Recent reviews by Thewe

Overall this is a happy purchase.

The world is beautiful and engrossing with a spot-on atmosphere. The combat is fun and rewards mastery. The campaign ended right when I felt like it was dragging on for too long, so that was a nice touch. The endless operations game mode is giving me more of what I want and that's great too. It's short excursions into the fray to accomplish tasks, like in the campaign, and becomes a grind for improvements and class unlocks that change the gameplay enough to keep experimenting.

There are a couple things I hope developers consider with any sequels or additional content.

The event queuing system that alerts you of opportunities to dodge/parry is an agent of Chaos. The timing is simply wrong. If you choose to live by it, you will quickly die by it. It seems to be triggered by an AI decision to perform the action with no consideration for varying times to animate or travel to the player. This will lead to either windows that are far too short to respond, or having a response that is WAAAAY too early. Also, it is the exact same sound for dodge and parry, though those two actions require different responses. This adds lag time to responding because you need to dart your eyes and confirm the color of the indicator, then press the appropriate button. It's not the worse thing ever, but I think it can be greatly improved with some minor changes.

The health/armor recovery was not engaging. The white HP bar you can recover does not stay long enough to get the enemy low enough for an execution unless you shoot them to get them to that point without taking damage, and all the damage you take is while sprinting from your cover to them. I ended up going around everywhere with almost zero health and full armor. At full health the enemies nuke you to low health in 2 seconds, sometimes faster. Then at low health, they seem to act more reasonably and target the AI (Yea I played the whole thing solo with AI). I don't know for sure, but it also seemed like there is a damage reduction that scales with missing health giving an overall impression that you're supposed to feel overwhelmed and on the brink of failure at all times and okay, sure, I guess that's 40K. No health - behind cover - watching a warp drop 10 enemies in your lap - and that's when you use the grenade you've been saving and charge in to execute an enemy with its own claw. Once I figured this out I felt defeated. The game is impossibly hard if your goal is to stay at high health. It's too easy if you don't care about that and cheese some things I won't spoil further.

Maybe this is all intentional because I found it fun again when I forgot about health and damage and made it my goal to play like a movie actor fulfilling the role of Titus. Apathetically spraying xenos blood with my bolter and indignantly stomping heretics like brush fires.

Overall, great game and it delivers on the promises in the trailers.

Walked around the intro as the kid. Immediately find that I can walk on top of barrels in the corner of the room but got stuck because it would not walk back down. Game close and open restarted from an autosave to fix that.

Very first decision is to make sure the game's AI doesn't start flipping your gender back and forth. I'm not making this up, they have an option where it just does that. It tells me a lot about how the story will be going. Drenched in impotence and self-loathing.

The roaming around is the best part. Beautiful scenic wilderness.

Then the stealth and combat in the first camp. Stealth was okay. Fighting feels like fighting 'gifted' people red-lining the spectrum needle. They are so dumb, but if they ever land a hit your lights are out because of their gift-strength. In reverse, you have to chop them down like a tree. Fighting is so tedious. There might be a stealth kill, but I didn't find the button. There was no reward for sneaking up behind anyone.
Also, from the audio it seems about half of everyone you kill are women. This is unsettling and a stupid decision. It doesn't mimic historical accuracy. It's not something people with good mental health want to hear. It's a bad idea from someone with issues they need to ignore and suppress until they are gone. The game is clearly made by some people with mental health issues.

The first pseudo boss-type character exhibits the same traits like it's a flex for the first half of the fight, while you're forced into slow motion tutorial prompts to dodge. That was fine at first. It took far too many tries because he has the ability to drop his weapon, pull out two hammers, and swing to 1-hit you in about 10 frames. All three things happen in about 10 frames. After several times of playing along with the tutorial that is either buggy or a fat lie, I ignored the tutorial and came close to victory, but the Russian roulette got me even more times where I was in range and he could just decide to practically insta 1-shot me. Finally, I gave up on this game and just shot him with a bow. I'm glad I decided to give up because the boat travel after that was about as lame as the pink and baby-blue flags at the Ubisoft office. It's a shame because I see a lot of good ideas, but they are held together with booger glue.

The testers had to be on SSRIs to play this and think everything's fine. The combat takes way too much time for the quality level. It's not satifying to kill anybody. Like putting away laundry, it's easy and takes forever but doing one part wrong means doing it again.

Great game. Everything is as advertised - even a little better.

>Not recommending the DLC
Liar ahead

>Not recommending the DLC
Liar ahead.

Read this review with a heavy pause between each word while imagining an epic orchestra of brass and string instruments elevating intensity and repeating every 16 seconds.

RNG if some units land hits. RNG for starting units. RNG for "specialization" you start with. RNG for "perks" you get between rounds (You always have to get the big circles that deletes opponent's troops). After you realize that RNG in strategy games are just time sinks that slow down the players figuring out how awful the actual strategy elements are, you'll find that there are stupid bugs considering the developers put effort into integrating the "Streamer is live on YouTube" buttons.
Chat keeps popping up in the middle of combat for you to type.
You have to keep selecting to hide chat every time you boot up the game.
Nauseatingly slow and obvious outcomes are common and you have to watch mechanized houses meander slowly to their death for 60 seconds with no chance of killing the air units waiting on them, which will take all day killing the swarm of idiot robots that park themselves under the enemy flyer they can't attack. (You cannot fast forward - you MUST watch this)
And you can just suck for the first 10 rounds of the game and then buy a nuke, and a level 2 troop that counters what your opponent has been investing in because it's been beating you in the low-risk early rounds, and then win the game because it's a high-risk late round.

Basically, the real strategy is to time the risky late round to win in your favor.
Have you ever played that game where you grab the broom handle with someone else and you each put your hands above the other's until the winner is the hand on top? That's this game when you spend the money and the 20~ hours figuring out all the counters and "strategies"

If you sped up reading instead of putting a heavy pause between every word, skip the game, too.

Very good mix between the good parts of Darkest Dungeon and FF Tactics.

Keeping everyting locked is stupid. You cannot do anything to better 'prepare' for dungeons until you've abandoned quests and died over and over. Games can be fun and hard at the same time without this senseless punishment for starting a new save. It looks great, but is only frustrating in practice.

Simplicity with style...