Recent reviews by Garosath

Dawntrail (or Yawntrail, for a more accurate name) is the singular worst RPG story I've had the displeasure of experiencing in my entire lifetime, and the fact its from the same game that brought us my favorite RPG story is honestly so baffling. I can't express enough how bad the story and characters of this expansion is. If you haven't played it yet, nothing can prepare you for how utterly garbage it is, I genuinely recommend skipping each and every cutscene in the entire expansion, with the only exception possibly being the first visit to Shaaloni, as its actually somewhat decent likely due to it being the only part of the story where we are blessed with the absence of one of the most annoying and cringe characters in the known cosmos.

That character being Wuk Lamat, the main writer's self-insert OC Mary Sue. This budget-Naruto wannabe will force itself on screen anywhere they can, whether they belong or not. They will never stop spewing garbage about how all we need is peace and love, that to understand each other and being friends grants us the power of friendship, and how they will be the next Hokage- I mean, Dawnservant, believe it! If they gave you the option to assassinate Wuk Lamat, me and most others would do so in a heartbeat. It's only fair; after all, she's been desperately trying to kill the player character with cringe with every cutscene she's in.

I could go into great detail over how the other characters suck too, adressing the inconsistent behaviours, character assassinations and go into detail how much of the "plot" makes no sense and has various plotholes, but I won't, as it would be way shorter to note the positives of the story and characters in this game, than the negatives. Frankly, this expansion deserves to be repressed in the deepest confines of the collective subconscious, and the development team should honestly offer a public apology for delivering such a disrespectfully awful product at full price, and last but not least; fire every single person on the writing team for this expansion. You might think I'm being too harsh or extreme or that I'm exaggerating, but if you play this expansion you will come to realize that this isn't just a bad expansion; it's abhorrent, its a stain on the legacy of this game as a whole.

Some people claim this expansion gets good at the 30% mark, 50%, 70% or 90%. I've played through the entirety of it, and I can assure you it's all garbage, but I will give credit where credit is due; only the first 50% of this game is loaded with cringe, while the remaining 50% just being plain boring, tedious and bad (with the exception of the final trial, where they made sure to shoehorn in an extra large dose of cringe to make sure you hate this expansion and the character Wuk Lamat with a heartfelt passion).

At least the music is good. The dungeons are excellent. The open-area zones are pretty good.
Which is why this is the first time in this game's history where I recommend skipping cutscenes. If you skip every cutscene of this expansion, you will probably enjoy it a lot. I imagine this expansion being the equivalent to Borderlands 3 in that aspect.

So when all is said and done, if you're still buying this expansion, don't tell me I didn't warn you.

Despite this review being negative, there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from this game. I've had a ton of fun investing myself in this game; however, the multitude of unnecessary ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ designed to make an insufferable experience at times is too much for my sanity to handle. I honestly have no idea how some of the aspects of this game could even be suggested to be implemented, much less make it through internal- and beta testing, and especially through early access launch.

I think the player base is just too busy jacking off to the great aspects of the game that they won't complain about the times where the devs bring out the CBT tools, like a parent kicking their child in the loins then offering them free ice cream as compensation. It feels like whenever you're truly enjoying yourself in this game, the game devs purposefully make it their mission to ensure that you shouldn't be having fun. Despite this, there truly is great potential in the game, so I'll list them out along with the cons to make it more apparent what I love and despise about this game.

• Vast, open procedurally generated world incentivizing exploration, that truly immerses you.
  
  
• Beautiful aestethics at times. This surprised me because when I first saw gameplay of someone playing this on twitch, I first thought Fortnite made a single player mobile version.
  
  
• Great enemy and boss designs. The boss fights are also really impressive in the atmosphere they generate.
  
  
• Meaningful* progression - Except for the skill progression (which I will touch upon in the cons section), it feels satisfying to make overall progress

All of this within a 500mb game is honestly amazing.


Now onto why this review is negative.

