Recent reviews by hobokenbob

getting the negatives out of the way: there's no need, Larian, to make me set up another email account and put me in a launch screen that aggressively tries to sell me the digital deluxe DLC, annoying, needlessly anti consumer. there are some annoying mechanical/ UI bits that are hard to work around, eg if i identify a trap, and there's easy ways around the trap why do my AI party members run right into the trap? is this a Skyrim reference? I don't want to have to ungroup Astarion and sneak him 30m ahead of the rest of the party just to keep idiots from walking into traps I'm asking him to disarm.

everything else is incredible 10/10 fun, feels like DnD, engaging story and characters, i'm flabbergasted at how much stuff there is to do - it's just so satisfying body checking goblins into bottomless pits!

i thought i was being smart and waited to buy the game at deep sale, but even at 15 bucks and years after release I've had 3 crashes in 6 hours! There's a pinned message on the steam support forums with people still complaining about it for months. why do i keep falling for Ubisoft.

Then when i fight the first animal boss, the deer, it checks me into the wall a funny way and i glitch out, fly through the air a mile up and desync, losing my progress. what a mess.

Setting aside the game stopping bugs, this game seems to also exacerbate a long running issue with traversal movement in these games where it feels like i'm fighting the movement controls, the issue is a big step back from earlier games in the franchise but they all have this issue to one degree or another. It's especially annoying around some knee high rock half hidden in the snow just stops you, or trying to kiss a wall just right to let you climb down from it, which is too often the case because of the weird lack of some kind of "haystack" analogue to drop into from many of the high points forcing you to anticlimactically and awkwardly climb down the mountain you wanted to summit to see the view.

getting resources early game is incredibly annoying, especially iron, unlike in Odyssey where you can just press a button to loot it while walking over the stone piles you have to hit them open. Only with the axe, your main weapon, the player seems to not recognize what your intention is swinging near the rock and instead of targeting the rock pile it just swings generically, leaving it up to the player to awkwardly line up the swing animation to make contact. then you can loot, after a small delay, just enough to make it annoying because your swing animation has put you ahead of the rock, forcing you to awkwardly double back. the whole process looks silly enough to actually break immersion.
and you will have to grind those iron ores because only have i think maybe 2 or 3 main story quest missions, the main story has you going into a zone that was way over leveled to the character and this was with no side quests pending.

so that's just the first 7 hours. bye assassins creed, you were one of my favorite franchises but now i can't even trust you on deep discount. this wasn't worth 15 bucks, it may not even be worth your time.

Wow, this game is amazing.

Alright lets get to the real question.
F%ck Cal, obviously, Marry Nem, Kill Dys. But only because Dys would think it was totally punk and appreciate the gesture.

How the eff do you jump from hard to expert!

it's a really good game. its only 3 bucks. i saw someone in my feed add it to my wish list and almost bought it for him for being such a cheap bastard. update: either that person dropped it from their wish list or bought it. my job here is done.

The last big FPS to have a campaign worth a damn, sadly.

BOY! Come read this review!

Unique inventive health system. I think this is a pretty nice alternative to the endless skyrim replays if you want that same viking open world feel but with building and survival mechanics

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeparlock/2020/07/12/three-ubisoft-executives-resign-following-widespread-harassment-allegations-at-the-publisher/?sh=1f665a5148c2

M&B series has always been this cool unique formula of medieval combat simulator, strategy game, and rpg. M&B 2 so far doesn't stray too far from the just about perfect Warband version, while upping graphics and scale.

The game is about as close to a "game of thrones simulator" as you can have. While almost all quests are procedurally generated and pretty repetative- there's a very small "main quest" that gets you going, the game's interplay of the different factions vying for control has this great emergent story quality that's hard to find in games these days.

If you've never tried a M&B game i'd say get warband on deep discount (community mods can update the graphics) and if you like what you see this is a natural progression. If you love the series you probably already bought this the day it dropped because you've been salivating for this since announcement.