Recent reviews by Pakku

1. Bad tuning.
2. Wonky hitboxes.
3. The new "Scadutree" progression system should've been tied to bosses.
4. New spells/incantations/items/weapons are more often lackluster and badly balanced than not.
5. Bosses pigeonhole you and kill build diversity, if I need to change out my loadout for each main story boss so that they become tolerable it's not an RPG where I get to make the decisions I want to nor play the game in a way I want to play.

I'm fine with all of the performance issues, even if it drops to 40fps on a good rig it's still Elden Ring where and when it counts but to say that my expectations weren't met with this DLC is an understatement.

The core Elden Ring experience is an incredible one and it stands as one of the best video games ever made.

CRASHDIVERS 2

I skipped the release with unplayable servers in order to play without issues.

But issues there are.

You can't rejoin missions after a crash when you've put half an hour of time in.
New content arrives broken.
Game mechanics are not working as intended.
The internal systems aren't working as intended.
The information showed to players isn't working as inteded.

The game is in a perfect juxtaposition where there are a lot of things going wrong but at its very core the addicting and fun gameplay is working well enough that you can forgive all of the shortcomings and bugs.

But, I for one don't want to close my eyes to the shortcomings when the flaws are real.

Edit: Arrowhead has certainly cooked after the time of writing but the game is still a whack-a-mole project where every update and fix brings up new problems and bugs to be fixed, I doubt we'll be seeing a completely polished game in its lifespan, specially now that the FOMO phase is over and the most of the players have left according to Steam data. It is what it is.

Incredibly enjoyable soulslike experience and a shame it has ao many mixed reviews. The gameplay mechanics are inherently familiar to the from franchise including but not limited to elden ring and bloodborne. Zero issues so far on my rig with a 3060 TI so my own experience is definitely biased as I've heard the console experience is subpar, game runs steadily at high fps and haven't had any crashes or bugs.

Gameplay is very good, it looks and feels just right, the umbral mechanics are cool. I only have a real issue about NG+ supposedly only having one bonfire but other than that there's not anything major that I've disliked in the game so far. Stellar work.

REVELIO!

It's a bucket of role playing game goodness, it has a great narrative with fleshed out characters in a grim but not too depressing fantasy world where you as a player have to make morally ambiguous choices and live with their consequences, the story is a banging 10 for the most part.

The soundtrack and sound design is godlike, thematically it's 100% on point and constructed very well, voice actors have nailed their parts and the casting is iconic. I can't convey with few words exactly how much richer the great soundtrack makes the game world feel like, it's that good.

Combat is great but I can't give it a 100/100 because at the very core of it all the build diversity isn't something that's that much supported, you're always going to be using your steel and silver swords in combat to some degree while augmenting that setup with the rest of your build.

It's one of the best video games ever made to be sure, if you open your eyes for half a second you'll find tens if not hundreds of thousands of well constructed and more eloquently worded reviews to the point of romanticizing Witcher 3 and to be fair they have a good reason to.

Very very very good, there are a lot of quality of life improvements that take the systems and are quite reminiscient of New Vegas as well as Fallout 4. Obsidian has the game mechanics side of The Outer Worlds to a point, it is truly fun to play. If you like tha Fallout franchise and its combat you'll most certainly enjoy this one. The TTD system compared to V.A.T.S is much preferred especially in terms of sniper kills and controlling your character by yourself instead of leaving it to the system has a more tactile feel. There are a lot of quality of life improvements over for example new vegas such as simple tooltips that give you information on what the skills actually contribute to as well as attributes and bonuses you by leveling said skills, the weapons have a much nicer way of scaling up etc. The game mechanics, combat, polish and quality of life in this game are really out there, top notch, so much so that I can't even get to them all in a reasonable amount of text. I haven't even had the game crash on me once. The graphics and the sound are phenomenal.

My gripes are that the perk system should be more expansive, for example offering something to energy (plasma, shock etc) weapon categories (as they lack representation and are bundled together with all guns perkwise), possibly more dialog based perks and overall more weird out of there perks that are more subjective and niche to really hone out different builds and that encourage build variety. The science weapon system feels incomplete and doesn't snap on quite nicely, the story itself is also critized as not having the most stellar of writing but honestly with mechanics like these I'm willing to give it a pass.

The most unfair downside is that the game simply isn't new vegas or fo4, if it was this would've probably been the next biggest thing. It's big but it lacks the overall area, the absurd amount and in total fairness an oversaturation of quests, locations, minor locations and map markers. I feel like splitting the entirety into different planets might've been a misplay. This is still in my honest opinion an unfair comment to make because the possible manpower of obsidian when they made this compared to bethesda was quite probably vastly different but nonetheless if it only had been so hyper expansive this could've been a truly godly piece amongst the classics. It's by no meter bad in my book but it could've been elevated to a higher place.

top roi

Game suffers from bad optimization featuring insane memory leaking, when it launched almost ten years ago it worked perfectly in a browser and now as a native application it eats up to 2gb of working memory? It keeps getting progressively worse to the point I need to kill the process and relaunch it and wait for it to start gobbling up memory yet again.

On top of that, I experienced continuous game crashing when launched on WIN7 but managed to fix it with setting the .exe to run in compatibility mode and run as administrator.

However, if you purchase this game only to support Orteil for the project these won't be problems for you.

You also probably get mileage on an operating system that's not as dated as mine, these are however my experiences with it. I'm still going to play it because I'm a dumbo. I won't be expecting these problems to get fixed.

This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ horrifying. Never play this.