Recent reviews by BaconNipple

I've put a good bit of hours into the demo, and I was disappointed, but I understand why the game's release date was pushed back to today. This is a critical review of a few issues with the gameplay, as well as an overall opinion of the game.

The game is very much a rich open-world sandbox experience. You're thrown in and told, "Go wild, explore, have fun," but that's where the issues begin. In modern games, we're often given quest markers and the like to guide us linearly through objectives, and Mirthwood does not do this (I'm happy). However, Mirthwood DOES NOT do a good job of providing your character context on these quests. You're often given quests and told, "Meet X person in Y location," and are told the name of the location, but never where or hints of where that location is. The game relies on you finding notes around the game world and gives you no clue as to where to locate them in your inventory, so you have to dig around the game systems to just figure it out. The game offers you a platter, but no fork or knife, basically. The game has no audio track management to adjust the music volume separately from the gameplay volume. Some helpful dialogue can't be repeated once exhausted, so if you didn't hear it you're screwed. Also, archery is botched and needs to have the arrow-guide snap onto targets for hits. It's a little ridiculous how hard it is to hit targets on a 2D XY plane when you're aiming a line from a 70-degree overhead camera view. You're limited to how many materials, food, and other item-types you can carry, and that amount varies per category (This may be the dumbest part of the game). The inventory should be based on overall inventory slots or add a weight feature to items for carry-weight. You can have an empty inventory, but still be limited to a carrying the same number of food items if your inventory were filled. Inventory is unbelievably botched because of this and is an unneeded headache.

If you separate those gripes, you're in for a great artistic cozy adventure.

Love Dragon's Dogma, but I can only REALLY recommend this if this is your first Dragon's Dogma game. If you've played DD:DA, this game is not a good sequel. It's a huge step back, and DD:DA is ultimately an all-around better experience.

FAR less enemy variety, Mystic Knight vocation was removed and replaced with Mystic Spearhand, Warfarer, and Trickster (Neither of these three vocations are good IMO and it was not worth the loss of the Mystic Knight.) Gear is also sorted in unlabeled "tiers" where an entire tableset of gear sits at a certain threshold of stats, and the next area has the next table with higher stats, rather than having all-around functional gear sorted for different encounters. The story is the most vital weak point, however, and the focus of the game is no longer on preparing to fight the dragon, but instead to overthrow a false-arisen in a big political scheme. The dragon just randomly "appears" at the end of the game without any story buildup. You need to do the exact and easily missable steps DURING the credits scene to get access to the section of the game that takes place after the Dragon fight. You will instead be forced into New Game + until you end up like me and find out you missed out on the other half of the game because you talked to a guy once instead of twice before sitting in a chair.

SERVERS AT CAPACITY. PLEASE CRY AGAIN LATER.

thx for releasing an always-online game so that I have to wait my turn to play the 4 player co-op game I spent $40 for

currently on day 2 of trying to play. will update as the days go

It's early access and freshly released at the time of writing this, so this will be irrelevant in time, but this is the current state of the game.

This game feels like a passion project of many different games meshed together. You can feel how strong the foundation is regardless of how much of a buggy mess it is. It's not ACTUALLY an open world; it's instanced zones that you must "fast travel" to through a map system that looks and feels almost identical to Mount & Blade: Warband. The combat is ridiculously good and physics-based. The weapon swings, spells, and abilities all utilize the camera and SFX to give a REALLY satisfying weighty feel. For example, when you do a huge move with a two-handed sword, it feels like you're swinging the full weight of a truck into an enemy. This weight stays consistent throughout every ability in the game. There's so much content available that you'll want to dig your little grimy fingers into, but unfortunately, this is where the problems start to arise at the CURRENT state of the game.

