StarCash

8/10 for the early and mid game 2/10 for the late game It's a good game. Put on your favorite playlist, make some tea, and kick off your shoes to explore, capture pals, build a nice base... The endgame is very lacking though, with some very questionable decisions. The final raid bosses are very messy and unenjoyable. Why can't we build a base in the World Tree? Why is the sacred water only farmable by killing pals? Why change the rules of the game at the end? It really feels like the devs want to artificially inflate the endgame by intentionally slowing you down. The best part of this game is the pals themselves. They are fun, well-designed, original, and useful. I reached the max level during the Beta, so I was worried that the new patch would not have enough content. It was recommended to start from the beginning, and that's what I did. In no time I was back to planning my next base, checking out the new pals, and playing until late. It is one of those 'I will play 5 more minutes' type of games, where it's past midnight the next time you look at the clock. Pocketpair really goes out of its way not to railroad you into one playstyle. You can fish, but it's optional. You can do dungeons, but they're optional. There are lots of recipes, but you can just cook Jam-filled Buns for the rest of the game and that'll be enough. They have melee weapons, ranged weapons, pal weapons, grenades, traps... The only problem is that it all goes down the drain in the endgame. The game is highly customizable. Don't like durability of equipment? You can disable it. You want to carry more stuff? Just adjust the settings of the server. From my point of view, this is the kind of game we need more of. Multiplayer gaming is terminally ill from cheaters, bm, microtransactions, and low-effort content. The future of such games is bright, and I am looking forward to seeing more titles like this one. Some areas of improvement: - The game is still buggy There is some rubberbanding when climbing/moving; some pals in the base get stuck, randomly won't eat, or will mine a rock from 50 meters away. Nothing game-breaking, but the game still needs some polishing. - Enemies shooting you through walls A classic of buggy games: getting hit through walls. What looks like cover actually isn't. It is across the board. All Pals and enemies will often laser you off through walls, pillars, hills, etc... It destroys any real strategizing and movement in favor of brainless brute force during the encounters. - Moving objects in the base To move something, you need to destroy and rebuild it. In Dune Awakening, it's possible to move them instead. So it's definitely something that could be implemented in Palworld. In particular, chests are really annoying to move. You need to remove all the contents, so you end up overencumbered and can't move. - Insane late-game grinding The late-game items like the Ancient Hatchery require thousands of components. Not hundreds, thousands. Also, the ammo required for the endgame weapons requires you to manually farm their components. As mentioned before, it is not possible to build a base in the last region. That means that after each encounter with the final boss, you need to go grind again for the ammo. The grind increases exponentially as you reach the late game, and crafting anything becomes daunting. - Terrible raid boss fights Sorry, but Astralym and Phantalus are objectively not good fights. - CC to no end - Abilities that track too hard to be avoided - Requires you to change your whole playstyle just for these fights - Buggy/confusing visuals - Phantalus: Has a weak point, but does not give opportunities to shoot it - Long, stalling animations in timed fights - Gigantic HP pools - Makes most pals irrelevant It's terrible. I understand that they tried to make something different, but it completely misses the mark.

2/10 The execution is really mid, and the concept is flawed from the start. I do not really recommend it, even on sale. - Bugs, crashes, and challenges that don't work The campaign crashed multiple times, and I had to restart at the last checkpoint because the next phase of the story did not trigger. One time, I had a complete crash of the game and it crashed my computer. That corrupted all my settings, and BF6 has dozens of them. That included all the controls, vehicles, and tracked quests. Sometimes, the menus freeze in the firing range. At other times, I cannot select my spawn location on the map. If I leave a match when being downed, the game freezes to a black screen. Sometimes the game crashes during a match, and does not allow rejoining the game when restarting the client. The challenge 'Resupply teammates with supply pouch' ignores most of the resupply done. The alerts to get your attention on upgrades or achievements are bugged to no end. It is a so-called AAA game tapped together with hopes and prayers. - Cheaters' hell There are cheaters in every game, the anti-cheat does not work. These are the same patterns as any other cheater-infested game This makes the game simply unplayable. - Broken meta The main issue is the conflict between engineers and vehicles. If there are not enough engineers on a team, it is automatically a loss. For some reason, these Battlefield games are designed so only engineers can deal with vehicles. The recon class has the C4, but the range is too short to deal with vehicles effectively. Seventy per cent of the games are lost because people do not play engineer. That means all the fancy mechanics, classes, gadgets, maps and positioning are irrelevant. It boils down uniquely to whether the team has enough engineers dealing with vehicles. You can tell the outcome of a match before it has started by simply checking the leaderboard and counting the engineers in each team. It makes the game very repetitive and predictable. - Terrible mission design Some of the quests are really boring. Having to get kills with sidearms while they are so bad is both a chore and detrimental to the team. Some quests make no sense, like the 'Suppress enemies with LMG' or 'assist with smokes' objectives, and you need to Google what that means. Some quests are linked to awful weapons. For instance, having to kill anti-air with the IGLA is horrendous since it always misses. Some missions have an arbitrarily large number of quest items to do, it is pointless. For instance, resupplying 135 teammates. Why not 50? What is the point? Or spotting 300 enemies on points.

