Recent reviews by Soma

Well the ring is somewhat useful, sure. And the hat is probably among the best in the game. The rest of the gear however is worthless, unfortunately. All clothing items are in your inventory from the beginning, sure, but you can't wear them until you become a pirate. That happens late enough in the game that by that point you already have way better gear. Why make a pretentious armor DLC and give said armor laughable stats is beyond me. As I said, only the hat and the ring are somewhat worth it, but not enough to pay real money for. In fact the whole DLC should've been a free update at best, with the pirate clothes available from the beginning since they're really not as hot a ♥♥♥♥ as PB pretends.

This game is best enjoyed with a second player. I played this game with my girlfriend and we had a pretty good time, overall. The combat is solid, the platforming is... close to solid and the puzzles range from unimpressive to decent and some to pretty great! The bugs are about on the same level as with Bethesda games, to be honest. But that's not a deal breaker, at least not to someone like me who is so used to them by now. There are a few game breaking bugs that you might come across, but it's nothing a restart won't fix, and the game usually saves pretty often.

I recommend it for what it offers, especially if you have someone who isn't a big gamer and enjoys things that are simpler in gameplay. You'll have fun laughing at the story, the various shenanigans, some of which will inevitably be caused by weird bugs which glitch out a character in funny ways. I would, however, wait for a sale.

Also protip: if you want to glide in the air farther than what the game allows you, you can mash the glide button instead of holding it. The animation won't make much sense but you'll "glide" for a lot longer, allowing you to cheese certain puzzles and areas or even reach obscure places in levels that the devs never planned for you to reach.

Have fun!

I recommend buying this game for the current experience it provides. That said, if you're a PB fan like me, read on, as you might find out something very useful.

As a fan of Pyranha Bytes games, this game is both great and terrible in all the ways PB has so diligently managed to maintain throughout all its games. Exploration is great and the RPG mechanics feel truly rewarding and fun... Sometimes. Other times you're stuck in a seemingly impossible to win fight, reloading for the 30th time, trying to figure out why you're still trying to finish this heap of garbage. And then you remember you're nearing the end game so you should probably power through. Yes, PB games are phenomenal, up until a certain point when the story reaches the mid-late game. After that, the game's quality takes a downright horrifying leap in quality. Complex quests with multiple solutions turn into mindless chores that involve getting random items from needlessly far locations which require a ♥♥♥♥ ton of walking and with an unfairly increased number of enemies sprinkled along the way. A cheap way to ensure the player gets enough XP to meet the increasingly high requirement in order to level up.

The story and quests also take a dive, as they turn from moderately interesting to nonsensically rushed. For example, the entire first half of the game, I'm being told that the leader of the berserkers has disappeared into pilgrimage and that no one knows where he is. There is all this mystery around him which makes you wonder what role he'll play in the story. Enter chapter 3, where you get tasked with "finding" him and instantly receiving a quest marker showing his live location (???). He won't do much other than sit on a rock and tell you to close the oblivion gates... I mean disable the converters around the map. Truly masterful quest design.

When I reached this point I realized all quests onwards involved me fighting 6+ enemies at a time, which is an impossible feat in ELEX, as the combat is simply not fit for it. The animations are too slow, enemies have infinite stamina and stunlocking is all too frequent.

Alas, this is a problem that has always plagued PB games. Call it lack of resources or laziness, but the issue persists. They rush the ♥♥♥♥ out of their games midway. Perhaps they get bored mid-development. Or maybe they don't manage their development time well. Either way, you'd think after 20 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years in the business they'd be able to deliver a product of consistent quality.

A frequent meme in the PB community is that all of their games are Gothic 2 with a different coat of paint, and that's painfully true. They hardly innovate or improve. The combat system changes every so often, sure, although it always ends up being bad (except for Risen 1). New mechanics are being added with every game, yes, but they end up falling kind of flat on their face (risen 2 is filled to the brim with those).

PB doesn't think about improving it's games' most important aspects such as story or combat. They just add new things that are meant to impress you in the short term, things that you'll definitely not see be improved upon or see at all in a future game. Whenever you play a new PB game you'll think "oh, this is new" while simultaneously thinking " wait, where is that thing from the previous game?".

Gothic 2, in a new coat of paint, but worse.

I know my 9 hours aren't much compared to other people's playtimes, but I feel I got to know the game well enough during this time. I've advanced a little bit in the main quest but I mainly explored the upper part of the map and did quests.
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This is not a bad RPG at all. It's got a lot of depth in it's gameplay to keep you hooked for quite a while. The quests and exploration can get a bit repetitive, however. All quests I've completed so far consisted of "go there, kill that/get that item". Exploring the world gets old quite fast too as environments consist of hills and trees with some roads inbetween that you travel on. Cities and villages are just houses that are bunched up and surrounded by walls. Same goes for dungeons/caves. Just mazes with enemies.

