MrMuffinz legutóbbi értékelései

I waited until I got to the end-game to make this review because I wanted to give it a fair shake.
It took me roughly 42 hours to get to the end-game, and here's what all of that content entails:

I went through 3 acts (4, 5, and 6 are unfinished as of writing), ending at about level 45, and this took me about 28 hours. Then I went through the 3 acts again on the "hard difficulty" called Cruel which took me maybe another 10-12 hours. After you beat the final boss of Act 3 again you get whisked away to a new location for the "end-game", which is a massive randomly generated rogue-like map/ board game looking thing. If you played PoE 1, it's the Atlas, except it's a little more like Delve I guess.

Anyway, so I got to end-game and ran about 5 maps, and here are my thoughts on the game.
If you want a quick summary: I really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love it, but god does it need some balancing.

This game is a much more refined and way slower version of Path of Exile 1 with the quality of everything turned up to 10. The visuals are great, the maps are dynamic, there's an insane variety in enemies, the music is awesome, the gameplay is punchy, and the bosses are all mechanically heavy to make each one feel unique and memorable. Many might look at the "dodge rolling" and immediately think Dark Souls, but heed my warning, this is a noob trap/ misleading. The first act or so of the game will have you dodge rolling a ton but by Act 3 and onwards into Cruel you will pretty much only be using it to last minute avoid a few AoE's, and the game will become much more aggressive to the point that dodging might as well kill you.

This leads into my main gripe: the movement is slow as balls. This game has no movement skills at all and barely any increase to walking speed aside from on boots and some passives I think. You walk in this game. While the enemies run. This makes the levels/ maps feel even bigger (and believe me, they are also physically bigger than PoE 1's, so this hurts even more), and makes it so any mechanics that cause swarming like Rituals and Breaches are a death sentence to the point you either have to tank the hits or kill them all first as they crackhead sprint towards you. This is the main thing I'd like to see changed with the game.

Aside from this, the game needs balancing period. I played a Mercenary (Witch Hunter) and while that class is quite well balanced I think, the melee classes apparently suck pretty bad right now. Not to mention the item drops in this game absolutely blow, even compared to PoE 1. To fix the issue of "too many item drops" of PoE 1 they legit just reduced the amount of all drops and then barely increased the rate of good drops. So you'll find a rare maybe once every 30 minutes in the beginning and it's just complete ♥♥♥♥. Then you get to endgame where rares drop a lot more, and surprise, they're still mostly ♥♥♥♥. Even the unique are harder to get, and they still thought it was a good idea to make most of them a hinderance to use. Most of the common uniques actively debuff you and are only useful MAYBE in the first 10-20 levels of a character. Like what the ♥♥♥♥ is the point?

Anyway, the game is great, needs balancing.
I also really really love the story so far, it's very engaging compared to 1 and I can't wait to see where it leads.

It's so hard to decide, but this might be my favorite of the original STALKER Trilogy, if only by a hair. It's so far removed from SoC's tight narrative and multiple small interconnected levels with their own unique personality-- replaced with a much looser story meant to be a setup for STALKER 2, and fewer, much larger mini open-world levels.

This can be a divisive change depending on if you're an old fan or not, but I think it works well for this game. The open-world in this game is suited to be a lot more replayable, with anomalies constantly respawning artifacts of different rarities after blowouts/emissions, a ton of cleverly hidden stashes, and a ton of (VERY good) side quests that take you around to more hidden parts of the maps. The entire "feel" of the game is different for this, which is why I like both games nearly as much. STALKER SoC has that really nice early 2000's tight handcrafted feel with a very bright and colorful but dirty art style. CoP has much sparser POIs due to it's open world and loses a bit of that hand-crafted feel, and it's art style is much greyer/brown as well that hits a good "rusted out and irradiated" vibe. It's all push and pull, and luckily you can play both games depending on what you want to get from them.

