Recent reviews by Koh

Game made me a furry back in the 90's which ruined the rest of my life. 10/10

The game is on the edge of getting a great review for a lot of reasons but I still can't recommend it. Every single time my and my friend groups have tried to get into this mess everyone bails quickly because it's just too brutal (past fun) or tedious to keep a round going for everyone. Even with mods and sliders cooling things out the tedium of how everything works (especially later stage stuff) just kills the staying power of this game. That mood gets palpable like clockwork after about 2 days every time we set up a server. Everyone just gets slammed by unreasonable enemies or re-frustrated by the item/build system and eh. We've had about 3 rounds in 20 where we get a cohesive base going and we seem to want to quit even faster when we do. Everyone agrees. Every single attempt we've made for years similarly falls flat.

A+ for style, D+ for actual enjoyment.

It's only fun if you're in a unified squad of former navy seals that now do nothing but play this game for twitch gibs and you know every little corner and meta tactic. Otherwise you'll be consistently paired with screaming brainmelt goblin children seemingly navigating their first day on earth along with their Karen moms who oddly believe they are also your mom. The latter is kind of cute but neither can shoot for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

As someone who just people-watches on VRChat I've learned that we are actually doomed and zoomers are truly irredeemable introspective-free illiterate harbingers of the skibidi toilet rizz gyatt nocap on-god whatever apocalypse.

Don't play until the devs rethink their latest privacy destroying TOS (and you want to lose remaining faith in humanity.)

This is such a wonderful love letter to the original animation and games. Could not be happier with what's at play here. A lot of games you can feel where development faltered and deadlines were pushed on people, not this. This is LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE. Every screen, sound, and button press in this just drips like it was done by people who love TMNT. I'm not sure if a better turtles beat-em-up will ever be made (unless it's by this team.)

More!!!

This game is absolutely lovely~ Tons of surprises and charm, completely chill and smile inducing. Wonderful graphics and audio. Great progression of story, abilities, and customization. So much was put into this, you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't own it! Buy it at full price then buy it for your friends, these guys actually deserve the money.

I feel grafted by this game. It's so bland I think they retroactively started pushing that as a willful decision sales wise. I'm tired of the "fixed by mods" notion from Bethesda fans as well. This is so uninteresting that I don't even have the excitement to play it with mods I expected out of myself. Wait 2 years, install 200 glitchy user mods, do another half playthrough effectively with gimmicks to help it limp along, then Todd will release some unnecessary patch that breaks them all like Skyrim anyway. This is cold campbell's soup out of the can when you were in the mood for steak.

And Bethesda? Hire people who can model faces. Please, just whatever you make next. Fire the sentient stick of butter who's been modeling your characters for decades and hire an artist with style for once in your history. Check anyone in my friends list if you need, they could all knock out something better in blender in about a week.

CHECK OUT MY INFINITE LOADING SCREEN SPACE GAME WITH ZERO ALIENS AND SAMEY CHECKPOINTS THAT ARE ALWAYS 1000m AWAY! NO ROVERS! -the mind of a deranged/disconnected ceo

So you want to be a pixelated viking...

Pros:
- World vibes. This is climate done right, color done right, travel done well, distinction done well, sound is great, music is great, nature is great, and hearth and home feels meaningful after a tough journey...it's a cohesive world presentation. There's also cryptic visits from the gods and other neat lore-things ready to pull you in.

- Progression. The progression is slow but meaningful and you really feel like you earn the use of the new items you discover. The tiers can be somewhat obscure on how to advance and the loss of skill levels on death is A BIT MUCH, VALHIEM but for the most part it really feels like you're getting continually better. Progression is controlled more adeptly than many games where you either bail because it's slow or you blow by everything too fast.

-Building freedom. You're not going to easily put towers in the sky due to the crafting support system collapsing poorly supported objects, but in many ways the building system offers endless choices and tricks to achieve endless creative nonsense. I made a glass fire table just cause and that's not an item in the game. Also no stupid consequence for misplacing objects, you get your materials right back if you need to move something so Feng Shui to your beard's content.

-Some combat: Some of combat is going in the con section, however many of the weapon offerings just feel cool to use and give them nice cromchy feels when you land hits. I've had some very nice moments in this game alone and with friends. The special attacks give you options in a fight. Footwork could be sooo cool if they'd fix stamina and responsiveness. If you can get adept at weapon swaps and roll-dodging it comes together more. And nothing beats harpooning a furling and yanking them out of their safe space.

