Recent reviews by Yarden

Titanfall 3 WHEN?

Crazy good, and technically impressive

Good game

This game is amazing, play it. When reading negative reviews make sure to filter out the ones about the game being unplayable, this is mostly solved and if not will be fully solved soon

This is an example of a really well designed pvp game

Tried the update, seems nice but broken on linux. Shows controller scheme instead of kbm and disables toggle crouch and dodge because of that. Shame. Will edit after fix I guess.

I think it's very clear that this is a well designed game that surpasses modern gaming standards easily. Multiplayer and singleplayer

This game has flaws, a lot of them. At the same time, at least so far, no game has ever given me the amount of powerfantasy + freedom + mechanical problem solving - social esc problem solving (a lot of the "puzzles" are conversations) - narrative and many many more, that this game has somehow managed to. TLDR please buy the game and be a part of gaming history.

This is my review so far, act 1 see above for hours played
Story - 10/10
Music - 10/10
Role playing - 10/10
Performance (linux) - 8/10
Visuals - 9/10
Multiplayer - 8/10
UI/UX - 4/10
Accessibility - 3/10
Combat - 9/10
Exploration - 10/10
Pacing - 9/10
Developers - 10/10

overall - 9/10 - must play


Note: the game is amazing, you will enjoy it, it's good, go play, stop reading reviews.

I will focus on the bad things here, even though this is a positive review, because I want you to know what you are getting into and I want to give the devs some feedback that might help.
There are many issues with multiplayer, some inherent, some are confusing oversights, some are bugs, and many are design choices.
- [oversight, bug] When you start the game with multiple people, then one leaves. You are stuck with them, no way to kick them out, no way to dismiss them or keep them in your camp. This is clearly a really big issue for not a small amount of players. Any person at Larian would agree that this is something that's basic and critical yet all of them missed it somehow.
- [design choice, possibly inherent] Dialog. Conversation is at the core of this game, and it's extermly well done. but a few issues arise when you try to interact with that system in mp. Dialog procs automatically most of the time, which is good, but it means that it will proc for the player that was closest, meaning unless your high charisma char is always the one exploring, you will have many failed checks and bad dialog interactions. Dialog also doesn't pull everyone into it, which is a good thing, because they are separate things, people in separate places talking to different people is awesome and amazing. But also it's horrible because many moments in the story will be missed because you didn't click on the small ear icon next to your friends name. In dnd your whole party is a part of the conversation, it's hard to do this here so they didn't, but that created many issues they didn't solve.
- [design choice] high charisma gives bettter prices, makes sense right? But then that means that you will never interact with the shopping/selling/bartering mechanics because you have low char, instead you will send all your ♥♥♥♥ to your forking bard who will limp (low str->low carry wight) to the nearest shop and spend 15 minutes selling (see ui secion for more fun details) and buying things while you either twiddle your thumbs, or start an extemly important sidequest by talking to a random npc. Because crafting and achemy is basicly none exsistent and even the parts that exsists relay on buying (meaning it's better if your bard did it) and of course, only one person can interact with the trader at any given time (immersion > QOL, again) You are left with dialog and npc interaction, but then we loop back, because many of the dialogs will be suboptimal because you are a witless charmless fighter...
So many things that they solved with DOS2 they broke again here.
- [bug] slow, it might be a problem with me running the game on linux, idk, but opening inventory, chests, level up screen, etc. all take way too long, those things shouldn't be heavy or hard but for some reason they are, really really annoying, like I'm using a forking webapp instead of a native app when I use the ui. Same with buttons sometimes not reacting (happens to me most with the listen in button, which is also slow but that's because your view teleports to another location so it's inherent (doesn't make it any less frustrating)
- [oversight] no proper text scaling, if you like bigger text, or can't read unless you have bigger text, you are forked
- [oversight] no add to wares keyboard shortcut, there is an amazing system where you can mark stuff you find to sell and then easily (not very, because they shop ui also sucks) sell them all when getting to a shop but you have to right click -> add to wares, instead of shift click like in DOS2 (which was also not configurable but at least it exsistsed) now you use shift or control to select multiple items and then add them to wares. One step forwards, three steps back
- [oversight] no sort button in party inventory
- [oversight, design choice] sort button is actually a menu of buttons, so you always need two clicks and extra mouse movement, there was nothing wrong with DOS2's sorting, you had a menu and a button, easy
- [oversight] no sort keyboard shortcut
- [oversight] can't use items from your party memebers in some contexts, but actually you can, kinda - you can't throw a potion from your firends inventory, but you can take it to your inventory and then throw it (same thing, same price, extra action for player). It's intended that you can use any consumable mid-battle from any inventory, then why was there any reason to go out of your way to smi-block actions like those?
- [design choice] they have over-the-sholder controls for console where you can control your character's movement directly in 3rd person but they decided that for pc you won't even get the option for that, which sucks because for walking around and stuff, that would have been really fun, I get that it's a crpg, I will always prefer mouse for combat, but exploration would have worked really well.

