Recent reviews by ArahorPlays

The Original That Can Be Mistaken For A Bootleg


First off, unlike many reviews here I want to start with saying that I've finished the game, I've not only done one chapter and decided that I had enough expertise to actually review the game, I went through it all, for me it took about 9 hours.

I'm not going to whiteknight or hate. But I will be BRUTALLY honest, this is a game that should not be sugarcoated because "It's Tintin!".

I've been following this game since it got revealed around March this year and I was pretty much counting days up to it's release.

With that out in the clear I want to list the positive things first.


+ The voice acting, while It's not the best voice acting I've seen they have managed to get the characters to sound fairly right, apart from Snowy, for me Snowy does not sounds like a dog barking but an actual human barking.
+ The character designs are actually pretty decent, it looks like something straight out of a Tintin comic/series, only Tintin looks a bit weird. From behind it looks like Tintin but from infront.. It kinda looks like someone who wants to look like Tintin but are kinda soulless and dead facial expressions.
b]+[/b] Some puzzles are OK, but there is not a lot of them, some sections of the game is puzzle heavy and some not.

That's it for the positive things, now let's get to the negative.

I'll be talk a little more in-depth about each section below before the summary.

- Unoptimized performance
- Crashes
- Overall gameplay
- Voices goes quiet, like the voiced are attached to something out in the enviroment and not to the characters?
- Voices disappear completely
- Glitches
- ALL THESE HORRIBLY BAD QUICKTIME EVENTS, ALL OF THEM
- THE CAMERA
- Controller Support (which is listed that it has, but it does not work)
- No skipable cutscenes
- Mission objectives not really guiding you
- OVERALL SOUND QUALITY (if you listen closely in the jungle it sounds like you are in an office, with doors closing and people talking?
- Every single stealth encounter, yes, all of them
- No manual saving
- The developers


You can feel how unoptimized and poor it is. In some scenarios like in the tomb early on in the game it's abyssmal, It runs maybe at 5-10 fps at best at some sections, and while the game can RUN OK mostly, the bad outweights the good.

During my 9 hours of play I had the game crashed for me three times. And I dare say that I think I got off lightly, can't verify that but I think I did, each time I crashed I got a "Fatal Error", It did not tell me why it crashed, if it ran out of memory (32GB) or if the game just like me around the 7-8 hours mark just wanted it to end as well. Nothing.



The game starts off with a quicktime event, worse possible decision. It's like they thought confidently "these QTE are really good". And let me say this, if you do not like the first QTE then get ready to not like ~40% of the game because IT'S FILLED WITH THEM! It's that or chase events where you need to escape or chase after someone, which is almost just as bad. Most of the game is like that, if you want any freedom you are looking up the wrong tree. I actually took a wrong turn during an event that softlocked the entire game and forced me to restart from checkpoint since it gave me an endless loading screen.

There is also all these stealth scenarios, there is a bunch of them either as Tintin or Snowy, and they are more frustrated than "fun". It's like the enemies can spot you even if they got their back towards you, I checked this out a couple of times and I must say that some got eyes in their neck, they must have.

Oh and did I mention how cutscenes are not skipable? That's right, you need to watch through the cutscene again, maybe multiplie times, depending on how many times you fail when the mission objective is not telling you where to go, because it can be completely hopeless 80% of the time.



This game has the worse camera ever, there is no defending this. It's horrible, VERY SLUGGISH from the beginning to the end, it never gets better, not once. There is no mouse sensitivity options so you can't tweak this. So for me I had to move the camera very very very slowly in order to turn, the slower I moved the mouse the faster the camera moved in the game, IF i went normal speed, I ran out of mousepad pretty much because I needed to lif the mouse and start over and drag it across the desk and then lift it again and do it again in order to turn. I'm sitting on 1600 DPI and I did ALOT of mouseplay here, never before I've done it like this, truly unacceptable. It's almost like the mouse is limited to joystick mechanics, which brings me to my next point.

