Recent reviews by Tripfy

The game is simply empty, few menus, basically one game mode and that's it. Progression for first few levels is quick, you get to unlock 2 more mechs out of 7 and then it stops to a crawl, it reeks of mobile game logic. On release, there's nothing to purchase, yet another cheap tactic of F2P trying to appear fair and friendly, so this game's gonna most likely turn into Pay to win mess few weeks later.
-hand holding tutorial, click here, then there, you can't do anything else
-matches turn into sniper duels or two dog robots rushing and killing you without chance
-players enter gremlin mode and steal all drops from dead enemies
-core loop is killing weak bots, then larger bots while hoping that you'll run into one of the 5 teams of 2
-traversal on longer distances gets boring fast
-when extraction is called, you have to rush across entire map, doing nothing but sprinting for 2 min
-matches feel too quick, there's no tactics or skill, just run, gun and pray to RNG
-some "players" must literally be artificial bots, there's no way you fire at a guy and he stands still, staring at you and slowly firing, regardless of his decreasing hp, this happened in several matches
-if your team mate dies, you're boned, 1 vs 2 is really tough to win
-on release the game has Mostly Negative rating, at least for once gamers don't put up with bait and switch pulled by devs, game presented in gameplay trailers is not this mobile port that AI could have coded...

At the start I've wanted to give the game a positive review, as it was fun and engaging - but after roughly 25h, hitting lvl 24, unlocking all three titans and suffering through countless matches, I can't recommend it. A lot of things need to be changed, something has to be done about every match starting as two sides of camping snipers or rocket spammers, mech building is a confusing chore and getting new parts is done by buying random gear that you don't want (there's no gear store with all parts). Upgrading gear is very expensive and will take weeks to max out even a single mech, at which point a random nerf can come...

-P2W has become a real problem week after game's release: more pre-made mechs for purchase, entire sets of weapons for purchase, premium to boost resources, battlepass without any challenges and slow leveling just to push players to purchase (it's possible to win as F2P but there's A LOT of paid mechs around)
+players that run into walls and don't shoot damaged mech parts are fun to kill
+graphics and sound effects are both good
+certain weapons are responsive and fun to use, others feel like you're spraying water on concrete
-once you hit lvl 7 and unlock Titan (super tanky and strong mech), matches start to drag on
-entire matches filled with camper snipers, matches take forever and get very frustrating (now it's upgraded to rocket campers that hit you even behind walls)
-passive team mates, who are scared to move with you, so you vs enemy is 1 vs 3 often
-any game mode other than TDM is painful, most players IGNORE objectives or even marked enemies
-no way to block or report players, I've had AFK team mates, ppl who threw the match, people that dealt 1/10th of my dmg and ignored objectives - yet I'm forced to play with them in future matches again
-confusing mech building system, UI is a mess, it's unclear why you can't use certain parts or where those parts even fit
-also extremely confusing and poorly designed shop system, you have to buy random unwanted gear for ingame currency, in order to hopefully get in the next roll some useful gear, and then you can't even use it !
-arbitrary limitations on "Factory" mechs, why can't you change any parts on them and have to first convert them to Custom ? I've also lost a factory mech, because I've removed 1 weapon from it, it didn't show up in the list and so I've had to build a new mech and use parts from this invisible mech...who playtested this !
-several Gb patches almost daily, but game is just getting worse
-3 forced tutorial matches at start with bots vs bots, 1 would have been enough
-for the first 3 hours I've played always on the same map, I was near quitting the game
-at launch the game servers would randomly crash and kick you out of the game, now it's better but often you'll get stuck in a match as spectator, wait with others unable to play, then few mins later a server error kicks all out

-almost no feedback from kills, gameplay feels cheap, TTK is too fast
-hero powers are so useless that everyone just runs around gun spraying and not bother to use the skills
-mobile game trashtics of making player click on everything "new" and force guiding them towards store
-majority of characters are from the start locked behind a paywall
-poorly designed spawns right next to enemies, spawncamping
-footstep sounds everywhere, confusing to orient yourself by
-gimmick of consumable cards is not enough to innovate the gameplay
-main mode is just Search & Destroy, feels slow with all the wait times between matches and at the start of a match
-certain skills take too long to activate, it's faster to just shoot the enemy
-map UI is extremely confusing, for some reason it shows direction where team mates are facing same as for your own character
-everyone just uses either 1 type of assault rifle or 1 type of sniper rifle, maybe 1 person per match uses something else

Fans are praising a game for the IDEA of what it could one day become, but the game's state right now is rough.
I can't in good faith blindly recommend a game just because I'm a fan. Stalker 2 needs more time, it honestly needed some testing that would reveal all of the problems listed below. Underneath all that is a spirit of the original Shadow of Chernobyl, but just like that game had a rough launch and ran poorly, history repeats itself with the new one as well.