- The game is a technological marvel, and yet I find myself in loading screens way too often, and slow ones at that. This in comparison to DOS2 which seemed much smoother on the loading and moving from area to area [needs benchmarks]
- That's it, needed a full section coz it's very painful
- [design choice] respecing your character costs money, making it harder to experiment, I find myself instead saving, respecing a bunch of times and trying some things, then loading the save. This means that my friends could not have done anything in that time and also because loading is so slow we pay for it with a long loading screen.
- [design choice] respecing is partial - you cannot respec your background, which is good thematically but bad because it effects your stats for the rest of the game, so if you are not an expert, if you don't choose carefully you will be a little sub-optimal (which is fine, but it is annoying and something to take into account)
- [design choice] no visual appearance change after character creation - after character creation I saw that in actual light, my chars lips look really shiny, which I really didn't like. Too bad, unlike in DOS2 you cannot alter appearance.
- [design choice] faces are race specific, and there aren't many, so unless you use mods, your character might not look as you want them to even though there is no technical reason they cannot,
- [design choice] They have their own launcher... This is just annoying, this already loses some players and just annoys the rest, I HATE having to launch the game twice, I don't think this is in any way good for any of their playerbase, it's only good for them and I think that goodness is marginal enough to not justify hurting the playerbase this way but evidently they disagree


to be continued

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
CONS:
- Bugs - while not really "buggy" the game glitches quite a bit, especially in regards to the npcs
- NPCs - A really cool idea nerfed to death. The npcs were supposed to make the streets dangerus to walk through as a violent vampire while also beeing a perk/health pickup alternative. Instead, the npcs are sparse, so you almost never have to be carful when feasting on them. They are blind so you can just run up to them directly with guns and abilities and they still won't see you. Not alive, they bearly move or do anything so they are literally a skinned pickup, a waste of potential.
- Account - you need a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ account to play? What year are we in? How dumb can you be? I was THIS close to not even trying the game out when I opened it and it asked me to register, like, wtf. You also need to do this from inside the game, which is fine and all but that means no password manager, no autocomplete, no tab to move to the next field, nothing. And you need to verify your email ofc, which takes more time before you can actually play the game. Devs just don't understand how easy it is to drop a game when there is friction of this sort...
PROS:
- Movement - the movement in the game is superb. While not titanfall level, it is really fun to run around, climb walls, jump, slide and shoot. To me this is what makes this game actually worth checking out.
- Extra life - when dying, there are a few ways in which you get a second chance in a match, which makes the game a lot more fluent, and scray when you know your next death is final and you need to find npcs to eat for the chance to get an extra life.
- Time-to-kill - feels like a really good balance between Hallo level and Hunt showdown level. You get to have prolonged firefights, no death comes as a surprise and when you die it's usually because you got outplayed more than once or twice in a row.
- Looting - very simple, exactly as it should be

Hard to find a good squad, but when you do, the experience is amazing