Recent reviews by 42

Dlc is amazing

I had a whole write up about scadu fragments for this but as of patch 1.12 coming out very soon scadu fragments now scale extremely hard at the beginning and then have diminishing returns. This means you no longer need to get very high amounts of scadu level in order to have enough for the bosses.

early bosses: 4 levels
mid bosses: 9 levels
final boss: 13-15 levels

you should still try to explore all the side areas before fighting bosses but you no longer need to utterly comb the map for them before attempting. Its still important to bear in mind how much scadu fragments increase your stats, compared to your rune level one early scadu level is like 15 under soft cap rune levels in a damage stat and 10 in endurance without contributing to or being effected by any cap. This means having less scadu level than the recommended above is essentially being upwards of like 30-40 rune levels under leveled for a boss.

I think you need to have genuine derangement to play the single player of this game but playing it multiplayer or with friends is really fun

PEAK

If you ever die on a save file then press do not continue then try and go back to the last checkpoint in that save it softlocks all save files, no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue why people are saying they fixed this ♥♥♥♥ when its clearly not fixed, just emulate

Imagine a turn based game and dnd attack rolling had a bastard child featuring gambling addiction from the devil may cry series and a "difficulty tweak [tm]" equivocal to a right angle. do you like the sound of that? then get this game. do you wish to not develop a horrible addiction? get it anyway, it will be fine... surely.

ok so first off post game is 1% less brain dead because you no longer need +10 pinnacle +15 artifact, instead you now only need +10 +5 or vice versa, but pretty much every other thing that was going to be fixed has not been done in a meaninfull way and now theres like 2x more issues (yay) so that's funny and my review is already rambly enough so the long and short of this update is that solar warlock now is worse than arcstrider (some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ how). The new major content update absolutely particle annihilated any semblance of investment in the greater story by comically retconning and dumbing down the threat of savathuun (and the season before with quira) basically ruining the 7 years of build up to the end of this long ass arc that everyone has been hyped about for that time. For reference, forsaken was the main setup for this arc and its infinitely more content full and substantive let alone considering the actual writing. The most blatant contradictory retcon is quira dying but the curse not breaking despite the fact we explicitly know the curse is linked to quira being alive, it's literally the cliffhanger of forsaken: we know who we need to kill to fix the curse but we don't know how to find it. This retroactively makes pretty much all of forsakens narrative worthless (good job bungalo) and single handedly ruined the greatest story telling of the franchise. on the WQ in particular savathuun becomes the dumbest main antagonist out of all of them by making some of the most tactically bankrupt decisions possible just for the sake of this dumbass fanfiction derailed plot line that the new writers want to push over the original planned narrative. This is at odds with forsakens portrayal of savathuun as the biggest mind♥♥♥♥ery of all antagonists just for savathuuns true plan to be that she wants to kill herself on purpose, make herself 1000% weaker and devote herself to the traveler?????????? what was meant by this, this is a ♥♥♥♥ plan that savathun should know better about seen as she ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ knows weilding both paracausal forces is not only the only way to beat the winnower but also just straight up better, but she goes all purist mode for like no reason despite this being an ideal that is portrayed as ignorant in the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ narrative. did we forget she is the goddess of trickery and smartness??? why does she just do bad decisions that corner herself for like no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason? So this entire plot line that has been hyped up for 7 years gets speedrun in like 2 jokes of boss fights, the quira fight where quira uses no oryx powers despite canonically knowing literally all of them and has the health pool of a thrall and the savathuun fight where she is reskinned ghaul UNIRONICALLY. Great, yippie, I am so happy about this information. And this botchery is all in service to usher in some random super duper fan fic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ new plot line with 0 pre setup or world building of these super secret right hand men of the winnower who have existed all along and have caused all of the events ever but they are never mentioned previously because all the people who would have known about it just forgor or something xd lol lmao.... WHAAAAAAAAAAAT? ok buddy and now we ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kill one of these literal gods because it basically lets us kill it then rambles in the lore tabs about how we are actually doing its bidding by killing it (wow I love antagonists who say "xd I win because I died" just like palpatine!1 1 ! !) this basically takes away the whole victory because it basically killed itself wow great amazing. Not to mention for an important story raid bungie is still cheaping out and making it 4 encounters instead of the standard of 5+ encounters for a major expansion. for some background the old standard for a major expansion is to have there be 4 encounter raids only for mini dlcs like crotas end and wrath and for actual high budget dlc there would be raids with 5 encounters or more, but bungie is using the forsaken 2 bonus raids as an excuse to sell full expansions with a raid lair instead of a proper raid. This is even more insulting when this enemey is supposedly a step above the antagonist we just spent the past 7 years soying over (who died comically anticlimactically) and it gets a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ raid lair where it kills itself and the other 3 encounters are loreless fluff with repeated mechanics and flawed setup but we will get to that. furthermore, this expansion expands the very amazing tradition of post SK bungie forgetting that 50% of the game should be mid game content and then they add filler to replace the lack of actual side missions and side stories that the original source material used to have as standard also STILL NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ACHIEVMENTS WHYYYYYY. This entire expansion is just a continuation of the degradation of the core mechanics and standards of the franchise into a cheap and ever degenerating state of disrepair, I would unironically rather play pre shadowkeep with no additional content than 4 year smg meta wild ride hell that is current destiny especially given the sheer lazyness and poor quality of the currently released content that has the replay value of a wet sponge.

