Recent reviews by Soci

Its just not even playable.

I have high hopes for this game, but atm, you spend most of the time compiling shaders and both times I have tried to play the game didnt work, crashed once I got and then I blue screened on loading screen.

I believe in the dev team, but this game is not ready for steam and the wider gaming audience and it was incredibly reckless of them to put it out when its in this state

The intro to this game has 0 context, 0 engaging moments and 0 reasons to keep playing.

No systems compel me to play more and the fps once I left the city was low. Also, Im pretty sure this game was meant to let you be your own vampire or similar? Instead I am saddled with a full character that exists already.

What a let down, years of waiting for this game and it turns out to be a shallow experience that is over a decade behind every game. Guess its a warning that games should never be in development this long

Its like if Genshin had 1/5 the budget, worse character design, was mmorpg, had 10x the microtransaction and played like ♥♥♥♥.

Its a style over substance game that doesnt have the style to make it work

Holy Peak

An amazing game ruined by gacha slop.

There is a fun game here.
It is not put together though.

- Sound effects are awful. There is 0 impact or feedback.
- Ui is unorganised, mixed styled, poorly readable and overall 0 effort put into the ux.
- Champion unlock is either a slow crawl or an instant get all by paying. They even have this advertised on the champ viewing page.
- Visually the map looks cheap and more like an unreal test enviroment. It works but I cant help but feel like not much thought was put into it.
- Seeing as how they are copying champion kits and designs into this game, there is a lot of champions missing. I could understand like a couple missing, but the roster isnt very big and it feels noticable.
- The champion design is quite leer-y. It kinda works as they are gods, but it can often feel very basic.
- There is a complete lack of deep design for catch-up and anti farming. If you die more than a few times you are forever behind and there is very little to do to get back.
- Jungle feels like a very cosmetic role as its quick to move between lanes.
- There is no visual fog of war. Enemies just blink out of existence and back again. It makes it hard to tell where you can and cannot see and quite often enemies just appear from nowhere.
- There is near 0 feedback on getting attacked by towers.
- You cannot see how many minions you have under tower, espcially if you are melee range. You either have to stop attacking to see or just hope.
- The score board, loading screen and alive tracker at the top are all unsorted. You have to tab the scoreboard and look at the role icons to tell who is who.
- The progression system is about 70% locked behind paying for each individual champion, about £5-6. Of course there is no 900gem bundle, either 600 or 1300. The game also gives a tiny amount of gems for daily login. Literally 5-10 per day.
- The main menu music sometimes just doesn't play?
- The announcer is constantly yapping.

Im sure I could go on. But this game just feels entirely untested, pushed out the door by like 5 devs and trying to hard to monetise not much content. Its sad and continues a legacy of HiRez games being potentially fun but hampered by playing and looking cheap whilst being so incredibly desperate to make you pay.
I pray that they can get ontop of this, but idk. Its already been in dev for ages with half a year in Alpha testing before this. It bein Open Beta "not final" is no excuse, this is very much an engine upgrade for Smite with new bells and whistles and not an entire new game. This is not the first shot at this

I think this could be something great.
The designs pop, although lack lore and personality enough to be engaging.
The gameplay is fun, but also lacking impact and feels a bit messy.
But the biggest problem atm is the ui. It overwhelming, clunky and lacking in information whilst giving too much information. It feels like mobile game ui in a bad way. It really drags down the play experience, but its early access so maybe they can hire a ux designer who can make the ui experience as well as its wanting to.

Wow, that was truely a waste of time
Chapter 1-2 are actually just time wasters with incredibly little plot and choices of 0 consequence.
Chapter 3 picks up the plot a lot but is still filled with time spending crap.
Chapter 4 was incredibly engaging and the best of the game
Chapter 5 was god awful, nothing made sense, no consequences happened and I ended up blue balled in every aspect.

Why have romance if the end point is just "made past the game's end point we will be a thing", why not have that tackled during the games runtime, a lot of it which is wasted on menial crap, so the game can end with at least 1 choice mattering.
Why break Max and Chloe apart, constantly have messages coming through about how Chloe is doing ♥♥♥♥ with other people, and then have the game tease that Max "MIGHT" talk to her.

I think this game is meant to be about Max getting over the events of the first game whilst setting the world to have more power having people.
However so so few of the characters works, with many feeling like the writers actively wanted the player to hate them. There was nothing interesting to do on the side and at the end of the day I was glad it was over.

