Recent reviews by Bludgeon

you feed the slimes and then you sell their poop for money

there are two bananas in my hands would you like to see me eat them

Game is really fun, feels pretty good for the most part, love all the new techniques that every character gets, and I’m really loving Fleet and Ranno in particular. Excited to see what Dan gives us in the future and I hope this game is successful. That said, considering that I personally didn’t follow all the pre-release material until I got access to the beta, I was honestly shocked that regular drift DI (like in Smash/the first Rivals game) wasn’t in the game. And I say that’s an issue because there doesn’t seem to be at least some sort of (specifically) an IN-GAME tutorial that told me what the differences between Rivals 1 and 2 were beyond the obvious additions of ledges, grabs and shield. Hoping for tutorials like the one in Rivals 1 to come to this game sooner and help out newer players. The game also feels a tad slower than the first one, but that’s not a dealbreaker, just a nitpick that I have.

They had every chance to pull a Far Harbor with this DLC and they didn't. I completed the entire DLC and Andreja adds nothing to the area.

Great DLC, the locations are amazing, and most of the enemies are really cool. Some FPS drops when playing, and it was definitely a bit detrimental since the lag spikes were occurring during the boss fights, but otherwise a great DLC, and definitely challenging.

Defeated all 11 major bosses, and maybe 4/5 of them were actually difficult. The rest were just alright, or downright disappointing in regards to Midra and Rellana specifically because these two were way too easy. Don't really like the idea of using Radahn again as a boss just because he was already in the base game, but prime Radahn is Malenia-levels of difficulty and that sorta made up for it, although not a fan of how his orbital laser move consistently drops my FPS. Even with close to maxed out Scadutree blessings, most bosses can still 2 shot you even with 60 vigor, so it's definitely a challenge.

space bar simulator

Absolutely amazing. Story is extremely well made, OST is great, voice acting is top tier, majority of NPCs were incredibly compelling, especially the companions, amount of strategy and freedom of choice in the game is insane. You will almost never have the exact same experience as other players when going through the campaign. For context, I completed the campaign twice, once in Normal mode, and once in Tactician mode.

Unfortunately, bugs and delays in enemy turns start to show up around the middle of the game (at least around mid Act 2 to throughout Act 3 for me) which makes the final act a bit of a slog to get through. Especially noticeable when there's a lot of enemies on screen.

For Steam Deck users, it kiiiinda runs okay on the Steam Deck, but in my experience Act 3 felt really bad to play through on it, possibly due to the large amount of NPCs in later areas causing massive lag. Was struggling to stay at 30 fps on medium-low settings. Better to just play this on PC.

Regardless of said performance issues (which would probably not be an issue on stronger PCs), this game is one of the best games I've played in a decade, and absolutely deserved GOTY.

Short but cute

Completionists can easily 100% this game under 2 hours

incredibly difficult but very satisfying when you get through a hard stage

great cozy game