Recent reviews by action_johnny

Excellent game.

EDIT:

Nice fast fix from the devs, all skins in the pack work perfectly now. Some of the best looking and atmospheric skins in the game, perfect for anyone looking to add a touch of Mary Shelley esque Gothic dread to their castle :)

Fantastic patch by a dedicated team of developers that clearly love their game and respect their player base. This update - the Gloomrot patch - was one of the best free patches for any game I've ever played. The developers clearly have a vision and although this game is still a couple of years away from a full release build, the scope for it is awesome and I'm having an amazing time with it. Will be sticking with this one long term and keeping a very close eye on it.

After around 1300 hours played in this game, I'm still playing.

Game's really fun. Each patch bring much needed additions, with the game slowly creeping towards where it should have been at release.

There's still too much RNG in the itemisation and the mission select, but it feels like these are stop gaps while they finish the game and deliver a better system.

It would be disingenuous of me to not recommend a game I've played for so many hours, so I can't do that. Performance wise, game runs well enough now. They are still refining and will hopefully continue to do so, but it is leaps and bounds better than it was at launch.

Beautiful game. Might be a bit content light for some, if you're the kind of gamer that always wants a new experience. If you're like me, and you enjoying games that have a massive amount of depth to their combat systems and ever increasing difficulty levels, then there is a lot to fall in love with here. The world, the characters, the voice acting and most of all, the satisfaction of mastering the Vermintide 2 flow state. An absolute treasure of a game.

This was my first ever Total War game, and as a long time fan of Games Workshop's IP and strategy games in general (going on 27 years now) I was really looking forward to finally getting to delve into one of these games.

Upon reflecting on my purchase a month and a half later, I can conclude that I have been thoroughly mugged off. This game is, in my opinion, unplayable, unfinished, and unfun. Now there's a perhaps a bit of hyperbole here with the 'unplayable' part of this statement but let me explain what I mean by this - if I have to constantly battle against the game's programming (and I'm not talking about AI here) in order to win battles, then the game is not in a playable state. An example of this would be giving orders to units and having them take a full 4-5 seconds to respond (missile units are particularly egregious here), or telling a unit to move and have models in that unit either get lost or not go where they've been told.

As for the content itself, the campaign design is a masterclass in how not to design a game, with several of the core mechanics actually punishing you severely for doing what the game wants you to do (I'm talking about the Realms of Chaos, Rift mechanics, and general mechanics of the daemon souls campaign victory condition). These mechanics are so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tedious that the thought of playing through the base game campaign another time fills me disinterested boredom. I'm not sure how you manage to suck replayability out of a strategy game, but CA have managed it here.

Speaking of game replayability, let's look at the '8' factions introduced in this chapter of Total Warhammer. I'll admit was less than impressed to find the game has closer 4, finished factions. I'll explain: I started out my first playthrough on probably the highest note possible in regards to my perception of this game. I chose Chaos Undivided and got to play with a cool Daemon lord I could customise and a hugely diverse and synergystic unit roster. Great! Imagine then, how ♥♥♥♥ it felt, when I booted up a Khorne campaign, only to find my army roster was about a quarter of the size of the Chaos Undivided faction, and worse yet the majority of this roster were units I could already play with in the much more fun, fleshed out Chaos Undivided roster.

This isn't just an issue with Khorne either, all 4 mono god factions feel like this - absolutely barebones with very little to make them feel unique. You could make an argument that the different campaign mechanics for these factions offer a different playthrough experience, but in truth nothing about playing a mono god faction felt interesting or unique to me - instead they felt tedious and stripped down with less player choice. In retrospect, marketing these 4 mono god factions really just feel like Creative Assembly were obligated to bump the number of factions up, and this was the easiest option for them.

I paid the full price for this game on release day and I really regret it. Honestly the idea of having to fork out for two other games by this company, just to play what (imo) should have been an option in some form from day 1 (the fabled Immortal Empires), feels like an absolute slap in the face. I've watched enough youtube content to know what a fully fleshed out version of this game should look like (talking about TW: Warhammer 2 here) and this iteration is not it. It feels like half of a game, and the half of the game we have is buggy, tedious and seemingly designed to suck enjoyment out of the game rather than stoke excitement. Maybe it will be good one day when they fix everything and add in cross compatibility with the earlier games, but as a new player to this franchise I see little incentive to give CA anymore money for the hope of a content filled, diverse strategy game after the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shambles that was this thing.