Recent reviews by Saturn

Runs surprisingly well for a ubisoft launch. After 2-3 hours of play I haven't encountered any performance issues or bugs. The combat feels nice and reminds me of a mix of Syndicate and Odyssey. The character animations in cutscenes are really janky, which does ruin some otherwise interesting scenes I feel like, but despite that the story so far is interesting and a great improvement over Mirage.

There are also many QoL additions, like auto-following NPCs instead of having to mindlessly move at the same speed to keep up during talk-and-walk moments. The environment looks great and the Japanese VO is very good (recommend switching to it). Normally the voice-acting in AC games not set in English-speaking countries makes my ears bleed.

Dare I say it, but this is actually a great ubisoft launch that so far has lived up to the hype for me.

Update:

Played a bit more. Oh my god, there are SO many escort quests. They are literally identical to ones from AC2, but you don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about the people you're protecting, because they didnt take the time to actually set up the stakes.

Also did the first big "Order" assassination quest and it felt so stripped-down and basic that I thought I was playing Rogue or one of the other obvious cashgrabs in the franchise.

The story is really boring, which is genuinely a shame, because Basim was one of the most interesting characters from Valhalla.

I'm at the point where I'll just take a loss on buying this and will promptly uninstall it. What a total waste of money and I feel bad for the people who worked on this pile of garbage. It's 10 years late to the party and has failed to add any new to the franchise and just doing a remix of all the worst parts old AC games.


Original Review:

I've played almost all Assassin's Creed games. I thought Valhalla was great, but Mirage is genuinely unfun.

The story sucks, the characters are uninteresting, the combat has literally no improvements over previous games, and if you compare it to Valhalla, it's a step back in every way. If you compare it to games as far back as Brotherhood, it's still somehow a step back in every way. It's trying to recreate the progression / combat of AC2, but it fails in every aspect, but it does manage to make the graphics pretty similar...

Give this game a pass. Even at a 50% discount, it's not worth it.

Let's hope Shadows isn't made by the same people who produced this stinker.

EDIT:

After my first 2½ hours, I had a mostly-positive experience, but I've now put in 2 more hours and found, to my disappointment, that every run turns out the same if you play Solo. You spec entirely into one skill, since otherwise you won't have enough damage. Then you hope to get good augments, but there's only ever 2 options and you can't reroll, which means it's 100% RNG-dependent.

If you get good augments you've got yourself a run that might win, but only if you get the one good final infusion, Plasma, which outdamages all other combo fusions. Given that, once again, there are only ever 2 options for infusions and no reroll possibility, you usually won't get it, and, ironically, it's harder to get the more you play the game and unlock additional infusions.

You also usually won't pick any of the skills like Hex Bomb or the Path thingy, since they're a greater harm to you than the enemies, and some skills when maxed out are just terrible compared to something like the starter Orbs skill. It really feels like this game wasn't really tested well, since this issue would be immediately noticeable.

I can't understate how frustrating this gameloop is. You end up relying exclusively on RNG, particularly for higher difficulties.

Add to this the fact that the only difference between the 3 maps is the layout and hazards, all runs get very samey. The events are the same few ones regardless of map. All the enemies are the same and their spawn rates are identical across maps. Even the last boss is identical, with just health being the difference between maps.

The game has a lot of potential, but right now the replay value is only grinding for the unlocks like other wizards and such, but some challenges are, as mentioned below, 100% RNG dependent, with the worst ones being the two cosmetic challenges that require 4 augments for a character's main weapon.

I hope all these many issues are addressed soon, because it feels like there's all the right ingredients here already, but they're just not mixed together well.

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I like the base game experience in solo mode. But this is styled as a coop game, as obvious by the fact that the "online queue" button is on by default and resets to on every time you restart the game.

HOWEVER, there's friendly and self-damage enabled in the game, making any possibility of teamplay basically impossible. The last boss of a stage and the golden crab event are both less about killing a target and more about avoiding your team's friendly fire. I can't understate how frustrating this makes the coop play.

