Recent reviews by Tolkien Ring Network

Context: I am new to PoE. I did not play PoE1. I played through PoE2 EA launch and the game is now in its second season. I currently have 390 hours in the game, having leveled a character to endgame in both seasons.

What I liked:
- First off, the game meets the most important requirement: it is fun. ARPGs aren't really my cup of tea, but I was convinced into trying this one by a friend, and yeah, it's good.
- There is an immense variety of builds to try. In fact, there's so many details about your build that you can modify that it becomes a bit overwhelming. I think the pacing of the game is pretty good at introducing you to everything slow enough for a new player to grasp, but it's still a lot to wrap your head around as a new player.
- Gearing up and finding a better set of skill points does noticeably make you stronger if you do it right, and that is really satisfying.
- Game looks great. Enemies are distinct, moves look cool, maps are varied in setting.
- The bosses, especially the act and pinnacle bosses, are so cool and fun to fight.

What I didn't like:
- The build variety unfortunately comes back to bite itself in the endgame. While you are really open with your options in how to tackle to campaign, the builds you can endgame with are more limited than you'd think. Sure, there's still SOME variety, but there's a lot of synergies that either aren't in the game yet or might never show up, making some abilities impossible to build around. There's also several abilities that look really cool and have a lot of power, but are not viable simply because the animation takes too long. I personally really wanted to use toxic growth in season 1, only to reason I'd get stunned or even killed midway through the animation once the endgame started to ramp up. There's some ways to mitigate this, sure, but the then you're spending resources and points to remove some disadvantage that other abilities just don't have. It's kinda disheartening.
- The devs haven't really landed on what they want, exactly, which leads to some contradictions of gameplay philosophy. They've repeatedly stated they want to slow things down. I want that too: looking at gameplay of PoE1, seeing someone run through a map at mach 5 barely pausing to look at 1 of 1000 drops the inscrutable mass of enemies scrambling to spend more than 0.5 seconds on-screen have left behind... that doesn't look like fun to me. But they've only really slowed the player down. There's a lot of enemies that move so fast you have no choice but to either play at their pace, or spend a ton of resources building up a defense that allows you to ignore their pace. Yet that gets back to the original problem: I want to interface with the enemies and work around them, not ignore them.
- The trade system is stupid. I get the idea, but it leaves too much freedom in people's hands. They can try to scam you with an item that isn't what you're there to get, or list something for one price and then demand a different one when you show interest, or repeatedly post it to keep it at the top of searches, etc. I'm sorry, I know you love your system, GGG, but it isn't working.

There are a lot of recent negative reviews. From what I can tell, these are people frustrated with the balance of the game or angry that PoE2 is not more like PoE1. If you're considering playing the game and see all these reviews, here's my thoughts:
If you are here purely to decide on buying the game, just wait. It'll be out of EA in a bit, you can get it for free then, and these annoyances will be moot by then, given how often balancing changes in this game.
If you've got friends playing the game NOW, and want to know if you should pay to join them, sure. Go for it. You can have fun with your friends and if you never go to reddit or the review section again, you won't ever have guessed there's a legion of people angry at this game. You'll be too busy having fun.
These gripes you see are temporary. In two months, the recent reviews might be overwhelmingly positive. Have fun with the game, put it down when you aren't, and maybe come back later when it's looking good. There's plenty to enjoy here.

So much has already been said about this game in other reviews, I just want to add the thoughts I had that I think are a bit less obvious and more helpful to those of you considering playing this game.

- The core gameplay of just building out a manor blueprint through drafting rooms is just plain fun. Which is good, because you do a LOT of it.
- The puzzles gradually move from obvious to obtuse, which is great because it allows you to learn the game's "language" at a proper pace without getting frustrated by lack of direction or clues. I think most players will, at some point, become annoyed with one puzzle or another (I did myself) based simply on how much of a leap of logic it took to reach the solution.
- There is RNG in this game, of course. It is a roguelike. It will be frustrating. But in the end, you can solve that just by starting a new day. However, I must add that this part is what made me set the game down before I completely finished. I was trying for many days to finish a couple puzzles that I knew HOW to solve, I just needed the RNG to fall into place... but it just didn't. I spent 50 hours in this game and had a lot of fun with it, but this just wore me down. I think it was just a matter of bad luck and a couple poor choices that couldn't be undone.
- In retrospect, I wish I'd kept at it a little longer. I think if I'd stayed focused on 1 objective at a time, I could've moved along at a more consistent pace. If I were to estimate, I think I got through maybe 75% of the game's content?

That's all. Fantastic game. Highly recommend.

This is a great game. Definitely worth a play if you like soulslikes at all.

