Luposlipaphobia

Probably my favorite game. Excellent pacing, progression feels satisfying, boss fights are hard though not daunting. Exceedingly beautiful music, characters, and locations. Though harsh, the world is full of personality and wonder, making it difficult not to press on. The quiet, dark, dreary moments are skillfully balanced with incredible crescendos. Utterly captivating from start to finish. 10/10

Not my cup of tea. Loved the first one though. This one is too punishing without enough rewards to justify its weird spikes in difficulty. Not a bad game, just not enjoyable.

I think TotK is an above-average game, for the record, but I’m judging this more harshly because BotW is one of my all-time favorites. There's a lot of cool new dynamic systems, but they the execution is flawed imo. Instead of focusing on the negative, I’m going to offer my solution to reworking TotK into, what I think is, the perfect sequel: 1. Replace the overworld with the depths and add biomes to areas. Make one biome the normal depths with pitch-black zones, one sky islands, the 4 normal biomes (snow, water, etc.), and one jungle. Make each biome fit the new inverted landscape. 2. Only allow ultra-hand in specific zones, i.e. “workshop zones” where you have to use what’s available. This limits crafting so you can no longer cheese every puzzle/fight every enemy with machines. Also keep blueprints, but only let you build full machines at unique vendor locations (make these rare). This makes it so you must be creative in order to transport your machine if you want to use your new machine in a specific area (maybe let you craft anywhere as an endgame mechanic, so the end feels more rewarding). 3. Make it so you can craft other player’s blueprints via. asynchronous multiplayer (perhaps these are unique/cheap vendors and these machines can't be taken apart). Let players choose 1 of 2 random blueprints, and if your blueprint is chosen by another player then you earn rep, which can be used in a new shop (perhaps a shop to buy specific weapon buffs, like one to make it so one of your unique weapons is “unbreakable” similar to the master sword). 4. Remove 75% of monster/dropped parts and only focus on 20 or so fuse items that make your item very unique. I.e. one of them removes friction from your shield and leaves an ice trail. One lets you create a mini-tornado around enemies/etc. 5. Make puzzles much more challenging/linear, like the lightning temple. All temples pale in comparison to this more “classic Zelda” temple, imo. 6. Add fully voiced companions that you can interact with during your journey. Let them make observations and help in unique ways/in specific areas. As is, their usefulness in combat is questionable at best, many of them wander around making it a chore to get their attention. 7. I’m going to botch the name of this ability, but replace the vertical ability in TotK with something like Statis in BotW. Maybe a gloom hammer that lets you charge batteries (temporarily) and build kinetic energy. Personal preference/QoL changes: 8. Just focus on quality, not quantity. It’s fun transporting those korok guys maybe 5 times, then you see the same scenario played out 30+ times throughout the game. 9. In a similar vein, add the ability to automatically skip forced animations, i.e. the animations at the end of each shrine. 10. Make shrines more challenging with different crafting parts. Perhaps change the difficulty based on how many crafting parts you get per shrine. Limitation is key in making challenging scenarios & creative solutions. (Obviously, you'd have to rework the story, but that is pretty doable) This would be the perfect sequel, imo. Part of my frustration with TotK is it does a lot right, but it’s tantalizing at points because Nintendo gives the player too much all at once. Simply cut down the filler and focus on quality.