My other biggest gripe is how the rerolls work. First off, you can only get 3 when you've maxed out the meta upgrade (which you have to work towards unlocking). Secondly, you can only reroll ability upgrades. You cannot reroll relics or augments, which seems like a massive oversight. Add onto this that there are some achievements/challenges that require getting 4 augments for a character's base weapon to unlock stuff, even though it's 100% RNG dependent as you can't reroll options. It just seems like a really bad design choice.

I also often found that the relics had no impact on gameplay and every time I play coop, the best option is always to pick the one that reduces friendly fire damage.

And lastly, self-damage is a terrible feature when so many abilities are either dropped right on top of your character (rocky road) or around or behind you. I avoid a lot of abilities because they literally just make the game harder for no apparent reward. Exploding augments are also just a bad idea since they keep hitting the walls of the environment and hurting you.


I do recommend this game, since the solo experience is a fun arena-based action roguelite. But the main draw for many will be the coop I think and it's just not designed well. The friendly-fire feature is also just not really designed well, considering the abilities that you can get.

I think the augments provide a good bit of diversity for runs and I like the element infusions, although they are not created equally, with Plasma just always being my go-to option since it outperforms all others for damage.

I also like the ability to unlock cosmetics for characters, but some challenges/achievements are not designed well, as mentioned above, as they are 100% RNG dependent at the moment.


I hope the devs will address these issues soon, since I feel like there's only a few issues keeping this from being an amazing roguelite.

3 new survivors, 4 new levels. Several bugs at launch. A typical RoR release.

This is almost exactly the same as the previous DLC's launch, except somehow feeling more stripped down, despite the long wait period between them. The new survivors have less upgrades to unlock than any other survivor, and the biggest new thing is that all survivors now have an additional skin to unlock by beating the DLC's final boss on Monsoon difficult (basically a massive time-sink grind for anyone interested in 100%ing the game).

Old bugs are still present and there's still a massive lack of quality-of-life additions that players have been wanting since the base game dropped. Exploits are still possible and it's so depressingly-easy to utterly break the game's 'balance', but some enemies also still have wonky damage potentials, which I guess evens it out?

If you are craving more RoR2, this isn't a terrible addition I guess, but I just find it inadvisable to support a game company that shows so little care for its audience. The re-release of RoR1 (titled "Risk of Rain Returns") was also just such a massive insult to old fans.

This is has just become one of those devs that hopes the active modding community will shore up their terrible releases and patch all the QoL features missing, while taking months to fix even the slightest bugs in their games.

Don't buy this DLC until the save corruptions and other myriad of bugs are fixed, because you can't refund it and $15 is a lot of money for this stinker.

I think normally I might give this game a "recommend", but I think, in the face of the overwhelmingly-one-sided positive reviews, I'll mark this "not recommend" just so people will actually be able to find some critiques that I haven't seen much.

First off, this game reminds me a lot of two Team Ninja games "Wo Long" and "Nioh 2", leaning more towards the former than the latter in terms of execution. If you've played either of these, you will quickly feel like Wukong is a subpar imitation. The reason is that a lot of special Yaoguai powers literally don't feel like they have any use and they're really clunky to pull off consistently. Additionally, the combat is very repetitive, as the stances available only change your heavy attack and not light attacks. The most obvious outcome is that you end up sticking to just a few skills the entire way through, because other options aren't viable, while also doing the same light attack / heavy attack combo without variation. It gets boring really fast.

On top of that, the basic enemies provide no challenge at all, while the bosses provide a varied amount. I think this sets up a weird expectation, as normally you'd have the basic enemies to ramp you into boss fights, but instead your first real boss fight (either the Wandering Wight or fire-blade Yaoguai) will come as a surprise in terms of damage numbers and such, particularly the Wight, which seems designed to be beaten until after you've collected a few different special powers, levels, and armour.

I don't think difficulty is bad, but other games that Wukong has taken inspiration from do a much better job at ramping players into their first challenge. I also found that, weirdly, as the game progressed, the bosses got easier to deal with. I had the most difficulties with the Black Flame King, mainly because of his tendency to completely ignore the paralyze spell and do a lot of damage with quick moves that aren't telegraphed well.