But while the level design leaves a lot to be desired, the gameplay itself is pretty decent. The magic system is unlike anything I've ever seen and it's amazing. Spells exist in the world as "cards" that you can buy or find on enemies. If you want to improve the strength of a spell, you'll have to find more cards of the same spell that you'll then create a stack with. Doing so will cause the spell to use the entire stack at once, effectively multiplying the effect of the spell by the number of cards you have. There's also a separate category of cards that you can equip in a separate row of slots that affect your magic abilities as a whole. Less mana cost for spells, mana bonus, etc. It's a very nice system that works very well.
Alchemy is also a very well done feature. You can brew potions on the go and there are no set recipes. You combine ingredients as you wish and simply make a potion instantly. The best part is that you can save those custom recipes under any name you want, so you can cast multiple of the same potion in a matter of seconds, provided you have the necessary ingredients in your inventory.

The skill tree is nothing to write home about. It does it's job just fine. You get skill points on level up that you spend on your various abilities and attributes and that's about it. The skills themselves are nothing to write home about. Theres a few types of attacks, theres circles of magic, lockpicking, sneaking, etc. Each gets better the more points you invest. The combat is.... weird. It's up there with the big terribles like oblivion and skyrim, or maybe even worse. It's a sword slapping contest made worse by horrendous stunlocks. At least you can dodge. That sort of saves this combat system.

The story, while I haven't finished it, I feel will probably be just as boring as it's been up until the point I played it. Bland characters, terrible dialogue and predictable events. You do NOT play this game for it's story.

It's a decent RPG to play when you literally have nothing else to play. It has an amazing magic and alchemy system dragged down by the rest of the game. Give it a try. It'll either be right up your alley or you'll get bored of it quickly. There's tons of other stuff that I haven't talked about like the ability to combine two similar types of equipment into a more powerful one or the fact that your horse(es) has it's own inventory that you can fill with loot, giving every dungeon run a very satisfying end.

If you like a game that gives you a hard time, you need to look no further. Outward is the type of game that will frustrate you and reward you all in the same gaming session. It's got solid survival mechanics and dare I say, even combat. Most people will tell you the combat is clunky, but I think it fits perfectly with the rest of the game. It's the type of game that wants you to work for your rewards, and I don't see why combat should be any different. It also has a CO-OP mode that is frankly the best part of this game. This is a good enough game to experience on your own. But by all means, if you can, play it with a friend.

There is a huge problem though. I don't know what the coop in this game is like if you play online, but I do know that split-screen is riddled with rage-quitting bugs. Imagine you and your friend spend 30 hours in this game, learning the game's mechanics. discovering new recipes that you become extremely dependent on (how to craft traps when you're in a tight spot, how to make all sorts of consumables) only to one day load your save and realize your crafting menu is empty. That's right, your character has been hit with sudden amnesia and now you're completely dependent on your friend, who probably specializes in something else and probably doesn't know half the recipes you do. Worse yet, you can't use manual crafting anymore. You press the button to assemble a manual recipe but nothing happens. Another bug that goes perfectly hand-in-hand with the other. So now, not only is your character's entire learned recipes list gone, you cant even use YOUR OWN memory to manually craft what you need. You've been practically locked out of crafting altogether.

This is one of the more persistent bugs that the player base has complained about ever since before the definitive edition. You'd think the devs would've fixed such a serious bug all those years, but no. They just made the graphics slightly prettier.

It's a good game that I fully recommend if you were to play it single-player. But as it stands, co-op needs a lot of fixing that, frankly, I don't think will happen. And it's extremely disappointing.

Spent hours last night modding my game only for Bethesda to release their first update in about a year, practically breaking my game and destroying all of my work I've put so far :) For a company who appreciates mods and modders so much, you really don't care for them as long as they don't make you money.

I feel I must write a review because this here game has potential. A gothic remake is something every hardcore gothic fan (including myself) wishes. And believe me, I almost teared up when I saw this remake. We could probably kill for a remake of Gothic.

BUT

As it stands now, I cannot play through this. The framerate is atrocious (and my rig isnt exactly weak), the dialogue is terrible, the controls are confusing, combat is (badly) copied from for honor, and all in all it's a fancy looking but hollow remake.

I advise the devs to ignore any negative reviews which dont add anything to the table and look for the good, constructive criticism. And now, for MY constructive criticism:

-Combat: Please, change it. Play the original Gothic, look at the original combat, and try to implement it in one way or another in the remake. Make a few changes, modernize it, make it unique. Dump the For Honor combat, this is an RPG, not a multiplayer fighter.

-Dialogue: Hire better voice actors, and make the dialogue more fast paced. I love Diego but I can't stand watching him say like 5 words per minute and flailing his arms about inbetween.