Positives
+feeling like the original Stalker, random hidden loot stashes, side quests with rewards, roaming gangs of enemies and mutants attack you out of nowhere
+difficulty options, on hardest (Veteran) enemies are quite accurate, mutants deal a lot of damage, guns jamming in middle of fights make it bit more challenging (easy difficulty dumbs the game down for I'd say complete FPS beginners, aka what's shown in game trailers)
+a lot of different anomalies which are deadly, different weathers, even zone emissions that kill NPCs that for some reason stand outside, when they're right next to a house - free loot I guess
+story is interesting, even when sometimes it's not exactly comprehensible, some actions have consequences, but a lot of them are softer than you'd expect
+screenshot worthy moments

Negatives
-TLDR: poor performance - you must use DLSS or FSR to have playable FPS of 40-60, bugs, glitches, missing features, AI spawning out of thin air or forgetting that you're fighting them, low carry weight limit, very expensive repairs for damaged gear and weapons, no mixed audio of English and Ukrainian for main and side quests, so you either play completely with subtitles and miss key info because you were randomly attacked or you'll have American English for ALL NPCS
-NPCs must reach their final destination to let you talk to them, if you talk to them earlier, they reply generic comment + you risk bugging the mission
-when looting dead enemies, you don't see their faction or rank, just a nothing saying name
-no loot from mutants, can't loot their body parts to sell them
-unable to use uniform of a faction as camouflage to blend in, they will attack you anyway
-can't see the standing with faction going up or down when doing certain actions, like killing the members of that faction
-no night vision and no binoculars, pitch black areas
-mutant AI can't figure out how to combat player standing on any tall object - all then run in corner and sulk there, sometimes get stuck or run in circles like mad
-bloodsucker AI on Veteran (hardest diff) runs at me, hits me for 80% of my HP, cloaks up and runs away to repeat it again
-later on mutants and bosses on Veteran are total bullet sponges, patch lowered HP for some of them, but Chimera and Pseudogiant are still even with best moded guns just tanking shots, often their AI bugs out and they get stuck in one spot, allowing you to actually kill them
-enemies seem to randomly spawn out of thin air, several times they've spawned right in front of my eyes, when running through empty fields game likes to spawn behind me bandit gang or random bloodsuckers / there's been few infinite enemy spawns
-enemies randomly forget that they're in a firefight with me, they'll stop attacking and go back to their routine of walking around, hilariously at this moment game allows me to Quick save because the threat is gone
-headshots from a pistol deal randomly more damage than headshots from an AR - I've cleared an entire army base and most of those kills were with a pistol, because it killed the soldiers sometimes in one hit, sometimes in two or three, vs several scoped in aimed hits with an AR, very strange
-a LARGE amount of healing supplies - on Veteran I didn't expect to have 25 medkits and 30 bandages just by going around and looting some bandits and stash or two, I've started to sell healing supplies because they increase total weight and I won't use so many, plus I keep finding more and more, especially before big fights
-inability to remove attachments from special weapons - I've found an AK in a stash with scope, it was for the first several hours the only gun with a scope that I've had, the repairs were too expensive and I couldn't just remove a scope that literally just slides at the top of the rails
-almost every gun that I loot from any enemy that was using it as broken and marked as red - I can't sell it, I can't do anything with it except unload ammo and drop it - overview that's supposed to show the durability before you pick up a gun often doesn't work, it feels like there was supposed to be a crafting system and this is its remnant
-enemy gun floating in the air upon stealth kill with a knife, dead getting up and then falling back into their dead position (not zombies), enemies T-posing and then instantly attacking you, enemy holding invisible gun etc...
-lighting in rooms - sometimes when looking into a room from outside, even when it's not sunny, the room is pitch black, like the lights forgot to work ? and when looking outside from a room, the whole outside is blown out like a sun erosion, extreme brightness
-sound effects sometimes break, so you don't hear your gun or weather sound breaks up every few seconds
-weight limit - the original game had quite a strict weight limit, here at least money has no weight, but after looting few enemies you'll be too heavy to run properly, stamina will deplete extremely fast and overall it worsens your playthrough - and yet, looting is a core mechanic, getting excited after a gunfight, finding a new gun in decent condition, only to be forced to slow walk -there are suit upgrades, but even after finishing the game, I haven't found all
-majority of artifacts have -radiation as negative trait, making you literally unable to use them, until you find an artifact with +radiation / it can take you 20+ hours like it did for me, truth is, most artifacts are sadly just eye candy
-after the first killed enemy, AI instantly knows where you are and uses half broken guns like laser sniper rifles, perfectly hitting you across dozens of meters and even through cover
-sadly you either play in one language or the other, so side quest NPCs and even random bandits will be either talking in English or Ukrainian, it's not mixed that main quest would be in English and rest in Ukrainian, either all or none
-no dynamic lighting - a key feature that was in the original Stalker and has allowed it to preserve its atmosphere well, some rooms look simply too dark
-easy difficulty in my opinion makes the game so easy that it loses its own identity and essence, it was clearly used for production of several game trailers, where enemies miss shots like they're Stormtroopers in a tunnel
-veteran difficulty is good for humanoid enemies, but mutants are painfully bullet spongy, bosses in several fights had insane HP while dealing near instant kill dmg to best upgraded armor you could get at the time
-lastly, game has crashed many times and I've had to reload saves to get out of bugs