Likes:
- Smooth soulslike combat
- Story kept a cheeky tone with a somewhat cheery ending unlike most games in this genre
- Variety of shells give an interesting take on the standard gameplay, and most of them have neat and useful abilities
- Map is open enough to feel broad and fun to explore, but linear enough that it's not overwhelming and unfocused
- Skill trees allow for focused builds that deviate from standard gameplay, rewarding you for playing in a way that leans into your build

Dislikes:
- At times, the platforming required precise movement from the player, but this game is not made for that. It's easy for your momentum to carry you off a small ledge, or for you to hit a platform at just barely the wrong angle and slide off. Jumping up an elevation was very annoying if the wall was angled towards you.
- Backtracking to find areas that opened up when you got new abilities was sketchy. There weren't memorable landmarks to make coming back to the right spots easy. One of the abilities that opened up numerous paths was on an optional boss that I missed and I just kept pushing the main quest, thinking that would give me what I was looking for.
- The skill tree was cool, but it was too easy to fill out the entire thing. I think I was 60% of the way through the game when I had nothing left to put my skill points into. There should've been more skills or higher unlock costs.

This is really rough to say this, but... I don't think I'd recommend this game. I don't dislike it, but I also don't think it's worth playing. In a gaming landscape of so many interesting, engaging, innovative titles, something that's just fine doesn't cut it for me.

Good stuff:
- Pixel art and animations are in a class of their own. If the rest of the game got the attention this did, I'd probably like it more.
- Wheels is a really fun minigame. Wish there were more excuses to play it.
- Worldbuilding is quite solid. This felt like a genuine fantasy world.
- Some combat systems (like locks) were neat and fun to figure out.

Stuff that's either neutral or too subjective to say it's bad:
- Story tone. Not for me. Too kiddie.
- Combat input system. Felt too inconsistent. I could tell it was too hard for me, but I wouldn't dock a game for making something too hard, it's just that I never felt like I understood the timing on a lot of attacks.
- Solstice shrine puzzles. Is it even a puzzle to put a key into a keyhole? I think there was one I found interesting, but the rest felt pointless.
- Fishing. Why?

Bad stuff:
- Everything felt like it took too long. Combat was slow, having to watch animations just because the timing of the button press was important to damage taken or given. Lots of transition zones with nothing interesting in them.
- Story wasn't that interesting, and at times just threw stuff at you with no foreshadowing, making it frustrating to watch. Other times it foreshadowed so hard the reveal was a puff of smoke.
- This is part of the story tone point, but the villains really were too cartoonish to take seriously.
- By the time I stopped playing, I still didn't have a concrete idea of what the end goal was and why. I knew who my enemies were, but there is SO MUCH more to a story than just beating an enemy, and I wasn't feeling that extra stuffing that really made the journey compelling. I felt a lot of the story was being held back for too long till I lost interest.

I can see why people would like this game. It does have things going for it. But I didn't like it and I don't think I'd recommend it unless I knew the person was already someone who liked this kind of thing.

Sandwalkers is pretty fun. There's lots of interesting systems like reputation, supply management, trading, hope that keep the overworld section of the game fun to engage with. The combat has a broad range of status effects, damage types, enemies, and strategies that keep it fun as well. I also like how they mode a lore explanation for the roguelike nature of the game.

I also think they did a good job with objectives. You're given a short-term goal and a very long-term goal at first, so you have a bit of direction, but you're also free to go pretty much wherever you want on the map. I went straight north on my second caravan and promptly died because of lack of supplies and higher-level enemies. The game didn't gate me from doing that, it just let me learn.

Less interesting, though, are the actual upgrades you get between caravans. While there are some upgrades that unlock new gameplay (like combat tools), most of it is just incremental stat upgrades. Higher HP, higher damage, higher supply cap, etc. I do like that it's there to some extent, but I also really dislike the idea of my ability to progress being locked behind failing some number of caravans before I have the actual stats to take on the more difficult areas and enemies.

Readability on combat abilities is pretty awful. It's very hard to tell what sort of effect an attack has while leveling because it's presented in such a confusing manner. For almost all attacks, if you see a negative status on it, you can assume that it applies that to the enemy. But sometimes it's you? And what does "80 damage | Target: has shield, 30 damage" mean? Do I get 30 bonus damage if they have a shield or does the attack only do 30 damage total? Does that apply if they lose the shield with the attack? Why does Genius' "Explosive" apply to my team? That makes the attack worse than useless. "Loses hope"? Who loses hope? My caravan? Why on earth would I use an attack that deals 5 extra damage over another if it's going to subtract from a limited, important resource? That's not a tradeoff, it's a scam. Why does an attack on an enemy say "Removes debuffs"? Why would I ever want to remove an enemy's debuffs? Maybe you want to make an attack that I need to plan around, but the raw damage on it is so bad that the trouble of planning around it isn't worth it. Please make the right click view on attack effects clear so I don't have to use trial and error to figure this stuff out.

And worst of all are the bugs. I know it's early access, so some amount of bugginess comes with the territory. There's some mildly annoying ones like combat mouseover info disappearing instantly the first time so you have to move your mouse off then back on. Then there's moderately annoy ones like resource tiles showing up but then when you move to them, you get nothing, like they don't exist. I found one that broke the game: the healing lizard enemies during the terramancer rebel questline have about an 80% to just not act on their turn, softlocking the game. There's more, but you get the idea.

All in all, it's good. I recommend it. Solid and unique strategy game with pretty cool art. Maybe wait a bit longer to buy if bugs really frustrate you.

