Recent reviews by Taraxa

Vrising: you can make an unforgettable game for many generations to come with great great story, NPC engagement, quests, and plenty meaningful bossfights or you can make a good game but forgettable nightmare, that is challenging and equally painful. Vrising has no in betweens.

So a friend gifted this game to me. I played it through brutal pvp twice, build a huge cathedral castle, twice. The building of my castle keeps me running only, maybe i got some meaningful engagements with other players and see what castles they are building, thats it. This game is lacking in everything, quests, more proper bossfights that dont feel like minibosses, balanced pvp and balanced gear progression, story and enough space in the world for people to build a castle, in fact, the world should have double the size it has now.
Would i recommend it? -> depends. Depends on your friends, dont play it alone.
Is it great? -> heavily depends. Depends on you, your friends, your server, the difficulty, your preferences.

Now, gameplay wise this game is still very very raw,
*Story: you dont really feel like there is a story guiding you, if any story even exits, its just "yo do your thing, get blood, you are a vampire", some more interesting cutscenes, npc engagements, side stories, character development, companions, antagonists that make you feel like the protagonist, it all is non-existent. "Quests, quests, quests, we need more quests" made the best role palygame in history, world of warcraft vanilla into the champion it still is today, even in diablo games the side quests usually make you feel engaged the most, even in spellforce 1-2 side quests were your main driver, here Vrising heavily lacks in real story and quests and npc engagement, it makes you feel like you dont really need to play, you dont matter.

**Boss fighting: in normal all is too easy, in brutal everything in the world is brimming with deadly dangers. I only talk about brutal from now on, because lets be real, normal isnt how this game is meant to be played, maybe bosses on normal lack abilities and come off as incomplete. So for brutal, it depends on the server, but the damage multipliers on brutal servers are actually really harsh, now in Vrising you are very very limited in how much you can actually set as a host, so you usually go with either way too hard or way too easy. As gear levels can only be unlocked by killing bosses that are higher than your current weapons (damage) or armour (health points), you will find yourself on a strict disadvantage and it can become downright frustrating.
!!!!! Then comes the big spoiler: you can only unlock the highest gear with the last boss, but this game is lacking any content to use this gear with. The last boss feels like the first real boss in this game, with proper music, proper boss dynamics and proper attack patterns and with it slayed you kinda feel like quitting tbh. The last boss also is either too easy (brutal with +17 lvls second try) or way too hard (brutal + 3x damage multiplier two weeks trying), but if you kill him regardless you feel empty as there is nothing much left. The world doesnt offer much, the coop quests (raids etc) dont exist, player engagement is highly frustrating and should be limited to endgame content only, that doesnt even exist (yet).

***castle building, i kinda love this game for what it is for me: a castle building simulation. Thats why i play it and keep playing it, i keep building and i often find myself backed in a corner between limited choices and limitting server settings (height limit, tile limit, no round walls?????). But how you build your castle: sturdy or beautiful depends heavily on the set pvp aspects of this game.

****PVP: this game does not support a healthy balance for proper pvp. Period. Instead, this game promotes harassment and grieving like no other.
A. Castle siege: I tried out brutal with and without castle siege. It all comes down to the extreme heavily stupid game design of binding your castle core only to ground level. If castle siege is allowed it doesnt even make sense, as any lower gear player cant ever compete against any higher geared player, the gaps are just too wide in this game. Slaves dont protect you much, you only get better slaves in later areas that you cant reach, if you are constantly grieved. You can easily destroy a castle with two players if the other party is lower geared or outnumbered and then all you build is gone instantly. If castle siege isnt allowed, then you build a beautiful castle, but you have ZERO engagement with the world, as npcs do not attack your castle at all.
B. Open-World-PVP: This game promotes harassment and grieving like no other. You hardly ever face off against properly balanced parties, important bosses for gear progression are usually camped by stronger players and you cant compete unless they are offline.

To the guys at Vrising: double the map size for more castle building slots, make a distinct 2nd difficulty world for higher geared players to compete in with raids, dungeons etc, find balance in between story and gear progression, make your game meaningful by making NPC characters and bossfights meanginful with quests lines, currently you only got the last boss going for you, thats it. And after the last boss nobody really cares of replaying your game.

Ubisoft how far have you fallen. I am so glad i didnt pay full price on this game, otherwise its an absolute skip. I only played this game because of Giancarlo Esposito, and his great acting, his sons character wasnt too bad neither, but Ubisoft just went total cheap cashgrab on the story, the side characters, damn there isnt a single Anime that couldnt produce a better job at entailing the player into a better formed and built story. Ultimately Farcry 6 stands for "missed potential" and "cut too many corners". Well at least they shoved in some redundant gay trans characters into this game that nobody cares about. Shame on you Ubisoft.

Oh how they massacred my boy...
A friend was gifting me this game, and i only played it in singleplayer. Wont spend any money on this myself, wont buy the DLCs with less intuitive maps (especially not when knowing how they gave you all the DLC content for free in stronghold 1). We continue our matches with stronghold crusader with community patch on lan instead of switching to anything firefly studio has produced since.

