Recent reviews by MaximumBunny

TLDR - Disappointing. Not really any woke vibes but basic story, bland characters, plenty of game breaking issues, graphics are unimpressive, tedious world exploration, poor combat, and extremely novice-minded game design and programming choices (examples below).

I don't really take time to try new games but this one seemed interesting so I gave it a shot. I thought it would have the fun factor typical of these types of games.

However, it does have game-breaking bugs such as a part where you knock down a tree to use as a bridge with Lucian, except the tree doesn't trigger the game action to make the path crossable (bad programming) so the story can't be continued. It's a linear game so whenever a path breaks it's over. There are no alternative routes here.

Story
The story from before the game broke was about ancient dimensional beings in history along with the villain trying to end their world's form of Samsara (life and death cycle of reincarnation in Hinduism) that is also somehow ending their version of the world to make the next one.

There have been no real motives provided to justify the protagonist going on a mystical murder spree of these individuals, the soldiers are just villains from the get-go. As far as I can tell you're playing as the villain who keeps on separating the souls of mortals from their bodies and having their comrades kill each other just because everyone in this world (including you) are mean and violent.

There isn't really any "wokeness"/DEI. The characters are fairly one-dimensional and most of the enemies look like Indian male and female soldier models with British voices. Up to the point I reached, the only white males I've seen appear are the main villain (Victor or Vincent) and an American (Lucian).

Bugs & Issues
The majority of the issues with the game are just from bad programming and novice-level game design principles with apparently no QA team.

Examples:
-Talk scenes turn head in wrong direction. The tutorial intended you to be on the left, the NPC can't track you on the right.
-When walking there are conversations. These cutoff abruptly if you reach a specific new event spot.
-Follower often gets stuck, and of course they never help you.
-Followers can be standing but are not seen by enemies.
-Enemies can be impacted by storm effects when no storm present, making them vulnerable to attack (error is no storm in that area).
-Cutscenes can have a subtitle of a sentence that appears in the next conversation
-There are many women soldier voices when most areas are mainly men. Some all-men areas have women voices.
-Doors get magically locked until enemies defeated, limiting stealth options
-NPCs are sometimes facing a direction where they're talking to no one
-Enemy AI patterns can get stuck, so their cross-routes get messed up and you have to work around it

That is just some of what I noticed from 2 hours in just trying to setup and enjoy the game, and what I could reasonably fit into a review.

The developers themselves are a subsidiary of Bandai-Namco which is why they had high production for this game as their first project. They are not indie devs and the team consisted of some established industry experts, so I don't see how any of these problems got by them.

Graphics and Immersion
The graphics and scenery are dull. You don't feel like you're in India because of how boxed and unalive everything is. It's not artistic in any way, it's just untextured and bland. NPCs have a few repeating animations in town and there is no sense of oppression or interactions. Only Haroona is really targeted by the "bad guys" and they're all just mean for no reason other than plot purposes (their conversations imply that they want money and power even though the villain states early on that it's not about power).

Gameplay
Most of the gameplay is spent pushing you forward through game design elements like walkways, climbing, and finding the next path/door forward which is more annoying than anything. Then the combat is pretty bad, there's no flow to it and no real rewards or penalties to keep it engaging. They wanted something like Batman and Dishonored with the limitations of Assassin's Creed but nothing is really responsive or fun. You learn that bad guys really like to hang around conveniently placed explosive tanks and other hazards.

They also took other elements from Arkham games where they wanted you to use direction buttons to perform specific things like see-through vision and stealthing (Batman's smoke, but this time a cloaking spell).

You have to unlock the fun gameplay elements (combat/specials) with skill points that you can miss, requiring you to constantly keep an eye out for the glowing orbs. And not all basic abilities are unlocked during the initial tutorial even though Haroona is supposed to have them at that point (e.g. the shield).

Conclusion
In the end I'm mostly just disappointed. I'm sure they may try to at least fix some bugs, but even if it was completely bug-free the game design choices (gameplay, levels, animations) are not fun. They meet the company's checkboxes (e.g. "Make this wooden platform here to cross over") but they do so just for the purpose of making the player stay on a level longer and not to enhance the game or that area. The same goes for the combat, the action is not any fun and is a slower-paced mishmash of things everyone has seen before. They were unable to capture the essence of the trailers.

They tried to throw too many different elements into the mix and missed out on the opportunity to craft their own identity. I think of all of the disappointments here, that one is the biggest of them all. The end result is that it will probably make for a better movie or show than what they attempted as a game.

Enshrouded is a Souls-lite, Valheim-lite, and even a Fable-lite. It doesn't do anything better than the inspirational sources, but the combination of them is highly effective.

It has a relatively forgiving respawn system that lets you revive at the nearest fire checkpoint or base and you only retain item durability loss + dropped resource loot. Equipment and food stay in your inventory. There is building, though everything is levels-based and you have to beat certain bosses or complete quests to unlock things. The game design seems very pulled from Fable to me, the exaggerated and colorfully charming graphical style. You don't eat or build to survive, you do so for benefits boosts.

