Recent reviews by HellDuke

I would say yes for the story. However the gameplay mechanics, particularly melee combat and movement (climbing to be specific) will have you pulling hairs out at times. Melee combat is most certainly the absolute weakest mechanic of the game, to the point where I would say the game would have been stronger if they didn't even give you an option to fight in melee. And they added an entire challenge line focused around melee combat, some of the fights will quickly reveal just how poorly designed the mechanic is. The performance is also certainly nothing to write home about, it just adds to the feeling where frame gen and DLSS are becomming a crutch that you must have or the game won't run all that well and this seems to leverage gen3 of the Nvidia variants.

I'd say get it for the story, ignore the challenges, they don't give you anything of value and only serve to reveal how frustrating some of the mechanics can be.

If you think this is just more of the same then you need to look again. This game managed to rip out nearly all mechanics from the first game, do something completely different and make you think "Yep, this is definetely Frostpunk".

Gone is the building to building custruction of a small town, now you are plonking down entire districts which have a minimum size to them. Instead of being in charge of a handful of people they are in the hundreds and thousands. You are basically moving from micro management to macro management.

This is also the only city builder series I am aware of that manages to pull off a story mode while being a city builder. The game has factions and voting on policy by said factions. You can negotiate to get the factions to vote for your ideas (or against ones you allowed a faction to pick) by making promises. I started this like probably many would: oh we will keep it balanced, find compromise and see how democracy goes, only to end up basically being a despot that forced his will to make sure everyone is alive and isn't killing each other. Not sure I've seen another game do that...

There are some minor gripes as they make the UI unintuitive, such as heat demand. It's practically a resource like any other, you have to meet the demand. Unmet demand is a negative value. The thing is, when you try to research something you might see a sentance state: -20 Heat demand in red. What does that make you think? Will it satisfy some of the demand or will it increase our demand? If it's the latter congratulations, if it's the former then you, like several others I know, have read it wrong. It doesn't help that heat supply is more or less a function of how much fuel you have, so if you have no stockpile and unmet fuel demand it's just straight unmenet heat demand, which often makes you feel that both values represent the same thing. All in all minor gripes, the game is well designed and polished.

Update: still no changes from them. Expect to get shafted at any turn, they do not have a good track record of either being consumer friendly or keeping promises. If either of them are important, stay away.

Very solid and fun game even from the outset. However it quickly becomes apparent that 2 other friends is a mandatory requirement to play this game. The first match was fun but honestly in every other match both teammates seemed like people that would struggle not to get lost if they were placed at one end of a corridor and told to go to the other end. There is nothing you can do on your own to pull through and there does not seem to be any skill system to try and weed people out since I saw plenty of oponents that clearly knew what they were doing on an individual level

I will be honest, the last half was more of a "Might as well get to the end at least". Some of my gripes with the game may be good in the eyes of another. I was going to list the bad and the good, but honestly I saw it was just devolving into listing tons of bad stuff so I will truncate.

The side stories are fun, core loop is reasonable. Consider this a sandbox with some quests that are interesting. The main mission is nothing more than a vehicle for NG+, it's neither interesting, engaging nor has any big moments. I have not done the free-star collective missions, but the UC 2 quest lines were fun. House of Varun were there as a mention, but it felt like they didn't really serve any purpose. You do not interact with them outside of a few enemies and once in an embassy and yet the lore seems to make a big deal out of them.

The loot has a garbage item class but they fail to tell you that all loot is garbage. No, seriously for the vast majority of the main playthrough there was no need to upgrade a single piece of kit. I got a helmet ~20 hours in that was the best until the end, then I kept the armour and booster from the UC Terrormorph questline once I got that (first questline I finished). There really was nothing even remotely good comparitavely speaking. Similar with the guns, did a few upgrades, kept a few around as novelty weapons but pretty much 90% of what I found was not even worth picking up much less using. Why? Well even to sell you will be getting at best what, 6k for an item? Takes up quite a bit of space yet I noticed that if you want to actually engage in the one money sink that matters - ship building, you are easily spending 250k in one go. So yeah, that's over 40 of those rare weapons you come across once every now and then. Also money is not really that big of an issue unless you want to build up a sizeable fleet of ships of which you will still only use 1 because there is never any reason to swap.

The other one I will point to is the menus... They are just clunky and make no sense. Why a single tab press takes up one level when a single button press gets you to it? You are on a map and press M? Well, too bad, now you have to hold TAB or press it 3 times (with transition animations in between) to get out. Why not just let us press ESC and get out straight away? Why on my ship I can press I, then Q to see the ship inventory and trasnfer, but when I am on the planet I must follow the strict steps of pressing TAB, going to ship view, then pressing F for cargo and only then I can check ship cargo or press Q to start transfer (if in range)? Similar story for scanning planets. Once you get the skill to scan any moon of a planet it falls apart. You must zoom in to scan. Ok... You can hover over any planet within the map view if in FOV and get the prompt to scan (can even do it on accident since hovering over the menu actually can focus the other planet/moon). Which is fine. Until you realize that that means the game will zoom out of the planet (animation), then zoom into the other planet (another animation) and then scan. Ok... You might think that's the only way this could work. Well, why instead of pressing scan, can I just click on the planet and it will go straight to it without zooming out and back in?

