Recent reviews by Mantoron

Peak game.

Good game to shoot around and have fun.

Strange ass game with stuff happening without you understanding why. Sometimes fun, often very frustrating.

Amazing movement "explore this hellhole" game.
The first thing I did was softlock myself by going downwards without the ability to go upwards, only to restart and almost speedrun the primary abilities simply because not having the major abilities forced me to learn "secret" techniques that are not explained anywhere. Absolutely amazing.

Amazing gameplay. It's overall kept simple, but it's masterfully done in it's simplicity and I love it for it. The world looks good, the... jiggle is jiggly, I guess, but if that's not your preference you can disable the jiggle physics, and it's overall just an amazing game to play, whether that be alone or with a friend. There wasn't a single moment of the game where I felt bored.

This one is better than the previous Dead Islands, but the combat is still strangely stiff.

Like, I stopped because I started dying due to my character just getting stuck on the random-est of things.
I returned, only to unlock the bossfight in SoLA, and thinking that since all my stuff is at ok durability and at my level I could go and try it.
The SoLA DLC has a bossfight that has you fight in the most overloaded sh*tfest where you get a headache and are basically blind because of all the effects happening.
The zombies feel just stupidly tanky at around lvl 30, and I've died multiple times to the line "byebye" by the suicidal explosive zombies that I didn't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ see. The boss fights take years upon years, and aiming with the melee weapons sucks, e.g. I have a knife, with which I aim the white dot/reticle so that it becomes read, which supposedly means "yeah, you are in range and can hit the enemy", which is a lie because my knife whiffs and misses. Amazing. Power attacks have take years, make you stay still for years, and just generally suck unless you very specifically make a build around them, but even then they still suck because getting stuck without having the ability to look around is a death sentence. The finisher animations making you invincible is cool and all, except when you are dogpiled or you get out of the finisher right as an explosive zombie explodes behind you. All my memories are not of the cool gore explosions, or the multi kills, no, they are of the times I died to what I felt was unfair.

I am rambling at this point, so back to whether I can recommend it.
Were the 35 hours I played fun? Mostly. Is it more fun in multiplayer? Likely. Do I have friends who wanted to play this game with me? Nope, because they did not enjoy the combat.

Do with this information what you want. I maybe recommend it on sale, and with a guaranteed friend who wants to at least try it together.

This game is awesome, gunplay on par with Destiny 2, sorcery seems to be varied and fun, and the loop while simple is really rewarding - to compare to Destiny again, it feels like you're doing hardmode Strikes with limited health with clearer attacks, less enemy spam and both a lot more strategic and reactionary combat.
All in all everything I wanted and more. I did not expect to have this game scratch the D2 itch gunplay, but it does and that alone is reason enough to enjoy this game.

Purge the Heretic, Kill the Xenos and Pray to the Emperor!

I've finished the main campaign, the one you can play solo or with two friends, and I've played some missions both solo and with a friend, and I can officially say: The balancing for the campaign missed the mark. Completely.

Solo you play as Titus, the same Space Marine from the first game, and you have zero control over the other two. Titus has the ability to once every blue moon regenerate a bit of health and regain health via melee. This sounds like a ok-ish ability, but because you're the primary tank and the primary DPS in your squad of yourself and two idiotic AIs you notice that you're missing AoE damage against the hordes upon hordes of minions that can and will stagger you in melee because almost none of the melee attacks do 360 degrees area damage and they will try to surround you.

So then you say "at least health as a resource isn't a pain to get since it's like the first game, right?"
Wrong. Remember me saying the whole specialty of Titus ability being health regen? That's because Medicae Stims are rare-ish enough and your shield of faith so ♥♥♥♥ you might as well have none. Try and get shield back via executions and you only get one shield block of it back, which instantly gets removed by any little thing hitting you in melee. So doing executions feels cool but doesn't actually help you survive beyond the few seconds of disregard of every attack while you do the execution, which is useless in Single Player as the bots do not do anything useful during that time where you are surrounded by enemies, but immune to their attacks.

This means you get downed in Single Player, and you will get downed often unless you're some god of parrying the staggered attacks of the hordes of minions. Even then, once you have ranged enemies that you do not kill quick enough you'll get melted soon enough anyway even if you do survive the minions + elites.

That means you have to learn how to use the medicae effectively as Titus. Which is by waiting for your ability, using it after you've got a mortal wound, then waiting until you're only missing 1,5 health blocks, and only then using the medicae to fully heal and remove the mortal wound, which allows you to get downed instead of dying.

Guns feel useless in Single Player, because you rarely get enough time to actually aim - you're the primary target, after all. You also require like a thousand shots to kill anything.
The one gun that's always fine is the Melta, and that is because it's the one gun that allows you to clear minion hordes.

So then, you ask, why am I recommending this game. Simple. Because it was still fun. Challenging, sometimes annoying, but still a lot of fun. When you understand the maps by having died twice and learned where the enemy comes from at which point and you tactically eliminate all Xenos and Heretics without so much as a scratch is when you feel like you're truly a Space Marine.

And all of that without even talking about the actual good part of the game - the multiplayer.
In the multiplayer campaign the second player plays Gadriel - who has an on demand AoE knockback and dmg ability with a short cooldown. Now imagine what happens, when the Titus player does his thing and runs around killing stuff, and the Gadriel player clears all the minions with his very strong ability? Exactly. The game starts feeling less like a shooter where you are forced to cower to survive, and instead feels more like you've been blessed by the God-Emperor with the ability to purge the xenos. That's when you start not just surviving, but thriving in the battlefields of the campaign.
All of the problems mentioned before just... vanish. Generalist Bolter not good enough? One of you takes the melta, the other the stalker bolter and you together clear the ranged and melee xenos. Healing? Who needs healing if all the enemies die before they can actually damage you. That's when the fun begins.
As for Operations (Coop PvE mode) it's even better because there you can actually customize your ability and your weapons to a better degree than in the normal Campaign.

TL,DR: The game is flawed when played alone, but is still enjoyable. It shines when played with friends or randoms and becomes a whole lot more fun.

Rating for Single Player would be 65/100, and Coop would be 90/100.

It does not respect your time. If you do get it, get it on a 80% sale, and even then use cheats to not waste inhuman amounts of time for nothing and even more nothing.

You can get locked out of dungeons if you're unlucky. You can lose loot if you die at the wrong time. You can just miss out on a lot of things. You can literally miss unlocking new classes because your friend died in coop to an event and you didn't, you disregard the event and then later you find out you should've killed yourself so that the event can actually play out.

Absolute b*llsh*t.

I found another fun thing! There exists an Archetype Crafting Material that can just... not spawn in your run. Literally just happens to not exist. That's the straw that broke the camels back for me, I am not wasting any more of my time on this game.

I've finished the main story.
This has become my game of the year, despite me being way more hyped for Dragon's Dogma 2.
But, this has nothing to do with how good a game is. I love Dragon's Dogma 2, and I will likely play it again and again - for it is not the story I care for in DD2.
This game on the other hand... it's an amazing journey.
I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for a beautifully made story.