Recent reviews by Dregora

So apparently I refunded the game on release, but i'm still able to write a review. I've beaten the game on gamepass, no DLC, just base game. So I figured I might as well post a review of my v1.5 experience.

I think the game has pros and cons.


Pros:
- Fairly acceptable/good level design, with a few odd choices here and there. But the environments look beautiful.

- I actually think the magic system is better here than pretty much all Souls games. The fact you can equip 4 spells and easily switch between them is a godsend.

- Combat took some time getting used to and while it works overall, it's not perfect. Some enemies have severe tracking and the dodge feels very wonky sometimes. There are a ton of bosses where you want to dodge behind them, but sometimes your dodge goes so far you're almost doing a 360 around the boss, still causing you to get hit. It's acceptable overall, but this was really annoying on occasion. But other than that it was pretty good.

- Umbral lamp mechanic I think is a really nice addition to a souls like game. Granted it didn't offer much variety in terms of puzzles or enemies, but the idea itself is very nice and I think opens up a lot of possibilities for a sequel where they expand upon this. I hope they really hone in on the phasing between two worlds. More puzzles and more variety in them, more umbral unique bosses (actual bosses), more hidden paths, you name it.

Cons:
- Enemy variety. This is absolutely terrible. The same mobs you'll see early game, you'll see late game. The first elite enemy you face, that knight with the flaming sword? He'll be there at the end too. And as boss variants. Eventually you'll face boss mobs, that used to be bosses turned into elite mobs. I generally don't have a huge problem with it, unless it's massively overdone. And it is 100001% overdone here. And not in a fun or challenging way. The Umbral plane only has... 5 or 6 enemies? And they never change.

- Bosses. There are a few that are okay, but okay at best. The boss before the final ''boss'' I actually really enjoyed, but aside from one, that's where it ends. I also feel the variety in bosses is very weak. A lot of them are your typical knights. With one or two quirks to them in their second phase. But it barely changes anything except maybe one additional move and their element changes. Overall they're not fun at all. Also a lot of ''bosses'' aren't actually bosses, but the game makes you think that they are. Elden Ring did this too and I didn't like it there either.

- Weapon variety. There are a lot of weapons, but non of them feel really unique. They might have a small change in visuals or effects, but that's where it ends. No real speciality to them. They all ''feel'' the same in that regard.



Overall i'd recommend the game, but on a sale. It's a good attempt and I certainly wouldn't say don't play it, just not for full price. But hopefully they expand upon what they built here because it's deff not a terrible game and it's a ton better than the first one.

I'm leaving a negative review until it's fixed.


The performance is just not good enough for a game that isn't SUPER pretty. Don't get me wrong, the game isn't ugly, it's a good looking game, but the performance is abysmal. This game should not have the performance issues it does with how it looks. I'm not asking to run this at 4k 2000 fps. But the levels are so hit and miss in terms of how well it runs. Forest level ran great for me, around 70/80 fps on all high except shadows.

Next world, the castle/decayed town, can't even consistently stay above 40 fps even on low/low.

It's wildly inconsistent and it really, really shouldn't.


And building your game with dlss in mind is just not an excuse.

Options aren't saved when selected in co-op campaign. Bad game. 1 out of 10.


PS; Buff brettonia and make lizardmen early game great again.

Elden Ring, the spiritual successor to Dark Souls and one of the most anticipated releases of the last decade.

There is so much to say about Elden Ring. It is by it's very nature not a flawless game by any means, but despite all it's flaws, it's still one of the top games of the last decade for me.


Graphics:

There's been a lot of talk about Elden Rings graphics. Some love it, some think it's below average. I personally think they're amazing, but it depends on what you look for. The magic and strength of Elden Ring lays in it's set pieces, environments and so on, much less so in facial expressions or textures up close. If you inspect all the textures up close, it doesn't look great. Character models are subpar as well. But considering it's not a story driven RPG where you have a ton of cutscenes, I fully understand why they didn't care as much compared to the set pieces, levels, boss areas and so on. Depending on what you value, you'll either consider them amazing or below average. I personally think they're perfect.


