Recent reviews by Akadosh

Sony still has well over 100 countries banned from sale despite declaring the game no longer requires PSN.

Much could be said about this game, but it's not really worth the time or effort to articulate. It's just Dying Lite.

Bought this game on the free weekend that saw the release of Frenzy mode. I have yet to play a single game of standard multiplayer, it's all been this one mode because it is that good. Frenzy was removed from matchmaking at some point and last I checked there were 5 people in the world playing Frenzy across all of the community servers. They created one of the best shooter experiences i've ever known and then bungled it into an early grave.

Frenzy mode is a zombie-style custom game slapped onto their immersive PTSD simulator and the combination of these two shooter sub-genres is positively exhilarating. It's really hard to pin down why it's so incredible because the interactions of so many different things coming together is as chaotic as the gameplay.

It's mostly just a game against bots with special rules. Enemies have only melee weapons, bigger team, always on defense, and can respawn. Whereas your team is smaller, only respawn when an obj is completed, and always trying to destroy an obj or capture a zone. Sometimes after capturing a zone you then have to defend it against waves of enemies, it's mostly random with the final obj always being a zone defense. Also with cliche special zombies like the big hard-to-kill dude, the fast jumper/teleporter, and the one that explodes. Being a custom game of bots meant a few things like they run just as fast as you do so if you can't hold your ground you NEED an ally (with good aim, friendly fire is on) to save you, the AI have differing types of body armor so there's some natural variance on how many bullets they take to kill without headshots.

The gameplay is where the crossover of sub-genres ties together really well. Insurgency's commitment to realism carries over into a sub-genre of shooter that is usually very forgiving. I remember in the hardest difficulty of Left 4 Dead it would take 10 hits to die from zombies and in Frenzy you almost always die in a single hit (i'm pretty sure they just have hax aim-botting for headshot melee but it sometimes fails to instant kill because of hitboxes or something). This makes EVERY single basic ♥♥♥♥♥ zombie an incredible threat on maps that have dense urban locations with tight corners and terrible lines of sight outside of streets. While these constant hit-or-die scenarios are happening you also have a reticle that doesn't stay in the middle of your screen, guns with very serious kickback, ammo management, sluggish movement responsiveness, etc. The whole time there's usually some AI mindlessly screeching in the distance, it's just such an intense atmosphere for a PvE game. Also, there's a brilliant anti-cheese mechanic where if the AI can't find a way to path towards you they will throw a potentially infinite number of molotovs with their aimbot perfect accuracy that instant kill on direct hit.

Difficulty is ENTIRELY map-based. There used to not only be no map voting, but lobbies would end after every match. The constant cycling of lobbies kept the matchmaking queue down to being a few seconds long and the inability to control which map you're on meant people would actually try at the hard maps. There was one cursed map on the playlist that was so near-impossibly difficult that i've only ever beat it a single time after at least several dozen attempts (lower single-digit win rate for sure). That one victory sticks in my mind as the Pride and Accomplishment that big international game publishers will crater entire SERIES chasing after. When they added map voting I never got to play that map again, no exaggeration, ever again. The EZ-mode tutorial map (you can't fail as long as most of the team understands basic shooter tactics) is almost always chosen. Due to the monotony of community choice, I quit sometime after they introduced map voting and i'm not surprised the game mode fell apart to the point of basically non-existance. Here's a downvote for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it up so badly.

Not a Halo game at all.

Hey I just wanna upvote.

I've never played Sekiro, but I consider Outward to be 2019's GotY in my heart so i'm a definite fanboy of this game and I gotta say that this DLC is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful in almost every respect. It's like that meme with the drawn horse that turns into a stick figure except without the middle section to buffer the drop in quality. The first boss of the side quest is absolute perfection and it even has a Zelda-esque intimidating boss door. It took me some time to get past my fanboy hype of wanting to like the DLC, but in hindsight this was the- and I can't emphasize this enough- only, ONLY thing I remember fondly about it.

The sense of exploration that sucked me into the vanilla game for hundreds of hours is utterly absent here. The whole place seems pretty lifeless: there are hardly random encounters, chests and caches are rare, buildings and tents are so empty there's not even furniture, and there's a weird obsession with putting unusable doors on every building that's not a pile of rubble. The mountainous nature of the zone reduces the map to being a "series of roads" where every unmarked location can be found just by looking at the map. The mountains also get in the way of finding and navigating by landmarks. None of the landmarks are interesting locations either; they're either exits to the dungeon cluster or not even dungeons at all. The instanced locations are shallow and forgettable. Sprawling caves like the first trog dungeon or the mine shaft in the swamp? Nope. Dungeon mechanics like the Spire of Light or Electric Lab? None. The simple, ominous weirdness of the face caves? No. I really struggle to see what they though these locations would have to offer.

