Recent reviews by Nixeras

Bro I haven't even been able to get out of act 1 help I think I have a problem..

Fun game with or without friends, lots of little events and stories. Cute art style that belies a surprising depth to the writing, while still managing to crack a wry joke here or there. Never thought I'd have so much attachment to a few paper dolls fighting an unwinnable fight against monsters way out of their league.

Legitimately one of the best monster collecting games I've ever played, and I've been playing since OG Pokemon Red/Blue, played all the Dragon Quest Monsters games, played the best of the Monster Rancher's Series, and several others. This game has beautiful art, phenomenal music, an interesting story that isn't too directed at any age group or another.

The typings in this game are done in a way that feels incredibly interesting to use not just "oh man I take more damage from that type" or the opposite. The fusion system is an incredibly interesting way to brute force your way through some fights you might normally have trouble with. The game has built in difficulty settings that make it much harder if that's what you're interested in but at a certain point if you're one of those players you can absolutely just turn the cheese on and become a god. (8 random starters and Headshot or Last Rites will end a fight before you even start a turn.) But that's not easy to achieve until mid game and then I mean if you're the one that gets rid of your own fun in the game that's kind of on you.

My *biggest* gripe with this game if it can even be called this is that there are some absolutely phenomenal characters in this game that aren't available as companions and it makes me so sad. I would *love* to see some of the captains, or Sunny as available companions but sadly their roles are very limited right now.

This game could drop a DLC at the same price as the base game and not only would I buy it but I'd feel like it was a better investment than buying the DLC for pokemon at the end of the year. I really really love this game. Thank you Tom and Jay, and your team. While everyone's attention is on Tears of the Kingdom you guys got game of the year in my books. I wish I could give you so many more positive reviews.

This is a weird one. I feel like it's inherently unfair to recommend this game to people. I feel that way despite the fact that I really enjoy this game. There's so many things I would love desperately to see changed, and I worry those things will not. The core gameplay is a boatload of fun however once you're outside of a match and managing things like what gear you have with what blessing or perk or whatever...that becomes tedious. The constant grind to get new materials and money so that you can spend that on more randomly generated rolls hoping to get the right stats on whichever weapon you happen to like (Or whatever weapon the devs have decided to buff/a replacement for whatever weapon the devs have over-nerfed due to vocal minorities on forums/discord) is one of the core aspects of the game and that's understandable after all because isn't that how most games with equipment go? The problem comes in that Fatshark in their immeasurable wisdom decided to split inventories to be per character.

Your dockets, your materials, even your weapons, some of which multiple classes have access to. All of these are separated for no good reason. This means that if you want to get better gear on a character, you're going to be playing that character no matter how poorly geared they are. Not having fun on Sharpshooter because your only ranged weapon is a crappy autogun that just doesn't put in the work? Too bad, you have to use that until either you get the money and random luck in the shop to get a good weapon, or until you spend said money on random common rarity items and then spend a ton of resources trying to make that common item into something useful, while praying that the rng involved in upgrading doesn't brick the item and make it useless.

Speaking of rng bricking items, the "crafting" system for new weapons is atrocious. It took the worst part of The Division 2's crafting system and made it universal. A fully upgraded weapon (Orange, legendary, gold, w/e you wanna call it) will have two blessings and two perks. These perks and blessings can vary from tiers 1 through 4, which already is a level of rng added that is unnecessary but it goes even further because you can decide to re-bless a blessing, and/or reroll a perk. When you re-bless you can choose a blessing from a list you create by sacrificing other weapons to extract said blessings. Meaning you have to find the rarest blessings "In the wild" so to speak, before you can put them on a good weapon. When you reroll a perk it simply rolls another random perk which can vary from "+x% critical hit chance" to "+x% damage to (one of like 6 different "armor" types in the game)" and again they're randomly rolled from tier 1 to tier 4. Oh and by the way some blessings are straight up broken, for instance "rending" reduces an opponents armor but in the process reduces how much weapons that get bonus damage vs that armor type do, because for some reason that is factored based on how much armor they have currently not base. Seems like a smart choice devs, make it so armor strip is actively detrimental for weapons that do well vs armor.

Anyways, this is all packaged onto an amazing system where every weapon has 5 stats that all roll randomly between 10-80% depending on the level of your character, the stats they affect technically go up to 100% but you can't get past 80% because the game was clearly not finished and remains that way. This is also evidenced by there being only 4 classes, despite the fact that Vermintide 2 for instance had 15 on launch with all 5 different characters having a class and two alternate classes. (AND A SHARED INVENTORY FOR CRAFTING MATS BY THE WAY)

The game also struggles at giving people fair and viable challenges to achieve for the mediocre "achievement" system called penances. Some challenges are simply a meter that fills based on your time spent in the game like killing tens of thousands of one of the two factions in the game. Some of the class penances which unlock their better looking (for the most part) cosmetics... well those are just stupid. For instance in this four player co-op game, the psyker has a penance where when a monstrosity spawns they have to kill the creature by themselves with no other player having dealt it damage, using nothing but their built in "Brain Burst" skill. It is impossible to do without the full assistance of your team, because like many penances similar it requires you to essentially go against normal co-operation gameplay, which is to kill the thing threatening you and/or your friends.

I've told so many people that I cannot recommend this game, and these are just some of the reasons that pop up regularly. There's more reasons I'm sure, but at the same time I have so much fun in the game when playing with my friends. The environments are fun to run through, even if they're severely limited in number right now. The music is great, at least in my opinion though I'm sure there are some that might disagree. The characters, despite being generic player generated characters, have a lot of interesting personality and I do hope that that grows the same way Vermintide 2's characters have grown over the years and gotten new dialogue lines that explored their histories and personalities.

The game is good, and I do love it. But I simply cannot recommend it yet because it consistently feels unfinished to me and it saddens me because it feels like Fatshark is flailing at the controls unsure of what to do. Nerfing Ogryn durability when they're already bullet sponges, giving some much needed buffs to psykers but then... giving them even more? Like a sword that functions like the veteran's power sword before they nerfed that? One day I hope they'll get their heads together. Remove the locks from the crafting, make inventories shared, ALLOW ME TO CHANGE THE VOICE OF MY CHARACTER WITHOUT HAVING TO REMAKE THEM, give us more classes and weapons, etc.

But until that day I have to give this game a thumb down because people that buy it will receive only a fraction of the game they pay for. An incredibly good fraction of game, but a fraction nonetheless.

Edit: They have updated all classes to be stronger and have more options (though some are buggy or broken as is tradition), most weapons are viable, and made crafting materials and dockets shared across all characters, they even reduced a lot of RNG in the equipment upgrade system (They purposely left half of it there, kind of annoying). Strong steps in the right direction. They also however doubled the special spawn rate and decreased horde spawns (For Xbox launch probably?), have not made weapon inventory shared for weapons that could be used by more than one class, and still rely on the weird mission board system instead of just letting you choose a mission. Changing my recommendation to a yes, but if there was a maybe option that's what it would be.

Rock and Stone brother. Rock and Stone.

I like spaghetti.

I now experience utter terror when I walk into my kitchen and see a coffee mug that hasn't been used sitting alone on a counter. Thanks.