Gameplay:

Arguably the one thing that made Dark Souls and Fromsofts work as famous as it currently is, it's gameplay. It started as a slow, methodical action RPG where rhythm is everything. Looking for gaps in the enemy combos and defences, dodge them to perfection and counter attack once or twice and that dance starts all over again. The combat is not complicated. In fact, it's quite simple. You have your heavy attack, you have your light attack, you have your dodge and you also now have a jump. There are no fancy combos like DMC, for example. It's not about being as fancy as possibe, it's simple, but effective. You either love it or hate it. It's punishing, something not everyone likes. You are meant to die. Dying is part of the entire experience. It might not click with you at first, especially if you're new. It didn't with me when I first played Dark Souls. But dying allows you to understand what you did wrong and learn from that experience to do better next time. Most of the souls like games rest upon the expectation that you are going to die. So what can you do better next time you're faced with that same situation? Learn, adapt and overcome. Elden Ring does add quite a few new things however, jump attacks, the magic system has been expanded upon and has so many amount of spells, you can now effectively change your weapon art with ashes of war, allowing you to use nearly any of them on any general weapon (minus boss weapons), allowing for great diversity. There's a lot of build variety and it's amazing.


Story/Lore:

The story is... well, you want to become the Elden Lord. Why? No clue. As previous souls games, the story is very minimal and only serves to give you a goal to achieve. There are barely any cutscenes and the ones that are there, do not explain a thing. It works exactly like other souls games. You're meant to figure it out on your own, puzzle the pieces together, go through ambiguous side quests that rarely tell you where to do, except hints given in the dialogue of each NPC. And even then they do not always tell you where to go or where to look. For a lot of people this is a massive turn off and I can totally understand why. I personally enjoy it, because i've deff missed some, which allows me to replay the game and still find new things. However, if you're looking for a solid narrative, this is not the game for you.


Music:

Epic. 10/10. Nothing more to say about this, as this is super subjective, but I adored it.


Performance:

As much as I praise the game, I do have to give it some negatives, especially in terms of performance. The performance is quite terrible. Sadly, this is nothing new for PC games. The port feels very half done. Problems can vary from fps drops, freezes to hard crashes and inconsistent fps depending on the area or what's happening. Some boss attacks will even murder your fps. Some people have odd graphical glitches as well where objects stretch out over the entire screen and there are invisible enemies/bosses (ones that are not meant to be invisible) and the graphical options are.. decent, but could've been much more. It's not a very well optimized game and depending on your system, you might encounter a lot, a few or almost non at all. They should've done much better.



Overall, i'll give this name a 9/10. I cannot give it a 10/10 as it's not perfect. There are some design decisions i'm not entirely sure how i feel about them, but that's okay, I don't think any game is perfect. It is however in my top 3 of best game of the past decade. I'm not sure whether to put it on 1, 2 or 3, but it's there at least.



100% worth a buy if you're into these types of games. But for people that are new to these games; proceed with caution. It's a tough game, you are gonna die and it can sometimes feel very unfair and it will demotivate you. This is mostly intentional and part of what makes this sub genre so enticing. But if you're not 100% sure you want to waste 60 bucks on a genre you might not like, I suggest you buying one of the Dark Souls games and see if that's your thing. They're cheaper. Also very good.

I rarely review, let alone negative. The gameplay is alright, nothing fancy but not terrible either. It does the job, but that's not why i've decided to give it a negative rating.

I can accept minor bugs. Most games, both back in the day and modern ones, have them. They're okay. But when I can replicate a crash simply from accepting a side quest reward of the first side quest I got access to, then having to restart only to see my UI disappear and yet again have to leave the mission and reload it to get it back. When on top of that you've had a demo and plenty of times to fix these types of core problems.

It's a little hard for me to swallow. This is a terrible practice, Square Enix as a publisher needs to step it up, because this is the second game in the past half year that was released broken. Avengers, one I luckily did not buy, was the other.