The travelling was Nine Dots trolling their players I think. I started out by spending the time to visit every map to see if there was a new exit and there isn't one. I actually had to use the internet on day ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ one just to find out that all the Soroborean vendors in town will fast travel you to Harmattan. A completely new concept to Outward. There's no auto-quest that starts to lead you to the new zone. More importantly though, leaving Harmattan sends you to a completely random city which can easily cost you many Travel Rations (and rot your inventory) and several minutes of holding Shift+W in order to go back to your main house. You can buy a house there even if you've picked another faction, but if Sorobor is your faction then you have to go through this every time you want to access your stash. If you could decide where to go it would just be a straight up fast travel system with 2 load screens and I they didn't want that of course, but it could really just send you back to the city you came from since there's no other form of reaching this zone. The fact that it took seconds for me to consider that option tells me Nine Dots is just trolling with this over the top pain in the ass.

They definitely wanted this to be the hardest zone. There's an unprecedented number of ranged enemies in a melee focused game. There are MULTIPLE big, hulking enemy types that leave lingering AoE effects which only previously existed with the tentacle-faced scourge, but they were weak support units that could easily be blitzed down. The elementals especially are literal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ turrets that just mindlessly spam ranged attack no matter what you do (to such a comical extreme that they don't even turn to face you). Numerical survivability of enemies is the highest of any zone I think. There's way too much dodging going on. So combat is super ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ aggravating and not in a "difficulty gud" sort of way is what i'm saying. The main story quest is exclusive with the original campaign, so you'll have to face all this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on a relatively new character or spend hours and hours getting to the "end game" in order to not be constantly overwhelmed. As a bonus, if you go there to check it out on a pre-existing character that's done the campaign already then every story NPC you talk to will start spouting out unprompted story spoilers! Hurray!

To skip over multiple paragraphs of rage i'll just TL;DR the worst of it:

• the implementation of Corruption and Enchanting is an abyssmal failure.
  
• the second side quest boss is a stagger-immune target dummy that just spam attacks. It's not fun.
  
• the final boss fight of the side quest is the only boss in my entire life of gaming that i've been genuinely disgusted by.
  
• you're forced into doing the side quest or the BBEG destroys Harmattan. (he declares his vengeance as soon as you enter Harmattan with a chosen faction)
  
• The whole Speedster class is a frustrating, gimmicky catch-22 as the only times you can build Awareness (every passive and ability requires this unique class resource) is when you would otherwise just deal dmg instead rendering it meritless, but with downsides.
  
• There are no unique enemies (non-bosses) to happen upon.
  
• Certain projectiles will track you AND clip through walls. Just full heat-seeking ghost mode.
  
• The gauntlet weapons have the range of a dagger so there's crippling hit box issues since unlike the dagger, every attack will come from this weapon.

To cap it all off, the NPCs will mention old Harmattan at every opportunity which is a grand location with a tragic and storied past, now filled with monsters and ghosts and loot (they specifically mention this part). You never ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ go there, rofl. The unfulfilled build-up, the empty promises, the absolute tease of what could have been perfectly captures the spirit of this godforsaken DLC. I've seen complaints that the majority of this DLC is cut content from the vanilla game. I would COMPLETELY believe that it was one of their earliest works that was abandoned because nearly every square inch of it is so thoroughly and so profoundly amateur-ish.

Update: Funny story, before writing this review I had made a chakram character (to try and make the most out of Speedster) to go through the campaign with. I probably should've mentioned the Sorobor campaign somewhere here. I'm not going to spoil the contents of the story of course but, literally all 4 quests give you a list of errands to run. It's kinda weird that they just spammed this format over and over, but whatever. Anyway, after starting the 4th and final quest and finding out that it was another list I just stopped. Post-review I went back to finish it so that I can officially consider it done and dead to me only to find out that after that checklist is done it quasi-ends, you get your Peacemaker's Elixir, and are sent off to Old Harmattan for a showdown with Scourge much like the original campaigns. There are no ghosts or loot or exploring to be done, but ok, I was wrong and you technically go there. The first major enemy of the scenario dodged ALL my Probes and then killed me with a ranged attack. Seconds after respawning, the scenario auto-completed without me. I missed the whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing and actually still got my reward at the end. There's apparently not even consideration for perfect clearing, lol. Take this however you will, but i'm not really sure what was actually there is any better than thinking it never existed at all.

I consider Darkest Dungeon to be the best RNG game of all time, but the degree to which they've failed to grasp even the basic interactions of how this game would translate to PvP is shocking.