Some of its real limitations are a lack of enemy and combat variety as well as the need to cheese enemies because their balance is off. Too much poise and damage on berserkers and shielded enemies, sicklescythe bosses have inescapable weapon tracing if you don't glide away, and some areas are designed to cheese you like the spider slides that sap all stamina + damage and have trap floors that instantly kill you from fall damage. Your ability to parry is also based off of the server/network quality, so it's essentially useless outside of single-player with their current server system which makes melee fighting enemies a chore if you don't build to tank damage or kite them.

Even in its current state though it's still better than most games and with active development it could get up there with the best of them. Still missing are:

1) Timed events
2) Hidden/Special enemies and bosses
3) Procedural endgame quests
4) Mini-games
5) World events
6) New Game Plus (the game would benefit from an ending and alternate storyline twists)
7) and more

I didn't touch on the bugs with the main one being how easily you can clip into objects and get stuck inside of them. I feel the real issues are just going to be figuring out what their overall vision for the completed game will be and how they will secure that long-term replayability. They already have a transparent road map and hopefully they'll be able to accomplish more on top of those updates.

Mildly fun arcadey style gameplay. They likely have 100 season passes planned though and it's basically a game with 0 heart. The devs/publishers have a roadmap that they won't deviate from, so don't expect it to be anything more than what it already is.

Wait until it's $4.99 and ignore any DLC unless it's included.

Here lies AC, the one that killed the series.

I tried to go through it before Ubisoft removes access to the content as I enjoyed its predecessors, but this game is a technical mess, the gameplay is awful, and the story is just as bad. I'm not negatively reviewing it because "uBiSoFt BaD HURR DURR", I'm negatively reviewing it because this game is genuinely terrible.

In what I've experienced, Ubisoft is doing the world a favor by removing it. If you really need to see the story then you can barf at the cutscenes on Youtube. I advise that you don't waste your time installing this dung heap if you enjoyed any previous or later games.

Crowbar man on morphine beats down squads of marines and wards off an alien invasion.

*Halo intro music*

If it's playing in your head right now then you win at life.

4 Hours in and I can already tell that while the story continues to be great, that the game itself is a downgrade from the original in almost every other meaningful way.

Graphics - Somehow worse. Lots of reused assets and bad designs. It's still buggy and standing in some locations for too long can cause the game to simply crash.

Gameplay - Janky controls, much less fluid than the original. The levels used to be designed intelligently like HITMAN where you had choices and they mattered. Not here. The people in the world are props that only react to combat. They don't care if you steal from their cash registers right in front of them. Everything feels empty and lifeless. Enemies are stupid and their detection methods are just based on sensitivity levels rather than a proper AI. They'll fumble around and move in unnatural, robotic ways and won't detect you when they should or will detect you when they shouldn't.

Story - Excellent. The downside is they replaced interactions with texts like books and newspapers to give you insight into the backdrop of the world. Also instead of having 2 separate campaigns, the choice between characters is just the other one getting trapped in stone. That's how lazy they went.

Sound - It's just okay. Music is great, voice acting is solid. However, in-game they're constantly triggering the same dialogues from your character or multiple dialogues at once from enemies. I think they programmed their speeches with when they move from their posts which kills the immersion once you notice it.

Overall - Just 4h in and it's tiring. The camera isn't great, the controls don't respond like they should, it's still buggy even now, and you can tell that they lost a lot of what made the original so great. I'm not sure how they even released the game in this state. I plan on completing it but it's going to be a chore rather than the fun it should have been. It's just highly apparent how lazy they were with the programming, QA, and design choices trying to cut as many corners as they could.

When it first came out in early access 6 years ago (from this post) this game made some pretty big promises for a small team of developers to deliver a multiplayer shooter with PvP and aliens. This never happened because they went bankrupt after mismanaging funds, failed marketing, and too slow development. What we were left with was the most polished and stable early access game ever developed. Looked good, no crashes or lag, everything that was in it worked pretty great.

Fast forward to today and the team that remained are still working on it in their free time. Think of it as modders trying to complete a project and that's where they're at. Will this become the next No Man's Sky revival? Maybe, maybe not. But I commend them for trying and I do want to see what becomes of it in the end. Perhaps it can become a community project to fill in the manpower gap?

DOTA Underlords is a game that mixes skill and RNG with the rich lore and flair of the DOTA universe. The game plays itself after you make decisions about your heroes and items from a randomized selection each round. It's not fully random as there are rules governing each portion of the game. Learning these is how you rank up, which is dependent entirely on your match outcome and not on the ranks of other players.

It's available on mobile as well and your data is shared between the 2 for unlockables and future items/cosmetics. If you're looking for an autobattler/autochess game, this is the best one period. The updates are consistent and solid so expect it to be active indefinitely.

Great game overall. This version just has intermittent freezing every 15 seconds due to its anticheat system's poor implementation. The only fix seems to be playing it in Steam offline mode. Blocking it from the internet is not enough. I'm not sure how other people aren't having issues with this but you probably will and that's what matters. Since PvP is half of the game then consider that you're only getting half of your purchase value from this title.