-Controls: I thought we reached a time when games weren't made with consoles in mind. I don't want to play a PC game with a console interface. It's painfully obvious the interface is for console, and that's frankly retarded. I don't believe it's that hard to make different interfaces for different platforms.

-Visuals: EFFECTS, EXPLOSIONS, POST PROCESSING. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I swear you enabled every single post processing effect a game could have. No one likes motion blur or depth of field, and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ theres so much bloom.

Those are my main criticisms. This doesn't feel like a remake made from the heart, it feels like a cash grab trying to profit off nostalgia. Not cool, THQ Barcelona, not cool.

If you're tired of cheap jumpscares and want a horror game which horrifies you at an existential level, grab this game. Not as much gameplay as in the other games made by Frictional Games, it is more story driven, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The atmosphere is perfect and so is the soundtrack. Get the game already and get ready to have an existential crisis!

I played this game with a friend and we liked it so much that we finished it multiple times to get all achievements to the point where we already knew the answers to all puzzles. We must've speedrun this game so much, but I enjoyed it! Its a nice game to play with a friend when you're both bored and don't know what to play!

WARNING: Don't look at my play time, please. I made sure to document myself on the internet about the game and it's gameplay and story. If you feel like I'm wrong about something, expressing it in a way other than "EWGH YOU DIDN'T EXPERIENCE THE GAME CORRECTLY" would be appreciated.

I don't usually write reviews but I really felt like I should express my dissapointment with this title. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is nothing more than a beaten up in some dark alley way Amnesia the Dark Descent with some make up slapped on it. This game has beautiful visual and audio design which is wasted on a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ walking simulator. Not only is the inventory stripped from you, so there is no item interaction, there is also no sanity meter. Oh, and the lantern doesn't require oil or anything at all. I mean, it's a nice looking lantern AND it runs for an infinite time?! NICE! Shame it's useless now, since there's no sanity that I need to take care of and a lot of the areas are pretty well lit.
Anyways, all of that wouldn't have mattered if it wasn't for the lack of exploration or even interaction with 90% of the objects lying around. When it comes to interacting with the environment, the only things you can pick up are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ CHAIRS. And it's a damn shame. The level design is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beautiful and detailed, but when I can't pick up anything around me except for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chairs, it's just like a painting. It's nice to look at but that's it! There's numerous urns, bottles, hammers, books which you can't pick up at all! They have physics like they should have, but you can't pick them up! There's even boxes lying around in some areas! The most generic, standard object in any videogame ever, the most popular background object in every Frictional Games' game! You can't do anything with it! The game just taunts you! "Look at all this beautiful scenery! Too bad you can't interact with any of it!"
But, that's not even the worst part. You see, in Amnesia the Dark Descent, the game takes place in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ castle with hundreds of rooms waiting to be explored! In A Machine for Pigs, even the exploration is taken away from you! And the Chinese Room did it in the scummiest way possible! You walk past so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rooms with locked doors! And you can't unlock them! Say there were 10 doors in a room, you'd only be able to access one, and that's just the way you came through. It's so damn lazy! This game couldn't be more of a walking simulator if it tried!
Literally no sanity system, not inventory, not environment interaction. NOTHING!
What you WILL get a lot of in this game is the developer's retarded story telling. So many notes scattered throughout the game, and it wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't so long and unnecessarily dramatic and poetic! What used to be a normal memo in the Dark Descent which simply said "I must unlock the door in the library" now becomes "I must wander to the menacing door which stands before me, keeping me away from accessing the room fate, also known as the library! Alas, I must find the key of opportunity, like a poor beggar looking for a coin! Oh the horror!"
The story of the game is...decent. Well, decent when you read it in the wiki, that is. When you try to figure it out by playing the game and reading these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ notes, it's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unbearable!
And what is it with the pigs? I get it, the game's theme is pigs, you don't need to shove it in my damn face every 5 minutes! The protagonist has an unhealthy amount of pig statues and other pig related things in their house. Oh, and of course, pig grunts.
I received this game for free togheter with Amnesia along with literally everyone else in the past month from Humble Store. I was only looking forward to playing the original Amnesia. This? I didn't even bat an eye. Only after taking a break from the custom stories (also, no custom stories menu. :P ) did I look at this game and thought I'd give it a shot.
All in all, this game should've come as free DLC for the original game, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, even Justine, a 20 minute free DLC is better than this. Purchase this game if you're looking for a nice, horror themed walking simulator. If you're an Amnesia fan and an overall Frictional Games fan, please, do yourself a favour and buy Penumbra or SOMA or ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Amnesia the Dark Descent if you, for some reason, don't own it already. If you are a masochist and feel like you can't live without expriencing this game, watch a playthrough or something. This game has nothing going for it. Pigs aren't scary, child ghosts aren't scary and the environment certainly isn't scary. The only scary moments you'll have when playing this game is with the cheap jumpscares.