DoTs no longer roll a death save of course or every DoT ability would potentially have 2 attempts to kill instead of 1, but at the same time players are in complete control of the turn order and you can just always reserve healing of ANY amount to get people off DD. This means that it almost doesn't even matter how much you heal, so all those tiny heals in the campaign that were awful now make you a fully fledged healer here. The way it stalls an entire attack is akin to an unresistable stun. So naturally comps on the upper ladder (you're forced to ladder btw) regularly have 3-4 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ healers in it and some of those can even heal multiple ppl. In particular this makes the Occ heals ludicrously good as so long as you don't roll the 1/25 and get a 0 you're golden. Randomly full healing instead of 1-3 is just a bonus. The majority of what's wrong with it can just be solved if they let hp go below 0 in order to let accumulated dmg make it harder and harder to remove DD. Having this wall to put your back against made sense in the campaign where you can be critically destroyed by a boss or size 2 monstrosity, but it's a seriously abusable mechanic here where you and your opponents are playing with the same characters.

Stress dmg has also been grafted onto pre-existing abilities. Stress is an entirely separate, parallel hp bar of sorts, but it's so utterly one dimensional. There's just no nuance: you have stress resist or you don't (Maybe this one's just a broader matter of integration throughout the classes), Affliction can't be removed like Death's Door can, and probably most importantly EVERYONE has the same baseline stress tolerance unlike hp. There are other comps that require full commitment like marking, but the problem lies on the receiving end of that gameplay. Even with anti-stress in your party, stress comps will just play Solitaire and spam whatever they're gonna spam. It could've been a real simple and fine anti-stall mechanic where you gain stress from every source of dmg or something (crit/DoT parties would be the closest thing to a "stress comp"), but whatever.
Note: a LOT of ppl are complaining about stress comps (Man at Arms), but idk why. I not only never lost to them, I never even received a single heart attack. Not a one in at least a dozen match-ups. I just hate it because they're so so boring to play against.

In any case, going into this mode I had an absolute blast thinking of the possibilities, but all that came to a screeching halt by the end of a couple hours of matchmaking. Yea it's free, but I wish I could be refunded my time.

Update: I almost forgot the trinkets. They're unlocked through a rigid progression path (no randomization) as you rank up. However, just like the campaign the ones you start with get completely replaced by more effective ones. This is a fine way of doing progression for a single player campagin, but yet again, when applied to multiplayer it looks and plays exactly like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pay to win model that's designed to aggravate you into shelling out, but without the actual paying part. You'll sometimes run into someone that simply has superior trinkets that tip things in their favor rather significantly. Could've just been a trinket store where you spend rank-up coins, smh.

Slay the Spire is a game oozing with charm. The general style, the surprisingly in-depth world building about the spire, the simple weirdness of many of the enemies, or just the way the text during events move around all leave a great impression. However, this game has a glaring flaw in that you have almost no control over deck-building.
There are a ton of cards per character and at the end of every combat you pick one of 3 cards to add or ignore completely. the ignore completely is important to note because this game is all about the synergy so you'll definitely end up ignoring most of it. I basically decided it was just time for a refund when I went for a dark orb run on the robot only to die on the first boss with a nearly unmodified starter deck because I couldn't find even one dark orb card to get the deck started. This sort of thing could be heavily mitigated if you had any way of changing your starting relic (run modifiers you find along the way) or deck, but no, you of course can do no such thing. Also, it's worth noting that leveling up characters does nothing but unlock more cards which just increases the pool size, lol. It's nuanced and critical thing, but the ratio of card availability to card total is abysmal. Game-play is so one-dimensional it almost feels like a hyper-complicated slot machine.
It could be said that the fun is going with the flow (read: RNG) and finding the best deck out the options, but what's even 'game-play' about that? I'm not taking a back-seat to my own experience.

It more or less delivered exactly what I was looking for in a sequel to Grow Home by making a bigger map and delivering ability upgrades seperately from the crystals (which improve the abilities, not unlock them), but it crashed twice in 21 minutes.
For something that's supposed to be a relaxing experience you'd think the devs would've made stability a high priority.

The demo is being deceptively advertised as a "free weekend". Double thumbs down for this alone.

On top of that weapon upgrade points are given out based on certain challenges done during a mission (get a multi-kill with a shotgun, do so many melee executions, etc.), but 1/3 of every level's challenges are finding the secrets. not just some of the secrets, ALL of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ secrets. I would also thumbs down for this alone as instead of them being a fun thing for some people to do, your rate of weapon unlocks is punished 33% for not looking up the answers.

Given their second attempt at paid modding i'd say terrible decisions are a Bethesda tradition.

EDIT: Ok, it was my fault that I didn't fully read the release notes on the free weekend saying only the first two campaign missions were available, so I reduced my thumbs down on this issue from two to one because they're still liberally throwing around the term "free weekend".

Also, look at these hater comments saying "spend the time" on secrets when I specifically said "that's dumb, no". Y'all are as bad at reading as I am. :)