Very fun. The gameplay puts you in the same sort of flow that something like powerwash simulator might, but with much more interesting dilemmas for you to solve. It's slow-paced, but incredibly engaging, with all sorts of things to consider on each ship, like how much your tools are upgraded, how heavy a particular piece is, what order to do things in, etc. Everything is introduced at a good pace to keep things escalating without overwhelming you.

However, this game is very insistent on telling you a story that I had no interest in. I personally would've much preferred if the game was me vs my debt and nothing else. Yet I'm constantly being barraged with unskippable conversations with characters that range from meh to outright annoying. Maybe if the story was handled with care and subtlety instead of a blunt, in-your-face anti-corpo message, I wouldn't have minded so much. Just let me play the game!

Anyways, give it a shot. The stuff that matters, the gameplay, is solid.

I suspect I will be playing the sequel.

Would give it a 7/10. Strong story, decent gameplay. Strongest was its sense of style and weirdness, not something you see very often and gave the game an interesting, engaging identity. Weakest points were the combat and the pacing. Combat is a mixed bag, it's fun to expand your arsenal and upgrade items, but ultimately it's too easy because all enemies are defeated by the same strategy. Pacing falls victim to the early-access troubles of a company needing to release content consistently to keep people interested, but makes the final product drag on too long. Not only that, but you have late game items wagged in front of your face from almost the very beginning, yet you don't get to touch them until the game is essentially over.

Also, they say it's a 1.0 release, but it's not. There's at least 1 door in the game they haven't implemented a key for, and the endgame upgrade materials were only partially in the game. It's an extra bummer because the one material that doesn't exist is the one I wanted.

Yes, I know they have updates planned to fix this stuff. I bet in a month or two half my complaints won't be valid. But they're the ones who said this was ready for a full release and put it out there and I'm playing it now, not two months from now.

I have done all available content and currently have a little over 8 hours playtime.

Above average, I'd say. I was hoping for each character to have their own distinct storyline and have it all tied together by a central plot, and it seemed that way at first, but nothing came of it. There wasn't any concrete conflict to stimulate character development. Some characters had something close and I think that eventually, each character had some sort of closure. But I felt kinda disappointed. The reason I say it's above average is because each character is distinct, believable, and, at some point, has some interesting lines. That's harder to do than you might think.

Music was pretty good. I don't expect (or want) background music to be absolute bangers while I'm going through dialogue, I just want it to set a mood and it does. Main menu music's pretty good.
Voice acting ranges from rough around the edges to good. Aio seemed disinterested, Shizu didn't really have a setting under 10, and Kyva seemed unable to take anything seriously. But I honestly liked them overall.
Art is good. I've seen enough cookie-cutter anime artists that what I really want is style, and shuuko delivers. The art on the store page is a good representation of what all you'll see. If you like it, you'll be happy with what you get.
The loading screen animations are super cute. By loading screen #50, though, I was just skipping them.

I won't comment on the visual novel side of things, that is what it is.
As for the rest of the gameplay, I appreciate the dev's idea here, intending to breaking up multiple scenes of reading and clicking with some sort of minigame. Additionally, it was tied into the story and made your character feel like he was doing more than bouncing around conversations. But it didn't work, at least not for me. It might have been OK with all of the minigames, which makes me wonder why they didn't just delay the game until those were done. I feel like that hurt the game a fair bit.

Two things that don't really fit into the other categories. 1) 20 bucks seems a touch steep for 8 hours of content that's mostly text. I know it's subjective, but I would've felt a lot better with a 10 or even 15 dollar price tag. 2) There are bugs. Not many, and of the ones I ran into, just about all of them seem to have been fixed with patches.

As a fan of both the Myst series and Obduction, I was excited going into this one. I think the game met my excitement, but only just. There's a lot to like about the game: the puzzles and clues are presented well, with the solutions intuitive and context clues guiding you along the way without any sort of tutorial windows or NPCs laying everything out for you. The plot is interesting enough to keep you wanting to move through the game and figure out exactly what's going on. The locations are varied and quite beautiful to look at, at least if you don't look too closely at the trees in one of them.
If you've been following Myst and played Obduction, you may be curious about performance and load times. I will say there is some stuttering, though it's not as bad as say, Elden Ring in that regard, and it clears up once you've looked around an area for the first time. Loading times are still there, but far more tolerable than Obduction.
Which leads me to my criticism: this game is SO similar to Myst and Obduction in structure it's disappointing. There's something to be said for Cyan playing to their strengths, but this game just feels unambitious. A hub world with different, uninhabited realms, each with a similar primary objective... I've seen this too many times before. And with my completion time being at less than 8 hours, that makes this shorter than Obduction. I should also mention a couple of the puzzles are buggy. There's a "teleport to safe location" button that I had to use I think 4 times due to 2 particular puzzles either putting me in an inescapable spot or bugging out and preventing me from progressing.
Overall, I'd say it's a 7/10. Fun puzzles, interesting world and story, but too formulaic and too short for the $35 price tag.