Recent reviews by POOP MONSTER

The game has some wonderful art but the combat is the weakest element of the game which is unforgivable given that that is basically what 99% of the gameplay consists of.

Other games do everything Cookie Cutter is doing better, I think the closest analogue is Sundered, which I highly recommend.

So nice I completed it twice.

The combat is not quite as satisfying as Hollow Knight, which I think is pretty much the gold standard in modern metroidvanias, but it's pretty close. The game has a take on combat all of it's own and delivers extremely well on what is as far as I know a pretty unique combat/skill system.

The game absolutely nails it's setting, the atmosphere and story elements are really well executed, the art is gorgeous and the soundtrack really completes the experience. Absolutely a 10/10 game that I could happily recommend to literally everyone.

While I am recommending against the game overall, it is not a "bad" game but rather a game that leaves a lot to be desired, but I don't feel like I can even say "hold off until they fix the issues" because I think the game's problems are a bit more fundamental than that.

The combat is deeply flawed to the point of being mediocre but serviceable, while the sound design leaves the entire audio experience at the end of a full 6 hour playthrough completely forgotten save for the timing of the "swoosh-swoosh-swoosh" of your sword, the only notable thing about the sound as I played through the game was at points feeling like sounds were missing, for cues for enemy attacks but also it felt like the game lacked the music to set the tone during events like bosses delivering their evil speeches. Whether the sound experience is bug or folly it was certainly not satisfying.

The one genuinely commendable aspect of the game is that the art is actually very nice, though some of the animations/telegraphing certainly needed work as did enemy hitboxes as they change between certain states, since you could take collision damage from enemies who had ended their attack and seemingly took up more room horizontally in a neutral stance than they did while attacking.

The game also feels like it's having an identity crisis. Instead of an identity of it's own it seems to be merely a conglomeration of influences. Very clearly it's inspired by SOTN, metroidvanias more broadly, but very definitely SOTN above all the others(evident especially from a couple of later-game homages), while also seemingly inspired by the *Souls games(and perhaps also the various 2d games inspired by them).

While the influences seems obvious it doesn't look like the developer has grasped what really worked in those games, or rather has something of a checklist of things that are emblematic of the games that inspire them without much of a mind for making those systems work in the context of their own game.

And the extent to which unlocking new things feels like it really opens up the world is incredibly limited and unsatisfying;
Congratulations hero, you've found the key that opens the magic gates! Only one of which takes you anywhere new(opening the gate that ♥♥♥♥-blocked you after clearing what turned out to be the penultimate zone of the game that you cleared too early) while the rest give you rings you almost certainly won't be using!

Maybe wait for a discount? Maybe wait for some kind of massive overhaul? Maybe buy it if you're feeling exceptionally generous and are really willing to give it a chance against all the advice to the contrary?

Maybe buy something else instead. At time of writing, both Hollow Knight and Ender Lilies are on sale and priced about the same as Elderand, both of which will get you more than triple the gameplay time for your money with the added benefit that they are actually worth spending money on.

The one silver lining is that I did not spend my own money on the game as it was gifted to me by a friend, however I must now live with the eternal shame of knowing that a good friend's hard earned money has been wasted on me.

Good but not great, definitely worth the money for anyone who really enjoyed the books/movies.
I recommend that you don't go nuts exploring the world too early on because much of what there is to interact with requires certain spells that are awarded by side-quests unlocked by main quest progression.

Core gameplay is generally good with the intended combo system being satisfying, though fighting melee enemies feels a bit like being on the receiving end of a beatdown from Batman in the Arkham series; once they initiate a melee attack it will connect and the enemies will be teleported on top of you to make that happen, forcing you to time your dodges/blocks quite rigidly. Gameplay wise the poor handling of melee is the only serious demerit I would give the combat.

The open-world collectathon stuff is ok, I'm neither hot or cold on it as a gameplay feature but I think they really missed an opportunity to make the collectathon more engaging in settling for the insane repetition and unsatisfying simplicity of many of the puzzles and caves. Having so much of the ability to engage with the the different POIs on the map tied to quest progression put a real damper on the excitement of exploring the world.

The sidequest plots are what really shine, it's a shame that there aren't more story-heavy sidequests because the few that are there that unfold over the course of the game are genuinely excellent, they feel much more grounded in the HP universe and are a great exploration of the subjects they are intended to cover and frankly put the game's main story to shame.

The main plot thread is merely serviceable, with a general story that could be fantastic were it not for the abundance of elements that do not feel like a good fit for the HP universe. A glaring issue is the contrast between the source material and the actions in the gameplay that are also not a good fit for the HP universe, in which a Hogwarts student running around the countryside dealing with warbands of goblins and miscreant wizards with a penchant for poaching by brutalising them to death or outright exploding them would be seen as a bit of a problem by the school and Ministry of Magic, which in the narrative is treated completely nonchalantly and often has the player-character quipping about how that's just one less poacher/goblin and that they had it coming.

Voldemort is made to look like a small time crook compared to the shenanigans our character gets up to.