ok now its time to talk about the raid because its legitimately ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ aweful. First opening encounter is a forced 5 minute segment of waiting for a thing to get to point a to b to c to d etc except theres like 2 scorn enemies (catastrophe) and you have to wait till knowledge spawns to pick up and feed it to the thing. this takes literally infinitely longer than it should for what is basically kill like 10 things then pick up a thing and dunk it. This is a bastardized version of the wrath opening but without literally anything about the wrath opening that made it entertaining let alone actually constitute gameplay. the actual first encounter has 3 people stay and defend and call symbols/ go and shoot taken knights and 3 people go in one at a time and read a thing given the call outs. this encounter is fairly basic but it isn't necessarily bad on its own the only thing I would discredit for is being a bit long given the lack of variance between waves (this is a common criticism of multiwave encounters in general). What makes this bad is the next encounter by it having the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mechanic but INFINITELY less of the mechanic, it keeps the shooting the right symbols of the pillar from the first but without literally any of the depth past that you literally just go in pick up some symbols and shoot them 3 times. This is made worse by the fact that 4 people are basically doing sweet ♥♥♥♥ all besides add clear and stunning (we will get to that), 2 people are on addclear which is only really an actual job that is entertaining on contest mode which I still think should be more than one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ day just so we can replay it (its infinitly more replayable than master mode) and the other 2 stun, stun is the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing ever, all you do is stand there, go up to the guy, go backwards, and shoot. You do this like 2938724723 times in a minute and it is all you do, the whole time. it is somehow MORE mundane than add clear on normal/master, because at least on add clear you have risk of death, or literally risk of doing anything other than pressing 1 button once and then backing off for like a second. not only does 4/6 of the part do sweet ♥♥♥♥ all for this encounter but this is another wave based encounter were each wave is mostly the same, I would credit the alternate floor layouts though they were substantive on their own on contest mode on lower difficulties they make like no difference on their own, and they are in fact on their own because the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemey spawns are identical for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason. This encounter overall is the biggest snooze fest known to man and is unironically an F tier encounter alongside crown encounter.
[continued here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14DIdNHR9JTielwOALVtLu2L2ylNkkuaF1y51f4AsCQY/edit?usp=sharing

The skill curve is steeper than Mount ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Everest but if you can climb it the game is 100% worth your time just make sure to focus on taking scrolls that give the most damage over health because you wont be able to do enough damage to beat bosses without min maxing damage output. Also try to use shields from the beginning and get shield backpack mutation as quickly as possible (it drops from those spiky dudes) because its really usefull

This is the only Game I will ever give a 9.5/10, it is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ masterpiece. I am not even going to elaborate in great detail because that would spoil too much, play it or you are missing out on the best movment shooter to date. My only singular (one) issue with the game literally at all is a singular mini boss in cyber grind is kinda annoying to deal with due to janky grapple attack but thats literally the only problem the game has, everything else is perfection PLAY IT NOW!

