You will love playing as your favorite hero. You'll love getting a new Avengers Story. No one can say this game isn't fun to actually play. It just becomes predatory and toxic once your reach the end game. I cannot stress enough how bad this game is for your collection because for the last year players have contended with:

-All game loot drops with randomized stats and perks
-There is no way to re-roll those perks, you can only do the mission again
-The highest tier end game loot can only be obtained once a week
-the highest tier loot can only be upgraded once a day
-Mission types repeat infinitely with very little variety in objectives
-graphical bugs present since console release
-Player complaints being virtually ignored
-predatory microtransactions becoming more and more prevalent to the point of becoming necessary to obtain most of the cosmetics in the game
-nerfing the drop rates of items that give cosmetics
-time-locking most of the player's progress

The entire strategy behind this game as a service is simply to engineer a near infinite grind. Every update. Every change that has been implemented in this game in it's year long lifecycle has been dedicated to two things:

*promote microtransactions
*slow player progression

I want to go play a game that views me as more than an ATM and concurrent player stat. I really want to change this review one day and even apologize for the harsh things I've said about this game. But after a year of Crystal Dynamics completely ignoring the largest complaints about their game. That communicates to me that they know what the issue is; we've been loud. they know how to fix it; there's many ways. And they simply do not care about the hours wasted playing their "end game content". Your time, that valuable thing you can't get back, means absolutely nothing to the Crystal Dynamics marketing team and it's not just my word proving this, it's their actions over the course of an entire year.

Buy at your own risk, you've been warned about the realities of pressing that purchase button, You've been told what awaits you. My recommendation is to find ANY other looter game besides this and Outriders because it's the same publisher and some overlapping teams with the same issues. I recommend you follow @playavengers on twitter and wait for them to announce a gear re-work. Other than that, it's just going to be another $60 you gambled on a great game being handled poorly.