Recent reviews by Rauke_

I like game

Right... i'm kinda done. I really really wanted to like this game, because I have fond memories of the first one, but the more I play it the more I find myself being more and more frustrated by every single mechanic to the point where I cant be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bothered anymore. And the reasons just keep piling up.

Time sensitivity
a. There are constantly quests that just get forced upon you in passing while you're just trying to get somewhere or do something. And if you don't basically just drop everything to do it, some random person dies. I don't care. And half the time it's like.. random teenager goes down 3mile cavern filled with monsters 3 times a day.. ofc the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ is gonna get eaten or dragged off. It's their own fault.

b. Theres a bunch of quests, specially early on that specifically ask you to do stuff inbetween like midnight and 6am. Theres no clock, or any way to tell the time of day or even what day it is natively in the game at all. Just doze at a random park bench and hope it happens to have woken you up with enough time to sprint 2miles to an objective.

c. Quests that their next step is "Come back in a few days" Go ♥♥♥♥ yourself. certain things like this would make sense but it's basically every 3rd step of every 2nd quest. It's just tedium that requires you to run laps around a mountain because the only campsite is at the bottom, and the quest is at the top.

Travelling/Exploring
a. Every. Single. Aspect of travelling sucks. fall damage is so insanely sensitive that you're basically locked to roads as they are. And as they are is just a frustrating time sink. walk 200m out of the capital gates, goblins, walk another 100m, harpies, walk another 100m, goblins, walk another 100m ooo bandits this time. Rinse and repeat for a 12km journey. Frequent encounters aren't rewarding, or engaging, it's just tedious. Ox carts? paying a little ingame currency for fast travel? sounds great actually. Oh? theres only 3 places you can go? fine.. i can deal with that. They're quite spread out after all Oh? My fast travel will be interrupted so the guards can kill 2 goblins? Just.. why

c. Exploring is so frequently the most unrewarding thing. Wide open world, nothing of interest in it. Pawns frequently point out statues, whats at the statue? a note saying "ooo a statue" Like c'mon.. Even chests and loot.. it's just always some potion or ailment cure, that will never get used, weighs you down, and doesn't even have value in selling. It's like every 1/1000 chests will be a weapon or piece of armour or something interesting, and half the time it's a downgrade from what you bought from the shop anyway.

Pawns
Are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless. Honestly leave them there for the loners with no friends (tbf I would also fall in this category) but i'd damn near buy the game for a couple mates and guilt them into playing with me so that the team could have ANY cohersion what so ever.. warriors/fighters just stand under stuff barely doing their job taking aggro or protecting casters. Archers just randomly pull you into the rare fight you can actually walk past. And both are oblivious when you're playing a caster and something is just chaining you to death in the middle of your entire party. Thieves just stand infront of stuff and die instantly.

Pawn voice lines
How tf did this pass any sort of playtest.. If you're gonna have 3 AI talking in your ears every 2 minutes.. can you have more than like 10 voicelines?? It's the most inane dribble and it's so incredibly consistent. And it just repeats every single time you do anything.. And half of it is just them calling you out for your choice on party makeup. Got all females? you're gonna hear about it forever. Got all males? They're gonna imply you're closeted. Every 2 minutes. Every single ladder, every single plant, every single ANYTHING you walk past they just leap at the chance to scream it into your ears.

Combat
Play a melee vocation. Just do it. Everything is super weak at the start so you feel like you have options, but magic is the most wet noodle ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ after the first 1/3-ish of the game. Archers are actually great when AI controlled as pawns since they just aimbot the weakspots, but when you're the player you've got some hidden extra aggro for sure. My warrior had the augment for extra taunt, a ring that made them more like to be a target, and the bellow ability which was used, and 2 hobgoblins ran right past her to just chain me up against a rock for a solid 15 seconds. And this is the frequent gameplay loop for a mage/sorcerer/archer build as the player. Aiming for weakpoints as a sorcerer is a joke, and as an archer you're trying to hit something that is frequently just having a fit across your screen all the time.

Basic RPG mechanics
I hadn't actually seen much of this myself til GeneralSam posted a youtube video on the game, and I was still early in, and wearing my rosey glasses so I was interested and had a look. Theres no consequences in this game. Theft, murder, trespassing. Do whatever the ♥♥♥♥ you want because the absolute worst that happens is you get put in jail, where you punch the wall behind you twice and get all your stuff back for free as you walk out the back door.