5/10, playable, but for one season only imo. This game only targets a small audience of hardcore extraction shooter fans. - The positives I love the storytelling and world-building. The classes and gunplay feel good. Bungie made a strong visual statement, and it pays off. The trailer is amazing. Also, the game is not pay-to-win. The shop sells only cosmetics, as far as I know. - The negatives With the Nioh series, this is one of the few games that truly qualifies as 'masocore' to me. Arguably one of the most brutal games I've ever played. * This game is very unforgiving. You will not extract most of the time. There are no safe pockets, so there is no way to guarantee progress for a run. Very low TTK. You die instantly in some situations. Look the wrong way, and you die immediately to a sniper or a shotgun. There are missions specifically for runners to hunt each other down. Some quests are designed around points of interest that campers can target. Therefore, all the lobbies are merciless meat grinders. The extract takes a very long time and notifies the whole map, and most exfills will be camped to death. * The game is very poorly designed for solos. The balancing is nonexistent. The amount of PvE does not scale down when playing solo, as far as I can tell. You may kill one single mob, and the overaggro that follows can be unmanageable. Hordes of mobs will follow that will get you killed eventually. Also, some achievements are impossible for solos. * Latency The game does not allow you to connect to a specific server and does not have an option to display the latency. That means that you have no idea which region you connect to, and the ping will be completely random. Some games may be crisp, and some others may be complete lag fests. * Very poor player retention This game is bleeding players. For instance, the achievement 'Run, repeat' that requires completing 7 runs has been obtained by less than half of the players. Let that sink in. In other words, more than half of the players quit after completing less than 7 loops. * Bad user experience Boring mobs. For a place as exotic as Tau Ceti, all the mobs are mostly humanoid robots. Yawn. There are too many bindings for a controller; it really feels like this was intended for mouse and keyboard. The UI is unintuitive, with ugly icons. The Tetris inventory. When will game companies let go of this forever? The waiting screens are disgusting. Worms, moths crawling on faces, close-ups of weird eyes. The way that units connect to you when you are downed is weird. Only one active quest at a time. Why?? Many abilities are very slow to activate, and the ADS is slow on many guns. * Full wipe The final nail in the coffin is the full wipe. The factions take forever to upgrade. I mean it, they will take hundreds of materials, and all that progress is lost every three months. * Premium battle pass That really annoys me. I paid for the game, why is there a premium battle pass?

The Warfare mode is a blast. Lots of weapons, strategies, and vehicles. The gunplay feels great and accurate. On the downside, all the lobbies are filled with cheaters to the point of being unplayable sometimes: wallhacks, aimbots, insta-kill, even enemies teleporting. Any possible cheat you can name. Also, the fact that these cheaters have high ranks means that the company has never taken the necessary actions to address these issues. I report all these hackers, and hopefully Team Jade will eventually act. Something infuriating is how, when spawning somewhere, the game sends you to a random location. It is very disorienting. You may spawn in the middle **** or under a vehicle, so you get killed instantly. Also, vehicles are way too dominant in the current meta. Most roles are useless, and only the team with the best engineers will win. Vehicles take a very long time to upgrade. That means new players are at an extreme disadvantage when facing fully upgraded vehicles. There is just no way a new player can win a 1v1 with a level 1 tank against a fully upgraded one. Finally, the controls for the aircraft are the weirdest I have ever seen.

