Recent reviews by DarkfireX34

TL;DR: This game starts off slower than slow, and can really turn away players coming from faster JRPGs (like the Cold Steel games). But stick with it, because the pay off in SC is more than worth it.

Trails in the Sky FC is one of those games that really pushes the players ability to delay gratification. The first 10 hours of this game had me constantly questioning whether or not to uninstall it. The combat was slower than a paralyzed snail. The story was mildly interesting but not paticularly gripping. By the time the first two chapters had gone by I had very little investment in just about anything.

However, by chapter 2 (The Ruan arc), the story had started to pick up a little bit. It was still slow, but you were beginning to see the formation of a larger picture. Once you start to get a feel for the combat (and learn that arts are way better than crafts) it feels less like you're headbutting a brick wall.

By the last chapter you finally feel the work paying off. Things are heating up in the story, the arts you get actually feel satifying, you actually have money to spend on consumables, and characters begin to come into their own. Turns out Earth wall is sort of overpowered! The game finally feels like you have the tools to take down your enemies effectively and the story motivation to want to do it.

Then the game ends, and it becomes very apparent that this entire game was actually the set-up to something much larger. Trust me, the payoff is worth it.

5 / 10 Combat
8 / 10 Story
8 / 10 Music

It's a good game, but a bad remaster. This is more or less the same game we should have gotton when DS1 was ported years ago. Dark Souls 1 is one of my all time favourite games, and this is definitely the ideal version to play, but it really isn't worth $20.

9/10 base game
3/10 remaster

If you already own DS1 and you aren't a serious Souls-game fetishist, you don't need this game.

TL;DR: Game was great concept but rough around the edges. Developer was slow to fix problems, made money, got complacent, and the game is now infested with Chinese hackers.

8/10 at launch, 3/10 in current state.


I bought it 3-4 months after launch. It was well worth the $30 dollars I spent for the amount of enjoyment I got out of it.

If I had purchased the game 2 months ago I could not say the same.

The game is early-access and so there's a lot of major issues including optimization and glitches which can be discarded as typical early-access phenomena. That said, major issues with the game's engine have been unresolved since launch, obvious client-side exploits have existed without any acknowledgement from the developers, and the game world is laughably strung together.

This game is not competitive. The sheer fact that ANY tournament was held is an insult to the consumer. The game itself does not lend itself to any sort of esport. One of the biggest elements in PUBG is luck. The drops you find, the circle's positioning on you, vehicle spawns, and more are all almost entirely out of the hands of the player. WHICH IS FINE. But the only reason it's fine is because PUBG is a GAME. It is not an esport, and should NEVER be viewed as one.
Furthermore, the state of the game is absolutely pathetic for any sort of competitive environment. Grass doesn't render in after a short while, which means you can be camoflaged on your screen and completely in the open on another player's. Objects render in differently depending on distance, so that tree you're hiding behind could be slightly to the left on someone else's screen. Water is an impenetratable shield against bullets (watch the ending circles of the Gamescom Invitational to see why this is an issue.) The vehicle physics are an actual meme. Literially, they are the running joke of PUBG.

Now for the client-side issues. From the beginning of the game it was obvious that too much of PUBG was in the hands of the client and not the server. If your teammate had poor ping he would run faster than you, EVEN WHEN HE SHOULD BE SLOWER. Now to be fair, this is an issue that can and should be overlooked in the context of an early access game. However, these issues were completely overlooked in the development schedule. Instead of addressing the issue that would no doubt lead to major hacking problems, the developers ignored it, issued slap-on-the-wrist punishments to a handful of .ini tweakers, and proceeded to focus development elsewhere. When we needed engine work regarding anti-cheat we got a grenade rework that still doesn't work properly. This led to the massive hacker infestation currently plaguing the game. Needless to say the ease at which the game can be hacked is hilariously sad. Speedhackers and aimbots run amok in at least half the games played. Worse yet, hackers can shoot through terrain from miles off. You can be killed inside a house by a person sitting in a field 3 miles out from you.

One of the saddest points in this game however has to be watching the developer grow complacent. The amount of small QoL updates and new guns/weapons has dropped from bi-weekly to bi-monthly. More time has been spent by the lead dev tweeting at streamers than discussing development progress on the game. It's very obvious at this point that PUBG has made it's money and it's done. It'll continue to update of course, but it is not eager to make itself into a better game anymore. The game that was seemingly immune to the early access curse has fallen to it.

I could go on about the state of the game, but all you need to know is don't buy. Wait. Maybe when the developers get organized and commit themselves to making their game legitimately great will it be worth the buy. Right now the game is so overun by hackers that it's lost the only element that made it playable; fun.

Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne had a baby. Very fast paced like Bloodborne, while retaining some traits of the original Dark Souls 1.


Graphics 9/10: Looks good without being ridiculously intensive

Bosses 7/10: they're either a gimmicky waste of time or some of the best fights in the franchise, no inbetween.

PVE: 9/10: Besides a few fringe cases, the generic PVE is great. No ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemy counts like DS2.