Not acceptable.

I felt forced to post a positive review based on the many negative reviews that simply failed to fact check or have no idea what they're talking about. I am referring to those who complain about abusive admins and the sort, but fail to mention they went onto player rented servers that are in no way affiliated with the game itself or it's developers/admins. The people getting banned get banned from player run servers, NOT official servers.

Yet they blame the game. That is about as insane as getting banned on a community server on minecraft and then blame Mojang/Minecraft that you got banned. Because that is quite literally what is happening here.

The official servers are US1, US2, US3, EU1, EU2, EU3 and they're tagged with [official server]. THESE are the servers run by the game developers themselves and they do not abuse a thing there.

Do not let the negative reviews trick you into thinking it has anything to do with the developers of the game or the admins of the game, because it does not. But they simply failed to check this and just acted like they knew what was going on an hour after playing.


Stick to official servers and you won't have this problem.

Fantastic game. From the developers of Dark Souls, you have a game that feels familiar, yet so very different.

There are a lot of comparisons. You have your ''bonfire'', you have your ''estus flasks'', you have to upgrade your flasks or get more of them, that kinda stuff. It's very typical from From Soft. "The door does not open from this side". Also typical From Soft.

But the combat is where it gets different. A lot of threads compare it to dark souls. They'll say they're souls vets and that this game is too hard. When people say they're a souls vet, it already tells me that that's where they went wrong. This is not Dark Souls combat. Where Souls is slow and you wait for certain patterns so you can dodge and punish, Sekiro is all about offense. If you stay back, you'll enable the bosses to do their special skills. When you keep hitting them, forcing them to defend, they won't have the time to do so. You literally stunlock them into blocking. They'll parry you too, which is where they'll usually follow up that parry with some combo. But you can parry their combo.

As such this becomes a parry dance. It does so very effectively. It's never really unfair. It can FEEL unfair, but that's because you're doing it wrong. They're fast, they're strong and one screw up will make you lose a lot of HP.

But you have tools at your disposal. Use them. Trust me, you'll find them worth it. You can also pretty much stealth deathblow every mini boss so they'll effectively start at 50% HP instead of 100%.

You're not a samurai, you're a shinobi. Utilize everything and the game isn't as hard as some people make it sound.


But do not make a mistake; it is still very hard, especially if you come from souls. But it is so worth it.

Runs like a charm for me personally. I've heard that some people have optimization issues, including a friend of mine, but people have to realize that not every game will run on a weaker rig. This game is very CPU intensive and if your CPU lacks, it might cause issues.

For some CPU's, Denuvo is causing issues it seems. This can be a problem if you have that specfic CPU. Problem is that Denuvo apparently has higher minimum requirements than the game itself, which can cause some conflict.

But I believe this has already been fixed in a day 1 hotfix, which is good.


Overall ,if your rig is weaker, expect some problems. But for me personally, it runs like a charm, 60fps at all times, controls work well, haven't crashed once, zero problems on my end.

I think the game itself is well worth it as well if you're into monster hunting. It's not too challenging for newbies that never touched a monster hunter game. It's a gorgeous, well working game and it can only get better from here.

Fast gunplay, feels very smooth, runs just fine if your pc isn't a toaster. You die fast, gameplay is very fast, no time to camp.

I love it, finally a fast paced BR shooter. well worth the money.

Where to begin.

I have more hours in this game than steam shows. I've downloaded it first to see how it runs on my rig. After I got money, I instantly purchased the game and continued the same save file.

There's so much to say about this title, both in a positive and negative way. I'll try to adress both.

Positive:
The story isn't anything unique. It's just about a peasant who gets mixed up in affairs bigger than himself and it's a typical revenge story. But it's done well. The dialogue is good, it's engaging, interesting. You really start to feel for Henry, the protagonist. It's not a story that reinvents the genre. But that's okay, because i'd rather have a well written simple story than a terribly written ''deep'' story.