To all the joke and fake positive reviews...Being a fan is okay, excusing everything because of your love for a franchise is not however. You're not doing your beloved game a good service by lying to others about the current state of it. People blinded by your review will try it, refund it and possibly never touch it again. The zone will not gain new Stalkers, it'll lose more of them this way. So please, consider writing fair, honest and helpful reviews.

To be honest, for how long this game was in development, how many times its release date was pushed back another year and what we've been shown in trailers, I was expecting a more finished and polished Stalker experience, than something janky that you could compare to game from 15 years ago. A lot of people are disappointed by the AI's intelligence and refuse to continue playing, others have broken saves.

Game for fans of magic and exploration
Absolutely worth it game for the discounted price and you don't have to be a Harry Potter fan. Descriptions of the important areas and items reward you with XP and give you a small info about them, immersing you in this magical world.
J.K. Rowling wasn't involved in creation of Hogwarts Legacy and she'd most likely hate it for certain things.
+Graphics are beautiful, decent facial animations
+Detailed world built with attention to detail
+Puzzles, fun side quests, large amount of spells
+The world feels alive, it's not waiting for you to arrive like in other games
+Metroidvania style exploration, revisit older areas with new abilities and unlock new secrets
+Summoning and flying on a broom feels seamless, controls are well done
+Lockpicking minigame that's fun to interact with
+Dialogue options make sense and feel like something that you'd like to pick
+In certain quests, you can pick a mean option and the characters will remember it, fun little easter egg
+Plenty of cosmetic options, each gear you loot is added as Appearance and you can change the look of whatever you wear
+Game's performance is fine, 5800x3D and RTX 4070, settings on Ultra, with Raytracing and DLSS, I've had only few stutters
-Combat at the start can feel a bit spammy with the basic attack, but give it just few hours of quests and you'll learn plenty of spells, you can have 16 in your quick slots - it's enough to not even need the basic attack anymore
-Gathering materials can be fun or feel like a chore, but later on you'll unlock the ability to basically summon most of the ingredients that you'll need, even creating potions for free, which greatly helps to actually use them
-More spell slots would be welcomed and larger gear inventory as well
-Few times I got stuck in places out of which was no return, luckily you can always open Map and teleport elsewhere
-You can't interact with the NPCS in the world, can't really use your magic on them - which is a shame, cause it would lead to some fun situations
-There's some LGBT content in the game, that feels out of place for the world you're in. Maybe it's there to provoke Rowling, maybe it's there as inclusion, but nevertheless it felt odd to interact with. It's a small enough part of the game, that it shouldn't detract from your overall enjoyment of the game.
TIPS
-Don't adjust your character's voice pitch, it creates strange effect of echo and produces worse audio quality. If you did adjust the pitch, go into game's Settings, Audio options, and click Reset to defaults, that'll fix your character's voice.
-In the settings in the last option - User interface, I'd suggest to turn off: Show hud tracking icons / and / Show minimap. That way, when you want to find something, you look around, use magic spells to help you, press V to show you where to go and it's overall more immersive than just staring at minimap and have an icon point to exactly where you need to be.

Hogwarts Legacy feels like Skyrim, in a good way. Receive a new quest, start moving towards the area, find a cave to explore, enemies near the cave fight a troll, ancient trial with a small puzzle, random character that needs help and then few hours later, I get to my actual quest :D The fact that it's so easy to get lost in the game's world, says a lot about how immersive it feels and how much it has to offer. Finally another proper open world game, where you can enjoy using magic :) More freedom would have been nice, but then they'd honestly have to spend another 5 years adding all the possibilities.