All of the main plot points feel like they could have been executed better without the developer taking a throwaway line from the books about ancient magic and spinning it off into it's own class of "chosen one"-superpower with it's associated mcguffins. It genuinely feels like someone took an extremely well rounded set of stories and themes that fit the hopes and expectations that Harry Potter fans would have for a big budget videogame treatment of the franchise and then dropped amateurish generic high fantasy dreck on top of it.

The building system is satisfying enough, though there aren't any opportunities to make things that use the sorts of physics mechanics present in SE, the game shines with it's genuinely amazing PVE environment. It has a bunch of accessible systems for mining, salvaging, operating and managing a fleet of ships across a large galaxy, having ships scout sectors for you and and having the ability to take part in the game's fairly extensive economy systems, your ships can be sent on missions to procure trade goods and sell things off for you as well. The game's combat systems are also solid with an assortment of weapon types and the ability to set up your guns to track and shoot targets by themselves(which also works for your mining and salvaging equipment). The combat is not without it's faults, mostly in that weapons like lasers which have been configured to autofire will attempt to lead targets as if they had projectiles with travel time and I suspect that all of the weapons use the same model for leading targets, there is a mod which claims to fix it but it's a dumb problem the devs should have fixed by now.


If you're disappointed with Space Engineers having the ability to make amazing ships but having almost nothing to do with them besides dig holes and smash them together, and disappointed with Empyrion which lacks the ability to churn out complex ships with all sorts of neat physics parts but tries to make up for it with a pretty hollow set of factions and regenerating bases to loot/farm(at least it has some amount of PVE content worth doing, unlike SE), then Avorion is worth looking at.


Broad Overview
The construction system is relatively simple, dispensing with requiring constructed components for each block and shifting the complexity of gathering/assembly into it's manufacturing/economy systems. Instead ship/base-building relies on whether or not you have sufficient quantities of the raw material of whatever tier(iron, titanium, etc), and has a dedicated build mode which has some neat tricks like letting you scale all the parts(and even the entire ship/base) up/down arbitrarily.


The game's economy is giant web of interconnected factories, some of which produce raw materials for manufacturing while others produce intermediary products that would in turn be shipped to factories producing trade goods or can be used as construction materials at Turret Factories for producing, well, Turrets.


You can find unusually large asteroids rich in materials and claim them to found Mines(or sell them off to the dominant faction in the area for cash and an improvement in relations), which functionally are the same as Space-Stations/factories, and are built/customised the same way, and build up an entire production line of factories producing goods to sell to either passing traders. Other factory types can be produced by buying a ship from a shipyard that is intended to serve as the foundation for a station and then it can be flown anywhere and established(for a hefty price) and then you're free to meddle in the economy.


Minor comparison with other games & Performance
In general it also just runs better than it's most similar games, Space Engineers has been mired in the arms race between the developers and the most autistic power users desperate to create a 1:1 scale Death Star and so the handling of ships and bases and the physics are genuinely impressive but things like terrain and draw distances and the way the game chugs hard whenever you play with the physics too hard are extremely unsatisfying while the game has had almost no PVE content worth mentioning , and Empyrion simply looks and runs like ♥♥♥♥. Avorion is admittedly not attempting to do the mineable planets thing, instead using planets as the occasional backdrop for a sector, but the handling of terrain in the other games feels like a detriment just as much as a feature. The only times I've had my framerate drop in Avorion is when initially loading into a sector filled with storage containers, where each group of containers are large grids of varying sizes but generally consist of 150+ container objects and a framerate staying low only happens in systems that have so many of these groups that there are near 2,000 containers total, on top of the usual collection of 500-3000 asteroids.


A faction system worth a ♥♥♥♥.
Avorion's faction system gives you a huge set of factions, including many different Pirate factions who are often at war with each-other, spanning the galaxy who all have their own set of traits(each of which they have to higher or lesser degrees) which dictates how and to what extent they respond to crime and invasions and who all have their own relations with eachother. Some factions at odds with their neighbours will send forces of varying sizes into eachother's controlled territories to try to destroy the established stations, and attacked stations will receive significant backup to try to put down the threat. It all works fantastically well to create a universe that feels meaningfully populated and creates what feels like a, dare I say "organic"?", universe with naturally emergent scenes, such as when I landed in a system populated with stations owned by factions who were at eachother's throats, leading to an invading fleet of giant ships (each an order of magnitude more powerful than any of my own ships) swooping in to try to destroy the station of the other, which was met by an equally huge response from the other side with my watching as a totally useless fly on the wall who managed to nearly get one-tapped by stray fire, with the ensuing battle leaving them both down a space station and having lost 7-8 enormous ships each, the goods from the destroyed stations being marked as Stolen which had the surviving ships who were now patrolling the area get very cross with me when I tried to scoop up the loot.

Pretty solid gameplay, good variety of endings if that's your bag.

The RPG stats are dated and obtuse with their effects not explained(though perhaps I missed something big and obvious?), and most of the HP-restoring food items do not tell you how much they restore.

GOOD AND FUN.

Seems like it has a good deal of replayability with the boss mode(replaying the game with new characters) and modes that force you to use certain builds.

Lots of fun with stupid idiot friends.

Being brutally murdered has never been so fun.

Online multiplayer is a great addition, all the fun of hurling food at friends without the hassle of getting out of bed.