• Insufferable balancing - A single hit of poison damage can nearly kill you at 60 HP with fully upgraded bronze armor set. I know that because it's what happened to me. This is a point all players unanimously agree on and is vocally complained about in the player base, yet it still somehow hasn't been patched through beta testing and steam launch( ? ).
  
  
• Loss of skill progression - Whoever at the dev team suggested this feature should honestly seek out immediate cranial surgery. Why? Why is this in the game? I've spent literal real-life hours attaining high levels of stats, but a single death would remove multiple levels in each and every single one. I reached level 45 running 2 days ago. Today I'm level 37. And if you die too far away to reach your tombstone, the "no skill drain" effect, which makes it so you don't lose more skill points on death, runs out. And good luck fighting off enemies naked with your bare fists and 25 HP, the very same enemies that killed you when you were fully upgraded armored with weapons yet still died.
  
  
• Wind - If you've played this game, I honestly shouldn't even need to write anything. You know the wind. ♥♥♥♥ the wind. I don't know how, but it's always, ALWAYS, unfavorable to you. I honestly don't know how, it doesn't make any sense, but it always is. It honestly makes the idea of jumping off the boat and swimming across the pacific ocean more appealing than waiting half an hour for the boat to drift to shore at the speed of an elderly amputated tortoise. It's not that bad however if you have a Nintendo Switch at your side to play on while simply waiting. I ended up playing Mario 3D World while waited in my boat for 2 real life hours for the wind to not be blowing directly away from where I wanted to sail. It's funny to me how Wind Waker, a game from 2002, a game from two decades ago, realized the issue with this and fixed it by giving the player the ability to change wind direction, yet this game doesn't.
  
  
• Hit detection* - Asterisk added because it's not that detrimental, but honestly sometimes trying to hit enemies on a 1% incline makes me one step closer to becoming a mental asylum patient.
  
  
• Stamina - Oh boy, here we go. Now don't get me wrong; the stamina feature itself isn't that bad. It's the single fact that it's shared with combat. I honestly think if we measured the amount of time in all of your fights where you were fighting vs walking in circles to regain stamina, it would be around 80/20, with 80 being walking. To fix this; either make a separate stamina bar for combat, have combat not consume stamina or have only blocking not contain stamina.
  
  
• Transport of minerals - Now this is the only con I personally think of as subjective, so you're free to disagree on this one. But I feel that having minerals not being able to be teleported is stupid. People say it's to incentivise the use of boats, but considering my statement about the wind, as well as it honestly just being annoying, it feels implemented purely to artificially extend play time.
  Now, there is a way to bypass this but I'm not gonna write it here in case the devs are lurking. I wouldn't mind telling but I honestly feel no shame cheesing this considering the amount of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ they should patch out first.
  
  
• Game crashes - Only a moderate amount, but one time my game kept crasing 3 times in a row. And not immediately after one another; it of course had to wait between 10-20 minutes each time to crash. I mined the same copper deposit 4 times because of this. On the 4th attempt I simply started manually logging in and out while mining to initiate save, so I would lose less progression.
  
  
• Boss awards - I honestly don't think I've felt this underwhelmed defeating a boss in any video game I've played during my entire life, and that's not hyperbole. Although to be fair, I only beat 2 until I decided "♥♥♥♥ this game" and quit. But the first boss drops you antler bones. Holy heck, am I right? But wait, you can also place his trophy and get; temporary reduced sprint/jump stamina, wooow(for some reason swimming isn't included( why? ). But wait, there's more! If you defeat the 2nd boss, you get the ability to; ...... chop down wood slightly faster. For a limited time. You also can only have a single boss "ability" equipped at the same time (despite them being nearly useless???).
  I just find it incredibly amusing how in a similar game like Breath of The Wild, you get to have 4 boss-granted incredible abilities, all in which feel deeply satisfying to achieve and use, and adds to the core gameplay experience, as well as having access to them all at the same time. But in this game, apparently sprinting longer and chopping down wood faster at the same time is too much to ask for, and even has longer cooldowns.

