Recent reviews by Siruss

I was excited for a tennis game and I played a lot of NBA2k over the years so I knew the score going into it.

Even for 2k this is insane. It kind of has an idea what it wants to do, and make it exciting. Then it remembers its still just tennis. In NBA2k, from year to year I like to make completely different players with different animations which keeps it fresh. But, this is tennis. 2 animation styles to choose from for your swings, that's all. However you have a LOT of control how often your character grunts in 5 different situations.
The bit about trying to force you to buy VC is true, especially because it is tennis. There is a charm to grinding your pro in NBA2k and you feel yourself getting stronger. In this, you hardly notice ANYTHING. Your stats just increase a bit, so you can go out there and grind the SAME shot sequence every single time to beat the computer. NOT FUN AT ALL.

Another one of those games that has POTENTIAL, but I have no worldly reason that someone played this and said "yeah, this is good, lets ship it!".
I haven't seen a review that I disagree with, so I'll keep this short because I just ALT+F4'ed after another Death Loop.
Overall the game is the same exact game it was through all the tests, which is why I don't have a ton of confidence things will change. All of these negative reviews are what the consensus was through all the tests. Nothing changed, in fact the game feels worse but also like I am playing the same exact game as then, just with some added voicelines to the NPCs that I speed click through the dialogue for.

1/28/24
The building UI is awful. Was just trying to do the bare minimum to not have to do it anymore - but the game keeps forcing you.
Overall the game doesn't really do anything better than other similar games and didn't grab my attention in that span. Even after the first session I was considering refunding.
Obviously gave it another try the next day, and to my surprise the game just crashes whenever I try to load in. Hard CTD. Nothing changed in 8 hr.. Brand new PC, with all drivers up to date, well above rec specs, just... crash. Only threads on the forums where people found fixes is to force changes on the kernel level which I am not doing.
Hard pass for me RN.

Great concept that sells itself as complete, but was abandoned. More than enough time has passed but somehow even the publisher didn't feel the need to finish.

Didnt scratch any itch for me.
Crafting seems very bland and survival aspect shallow. Ran around for 2 hr and just accumulated stuff that I needed to store somewhere - dropped it off in a house and went to another area where I needed the stuff I dropped off.
Im sure the game has more to offer than I saw in the 2hr but I really didn't get a sense it would be worth it.

EDIT: After all this time, after the devs insisted on doing what they wanted, the game is finally being shuttered.


I first purchased this game 7 years ago. Def "had its issues" and wasn't that easy to figure out, but EA so whatever. So when you see my hours and say "how can you downvote this game" its because I played a lot when I got it, and over those 7 years would spend a few hours revisiting.
I see they finally are releasing 1.0 and give it a try.. This is one of those "where there is smoke, there is fire" situations.
The game was supposed to launch locally at 10am.. Doesn't happen.. eventually a dev finally says "sry just need a few more minutes".. ok no problem I guess.. THREE HOURS LATER they finally update that they are ready to go.. allllrighty. Then doing tutorial/starter quests, of course a spawn bugs so nobody can continue.. Hotfix/server restart... STILL NOT FIXED and OTHER spawns are bugged.. hotfix/server restart. Every few hours is another "server restart" with no idea if its a 10 second restart, hotfix, or multiple hour long server maintenance. ZERO idea. Every time this happens, there is a message "server will restart within 10 minutes". Sometimes it is 10 minutes, sometimes its 15, sometimes its 2.. No idea if you can finish what you were doing or not. Also each time is a nice little rollback. Basically the game is hardly available.

NOW there is a problem with "firewall seems to be blocking connection". I saw it before, but game played fine. But they attempted to hotfix it, and now it is unplayable. I have to turn off my firewall to now login - and once I do login the game will not load because of the firewall that is turned off. Devs say in a thread "we are working on it - try XYZ" well XYZ doesnt work but here's an idea - undo whatever your fix was, because a false positive is much better than actually being broken.

