Recent reviews by Scaramouche

Its a great all around arpg. Gameplay is good, mechanics are good, build diversity is good, even the story is pretty good. game is long enough that one play thru is a good return on price. Mechanics are deep enough that you can put in infinity hours grinding or min/maxing etc.

It's fun to play casually, but a couple of the mechanics are...not conducive to fair competitive play. The reversal edge mechanic locks you into a roll of the dice hit. you can just guard out of it but its a big part of play. Its literally rock paper scissors. you and your opponent each pick one type of attack and then its resolved. there is no information about what they picked so you either guess lucky or you dont.

There's a large single player game, story is fine for a fighting game. It's actually pretty fun until you hit high levels and then you have to start cheesing because The ai is not a true opponent, it just reads your input. At high levels it reacts to everything instantaneously. it cuts thru your block and somehow cancels out your critical edge(cutscene super move). But there's usually one or two moves that 'breaks' it. As in it just doesnt respond, so you end up spamming that move a lot.


You wont miss anything if you dont play it. It's a bottom tier fighting game for a reason.

I should just cut&paste most of my Dark Souls 3 review. Its a much better pc port but still. Controls are pretty good. Kb/m works great. Camera is still god awful and does its own thing, get a mod that turns off auto camera rotation and you'll see what i mean. FOV is still ridiculously low.

Gameplay is still rote memorization. Repeat boss x times, memorize pattern, kill boss. I guess its fine, its just...a little boring? You get all these cool moves and you can deflect everything from bullets to blades except on bosses. Lame.

And then there's the death penalties. on one hand they do add a level of stress to the game which makes things more intense, on the other hand we're in the 2020s and death penalties seem so amateurish.

It's ok, I played it through, did every boss, got gud etc etc. It was average. It's 'console-hard' plus 80s game design. Pve is just a)fighting the sucky ass camera at all times and (b) repeating the boss until you remember all his moves, just straight up rote repetition.

The fov is set to 43! One level is all monsters with human heads and bug bodies, the next level is bug heads on human bodies. otherwise its mostly skeletons, zombies and poison blobs. Its just odd and eventually boring.

The art design has no actual theme or reason for it because there's no actual story. There's bits of lore on all the weapons etc you pick up but even with that it doesnt really explain anything. Just look at the wikis, its mostlty peoples interpretations from the disjointed bits and pieces. There are like 8 quests total and none of them have any sort of markers. explanations, introductions, or official rewards. You'll pick up a ring or a weapon or you'll miss it and the 'quest giver' will die and you'll get to loot them for their armor or something.

I mean I got all the quests done because I went slowly and with wiki on a tablet to maKe sure I got everything. I even got the 'good' ending which is a 2 second cutscene with no dialogue, exposition or anything else. I still have no idea what is going on or why anything is the way it is.

i don't know why it's so good but it is. It really is and I don't know why. I got attacked by two undead dragons, I mounted one and killed him and jumped off on to the other one and killed him too. Then ran away as fast as i could when Death showed up.

If you get it make sure you read some guides and sign up on the pawn specific forums so people can use em etc. You'll see what I mean.

If I could I'd give it a neutral rating. Soundtrack is great, story is pretty good. I finished the game once and will never play it again. The game play idea is fine, the execution is...lacking. I used both controller and kb/m. Both are fine and both have the same problems. I can't pinpoint the problems but it felt like some combination of: the timing was off between button presses and actions, the hitboxes not matching the graphical representations, and the maps having odd little bumps and catches that were effectively invisible. Mostly if you're running on the edges of the maps. I often could not tell why my blocks, passes, goals?(baskets? goalbaskets!) were successful or not.

TLDR: It's mostly fine, I personally found the core gameplay incredibly frustrating and that overshadowed the great soundtrack and good story.

It's good, gets that visceral gut reaction when you're trying to get to safety and you the zombies are right on you. The crunching and ragdolling and chopping is also very satsifying.

The base game is okay, worth a few bucks on sale for sure. It's more like a simulator than a "rogue-lite". You put together a team of 4 characters, then basically micromanage all the temporary and/or permanent negative effects your characters accrue. Many of which are random and will be inflicted on your characters regardless of how well they do in a dungeon.
Still its pretty fun if you like that sort of micro management. Don't get the Crimson court DLC, all the new things it adds ends up being either frustrating or a grindy chore or both without the corresponding ability to manage any of it in a fun or satisfying way.

I put almost 200 hours into it and enjpoyed it but I would only recommend the base game on sale and mostly for the novelty of it. I doubt I'll play anything like this again. I'm a simple man, I want to hit stuff, get interesting loot and go hit bigger stuff with it.

So far so good. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one.

Pay no attention to the triggered little alt-right nazi wannabes desperately lying about the game in their reviews.

Edit: Ok I see why people are talking about the cutscenes now. They're actually very good. So far, not more than a minute or two and usually less than a minute.

However, if you had a traumatic childhood some of the cut scenes might be difficult.. Hell I had to take a break for awhile and my childhood was pretty bland.

And the cutscenes will absolutely trigger you if you're a racist.