Recent reviews by Xeyron

Came in from a sale with no expectations, but was met with unlikable and quippy characters, poor readability of maps and specials, and even worse sound design. Constantly just roaring which makes you not hear the infected running to you, while you're just running around collecting copper coins. No stings or recognizable sound queues.

It's a shame, reading some of the pin boards was nice and gave me the feeling there is actual survivors, before I was reminded I am an immune errand boy in a group of snarky teenagers and adults.

"Back 4 Blood is a thrilling cooperative first-person shooter from the creators of the critically acclaimed Left 4 Dead franchise" - since it's putting itself out there comparing itself to Left 4 Dead, it sadly falls short on practically everything save for perhaps replay motivations with the currencies you collect between missions...

4/10. Play Left 4 Dead or a Tide-Game instead. They understand what makes these games good.

Given to me by a friend, and usually this is not my cup of tea, but it was very enjoyable - even if the writing was a bit flowery. Do yourself a favor and play with a mouse and keyboard, even an old fart like me who never touched OSU! could do well in there.

A game that everyone can play how they want. Whether that is the "geneva convention is a checklist" colony, the endless utopia lasting for as long as it can becoming a map-spanning empire, or a diehard challenge of 500% Threat Scaling with the final push requiring total mastery over the game.

It is a story generator at heart, and gives you night infinite replayability. And once you tire of that... open Pandora's Box of mods. The basegame with all DLCs, while a bit pricey, has so many rich features to engage with, it will be a while before the 200+ mods are installed, but damn, if there isn't creative minds out there.

This game is a video game. The ones you keep thinking back to, all nostalgic. And it's not even a boomer shooter.

Old GameCube Era Graphics, basic quests to make you go to points, some loot on the way and some XP to gain to always poke your dopamine receptors. And more importantly, the Gameplay is fast, fun, not too easy, not too hard. Parry windows are generous, but you should get used to parry. You can punch above your weight but don't expect to be handed the win. A nice selection of weapons not locked to any class or stat with 3 classes with different skills to boot.

It is currently a bit short, you get a few hours of fun out of it before you reach the door you can't open.

The only things I will critique is 1) you have too few hotbar slots for the skills you get and 2) the inventory restriction on materials makes not much sense to me. Like 60% through the game suddenly you get an "inventory full" popup, causing you to just throw everything into a chest, and then need to rummage through it whenever you need it for a quest / enchant.

We need to support devs that just make a good game.

After all this time gotta say 5.5 / 10, won’t recommend.

Basically no mechanics evolve, meaning you are doing the same thing at level 5 as you are level 50. The same enemies, the same objective of “2 crates, 1 mythic” which means eventually you don’t want to engage with the POIs anymore beyond ticking off the boxes and finding the blueprints.

Combat is also pretty janky. The deviation is too short lived and too unimpactful to be used in regular combat, rolls are basically useless, enemies are pretty silly in overworld combat. Hard Mode dungeons are better but even there most of the modifiers are unnoticeable with the “gimmick phase” of the boss being the most notable change. (PRO difficulty changed nothing beyond one enemy in one dungeon and repeating a gimmick again.)

Builds are… annoying. With how limited Starchrome is, experimentation / shifting builds feels like ass. Unless you luck out in the Gacha, you’ll lock yourself in a build. The “free” alternatives you get through exploration don’t come close to the potential of the Chrome sets. Most of them also sometimes just get screwed. Oh? Weakspot sniper? Here, have a boss with no weakspot.

Exploration is somewhat kept relevant through some materials like the “Tier X Crystals” being only in crates, as well as some materials like Electronic parts. You can’t automate everything; though arguably Fuel is really the only resource you need tons of in the endgame.

Prime Wars are a laggy mess with a Rating mechanic that’s both nice but terrible. Jumping off a tower to hurt yourself and healing that, shooting enemies once and spamming fences can net you more rating than somebody who brings 50 missiles and does high boss damage.

Base Building is nice besides some snapping issues, but the crafting from chests, general resource abundance and flight mode are all incredible QoL features.

The monetisation is by far the fairest I have ever seen in a F2P like this, even though it has it’s own issues, mainly the proprietary currency and the fact you have to buy full sets. But there is 0 P2W, any daily or weekly login incentive is accumulative and needs to be claimed eventually instead of “login daily or perish”.
Scratch that, they added predatory lootboxes with a 0.4% chance to get the item you want. Have fun spending 300+€ for one cosmetic.

Economy is… uh. I have 700k, like a million in bars and all I can do is spend it on player economy where most things are very cheap.

And don't even get me started on this unnecessary season system they keep adjusting and further fracture their divided playerbase with. As if we needed more convoluted systems on top of the already convoluted systems.