After I felt disgusted enough by the camera I checked their store page and saw it had controller support. So I said "Let's see if that's better, because it can't be worse than this". I'm using a PS5 controller, which I just use the cable to and plug into the PC, sometimes I need to restart the game for it to work properly, it depends on the game. After it was plugged in it did not work in-game. I restarted the game and it did not work.

So I think that they are just straight up lying about this game having controller support on PC.



One of the worse things I experienced in the game and was plaguing my playthrough for more than 40% of the second half of the game was the audio, voices just suddently goes really quiet, it's probably worse in the jungle, where you will hear the "ambient sound" (which sucks let me tell you, the one good thing I heard was the thunder, nothing else) louder than the voices.

It's like the voices are not fixated on the characters when they are talking, it's like they are outside somewhere. I can handle horrible lipsync but when the voices just vanish or goes really quiet is just bad, speaking of which.

In many parts of the game the voices just vanish completely, and this sucks even more because when the subtitles bug out (which happend to me a few times) you end up just wondering what's going on. This also applies to the first car chase in the game where the car did not make any sound, but It might have been the first electric car, I don't know.



Prior to the release of the game, like ~4 hours before it was unlocked on Steam (not a couple of days or weeks) the developers posted a message here on Steam called "Message from the devs".

In said message they mentioned that the people who were going to play the game on release would not get the best gaming experience and that it would take them a couple of weeks to patch the game up. But I say it will take months, the game is nowhere close to be done.

If this was an Early Access or Kickstarter I would let this slide probably, but they acknowledged how bad it is, and still have the spine to charge full price, which is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.

Gollum is a better game than this, and I don't say that lightly and I'm not I'm overreacting. At least the devs there came full circle and decided to shut down when they realized their mistake. This game, is Ride to Hell: Retribution level. It's by far, no question about it. The worse game I've played this year and It's up there on my list among the worse games I've played.

Death Stranding Director's Cut

Not every game out there hits it right in the feels, actually most games I've played can't produce big enough impact for me to feel it, they just don't have the "soul" for it.

But Death Stranding do.

You are a porter, you deliver lost cargo to a survivors in a apocalyptic United States. You have little to no backstory of your character, you just know your name and what you need to do.

You are introduced to Sam Porter Bridges, more or less a shell of a man, with a "dead" personality, like he just don't really care anymore and given up on everything.

But this personality will slowly change over what some in the game refered to a "tool". BB, or simply a baby.

At first you simple use it for just that, a tool, until you realise it that it's much more than that. It's something that clings onto Sam likewise the player, it give you a purpose to keep going that extra mile. It's cheerful laughs, it's cries, you get affected by them, you care about the BB's well being.

And you don't REALLY understand how much it means to YOU until you are without it.

The story tells you many stories, more than just being a porter, and you end up with more questions than answers. It's a very #HideoKojima thing really, he is a master at doing things like this, a true visionary.

I passed most of my +100 hours in the game, still figuring things out. Until the last couple of hours of the game I figured things out.

You just end up feeling more and more lost in the plot, even as it thickens, like "how do I come to be here?". But then everything and I mean EVERYTHING falls into place and paints you this big picture.

It all became a very emotional rollercoaster, your feelings shifted, spite became pity.

And I'm truly thankful for savoring this amazing story this game had to tell

I want to start with mentioning that I have 800 hours in this game at this writing moment and I've played the previous technical tests and open betas of the game and been playing it since release. I'm now ready to give a full statement of what I think about the game.

During my 800 hours in this game I've accomplished quite a bit but not everything. I'll begin with listing some of them below and I'll continue after that.

- Played since release
- I reached level 60 on TWO characters (scroll down to read why)
- I witnessed the outcome of all dupes
- I never reached ~600GS watermark
- I never reached 600GS
- I never maxed a crafting even though I got to 160 armoring on two characters.
- I did mostly PvE with some PvP & Wars.

- Sort of TD;LR at the bottom

With that covered, let's begin.

