Recent reviews by Max Shadow

These weapons make me feel quite hungry.

It's such a shame that the score of this DLC is tainted by one design flaw. Yes, the quest of Theresa was done extremely poorly. You start it very early in the game without knowing that you'll be locked in it for around 4 hours, without being able to go back to the main storyline until you finish, or you load a previous save. That was a terrible decision, one that they could have avoided just by adding a way to switch between the storylines at will. The gameplay in that quest is pretty annoying too, as you are severely underpowered, and most people won't have enough experience in the game by the time they start the quest, which only leads to great frustration as they die over and over to unfair fights.

However, the second part of this DLC was great. The writing was superb. Even tho you don't do anything new there, and it's mostly talking to people, It was an interesting story. I usually rate games stories by their capacity of filling me with emotions, and the ending in this DLC left me with sadness and anger (although I didn't get the best one, or the worst). So yeah, I think this DLC is worth it and I recommend it. Just don't start the Theresa quest until very late in the game and you should be fine.

I don't usually write reviews, but this game really got me hooked, so here it goes.

The main gameplay loop goes like this: You have a mobile outpost that you can customize at your base, and you use it to make "tours". These involve multiple exploration days, and one final recovery day.

During exploration days, all you do is run around the map looting items, collecting resources, and killing a few enemies that pose very little threat. You usually can't take all the loot, so you have to manage your inventory efficiently.

Then in recovery day, you have to defend your outpost from waves of enemies. Here you'll spend most of your time loading ammo into your turrets, building a few extra defenses, and looting. You can fight, but it's not strictly necessary, as your chances of success depend mostly on your base, and how well you balance the main 3 resources: materials, energy and ammo.

If your base gets destroyed at any point in the tour, you lose ALL your collected loot, and you have to survive for a few minutes until the emergency evac ship arrives. If you die at any point, you lose everything, including the equipment you brought to the tour. This can be quite frustrating, but there are ways to avoid it.

The difficulty in this game is a bit weird. It's not a hard game, and succeeding in a recovery day depends almost entirely on your outpost. The issue is that there's no reliable way to tell if your outpost is good enough for the next zone and difficulty, and the cost of failing a tour is too high. There's a power score, but it doesn't help much, as winning requires more than just having enough turrets. If your outpost is well equipped for the tour, then the recovery day will be extremely easy, requiring very little intervention on your part. Now if your outpost is not good enough for the tour, then you'll most likely lose, as "skill" in combat makes very little difference.

Besides the main tour/story mode, there are a couple more modes.

The Infinity Siege mode is just an endless mode. You fight an infinite amount of waves that get increasingly harder. However, before having access to the challenging waves, you have to go through the easier waves, which can be quite boring. Luckily, after reaching specific waves, you can start your next match from that wave, so you get to the action faster.

Then there's the Return to Dawn Base mode, and I think this is the most fun mode in the game. It's a series of challenges where you use premade outposts and random operators, like a roguelite. You have to loot items between waves, so it's a combination of exploration and recovery days in a single mission. The difficulty in these challenges is just right, hard enough to keep you entertained, but fair. You know that the outpost they give you is enough to pass the challenge, so succeeding depends on what you do during the match. You can also use your own base with some restrictions, but in my experience, the premade bases are usually better. There's also a free mode that allows you to build your own challenge by adding cards with bonuses and risks, but I haven't been able to create a "fair" challenge, while also keeping the loot quality decently high.

The story is nothing to write home about. It's decent, but simple, predictable, and a bit cliche. Many people seem to criticize the voice acting, but I don't think it is that bad. For the most part, it's pretty decent, although some specific characters sound awful.
The main problem is not the voice acting, but the script. The dialogues are incredibly bad, very cringeworthy. Some scenes made me feel uncomfortable of how bad they were. Which is a shame, because the game intro is very cinematic, and kinda sets the bar high for the rest of the game. But then it gets very disappointing. Characters don't have proper lip-syncing, so watching them talk looks awkward. Most dialogues are thrown at you from your first person perspective instead of playing a cool cinematic to add more emotion to the scene. It all leads to a very underwhelming experience.

As I said above, if you die during a tour, you lose everything. This is similar to extraction shooter games like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt. However, those games have short matches, where dying is not that big of a deal. Here, dying can make you waste an hour of playtime, and some rare gear, which can be very frustrating. I don't think the extraction shooter mechanics work well here.

Luckily, there are alternatives, if you don't mind cheating. If you ALT+F4 during an exploration or recovery day, the game will close immediately and when you get back you'll be right before starting your last day. You can do this right after dying or losing your base.

And even if you forget to do that, the game keeps a lot of backup saves of previous days, so you can go back in time freely just by moving and renaming some files. It's a bit tedious, but at least you can skip what I think it's the worst part of the game.

I think it's a pretty fun game, and very addictive. I'm constantly thinking how I can improve my base, and I get that feeling of "one more tour" to get those rare materials I need to craft a new cool turret. It's not for everyone tho. If you're expecting a tower defense game packed with action, this is not it. The defending part of the game is pretty "passive". You spend most of your time doing mundane tasks instead of fighting. And that's only like 20% of a tour, the rest is spent looting. But I think the gameplay mechanics are kinda unique and very well made, and the graphics and sound effects are very good.