Compared to Clear Sky, this game jerks the gameplay back into a different direction. CS played a lot more like a modern shooter with very low TTK for both you and enemies, but CoP almost overdoes it in the other way and makes it more like Shadow of Chernobyl but easier. You can find great weapons and armor early on if you're exploring that you very well could use the rest of the game, and the issue is that it makes any upgrades feel very underwhelming. If you find a TRs-301 (M4A1 really) very early and use it for the entire game if you wish. The rest of the 5.56x45 weapons by extension feel like they're barely better, especially when headshots is still the name of the game. None of this makes the game any less fun, but it makes some of the highs of the game less high than they could be. You still die very quickly no matter what. Even in an exosuit a couple snorks can take you down if you get slowed by one, and many of the mutants are still very resistant to bullets, even if you have the turbo-♥♥♥♥-you 600rpm assault rifle.

Story-wise, not much to write home about. As mentioned above, it was VERY clearly meant to be a setup to the 2012 STALKER 2. It looks like it still is, considering the new actually releasing version of STALKER 2 has Strider in it as seemingly prominent character. The story has you playing as a Major of the Ukrainian Security Service investigating why a military operation on the zone to contain it had failed so horribly. And the reason for it that you discover at the end is very underwhelming, and you if you're observant enough you might understand why pretty early on lol, as it becomes very obvious in hindsight. The real meat is the side characters you meet. Setting up who the big players will be in the center of the Zone with the quests you do, assuming you choose to be good instead of helping bandits and ♥♥♥♥ (and assuming the good endings become canon). They all have fun quests and the characters all have good personality and (written) dialogue. I was shocked.

Overall very fun game.
Took me years to actually beat the game, I always ran out of steam by the time I get to Pripyat, but this was my first STALKER game that I owned and I'm glad to see my nostalgia for the first two areas held up pretty well.

I'd give this one a 9/10.
STALKER 2 in 3 days as of writing babey.
God I hope it's good.

I hesitate to recommend this one after what I just experienced, but here goes.

This game is *very* different compared to SoC and Call of Pripyat.
Clear Sky is what you get when you made SoC and go "hmm it was successful but not call of duty successful, lets take some bits of SoC and try to turn it into a modern heavy action narrative shooter". It mostly works, and you can see a lot of the ideas and tech that was pushed into Call of Pripyat, but unfortunately it still wasn't that good, and even worse they seem to have always taken criticism harshly and 180 their bad choices with each game instead of improving them. CoP retains none of the interesting narrative bits of either SoC/CS, and has an otherwise pretty boring story with great gameplay, quests, and environments. I'd like a game that's somewhat in the middle, but I digress.

Gameplay: It's STALKER, and brings about the first of CoP's style of anomalies which I really love. As for combat, where in SoC that difficulty is "bullet sponge body, one tap headshot", in CS difficulty is drastically changed by removing bullet sponginess to the point where you and your enemies take but a few bullets to kill each other. I rather like this, or LIKED this, until the very last mission.

Hoooo ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boy do STALKER games have a reputation for awful awful last missions, and this is no exception. The last mission takes place at exactly the same place SoC's last mission takes place: the teleporter sequence of the sarcophagus, and while it doesn't drag on nearly as bad, the encounter is just horrible enough that it completely changed how I feel about the rest of the game despite liking it a lot and considering some of it better than it's narrative sequels. The entire last "stretch" of missions in general takes a huge turn into an action fest and it felt so off, just like SoC. Both games are quite slow burn with a few big firefights here and there and a couple crazy dungeons (labs), and then the final stretch they for some reason feel compelled to have a big explosive finale. It fits better in this game than SoC, but the gameplay change is jarring. You basically get locked into a series of linear Call of Duty missions after a point without really knowing when it's going to happen. Massive sequences where you're killing 100's of dudes and no way to restock ammo or buy anything except for trying to bum it off bodies, but oh wait, the enemies respawn in waves :|

As I said, I REALLY like most of the game. The engine of this one is probably the most unstable, even with Sky Restoration Project, half of the time me reloading resulted in CTDs. But the gameplay for MOST of the game is some of the best and people tend to sleep on it (maybe for good reason).

Without the last sequence of missions: 8/10
With the last sequence of missions: 5/10

Maybe when you start heading to the CNPP just quit and look up what happens. The only reason for the existence of this sequence is to explain why Strelok ends up in the dead truck at the beginning of SoC, though I was left quite unsatisfied regardless.