- Doesn’t get stuck up on plot or story, just enough to hype you up.
- Music is a banger with hefty electric beats and guitars, complementing the pace and atmosphere.
- Tons of builds and guns to try, little nuances that play together, yet enough rerolling and upgrading that you can consistently “force” your favorites to a good degree.
- Incredibly satisfying level mobility and design. Eventually the boundaries of the level become suggestions. Even without ledge grabs, wall run or air dash.
- Every meta upgrade feels good. You do well without them, and even better with them.
- Secrets, branching paths, keys and quests. You find doors that tell you “be faster” or doors that tell you to enter a keycode… or a spot you need to bring a certain item for. But it never was annoying, it was more a “hmm now where do I get this?” or racking your brain where you saw the code before.
- Gunplay. Quick, accurate, snappy. Nothing is really slow, everything feels good to use. Save for some shotguns everything has the sounds you’d expect and the oomph. From Kunais to Mortars.

It knows what it wants to be and hell does it make it good. My only frustration stems from Co-Op because sometimes you get hit from projectiles not meant for you, but else it’s good.

One of the better survival games lately with it's own unique spin. And no shallow combat system either!
The game is very strong in the early game, but loses a lot of steam in the late game. At the start your progression, exploration and discoveries are very well paced and the world evolves very visibly.

However, the systems seemed to not mesh as well together towards the end, especially the mutating of insect, fish and frog eggs felt... underwhelming. By the time you unlocked Animals, you didn't really need them anymore. Unlocks seemed a lot more mistimes - in my playthrough I practically skipped fishes.

The endings were frankly a bit disappointing, but that is fine. The ending / story is not what I play these games for.

Overall, still a very easy recommend from me.

It's fun, it's a little time filler and the developer is quick to buff and nerf items accordingly. It can get a little annoying in ranked when you face the same broken comp (ahem, blind pet ranger) over and over, but for that you can always go to another character or play unranked. Or... not at all, and give it a week until it's nerfed.

#Edit: By now they have addressed most of the bugs and the game is playable again. Having beaten Roguelike III and started IV, it certainly seems to have not lost it's bite. The only bug I encountered was that after any run, clicking "Accept Party" as a client, the session is broken for all players until restarted. Also, when you are max level (20), you don't receive ANY rewards... including Act 4 Boss loot.

Every patch made this game buggier, with the 1.0 release making the game outright unplayable in multiplayer. Events that have no option to be selected, and remain bugged even through relogs, sections of the level that don't properly "raise". The main story is seemingly just an AI-wirtten and voiced narration.

It is quite fun once it gets going, and the roguelike mode is even better, but right now I cannot recommend it due to practically being unplayable.

Besides that the game is a quite challenging tactical RPG with less depth than a classic CRPG but not as simple as say an ARPG. There is plenty of fun and viable builds to be explored, so you get your moneys worth. Can't say how well the endgame is balanced in this patch, but it was quite hit and miss between patches.

Do I recommend it? Not yet, I'd put it at mixed review if I could.
Funnily enough it's still one of the stronger survival games out there; I think I am holding the genre to too high of a standard, but the missed potential here frustrates me to no end.

- Base Building is it's strongest part. One of the best systems I've seen. You can make incredibly detailed and custom structures with ease. Only downside is that if you go custom (which can happen by accident), you need to painstakingly remove every 1x1 voxel. I wish they allowed you to have a "free flight" camera for building.

- Exploration is heavily soured by it's overabundance of fetch quests and that every secret you find is another quest marker. The world is quite pretty, if somewhat repetitive in villages and the shroud.

- Crafting is lots of workbenches with little to no purpose, including the NPCs, and crafting can take literal hours of time. Padding, the aptly named endgame resource, will take you the better part of your day if you try to make an end game armor. <UPDATE: Funnily enough they patched in methods to make it less insufferable, but then added Warm Padding, which does the same with Yak Wool.> That, and the fact that you must find your weapons and can find shields and armors as well also makes crafting feel unrewarding. Beyond tools and a few armor pieces I found myself not crafting much.

- Combat is serviceable but doesn't evolve much beyond the basic move sets. There's not many enemies that behave differently, a level 1 scavenger fights the same as a level 25 scavenger etc. And so will you not fight any differently with a level 1 driftwood club or the level 25 legendary sword - the skill system almost exclusively adds passive skills, save for a few exceptions (Jump Attack, Double Jump, Glider Updraft, Hovering while Shooting). Currently there's 1h, 2h, Wands (short range infinite ranged) Bows (ammunition + stamina) and Staves (ammunition + mana). It doesn't matter if it's an axe or a sword beyond one passive bonus you can get. So you find yourself ditching your weapons constantly, sometimes swapping a legendary glowing sword for a literal scrap sword because the numbers are better. (And as mentioned, you cannot craft any better or upgrade).

- Multiplayer is... fine, but the quest system again hurts it. Quests are not completed for both players and a lot of them want you to open chests, so only one player can do it at a time until the server restarts. Loot is also server-side, so expect to have some shortages if you play with more than 2-3 people.

Overall it is a beautiful game with a decent baseline that is held back by shallow and underdeveloped mechanics. I would hold off a little until after the developers got feedback, and I hope they focus on improving their mechanics and design before simply adding a fifth biome.

I want to like it, so I'll update my review if things change.