Zodwraith

Just finished this game and I have to say I'm kind of disappointed. The graphics are absolutely amazing and a real testament to what's possible with Unreal Engine 5, but unfortunately that's it's biggest strength. I knew it would be a walking simulator but at least half of the game you aren't even in control, which is always annoying. You quickly get tired of the game trying to confuse you, and not in an entertaining way, while the voices in your head get old really fast too. Yeah, I "get it". She's mentally ill. But that doesn't make an interesting or thought provoking game. The most painful part is looking out around such an amazing landscape you badly WANT to explore only to realize you're stuck in a constrictively narrow corridor of actual play. The game is heavy on atmosphere, light on story, and barely qualifies as a "game" when it comes to gameplay. The game is so violently linear that you often literally can't go backwards 10 feet to see if you've missed something. Save your 50 bucks and watch a playthrough. You'll thank me. It only takes about 6hrs to beat and that's when a lot of traversals and wandering around eats up at least half of that time so you can FFW through it. Anyone that would even consider this as GOTY is either addicted to graphics, or they're viewing it as "art", and not a game. Because that's exactly what this is. If you're that hard up for art save the $40 and go to a museum.

7 for the game itself, 1 for Bethesda's handling of it. This game is far from perfect but gets far more hate than it deserves from ridiculous expectations. Just look at the reviews. "It's too hard" "It's too easy" "This MULTIPLAYER game gets boring without friends" It was and still is a solid game, but what really hurt it was Bethesda's knee-jerk reactions to cheaters at launch throwing massive nerfs across all weapons across the board hurting legitimate players too. If they'd have just patched the duping exploit, left the rest alone and focused on server capacity this game would be remembered with far less vitriol. Once it loses its player base that's it for a multiplayer game and it's sad because it COULD have been so much better if Bethesda had handled it better. The game is worth playing today but don't expect a lot with it's low player count. If you have someone to play with you'll get a lot more mileage and can have a lot of fun.

An above average Souls clone with an interesting environment and story. I can only assume the high ratings are from Souls fans desperate for quality clones when many are so shallow. The problem is it shares the same shortcomings of many other clones as well as the Souls games themselves. It's linear and shallow. It has a pretty environment, but that environment is sorely lacking in interactivity. Remove that pretty paint job and you realize the entire game is just running down hallways from encounter to encounter. The story is interesting, but it's fed to you so slowly and thinly that you really don't care or feel invested in it. After the freedom of movement Elden Ring brought us this feels like a huge step backwards being constrained to hallways again. Combat is very souls like and that can make or break it for you depending on if you LIKE that kind of methodical pattern-based combat or not where enemies have zero AI whatsoever. I'm 50/50 on it as I find it boring and too easy once you memorize patterns. Performance is really good on PC, but that's to be expected when the graphics are hardly demanding, and this can easily run on a PS4. The game itself is a solid 6 but I upped it to 7 for the unique story and environment as well as considering that it comes from a small developer.

While it's not BAD per se, it just felt kind of .... meh. I love a good point and click casual adventure and I've been a massive monkey island fan for years, but there's so little story here I just felt like I was reading a children's book to my 2yr old. The puzzles are random and disconnected while making little sense. The graphics feel like a phone game, and what precious little story there is could be summed up on one page while making little to no sense as well. Where I usually like games like this, this one just didn't click with me.

This is the wish version of Portal. I wrote a 500 word essay of what's wrong with it but metacritic **** and broke when typing it. Laughably long load times, unchangeable key mapping, and uninspiring level design with muddy controls. Put a weight on your shift key cause that's the only way to play and I know it's the shift key cause you can't f*cking remap it.

I must be the only person that didn't really care for this game much. The mechanics are fine if clunky sometimes but the narrative just turned me off horribly. Games like this are critical to the drive of the story and that's where my problems lie. A grand tragedy needs to have highs to add impact to the lows. There are no highs here. It's just bad piled on bad piled on bad. Every turn is the worst that could possibly happen and it ends up making it predictable. All you have to do is be pessimistic as possible and you'll know exactly what will happen next. It left me feeling like it was written for angsty emo teens that want to cut themselves for attention and think their darkness is so profound. By the end I really didn't care about the characters anymore and just wanted it over with. That's the last thing you want your player to feel in a story driven game. The ending was pure trash but expected after the depressing slog I'd gone through for 15+ hours so it had zero effect on my heart strings. I get what they were attempting to do but it would have been far more impactful if they would add some glimmer of hope instead of just phoning it in with dialog saying "just this one more thing and we'll be in the clear" over and over again. You can't make me miss a character you never made me love to begin with.