With all the good, there is a reasonable amount of temporary bad. Tons of shopkeepers don't work. Much of the UI has clunky issues like not being able to move items around in your inventory, potions not properly healing or giving stamina when placed in the game's quick access menu, and not being able to store regular health potions in your dedicated potion bag. Many quests are unable to be finished as even when you complete all of the objectives, they don't trigger "completion." I mainly found the quest issue with quests related to open-world events like a bandit invasion at a certain hold or ALL guild quests I attempted. Many of the big scary zones you'll want to explore on the map like the Molten Craig, the big undead scar, the tomb of the betrayer, the dwarven city that was brought into civil war, and other big hostile zones to overcome have about 60% of the content there where you'll unknowingly dive full into them, and be unable to progress further about halfway because they aren't yet finished. I was unable to find any boss encounters even after having 10-20 trebuchets launching what felt like fiery meteors at me in an almost D-Day event, only to have the actual city I finally broke into have nothing inside. There's also a massive reduction in XP around level 8 or 9, prepare to not be able to dive into multiple skill trees easily without making a new character at this moment.

DO expect to:
Have a blast with the foundational content that's available
Almost die fighting goblins until you learn how to properly whoop gobby arse
Become a money mogul selling your expensive loot
Enjoy the engaging combat and go dirt-nasty smacking enemies into the stratosphere.

DON'T expect to:
Do rewarding dungeon crawls (Nothing is finished yet)
Fight boss encounters (They don't exist)
Build your town outside of the stronghold (there aren't enough ways to get resources)
Craft good weapons and armor (weaponsmithing isn't beyond copper tier)
Make use of your stockpile of gold (there aren't enough vendors and half of the ones that exist don't work)
Ride your donkey or boar from one end of the world to the other (everything is instanced)
Test out different skill trees (you don't have enough skill points)

I bought this game from a recommendation by a friend who swore it was good. I thought this was a meme, a porn game, a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ visual novel with ♥♥♥♥♥ and titties... It turns out this game was 11/10 with awesomely written characters, incredible dialogue, tons of drama, and peak comedy. I didn't expect a porn game to have me at the edge of my seat, laughing my ass off and getting heart palpitations over some of the romances and twists. I only played up to Season 2 as of the time writing this, and tbh this game deserves 100% positive reviews instead of just 97%.

BIG RECOMMEND.

Still can't pick between Jill and Sage, both are best girl

This game ruined mommy kinks for me

Bought this game 6 months ago because my friends convinced me to buy it while I was blacked out on ambien at 2am. Played it that night for 2 hours and hated it because my cognitive abilities were completely non-existent. Decided to play it for the first time since because of the settlement update trailer and realized this game is ****ing amazing. I've been no-lifing it for days. 10/10

Studio announced a new game. The new game is being worked on by a completely different team. Reviews on this game are unreliable due to this.

The game is clunky (early access as early access gets) but has a REALLY diverse amount of content, and it's good as hell. Gameplay loop is great, exploration is great, crafting is great. Combat needs polishing but it's enjoyable. Overuse of pets currently as of 6/28/2021 cause multiplayer games to get a bit buggy, but it's not a big deal. 8/10, spent 30 hours playing it in 48 hours after buying.

The game is a fun meme... for like 5-10 minutes tops. Rather spend money on like a butterfinger or coke zero or something though

Now now, let's get this straight. I've played Fable since it originally came out in 2004. (My first genuine game, ever, aside from black guy stealing bicycle in that one first mission.) The original Fable was fantastic, beautiful, full of dank memes of the early 2000's like farts and bullying children. The story is twisted, engulfing, and lit af fam. The Anniversary edition includes some really great texture updates but makes your face look like you're carrying a bow, a sword, and an extra chromosome. It sadly also includes a brand new Menu that is clunky and absolutely f**king retarded. If they hadn't changed the menu and made you look like Rosie O'Donald, this game would be a solid 11/10. These cons are easy to deal however with so Fable Anniversary still holds strong with a 9/10 in my heart. I play through the story at least once a year to get my Fable fix.

P.S. Fable 2 and 3 should've never been made.

11/11 Jack of Blades best antagonist

EDIT as of 9/23/2024: Every word is still accurate