I also see a lot of people praising the graphics, but I genuinely think there's a fundamental lack of style and attempts to set enemies apart from the environment. The colours in the first two chapters match the basic enemies so well that they often just blend into the background in a lot of areas, and on top of that, I just personally don't think the attempt at realistic visuals works well. It kind of just looks like an unreal engine graphics demo, and the over-reliance heavy particle simulations for the elemental effects really doesn't help in that regard, not to mention hurting performance.

I think games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Nioh work well not because they are visually-realistic games, but because the graphical style is readable. The end result of Wukong's style is that, because of the way effects are done, the telegraphed moves are hard to figure out by watching them and instead you have to learn the timings through being punished for getting them wrong. There are also just sometimes really wonky hitboxes, which don't help.

Also, some dark areas are crazy dark, with the light simulations of torches in the environment usually doing nothing to illuminate the enemies often encountered in such areas. It honestly feels less like a design-choice and more like an engine limitation. Paritcularly given the fact that turning up gamma all the way changes nothing.

The story is another part that I think a lot of people will be frustrated with. I think it's cool that they are using Journey to the West as the fundament for the game, but it's clear that there's a lot of context you won't have if you are playing this as non-native Chinese. There aren't any attempts to try to fill these gaps in context and after my first 5 hours I just started skipping through as much dialogue as I could, because I had no idea what the hell was going on, lol. That being said, the Chinese voice-acting is great, I recommend switching it on with subtitles, since the English dub really has a lot of VAs hamming it in.

I think I might be more negative towards this game than normal, since it was so majorly hyped and I'm a big souls-like fan. Having recently beaten my second playthrough of the new Elden Ring DLC probably also didn't help. But yeah, I don't think this game is worth the hype. As a souls-like fan, I'd give it maybe a 6/10 in its current state, due to the many problems stated above. I just think it's kind of boring after only 10 hours into it. The boss designs are cool, but the execution isn't good enough.

Sad to see the low ratings, because this is an absolutely tremendous DLC. There is so much effort put into it and even as someone who usually relies on player summons and spirit summons to get through fights, I never really got stuck anywhere for very long. The fact that you can literally go to all but one area of the map without killing a Rememberance Boss is also just so cool. Exploration is really rewarded a lot, even more than with the base game in my opinion.

This is legit one of the best DLCs I've ever played. It harkens back to the bygone age of Expansions that were games unto themselves, but unfortunately only game devs with integrity, like FromSoft, remember that time it seems.

If you liked Elden Ring, you'll love this DLC, 100%

I really do think this game has a lot of potential with some of its unique ideas, but I currently don't recommend getting it for these three reasons:
- it is obscenely grindy and the rewards are few-and-far-between
- there is very little variety between runs (which is what Roguelite is all about...)
- new content is months apart

Now, for the last point, that can be overlooked if the core experience is great, but I just think it becomes really uninteresting after a couple runs. I've put this game down and picked it back up several times since buying it over a year ago, and I keep hoping to find some reason to enjoy it, but I just always end up super bored and uninstall it.

There are plenty other action roguelites that are better than this, but I really wanted to like YAZS because it has some fun ideas, like team composition, but I think the game is too expensive for what it actually offers.

I have only played two or three other Action Roguelites with comparable depth and complexity, one of them of course being Vampire Survivors, but even saying that, only VS holds a candle to HoloCure in terms of sheer amount of characters.

And HoloCure is free... get it, you literally have nothing to lose!

I was expecting something more like Valheim, but the game in its current state feels way too janky. It's very easy to get stuck terrain with the glider while trying to jump up somewhere and the combat feels really floaty. The crafting system is alright, but minor things like items in your storage chests not being useable in crafting menus is really annoying. I do think the vistas are cool, but it's a shame that the grapple hook doesn't really allow you to traverse in the way that I thought, as it's tied to specific "hook points". I really tried to force myself to enjoy this, but I just can't.

Really fun concept, though I hope there is more replay value in the full product, since runs can end up very similar, even with different characters and different upgrade paths.