Recent reviews by buka59

It aint tatical game despite advertising itself as such. Its about as much tactical as Battlefield is. Gamemodes are small and operate around runing and guning mentality, with ocasional snipers. Basicly Battlefield but smaller.

It's great game in its own right, what is most important for most of people is how it compares to previous DIRT Rally games.

Handling:
It feels more refined to me, especially RWD and FWD cars. AWD was already fine in DR2, but Codies made big improvements in vehicle feel in all conditions in all cars. They just follow your imput more acuratly, and are generally more stable. At the same time if you enter corners to fast, or jump with too stiff suspension, you will have to fight for control, its not easier, but you have more control, there are no sudden snaps of oversteer seemingly out of nowhere.

Stages:
They are way bigger, more open and more varied. In DR2 it sometimes feeled like a tunel, with high banks on both sides of the road that blocked the view. Here you can see a lot of ground around, it just looks more realistic, like a real stage, instead of some cut fragment of it. Diferent stages arent so similar to each other, and also they can change rapidly on longer sections. Place where i first noticed this is Spain. In DR2 it was basicly the same few fast corners, separeted by ocasional bridge, and on 2 stages a small vilage. Here you have some more technical bits, and intersections, road signs and roundabouts, that make it feel more like an actual road in real word, All the stages have more elevation, and vehicles feel more restricted by it. Your car will go significantly slower uphill, or faster downhill, in DR2 it felt a bit flat, with elevation changes not influencing you car as much.

Surface:
There are more holes and uneven terrain that distrupts your car, you can easly damage your exhaust if you will go to fast with too low suspension, or cross curbs. Asphalt now feels like and actual asphalt instead of an ice greesed with oil. Now you can use your actuall grip to travel corners, insetad of semisliding all the time, or suddenly spining out of nowehere. Also there are huge grip changes as you travel, with gravel of diferent grain behaving slighltly diferent

Tyres and damage:
Tyre choice actually maters for once. Degradation is much higher, and repair stops much fewer, with less time to spend. Furthermore, tires are limited in numbers, so you cannot just change to new softs every stop. You have to choose if you want to go a bit longer on one set, and then have fresher tires, or sacrifice time on the end of the event. Also, you have to manage your tires on the stage, excesive handbrake on asphalt will lead to high tire wear.

You can easly damage your car, even if you dont stray to much off the track. Suspension takes a beating every jump you make, the same goes to exhaust. Wear will also show on engine and other componeents even if you drive cleanly, so sometimes it may be wiser to slightly slow down before jump to save your car. In prevoius games, if you stayed on the track, there was nothing that could happen to your car, it took no damage,

Graphics:
I do not have a best of PCs, my 1060 is only sufficent for medium settings, with fps in around 50's, they are stable thou. Last patch made huge improvemnets in fps stability, it was much worse before, and I gueass that on the release it was even worse. Non the less, technical state as of now is very good. I experienced no bugs or crashes, and graphics are about what I would expect from my PC.

There are many opinions that DR2 looks better, and on max settings it is propably true. I cannot test it properly because of my gear, however water effects are much worse in EA WRC.m the same goes to trees textures. Overall however the game looks lively, there are more details like roadsigns, some small fences around houses, logs and rocks further off track, it makes the game feel a bit more realistic. Maps are also bigger which I think impacts performence. Overall I dont mind how WRC looks but it could certailny use an improvemepts. There is also no VR support as of now, however it was announced to be ready in spring/summer.

Audio:
It was always solid in Codies games and its no diferent here. I think that cars and terrain sounds slightly better, however copilot sounds way worse. Its not as audible, sometimes I can barly understand what he is saying, he is also rather quiet. You can lower soudns of engine or effects, but its not how it should work. Also there are way less languages to choose from. A positive in copilot is that he is not trying to kill you like in DR2, where there were some rather shocking errors in pace notes, or sometimes no pacenote for a corner, especially in Scotland.

Campaign:
You get an actuall campaign, where you advance to the next WRC classes. You cannot complete whole campaign with Fulvia anymore, you enter events that require specific class or classes of a vehicle, it is also more varied this way, you dont have to finish 7 rallies with the same car in a row anymore. You race one rally at a time, and then choose next option from the callendar for a week. You can also expand your own team, add engineers, and even second driver. You also get livery editor. You can also set dificulty to your desired level, and also limit restart numbers avalible if you so wish.

Campaign UI i messy thou, calendar is hard to navigate, there is also no easy way to check your current standings in a given championship, or at least I havent found any. You can only do this if the chamionship event is in your current week. There are also no random events on the track. You wont find your oponent stranded anymore. Its a huge loss of imersion in my opinion. The game is also lacking rallycross. Now I wasnt a huge fan of it, because of the AI, it was cool to have it non the less. Instead you have regularity rallies, that are just boring, and moments. Moments are some scenario one time rallies with objective. Like get damaged car to some place or something. Nothing to write about really.