Last Edit: I leave that game now. I was getting really bored, so I thought I would give it one last chance. I got killed twice by rats at the extract, when I play PvE exclusively. I may come back when then Embark adds a 'PvE Only' option, which means never. Edit: I don't understand. As soon as I put on any good gear, I land in PvP lobbies and lose my stuff immediately. I can play 20 games in a row using a free loadout without any issues, but as soon as I equip some gear, I get PvP encounters. Why is this happening? Why does the matchmaking even do that in the first place? Is it because of cheaters? The latest cheats allow players to see the gear of other players from any distance. That means cheaters will chase you from the other side of the map to hunt you, kill you, and take your stuff if you bring anything good. There is no solution at the moment, as the cheats also provide aimbot functionality, which means it is not possible to win these encounters. Also, every time this happens, the gear is completely unbalanced. If I bring a Burletta (green), I encounter someone using a Torrente (blue). If I use an Anvil (green), I encounter someone using a Canto (blue). Why does this keep happening? Why is the matchmaking so bad? Why can't I use my hard-earned gear and remain stuck using free loadouts? Because the cheating is unmanageable, please Embark, add a 'PvE only' option to matchmaking that disables PvP in matches. If you can't beat the cheaters, at least add an option to disable PvP entirely. Good game, but EXTREMELY ratty. There is no real PvP to speak of. All my encounters have been EXCLUSIVELY backstabs. People only attack you when you are fighting Arcs, when looting, or from far away with sniper rifles. The PvE lobbies are great, but sometimes the algorithm completely misses the mark and throws a few PvP players into the mix, which makes the experience truly miserable. The matchmaking based on aggression may be the most innovative idea in PvPvE games I have ever seen. It is the reason why I bought the game. I have not shot a single person yet, and I have landed in lobbies with 90 percent like-minded people who focus on having fun, questing and PvE. The sound design is phenomenal. Each sound tells a story about what is happening. I LOVE that the maps make sense. They feel real. The apartments have beds, kitchens, and drawers. The pharmacies have shelves and a counter. They really went out of their way to make a world that feels alive. I also LOVE that most maps are outdoors and lush. It is such a different take from the overdone bleak post-nuclear apocalypse. It gives an eerie feeling and is strangely liberating. One issue may be that the game is becoming too difficult for solo players. Events like 'Close Scrutiny' do not feel aimed at 'people with jobs', as advertised. Many strategies for solo players have been nerfed: Deadline, Wolfpack, Hullbreaker, grenades, and Anvil. This makes the game tedious. Also, the small stack sizes of items can be annoying. There are so many items. Please increase the stack size in the stash.

7/10 for the first map, the Warring States 0/10 for the rest of the games. Utter garbage. Team Ninja is back to its old self with cramped maps, spammy encounters, badly designed human bosses, endless HP pools, and cheap ambushes. Buy this game if you want one cool map, and an annoying mid and endgame. - Game as a whole - The end game is atrocious. The encounters become extremely repetitive, bosses like Tokugawa Kunimatsu or Okita Soji are gameplay abominations that should never have been **** final map, the 'Final Battle of Edo' is a boring rehash of all the previous bosses, and should not be part of the game. - Warring States - The open map works well here, for many reasons.First, there are fewer ambushes than in the other **** gives some breathing room and opportunities to plan fights.Also, open maps prevent the camera from freaking out as it usually **** open map also prevents repetitiveness; many sub-missions in Nioh 1 and 2 were just variations of the main **** level layouts are good.I really enjoyed exploring the first **** Warring States is a fantastic map as a whole.They even got the jokes right, about taking a bath during a mission or the headache medicine. - The not so good - A few drawbacks: the colour palette is very uniform at **** first zones are a smudge of the same few colours, and it is not very interesting or clear.There is too much **** inventory is full of new items after only a couple of missions.I wish there were more significant items in smaller **** fights against humans will forever be boring **** Hanzo fight is as horrendous as the previous iteration.I have to hit the guy 50 times while he can one-shot combo **** fight against Yamagata Masakage is equally **** blacksmith is just as useless as in the other games during NG.There is no point in forging any items when they will be obsolete in five levels.Offering items for Amrita is always the better choice **** PC, the right stick has a massive dead zone when aiming, even when the setting is at zero.Some players reported that the bug did not exist on PS5.

2/10 tedious. It is a Souls game where everything is just a little bit worse. The first major issue with this game is the input lag and registration. Intermittently, inputs are simply ignored, which is a massive problem for a game like this. A quick search on Google shows that many people experience this issue on PC. Another major issue is the input reading; several bosses react instantly to a button press. For instance, Saito Toshimitsu literally dodges bullets when using a gun. The bosses have endless pools of HP, which makes encounters very long. At the same time, many mechanics are one-shots. Players are supposed to use the 'confusion' mechanic to increase damage, which is just stacking debuffs and is not interesting. Bosses deal an insane amount of poise damage, making blocking irrelevant even in mid-stance. They also have very small openings, so 80% of the encounter is spent spectating and dodging the moveset. On top of that, there are too many ambushes. Sometimes the game breaks its own mechanics. For instance, a mob will take me out of invisibility for no reason, or a flying mob will hyperarmour through a projectile and not fall. Some items, like blinding shells, do absolutely nothing. Why? Who knows. Another infuriating aspect of this game is how slow all our projectiles are. They will not hit half the time. A boss like Saika Magoichi has no value in terms of gameplay. It is just a spam fest of abilities to dodge or run away from, endless teleportation, grabs from outside the field of view, constant hyperarmour, and an HP pool straight out of a WoW raid boss. It feels like Koei Tecmo cannot find the fine line between challenging and tedious, between compelling scenarios and pointless blah-blah, between good mechanics and fluff. The only reason why I do not give 0/10 if because of the artists. The characters, the Guardian Spirits, the voice acting are all very good. Everything else is horses**t.