New World is a MMO that clearly needed to be baked much longer than It did, there is no question about it. The devs or the community team can defend that how much they like but It's clear as day that this game was not ready to see the break of dawn when it got released. I don't know what happend behind the scenes but If I got to make a guess I think the pressure became too great to handle by some people in suits for them to see some money in their pockets again.

If I'm wrong and this was 100% the choice of the developers/managers then It definitely was the worst thing to do.

We have had a lot of debate about mass reporting people causing the person reported to automatically become banned, as in a system banning them after xx-x amount of reports. Now, the first thing that happend was a Community Manager iirc adressing this on the forums, the person did mention that it's an automated system, which explained a lot and It's really rubbish. However, about an hour after said reply another Community Manager or Developer came into the thread and corrected the previous CM by mentioning that "No, It's not a system banning people, each report is being viewed by a human manually and looked into before any action or if any action is taken".

Now here is where it gets a bit strange, same evening this happend the CM that mentioned about the ban system got their CM status revoked and later banned from the forums I think. Now, this is still something AGS defends to this day that It's not a system and it's a human reviewing the reports, although people who get mass reported every week end up getting banned. At one point some companies could get completely banned before a war so their opponents could go for a easy win. If you ask me, this is a grave bannable offence and I do think they still use a system, or the person in charge for reviewing the reports need to get replaced.

Once of the most harmful things that happend to the game was a gold dupe a few weeks into the game. For a MMO with a player driven economy this is pretty much one of the worst things that can happen. When this dupe broke out it was about Halloween, the developers had just gone on holiday pretty much over the weekend so this dupe ran lose for 2-3 days before something actually happend, and I dare to say that the economy never recovered 100% after it. Some dupers got permbanned, and some even got around the ban to get themselves unbanned.[/b]

Now at this point many probably thought that it could not have gotten any worse. But it did.

After this we were plagued with lots of exploits, mostly related to latency/lag issues if not it was skill issues, it was everything from doing insane damage with certain weapons to flying around the map to become immortal by playing in windowed mode.

I understand why 800K people has abandoned the game, every MMO has a drop off, the hype dies out, many just want to find a new MMO and such. But really, there is no denying that losing 800.000 players in less than 2½ months is very bad and seriously something worth to look into, which this game was released with a big hype, not all of those 800K was pure hype

If you truly enjoy the game and all you would give feedback for it to improve, but frankly this didn't work since they simply ignores it and goes their own way.

We had their big "Into the Void" patch on the Public Test Server, people reported many bugs and such and yet the patch got released without any polishing what so ever, the feedback regarding certain weapon changes was ignored, buffing the already strong weapons and making some other weapons worse, while it was actually needed the other way around to balance it out.

Even exploits and such that was reported didn't get taken care off, It was mostly to show off the upcoming update, not to WORK on it to make it better. Well, they released said update, riddled with new bugs, some furniture dupe bug which closed the economy down, again. Which followed with some compensation that got a decimal placed wrong so some people got 300k. This caused the EU Central servers to be shutdown for a full day almost, for a few hours of rollback with the devs going on holiday for a week with the trading post being down. Nice! 10/10

Now as I mentioned at the beginning of this wall of text. I leveled up two characters to max level. Why?

Well. When I started playing I went on a medium server with some friends, mind you it had about 1400/2000 people so It looked good. After that our server got locked, so our other friends who started playing just could not create a character on our server. So they had to join another one.

After a lot of waiting the server transfers came, so we went, hopefully reinforce our faction on the new server too but mostly to play with our friends. This created a lot of issues for some people and server transfers were taken offline.

Once they came up again, many people transfered off the server we now were on. And we ended up not even getting a full team for Myrkgard anymore, during weekends at peak we had about 120 people at best. So as I noticed on the others I played with that It simply sucked, and we asked for Merges on the forum or a second transfer token and the developers just simply didn't care, they had not even finished working on server merges, a feature that is mentioned when you even create your character. So many of us created new characters against our will in order to keep playingm , the developers should be ashamed that this happens, I've never seen anything like this in any MMO.