MP:
DR2 has much better online component, with dailies offering a lot of fun where campaign failed. I honeslt dont know as much about WRC online, because I played Campaign only so far, but as far as I knwo there are no dailes, weeklies or monthlies as in DR2. There are clubs however.

Overall I prefer WRC to DR2, I think it is more fair, with cars not being so unpredictible, tracks being generally wider, with not as many walls everywhere, and co drover not trying to cheat me on pacenotes. It is very pleasing to drive, offers huge variety of stages, with everyone offering something a bit diferent, I think I like almost all of them, maybe not Corsica. It is slighlt behinde in audio and visuals compared to DR2, but it isnt the most important factor in my opinion. DR2 is cheaper so it may seem like more suitable entry game if you never played rally before, but its rather unforgiving, its easier to get into EA WRC. Oh there are no micro, apart from some cosmetics and moments I think.

Game has terrible UI, you often times have to move from one tab to other. Sorting is terrible in any other language that english, because while it translates names of categories, is still sorts them in english words order, so its not alphabetic in non english languages. Names of categories often times fail to describe cars, two similar cars may be in 2 diferent categories. Convoy system is garbage, there are problems with joining convoy, and then with matchmaking, sometimes one of your mates may not join the race for some reason. Sometimes you have to restart the game in order to fix this issue.

It boots up for very long time, even on SSD, further more, it first loads you to some completly useless menu, where you have to click continue to load rest of the game. then it can start changing season or "optimalizing your PC" and you waste minutes. jumping from map, to hub to events also takes time, so its not like the whole game is loaded on start.

Game has a lot of cars, but they are often copies (sedan, cabrio, coupe), then it misses some brands like Kia, Citroen, Fiat (you have Abarth thou). Cars are not balanced at all, car with similar stats, on the same rating can be much faster thanb other cars, there are lists of op cars on the internet. Some cars ignore laws of physic, while ome seem to have some kind of debuf. Porshe suffers from cronic understeer, but Vans hold on to the road like glued. Also physic on free roam are diferent to that in races for some reason so its harder to test your cars. Some upgrades skyrocket your score, while ofering minimal gains, so sometimes tuning turns into a puzzle game, where you have to check parts and find right combination.

Bots are absolute cheats, and they dont even try to hide it. The can race the same cars as you, and yet be like 50 kmp/h faster on straight if you are ahead, or can grip on curves no matter the speed. Also from 8 bots in match, 6 are roadblocks, that will brakecheck you constantly, one is super fast, and one is his wingman, who will ram you if you get close. Have fun.

Players are no better, most of the are rammers, they do not care about racing lines, or break points, breaking on you is their best play. Also sometimes you can hit a wall at high speed and just continue forward, and other times you will be stoped aas a penalty, there seem to be no regularity here, its random. Also you can be ghosted if you are slower than someone else (so if you actually break for corner, ramer should get past you) but it also works randomly, you can get acelerated from 50 to 120 after such crash, so I think that speed diference was high enough.

Game doesnt map steering wheel keys properly, so it will ask you to press button number 4 for example, go guess wich one is it. I am also almost certain that it can vary between menues, the same button can have diferent number depending on diferent game popups. Also if you alt tab you will lose forcefeedback in your wheel. Accidently presing windows key + f instead of + g (so you can use MS ♥♥♥♥♥♥ friend list to join a game.. most of the time) will alt tab you out of the game, so you either replg your wheel, or if it doesnt work you restart the game.

If it werent for my budies I wouldnt play this trash. Its actually preatty funny to play weeklies with friends, game doesnt really offer anything else. Main story sends shivers down my spine everytime I hear one of those idiots being absolutly thriled by anything you do, and you ahve to unlock weeklies by reaching some level, I dont remeber wich one it was.

If you are looking for something slower and more teamwork focused, but dont feel like jumping into a full milsim game, then you gonna find a lot of fun here. It is kind of semi sim, where you cannot run around hipfiring and have to methodicly push together with your teammates, using supresive fire and smoke granades yet the game is rather fast paced and you dont really need to spend hours learning the basics. Its more about geting used to long distance fighting and often time one shots. Most of the time you have a spawn point somwhere close to the fight, so you dont spends as much time walking around as you would in some more "serious" products.

That being said, to trully impact match and help your team you absoloutly have to comunicate and do you part, be it building supply nodes and fortifications as engineer, laying supresive fire as machine gunner, or commanding a squad and organizing your movements with other commanders.

Big plusside of the game is its atmosphere, both from the game itself in form of explosions and nice, detailed maps coupled with strong audio, and from players side, many of them are roleplaying and most are open to new players who want to learn the game.

