Recent reviews by Crius

So, I held off this purchase for the first two months because I didn't want to give in to root level anti-cheat software that get installed on your PC, the specific one have had plenty of issues in the past, and it didn't really inspire trust to me.

The game is great per se and peer pressure in the end made me give up and buy it. I played enough time to confidently say that it's a really good game IF you have some friends to play with. Otherwise, it's a nice one but to be honest really just too much at risk of depending on how the rest of the team of random is willing to play together rather that just each one doing their own thing.

The game also has plenty of issues that are quite serious and still not getting fixed, giving priority to other things. We are talking about misaligned aim, damage not working, weapons and stratagem (high powered on-call weapons) that suffer from huge unbalancing between them, resulting in just a few of them being "favoured" among the rest and so on.

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On top of this, today they announce that until now the Sony Account wasn't really enforced but, by the end of the month, it will be for "our security". Our, the users. PSN is one of the most hacked platforms in terms of sensible data theft and clearly is not needed for the game to function at all. So, this is just Sony imposing on the devs so they can gather and resell users data to further increase their profit.

Overall, unless you really are intrigued by the game, stay away. Not for the game merits or flaws per se, as they kind of balance themselves out, but for how the management behind it is acting in a very anti-consumer way, as it's tradition for Sony.

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Edit: Changed to positive after the update from Sony and the step back on the PSN requirement ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
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There are plenty of other good games. Just for coop, you can try Deep Rock Galactic for a live service game that has developers that are ethical in how they treats their players.

For rock and stone!

This game is a perfect sum of all the good bits from Diablo 2, Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Path of Exile and some original parts that are clearly developed by people that love and enjoyed play this genre of games up until now. It has still some rough edges, but the developers communicate clearly and honestly to the player base and listen to feedback. It is a great game to play and has tremendous potential. If you love this kind of games, you'll love this one.

It's absolutely broken as you can basically solo the content but beside that, it's finally here.

Each weapon has two models, basically changing only some minor details, and each model two colours.
The armours are all basically the same with just a notable exception. The headpieces are quite well done and varied instead, which is appreciated.

There is terrible lack in cosmetics to be obtained doing achievements which is disappointing (just the white armour).

Overall I would have expected a bit more.

This game could have been quite fun but the lazyness of not adding a very simple thing like mouse support is really incredible.

It would be perfectly usable with a mouse if they just allowed to select the sensitivity and allow to always show the cursor.
Just that.

Instead, they simply decided that "♥♥♥♥ M&K". For a computer game.

Edit 07/10/2023

So, after basically one year, Fatshark release a complete overhaul of the classes. It's a mess. But at least it's a fun mess. There are builds to try, and some are outrageously stronger than others. The reasonable expectation would be to see the talent trees being reworked so that more or less various build are brought on par with one another... The more realistic expectation is that Fatshark will nerf the powerful and fun builds and simply forget to improve the ones that are not working or are plainly boring.

ON TOP OF THAT, apparently the game is finally ready for the consoles! So new players from console will get a much more polished game (crafting, albeit still grindy for no reason beside driving engagement metrics), fun classes to play and a whoppy 9300 aquilas, the premium currency, for free in the base game! Isn't it grand? What do you say? And what about the players that bought on day one and received an half-baked Early Access with no crafting, boring classes and all the rest of the subpar game content? Screw them, who cares. They already paid and probably bought even some cosmetic in the meanwhile, the fools.

Edit 31/12/2022

Still hot garbage. Don't bother. Fatshark management and community management is abysmal. The only people that still defend this mess are people that need help because of how much they suffer from FOMO mechanics. Seriously, if you know that you are susceptible to that, don't start playing this game.

Edit 06/12/2022
I've refunded the game as, as of today, there is a very important issue that prevent players from being able to play unless they use a VPN. As much as I could do that, it feel absolutely unjustified to have to pay an additional third party service to use a game that I've already paid for and for which the developers seems to care very little to fix. This behaviour, on top of the point listed below, makes this game an absolute "to avoid" in my book.

Hopefully it will come around in a couple years, like Vermintide 2 did.

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This game is the quintessential "Fatshark experience" with a sprinkle of greedy GaaS on top.

The developers (Fatshark) simply ignored any feedback received in the last years of Vermintide 2 and went ahead with a vision they had that disregard everything that could have been good of the previous titles and implement some terrible user abusing mechanics that are meant to exploit the players.

Every single system in the game is designed around the idea of creating "engagement" meaning that things are either time gated (shop, weekly quests, missions types, etc) randomized or straight up locked behind some way of progress that require an absurd feat or amount of time to be unlocked.

You are not paying for the game, you are paying for the possibility to have your time wasted behind some abusive mechanics that will make you hate the time you wasted.

Onto more details:

- Items are not dropped either during the run or at the end of each mission. Rarely you will get a single item, randomly in terms of type and power level.
- Items are meant to be obtained via the shop, which refresh every 60 minutes and range between the unlocked weapons type (for your level) and weapon rarity (white, green, blue).
- Items of higher rarity (purple, orange) will be obtained via a "premium" currency that can be obtained doing some weekly quests in the range of "kill 1000 of this type of enemy in melee" or "find X amount of this secondary mission item" and so on. Usually you manage to unlock ~2000 units of this extra currency. Weapons of the orange rarity will cost slightly more than a week's quests so you'll need to weeks to buy one of those prestigious items. This system already stink of "buy X amount of this premium currency to save time farming" written all over.
- Most weapons are just the same skin and a different name (MKIII, MKIV, MKVII, etc) that will simply change either the attack combo animation for melee, or the fire mode for weapons (single, auto, semi-auto, etc) which feel a very cheap and lazy way of introducing variety when things like that could be managed with weapons mods eventually.
- There is an upgrade system which basically allow you to upgrade an item to a superior tier. To do that you need to find, in missions, some crafting materials that are randomly spawning around. The higher the upgrade, the more it costs in terms of materials. There are also advanced features like saving a stat of a weapon to be reused on another weapon or reroll the properties of a weapon... but they are not yet in the game.