F*** you Activision

Democracy has won, for now...

Now that the PSN account requirement is out of the way, I can confidently say that this game is excellent.

No he jugado mucho, pero creo que ya vi suficiente (y leí suficiente en internet) para estar seguro de que no puedo recomendar este juego. Es una lastima, tiene buenas mecánicas y gráficos decentes, pero demasiados defectos.

Pros:
- Gráficos decentes. Las texturas se ven medio borrosas de cerca, pero los cuerpos y caras de los personajes tienen buen detalle.
- Buen sistema de combate. Mas orientado a un Action RPG que un MMORPG tradicional. Las skills se lanzan con una combinación de teclas, y hay buena libertad de movimiento. Los combates son mas dinámicos y da la impresión de que la habilidad del jugador tiene peso, no solo los stats.
- Mecánicas semirealistas. Los almacenes y establos están separados por ciudad. Para mover items, animales y dinero entre ciudades es necesario ir a buscarlos personalmente, o contratar trabajadores para que los muevan. Es una mecánica interesante, aunque también podría ser una contra.
- Gran variedad de clases. Entre magos, guerreros, luchadores, arqueros y mas.

Contras:
- PVE terriblemente desbalanceado. Mi personaje desconoce el sabor de una poción de salud. Desde que empezás hasta que llegas a nivel 50, casi todos los enemigos que encuentres van a estar por debajo de tu nivel, e incluso aquellos que están un poco por encima son estupidamente fáciles de matar. No hay desafío, matar enemigos es terriblemente aburrido. Tengo como 20 ataques, pero tranquilamente podría usar el mismo constantemente y todos moririran sin problemas. Todo el contenido PVE es básicamente un tutorial muy largo para el PVP.
- Los quest son bastante lineales. Si bien se puede ir a zonas de mayor nivel para tener algo de desafío, te perdés de muchas recompensas de quests en niveles mas bajos, como las expansiones de inventario.
- Pésimo endgame. Básicamente, al llegar al nivel 49, necesitas activar PVP obligatorio para avanzar. Si no te gusta PVP te jodes. Claramente BDO no es un juego que se destaque por su PVE.
- Modelo de negocio agresivo y caro. Todas las mecánicas del juego que "molestan" o ponen alguna traba en tu camino, se pueden saltar con dinero real. Todas las ropas que ves en trailers e imágenes del juego se compran con dinero real. Si no pagas nunca, te vas a ver como un saco de papas durante todo el juego, a menos que grindees por días enteros para conseguir alguna ropa ligeramente interesante. Los precios son una locura. 4 slots de personajes iniciales, debes pagar para conseguir mas. Slots de inventario limitado, peso limitado (si, el juego pone ambas limitaciones), y si bien se puede conseguir extensiones por quests, si querés mas tenes que pagar. Un desastre.
- Los créditos del juego no sirven para nada. En unas pocas horas vas a sentir que sos millonario, y todos los ítems del juego se pueden comprar sin problemas. Sin embargo, también vas a notar que ningún ítem del juego vale la pena comprar. Vas a juntar toneladas de plata sin saber en que usarlo. Para lo único que sirve es para comprar algún ítem con mejores stats en el mercado de la comunidad, o algún ítem especial, si alguna vez a alguien se le da por venderlo y no te lo compra antes otro jugador.
- UI demasiado sobrecargada con información innecesaria. Se puede configurar, pero los valores por defecto son horribles. Supongo que es algo común en MMORPGs orientales.
- Mecánicas del juego no muy bien explicadas. Vas a tener que ver algunos tutoriales en internet para aprender algunas cosas.
- Pésima traducción. Los textos son un desastre, a veces es difícil entender lo que dicen, e incluso algunos diálogos con voz en ingles suenan mal. Parece que contrataron actores de voz conocidos, pero le dejaron las traducciones a cualquier aficionado amateur.

Lo compre en oferta al precio de una gaseosa, y ya me estoy lamentando por haberlo jugado mas de 2 horas.

I really like this game, but I can't recommend it. The combat mechanics are totally broken, and pro players will own you with weird moves like swinging a sword over their heads and hitting you while going backwards. Hitting someone at the start of a swing shouldn't do any damage, and a real knight would never expose his back like that, but since you can turn as fast as you can move the mouse, it doesn't matter. It's so unrealistic and really kills the immersion. I don't understand why the devs never patched that, I guess they find it "fun" or a completely valid technique. So after lvl 15 you have to either learn to do those tricks or die in frustration until you decide to uninstall.

Another thing I really hate is the fact that some players wear special skins with a different color than red or blue, and it takes a bit more time to identify them as enemies. Friendly fire is always on, so you can't just attack everyone you see, and in the middle of a battle you can't hesitate.

It's a shame, the game has a good variety of weapons and the matches are really fun with a full server, but its gameplay is broken.