Recent reviews by Jahlon

This game has a lot of potential, but there is one major glaring issue that is going to cause people to not enjoy it. The entire process/concept/method of selling things is simply terrible. You "might" be able to sell "some" items to a merchant on a particular day. Never mind that you will have piles and piles of stuff you can't sell and then are basically guessing and trying to see what items you can sell, and it doesn't really follow any logical pattern.

If currency is the throttle, then there has to be a better way then having hundreds of items that you will stockpile, but since you can't see the recipes past your current reputation you have no idea what you need nor how many of them.

The idea of a stand-alone game spawning from an MMORPG development process is something that was tried by Intrepid Studios back with Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse when they released a 100 man Battle Royale. While the idea of having a BR for combat development & testing environment as well as being as stand alone game was odd when they did it, I can see how it could be useful. Ashes of Creation was intended to have a second mode called Horde Mode, which would have been a PvE Setting. That PvE setting was something new and unique and something I think that Final Stand: Ragnarök was almost able to reach.

I could see Final Stand: Ragnarök as a great marketing tool for Camelot Unchained except, why did we suddenly go to Norse Pantheon? Camelot Unchained is a unique IP, and it could have easily transferred from the MMORPG into the same battle mode they are making here. Could have very easily had the Arthurians as the playable characters and the Tuatha and the Vikings as the enemies. Could have introduced players to the classes and ideas that they would see in CU through this mode.

The Bad about this mode:
There are very few people playing it. In 7 matches today, I had a fellow player in one of them. The rest, I was basically soloing the content.

It looks so much like a cash grab. $19.99 for this seems like a "we are out of funding" panic button. Coupled with the fact there is a shop, and a battle pass "coming soon" It seems this was a crank to churn out more money.

The Good
Having only played the classes independently I cannot be sure of this, but it appears that the 5 classes are built to compliment each other nicely.

The tank really felt like a tank
The damage dealers all had different roles from mass chowder clean up to single target killing elite/named mobs

The two modes I saw were well done. Hard to judge playing most rounds single player, but they were well done.

I could see this game being good and fun if there was a playerbase, but as it is right the box price is cost prohibitive.

Even without much tweaking or tuning, this game could see success if it went F2P but locked character progression behind a box price. For those that haven't seen it, your character does level and gets access to new things. I could see that part being locked behind the box price, and then the season pass and shop could help augment income to cover server costs.

They also would have the opportunity to get people hooked into CU if there were rewards in the battle pass that gave you cosmetics in the MMORPG and even a limited amount of sub time. If you throw 3 to 5 days sub time on the free path of the battle pass for level 50, and then turn that into say 10 days on the battle pass, You'd probably get people buying the battle pass to have fun messing around with it just to stack some sub time for CU launch.

Sadly at this time, I can't recommend the game, but I think with just a few twists and turns, tucks and wedges this game could be a distraction for F2P players and an investment for CU fans who are waiting.

I do not know why people gave so much hate to the Legends of the Dead DLC for Crusader Kings III. Reading a lot of the negative reviews, it seems like people want to be negative for the sake of being negative. I keep reading about the “overpriced” DLC, but people forget that half of the expansion was free. Yes, free meaning that you didn’t have to pay anything for it. I see review after review for Legends of the Dead for people who have played 0.0 hours in the last two weeks. If you’ve played 0.0 hours in the last two weeks as of 10 March, that means you’ve played 0.0 hours of Legends of the Dead, including the free parts.

Are there some rough edges for Legends of the Dead? Yes. Did Paradox have to do a patch after going live to fix an issue? Yes. Did Legends of the dead (The DLC not just the free expansion) change the game? Yes it did. Was Legends of the Dead as good as Bloodlines from Crusader Kings II? I don’t know, that’s a very subjective question, but is Legends of the Dead worth $19.99? Absolutely. Without a doubt. Absolutely.

I originally played CK3 and then set it down. Came back to it a few weeks ago and I'm loving all the details. I want to figure out a way to do like a 40 hour stream (5 days | 8 hours a day) just to do a long playthrough.

So this game got my attention from the word go. I started streaming it during my livestream which was a little rough. You don't want to be distracted playing this.

I will say, that the intro, the immersion is a bit silly. Its a bad force into the story. However, it certainly has my interest.

Now if I can get some free time, I want to jump back into it. Mainly because I had being stumped by games and killed early on in games.

Full Disclosure: I am an official Content Creator for Intrepid Studios on the Ashes of Creation Project. Also since Gigabear will no doubt come along and demand to know how much money I have in referrals, its north of $400 at last check.