Personally I like somewhat asymetric balance of the game, its best seen in USA vs Germany. Americans have many submachine weapons and semi auto rifles, while most of germany troops rely on bolt action. Yet the game doesnt try to balance it by giving germans large number of assault rifles and some wunderwaffe stuff. Couple of STGs and FG, plus MG42 are enough to balance the game. It is posible thanks to big maps that have many flanking oportunities, so you are not funneled into slugfest with your enemy, small disproporties between difrent guns feel small in comparison to grand scheme of thing on the battlefield, where taking good position is more important than covering your enemy with bullets.

Two downsides I can identify are optimalization, and servers. Some maps can have huge performance drops, for me its Stalingrad, but sometimes also Carentan. Sometimes its also hard to find an open server with resonable ping, and without language barrier but its more of a minor inconvinience, after a couple of minuts max you will find a spot somewhere.

First of all, this game provides great music, its a massive contrtibution to metal genre, with many artist voicing a song or two. This music ties beautifully with gameplay, providing both fun and challange, especially if you go for a high score. Leaderboard is the main replayability factor, so if you want to break records, either world, your personal, or rival with your firends this game can provide long hours of maxing your score on a level.

Apart from the main campaign, game provides challanges, that unlock upgrades we can use during missions. Developers are also adding new content to the game, thou I havent tried it yet, but it shows how much support the game gets.

If you are only interested in beating the game, then its gona be a short journey, few hours time, mainly depending on how good you are, and what dificulty level you are playing. Price however compensate short campaing, and as stated above, Hellsinger offers more content than just main story.

Speaking of story it is rather simple, as could be expected, its main advantage is not geting in the way of the gameplay. Game supports sufficent number of enemy types, thou boss fights are rather repetetive. In base game you have 6 types of weapons, including basic skull, that lets you keep combo in between fights, and sword. Remaining weapons are: dual revolvers, shotgun, crossbow with area of effect bolts and a pair of scythes. Apart from scythes, those weapons are not very interesting, or innovative, thou they fullfill their respective roles. Downside is, that you can only choose 2 of them for a mission, so most of the time you will be using two of your favorite weapons. DLCs add 2 more weapons, thou as I said, I havent tried them yet, but the problem with being only able to choose 2 remains.

Graphics are mediocore, but somewhat pleasing, thanks to slightly stylish textures, game runs smooth on my now largly outdated PC. Thorughout the game, I only encountered 1 gamebreaking bug, I got stuck in a wall after dodge, had to restart the mission. Apart from that, game runs with no problems.

Hitboxes are a joke, you never know if you will hit someone, often times I saw my weapon passing throu enemy or the other way around, passing throu his shield and hiting him. The best trick you can lear is to spin with crouching to evade enemy blocks, that is ridiculous in a game thats suppose to somewhat imitate combat and reward good timing, combos and positioning. I dont think there is a matchmaking system, games feel rather onesided.

Game can give a lot of fun, it has a good basis, maps, audio and graphics but the attention to technical details is non existant.

Game offers a wide array of spells, feats, classes and what not, but most of them are worthless junk. A lot of this is due to a campaign design, you are fighting demons, so will have to apply fire and will resist every damn fight. Its a chore, of you dont do it, you will get smoked, if you do it, you will be wasting time apllying the same buffs for the hundred time.

Ballance is simply mind blowing. I was smashing enemies for half the map, barly even stoping, then geting hammered by 3 demons, who are basicly unkilable for me at this point. I understand placing locations of higer or lower encounter levels, but mixing those encuters in the same location? Its not even booss fights, its the regular fights that are broken.

Overall I like the plot, it really has its moments, thou I never went far, my only gripe is apparent lack of options to express your charackter other than "for Iomede" or "Ima kill ya all for fun". Its not always the case, but its usually the only choices in important moments. During more "casual" conversations, you usually get more options.

So yeah, cool story, shame that game hate the player, and tries to bore/iritate him with every fight, because they are either super easy or super hard. I dont think I had a balanced fight yet, where victory hangs in the balance for a better part of encouter.

I am not into rougelikes, but I love a good carnage, and this game gives me exactly that. Its very fast paced, but you must also think about what you doing, because you can easly kill yourself either by dashing into group of enemies, throwing granade underyourself, or forgeting that your new one shot sniper rifle also ricochets off walls.

Game has a lot of repliability, mainly from various weapons. You get many types of weapons, pistols, smgs, granade launchers and so on, and they are avalible in many variants. furthermore, you can modify them, making your weapons unique to playthrough.

Single run is rather short, so you can easly squeze it into your day, and you dont have a feel of a big loss once you die. This is a big thing for me, if you are not into rougelikes, you may still try this one, as I did.