Just loads of little things like this that make it hard to recommend. Fun for a bit then gets repetative. Not even sure if there is enough to pull me in for a NG+ run even, just too bland. Maybe mods will fix along the way (also telling that there are mandatory mods on day 1, like the inventory screen mod)

Definetely a good story however with the technical state as is I would not recommend it. While fine overal the frustrating moments should not be there. Tl;Dr I would recommend it on sale or once the game is fixed (if it ever is, seems like quite a lot of time has passed with not enough being done)

Frame drops is just a tip of the iceberg, but there are places you can fall through the map and get semi stuck forcing you to try and die or restart from last save.

As someone who is typically fine with these types of games I started this off on Grand Master difficulty, which made some issues quite glaring as there are many scenarios where you will be locked into an outcome that is an instant death (basically you have a few options to defend but one option leads to a one shot kill from one enemy and taking a different route leads to one shot death to another enemy). So in short some encounters are made very well (most boss battles are fine) while others seem to have been thrown together with little thought as to how things will either bug out or how much luck reliance the fights are

Hard to recommend at this stage. Should be fne for 40-50 hours, however by that point it's going to start feeling repetitive (maybe even sooner),


There is none. Not really. Each region has it's own problem. For example at the starting area you have a refugee crisis. One off to the side has 2 warring lords one of which is some kind of religious fanatic etc. You do not really get engaged in the events or the people. It just sort of happens. You either spend resources to solve an issue or you bonk one of the arguing parties on the head and move on.


There are essentially 3 types: Knowledge, Path and Character. There is nothing wrong with the first 2, but the character progression is a bit weird.

Your character classes are per-determined once you find them. They can be Swordmaster, Warrior, Brute, Spearman, Ranger or Archer. This class will determine what perks they can pick and what weapon they can use. Swordmasters use swords, warriors use axes, brutes use blunts, archers obviously use bows and rangers use daggers. Whether it's a 2 handed or 1 handed weapon it still is restricted to the same class, so a one handed axe is only for warriors just like a 2 handed axe. If you have a 1 handed weapon you can take an offhand weapon which are not class restricted, such as shield, torch, throwing dagger, throwing axe or throwing sickle. Your weapon will decide what attack skill you use.

As they level up you gain an aptitude point. You use this to level up one of the stats: strength, dexterity, constitution, willpower, critical chance or movement. You are not free to do whatever you want though, Most of the time you get 3 options with one letting you get 2 points while others are 1 point. So even if you wanted to increase the strength of your brute, you might have been given the options of dexterity, willpower and movement and there is nothing you can do about it. The only thing you can do is spend 10 influence (an unlock) to make one of the options to add 1 point to become a 2 point increase instead.

The other thing you get is a perk, you get these at levels 2, 3, 5, 8, 10 and 12. These can be either passive abilities or actual skills. Your main attack skill is determined by the weapon you use. This allows for some build variety but you will quickly notice that some perks are simply never worth it and for each class there is a few obvious things to pick. The problem is that once you hit level 6 it becomes very very slow.


Here I have one gripe. You can craft weapons and armor with your blacksmith. The thing is, that you will always want to use crafted armor but almost never use crafted weapons. That's because crafted armor will always have better stats than armor found in the world. The ones you find may have things like increased movement, crit etc. but crafted armor has slots (up to 3) which you can use to add the same things with add ons you craft as well.

Crafted weapons, however, are only good for their stats. First of all one thing to know — skills do damage based on the sill. So for example a swords skills will use the strength stat for damage. Your sword will not have a damage range itself, instead it will have a stat boost, let's say +10 Strength. Crafted weapons will mostly have a much better stat boost. However they will always have the exact same skill. So while you may find a 2 handed sword that does single target attacks and increases damage reduction on each attack in the world, every single 2 handed sword you craft will only add strength and do a simple AOE attack in an arc. That's it.

Other than that you will cook food to get more food points rather than the raw materials. However while you can find mushrooms, fish and meat in the world, for most recipes you will need salt and vegetables which you can only buy (you can earn salt passively if you have an item for it). The vegetables are annoying though, because certain regions sell certain things. So you may end up in a situation where you can't craft any of the better foods because there is no way for you to get the missing ingredients without spending a load of time traveling to the other region and back unless you get lucky with a traveling merchant.