Story and world lore
Ha. There are like x6 more pawns than inhabitants of this world. Considering they seem to be just like normal people until an arisen rocks up to force them into slavery why do they just take ♥♥♥♥ constantly.. specially since the godsway seems a very new discovery to the region. They dont even die ffs.

Honestly feels like the devs made a world that was too large for the scope of the game, crowbarred the players into having to see it all piece by piece. Slapped a name from an older game that people liked and said ♥♥♥♥ it. I got some mods to try and lighten some of the problems, And now I see why more than half the mods (not including the porn mods ofc) are just 1 button cheats and things that're designed to make you just ridiculous.


Get it at like 90% off if you're into the genre, but full price is a bloated joke.

Don't even get me started on seekers tokens!

Theres the absolute barebones basics of what could be a game here. But nothing works properly or is finished in any way shape or form. Wait til it (if it) leaves early access to give it a look or go cause it's one of those games that very well might never leave it.

List of things I liked that worked pretty well;
-Wall running/jumping (parkour)
-Grappling (Attack on titan MG vibes)

List of things that didn't;
-Sitting (you get stuck in chairs frequently, requires reload)
-Using workbenches/cooktops etc (It slightly disconnects you from your camera and makes it so your own face blocks your pov unless you look at the ground, requires reload)
-Attacking with a weapon (Seems to randomly lock up and not let you keep attacking mid combat, usually fixed by pressing the block button, which does another attack and fixes it temporarily)
-Decorating (Placing decorations seem to randomly flick between 2 orientations 180* apart, so you 50/50 on it it places the way you want it to, and it you lose that coinflip you cant remove the decoration)
-The UI (hotkeys are kinda all over, keybinds in menu doesn't even list them all, pressing escape to close a window instead just opens the main menu, but doesn't close it if you press a second time. Small gripe sure, but it's 2023. We don't have to settle for 1999 QoL)
-I bought and got on a horse, said horse worked fine for about 20 minutes, then started kicking me off it randomly everytime it even saw a bump in the road, which caused it to throw me off a mountain to my death multiple times.


Things that're just kinda eh;
-Story, you're an heir to a castle/settlement, but day one you're told to piss off into the wilderness and collect rocks and sticks. Very grand. The progression seems backwards. Feels more like you should awaken as a peasant with some kind of vision/premonition then set out to change the world instead.
-Spells, it's alot of just different coloured point and clicks. Some slow, some dont, despite having mana as a limiting factor most spells also have a charge limit they dont tell you about, so you can't really spam anything anyway. the others are just kind of lackluster, one necromancy spell early says its used on lost spirits and enemies to harvest their souls for necromancy xp, puts an effect on their head if they're alive, or dead. But only works, (sometimes) when they're corpses. Super unhelpful and badly done tooltips.
-Aside from melee/ranged, spells are supposed to be the other grand allure of combat interaction. But they're just tedious in my experience. Was infinitely more effective to just stand still and facetank enemies with a spear mashing left click.
-The asset pack. Idk if it recently became free on unity or whatever, but it's so incredibly overused on garbage games everywhere this year. And soon as I saw the player/npc models it just leaves a bad taste by association.


Has potential, the game they *want* to make is evident. And if it gets to that point I think it will be enjoyable, for that reason I won't refund, It just needs alot of work and I honestly wish I hadn't bought into another game that I have no reason to believe will ever leave early access hell.

Voted no because theres no "eh, maybe one day"

PvE? Games actually alot of fun, I won't deny that, get a friend or two and just sail around having fun.

PvP? Genuinely the least amount of fun i've had in a long time. The only way to do any real damage at all or make any progress is to board the enemy ship. If you're chasing, YOU are the one at a disadvantage. Cause the players ahead of you will just jump into the water and climb onboard you while you're going at speeds that'd break your arm grabbing a rope/ladder. If you're being chased, beware the unimaginable difference in skill that the people who actually seek PvP have. You'll be instantly killed before you even realise you've been boarded. And get camped til you scuttle your own ship or quit the game.

Honestly, the lack of any front mounted guns or any way what so ever to fire at or otherwise affect a ship in front of you is ridiculous.

Playing solo? Don't bother.

