Darxevn

Looks and plays great overall, fan of the original will love what they did here. Otherwise you might find the gameplay a little more lacking compared to more modern games like bioshock and deadspace. The maps though are great to explore. The puzzles are generally fun on their own. You also might appreciate the lack of handholding. It's up to to figure out where you need to go and what you need to do to progress from the logs. There so "press this button for main objective" handholding. One little annoyance I have, I couldn't see a consistant and clear indicator for what type of ammo I have loaded. So I was also going back to the inventory to remember which ammo is in certain weapons. For some weapons it's obvious, but not all. The game manages to maintain some suspense with the gameplay, but the environment isn't really built for horror. This could be a horror game but isn't quite there because of the presentation. However, the presenation is a modernization of the original, it's true to itself. So fans of the orginal should love it. Worth noting that their are seperate difficulty settings for combat vs. puzzles etc. So you can tune it to your liking. However, once you start you are locked in.

Brilliant and fun action gameplay with co-op that is so easy to get working for the entire game. Every mission is just the right length and difficulty. The environments are gorgeous and just full of life everywhere. This game also does this thing where you have massive numbers of moving enemies during certain sequences of a mission. You can shoot at these and light them up and it feels like you are contributing. It doesn't make a difference, but just the fact that they made the illusion work adds to the immersion and makes you feel like it really is a fully alien invasion of massive proportions. The gameplay does also mix up a little bit as you will find items and weapon swaps throughout the missions such as big power hammers, heaver bolters, and jet packs. Dialog is fun with some character drama mixed in and some props to the first story and characters. It's not going to blow away with it's writing but there are moments in the missions that carry weight, and you get that feeling that you are part of the brotherhood there to fight in the worst circumstances against the darkness, and you know what? That the stand is just worth taking no matter the outcome. Who doesn't want to feel that every once and awhile? The game also manages to make victory feel sweet. Feels more awesome if it is hard and you've got your co-op buddies with you. There is also a pretty solid multiplayer option with different classes that unlock additional abilities and weapons as you progress. It also has many unlocking skins and full customization so you can build your own space marine chapter. Keep in mind that these customizations are for the co-op missions and pvp not for the main story scenarios. The main story has co-op but not the customizations. I had a good bit of fun with the multiplayer but it does drop off due to lack of content. They are adding new missions and maps with DLC so if you are really into it maybe that will be worth your while. For me, the base story and built-in co-op and features is enough to justify a very well taylored experience that I'll be sure to come back to. Game is a 9 and not a 10 because it could be a little longer, it could have a little bit better writing and story, and there are a few minor oddities I experienced in the game.

A great addition to Elden Ring that amounts to a full game of content. that is very nearly equal in quality of the original in every way. The new areas and characters and bosses built into the game are fantastic. The items/spells added give you many new gameplay options to explore that are a lot of fun. The leveling system works over all but has just one catch. Your power ends up being based on how much exploration you do. This might not be ideal when you are replying on additional characters. Additionally, there are a few areas on the map that can be difficult or confusing to understand how to get to them. Additionally, there is one optional area where they've basically added a stealth mechanic that is a miss for me personally. So for those reasons I knock 1 point off of this amazing expansion.

World building, gameplay, graphics, music, character creation, epic fight, adaptability, exploration, replayability, co-op, pvp raids, it's all here and it amounts to the best FromSoftware game. Never had a technical issue either.

Traversal and world exploring put me to sleep. This expansion is a variation of a dead world that had the same problem. Big zones that are a chore to explore. Finished it but it killed my momentum and love for this game.

So much fun. So many jobs to unlock, builds you can do, weapons to find and upgrade. The bosses are good. Tight gameplay. Ran well on my computer. I have to knock off some points because one of the worlds has a large empty wasteland approach to it and it leads to some boring long stretches. It hurts the farming when you have to got back to this world. The DLC is ALMOST all good. The final one that came out in 2024 was based on the boring world and they do try to fix it a bit but it still fell flat so you end up bored trying to traverse this dead world. I finished it but didn't want to farm and continue playing with builds and gear because of it.