There is a lot wanting there. For one the party list and inventory list make little sense. They are locked to the top left and bottom right corners respectively and you cannot move them. Furthermore they are basically grid based icons, think like the inventory system in Diablo only that the grid is not a limited size and expands (you can't have gaps in the party list)

The problem is that there is no benefit from that. In the part list moving people around has no benefit. Once you open a character sheet you can press the arrow keys to flip between them (the game never tells or shows you that) and the order determine which one is next, but that's it. There is no formation or benefit in combat.

The inventory is same story. The grid just expands as you add items, you only worry about weight. Instead they could have done both with a simple table and show some stats instead. So for example you could see the level and class of a party member without hovering over them or in the inventory you could see the value of an item, an item weight and the stack weight. Instead you must hover over items for this info. Furthermore the weight is shown as per item, but when you sort by weight it sorts by stack weight.. Again, a simple table format would solve this.

Finally in the combat. Only the enemy has set turns. You pick which of your companions goes next. The problem is that there is no clear indication which ones have moved and which ones have not. It's fine at first, but once your party has 20 units, most of which look more or less the same you will end up doing a lot of clicking through your units to figure out which one has not moved if you accidentally clicked off the one suggested to check on something.

Tl;Dr — needs work, good for some brainless downtime, but not something I feel like returning to from this point until some serious UX and balance and changes are done.

A good game overall, not too many bugs, the polish is definetely notable in the current landscape of releases. The difficulty seems to be a bit on the worse end, I started off with normal expecting not to be challenged much but needing to at least pay attention. Turns out that's what the hard difficulty is for. The game is very easy.

In terms of story, there are a few minor gripes with it, but it does the job of railing you from point A to point B quite well and is somewhat interesting. The minor gripes are that your MC was barely learning magic and yet somehow is absolutely proficient in everything he tries his hand at. No kidding, if he had to go up against Voldemort he'd probably trounce him as if the most powerfull dark lord was starting his first year in Hogwarts.

Other minor nuisances with the story are with the side quests. Everyone is worried how dangerous various dark wizards are and someone should take care of it, but goodness no, not you, a student. The student proceeds to roll into an entire camp of poachers and decimates them, then goes back "oh yeah, I bet that very dangerous leader of the poachers".

Combat seems fine, though I would rather have more spells per spell set and fewer spell sets as sometimes it gets finnicky switching between them all.

Tl;Dr in hindsight I'd say I would have rather not bought this game. It crashes a lot and has a lot of problems.

EDIT: to this day they have not fixed the crashing issues. Seriously, do not buy and I would say best stay away from the next COD as well, I do not feel like COD can be trusted to run properly at this stage

First the ugly — the game crashes, regularly. On Steam it is possibly even worse as it seems that when playing sometimes the connection to steam might get interrupted for a second. That is enough to boot you from the game even if there is no problems with your internet connection and you can connect to the match. Other bugs include a weird lighting issue where lightsources are all visible in the campaign through walls and terrain. The only fix is to verify integrity of game cache, then you MUST restart the mission, you cannot load it up from where you are. If you continue the mission after the shader optimization the bug remains.

There are some serious QOL problems, some of which are there with us since MW2019. For one the game will at times require a restart for an update. This is not "Hey, your game is out of date, please restart to update". No, update the game via steam, then start it, then it will tell you to restart for an update and restart.

Similar to the same problem — the only way to start the campaign is to start the game (including all the fun mentioned with updates) and then you can go find the Call of Duty game mode (more on that later) then go all the way to the bottom, find the campaign... And then it restarts the game to start the single player game. There is no way to skip this.

All of the previous problems are compounded by the fact that the UI is absolutely atrocious. You are always greeted by a message of the day, which you don't care about. There is no option to never show it again. Then to get to the game modes you need to scroll down and if you don't want to play multiplayer on a single map or DMZ/Warzone you have to scroll even further down. The UI at this stage is inexcusable and is enough to warrant me to be sure I won't be buying more Call of Duty games and will be recommending to all friends to do the same until they prove they can do better.

Other than that the same old call of duty, nothing spectacular in the campaign, you will be playing a small handfull of maps over and over.

EDIT: seems the main issue, regular crashing either has been fixed or it's something that only happens in the first half of the game with regularity.

So far the gameplay is definetely fun. The story is meh, maybe not used to Spider-Man as much but very convoluted "Oh, I will just whip up get X in a second and this will solve all super complex problems that scientists could not for years"

The main issue I have noticed is the crashing. At first it was fine, however after some main story missions (very minor spoiler, not really much in terms of story) at the point where peter gets evicted from his apartment I got the first crash (maybe 5 hours in). After that point I noted crashes every couple of hours or so (perhaps because I started progressing the main mission, as up to that point I did pretty much side activity). Otherwise you can get consequetive crashes when restarting or starting challenges. At first I thought it would be a minor nuisance to crash every few hours or so, but it's not uncommon for the game to fail several times in an hour