With that said, you can check my YouTube videos (linked to the Steam APOC page) and you can see that I call out Intrepid for the things they do wrong, the things that appear shady, the things that appear as if they are setting up to do something shady. It’s a pretty common occurrence that I piss the CEO and Creative Director Steven Sharif off, just head over to the official discord and you can see some examples. With that said even after being highly critical of Intrepid and Ashes of Creation I’m still a welcomed (maybe not favorite) member of the community as well as retaining my position as an official content creator.

All that aside, I’m not a Battle Royale or a First Person Shooter player. I’m old, I have horrible response time, bad reflexes, and basically have to play one handed and yet Ashes of Creation Battle Royale was still fun to play. Being able to wander around the future landscape, to experience a ton of the art, assets, environment was like having a backstage pass with not just a peak but a full walk around the set. Half of the matches I ran around just looking at stuff and a lot of the time I forgot I was playing a BR, until someone sniped me from 275 meters with a Longbow.

I will admit, the September through December Alpha testing was rough, lots of bugs but then in Alpha testing you expect to find a lot of bugs. You could tell that Intrepid was busting their ass trying to fix those bugs. Lots of long nights at the studio and a lot of interaction on some discussions when something critical was found. On a number of occasions I spoke with the team because of something that was discovered, and the ticket responses were more than just “yeah got it” they came back on a few things to ask some detailed questions.

The December Open Beta did leave a lot to be desired. It was the community opinion that it was rushed, and coupled with the other issues Intrepid was having at the time, it didn’t feel finished or fixed enough between Alpha and Open Beta. Then the decision to take the game down on 26 December came and it was heartbreaking to fans because it signaled the start of a series of delays. Yet the decision to take it down remains the right decision.

Intrepid analyzed the test data and they realized that in order to have up to 500 vs 500 fights in the MMORPG the netcode they had in Apocalypse - BR in Dec 2018 wasn’t going to be sufficient. They tried for 6 weeks to patch the issue then made the bold decision to scrap the backend and redo it.

Here we are 6 months later and this is going to be the first public viewing of Apocalypse since it was taken down.

Will there be bugs? Yes. Will there be performance issues? Probably

Will the game still be fun? I found it fun, and I hate BRs, so if you enjoy BRs you will probably enjoy it.

If nothing else jump in and take yourself to the edge of the map and just experience the world for a few matches. Even if you don’t like BR games, you can get a first hand look at what Verra will look like.

So I do game reviews, I do them right out of the box or with very limited amount of time being subjective to them because I review them based on 1) Graphics 2) Soundtrack 3) Immersion and 4) Ease of Gameplay (not is the game easy, but is the game Easy to Understand)

I posted a review of Norpon on YouTube (you can find it linked in Videos)

I've had Developers come to my Channel and say Thanks for the Review (such as on Dead Fronter 2 and Final Days) I've also had developers contact me in private about game reviews I've done to talk about things from the videos so they can make improvements. Since they were done in private, they stay private.

I've never seen a developer come to my channel and make a statement " It doesn't look like it's your type of game and you are reviewing it very subjectively which isn't very professional and not what we would expect for who we give keys for."

Couple of things here.

Reviews are subjective. 1 out of 5 stars, 2 /10 these are subjective ratings.
Also you gave out keys for your game to be reviewed. If you are upset about the things said in the video either 1) disprove them or 2) fix them.

Usually I like to keep my eye on games as they get developed and then swing back if there is significant improvement. In this case, honestly game is already uninstalled.

This game isn't worth $11.24 even on sale. This game is maybe worth about $1.99

I find the garphics to be a poor copy/pasta of pre-made assets, the sound track is mediocre at best. I find the level of gore done on the skinning of the bears to be in very poor taste. The weapon assets are all almost totally out of date. The pistol is pretty good, but the shotgun is using modern day pressed/stamped shotgun shells and that axe looks like a polished fire axe.

I'm not even going to do a video video on the game, its just not worth the time.

I am really impressed with this game.

I am a fan of action/tactical games, plus I'm a fan of the post-apocalyptic setting, so when you mix the two together its phenonomial. Plus, the fact that you can play as a Dog is amazing.

I will say I'm not 100% in love with the graphics, but then I'm not a fan of Unity to begin with. I do dig on the soundtrack, and I will say that the tutorial for this game is absoltuely amazing and should be considered to be the benchmark of how tutorials should be done.

The Alien franchise is my favorite movie series of all time, with Aliens being my favorite of the group.

I'm not generally a fan of FPS games, but this one was worth it to take a deeper look inside of the Aliens franchise. I think they took too many liberties in a few places, but overall I'm very impressed with the game. Was worth every penny I paid, but I'd balk at the $29.99 price tag on Steam.

Its not too hard of a game and I would really call it more an interactive movie than a FPS game.

Like I said, was worth it for me since I'm an Aliens fan, but some people might not feel the same way.