Excellent game that still holds up very well provided you use a community patch like ZRP to help clean up some stuff.
Boy did I forget how awful the ending level is. If STALKER 2's ending level isn't that ass then I want no part of it!!

Anyway, I recommend not modding it beyond adding Zone Reclamation Project for your first playthrough. The game has a very good and consistent art style and atmosphere that you start to kind of lose with any texture/lighting/environment overhaul mod. The jankiness of how the game looks and feels gives it soul. After all, if you're buying this you're certainly not doing so to play GAMMA/ Anomaly, might as well go all out and play it vanilla to see how this all started before checking out STALKER 2 (hopefully this doesn't age poorly, game comes out in a week from writing).

Absolute 9/10 game, absolute classic. I feel I had to subtract a point because I literally spent an hour on the last half of the last mission (if you've beaten this game you know the one) and it was driving me up the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wall with how much it was overstaying it's welcome.

Compared to the other two original STALKER trilogy games, I don't know where I'd place this one. I've beaten this one the most but I prefer the overall gameplay of CS/COP a tad more due to stuff like weapon/armor modding, repairing, and the weapon/enemy models not looking ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane. There's just something about the way this game feels and it's story that keeps me coming back. I'll have to see how I feel after beat Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat again, but I think this one has the most compelling story, CS probably has the best overall campaign, and COP has the best open world and gameplay, and is where the modern idea of STALKER originates from.

Quite a short game compared to it's sequel Shadow of War, clocking in at about 12 hours each play-through I've had, but it's very fun if you like any of WB's other newer "Arkham combat" games like Arkham Knight and Mad Max. Pretty good story and quite addicting to hunt down enemy captains and warchiefs.

This game doesn't really have the "Nemesis" system that Shadow of War has to make it so replayable, but it has the bones of it (and indeed a single "nemesis" character in the game).

Absolutely worth playing, and it's pretty short in that you could almost consider it a prologue chapter to Shadow of War by comparison. It goes on sale for cheap very often.

I don't know if any of the DLCs are worth it, they seem to be just small standalone chapters centered around the side characters of the game, but I haven't played them. There's also a few weapon/runes packs and a few orc factions but I don't recall seeing much of the new factions.

Took me years to finally beat this game having played and loved both HR and MD, but I would always quit out at Hong Kong. That was a mistake. This time I finally pushed past Hong Kong (which isn't even halfway through the game!). This game is incredible and holds up on it's own just fine compared to it's two prequels. It's way longer than you would expect a game from this era too. I think my playtime ended up being 14 hours having *mostly* explored everything important and making sure to do a majority of the side missions.

Insanely peak game, I feel like a dumb bastard for neglecting to beat this for so long.

Yet another case among the hundreds of games deserving of the line: "I wish there was a neutral recommendation option"

Dragons Dogma 2 is at it's best Dragon's Dogma 1 with better combat, and at it's worst it's a rushed mild disappointment that just hurts at how close it was to being amazing. It's a side-grade really.

The game is very front-loaded. Playing the game for the first 10-ish hours you might be thinking "holy ♥♥♥♥ this game is incredible", but as soon as you cross over the very obvious "second half" point of the game you will discover that said second half is very boring and the story content becomes rushed or at times non-existent. The first half/ biome sets up a ton of really interesting plotlines that you expect to be elaborated on further, but they never are, and I ♥♥♥♥ you not, once you cross over into the second half of the game it becomes "go to the new city > go to the castle > go investigate a ruin > alright time for the ending fight". If you're not doing side content you can finish the game from this point within like maybe a few hours. This wouldn't be so bad if the side content didn't get so boring so quickly. You will discover very fast that you can't walk 5ft in the world without encountering a goblin camp, a pack of lizard men, or a pack of wolves. These are the only 3 common basic enemies in the world. There's lizard and goblin variant types/ races that can be a bit different to kill but that's it. Otherwise the rest of the enemies are the same wandering mini-bosses like ogres, golems, metal golems, minotaurs, and griffins. They don't even include the enemies and other bosses from the first game such as the giant rooster.

The "end-game" portion does end up being really cool visually and atmospherically, it feels like you're in a Berserk style apocalypse, but it's sadly really short and is composed of timed boss fights that are pretty cool, but again it's short lived. You CAN stay in the end-game as long as you want once you beat the bosses but nothing really changes besides there's more undead wandering the world.