COUNTEREDIT: recent patch fixed literally all my gripes with the update lmao, act 2 is another 9.5 out of ten the lore and story is even better everything is amazing buy now or dioajsijfdgfdh

A genuinely miserable game marred with constant terrible design decisions and over convoluted upgrade mechanics that only prove to force you to spend half your waking days in ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ menus.

first off the first area is actually pretty good but it goes down hill from there, each early game boss at first is brain damaged easy you then reach a red ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dumbass dragon that is harder to get its tail than to beat the final boss of the game without using a cheese (thanks obama) next you now have multiple paths to go which is good until you realise that going through any of the "progress skip" paths essentially become way harder and more arduous than actually fighting the bosses even in those paths ie the entirety of blight town is complete aids while its bosses all are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ easier and take way less time.

this quickly becomes a pattern in this game of holy ♥♥♥♥ I could beat the entirety of ds3 in the time it takes to progress past one add clear area because of the cancerous enemy placement.

This contrast in difficulty just makes beating bosses unsatisfying not only is the bosses in this game being so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ easy overall unsatisfying on their own but trudging through a convuluted maze like area with no major landmarks to see where the ♥♥♥♥ to go or where you are or where you have been half the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time just to first try a boss without even soul grinding ever is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ridiculous

People keep soying about O&S boss difficulty but I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beat them first try with 4 estus what is this retardation?

This game is spending like 0.1% of the time trying to beat bosses and the rest either spent in menus and traveling between the 2 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ blacksmiths which by the way WHY DO YOU HAVE T O GO BETWEEN 2 OF THEM WHY IS THE OTHER HALF OF UPGRADING SPLIT BETWEEN 2 LONG TO GET TO LOCATIONS FROM A BONFIRE? ?? ? ? ?? and just getting stuck on areas of the game because they thought it was funny and ironic to put 10239829189424 enemies in a tiny area and told you to have fun (amazing game design)

dont get me started on specific examples of pure brain damage like the skeleton wheel ♥♥♥♥♥ having such inconsistent physics that it gets you killed by pure unpredictability rather than being out played.

countless bosses are just ridiculously easy, sif, all of the early game bosses, the stupid black dragon boss which I managed to stay aliave in for 20 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ minutes multiple times trying to cut its ♥♥♥♥ tail and giving up on how inconsistent the tail slam attack registration was and how rare the opertunity was and the fact it was rng (literally why fromsoft) I mean ♥♥♥♥ even artorius and manus were pretty easy, this game is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ easy compared to ds3 almsot all the bosses are a cake walk and the "difficult bosses" are just slightly harder and this is all being said when I was most of the time 30 levels underleveled because I was so wasteful with souls because I never felt like I needed to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ take care of that.

I did not expect to find literally everything besides the bosses to be difficult and unintuitive but here we are

I tried platinuming this game or 100% whatever but holy ♥♥♥♥ is it so much more purified cancer than just beating the game or the other 100%s you have to do so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ menuing and buying materials that I wanted to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ kill somthing in real life out of pure frustration call me an adhd sperg but spending 90% of post game in a menu is retarded

oh and dont get me started on the bed of choas that boss was literally the only boss that took my more than 5 attempts and it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks so much ass ironically the 3rd phase is easy because you can consistently bait out attacks and run through its the second phase that is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ because you have to dodge consequtivie of those arm attacks with lingering hitboxes that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ drag you across basically making it impossible to dodge its just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