Inb4 big salty baby, yes I am. Doesn't change how the mechanics and my experience are.

o0o0o0o okay where do I start.. First of all, do I like/enjoy this game? Yes. Quite alot in fact, however would I recommend this game to others? Weirdly, no I wouldn't. That being said my review will stay as a yes as my "problems" with the game simply won't apply to everyone.

tl;dr Rust meets Valheim glazed in vampire sauce. Play a PVE server or a local host for you and your mates for best enjoyment imo

The core gameplay loop is actually quite enjoyable, it's a bit rough to get started but once you understand your starting abilities and how the game controls you'll start to obliterate nearly everything you come across in the farbane forests. Gathering resources and building a castle is quite satisfying as you discover the various mechanics associated with it. While locking progression behind bosses struck me as unreasonable at first, it quickly grew on me as it forced me to track, explore and discover alot of various locations and facets of the game in the process, gaining new abilities for each boss kill was also satisfying as it gave you things to try and experiement with on top of the unlocks of base building and resource progression. After several hours though is where my problems start.

PVP in this game is genuinely nothing but a hard CON in my opinion. Various abilities are simply better in every way for it, so it pays to either have a setup half devoted to PVP at all times, or if you spot someone to retreat, respec and then advance on them. Though due to the nature of these "rust-esque" games you'll almost always be running into groups of people and fighting anything more than 1v1 is just always going to be difficult if not downright impossible.

The downright worst part of PVP is the siege mechanics for castle raiding. There are 3 ways to damage, and therefore penetrate castle defences. These are small explosives, which only work on wooden walls. Then for stone walls (which is the only tier-up on defence and obtainable in literally the first hour or two of playing) large explosives (requires a quite frankly silly amount per wall) and Siege golems. The explosives are about as bog standard for these kinda games as you get and in their own way make sense. The siege golems though.. good lord where to start.. They're just.. stupidly cheap. The first time you get access to them they look expensive and strike you as a rarity, however once you figure out where resources come from and establish your farming routes/locations you quickly realise you can probably put together a base wipe capable siege golem in maybe 30 minutes. Granted to counter this the creation of the golem stone itself takes about 45minutes to craft, resource processing not included. Seems fine right? not really. Once the outer most wall of a castle is breached the entire thing suffers a debuff that allows anyone to damage any part of it, albiet slowly by comparison. A team of 4 (my servers clan cap) can quickly demolish walls within 15 seconds, making base defence largely akin to a joke. Thus like most rust-esque games you'll likely wake up to a base wipe the vast majority of the time. So abuse mechanics and make your castle disgusting with 100,000 layers of honeycomb ladies and gents.

Building a castle, establishing servants, and decorating.. good golly god I have loved spending time decorating in this game. However another thing the game lacks is end game content. Once you run out of bosses that provide recipes, you're left with 3, what are essentially final bosses. One could argue the rest are mini bosses with these being the only 3 actual bosses. But once you've killed them, each of which rewards a buff you can reuse. The game simply has nothing. It's clearly designed for PVP to be the end game, but you have nothing to gain from it at that point. The game utilises a system called blood-bound, where your tools and armour do not drop when you die, even from player kills. So aside from durability you lose nothing, and gain nothing from PVP. Theres no need to restore your lost gear, rebuilding a demolished base is barely an hours work at most. Theres simply no place for PVP to be meaningful or useful past the first few hours when you have literally nothing and getting 20 iron from your neighbours (if you're lucky, which they probably wont have at this point anyway) means you get a new weapon and a significant power spike. That lasts about another 2-5 hours til you replace anyway.

Another terrible side effect of the PVP focus is the keys system. Your castle heart has tiers, which you spend specific resources to upgrade. Each player can have a set number of hearts per player, so in my case (4 player clan cap) we could have a total of 8 bases. Early game especially that simply wont happen and you'll have everything pouring into 1 as you're learning. Each tier after the first also has an associated key that can be crafted, bone>iron>gold. These keys allow you to instantly wipe out an entire base once you can reach their castle heart. Ludicrus.. but dont worry, if you bring 3 of these excessively expensive suckers you can instead take over the enemies castle heart and therefore base. But why the hell would you? At bone tier, you probably can't make a siege golem yet, so wont be doing base raids. Therefore useless. At iron tier, you'll be starved for scourgestone and pouring all your time into getting materials to craft some, whilst farming them along the way. The chances of any base you can crack with a golem at that point having enough scourgestone lying around to make a profit? basically neglible. At gold tier? What a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joke lol. The resources required to make a gold key, basically means your just out to screw someone over. If you have the resources to make a gold key. You're basically done with the game and are just out for revenge or simply to be a bully. On the topic of castle hearts, you have to constantly feed them blood essence, which is easy to obtain to be fair. Or the base will start to decay, once it starts decaying, any old fool can start slapping down your walls, make their way to your heart, and simply remove it once it gets low enough. So if you take a break for a week? You've just committed to restarting essentially. This includes PVE servers.