That said, the combat and gameplay is peak. There can be SOME issue with the combat, such as vocations having less ability slots compared to 1, but I enjoyed combat much more than DD1. Visually the game is stunning. Performance-wise the game kind of blows in the first city, but otherwise it was solid throughout (and the most recent patch apparently helped a ton, though I haven't played the game in months). The first half of the game "Vernworth" is incredibly fun and interesting to explore, and the second half is initially pretty cool but again, you'll be met with disappointment if you managed to care about the story at all.

I'm going to actually recommend it on a decent sale.
I enjoyed my time with it a lot but I wish it was much more than it currently is.
If I could, I would really rate this in the middle, but since I lean more positive I'll recommend.

As for whether this is better than DD1, or which one to get... eh...
DD1 is usually cheaper at least, and the story can be pretty interesting, but the combat is a bit rough at times.
So it's really up to you. My current recommendation is to get DD1 really cheap, play it, if you really loved it and want more of pretty much the exact same game with more fluid gameplay (but ultimately not an upgrade or downgrade), then get DD2. I spent about 60 hours in total with these games across about 2 weeks and it was absolutely worth it, they are very good action adventure RPGs.

Update: The final mission of The Final Shape released and it was absolute peak. It feels insane to actually have an "ending" to Destiny finally, and they absolutely crushed it. You fight the big bad in a large scale 12-man fireteam mission and then you get a very satisfying conclusion. No giant cliffhanger or anything for once. There's only some allusion to what the next 3 seasons/episodes are going to be about, but there's no more "something big is coming next year" as typical of past Destiny expansions.

Best campaign they've released IMO, and the "final mission" and raid aren't even out for another day.

Server issues on Day 1 aside, Bungie cooked hard with this expansion.

The entire campaign this time is done as a "single go" like a normal video game campaign.
In a typical Destiny 2 experience you would beat a mission, you would teleport back to the tower or whatever camp on the planet you're on, you would open your director to find the next mission, and then teleport to it or drive to it to continue the story. In The Final Shape, you start a mission, you finish it, and then you're given a short rest in a camp to listen to narrative, and then you start the next mission. You can leave and do other stuff if you want, but Bungie even puts a warning if you attempt this that says you should really just do it all in one go. Again you don't have to, but they really treat this like a traditional single player campaign.

Narratively they did quite a good job. The characters are great, their development, thoughts, and feeling are all explored in great detail, and there's a good few heart throb moments. Keith David kills it, though it will still be jarring, and if you didn't care or weren't around for Zavala's side stories for the past few years, you'll think his character change sudden and out of character, but I thought it was good.

In terms of level design, this map is basically a "greatest hits". It's an insane abstract mishmash of many levels that have been significant to the narrative over the years, and is about twice the size as whatever Destiny 2's largest patrol map might be. To top it off, it's full of new activities and has some of the coolest art they've done. A lot of Destiny areas have an "art piece" quality to those don't even compare. Almost every nook, cranny, and angle of the Pale Heart/ Traveler is striking to look at.

As for gameplay, they cooked just as hard here.
The new "Prismatic" class lets you combine all of the other light/dark classes to introduce new synergies, as well as new modifiers to go with them. It ends up making the game feel much more dynamic than it ever has before, and there's also a new sort of "ultimate" ability that buffs all your stats and damage on top allowing you to kill specially shielded enemies. It's very interesting combat for sure.

I'm going to address the Lightfall in the room: it didn't matter.
At all. Lol.
Not a single plot thread or character that originated from Lightfall made it into The Final Shape. The only thing that made it was the "end cutscene" but the end cutscene of Lightfall was literally the first part of The Final Shape's intro cut in half. If I have a single second hand regret, it's that they didn't just skip Lightfall and focus solely on this for 2 years. The content in this expansion is some of the most they've had, at a glance, but it could have been even more.

Overall, this is the first time I've been happy to play Destiny 2 since like... Beyond Light. I never could get into Witch Queen even though I acknowledge the story was pretty good. And I skipped Lightfall of course.