- Real sense of danger: It's one of those games that'll teach you by punishing you to keep you careful to the point that when you're on the high seas and/or headed to coast your head is on a swivel.

-Content: There's so much to do! I mean I still want more usable items and biomes still but it's hard to deny how full this game is. Odin done did a plethora.

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Cons, or "Things about Valhiem that are still violently, butt-up stupid:"
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-Stamina management. Good. Lord. Ever have a dream when you go to punch something and some unsatisfying force slows your fist down to a stop? Want to feel like Mr Incredible getting florpaglorp'd by Syndrome's black goo cannons literally all the time? Want every potentially good feeling fight to be undercut by how inexcusably fast stamina drains and how slow it regens? Ever get stuck in a car with your aunt Mable for 9 hours talking about boomer Facebook memes? Want that all to be 50 times worse when you're *gasp* ...slightly wet? I understand what they're going for but to say that system could be dialed back is a huge understatement. Even in late game if you're not RESTED, FULL, DRY, EIKTHYR'D, WARM, *AND* STAMINA-POTION'D... you get about 2 swings and a jump before you're walk-fleeing and crying like Peter Griffin with his pants around his ankles. Feel bad, man. Stamina alone makes people bail on this game. It's too harsh in vanilla and there's really no counterpoint. Please do better, Valhiem. That constant unsatisfying feeling is leaving players with a bad taste in their mouths when they reflect.

- Level loss: That progression feel in the pros takes a hit because it takes too long to gain a level in archery just to lose 2-5 levels on death and subsequent corpse runs. The no-skill-drain time isn't enough of a perk to balance it. I think there should be an entirely different death consequence. Everquest isn't a thing people play anymore for a reason.

-Enemy ai: Needs work. It's got potential but many times you're just waiting for them to complete their ants-in-the-pants dance to come around and swing at you again. (Or they just never stop their basic follow path when you're no-stamina slogging it like always.) Also gaining altitude on a sharp surface usually just negates their brains entirely and you can sit there and cheese them. But it's taking an hour because you shoot one arrow then went to make a sandwhich while your stamina comes back.

-Group splitting: The finite resources of this game kinda pulls people away from each other in time, and players who join later suffer greatly from later tier raids becoming active after boss defeats. They basically have no option but to log out or die during those. I think based on how difficult the Mistlands and some bosses are it's supposed to bring people back together to group up again, but your friends who are expecting an attached at the hip game like Vermintide or Fall Guys might be pretty let down.

-Buggy AF netcode+gfx right now: We're talking regular disconnects, regular world save stutters, rubberbanding, poor server/client handoff with multiple users in an area, simple server handshake requests causing drops of players currently in world, boats destroying frames, my gtx 3080 melting, random desktop crashes, fish flying in the sky, MASS HYSTERIA

-Building cons: While you do get a lot of freedom to create, the build pieces are too few and I'm not sure god understands the snapping system. You will build with the strictest attention to math and stuff just won't line up anyway sometimes. The build camera negotiation is also just..oh wait it's just your regular camera. You can't see under that object to snap it? Tough luck.

-Inventory: Vikings often raided and stole new technologies. Guess they never found a village with a SORT BUTTON. Or a search menu. Enjoy squinting at 50 long since irrelevant items in the craft list looking for the new thing you discovered without the option to even sort alphabetically. Your viking cannot read, confirmed. Oh and can the craft system detect nearby chests that have the thing you need in it? No. You have to go over there and get it every time, gets old.

-Landscaping: This feature can be super cool at times but I feel like I have as much control over the flatten tool as I did in my last relationship. And there's an arbitrary bedrock from any height you're at to about 6-7 blocks down; as in, if you're on a mountain inland you simply can't dig down to water level and create a port. It'll stop you based on your altitude so if you mined all the way to sea you'll end up with a nasty, uneven land ramp.

-Administration: I've set up two servers so far at home, migrating our world from one to an upgraded second. It's buggy and there are so few admin options beyond kick/ban stuff and I don't know why. Admins in the adminlist.txt cannot even spawn in items to replace stuff that Valhiem inevitably destroys with some random crash. There's no ratelimit manipulation without recompiling dll's with DnSpy. There's zero world management options without mods. Like HEY MAYBE IT COULD RAIN LIKE 20% LESS should be as easy as moving a slider. You know, stuff you would find in *every other crafting game server management console since the beginning of time.* Whhhhyyyyyy

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All that aside, for an Alpha this is very worth the money to check out. 322hrs of exploring and building with a lot of engaging gameplay is very worth that cost. I really hope they do more, and in some cases do less.

