Recent reviews by Zem

It's an alright game, but they've made it far too grindy now. You used to be able to pick it up and play randomly, without major setbacks, and you were rewarded for just playing the game. Now it feels too articulated and specific, it's overwhelming and obnoxious.

Plus, the devs are major ♥♥♥♥♥ about modding and evidently have monumental egos. God forbid you get a reshade or retexture something.

These guys couldn't make a competent anti-cheat if their lives depended on it.

I love this game so much, I've played through it from start to finish multiple times. The modding community is fantastic, the player base is as well. The environment is diverse and beautiful. The gameplay mechanics allow for all sorts of manners of play, incredibly inclusive to any sort of player.

10/10 GOTG

I do wish we could expect a DLC though

10/10 would recommend

I've always loved the Soulsborne games, and despite complaints here and there I find this to be my favorite of all of them.
Are there some things "copy pasted?" Sure, but the game is absolutely massive.

DLC is amazing as well. Would have been nice to have a bit more lore fleshed out, admittedly. As we're still left with many questions unanswered, and some new ones. I hope they release another DLC. Even if it's another game entirely, I'd buy it.


People thinking the game is too hard just need to git gud. It could honestly be more difficult imo



EDIT: I love getting banned because I trusted an online player, picked up an item, and it was a cheated flagged item to deliberately get me banned. Support won't help you either, they just blame you. Guess I'll get to play again in ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ February.

Albeit the hours aren't really on this account, I have well over 2.5k hours in this game. I've had it uninstalled for years, and fairly recently reinstalled. Apparently, amidst that time it was uninstalled bots and cheaters have become an insane issue. You'll find servers solely inhabited by bots accounts, or bots will join your match, noise and chat spamming. The latter often advertising a fake immunity to their bot, and even anti-bot bots to follow your games?

VAC has been a joke for as long as I've played PC over the passed roughly 18 years. I wonder if Valve will ever actually give a ♥♥♥♥ and make a decent anti-cheat. Probably not, but one can hope.
Despite Valve making millions of TF2 micro-transactions alone, they take no action. God forbid they just update VAC, right? An anticheat used on their games that make them BILLIONS annually.


***Edit***
The bots are gone, VAC is still trash though

I wanted For Honor but didn't have the money for it.

I hate battle passes, and the items you earn have uses which is pretty lame.

Decent game for it being free.

Love MTG, MTGA is pretty solid truthfully, but man oh man are the players toxic and brain dead. Don't be one of those sorcery or instant spamming f*cks with removal, damage, or counter spells. Micro transactions are over priced, and of course there's a battle pass because it's the 21st century.

Would recommend though. I'm glad this game is finally on Steam, I used to use the epic launcher.

I love movement based games, and this one hits it out of the park. Good amount of content, lots of replay value. Would recommend

This game is absolutely horrible, and a complete waste of time.
I'm so surprised by how much has been done for the game, yet it is completely and utterly garbage.
The animations, dialogue, map design, mechanics, fluidity, and so much more are horrendous and aren't intuitive in any capacity.
Do not recommend

I've nearly completed the game in a matter of 8.2 hours. I have sat down and played this game three times, yeah with some decent length sections but still.

I really missed the DS series, and it's very reminiscent of that, to which I appreciate. I've got well over 1.2k hours on DS3 alone, across my PS4 and Steam. Beaten it countless times.

Mortal Shell is alright, however it's not without it's criticisms though. Yes, there are a lot of quotation marks, and that's on purpose. Good graphics, decent performance, pretty decent sound track. It's honestly really disappointing because I think they had some really good concepts and ideas here, and just didn't live up to the potential.

What even is the story? Not really sure, like I get vague concepts and I've tried going around in the world to gather what I can, just doesn't feel evident enough from what I'm getting. Sure, I can and have looked it up and stuff, but I shouldn't have to, especially to this degree. It felt like the devs just wanted to try recreating some DS mechanics with some of their own twists, then half ass threw a "world" around it. There's no motivation, and no immersion.

The maps can be beautiful, but they feel cluttered and hectic. Even worse than the over the top environment in Bloodborne. At the same time, there's not really anything to go off of in your environment in order to build a good mental map of the place.
Boss rooms are sick, general map can just be a tad much I'd say, even when considering that into the setting it's trying to portray in a given area.
Do you like exploring maps to find cool items, areas, encounters and more? Well give up on that in this game, because you *might* be "rewarded" for that twice. So much of the already limited amount of map is just blank, or full with filler.

The AI leaves a lot to be desired. The Hadren fights would all break for me, no matter how many times I'd restart them. I ended up just going along with it, and just wailing on a frozen character who might occasionally try to swing while standing in place. General path finding is rather bugged, could use some tuning there. Enemies get stuck on props, or corners, and all sorts of things, and it's a bit ridiculous.


The game felt difficult at first, I loved it. There's a little bit of a grind you can do to get your gear upgraded to make things easier. But there's a big issue in this game, in my opinion, and that's that there isn't enough. We're limited to 4 characters with pre-determined stats, with generic variation. You get a "skill tree" with the a limited amount of options, though they do offer a couple cool bonuses/effects/buffs/etc. Maxing out a character really doesn't take long at all, and while that may sound good, it just doesn't feel like you're doing anything with your character, there's no customization. I could understand a lack of customization for narrative purpose, and there "is" to a degree, but I wouldn't say enough to justify it.
There are like 3 main bosses, a handful of "mini bosses," and what feels like maybe 10 enemies otherwise. Given the 4 choices of weapons, with no difference in move-sets other than speed, combat got boring very fast. Like I said, I'm writing this at the last boss fight with 8 hours in.
Parrying and Riposte are inconsistent af. I gave up on using it, which really disappoints and frustrates me considering it's a way to heal and this game severely holds back healing options. But hey, at least Harden is cool?

The game is actually really easy, stupidly easy actually. They try to make up for it by making you thirsty for items that actually do anything at all, like healing.
"JuSt DoNt GeT hIt!" Yeah, parry is inconsistent af, and dodging sucks unless you're using Tiel, so there's pretty much just harden. And excuse me, I didn't realize that a pro not hit speed runner was reading my review, nice to meet you.


It's frustrating that I held hope and held out for the game, wishing it would pick up, only for it not to. So now I won't be able to return it, lmao
It's not like what I'm saying hasn't been said before, just look at these other reviews.


Also, +1 for letting me pet a cat

Seems like it'll be fun when it doesn't run like trash. Couldn't even finish the tutorial because it was broken.
What is it with companies releasing things unfinished?
I wouldn't recommend getting Odyssey until you've heard it's been fixed.