Detailed graphics in a horde style shooter, plagued by connection issues and inability to play with other players.
Poor variety of weapons for most classes and weapons feel much weaker compared to other 40k games.
Simplistic melee combat that consists of one button to mash and other button to parry attacks.
Darktide has superior melee, Deathwing has superior feeling classes and weapons.
AI in coop and singleplayer is abysmal, often standing around not doing anything.

Campaign is epic and beautifully looking, sadly it was designed as coop with singleplayer being an afterthought, so you'll be stuck with AI team mates, which will take away from your enjoyment of the game.
Coop missions are side stories to the campaign, with 6 difficulty settings. These missions tend to feel repetitive when you play them few times in a row, there's no randomization or variety, just the same missions over and over where you walk from point A to point B, with some collectibles hidden within levels, but nothing like Grimoires or Tomes. You just break boxes by rolling through them and hope for something useful or walk off the main path to a corner with collectible.
PvP is serviceable, but it's not this game's main focus or even strength. Certain classes are far better than others, progression between coop and pvp are not shared, you die quite quickly even 1v1, it often comes down to 1 vs 2 or 3, so expect lots of deaths. Teams can get pushed all the way back to spawn and you can join such matches in progress as well.

SM2 is a barbie dressing sim for space marine fans, there's large amount of chapters (factions) that just use different color combinations and emblems where available, actually different looking cosmetics are locked behind DLC. Fans praised the game since release, large portion of them pre-ordered and played several days in advance, then gave the game positive review hours after official release. In reality, at launch there were serious coop issues preventing players from playing at all, crashing their games and locking people out of coop with others and terrible AI that refused to help even in Campaign. These issues persist, they got even worse recently with a content update, with no fix in sight. Fans online are extremely defensive about the game, critique or new ideas are strictly rejected, yet in the game everyone's silent and doesn't use text chat, even when you try to engage with them.

This game works best when you play solo
A breath of fresh air for the first few hours, that turns into a grind for resources with repetitive combat. You build your little house, gather weird creatures to help you at home, shoot and melee zombies while getting showered with rewards. Game has it's issues and the negative reviews are deserved, see the explanation below.
The good parts
+light survival mechanics, hunger and thirst deplete slowly, stamina recharges quickly, lots of resources to never die
+good looking graphics, decent voice acting
+arcady style combat where melee is king
+monster catching, you get to use them in combat or in your base
+tons of crafting and complexity, resources etc
+events, login rewards and no hard P2W push
+search for hidden stashes, while being ambushed by random alien looking creatures, especially in bad weather reminds me heavily of S.T.A.L.K.E.R
The issues:
-Server wipes after 6 WEEKS, a big issue that's still being discussed all over forums, currently there are no servers safe from this, not even PvE only - you do keep some things, but majority is still deleted, along with your progress and home
-servers fill up so fast that even after few days, friends can't join your server, you must make a new character basically all at once to play together, losing ALL
-ability to play with friends - even when you're in a team, quests often separate you, if you teleport to someone else's house, you get separated by a different world, quest items sometimes work only for one person and quest progress does not work for all, everyone must solo complete all steps in many missions...this was clearly a solo game with coop being added later
-the UI is terrible, menus upon menus, it's like the game was made by excel spreadsheet enthusiast
-quite early on, bosses start to become bullet sponges, even elite enemies are face tanking more than in Division, sadly the best way to deal with that is stunlock them with melee attacks, which becomes quite boring soon
-voice overs for quests run out soon and then it's back to reading walls of story text
-the story is confusing and feels like you've opened a book on page 105
-base building is finicky, with lots of bugs, also the only way to have a large window in your house, is to buy a $50 Glass pack
//Update: At level 50, you're supposed to do Lea Research Lab mission for the story and for Seasonal challenges. The difficulty spike is insane, bullet spongy enemies, forever spawning minibosses and there isn't any proper match making for this 4 player activity.