I'm usually pretty forgiving, but this is UGLY and the vague communication displaying a lack of understanding of what the problem actually is looks a lot worse when compounded with "hotfixes" that are 2 steps forward, 1 step back if we are lucky.

Plagued with hackers with 1 punch KOs, infinite health/stamina, etc. If they aren't hacking they just disconnect from games because it just rewards you for that too even if they are losing.

I am fine with the content that was promised in EA.
What I am NOT fine with is a game that is in worse condition than the 2nd Beta test.
The performance is meh overall but can get to a playable (meaning not 15fps) state with a lot of tweaking.

The ranking system:
Do your "placements" and get ranked - somehow there was some weight to the fights when everyone was unranked so people that were 5-0 might be Top rank, plat, or gold. No idea how that works but then people that got their rank later - who fought people WITH ranks, would automatically be put higher than others.. So 4-1 is a better record than 5-0 because it saw their opponent was higher rank.
Then you need 100 points to rank up 1 spot (from gold 3 to 2 for example). But you only get any real points if you fight people near your rank which is ~10. So that person who was 5-0 and got into plat, and the 5-0 person who got into gold - the gold person would have to be 20-0 just to catch up to the plat person.

Apparently the fights are P2P connections - meaning you are connecting directly to your opponent and not a server. Resulting in extremely laggy matches sometimes. I had my opponent rocked, moved in for the KO, and put him to the mat... But wait, without throwing a punch, *I* am the one on the mat, flash KO'ed. It also results in your opponents ripping you up like they are The Flash with superhuman punch speed.

Why didn't they have another beta with 50+ boxers in it and fix stuff earlier? You can have 5000 boxers for all I care but there is only 1-2 being used in each division 99% of the time. SRL is always going to spam the backfoot straight, ali is going to spam hooks, etc.. Every fight the same nonsense, some stuff is easier to deal with than others but how is this even viable?

I played a ton of both betas and was super hyped for this, but I cannot explain how disappointed I am now.

Figured I would revisit after 1 year of release and can say it feels just as terrible as it did on release.
Combat feels clunky and mobs still melee hit you from forever away, they will also chase you to the ends of the planet.
Couldn't even go do basic training things outside a town because everyone will instantly attack.
The best part was I first logged in and saw a pack of tamed animals that the owners were abusing bugs to train their skills. Eventually some player came around to kill them and announce to not abuse bugs to train your pets and I won't kill them and was just met with typical pvp "gamer words" in VOIP.
Terrible gameplay even worse community.

I play it every year out of habit. Enjoy the grind and the GOOD games. But won't give it a thumbs up because as always, hackers galore. Also no way to punish trolls that shoot 0-15 with 5 turnovers because they do just enough to not get a F grade and AI take over.

Paragon: The Overpriced.
It appears to be applying Asian storefront strategies to a Western market.
Skins cost $30!!!, heros cost $10. You need 14 heros to even play ranked, meaning it will take 5 days of doing all your daily quests to unlock 1. So it will take weeks of just tooling around in Quick match where nobody cares, picks whoever they want for whatever lane, get streamrolled by someone 100x better, surrender at 15 min, rinse repeat.
The skins are pretty decent, just no interest in giving them money after making me grind out the heros just to play meaningful games in a few weeks. I also think the biggest problem is their direct competitor is selling their game for $10 and you can get all the heros. The difference in the games is not enough to say one is that much better than the other.

The gameplay is currently extremely snowbally and QUICK. Most games you can surrender at 15 and everyone knows they lost, but even if you don't it takes about 20 min for the team to win. Frankly whoever starts winning is just going to snowball via deathball and win. There is no comeback mechanic. Of course they will work on gameplay mechanics but the patch notes between the final test and now don't bode well for the future. Hardly anything meaningful was done and the same OP champs are still OP - so if you shell out $10 per, you too can play the crazy OP champ.