There's way more I could bring up but I'm tired of ranting. The preceding moments of me writing this review, as well as the motivation to write it, was due to me practically getting soft-locked due to dying in a swamp. For some reason, the enemies don't despawn (even though the wiki apparently says they should??) and camp my body, and I've tried running in and grabbing my loot to no avail, so I'm done. I might return to this game if I have a day I feel particularly masochristic, or the devs decide to not be literal sadist trolls in their game mechanic implementations, but until then I'm prioritizing my mental health.

If they're willing to fix some of these issues then I'm happy to change this review to a positive one. But seeing as this will probably be lost in the cesspool of positive reviews that all seemingly dismiss these issues, they probably won't be.

Bugs. Bugs bugs bugs bugs everywhere. And I'm not talking about the annoying spiders in-game, I'm talking technical bugs. You will encounter AT LEAST one every game. And not miniscule bugs; game breaking bugs. I've played the game for a single day. Here's a list of the bugs I've encountered so far with my friends:
Character randomly getting stuck in T-pose. Numerous times
Character stuck in specific spot behind tree on map
Character stuck in rescue door
Game booting you out for non-existent update
Host with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ internet results in practical lag-switch, and the host is always the killer
Bug that doesn't let you craft
Character stuck in numerous other spots
Game crashing with message "Fatal Error"
Having to click to search games numerous times due to consistent "No Session Found" error appearing immedietly after I click to search
And these are just the ones I can name from the top of my head, from a single day of play time. I can confidently claim that this game went through zero bug testing

Having played both the alpha and the beta now, I would not fully recommend this game in it's current state. It's still a "decent" game, but it seems to have taken the wrong path during development. The sense of progression in this game is lacking; you progress through a "zone" for about 1-3 hours, then when you get the artifact(s), you start the game all over again in a different zone. This could be fine if there was a meaningful goal in sight, but the problem is: there isn't. The overall progression in this game is simply collecting artifacts. Doesn't sound too bad right? Well, the artifacts in this game are, simply put, useless. They don't feel meaningful to get, and you don't feel any difference in gameplay after obtaining them, at least me and my friends didn't. All they do is slightly boost the most meaningless specs of your character, like diving speed and lamp light radius(yes I'm serious). This seriously demotivates players from playing when there's simply no reward.

To summarize the gameplay: Spawn in, get one-shot by nearly all enemies, grind low-level mobs for a random chance for item drop, grind enough to get items to take on the dungeon, then begin all over again in a different zone from scratch. This game would've greatly benefited from almost any other alternate implementation of progression, for example a leveling system. The map also has no purpose being endless, it feels it actually detracts from the experience as all the quests are repetitive from a pool of 4-5 different quests that you do over-and-over again endlessly in every different zone you encounter. The game also used to have a skill system during the alpha, but it has for some reason disappeared from the beta; which is a shame, considering the progression could've greatly benefited from it.

I also forgot to add the technical difficulties this game has. Me and every single friend of mine has and is experiencing issues with the game. Some experience it mildly, some extremely, while I experience it moderately. Me and a friend of mine experiences immense slowdown of his entire computer when starting up the game. For me this often later causes Cube World to shut down itself, and causes my discord to infinitely restart and my browsers to run out of memory so I get disconnected from the websites I have open. This is happening after having closed the game for hours, so the game still somehow takes up what I presume is all the RAM in my computer while not even being open. Another friend of mine gets his entire computer shut down from running this game.

As I'm writing this review, the game is still in beta, moments away from launch, so the content of this review may not apply to the final product. But considering the beta only lasted for approximately a week or so, I don't really see much room for change except implementations of builds that were from the Alpha. If the issues in my review get dealt with in the final product or in a patch, I'd be willing to recommend this game. As the game stands now, I only see it as wasted potential, which can still be saved.


Also, mages are OP af.