I've gotten my moneys worth. I have. But I just want to warn other people about this. The developers are ninja patching a lot, undocumented changes not listed in patch notes. They are trying to increase the longevity of the game by making things taking longer and elite areas harder. Now if the content would be fun, this would be no problem. But the end-game in this game is to run chest runs pretty much. They are simply ignoring all feedback what so ever.

Today was the last straw for me, where after a whole week of game being in flames and all, we got patch notes so small that it would not even be accepted as an essay in a school project. And half of it was just some text about last patch, one section was just a straight up lie which they later adressed, and people are still waiting for one of the other things that they mentioned in them. No bug fixes or anything.

The in-game store had gotten more changes in it's available items than the patch notes had changed for us players. And even then, nothing of those new items in the store was listed among the patch notes.

Most of the issues this game got is probably related to it's engine. Which is no easy fix, and the developers are showing that too. It will always have issues.

I could go on but I'm limited to 8000 letters....

It's a great shame. But as long as FEEDBACK is being ignored I can NOT recommend this game and I encourage people to stay away from it.

END

Have you ever felt that you dont have enough frustration in your life? Don't you wish to find something that will make you insane and sit in a corner somewhere and cry of frustration? Good news!


Darkest Dungeon is a turn based dungeon crawler.

You will have a set of heroes at your disposal, some you might grow very fond of. you might even give them a catchy name. Maybe you name it after your first dog you had as a chi.... oh no your heroes died.

That's it, you care for your heroes, you give them equipment and preper them to explore dungones, you dont know what's a head. Maybe more loot? So you push your team to the edge, up to the point where you just get overwhelmed and can't possible win and lose everything. The temptation is strong and the whole overall experience is kinda nerve wracking and fun at the same time since you dont want to leave before you are done, you want all that loot!

There are multiply classes/roles you can have in your team that can alter your playstyle or your team composition that can maybe make the whole thing easier. Or maybe your team dies again.


Darkest Dungeon is a good game for those that are after a challenge. It's very hard and extremely unforgiving. One thing is for certain though, it can make you frustrated in this psychological stress terror.

The wolf is coming..

You like fairytailes? With a dark setting added to it? And somehow they all are using a magical item which turns them all into humans to hide their true form to the world? Hold my red apple, because you are in for a ride.


You are playing as Bigby Wolf, the big bad wolf. Now a sheriff of Fabletown where many other know characters live that you have heard about.

The game is a point and click game with some quick time scenarios, it also features lots of moral choices that can alter the story. Like many Telltale Games you can be outright polite, be quiet, don't care about anything and just be grumpy all the time, or something inbetween it all. Overall Bigby is quite a grumpy fellow so the choice is yours.

The game is split into five episodes, all delivering quality content in my opinion.


I belong to the herd that say that The Wolf Among Us is probably the best game Telltale ever made. I think the voice acting, the handling the story and the tension in the game was amazing. I'm glad that I bought this game on the same day episode 4 came out (iirc) because I was just yearning for more and more after playing it.

A long time ago
In a galaxy far, far away....

A tenno awoke, and started laying a path of millions of dead grineer and corpus enemies in the hunt for unlimited resources to satisfy the huge desire to craft the ultimate weapons, just to destroy them later on when they are maxed and taking up inventory slots for other weapons you need to craft.


Warframe.

It's hard to summerize everything in a review like this since there is just not enough space to cover everything. But the plain basics are the following.

You farm a ton of resources so you can progress your gear or your warframe the higher the level they have (max 30 for most) will increase their capacity for mods. There are hundreds of mods in this game and their purpose is to make your warframe and your weapons stronger, just so you can grind even more effectivly.

The game can feel extremely overwhelming at the beginning since it does not really explain things to players. But if you get the hang of it and learn how to progress in the game you will find hundreds of hours of content on your hands that can be free.

Speaking of which, the game is Free to Play, which of course means that it has microtransaktions. Although I've never seen a better implemented microtransation system then the one Warframe got. I'll try to explain it briefly below.