A disaster that had me finally quit this game that I loved for so long. Some of the job changes are good but the new job I tried was terrible. It's a 2 button on-rails rotation where you literally watch the job gauge and it tells you which of the 2 buttons to press. The new zones were empty. Just void of life and boring. The story is a terrible let down and a bait and switch. I was sold a monster hunter inspired adventure, and I got a lame scavenger hunt from a dictators child where I went around and did things like boring trades between NPCs. There was some fun gameplay by the time you got to the fire giants, like 10 hours into the main quest but I gave up shortly after. What's worse is they subvert your beloved characters by making them play **** to these dictators children and then also push this weird diversity self-flagulation from terribly annoying NPCs. This comes after the endwalker disappointment, where it seemed like fanservice and trend-chasing combined with covid really screwed with the vision and development of the game. There was also a trend of either worsening content or content I didn't care about in the regular game updates. I had no interest in the new criterion dungeons, the relic quest was just tombstone farming, the omega ultimate fight was a huge letdown. They managed to make a fight both hard AND boring. It was hard only because you kept falling asleep in phase 1 and 3. There's been an ongoing trend in the raiding where all the mechanics are just geometry puzzles while the job gameplay gets simpler and simpler. The rest of the side content was very much trend chasing other popular games that I'd rather play.

There are some good ideas here and it is fleshed out fairly well. The graphics are good and the game ran well on my computer. I liked the idea of the second world that you swap back and forth to for exploration. The combat feels like a souls game but there is a bit more of a range option built in for everyone. It's also a little bit easier than a souls game. None of this is bad. It's doing it's own thing and that is pretty interesting. Several of the boss fights were pretty good, but there were also some annoyances where it felt like I was unable to do anything but wait for the boss to attack and then dodge and then wait again for phases that lasted several minutes. What doesn't work is spawning the same enemies over and over to just annoy you when you are in the second world. What also doesn't work is this mechanic that shields enemies unless you find and use this little ability to remove the shield that makes you just stand there and hold a button for a second or two. These ideas where not fun in practice. I think the world building fell a bit short and the characters and dialog didn't capture me. They were not annoying or terrible, but not really great either. You can have some fun with this during a down period where you want to play a souls-like that won't challange you too much. However, you might get annoyed and just not finish the game like me.

Good overall and a lot of depth and difficul choices. It does build suspense well here and there. However, I did not personally prefer the move to the Civ5 hexagon approach to the city building. I also found aspects of the mechanics to be cryptic and not well explained. Finally, what really hurts it is some pretty bad freeze/lag when you switch from one settlement to another. The game will just freeze in the top down view without being able to zoom in until things load. There is no indicator for what is happening, it just looks like you don't have a settlement there.

So much fun, the ships and battles are awesome and the factions play very differently. It's like a slower paced RTS with a bigger scale and more economic depth and that's a good thing for this old man that's not going to be doing 400 apm with the kiddos but appreciates all the little nuance decisions you make for your economy or minor faction **** can still do all the little controlling of things in battle though and I'm sure leads to better results. There is also a replay function that works really well. You can look at your charts after a game, see the time stamp of some jump or dip and then click right to that timestamp in the replay and it zooms there so you can see what happened easily.People comparing this game to games like Stellaris and Galactic Civ seem to be completely missing the point of the game? I have no interest in ever playing those. Those are menu games. This is a traditional RTS. It plays exactly like a traditional RTS but there are a few more mechanics built on top and a slower game pace. I knocked off a point here or there becauseI think it is really lacking in some modes and some aspects of the game (diplomacy) is a bit bare bones.