PVP 7/10: Better than DS1, significantly better than Bloodborne, but worse than DS2. Weird asf, but no soul memory at least

Replayability: 6/10: Game has a NG+ setting, but there isn't much different. Feels like regression compared to DS2 NG+

As for the DLCs; Ashe of Ariandel is not worth $15. It has 2 boss fights, with 1 of them being more of a joke than a boss. Very shallow on it's own, but it leads directly into The Ringed City. The Ringed City could easily be the best Souls DLC ever. Intoduces 4 bosses, 3 of which easily enter the top 10 bosses of the entire game. Makes up for the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that was AoA on release.

Overall: 8/10, 9/10 with the DLCs.

Changes up the formula of the Dark Souls series in a few minor ways, with a lot of clear influence from Bloodborne. Probably the easiest Dark Souls game from a gameplay standpoint, but fails as a series introduction as the plot motivation isn't there unless you've played DS1. Story all but forgets DS2 exists. Excellent game by all measures, but not without flaws.

It's straight up Age of Empires 2 with a Star Wars reskin. Handful of differences, but the core gameplay is identical. The game was created before Revenge of the Sith, so you can only play factions from 5 movies.

There are only a few reasons to buy it over Age of Empires 2.
1. You're a Star Wars fanatic.
2. You're nostalgic for a game of your childhood
3. You already own AoE2 and you want a weird twist on it.

If none of those reasons appeal to you, buy AoE2 instead. It's literially the same game but more polished. Galactic Battlegrounds is by no means a bad game, it's actually quite enjoyable, but it is literially a Star Wars reskin of AoE2.

6/10, well worth the cost, but it's an illogical buy when AoE2 HD costs about the same for a better variation of the same game.

The best CoD game in recent memory. That's not saying much though.

Just the name "Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition" should clue you into exactly what the series is about. It's brutal but fair difficulty has earned it a large fanbase as well as a sequel and 'soul-successor'. That said, Dark Souls is comprised of many elements, including it's rich story with deep embedded lore and popular online PVP community. Starting with just the story, Dark Souls begins with a cutscene that sets the entire scene for the creation of the Dark Souls universe. It tells of great figures such as Gwyn, Gravelord Nito, the Witch of Izalith, and Seath the Scaleless. The entire first half of the game forgets these characters. They are part of a fading history, and everything they did seems so distant. Then the mid-game boss hits. After a challenging fight in the old city of the gods, you step up to receive your reward for coming so far... only to realise the journey has only just begun. As the Chosen Undead you are now tasked to find and exterminate the great figures of old for their Lord Souls. Every massive figure you saw in the beginning cutscene is out there hiding, waiting for you to try and slay them. It's this task that sets the story of Dark Souls apart as such a lore rich story. There was an entire story already written, and you have forced your way into it. You are literally a living legend, making history with every step. The path the world takes is up to you, but only if you succeed in seeing it through to the end.

Secondly, the multiplayer aspect of this game is very expansive, with an innovative way of co-op and PVP not seen in other games today. At any time you can have your world invaded by another player. If the brutal PvE didn't have your back to the wall, a living breathing person coming at you with the sole intent to kill sure will. Of course it's not entirely 1-sided. An invader cannot heal themself, and fending off invaders grants you a humanity point as well as all the souls in their possesion. In addition to the PVP aspect though is a Co-op PvE aspect. In the majority of the games areas, another player can place down a sign that other players may see in their world, allowing the player to summon an ally to assist in clearing an area or fighting a boss. This way, those who have a great deal of difficulty with bosses may get the assistance of others in similar positions.

Thirdly, I'd like to talk about the flaws this game has. While the game itself is excellent it suffers from the usual issues of console porting. The FPS is capped at 30 by default, but some light modding can remove that cap. That said, there are still some glitches that have not been entirely ironed out. Sometimes the player can be stuck sitting a bonfire unable to open a menu. The only option then is to restart the game manually. This leads into another problem. If two players wish to play with eachother specifically, there is little way to connect directly to eachother. I've once sat down for a good hour waiting for my friend's summon sign so we could do a boss together, only for it to never appear. Additionally, due to the node acquiring method the game uses to link online players, if one player is accidentally glitched into the infinite bonfire, they lose their link and may have to wait several more minutes to connect again. And that's just the problems with the software itself. The game has a few balance issues as well. While several batches of balancing patches have fixed the more 'broken' aspects of online PVP, there is still room for ridiculous events. Connection lagg between players is often more than enough to pose a dangerous threat to the person being invaded in a PVP scenario. A player could be traversing through the game's story only to be present a PVP battle he has no reasonable means of defending against. "Laggstabing" is extremely common as a player will often get forced into the position of being backstabbed due to rubberbanding enemy players. Additionally, due to the online matchmaking being based off 'soul level' (the amount of stats a character has leveled up through spending ingame currency), veteran players can traverse the game while staying at a low soul level, only to go back and prey upon newer players using end game equipment and abilities. I was actually once stuck with a mushroom on my head due to such an invasion, and the only way to get rid of it required several hours more of progression.

In conclusion, the game Dark Souls has a very rich and refreshing story, and an extremely innovative multiplayer aspect. There is, of course, several flaws with the games, but none enough to draw away from the absolute beauty of it. Personally, if you are playing the game for the first time, you may wish to look into the program DSfix to fix some of the issues with the console port.

9/10