You can farm pretty much any mission on any planet. Each mission usually gives you rewards after x amount of time. For example, survival gives you rewards every 5 minutes you stay there. These rewards can be "relics" and these relics can be unlocked by running "fissure" missions.

Once unlocked you will be able to pick one reward out of four if you have a full group. Once you have this new item you can choose to sell it for platinum, some items sell for just a few platinum and some sell for hundreds of platinum. You can only sell a certain amount of items every day depending on your Mastery Rank. So someone at Mastery Rank 4 can only sell 5 items every day before reset while someone at Mastery Rank 23 can sell 24 items every day before reset.

So it's a good recycle system to gain the money bought currency to buy stuff from the Market OR buy stuff from other players. In short, It's a money bought currency that you actually can farm for your own gain.

Combat! Warframe got a very good flow in it's combat, all melee weapons have a set of stances that change the animations and combos, combine with some strong mods and you will cleave through mobs like butter. It's probably the party piece Warframe got. Fun combat are always crucial in a game like this.

There are also a TON of weapons and different warframes/classes to choose from, so finding something that suits your playstyle should not be too hard.


You are a space ninja, in a beautiful free to play game which are still getting updates. Like I said, this game features too much stuff to be summerized in one review. It's next to impossible. It's definitely worth to check out in my opinion.

I consider Stardew Valley being one of those hidden gems that you don't really find very often, you don't really expect much from it either when starting out but it can grow on you very fast.


The game starts with you the player inherit your grandfather's old farm in Stardew Valley. You will start with rebuilding the farm, improving it and upgrading it so it becomes more homely.

There will be four seasons in the game, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. So you need to make sure that you grow the right crops at the right time so they dont wither when passing into another season. You do this as one way to earn money so your are able to progress on your farm by installing irrigation systems so you don't have to water the crops every day (because that will get old, fast).

You can also take a deep dive into the mine, fight monsters for loot and mine resources.

But for me personally the best part of this game are the character depth each NPC has and the fishing.

The fishing does not really sound that special but there are a bunch of different fish in the game, some can only be caught in specific weather or in different seasons, you might end up fishing quite a lot and if you pay attention you can "feel" that every fish has it's own personality about how it responds after you have hooked one, which is not something you find in many fishing games even but it's just adds to the overall quality to this hidden gem.

The characters. Now each NPC kinda have a personality and a backstory. They have things they like and dislike. You can romance almost anyone in Stardew Valley, and as you progress with them with romance or just friendship wise you will notice some character development. You can also end up marrying your Stardew Valley crush if you fancy that.


This truly are one of the better games on Steam. I think many people who plays this finds themselves surprised on how good it actually is. It's a very laidback game, if you like farming games (like, actual farming) then you will probably end up liking this too. For the price of this game you get a lot of gameplay for your money, It's a great value in my opinion.

The Warden & The Paunch adds two new legendary lords to the game. Eltharion the Grim for High Elves(Tor Yvresse) and Grom the Paunch for Greenskins(Broken Axe).


I've stocked up towards 800 turns across multiplie playthroughs with both lords combined probably, in both solo and coop. And It's bit hard to dictate who the favorite is.

Eltharion is a good foot infantry lord, he has the option to have mounts but I found out that he is better on foot, he is quite capable in melee for being a heavy spellcaster. Speaking of which, he has decent spells that offers good support and offensive.

His faction mechanic is Athel Tamara which is a prison where he can jail defeated lords and then execute them (can't execute legendary lords) or release them for buffs or just keep them jailed for some time. While Athel Tamara can be upgraded i can't help to feel that this got little thought put into it, next to none of the buffs you get from upgrading them feels necessary which ends up being more a chore in the end.

Grom is a strong chariot lord. His skills are very focused on goblins which are no surprise there since he is one big gobbo himself. He does not offer any spells but he is quite a wrecking ball on the battlefield, literally.

