Recent reviews by Fodith

TL;DR: Game is currently not good enough to be played over it's predecessor. Early Access is not an excuse for clearly intentional unfun systems.

The maps are a slog to go through, you're most likely going to think it's not that big of a deal but it really is. I have done the campaign with 3 characters and it was honestly the most painful experience I got from an ARPG campaign.
It wasn't hard, the difficulty isn't the problem to begin with, you're simply always on the edge of being killed so you have to be careful of EVERYTHING and play slowly constantly while spamming dodge roll.
No, the pain came from how long each map take to clear/go through. The maps are immense and you have no movement skill. If you have to full clear a map because you missed a corner you probably spent 25-50 minutes here.
It wouldn't be so awful if the maps had league mechanics to do, sadly it is not the case, it's only trash mobs taking ages to die while being able to two-hit kill you or very rarely an optional boss that gives nothing.

The bosses are cool, I'll give the game that. The designs, animations, patterns are very well done and it is a blast to kill them but those encounters also got a big problem, they were designed to require you to use the dodge roll constantly.
Again you might think it's normal to make the player use a tool for those fights, yes it is, but not when half the moves of the boss one shot you if you miss a dodge no matter your build.
Please understand that later on in the Atlas the maps are "one time use", if you die you lose your materials, 10% experience and your time. When you lose a big chunk of the investment you made because you missed ONE roll, I wouldn't call it hard but unfair. Even Souls have very few moves being able to one tap you while you're built to be tanky.

The gem system is very restricting but also very clear for new players. It was said during an interview that even they don't know the combos the players can make but that's a lie.
The gems are all locked to a weapon, which reduce the combo possibilities already.
Worse than that, instead of making support gems work with both attacks and spells they made distinctions. This kills the amount of potential synergies available. To me they restricted those uses because they wanted to narrow down gem combos and have an easier time balancing.

The loot was VERY bad the first few days but now with the buffs it's tolerable, at least when you go through the campaign you can find an upgrade every few hours now. But you are hardly feeling like you earned the loot through hard work, you're more feeling like "FINALLY a new piece of gear that isn't garbage". In endgame with juiced content and Magic Find the loot is similar to PoE1.

Magic Find is basically mandatory if you want to feel like you're progressing. Without it you are dropping a lot less currency and the economy is already ♥♥♥♥♥♥ because of it. Either join them or don't buy any good item. It restricts the builds to a select few, it isn't fun.

I really want to like the game but it's not doing itself any favours. I don't want to think about how bad it would be to go through so many hours of campaign every league. In fact I probably would only make one character per league, if I even bother.
The game is currently not fun because you have to be on edge constantly, the punishment for a mistake like mistiming your dodge roll is too high even against trash mobs and the loot doesn't feel rewarding either. Armour is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the passive tree is promoting Energy Shield gameplay.

Go play PoE1 and enable Ruthless, it's the same experience and no one liked it.

A lot of the good reviews are from people that are either still on the hype high, not in endgame yet or with too little playtime for now to experience the problems that will come down the line.

The game is incredible despite the AI translation and you should definitely play it if you like blobbers/dungeon crawlers, let me explain why.

To begin with the skill system is very unique, at least I never saw anything like it before.
To describe it succinctly you have a 3x3 grid where almost every skill you put in can affect adjacent slots. For example if you use a fireball with a poison potion on its side you will apply a poison on top of the fireball. Most of the skills have "Synergies" which affects other skills like that.

The grid also serves as your party formation, for example the "top" row is your front line which will be targeted by melee enemies more often.
The slots are taken by your character skills, if an enemy throw a T shaped AoE the characters in the top row and the vertical middle line would take an instance of damage for each skill they have on it.
So you have to consider the number of skills you want from each unit and where you want them so they are not damaged too much. If you want your tank to soak most of the damage you can put more of his skills on the grid.

That system makes you try to balance the location (for synergies), the number (for who will take the most damage) but also the type of party you want to make. Want a full mage party ? You probably can do it with some tinkering of their skills and status points. Which takes me to the other system, the classes.

