Recent reviews by anomalouslysingular

I know this is day 1 early access, but right now, I gotta say, save your money.

Dodging
Dodging is okay as a mechanic? Not great, especially in some of the bossfights (Lachlann's summon frost phantom that hits twice). Just not rewarding to use, yes somehow you have to dodge more than you get to cast.

Bosses
Love the new mechanics! There's just not much counterplay. Whatever the Act 1 end boss is (the wolf), you end up in a frost circle surrounded by ads, as the invulnerable boss darts across a tiny safety circle with no warning.

Singleplayer
It's definitely not tuned for singleplayer. If you die, the instance "resets" at your last checkpoint, and the monsters are vicious. Especially the blood levels. Packs of suicide physical mobs buffed by offscreen mobs charge and the moment they reach you explode and leave a large DoT under your feet. You can dodge one or two, but not all 5 or more. Further, in multiplayer, you can revive people. Literally the difference between losing a bossfight after your 8th attempt 5 minutes in and being able to kill it. It just feels bad to play solo.

Hitboxes
The hitboxes on some of the attacks are larger than visually shown. For the most part, attacks from bigger mobs are telegraphed, but they have major aimbot, and some attacks are just large enough that a single dodge won't take you out of it and just fast enough that you can't dodge a second time.

Game speed
The game speed being slowed down is kinda nice, but not all monsters got the memo. You as the player are only one, but the monsters charging you are plenty, which leaves you with less options unless you passed the DPS check.

Overall
I think PoE 2 both failed to live up to the first game, and failed at succeeding in being whatever it tries to be (souls-like is what I hear most, but that's not the case in multiplayer - most bosses can only target one person, so they're many times easier in a party) I'll try to trudge my way through further and see if it opens up any further as I progress, but so far this isn't a game that I can pass the time at work thinking about all day, or want to rush home to play.

A couple of champions are just impossible to beat without the right comp; ESPECIALLY in duos.

Otherwise, game's solid. It's literally a MOBA Royale.

Not a game for the slow of pace, though.

Baldur's Gate 3 has a ton of potential, and for the most part is fairly well put together. Right now, I just can't recommend it because of how broken it is. To clarify, for the most part, it's broken as in "these interactions that make sense just don't work because a slight oversight was made", not as in "I can't play my AAA game because the servers are permadown" broken.

Even on the normal difficulty, enemies crit you just as often as you miss... which is to say all the time, even with "kharmic" (anti-failstreak) dice on. And this is coming from someone who sees Divinity 2's Tactician difficulty as too easy still.

The characters (to say the story characters, Gale, Karlach, etc), no matter how customized or left alone, can't 1v1 an NPC their same level since the average PC damage output per turn is less than half the NPC damage output per turn.

Several areas have omni-triggers for cutscenes that can break your progress loop
<<SPOILER START>>
for example, in the Grymforge, above the tunnel collapse, simply exploring this area is enough to trigger the autosave and 2 long-rest time bomb that is Nere, even though you can traverse past Nere at 100+ feet above his head in an NPC-void walkway system.
<<SPOILER END>>

Several interactions are non-existent, poorly explained, or plain broken, such as
- Auntie Ethel's potions not applying when thrown, unlike every other potion in the game
- Using powder bombs to free Nere (a scripted option, not a "does this work?" option) has a very high probability of massively damaging your party members and/or starting a town fight (you versus 10+ NPCs)
- Lump's War Horn triggers neutral NPC's to become hostile as soon as Lump & co enter the area, even if you are already in a megafight.
- Certain inconspicuous dialogue options, when playing the common goody-two-shoes lawful good character type end up either locking you out of quests, or causing unintentional town megafights
- Knocking people out is a lie except when it is scripted to work. They die anyways 95% of the time. It was mighty disappointing, for example, to knock out the masked men in Ethel's lair, kill Ethel, then unmask the masked men only to find they are unable to wake up and will be "permanently deleted when you next long rest"
- On multi-layered maps, the map view is split into chunks, where the chunks you are not in display the ground floor, and only the chunk you are in displays the floor you are on. This leads to a poor exploration experience, instead of just putting the entire map on the floor you are on with a layer chooser.