Incoming wall of text, thanks for reading if you choose to. I have around 700 hours in Apex. I made it to diamond during the first ranked season. I love the variety and skill set of legends, the lore, I love king's canyon and the recent Grand Soirée event. Season 4 hit, however, and just about everything went downhill: 1. You can no longer solo queue without playing death simulator. If you choose to (and notably, your overall skill is above average), you'll find yourself in lobbies filled to the brim with three stacks/premades. There is just no way you, your random teammates xX420Gamer420Xx and SmolBoi1 can take on a three stack diamond/predator squad who are in a private chat over discord, treating a public match like scrims. Why solo players continue to face three stack/premades in Apex is beyond me. This is the biggest issue for me, because I have effectively quit playing because of this one attribute. Very disappointed that this gets ignored. 2. SBMM isn't working. 1-5 seconds of so-called "matchmaking" is like throwing a pile of laundry at the floor and hoping they sort themselves into nicely folded piles. It has a higher chance of working for socks or undergarments, but it will never work for a dress shirt, for example. Higher players are all lumped together into lobbies (regardless of the skill gap between pros and above avg. players) because, again, 1-5 sec matchmaking doesn't create balanced lobbies at high skill levels. 3. Bugs everywhere. The infamous "dashboarding" exploit (quitting ranked in a way that avoids RP loss) was in this game for 2 ranked series (7 months). Season 3 comes around, and they "soft fix" this issue, however, there's an entirely new bug that confuses one of your previous season's final rank with your current rank, creating two separate ranks for some players. At the most extreme, this hiccup places higher players in lower ranked lobbies, undermining ranked as a competitive mode. Let's see-- there's an invisibility bug where bangalore is invisible from the shoulders down from 20 yards away. Muzzle flash continues to blind players indoors while using iron sights (typically with an R99 or L-star). There is constant crashing on some PCs. There is no loss forgiveness if you quit a game early when you were not given teammates at the start. Footsteps cease to exist if too many sounds are present around you, meaning you could be healing and an enemy will drop 3 ft. behind you and you won't hear them. Pathfinder can zipline or run right next to you and you won't hear them. This leads to more frustrating randomness, will you hear an enemy this game or not? 4. The worst servers I've seen in a game. 20-tick servers, constant lag = RNG as to who gets a hit reg and who doesn't. Every so often you get into a slow-mo servers, doubling each in-game second. 5. Unbalanced weapons/legends. Peacekeeper regularly hits for 99 damage with a single shot, downing players with top armor in less than a second. G7 scout + light ammo (it was conveniently removed from the new sniper category this season) = players can spam shots at up to 20 bullets a clip, and all it takes is 3-4 headshots to down you (who in their right mind would choose a different rifle?). We've gone 2 seasons (7 months) without any changes to more than half of the legends, meanwhile Gibralter gets around 5 passives and continues to get inexplicably buffed. Pathfinder, Wraith, Wattson continue to be top contenders in games. Side note: if you make all of your changes based on the entire playerbase's data and never look at the competitive scene or above average lobbies, then you will get skewed ideas of what to buff/nerf each patch (not that there are any!). 6. Communication and the iron crown fiasco. Some devs wouldn't hold their tongue and stooped down to the level of some (probably 13 year old) users on reddit, resulting in a public apology by Respawn's CEO. This just fanned the flames in my view. You can't have any dialogue on any of these social media platforms anymore. Do I blame the devs and not the ones who kept insulting them? Of course not. But some professionalism, etiquette, maturity goes a long way. Instead of engaging those who are most "toxic," engage those who are most willing to understand and are able to change their own views. Now, anyone who so much as errs on the side of (constructive) criticism is told to uninstall and play something else. This only hurts the game in the long run, because those of us who actually want the best are told to leave. tl;dr Season 0-2 - 9/10, all around fun and exciting ranked and pub games. Wide range of players to engage with, great communication from the devs. Season 4 - 3/10, can't even solo queue anymore due to being placed against three stacks almost every game. Rarely play more than 5 games before signing off and hoping we hear more from the devs.

I made an account to create this review. Imo this game excels at: -Cool environments. Lively art direction and interesting variety of biomes. -Great sense of scale. From the surface all the way down to the "depths." -Unique creatures. Large array of alien species make you want to explore more. -Original and well-executed core idea. The "water planet" backdrop is both a nightmare and a paradise. -Creative story and lore. I loved the plot, though I found some areas out of order. The downsides: -(Again) Out of order events. I felt completely lost at times because I ran into "deeper" areas out of order, often using the wiki or youtube to see what to do next. - Would benefit if they made the beacon a reusable tool so you don't have to remake this item repeatedly a couple dozen times (then forget when you need it most). -I wish I chose the "no food/water consumption" mode. I built things in my base to help, but I found myself tethered to my base because of it. -The Prawn suit needs more arms imo. That way you can be spiderman and not have to switch out appendages. Conclusion: The beginning of the game is extremely entertaining. The latter part gets tedious, especially if you have to deal with food/water every 15 minutes. Still a great and unique game.