I've realised while writing this my short "Games pretty good but dont buy it without a local host and a group of friends to coop it" review has essentially turned into a rant of the things I hate. But here we are :shrugs:

Instant edit post-post: I didn't really touch on any positives in hindsight.. and I kind of stand by that. Go in blind, learn as you go, greatly enjoyed doing so.
Also, out of spite, don't be like me and buy the day1 deluxe and day1 dlc on an early access title. Though in this case they're purely cosmetic. It's still absolutely dirty and disgusting business tactics that are done by cutting finished content of a game to add a secondary paywall specifically to bleed money from you.

For the price, it's not a bad game, the cost vs hours is great.

But it's not for me. The game starts with approximately half the items locked, and some other mechanics "hidden" in the levels. So you're looking at probably 10 or so hours of just unlocking stuff before you can even start trying to play the game properly regardless of your choice in character (in my opinion). So personally i'll probably never play it again.

Also has some issues with some weapons being blatantly better than the rest in nearly every single way.

If it were like $10 or more, it'd be a negative and a refund from me. But again, if you're into these kind of games, then it's a great investment for the price.

Edit like a year later: So i've kinda completely finished all of the game at this point.. it's a pretty good game.

tbh the game itself is pretty neat and fun, however sweet jesus the hackers are blatant and numerous. Since you can spectate whoever kills you, you get to watch them just go directly for people one after the other, instantly kill them with a single bullet from a green ak, or my favourite so far was the guy shooting crossbow bolts into a wall and getting kills, before doing a 300m dash over like 4 streets to finish off the guy he downed. It also has this really annoying lobby system where upon starting the game you're put into a pre-queue lobby with random people, idk why tbh but I dont like that. Maybe if there was a shooting range or somewhere to test the guns and stuff out it'd bother me less? Or just give me a stupid main menu-esque queue screen pubg style.

Other than that im torn.. i'd like to recomend the game, but why waste time when theres so many people who just wont let you play. Time is money and free is too expensive for getting killed by a hacker in 80% of your games. Specially when it takes longer to actually get into the next game than the round itself takes if you happen to spawn too close to said hackers.

I'll happily change my recomendation if/when I feel like I can actually play the game.

Edit approx 2 years and 2 months later: Game now basically has no playerbase (In Aus atleast), and therefore fills almost entirely with bots. And weirdly is actually a far better game because of it. Theres also now a shooting range, and some weird little fetch quests to do in the lobby which helps pass time waiting for queues. Queues are pretty quick, think longest i've waited is like 6 minutes in last 10 games. Gunplay is solid and more fleshed out, now a half decent game, based in a very interesting universe. Review changed to positive.

Edit, edit; Games been abandoned lol

Better to die with honor than live with shame.

♥♥♥♥♥♥' great game to just RP a viking in. Personally, teleporters are TOO convenient, but not everyone has THAT much free time so that's a fair middle ground. can't wait til its finished, and hopefully with some kinda mod api cause I can see this being pretty easily expanded by community modders. Also the realm hopping abuse is too easy. Don't do that ♥♥♥♥.

9/10

I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate this game

because it's too good at what it does. 8/10

I wish I could like this game, I really do. But sadly it is sickening to play for me. Bumping into an object with your hands either moves the object or it moves your character, and your character moving like that with no physical feedback (albeit impossible with current vr systems) or without the mental preperation of the motion being initated by you, is extremely disorientating. I frequently found myself trying to adjust in real life for the movement which almost threw me over constantly.

This also applies to the extremely common climbing mechanic. once a hand is "attached" to something any smaller movements at all causes your character to jitter about excessively, again causing huge amounts of nausea.

The other main gripe I have with the game is that vertical drops are just as bad, which seems to be their only way to traverse into new areas, and with climbing being such a prominent "feature" you're constantly falling either on purpose or by accident.

The gunplay is solid, but brings nothing new to the table to set it apart from other VR titles. Pavlov handles gunplay to an almost identical degree, and there are plenty of games that focus on melee combat with again near identical mechanics. And just to be annoying as heck, the "Arena" and "Sandbox" modes aren't accessible without story progression, which to me is just shooting themselves in the foot.

I can see the potential, but sadly I will never be able to get there. I would say give it a go, but dont leave it running just to save your progress once you realise how far the checkpoints are spread when you NEED to take a break. Just in case you have the same/similar problems.

Posted whilst awaiting my refund request response.