There are still gamebreaking bugs four post-release patches in, not even including the beyond flawed 5e of DnD that the game is built on, and no reasonable way to report it (a send and forget report-a form is not a clever, intuitive, transparent, or helpful way to do bug reporting).

The game sort of forces you to save-scum, too. I started by doing an RP run, but the amount of jank micro-interactions such as very poor PC pathing, no friendly-fire confirmation to prevent attacking another PC instead of switching to them, zeroed (aka hard-coded impossible) skill checks, yoinking you into cutscenes against your will while trying to hold-person a hostile character, and uncontrolled PC's failing to jump/follow after you, made it impossible to stay scum-free.

Also, the "community" will laugh at, gaslight, and ridicule you into the ground if you so much as say a single negative word about the game.

I've tried doing three different playthroughs, and I can't even get through act 1 (which is apparently over half the game) without experiencing a collection of the above issues, making me feel like I'm fighting the game, not Thudd, Priestess Gut, or the Redcap Prowies. Your experience may vary.

Enjoy being spawnkillled? Love being laughed at every time you die? Want to play with up to 126 other players in complete silence? Ever felt like roaming your city at 3 am while the power's out, sky is cloudy, and you don't have a flashlight?

Then pick up this game, it'll be perfect for ya!

Enjoy losing hours of hard work?
Ever wanted to be one-shot by things you can't see?

Then go play CoD:BO3 Zombies with Perkaholic and Shopping Free doing a pacifist run. Will be far more worth your time than this heap of scrap, and won't run up your psychiatry bills.

Avoid at all costs
- Conquest (the 5v5 "main" game mode) is the only one they care about.
- Joust (the 3v3 game mode) hasn't received any balancing changes in the last four years.
- The meta in any non-main mode is everyone be a tank and do more damage than the DPS, removing a plethora of viable build options
- Several god interactions and skins are broken, bugged, or had major design oversights, resulting in a competitive advantage (ex: some artemis traps are in 2d, others in 3d. Artio stun doesn't stop ganesha dash? really?)
- If you want to play any game mode, ranked or casual, you have to max-stack the queue to stand a chance; yet you can only duo-queue in ranked conquest.
- They literally replied to me on twitch about how they care about joust (https://youtu.be/GgetCCBkx9w) yet continue making changes beyond detrimental to the mode, in intentional oversight.
- The community, in-game and on social medias are beyond toxic, and would sooner tell you to "kill yourself" and "uninstall the game" than discuss constructive criticism.
- Every survey offered has been not only rewardless, but also all about better monetization, never gameplay.
- All ranked modes are cesspools. And that's before you mention the rampant smurfing and MMR-gaming.
- They claim you don't need cooldowns, yet I rarely see anyone without max cooldowns, and even rarer to see them win.

I got dragonfall originally way back when it was still on iPad only (like, 2014) and finally got around to picking it back up.

Definitely regret it.

If you mentally take a zero off your PC's chance-to's and add that zero onto the enemy chance-to's, it's far closer to reality than whatever propaganda they are spewing.

Also, if you're hoping to look up things like "why am I 25 missions in and still have yet to see a deckpoint with decking 5 and a cyberdeck equipped" you will be woefully disappointed in both the community as a whole and with how much time you wasted just to get nowhere. Shame, too. This game had a chance to be in my top 10 globally.

TL:DR; I told myself "I should get back to work after this mission" at 2 AM. It is now 8:39 AM and that mission is still not complete.

My hour count is for steam. I got this one Xbone when it dropped as my first CoD ever and I was BLOWN away, Zombies was terrifyingly difficult, but easy to learn, live and love, and the multiplayer was sorta what I expected - until fracture met my mothership.


...I take credit for killing off that game mode alongside TheFireGoddess.

It's not a grind if you're laughing along the way.