- Missions are randomly selected from a pool and you will usually have the same mission available in multiple slots but some "plain", other with a secondary mission, others again with a random "modifiers"
- This means that the mission you might want to run, at the difficulty you want, might not be available and ... tough luck.
- Modifiers for missions makes it, most of the time, quite harder for zero improved reward
- Secondary missions are simply "find X of this item that will spawn semi-randomly around and occupy your utility slot or have your health being slowly eaten away" for a meagre reward of experience and golds. Not enough to justify the effort and surely not relevant once you reach the experience cap anyway

- Combat is "sluggish" compared to the previous titles from Fatshark. The overall feeling is that things are slower in terms of animation (and animation locked) but that feeling may fade away after a bit of playing as you get used to it. Still, not a good combat compared to other titles and definitely NOT a "hybrid combat" as loudly advertised.
- The previous beta had shown a frenetic and eclectic combat feeling, which is in contrast with the current state of the game in which combat feel more slow and clunky. Adjustment might be made but currently it's not leaving you euphoric after an intense fight, more like relieved that it's ended
- Some enemies have pathing issues that lead them to do impossible movements and contribute to the janky feeling of the combat's experience (hounds, chargers)
- Some physics are absolutely broken. Explosions tend to shove you in the wrong direction, charging enemies doing absurd corners and maintaining speed, other grabbing you when you shouldn't be grabbed (behind corners, warping back onto you, etc)

- There are a grand total of 4 playable careers and most of the weapons for careers are shared between them, leaving a feeling of "already seen" when switching between them.
- Most careers have broken feats, talents and mechanics. You'll quickly end up finding a meta that is working around the broken aspect and deal with it that way

- Difficulty is currently an hard evaluation because, beside lvl 1-2 missions, lvl 3-4 have sometimes the AI director spawn so much stuff all at once that makes it a miracle to be able to survive, leaving a sense of "relief" when finishing a map more than feeling like you dominated the mission or anyway raised to meet the odds.
- Lvl 5 maps are currently something that very few have even tried as it simply requires an equip that only few have started to obtain. The time gated equip is contributing to this slowing down of progress from the community.
- There is an ongoing bug that force every lvl 4-5 map to spawn with the modified "increased hordes" which makes those difficulties absolute bonkers and, to use a classic term "an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥". This bug was present in beta. A week after the release, it's still not fixed.

The game overall has potential and can be fun if played with friends but, to be honest, anything played with friends immediately acquire an extra +X points in it's evaluation due to the fact that we just have fun with friends.
If you are into WH40K as well, that might raise the score but again, the mechanics are horrible and after viewing the maps and some of the weapons you'll be left with a sense of "shallowness" that really can't be mitigated by the astounding visuals.

The game is 7 years old but the UI/UX is 20 years old. No thanks.

TTK is completely random due to completely lack of balance with weapons. PVE is buggy as hell with basic pathfinding not working properly and basics like aggro and aggro range being nonsense. It's a grindfest with time gated progress. Stay well far away.

The game has lots of potential but is plagued by some "bad" game design decisions.

Just to list a few:
- Static map means that once you reached the end of PVE one time, all the following starts will just be the same thing over and over. This means also that "dedicated" players will just know what and where to go and have an immense advantage over new players. This is imho the most immediate danger to this title.
- The default settings are incredibly grindy and playing alone will require you to farm resources and loot for a long amount of time. On top of that, dying and simply using your equip/weapons will damage them (of course) but the rate at which it's damaged by default is so high that you risk getting pushed back in your progress by a lot if you die too often, which in pvp is going to be quite the common occurrence.
- There is really no end-game. Which is fine for an EA but when you got the "end game" shards all you can do is really wait for someone to come and get them out of you with a raid at your castle. Which is not going to be that fun considering that you just sit there and wait really, you have no "post-end-game" activities that may entertain you while you wait for a contender.

Overall, this game seems lacking the most important part right now, and that is a goal really. I would suggest waiting and see what the developers decide to do with it. Unfortunately there isn't much response on the huge amount of feedback the player base is giving, so we can't know if they are even listening.

UPDATE FOR RELEASE (it gets worse)

Everything above still stand. But on top of it it seems that the devs have listened to their community and removed, yep *removed*, some customisation when you create your own offline or self-hosted world. Incredible how some stupid decision manage to see the light.

Specifically they have removed, among other things, options to decide damage/health factors of players/pve/pvp and bosses. So that if someone wanted to make a server in which the PvE is less important and focus on PvP, now you can't. Want to make an accelerated experience world? Can't sorry. And so on.

Really, this game already suffer from Rust syndrome (who play most, wins) even worsened by it being driven by stats instead of player skill.

An interactive short animation movie on the value of yourself. Great stuff!