The character creation is pretty barebone at first glance, 4 races with different perks which obviously fit X or Y archetypes, you have a few status points to distribute to fit the archetype you want and that's basically it.
However I find the classes to be interesting because you're not locked into a single path, you can make a Sorcerer that can take hits or a Healer throwing damaging spells or poisons. You get points to attribute wherever you want, this can make the grid way easier to manage if your frontliner got a synergy you're forced to put in the top row instead of putting your Mage to be obliterated there.
At the end you have 35 points to distribute for your classes and status, it gives a lot of freedom and in case you figure out new funny ideas you can redistribute them later on by purchasing an item in the shop.

The gear system is also very nice and honestly it would be way too long to explain how it works.
It feels smooth to progress once you understand how the item rarity work and that enchantments can be spammed at will to get upgrades. Stack garbage to sell, reroll good items and repeat to progress.

Depending on your build some bosses could feel unfair, don't hesitate to change setup. I started with a DoT party which cleared trash easily but suffered during early bosses, swapping grid setups is the core of the game it feels great to find good new setups.

I cleared the game in about 35 hours, afterwards there is a last dungeon that goes on for a while, power level increases drastically from what I saw.
I didn't get to finish it and I don't know if you even can but even if you don't want to attempt it the game is a blast until then.

For the price you should definitely try it, I'm sure you'll fall in love if you're into the genre.

Game is fun, worth every penny, especially at that price point.

I believe additional content is planned to be added down the line so that's even greater news.
Getting through all the achievements was very fast (7 hours) but the replayability is there even if the game currently lack a long term goal.
After doing all the difficulties I can say it felt easy enough as I was able to clear them in 1 or 2 attempts but that might be because I played my fair share of Shmups already.
The difficulty is probably spicy enough for newcomers. At the very least it never felt unfair and if you are good enough you could win every run even with bad rng/items.

There are a few things that I found "lacking", for example I would love some form of endless mode or maybe challenge runs where items are limited/fixed. Current runs got a great length to them but I want to see my crazy combos blow through harder stages until it can't keep up or I grow bored.
A way to spend the points once you're done upgrading everything would be neat too (maybe characters upgrades with ever increasing cost ?), I'm only missing one upgrade and there is no other way to spend those in sight.

Overall the game is really entertaining and I had a hard time putting it down, I would highly recommend anyone who likes Shmups or Brick-breakers to get it.

I only downloaded this to tell you not to play the game, I played a ton when Overwatch 1 released and I tried Overwatch 2 too but all I got from the experience was repulsion toward the company.
The devs won't respect you, your time or feedback. They deleted most of the aspects that made the players happy only to replace them with monetized counterparts.
The rebrand from Overwatch to Overwatch 2 was supposed to be for the PvE which they didn't even deliver on.
They are now selling garbage mission packs only to milk you further.
The game as its core can be fun but as it stands Blizzard doesn't deserve even a cent from you.
Please, I beg you not to give them anything, be it your time, attention or money.

New game, new gameplay elements.

EO2 (Etrian Odyssey 2) improved on a few aspects that made the first game a bit obnoxious.
In Expert difficulty the monsters and bosses are a bit more fair and easier to work around compared to the first game, especially in the last stratum. This is not to say the game is much simpler and you would run through the floors, the game still provide a significant challenge.
Now, it isn't perfect and have some dumb design choices, I'll enumerate both below.