80% of the game is outright unenjoyable and 20% is genuinly good but its not even difficult not even underleveld

this game has so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ issues that constantly and consistently make runs unbearable that this game is almsot entirely unreplayable and NG+ is just so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring because bosses are still stupid easy because they still have very basic and clear attacks and dont have many to cycle through you spend most of NG+ in menus and getting lost or refering to guides again because ♥♥♥♥ knows you arent going to remember the garbage maze like architecture where every subsection of most areas are so similar you cant tell where the ♥♥♥♥ to go anymore. NOT TO MENTION you have to re aquire EVERYTHING you unlocked in NG in terms of progression which when its already tedious enough 1 time round is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ unbearably boring the second time round it makes me want to tear out my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ eyeballs

I would not recommend this not even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ close I would recommend you avoid this like the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ plauge and just play ds3 its a far more difficult and less frustrating and more enjoyable experience than this buggy hellhole of a game

OH I NEARLY FORGOT this version of the game not only maintains all the issues of the previous version but ADDS MORE BUGS SOME ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ HOW, not only this but by some miracle the game some how drops frames every 10 minutes which wasnt a problem with the previous itteration and ALSO my pc exceeds the system requirments, I think this has somthing to do with the garbage filter they put over every ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ area that is what they did to excuse rereleasing a 10 odd year old game with zero gameplay improvments. If anything and you still want to buy this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game get a steam key for the prerpare to die edition as its a much more stable version of the game (although you wont be able to do Multiplayer as much because it has less people still playing)

This game is a completionist worst ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nightmare and somone who likes hard games boring experience because it isnt even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard its just tedious, repetitious and frustrating. (and also wholeheartedly unreplayable without mods to fix aspects of the game (most of which arent up to date for this version because the modding community died before this version released) or cheeses that arent even much easier)

This game is amazing to the point where there are only a few nit picks I can think of that could possibly be negative about it.

The game has tones of cool unique and interesting bosses and boss fights requiring different strategies and preparation each time, tones of different weapons and 4 weapon class trees to specialise into, or you could make gear for multiple classes and swap out mid battle for even more optimised lodouts. The games combat is very engaging and difficulty never feels too unfair.

now for some of the nit picks:

1) voodoo doll demons are annoyingly rare for farming the WoF early hard mode

2) ultra rare drops in general are quite frustrating not necessarily because setting up a farm for them is too difficult, more so that additionally waiting ages for the item to drop can be quite frustrating even with a farm. Maybe making some way to craft these items while still maintaining the original difficulty to acquire would be nice but I am not sure how to do that.

3) fishing achievements take way longer than all the other achievements even with quest fish brought in from a different world.

4) The celestial pillars encounter makes the moon lord very annoying to grind for rare drops even with the craft able summoning item you can sometimes make after a celestial pillars event, this is because the encounter is a fixed time that takes way longer than the actual moon lord fight and can't be significantly sped up. A solution to this would be to make it so the first time you beat the cultist the pillars spawn as usual and after you beat the pillars the moon lord spawns but if you beat/die to the moon lord you no longer have to go through the pillars to activate the moon lord fight. Instead the moon lord fight activates after beating the cultist each time and the pillars event would be activated additional times from crafting a summoning item for the event costing material from the moon lord being defeated.

5) Even with the clentaminator or how ever you spell it purifying world corruption takes so long because you have to make regular hellavators for each patch of corruption, it isn't even like its necessarily too difficult to purify your world its just in endgame it becomes so tedious and long to do even if you quarantined your world efficiently that it is quite frustrating. Having some kind of post moon lord purification item that can purify all the way downward or just straight up purifies your world would be nice seen as after you beat the game it's not like world corruption is even a practical problem outside of cosmetic or sentimental value so you might as well give an op purification option especially seen as you give an op post moon lord weapon (the zeniath), heck you could even make it like the zeniath in the fact you have to do a big crafting tree to make it.

Apart from those complaints I have no other problems with the game to my memory, for sure it's an incredibly enjoyable experience and I would recommend it in a heart beat especially as it's so cheap