The good: the mechanics are good, although changing stance does not really matter. I love the bosses, they are so varied and interesting. The Yokai are fun to fight, and the Japanese folklore that comes with them is fun to explore. The average: the story is meh, and there are no new enemies after the fourth region. After the initial phase, the game becomes very repetitive. Same maps, same enemies. The bad: some ambush mechanics should not happen if I am invisible, the game breaks its own rules. Talking about ambushes, this game overuses them to the point where they make no sense. Some Yokai will not move, have a big rock next to them, and throw it at you if you get in their path. Some ninjas will stay on the ceiling and wait for you. Really? Is that their life, waiting 24/7 suspended on a ceiling for a guy? This game also overuses one-shot mechanics. It is not like Dark Souls or Elden Ring. In these games, if you invest in Vigor, your character will eventually become tanky. Not in Nioh. Even after investing in defense, many mechanics will still be a one-shot. Another annoyance is that it is possible to rebind the controls, but it messes up the menus when rebinding the top buttons. I do not understand how that was overlooked. Finally, the difficulty is all over the place. Sometimes it goes without issues, and then all of a sudden, the difficulty ramps up to 100 for no reason. If you look at the stats on Steam, only 50% of players complete the third mission of the game.

THE GOOD: - Satisfying gameplay - Great sound design - Excellent boss design - Well-made difficulty curve - Good voice acting - Can earn and recover Lacrima in boss fights. THE AVERAGE: - Lack of a strong, cohesive visual identity. - Not enough weapons. Switching between them should not require respeccing. - Having the option to switch weapons during combat would have taken the gameplay to another level. - Cliché and uninteresting enemies. Please, can developers stop putting spiders, boars, and bears in their games? Yawn. - No jumping or climbing. Sometimes Khazan gets stuck because he cannot climb a 2-foot ledge. - Weak scenario. THE BAD: - Collectibles-based gameplay. Multiple upgrades require finding collectibles in the world. It is infuriating to finish a zone, kill the boss, and realise that there is one obscure collectible missing to unlock upgrades. - Cannot rebind the buttons, and Steam rebinding cannot be used to change the top buttons, as it messes up menu navigation. - Some levels have very low contrast. The colour palette is a smudge of the same few shades, making it hard to see what is happening or enjoy the scenery. - The gameplay quickly becomes very repetitive. There are not many enemy types in the game. - Overuse of the ambush mechanic. Too many rooms boil down to being jumped by five enemies, which quickly becomes very annoying. - Push attacks: enemies will push you against walls all the time, even after a parry. - Terrible, uninteresting level design. The rooftops of Bloodied Sanctuary is arguably the worst level I have ever played. - Dark Souls plagiarism. Some levels are very similar. - Controller input registration problems. So many times the input I pressed wasn't taken into account. - Way too many cleanse potion types, 8 in total. I have to switch them all the time. Some of them have near identical looks, making it easy to use the wrong one.

I asked for my personal data, and my account was terminated. I lost $100+ worth of digital goods. Riot Games and Tencent have been sued multiple times for gender discrimination ($100m settlement), defamation, noncompliance with laws protecting minors (Beijing), money laundering, and received antitrust fines. Riot Games is the peak of incompetence, contempt, and fraud. Never play any of their games: you will avoid the most toxic games out there and prevent financing a very shady business.

I asked for my personal data, and my account was terminated. I lost $100+ worth of digital goods. Riot Games and Tencent have been sued multiple times for gender discrimination ($100m settlement), defamation, noncompliance with laws protecting minors (Beijing), money laundering, and received antitrust fines. Riot Games is the peak of incompetence, contempt, and fraud. Never play any of their games: you will avoid the most toxic games out there and prevent financing a very shady business.

2/10 So woke, it's embarrassing. The majority of the game is spent listening to a wimpy/incompetent/moronic guy (Rhys, Vaughn, Timothy, Titus, Claptrap, Troy), while praising the strength and skills of the female counterparts (Lilith, Maya, Juno, Rose, Lorelei, Tyreen). It even gets weirder with lines like 'Shoot him the D', ’Kick him in the D.' repeated multiple times for one of the quests. This trope will be repeated 'ad nauseam' throughout the story and DLCs. This kills any replayability; going through the story once is more than enough. That’s a shame because the gunplay, level design and soundtrack are pretty good. But even then, the game is buggy. The game crashed, the interface was sometimes unresponsive, and two quests got stuck, even though the community had flagged the bugs months prior.