Think like Nexon: design a monetization scheme first, then make a game around it.
Copy mechanics from Warframe and Destiny, then put roadblocks several hours in and start forcing players to pay or grind endlessly. Add poor optimization, bad value to cash shop items, bugs and server issues - voila, TFD's born.
Dull enemy AI, predictable story filler, the only thing keeping the whales spending are sexy characters, maid outfits and ofc gear so that they feel OP and can brag online.
-base Descendants will cost you $120, one ultimate descendant = $60, 100 gear slots = $50 / boosters, season pass, material packs, recolored skins, reactors for weapons and descendants, crafting times - mobile game tactics galore!
-most popular and early unlocked chacarter, Bunny, just runs around with electric pulse around her, killing everything instantly or she runs in circles to kill the heavier enemies, without even using a gun - peak game design !
-enemy AI: they slowly walk towards you and take no cover, bosses have several health bars and forced invincibility sections, where they spawn floating balls above their heads - these balls are bullet spongy and at higher levels quickly regenerate, Colossi are extreme bullet sponges - the higher level you go, the more you feel like shooting bb guns

TLDR: It's a fun game with friends and sometimes randoms too, but get it early based on your tolerance for the issues below
+Graphics, effects, the game looks nice
+Plenty of weapons and utilities to unlock
+Situations get quickly hectic with swarms of enemies
+Satisfying bombardment support, with large explosions, minigun, napalm, laser and even a nuke
+Death can be quickly countered, with limited revives though
-only 2 enemy factions, with different enemy types yes, but it needs more variety
-shooting is arcady, aiming and response needs some work, especially first person perspective is quite bad
-bugs, glitches: getting stuck on terrain, getting stuck while picking up items, glitching through textures of your own ship and having to quit and join up with friends again, hard crashes of the game, failing to join players through match making, getting stuck on forever loading screen even while solo traveling to your ship
-unfinished features: random selection of leader of the squad, no ability to promote to leader so you have to quit and join together again after match making, missing markers on important upgrades in the ship for starters, unlocks system is very basic and at the start quite grindy, your ship feels empty, on the planets - long distances to run with often nothing to do meanwhile (The Division flashbacks), rescue missions are so far the most annoying as three of you stand next to buttons, sending waves of dumb humans to run through hordes of enemies (they even climb on top of the enemies or run right into them), certain enemies feel almost indestructible with your limited weaponry in the early levels, poor explanation of difficulties and really strange difficulty spike very early on, customization of your character is extremely basic - 2 body types, 4 voice packs and no face/hair etc (strangely, no male / female, it's Brawny / Lean body and then Voice 1-4, plus your female character is just a smaller guy model) - strange for a game with strong comedy and parody themes
-voice chat with open mic, you can mute it - sometimes it's funny, other times not so much

If you have some friends to play with, this game can be a fun experience. Just a bit repetitive, with only two enemy factions and after certain point, there's nothing to spend your resources on. They've added several new paid weapon passes, but majority of the important stuff is unlockable just by playing the game, so you'll be missing out on just some new weapons.

// So the updates seem to focus now on adding more paid warbonds, there's 7 in total, 1 can be unlocked by playing and others have to be purchased ($10 per 1) and contain unique weapons like explosive, electric and chemical ones. In a paid coop game, putting new content behind paywall while nerfing regular weapons constantly, not a fair deal for players. Plus you're forced to accept new EULA on game's startup, that has just unclickable link without text and no explanation on what you've just agreed to, other than it leading to playstation...

In short, it's grindy, loot system sucks and randomly you'll face mega bullet sponges that will deal 3x the damage of any enemy before that. Story's confused with itself, season pass rewards are pathetic, Season 2 had at least good powers, Season 3's just bad (dungeons overfilled with traps, if you get hit x amount of times, you can't open the final chest).
-it took 45 hours on the first playthrough doing story for my necromancer to start properly dealing damage
-at level 50 I've still had lvl 30 legendary items, because those help your build to not suck so badly (specific aspects)
-in third season, currently lvl 45, I still have lvl 25 legendaries...you mostly get fodder drops or low level items from enemies of your own level...
-armor and weapon vendors have literally no function, they sell blue and yellow gear = useless
-when you start new character on Seasonal server, you'll have no money or resources from your other characters, back at 0 with everything
-very limited space in inventory, which you can't expand, you'll have to constantly travel to towns just to scrap the garbage or not bother picking the items up, but then you can't upgrade your gear...
-the game's clearly designed to waste as much of your time as humanly possible and your character looks for the most of the time ugly, so of course there's a cash shop, in the same menu as Map and Season pass...

Blizzard's just trying to get away with as much nonsense in their games nowadays as possible, mobile Diablo makes them tons of money cause of whales, so they try to push those crap mechanics into triple A titles.

This Diablo isn't worth the price, even on sale, get instead Last Epoch or Path of Exile / PoE 2 when it comes out.