I hope the so promised "max Caufield will return" game has some love put into it, but I do not think this game is good enough to push publishers into making another game.

Just watch someone play the game on Youtube, this isn't anywhere close to worth the price and it would have to be under £20 for me to consider this a worthwhile usage of money,

I think there is a good game here. But so far its absolutely hammered into the ground with terrible movement and targeting.
This game is meant to be action combat but everything happens in a tab targeting format and that targeting is terribly implemented. During world events I end up not being able to hit enemies due to it trying to target players, the controls for targeting feel like a mobile game. The range to interact with non npc items is awful too, often end up spamming F to try interact and you are just constantly too far away.
Then the movement. It feels so float-y. Traversing feels a little bit like you are on ice and there is not a mantling mechanic or a way to double jump (at least that I have seen so far) so you can very easily get stuck on objects.
There is gliding, but its incredibly limited and you can only go forward, flap up or bomb down. It feels awful and needs to be replaced by actual gliding.

A couple misc problems:
1- Ui is cluttered, visually over-designed and information is not condensed. This rears its head with the tool-tips the most.
2- Story content is awfully un-engaging but the devs did not realise this and so you have to trudge through it. Conversations aren't fully skipable so you end up wasting a lot of time trying to get through.
3- The game needs a way to test drive the weapons at full power. The game has a tutorial segment that could so easily have this, but it doesn't and forces you to use 2 weapons until you get to a point where you can wack a training doll at level 1. The game has you comitt to weapons, so being able to test them at full power so you know what you are getting into would be massive.
4- Overwhelming skills at start. The game gives you about 4-5 skills per weapon (you have 2 equipped, so 8-10). It feels overwhelming, even more so when the tool-tips are horrid to read, and the game could easily spread the skills over levels as you level up and get nothing often.
5- Inventory mess. There is a bunch of materials, consumables and "stuff" you pick up. Its needing better storage that being all chucked into one slot based inventory.
6- Limited body customisation. The game lets you customise the body of your character. You cannot make even a chubby character. It ranges from skeletal thin to normal person normal. Its disapointing, let me make ta chonky girl!!!
7- Currencies. Its asian, so of course there is like 10-20 different currencies and the game does not tell you what they do until you staring at the vendor for it. The main gold currency takes on the gacha design of investment currency that acts as a gate for lower level players and I can imagine it being a real pain point at end game.
8- Lackluster skill combos. It really feels at current (level 19 Daggers and Crossbows) that I am just spamming out abilities. I have one combo proc and thats it. There might be more depth there as I progress, but it really plays with skills being isolated from each other, doing their own thing. Its a bit bland and makes combo feel spammy.

I think there is a good game to be made and played here. But it feels like they designed a mobile tab targeting game and then spent 6-8months rushing it into a full action combat game. I think if the targeting and movement problems can be sorted out and the ui gets some love, it could be an easy 8/10 but it plays so so clunkily

Its just not great.
There is a good setup, new girl in a new town with a Volatile power.
But by the end of the first episode, Alex getting overwhelmed by her power is no longer a problem at all and there wasn't impeteus for getting over this. She just gets better for plot sake.

Alex, our main character often just has very little to say, she just exists and progresses conversations. People don't have much opinions on her and it makes her feel like a vehicle for the player than an actual character.

The gameplay is also really unengaging. I physically cannot keep going as it was too boring. There is a constant "do this thing cus we need the player to do stuff". I never feel like I can investigate and find useful info, get hidden scenes or anything. I just have to go to objectives and go where I was told to. The power mechanic also plays really blandly. I can read people's minds, but it only amounts to fluff text. The big power moments also could have the power removed entirely and nothing would've changed. Compared to the first game where its an active tool you use to solve puzzles, get info and access what you couldn't before, it just plays like a telltale game without the qtes to keep the player awake.

The surrounding cast just kinda fall flat. There is something here, a spark in some of the characters. But they are rather one note and are just too player-friendly.

Finally the story. The first episode is 90% "welcome to new location" until the end event. From there the game inserts a "find the truth" plot that does not work because, the character we are meant to care for the player and character only knew for under a day/2-ish hours. You are then meant to be progressing towards finding out what happened, but the game has such little story to tell that its constantly filling the game inbetween with random crap. Its boring, incredibly so and the setting barely feels relevant.

Yet another game zombie driving the Life is Strange name all for medicore writing ability to take center stage with 0 understanding on what made the first game work.
Here's hoping double exposure doesn't make a trilogy of bland and unfun games