Recent reviews by Silen

Great game

Great game, now with coop as well. Definitely recommended, and worth the price.

We have limited time on Earth. This game is a waste of time.

The most hideous multiplayer shooter I've played in eons, the paradigm of casual game for masses of brainless gibbons who find glee in thoughtless mashing of buttons. Tragic respawn system placing enemies behind your back constantly, transforming this already sad pile of trash into an infinitely sorrowful sequence of "kill someone, die, kill someone, die, kill someone, die". There's constantly a convenient highlight around enemy players making you see them immediately wherever they are, to aid the slow processing power of the enjoyers of this "videogame".

Thank ♥♥♥♥ it's free.

This game's enjoyment is directly proportional to the amount of money you intend to invest in DLCs.

yeah, I ran with rifles

I didn't know how to manage a football team. I still don't. 10/10

A while ago I was permanently banned for ""cheating"" despite only having 2 hrs in the game and playing like ♥♥♥♥. Yeah, recommended.

> Found a cave in the middle of a forest
> "Troll cave", funny name I thought
> Got in and around a corner I see a massive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ troll standing there with his giant club
> Pulled a 180° and went "Noooope", got the ♥♥♥♥ out immediately

10/10
I will never enter a cave again

For the multiplayer and combat, I cannot recommend the game. I'll be brief because of character limit. I tested the alpha/beta for about 900 hours.
Gamemodes are scarce, customization is totally absent, combat is bad, balance non-existent, developer response to feedback abysmal.

The main characteristic of Mount & Blade's combat is being highly skill based, 'easy to learn, hard to master'. In Warband the mechanics were simple, but the way they could be manipulated by the player offered a huge degree of freedom, and separated new players from skilled veterans. You could play for 100 hours and get a good idea of the combat dynamics, but you'd need thousands of hours of practice to truly master the combat system and compete against the most experienced players. In Bannerlord, on the other hand, combat mechanics aren't simple but totally overcooked, with multiple unnecessary variables that go into calculating everything from stuns to movement speed, these variables offer zero control to both casual and competitive players alike, and all they do is add a feeling of randomness and inconsistency, which combined with the game's mechanical functioning (with the animations, for instance), and the pile of present issues, do not allow the combat to have nearly as much control and freedom, and as a consequence the skill ceiling is absolutely remote from Warband. Essentially, you could pit a relatively new player against a pro and the new player would have good chances of beating him, because the current combat does not allow the player to use their skill and experience to the full, or even an acceptable extent. It's littered with issues, which we have been pointing out in closed tests for about 10 months and yet they are still present. There are many contextual problems — for instance damage to horses from up close being totally negligible while becoming extremely high with speed bonus — however I will quickly skim through the issues of the core mechanics to avoid writing an essay. Movement is horrible, it's floaty and sluggish, it feels like you're dragging your character around any time you change directions due to acceleration issues, and on top of that the way 'momentum' acts makes it often feel like you're sliding around the place or 'ice skating'. Acceleration to top speed on the other hand is extremely quick, and deceleration to combat speed (combat speed is a lower movement speed that kicks in when you do any combat action like blocking or preparing an attack) is very slow, combat speed is slightly too high, and the strafing/backpedaling speed ratio isn't quite right, which mixed with the issues above makes it so that you'll often find yourself fighting players constantly sliding around you spamming or attacking you and immediately moving out of your range. Bear in mind that movement could be fixed with a few parameter changes but nothing has been done in all these months of beta.

The stun timings are off, which in turn means that the rhythm of combat is off — to briefly explain how it works, if I parry an attack, I will have a stun duration which prevents me from attacking until it's over (it's very short), similarly if I attack, I will need a short time to recover before I can attack again — the current timings make it so that the defender has a very large window to respond to an attack, while the attacker can't recover very quickly, essentially you cannot put pressure on the enemy by punishing them for poor reactions or trying to get a 2nd hit in with the correct positioning, since they will always have enough time, even if they react very late, to attack you back. This transforms the combat in a stale hit-block-hit-block sequence which goes on forever. On top of that, stuns are extremely inconsistent because they are calculated using a large variety of totally unnecessary physical factors, so one time you could get a short stun, and another a much longer stun, and you can never really tell when that is going to happen. Shield blocking is directional, blocking in the right direction will make your shield receive less damage, however you receive so much less of it that even blocking correctly by mistake will essentially make your shield last forever. You could block for 30 minutes straight while waiting for your team to come help you, again something that could be fixed with one number change. The speed to ready an attack is incredibly sluggish, it feels like to prepare an attack or to switch between multiple directions it takes ages, similarly blocking speed is noticeably slow and this could get you killed particularly when using heavier weapons no matter how quickly you react, all of this makes combat feel totally unresponsive. The arcs of swings are huge, you could hit someone almost behind you, this inevitably incentivizes spam as one way or the other you'll end up catching the opponent in one of your wide swings. Furthermore, glances are not animation based as they are in Warband (meaning, too early in the attack animation your attack will always glance off), but they are damage based, which however means that they're completely inconsistent and you will find yourself almost never glancing simply because you go over the damage threshold. This means that you could hit someone when your swing has barely even started, leaving them no time to react.

Feints are garbage, mostly because of how long it takes to switch from one attack to the other, however if you sped this up, because of the way the animations smoothly transition into each other, they would become op as it would be impossible for the player to understand when one attack ended and the other begun, moreover because of these transitions at the moment your feints can go through a player's blocks or body making it look like it was a real attack. This could be fixed by making the transitions between animations break up just a little more, but of course nothing has been done. The balance between different attacks is off, right swings offer you the highest range but they're also faster and the easiest to hit with reliably. Chained attacks (essentially combos, chaining one attack into the next) are useless, they're actually slower than performing 2 normal consecutive attacks, this mechanic makes absolutely zero sense right now. Chambers (countering an opponent's attack with another attack) are broken, they require your weapons to physically touch to happen, this requires a precision that no player can ever achieve, on top of that the timings are so unreliable that chambers only ever happen by mistake. Kicks are equally useless, the stun after kicking is never long enough to follow up with a hit, so you're essentially exposing yourself for nothing. There is a stance system in the game, meaning your attacks will be slightly faster if you're in the correct stance (left or right), at this point it's still unclear if they also have any other effects, however stances are controlled with your movement keys (moving right or left) which entails that you will never be able to use them correctly, as to use stances you will be forced to disregard your footwork which is extremely important. Essentially, everyone fights without thinking about them and it adds to the feeling of randomness and inconsistency.

I'd write more if not for character limit, but essentially for the whole beta duration it felt like talking to a brick wall, barely any changes were made, even changes that only required 1 number tweak, and it felt like we were being almost completely ignored. They didn't even bother to give us a proper environment to test the game such as duel mode, so we had to resort to community mods to test their game to give them feedback. Practically, a waste of time. I cannot recommend the game at the moment until the developers get their ♥♥♥♥ together, start listening, and start fixing the game.

They released this game in Early Access (I was one of the first to get it, before it even released), they did ♥♥♥♥ all for years releasing one insignificant update every few months, never fixed many of the major issues nor introduced any meaningful content. Meanwhile Space Engineers was constantly getting big updates and improving tenfold.

Now this. They bring the game out of Early Access with a loathsome announcement saying they won't work on the game any longer and that Space Engineers is their priority, and if you're not happy with that, they basically said:

"Well, the game's complete in our eyes, if you don't like it go ♥♥♥♥ yourselves. Thanks for all the money, by the way."

Please, don't support these scummy practices.