Lets start with the good parts:
- marketplace allows for clever auto-economy, selling and buying items with set threshholds
- smaller farms/building with walkable space allows for better building experience in general

cons:
- old but gold stronghold 1 songs / elements are downright missing, makes me wonder why they didnt reuse things that they did great in stronghold crusader but put in worse alternatives for stronghold crusader 2 instead
- combat has suffered so immensely, as units usually need two seconds after stopping their motion to enter into attack motions, its frustrating, and they auto stop on melee so you need to permanently right click them out to make them walk out of combat, which makes it also super super easy to kite masses of opposing AI knights
- for some units such as bowman and Maceman both bows and crossbows usually auto aim very well, slaughtering a group quickly but man for catapults bow units don't prioritize them with their long range and approaching knights all 100 crossbows often only target one knight all together, making it difficult to tackle multiple close combat and catapult units*.
*And you cant really improve this, I know the principle of stopping range units from targeting the same approaching units by pressing "hold" in age of empires 2, which does not work here neither, nor does it help much to put them in groups.
- AI enemies are either super overpowered with elevated spaces (especially on killing units on walls or even turrets) ) and too many close combat masses of knight and slavers that make normal mode frustrating in certain maps**,
**you must cheese your way through by tricking the cheap AI with wooden barriers and temple knights with healers as tanks to lure the units only to have a chance at winning or easy mode it is
- trebuchets have way too big hitboxes, making it impossible to delete building with them nearby
- monotonous game play on single-player, its simple: build a tower with 35 archers, 2 healers, one or two tribuchet counters everything, build 35 archers, 15 shields, 5 temple knights and 3 tribuchets to "dry out" the enemy base wins every base, AI is just not good, not good at all
- the game is unoptimized as f, it just takes forever to load, it does not run smoothly, for an old game to take this much of memory is unheard of, did any RTS dev every hear of multi threading??
- bugs, many many bugs, safe a game you crash, attack with too many bows and issue to many units at once, you crash. If you load a safe game that crashed you get corrupted safe games, selecting towers as gathering spots for newly recruited units your get stuck underneath the tower and you can only fix this by gathering them at stairs.

Overall: recommended for hardcore fans only, wouldn't dare to call this a worthy successor of stronghold crusader.

So, after 800h, mostly playing realistic tank battles as Germans and russian, and some aviation, this is my finale evaluation: is it bad, really bad, and Gaijin will never fix it. What is bad? Biases throughout the ladders: although repair costs have been addressed by Gaijin, which made grinding through to rank 8.0 possible, no matter which rank you play you will always face tankier, faster, stronger, one-shot-killing z-putinist inspired unrealistic modern Russian vehicles that will totally make your whole (in my case German) team lose dramatically and be pushed back to the spawn, since spawn camping already was a huge issue, its now become a real problem. Why do i think it has to do with Gaijin: althought there are many German faction players Gaijin, treats them extra harsh, Russians get blueprinted never buil russian unrealistic overpowerful modern tanks and Germans dont get anything, none of the old factions actually get balanced, only the Russian (and to some degree israel & USA) faction does. Playing this game is frustration beyond belief, you will face these issues no matter what rank you are playing on, Gaijin does not balance this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ game due to their belarus soviet z-putinist ego and if you ever needed help their support is just scrupulous to the point that you could actually sue them as they are violating several European customer laws. So still: ♥♥♥♥ YOU GAIJIN, and ♥♥♥♥ WARTHUNDER.

Ok so after another 300h and some tickets i spent with Gaijin to reclaim some cheap rank2 planes i had from an old account, that are permanently lost due to that Gaijin company's inredeemable greed for not allowing you to merge your existing Gaijin account with your autocreated Steamaccount, I can give you a realistic update: DONT PLAY WT; ♥♥♥♥ GAIJIN; Again: ♥♥♥♥ YOU GAIJIN, YOU INCOMPETENT ♥♥♥♥♥; AND ♥♥♥♥ YOU RUSSIAN TANKS/TEAMMATES.
Ok, thats my two cents. Take care.

Old review:
This game has some nice features, such as old, as well as modern tanks. Thats it, thats all there is to it positively.
Now the cons:
It has no dedicated servers: this means a often very high ping, often disconnects, no mods, no training as clans, no clan wars, no anti-cheat tools.
No spawn rules against spawn camping, if a game from 2002 called battlefield 1942 had anti spawn camping rules enable, then why didnt they think of it in this game? This simple rule would prevent a hell lot of grieving which is currently happening on this game. If you dont wanna wait for your tanks to repair, you pay, so your progress gets decreased greatly every single time you die, and often you will die, because of more cons: premium tanks, planes, ships are highly pay to win, they are imbalanced to non-premium, and even new tanks are highly OP against older tanks, that do not get a rebalance. These game developers clearly dont want to make a good game, they only want to get more money, and a premium tank easily costs 40 euros.... Then there is the constant exploits of the toxic playerbase: spawn camping, spawn camping with planes on ground battles, camping with op tanks on enemy spawn, dealing "no damage" against OP vehicles that have high explosives one-shot you. And this makes you rage a lot, so really, ♥♥♥♥ this game!

initial review of csgo: full of cheaters, this game is ruined and does not promise any fun, unless you game in private games with bots and friends

further review of csgo: still full of cheates, valve put so much effort in creating more loot boxes and neglected the community support, game performance and forced everyone to switch to a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ version of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ css mod. Valve you are the worst.

and then comes cs2: even worse than csgo, still pretty much full of cheaters, decent players quit this game so much that prices dropped by 30%, so its not even worth it investing into this rotten to the core piece of sh invested game. Cheaters are proud here, even, imagine. Whats best about this game is the company behind it: contacting the Valve supports offers absolutely no merit, they dont look at the evidence of cheating and online harassment and bring absolutely nothing to the table to show a significant awareness of the issue or any will to change the current madly terrible status of the game.


final review: Valve made a true masterpiece, honouring the title of worst anti-cheat-/community feedback neglecting gaming company. With this csgo, cs2 and other affiliated games, where cheating is a serious issue, it can only be summarised as a failed IT project.

Good game, turned into bad game because of too many very malicious bugpatching practises. Jeah and worst of all, it runs on ♥♥♥♥♥♥ steam.