Gameplay wise it's where this game shines, in my opinion. They've obviously went for a realistic approach overall, to really make you try to engage in the life of medieval times. And they're doing it really well. It's a perfect mix between realism and gameplay functionality. The survival aspects aren't tedious. You don't have to eat 6 times a day or spend your day gathering food. Eating once or twice a day from a pot on the fire is enough to last you the day. I typically start my in game days like this: I wake up, I eat from the pot of food that's on the fire, I exit the house and wash my face, then start my day. It's simple, effective and not at all tedious. You also have to maintain your weapons and armor if you've taken damage or used your sword in combat. Again, it's not really tedious. You can sharpen your weapon on your own and it's a fairly easy, yet fun mechanic and fun approach on maintenance.

Combat is good, really good. There are a lot of complaints about it, but I think the majority of those complains are from people that simply did not learn it or find it too hard to learn. One of the complaints is that if you get perfect blocked by the ai, he'll do an unblockable attack on you. This is not true. You can perfect block his riposte and do one back. You can constantly do this back and forth until either party hits. Everything the enemy does is counterable. Even their riposte. It's an amazing system, but takes time to learn it as the game does not lay it out.

Alchemy is simply amazing. Usually I hate alchemy in RPG games, never been a thing I liked. But KCD makes alchemy every engaging. You literally have to brew your potions. You have to cook water, throw the ingredients in, mash them and mix them, etc. You gotta pour it in the bottle, you name it. The entire process is amazing, never seen this before in an RPG.

The thing I love the most is probably that the main character, Henry, sucks at everything. He sucks at combat, lockpicking, sneaking, he can't read, he can't hunt, he can't shoot arrows well, you name it. You literally suck at everything you can do. And it's perfect, because as you play the game, you grow in all these aspects as you engage in them and you will noticeably become better at everything. It gives you a real sense of progression, at least, it did for me. You grew with Henry. And it feels like a very natural process.

Music is great too, feels very in tune with the overall theme. Not much to add.

Graphically there are some technical issues. The environment looks absolutely breathtaking. I've never seen a forest better done than here. It's amazing, beautiful, the sounds are perfect, everything just fits. The animations of the characters are a little awkward though and you can see it's an indie game. They're not extremely bad, but they're flawed, sometimes a little awkward even.


I could go on and on about the good aspects of the game, but I don't want to write a book, so. I'll go on about the negative now.


The negative is, currently it's a technical mess. You'd need quite a tough rig in order to play this game at it's highest. It gets better with each patch, but still. It's still not where it could be.

There's also a ton of bugs, some being gamebreaking. I haven't personally encountered many yet, except for one that didn't allow me to finish a quest, many others have encountered bugs. Graphically there are also a fair share of bugs. One instance was that the heads weren't loading in, so as I was walking through a town, no one had heads lmfao. While this was funny to see, it did take me right out of the immersion.

One particular feature I do want to warn about. The save system and here is why:
There are limited places where you can save. You can save everytime you sleep, it saves at specific checkpoints during quests and you can save using potions called Saviour Schnapps. You can make these potions yourself, but it does require you to gather the ingredients and go through the alchemy part in order to make them.

All in all this isn't too bad, but it did catch a lot of people off guard. The problem with this function is that if you suddenly have to go for irl reasons, you can't just quickly save and leave. You'd either leave the game open or close the game, losing all progress in the meantime.

I don't think it's a bad function per sé, but I am against forcing people to play this way. They should've just introduced an iron man mode for the people that really wanted this.

Luckily this is something a mod fixes. But still, if a game needs a mod for something, it's still worth noting.

However, they are gonna patch the potions, but I do not know what they'll change. I'll update my review accordingly once that patch hits.



All in all, I recommend this game if you're into semi-hardcore and semi-realistic medieval RPG's. It's an excellent game and it's one of the first games that got me hooked really badly. I haven't had that feeling for years.


It's an excellent game. It's not perfect, it's flawed, but despite that, god is it good.

8.5/10