Recent reviews by Freddo1Kenobi

In general a solid addition to the Elden Ring base game. Lots of content for the price, and a really good DLC overall.
It's made to be a challenge and it delivers that. Some bosses are a bit too rando aggro mode and it can be hard to even get the right camera angles to see what the hell is going on at times.

It does suffer from some stuttering and drops to 40 fps on my rig at times but I can live with it. If you can't then just wait until they patch it and give it a go, you won't regret it.

Went back in to try it with the new updates 3-4 years later since I played it.
Greeted by a wooping 20 fps in menus and 25 fps in character creator with a RTX 4070 and a AMD Ryzen 3700 8-Core 3600 mhz CPU.

Bethesda....Bethesda never changes.

Last reconnect.

"We never saw it coming"

EDIT: 5 days later, still didn't see it coming.

I have seen some people on Reddit and Youtube cry about how difficult this game is. I absorb their tears like f#@!ing ergo and it gave me the strength to perfect block the swamp monster to death. 10/10 would absorb tears to fuel my fun again.

On a side note, it is a good game, albeit a bit short (around 14-18hrs if you are not getting steamrolled). If you like souls-like you should get it!

F

TL:DR
If you are a huge Harry potter / Wizarding world fan, you will find plenty of the things you've read in the books, seen in the movies and they are doing you a huge service by providing a chance of being part of the wizarding world. However, except for the combat, you won't find any overly engaging gameplay, so if you are looking for an intellectual stimulus in forms of puzzles, challenges or an engaging story, you should look elsewhere.

The good

• Great visuals
  
• Good performance for a AAA game at launch (and of course following the launch)
  
• Outstanding sound effects and soundtracks, you can really feel the sound and impact of the spells and the music in the game is just lovely
  
• Overall very few bugs and pretty good controls (not too wonky)
  
• The combat system - With an arsenal of iconic spells and good combination system it feels very fluid and fun to engage with

The bad

• Nonsense story with your choices having no real impact on anything The whole ending sequence is a literal joke, whoever wrote this piece should not be a writer
  
• Unlikable and forgettable characters In terms of story and character building only the characters in Sebastian story contains any kind of depth.
  
• Incredibly easy and simple puzzles, you will feel like you are doing chores more than getting your wits tested
  
• The open world is only filled with copy-paste activities which gets incredibly tedious very quickly. It makes games like Assassins Creed Odyssey and the like look pretty damn good.
  
• The pacing - inconsistent and painfully slow at times

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This is not a good game, no matter what anyone tries to sell it as in the steam review section. I get that some people are huge fans of the harry potter franchise and world. For you, congratulations, you might have something you will get out of this. For me, as a person who read all the books and watch the movies, enjoyed them, but not much more, this is not worth it. I expected more game, less copy-paste.

If you look behind the dress up, this is just a Ubisoft open-world style game that arguably does everything that your average Assassins creed game does, but worse. The game start very slow, which hides some of the open world stuff, and you get sucked into the story because you commit to around 5-6 hours of slow gameplay with many cut scenes. Then it really takes off as you get the broom, start travelling the world, exploring puzzles and getting to do combat with your new earned spells. So hour 6-14 is really where the game shines and you are exploring the world.

Hour 14-finish is you realizing that everything that felt new and fresh is what the rest of the game is, anything from 20-60 more hours of it depending on how long you can shut your brain down at a time to just go about it. If you want to do other things than simple fetch quests or the main quest, you do have a few side quests containing some characters that you stick with throughout the game. Of these quests 1 has well written characters with real motives, good voice actors and an impact on gameplay you can learn the unforgivable curses.

The main story is just you running around from place to place facing the same generic enemies (there are a few exceptions which were appreciated), and so so so many cutscenes which drags. At the end of it, I felt myself just skipping some of them cause it's just so hard to care about any of the characters in the game, most are so flat.

There's not that much more to comment on, the game itself is a collection of mini-games spread out in a mostly empty world and is stringed together by a half-assed story. Although, everyone to their own, if you are just looking for a game to sit with and turn off your brain after school/work and appreciate visuals, this might be it!

Lots of rats

Came back and played for a few months, it's the same buggy release it was at the launch date. The game do have a lot of potential and good stuff in it, but the devs/lead are just completely ignoring a lot of game-breaking and immersive-breaking bugs. Do not waste your hard earned money on subscription to a poorly maintained product.

With all due respect, developers, is this not the chosen game? Is it not to implement controller support and bring balance to the genre of couch gaming?

I have been playing since the beta was first released and this game has come very far since then. If you are a fan of realistic shooters that rely on teamplay with active communications to win, then this is the game for you.

Big thumbs up for the developers, this is a game release done right. The scheduled release was pushed to December
because the developers listened to the community feedback and wanted to improve before releasing their finished product.
Other developers and publishers should learn from New World Interactive and Focus Home Interactive(YES I am looking at you EA and bethesda) because these guys seems to understand that to make a good profit in the gaming industry, all you have to focus on is to release a finished, polished and fun product. It is that simple.