His faction mechanic is Grom's Cauldron. At Grom's Cauldron you can put ingredients into a cauldron which will give you buffs that boosts you in battle and in the campaign. Ingredients are unlocked by performing various tasks, like defeating a dragon or like roaming the ocean for ingredients. You will also be able to expand the amount of ingredients you can use up to maximum 4, doing so means that you have to do a cook off against a hag that visits you from time to time, the result of this is that you can buff Grom and his armies even harder. Grom's Cauldron really put's all other greenskins factions to shame in my opinion.


The Warden & The Paunch are overall a decent DLC. I personally like both lords and will end up playing them more in the future, I kinda always roll with Grom if I want to be a greenskin now since I'll end up confederation or accepting other factions into my own so all the other legendary lords can take advantage of Grom's Cauldron.

Creative Assembly released this Legendary Lord along side The Warden & The Paunch DLC, comparing the new three Legendary Lords, Imrik has the upper hand in terms of being "better".


"The Dragon Lord", that's that he is refered too. It's kinda self explainatory that he is focusing around dragons. He has a dragon mount later on which makes him extremely powerful. And his faction mechanic allows him to recruit unique dragons to his army which are also very strong and better then the ordinary dragons that can be recruited from the High Elves unit pool.

At later game, Imrik is one of the strongest lord out there, his stats are nothing more then just plainly beautiful.


I don't have to say more really. As a FLC this guy is just a sweet sweet gift from Creative Assembly.

You are an Exile, banished to the Land of Exiles due to crimes you have commited. You are crucified to a cross in the desert, waiting for your death to come.

This is where it all begins. You get to create your character in a bit limited character creator but not a bad one (more options would not have hurted really), before you get to roam around in the Land of Exiles on your own, facing it's dangers and perils. You have to build to survive these unforgiving lands, level and become stronger as you advance to fight stronger enemies, bosses and complete dungeons for that beautiful loot.


Conan Exiles is a open world sandbox game with crafting and survival elements with gore and optional nudity.

Like many other of it's kind, you will be building a lot, there are a bunch of crafting stations in the game that take up a decent amount of space, so when you start with a small 3x3 hut you will be realizing very quickly that you need to expand your hut into a cottage, into a house, into a base/castle. Or a lodge with a viking feel to it like I have done a few times. (worth mentioning that some mods are into play in that picture so It differs from the vanilla experience)

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1963721358

The overall building system is one of the best I've seen in games like this, It just casts a huge shadow on ARK for example in my opinion, you get so many more options on how you want to place your building parts which can probably satisfy many people who like building and decorating in games.

As for the combat part of the game. I came from ARK after more then 2000 hours, and I feel in love with the combat in this game at an instant, I loved how each weapon had it's own moveset and combos that much that I've been kinda spoiled with it by now. I find the bow a bit weak though, but apart from that most of the weapons has it's benefits. I usually always run with some heavy weapon with high armor penetration.

There are some "flow" to the combat, cant just smash buttons since you need to maintain your stamina and to make sure you get not locked in animations so the enemies can kill you.

Another good thing with this game is that you can climb on pretty much everything, see that mountain over there in the distance? You can climb it. *hint* *hint*

The game got something called "Thralls" which are humanoid npcs that you can knock unconscious and drag them to a wheel of pain where they will be tortured until their spirit is broken and then they will become your slave. You can then use them as fighters to defend your base you bring them on your adventure to help you, or you can slot them in their own specific crafting station (A smelter goes into the furnace) and they will decrease the materials needed to make stuff, unlock some better recipes for you and increase the crafting speed dramaticly. There are four kind of tiers for thralls, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 which are called Named Thralls and are being the most sought after.


While the modding community are not massive in Conan Exiles it still does feature some high quality mods. I like playing with Age of Calamitous since It fleshes out a bit further after you are finished with all the vanilla stuff. There are also some mods that allow you to pick up building parts if you placed them wrong or so which is a good quality of life mod.


This game was kinda Funcom's last shot at making something that would bring money in the bank after some struggling IPs. And this is one of their most beautiful creations they made in my opinion. They hit the nail on the head and it's still being worked on with some rumor that there will be an new map sometime in the future.