Dragons Dogma 2 expands upon Dragons Dogma and improves it in every way with perhaps one exception (so far). Dragons Dogma added some additional postgame content to continuelly improve your character. I hope we eventually see that here as well. Beyond that you have a well crafted open world where incredible things happen, seemingly, dynamically. If it's not dynamics, they fooled me well enough. I have had some epic battles in the open world that just happen because I ran into the monster that decided to spawn and roam there at that time and I was ready for it. It's an action adventure gameplay with a number of jobs with varying gameplay, but they do not grow too much. Instead, the game is built around your ability to switch your job and level a knew one and then adjust your party composition. You also unless additional jobs through the game via quests or other finds or events, similar to Remnant/Remnant 2. So expect to enjoy the job of your choice until you start to max out and it starts to get a bit bland and then BOOM you unlock something cool to keep you going. That's how it was for me and I really enjoyed it. There story is somewhat basic, but so was the first. They have an intersting world premise that is a bit interesting as it is revealed. Beyond that, I don't think you'll find the characters or writing very memorable. There was some initial controversy about this game regarding in game purchases on the steam store for items that at least appears to allow for fasttravel in a game that didn't have much fast travel. I think this is somewhat overblown from people who didn't play the original. All of the items in question where in the original game as well and they were rare items that you could find and were given direclty in quests in the game. These were not unique store purchasable, pay for a feature items. I don't think these should've been there on the store, but they didn't detract from my experience because I didn't get store advertisements in game and the features and functions of the game were in line with a dragons dogma game. It was true to its vision otherwise. If most of your concern was around this contrevery, I'd check out this game. An adventure awaits you.

Not dragon age as you've known it. This game continues the diversion from the themes and tone of the original which began with Inquisition. There are many fans of inquisition, but the problems inherit in this game began there. It continues with the snoozefest gameplay that was also the case with Inquisition. A game a put many hours into but never finished because it bored me to death. The gameplay here is equally boring, but what's worse than Inquisition is that the environments are very much on rails and limited in choice and real adventure. Furthermore, fans of several of the original characters will find their writing to diverge from the tone, nature, and personality of those characters in prior games. The writing overall has not been interesting. Things just happen "because" and your companions don't always react to what is happening around them in the way you would think. It all comes off very detached. Simply compare the reactions you get from companions in this game to reactions to the open dungeon in Baldurs Gate2, a wonderfully written Bioware game. Game seems to run well for me. Not huge in the bug department either, that I can tell. It's just boring and not the Dragon Age I loved. Which is sad because they've clearly put effort into a boring, poorly written, scripted monorail. It's hard to believe that fans of this game still have any recent memory of the history of excellent Bioware games which have been lost since Inquisition, even though I know it was massively popular. It wasn't really dragon age then, it wasn't even Bioware then. But hey, clearly I am just another BIGOT. Keep in mind, this game got high credit reviews intially because of access media. EA went and curated who was given a review copy based on their initial demo responses and content. So there is very obvious pushback from that kind of corporate **** behavior here which is also getting wrapped up in stupid politics.

Great job gameplay, good zones, but rough around the edges with regular quality issues, and that is ignoring the server issues. The story is full of plot holes, jarring transitions, lack of character development, and just bad, tired ideas. Worst story of any expansion. I wouldn't characterize any of the other expansions this way. I see a lot of problems that are unique to endwalker. They try to paper over the nonsense with fan service, which works sometimes, but sometimes it's obvious that their own fanservice is creating some of the problems in the story telling. Lots of things don't make any sense. You can see the effects of covid on the development because the whole expansion feels like a fan movie created without a director. It feels like people working on their pet projects and just mashed them all into a product at the end without enough oversite to make sure everything goes well together. It's especially pathetic because it's the completion of a very long story and they clearly had a good storyboard concept for the expansion. But in the execution it's just feels like a bunch of bad decisions being made in work silos where there isn't enough supervision. Most will appreciate the fanservice in the story but don't look any deeper because it isn't pretty. I would've quit this game twice because of it's terrible story if it wasn't my MMO of choice, but there is still a lot of good content here if you ignore the story and other issues.