It is also worth mentioning, that the game has a COOP. Its even easier to kill yourself with your freinds aid. Also enemies are more numerous, and the game changes from fast paced, to ultra fast paced. If you dont have a buddy to play, Synthetik has a big comunity, that is very active, you can also county on their help in explaining the game, chat is rather supportive.

Not much can be said about graphics, but I must say, that audio is supreme. Music is great, its a shame, that sundtrack, especially the combat ones are rather short and few. Weapon sounds are increadible, and change based on weapons heat, and even mag size.

I can recomend this game for all the shooter and rougelike fans, and also for guys that want to have a nice game to play with a friend.

This game has a lot of fights, like a ton of them. And you will need to casts spells, like a ton of them. Obsidian decided to go with somewhat classic take on magic systems, and you have limited uses of spell tiers. That means, on low levels, your spellcasters will be able to either cast a spell per fight, or cast their life away, and be useless until resting. And resting costs resources, you can carry only limited amount (2 on normal dif level), you dont encounter them often, so you will have to count your spells. So most of the time, your mage will be a glorified archer, doing something I guess.

But it goes deeper. Since you will be fighting a lot of enemies, single target spells are garbage, they do barly anymore dmg than aoe, and using them is just wasting spell uses. Also, combat goes in real time, and enemies have no coherent plan. They dont know what they will do in next second, and neither will you be able to anticipate that. Enemy may be tempted to just run past your frontline, and if you targeted him with a ray of something, then god have mercy on your frontline, because they will melt. Hiting anything is just pure luck, enemies may be in zone of AOE, and your guys may be safe, when you start casting your spell, but enemies may have this random idea, to just take a hit from your frontline, and take the whole party into the centre of your fireball. Its not like they are planing it, or want to use your spells against you. They have no clue what they are doing, they may do it once or twice, and sit through rest of aoe, you never know. Its also not like "inteligent" enemy types will lure your party. Spiders and wolfs will too.

Using magic is like russian rulet, you never know what will happen, chance is, that nothing will happen at all, because your mage will get hit by an archer, that decided to change his target. And magic is crucial to wining fight, you can not win a big fight, without some aoe spells. It gets even worse in closed spaces, with hordes of enemies stacing in one place. Also, enemy spells do the same mayhem, as your own, so basicly if enemy has better spells avalible, you will lose.

Limiting spell uses also means, that you will be using 2-3 best spells, despite having like 20 in spell book. Using anything else, is just a waste of time and uses. Every fight, you will cast a fireball, or if enemy is resistant to this particular type of dmg, you will cast fireball, but made of ice or something. Every fight looks the same, you try to catch enemies with your tank, try to cast aoe spell to hit as many enemies as possible, and then just pray, that during the next 3 seconds, nobody will move.

This system works great in pen and papers systems, you normally have a fight, or two in a dungeon, because they take a lot of time. This game, youfight numbers of enemies rivalling hack and slash games.

Obviously there are people that dont mind this particular combat system, and they will propably have a good time, plot is good, characters interesting, thou do yourself a favour and skip goldplated ones, they dont have anything interesting to say, their memories have usually nothing in common to what happens in the game. Also you will see a lot of loading screeens. Maps in this game are 10 times smaller than they were in BG. and you will load into every single house you want to enter.

Overall I think this game concept, and technical side (loading) is outdated, most of the time, you will be fighting game mechanics, rather than enjoying conversations, or combat.

Game looks good enough, and apart from main menu stutering for 5 minutes after launching the game it runs smoothly enough. Gameplay feels very flat and basic however. I only played tutorial mission, but it really didnt encouraged me to play for longer. Shooting a gun feels like using toys really, instead of gunshots, there are sounds of flies buzzing around the ears, thatere is just no power behin the shots, only numbers above enemies. Whole shooting consists of holding the LMB, leting it go and presing again when you run out of ammo, to reaload it (sound doesnt help to notice you run out of ammo, and it wont reload automaticly, you have to click again), runing bacwards, and ocasionally jumping away from enemies. There is just no meat in whole combat, at elast in starter mission you have 1 type of enemy, that dont shoot back. at one point I was just jumping through them to get to the objective, they are harmless really.

But the shooting is only like 40% of mission. Most of the time you are just walking very similiary looking coridors. There is no sprint option, so your only option is to roll forward, its faster that way. Opening stuff takes a long time too, to open a chest, you have to hold "f" for like 2 seconds.

I read that the game gets more interesting in midgame, but honestly I dont chersih the idea of wasting 30h of my life to start doing something interesting. Synthetic for example is way more satisfing from the get go, and also has some actual shooting mechanics, that you can use, instead of just spraying ahead. The game has some powers you can use, but honestly I got one just at the end of tutorial, and it was a mele aoe attack, not very thriling if you ask me.