After 100%'ing this game like the tarnished I am,

Problems:

• May melt your m.2 drive. (It did mine.)
• Every Quest In Elden Ring Is Like This <---[youtube this]
• Low effort endings imo, 4/6 esp. being slideshowy recolors.
• Aloof / cryptic storytelling with failures to track, guide, or coalesce.
• NPC's move-prediction is not always sober.
• Imbalanced pvp soaked in metabuilds
• All the reused assets leave a mild samey-feel.

Positives

• Beautiful. Just stunning sometimes. Nokron lives in my brain.
• Ludicrous amount of exploration content and combat options.
• A host of maidens, don't hug that one.
• Instills fun caution in the player.
• Deserving of its trajectory to classicdom.
• Dog


The cinematic narrator sounds ready to Elden-Nut.

I ignored all the bad reviews for Winds. That was a mistake. You almost have to work to get a "Mostly Negative" review for DLC on steam. Holy lord Fatshark. I want to love you but you have to lose the contempt you have for user feedback. LISTEN to people, they *almost* love your game and many of them are trying to help.

Here's what's still wrong with Winds as of Oct 11th 2019:

Regarding Bugs

• 2.0 reintroduced a bunch of problems that were already fixed, these are echoed throughout the comments.

• Broken Audio cues are a Tier 1 problem. About 1 out of every 10 specials or more are silent. Further, the warning stab-swoop cue is now absent so often in thick hoards that I've switched to trust only visuals in that scenario which is a losing/frantic/unpleasing state of play.

• Beastmen have introduced weird performance issues. My 1080 was purring like a kitten before winds and now there's frameskips that seem independent of settings. Gamespeed fluctuations are baffling. Imagine you swing a sword at someone's face and Quicksilver from X-Men goes all speedmo and moves your strike a foot to the left making you wiff. Frustrating is the word when there's too much on screen now.

• Not a common issue but once in a while you'll come across the crazy new npc: Invisible Beast, usually happens for me on Against the Grain.

Regarding The New Beastmen mobs.

• Regular Beastmen hoards are unmanageable, especially with the cleave nerfs. The game now feels like a frustrating dream where you're wading through tar and you wake up irritated and unsatisfied. In the past Vermintide has often created fun, seemingly hopeless situations that someone who's really good can clutch and rise above. They way beastmen stack, ghost-hit, and gum up the map makes most of those situations _actually_ hopeless. This is probably the most game ruining thing. I've never seen the Legend+ public chat in such agreement about anything. The DEFEATED screen then a round of "This is stupid" by all. I wager this is why the world play numbers are down so fast.

• Spearmen still have laughably cheap attacks. Their reach is meant to make people approach more carefully like berserkers but outside of being individually hitbox glitchy, even small beastmen hoard groups mask them and basically award them free hits. Even alone they appear and stab with such reach and speed that they never feel tactically approachable. They just feel like something you have no control over and they are so poorly executed you roll your eyes when you encounter them.

• Beastmen attack animations are still very unclear and follow the player unrealistically. There are times where you can complete 1.5 dodges in an arc and the general infantry beastmen will still somehow turn/track with you and place a hit. This hasn't gotten better in the recent patches at all that I've witnessed.

• The Minotaur attack/turnaround patterns are soooo extra, Even the ♥♥♥♥♥ out chaos spawn has places where you can recover and work some magic. More than once I scrubbed my letsplays and found the Minotaur performed a 180 degree turn and attacked in the same frame.

Regarding player content:

• The new weapons are ok to experiment with but have no red skins and need some balancing. The latter is understandable.

• There is zero incentive to play Cataclysm other than masochism. You still just get Legend vaults as a reward. It's basically a bland/measured Twitch mode difficulty that's DLC locked. It feels like a very lazy offering and should have been available to all.

• Dark Omens: the map itself is an acceptable design and with a good end event, however since it's 98% beastmen people mostly just quit or groan in dismay when it pops up in the rotation. Also one map for this price and it's mostly a stone quarry? Kind of a rip, I hope Fatshark makes amends.

Weaves:

lmao

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I'll update this if/when they smooth this out but for now, seriously stay away from this. Look to the tsunami of people saying that Winds ruined Vermintide 2. They are correct.