Recent reviews by Native

Variants Daphne uses an anachronistic Link/Password system that can't be accessed or restored again if you uninstalled the game before using it. No website account, no support methods. While the workaround is careful bookkeeping or to just never uninstall the game, in my case, because I was migrating from mobile, it's caused me to lose all of my progress.

Link your account and save it on a spreadsheet somewhere.

I've always played monster hunter to play it with friends. It really feels like they skimped on the multiplayer system this time around. Baffling.

An anime-themed sandbox that gets wackier the more you understand it. The basic loops of combat and exploration are decent enough, but honestly what attracts me to this game so much is the easy-to-understand yet paradoxically complex stat progression system.

I'll explain nutrition just to provide a glimpse into the silliness that is Elin's game logic, but in a nutshell, you gain stats from what you eat, cool. But then you realize that to get truly good stats, you'll want to learn to cook so you can shove more nutrition in your food. Alright, so you foster a large base with plenty of cooking facilities and a carefully logic'ed storehouse system to automatically sort your loot and keep the perishable stuff from perishing. You hire a bunch of people to automate fishing, farming, etc, to supplement your ingredients... Then, you will inevitably conclude that to cook the best food, you'll want the best ingredients, so you burn down your old crop field and start over from scratch, carefully culling weak results and replanting the best, most potent pieces of produce. Now that you've completed THAT laborious process, you finally cook this damn dish only to find that there are MORE efficient dishes you could be producing with your newly improved cooking skill and it starts all over again. It's engrossing.

Elin is terribly fun if you enjoy digging into systems like the above. However, if you just want to go out, kill stuff, get loot, get stronger, and not worry about all these strange intricacies and base management, this isn't the game for you.

I want to love the game but it really was released far too early. Some examples:

- The very worst, but many of the enemy AI are broken. Like legit maybe one/third of an enemy camp will mill around and refuse to retaliate as you cut them down. It is astounding that the game was released in a state where the enemies were broken, on top of all of the other problems below. The enemies that DO work have very little difference between them aside from their hp and the weapon they wield, which is 100% melee weapons and never a bow like you can get very early in the game. Standing on a box or rock and shooting them is a 100% sure way to kill any enemy in the game. While I can keep myself from cheesing enemies, it's nonetheless a gaping flaw.

- Of similar importance, the actual "Dynasty" portion of the game is NOT IMPLEMENTED. It's A CORE FEATURE of the series this game represents and it is not yet implemented in version 1.0. You can talk to a potential spouse, court them instantly by talking to them once and confirming the decision, pay a bunch of money, and you'll be given a child. This child does nothing and does not grow up, it may as well be a backpack for your spouse to carry around. That's the ENTIRE mechanic. It was truly released too early.

- The village management UI is terrible, with no way to organize or sort villagers or jobs, they are listed simply in the order in which they were created. So if you need to hunt down all of your woodcutters to change their production, you'd need to find each wooding cutting job you created since the founding of the village and change each one, one by one. Every task has a ticker for the production amount which you can raise or lower by mashing to click or by holding down the mouse for a long time, something absolutely any other game would have introduced a slider or [select all] button to resolve.

- The villagers themselves are extremely bland, use the same few faces and sets of ragged clothing, and have absolutely nothing else distinguishing them aside from their name. They get stuck on objects and mill around, picking objects seemingly at random to interact with. It isn't unusual to come home to your house and have 5 or 6 random villagers picking through your shelves just because they are valid interaction points.

- The game lags. You can play it alone or play it with friends, but either way, even with a most definitely well enough computer, the game will slow down considerably when it loads alot of content. Even turning down the settings for loaded plants and such to the minimum does little to assuage the problem.

Despite having fun with it early on before I grew disillusioned to all the issues above, I could not in any good conscience recommend anyone pay money to buy this game. It is not ready for sale at all.

Like others are saying, I entirely would have paid for the DLC. The base game is so much fun it's a joy that DLC's are being released for it.

Honestly was skeptical of it's co-op gameplay because it's just splitting up control of a full party between friends but it's been great! They put the effort into allowing co-op partners to contribute in decision making and gameplay is fast and challenging enough that you don't feel bad waiting for your turn.

Honest looks great and I love the idea of the game but I have had a pretty bad time with it so far. Your villagers need ALOT of micromanaging, as they will happily sit there not doing anything if, say, the farm plots are done being seeded or the nearby berries/animals are done being exploited. They don't even do the tasks that idle or unemployed workers do, they just legit sit there, needing you to check up on them all the time or reassign them. They really need to help with hauling or construction or something when their job is done or at least a warning needs to appear so you don't have to check all the time.

Your neighbor also expands at insane speeds, gobbling up the territory and I never feel like I'm making any progress towards catching up or eradicating the bandits that plague me.

Dragons dogma 2 is fun SOMETIMES. BUT ONLY SOMETIMES. And that's the problem. I like the combat and I like the atmosphere/setting but not the story or any of the characters so far. Willing to at least give that a chance though. Character progression seems nice, I like the concept of vocations and unlocking stuff is cool so far. New gear looks good and I'm happy to buy it.

THE MAIN problem is that it's bouts of fun interspersed with long periods of boring, when every 100ft on the way to the next section of fun, challenging content, it's an overworld fight vs 2 or 3 goblins, each with a bunch of hp and damage so on paper it's challenging but because of how hitstun works, it isn't, as long as you actively participate. You cannot ignore these goblins because if you do, they will somehow manage to kill your pawns and they die permanently unless you backtrack to save them lol.

It's kinda gritty, with wounds that last until you rest, painful encumbrance/inventory limits, and no fast travel, which I very much like... but it's also another large factor in the time consuming grind that is traveling anywhere on the map.

Another, somewhat worrisome issue is that everything in the game feels like it's inches from collapsing, like important npcs get stuck very frequently, only just barely unstucking themselves with some player prodding in order to allow you to progress the story and your pawns and npcs leap around perilously close to the deep water which for some reason perma-kills them if they fall into. Major quest items masquerade themselves as mundane ones and you can seemingly sell them to merchants with no way to get them back.

Great co-op gameplay where killing your friends does set you back a little but not enough for anyone to be upset about it. Perfect balance of difficulty and challenge.

Has a fair bit of bugs at this time but I have faith in the developers, considering how fast patches and fixes to their outstanding issues are being rolled out.

Gameplay is very solid and upgrade options are plentiful enough to have considerable freedom to develop your characters how you want to. The art style isn't really my jam and there's a few issues with the translation/localization, but overall, the feel and flavor of the setting is sufficiently retained.