Recent reviews by Ambigant

killed the no skin man by throwing a medkit at him

I am a terrible doctor

Before about a week ago, I'd never seen anything even remotely related to this game. I knew about it, of course, but with alternatives out there that I'd already became invested in it felt to me like it would never be worth even trying this. That there was no merit to it.

I was wrong.

LOTRO is a very *very* clunky experience. It has UI problems up the wazoo, the combat is dated to all hell, the way that the quests present themselves to the player is slow and tedious, and it has UI problems up the wazoo. Did I say that already? Oh well.

Despite this, the world of LOTR shines through this possibly like no other title out there, even Shadows of Mordor. The fields and hills feel alive, the towns are vibrant, the inns more so, and the dialogue, though tedious, is worth reading in my opinion. The Combat, though I do still think is clunky, is serviceable ultimately but again that's just how I feel. At eight hours invested into it so far, maybe my feelings could change yet, but there is definitely more to this experience than just some hollow good-for-nothing MMO; it's a world that has meat to it, substance and developer consideration that is apparent if you know how to see it.

Several fellows near to me installed this and made me aware of it shortly after and I happen to agree with their sentiment: Going into this blind truly is something else, and if you give it the patience that it requires of you, it may very well be worth it.

I would say give it a try.

It's very bare-bones and underdeveloped. I don't want to discourage the developer as I did think the art direction of what was in this was quite pleasant but it simply could have used more content and clarity for that content instead of expecting the player to create the content themselves.

Regardless I do hope lessons were learned since as a free title I'd still like to see what you can accomplish with a more premium route. Keep making games!

It's cheap, it's fun, it's a pretty quick one. Good stuff all around.

I could not, for the life of me, ever get into Path of Exile 1. I tried on seven separate occasions to open up the game, make a character, and just try to enjoy the game and... I just couldn't. Something about the pace of the game, the feel of it... I could not get into it regardless of what I tried. There was just no connection.

Path of Exile 2 has made that connection for me. The impact of the weapons hitting creatures, the pace that ramps up and the enemies that ramp up with it- this speaks to me in a greater magnitude than POE 1 ever did, and I don't fully know why. The game isn't perfect mind you.

I've had three sessions and each of those sessions ended with the game crashing- that's something the devs really have to get fixed cause I can understand why it would be a deal breaker for a lot of players- but for me... I'm just enjoying it. The boss fights are really intense, the music is too. It's pretty great!

I'm going to disregard what I said it my previous review of the game, but just know that I happen to think exploiters will make this game unplayable in a multiplayer capacity in the future. Hopefully not.

Great experience though.

Very well put together builder that I hope a few things get implemented to in the future, in order of importance to me:

1. Bigger Plots. Seriously guys, we need more room to work with.

2. Furniture; like a tab for ground objects that aren't placed randomly as they are now as it's quite annoying to deal with.

3. (This is a personal suggestion that I think would be cool) Maybe this is difficult to do with the way the game is fundamentally made right now but I *really* like the first person camera and think it would be really awesome if it were expanded to have more utility, IE Building whilst using it or flying and building with it. Possibly even having the capability to create interiors with all of these things combined?

4. Perhaps it's a bug but ponds/created water sources do not play nicely with elevated terrain.

5?. In my opinion it's not that big of an issue but maybe there could be a set of tooltips that sort of give players a function tutorial at what things interact with other things? I understand if this isn't really in line with the philosophy of the game's style, just maybe some people could use it I suppose.

Ultimately it's excellent and was really cool to design some of the daily themes that popped up.

I want to be clear here: I absolutely do like this game a lot, and I would consider this to be more of a mixed review. Visually pleasing, controls well, great music, good characters, and quite a few quality of life improvements over other games of the genre, but... this might lead into the issue that I've noticed- and though this issue is ultimately reparable, it... could fundamentally prove to be problematic with the structure of the experience. Let me explain:

The systems in the game that lead to an improved quality of life actually do inherently have a drawback to them, particularly in regards to the NPCs themselves. Outside of request board tasks, you will essentially not run into many of the villagers aside from a few that happen to be in your path on daily chore runs. I'll talk to them when they are near, often leading to one single line of dialogue, and then run off on my merry way- you can of course talk to them multiple times a day after a conversation cooldown ends, but this tends to be flawed.

The days are very fast, and the distance you have to cover to get from say your house to the museum/mines, or from there to the beach, back to town or some such will often consume more time than you're willing to spend, and in the heat of this rushing from one place to another, maybe it's just me, but I forget things. Especially things I was only informed of once. I forget even their names or the things that certain individuals might have asked for on the request board (yes I do know the requests are in the pause menu, I simply forget from not having an objective marker immediately present). Add on top of this the fact that you don't even need to have them present in their respective shops and honestly I just straight up forget who's who at that point. It only happened to me once but I literally had to reset one day because I wanted to give Olric a gift on their birthday and I ended up giving it to the wrong guy thinking they were Olric.

Now the issue described could just be a personal problem, but I don't think the games structuring really helps in the matter, and it doesn't justify other problems. One thing I'll make note of is that at the beginning of the game you acquire quite a lot of unique stacked items, leading to serious inventory management, so much so to the point that many of the items I got in spring I had to simply delete due to not having time to run to my farm and stuff them in a chest. Really I think that time boils down to being one of the biggest hindrances in the game and not in a strategic way. I even think that having more time in the day would allow players a better ability at conversing with characters or doing things that they might otherwise not do, which I feel is important to have in games like this.

If I could make one suggestion, it would be to reduce the rate at which every "ten" minutes tick by roughly 30-50%, thus allowing the player more freedom per day whilst still having the added mechanism of stamina hindering what they can actively *work* on per day. Even simply giving players the option on world creation to set the rate at which time passes would be much appreciated.

Another suggestion would simply be to add more meaningful and moreover ACTIVE interactions with NPCs, and to not delegate their appearances to simple <~30 second cutscenes or sentence long conversations. Perhaps this is ultimately handled by heart events, but I've not seen those at present.

I say this all with the lens that this game is in early access, and I do like it a lot, and I do think it successfully surpasses in some areas many other shining examples in the genre.

31% of reviewers should have stayed behind with Mohg.

randomly decided to install and play this

got an event of a bloody face that traumatized me into remembering a dream I had a long time ago that was very eerily similar not just in visuals but sounds as well

very epic would recommend the existential crisis going on here