I rate this "Buy it if you like Destiny 2". If you don't like Destiny 2, then don't buy it.
If you think Destiny 2 is okay, then you can wait. It's ok. It'll still be here.
Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.

Much like the first game, Hades 2 feels great to play, has nice art, a kick-ass soundtrack, and good voice acting.
The biggest issue impeding my enjoyment of the game is the sheer amount of time padding added to the game.

The game is full to the brim with so-called "anti-speedrun" mechanics to ensure that you don't beat the game too fast/ don't miss out on the all the story in-between runs. This would honestly be okay if there was any subtlety to it. In Hades 1 it felt like the "anti-speedrun" was the fact that you don't have any of your permanent upgrades, death defiance, etc. In Hades 2, the second you make meaningful progress in the game they decide to kill your run with Eris cursing you to pretty much take +20% damage per every encounter (move to a new room, now it's 40%, etc.), or the game will sometimes just a random enemy that does more damage and has as much health as a MAIN boss you just fought two rooms prior. It's asinine. Eventually as you progress and finally make it to the end boss Eris stops showing up, or shows up way less. She's literally there just to temporarily make you end runs early in the early game.

This soured my experience a lot by witnessing it first-hand and seeing many other people experience it. Let the game have natural difficulty. If they need to tell the story, then just do what Hades 1 did by having you beat the game a bunch of times before getting the real ending. That should be enough to get the dialogue you need out if you're really worried about making sure the viewer pays attention to your story.

I'm refunding for now, but I will likely purchase again once it's closer to release and has hopefully had some improvements made on these infuriating mechanics. They unfortunately sapped all of my desire to play the game currently. I recommend this game if you really like Hades and don't care about being force reset, but I'm leaving it negative for now to express my disdain for this system.

This game is so incredibly good.
The story, the music, the gameplay, it's all so peak.
It evolves on the first game in every way possible, but unfortunately the game is fundamentally broken to it's core.

Touting a "3 year development cycle" like it's something to be proud of, it definitely shows. They spent zero time getting the game to be stable on PC, and barely any time on console either, though that at least has it's performance fixed now. On PC however, the game still has insanely up and down performance at the most random times no matter the settings, and a constant trademark "UE4 microstutter" on traversal and just in general. If you're lucky like me, one of the few mods out there can improve the stutter greatly, but the performance will never be good. Even with RT off, DLSS on, and High settings, my 4070Ti Super and Ryzen 3800x could not keep up some of the time. I don't really care about the performance however, my real issue with the game is the crashing.

Holy ♥♥♥♥ the crashing.
In typical gameplay I experience maybe 2-3 crashes the entire game.
Fine. Reload, doesn't usually happen again.
The cutscenes however, a big chunk of the game and where most of the story is kept, can sometimes have consistent repeatable crashes when triggering the cutscene. Of my crashes I probably experienced about 20 or so cutscene crashes, resulting in me just not being able to watch them and having to tab out and watch it on YouTube. Worst of all though, is I experience one of these crashes at the last level of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game. The big cutscene, the moment you've been fighting for the whole game, and it crashed right[/] as the cutscene started, so I could not even skip it. The instability of this game almost ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ blueballed me from finishing in the final 30 minutes of the game. I spent an hour doing the most random ♥♥♥♥ to try and get it to load, and I don't even rightfully know what did it. After exhausting stuff like turning all graphics settings off, changing resolution, changing controls randomly, and even just doing random ♥♥♥♥ in game before triggering the cutscene, it finally went through. Keep in mind, every time the game crashes you are forced to sit through a 45 second long splash screen, a 2-3 minute "shader compilation", and then finally the actual time it takes to load the level. Every single time. So testing these things were not quick. Unless they massively overhaul this game (incredibly unlikely), I don't think this game will ever be fixed. 10 years from now people will likely look at this trilogy and think "yep skip from the first game right to the third game because they never ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fixed it due to their 3 year dev cycle that they were so proud of".

If you really want to play this game, get it on a Series X or PS5, or else be insane enough to force yourself through all the crashing. It's still an incredibly good game, and the best Star Wars game I've ever played, but I do not ever want to return to this unless it somehow gets completely fixed.

Please for the love of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ god do not try going for a "3 year dev cycle" for the third game Respawn, I beg of you.