Good:
- You don't feel like you NEED a Medic anymore
- There is only one locked class and it is unlocked right after the first stratum boss, this makes the leveling experience for it much smoother
- You now have a form of activable shortcut every 2-3 floors, this does not make a huge difference to clear the game but it definitely helps if you have to push to a new floor so you don't waste time getting up the previous 4 floors.
- Classes got adjustments and you can especially feel it with Ronin. You no longer have to waste a turn buffing yourself to be in a time limited stance to do your skills, now you can just use them like any other class, YAY. This does not mean every class is strong mind you, Survivalist got gutted for example. I'm only putting this as a positive because almost everything is pickable without issues or can work in specific setups.
- Force is a much better special action compared the the generic Boost in EO1, it fits the theme of every class. The fantasy is there, you don't use a special move on a tank so he deals more damage, you use it so he does his job better, that's exactly what he does here.
- Drop rates are significantly better, if you don't go for 100% completion it won't affect you much but the Scavenger skill is now VERY impactful and conditional drops are almost always close to guaranteed (if not guaranteed).

Bad:
- Balance while better can still be finicky, it will join my second point in a bit but classes are also affected. I said classes got adjustments before but it wasn't all positives, Medic for example is worse than War Mage as a healer (still very useable). Survivalist is garbage but Hexer is monstruously good through the whole game, hell, you might even want 2 for the final superboss.
- FOEs are even harder than the first game and on top of that don't give exp when killed. This makes some exploration parts a bit grindy because you might need to go back in town to heal right after defeating one without anything to show for it.
- A few gameplay bugs and it kind of is an expansion of the previous balance point.
Beast for example have a skill that makes it take damage for an ally. Until now everything is fine, it's the dynamic of the class, but that damage is based on the character that would get hit. So if the character hit is an alchemist with no defense it would take the full brunt of that damage. Intended or not it makes using Beast outside of tanky teams a bit of a hassle to use. Funnily enough the more beasts you have the better they work together as they all got great defense, healing and damage.
- TP is extremely important in this one, be very careful about your resource management because there are only a few ways to generate it (and it's class specific)

Overall I enjoyed the game more than the first despite the very few (but important) issues.
The first two games are still a bit player hostile compared to the subsequent entries so if you get the "I-II-III HD Collection" don't be ashamed to put the difficulty to picnic to just enjoy the story and lessen the grind.

To the sky!

Overall I really liked the game but the experience can be rough depending on the difficulty setting and if it's the first instance of the series you play.
The balancing is probably the worse out of the current 3 games, it is very playable nonetheless but some classes are clearly superior to others once you try them all.

Here are a few points of advice:
- Don't be ashamed to run away from encounters
- Put battle animations to fastest
- Get a Protector and get the 3 Elemental Wall skills to level 5
- Get a Medic and if you want to trivialize the encounters learn Immunize
- If you want to complete the codex change the difficulty to Picnic in the endgame, it will save you a few hours of grind
- FOE FOE FOE FOE

The game can be harsh at first but once you got a few skill points and a decent TP pool it gets progressively smoother.
The first two games are still a bit player hostile compared to the subsequent entries so if you get the "I-II-III HD Collection" don't be ashamed to put the difficulty to picnic to just enjoy the story and lessen the grind.

Time to explore the depths !

The game while fun in solo, becomes a nightmare in multiplayer, but not for the reasons you might think of.
In multiplayer you will have lots of desynchronization, meaning something has gone wrong, often it's just the fog of war not being the same for every player or something not too important.
This is fixed either by itself when you finish turns or you can save, quit and invite everyone again. It's a bit of a pain but not game-breaking.
The real issue comes randomly when every player end their turns but the AIs are in talks and the game just won't progress further.
This, sadly, cannot be fixed. We tried reloading older saves, redownloading our games, verifying the integrity of files, we had no mods on to begin with so it's not the issue either.
That problem happened to us thrice in the span of 5 games, almost all around turn 150/300, imagine losing hours of gameplay to a silly unfixable bug like that.
This problem has been known for years and is still not fixed, as it stand I really cannot recommend the game for the multiplayer part, which is in my opinion the best part of a 4X.

One of the best Rogue-Like game I have ever played, while the story is quickly forgotten it is still a great plot device to go into a dark setting.
The game mechanics while challenging and maybe overwhelming at first could make you want to drop the game, once you got the hang of them the experience should be way better.
The degree of replayability is really high and I would recommend anyone into rogue like to at least try out the game because it is phenomenal.