TLDR: hard pass, just watch it on YouTube if you're interested in the story cause there's zero game here. I honestly can't understand the positive reviews here. All I can imagine is judging it as art, not a game. Which will always be subjective. Yes, it's an interactive novel, but by "interactive" it really just means "hit 'ok' to proceed." Choices have zero input on the actual story, not to mention the dialogue doesn't even coincide with your choices. Let's start with the story, without giving spoilers. Do you like virtue signaling? Story with an obvious liberal agenda? You got it. Do you like your protagonist to be the biggest pansy you've ever had the pain of "controlling"? You got that too. Do you like any masculinity whatsoever to be toxic? That comes in spades. I knew I was getting into a story with political subject but I didn't expect it to be so blindly one-sided. Getting away from that train wreck, the art style is interesting, if extremely minimalistic. Anyone calling the graphics "stunning" is the type of turtleneck and thick rimmed glasses wearing pretentious twit that gushes over a jar of urine. So let's get into the gameplay or what little here could be considered a "game." I've honestly never seen collision detection this bad in any game in my life. You're often floating feet above the ground, or buried to your waist in it. Like, so bad it's funny bad. This isn't "indie". This is amateur. Animation is as clunky as a 60's stop motion claymation short. Seeing 2 people hold each other with 8 inches between them like they're saving space for Jesus (which is exactly what my wife said laughing), or seeing those people walk while holding hands and their arms look like they're desperately trying NOT to hold hands? While it's meant to be endearing it just looks comical. Movement feels like you're giving a drunk suggestions on where you want him to go. With such glaring flaws in collision and animation the art style no longer comes off as artistic, but lazy. The music was fine but meh for the overly mundane scenes it often accompanied. Pacing? It's like the end of Death Stranding where the director _wanted_ it to be a painfully slow slog for art's sake, except this was the ENTIRE GAME. Most of the conversations had little to do with the paper thin plot except to push a political narrative, massive plot holes you could drift a bus sideways through, and less character development than a beer commercial. These sins are unforgivable for an interactive novel. I guess I'm just offended because it COULD have been so good working off the main plot, but you're left with a story that could literally be summed up in one paragraph while leaving nothing out. No need to write an ending cause there isn't one. So why the 2 instead of a zero? The voice acting was top notch. The protagonist's actor perfectly caught the whiny defeated pessimist that you wanted to slap the entire game and tell to be a man for once. The voice acting was the only thing in this package that didn't scream budget restrictions.

Not only is this VR done badly, it's a shooter done badly all together. Right off the bat you're in a jeep in an on rails shooter with wave after wave of bullet sponge identical raptors that can eat 7-10 rounds each right to the face. You're constantly swamped with enemies and your shots means nothing because your weapons feel like they were made by NERF. No point aiming, just fire as fast as possible until an enemy dies and move to the next. Don't worry, he's 2 feet away as well so you'll have no problem finding him. Put up with the bullet sponge slog long enough to finally see something other than a raptor. 1st boss. T-rex. Heck yeah, now I got a machine gun!.............hold up, the machine gun is just as ineffective, it just fires faster. Shooting him in the face does nothing? I have to shoot his ankles and only at specific times? Are my bullets even doing anything? I can clearly see I'm hitting him all over. Boss finally dies and we move on. First raptor I see I shut the game down, uninstall and refund while I still can. There's so much wrong here. My admitted extremely limited time with this steaming pile left such a bad taste I don't care if it gets better. Repetitive textures and assets. Objects constantly passing through your head, a huge no-no in VR. Weapons in a SHOOTER that feel like they're doing absolutely nothing. No variety in enemies. Non-existent physics. It felt like I was watching a pre-recorded run of someone badly playing VR in 2015 with 1995 mechanics. I wouldn't play this if it was free, let alone 25 bucks.

Ignore the obvious paid reviews. This game is truly as disappointing as it's reputation that precedes it. Give this a zero just to tell them you don't want politics in your games. Save your agenda for CNN. Oh wait, nobody watches CNN now, do they?

I honestly can't see how anyone has rated this this highly. Once you get past the charm of the pixelart style there's VERY little gameplay here. Seems only pixelart fans are reviewing this one with hardly anyone critiquing the actual gameplay. I don't let modern games slide on beautiful graphics alone and I won't let this slide on style alone. At it's core it's still supposed to be a game. The first 15 minutes had my hopes high. I hoped I was seeing a new Monkey Island/Willie Beamish with some action mixed in and humor to keep you entertained. Why let me move stuff if there's never anything hidden under it? Way too few items to interact with. Throwing dog poop into your neighbor's grill did nothing. Throwing dog poop into your other neighbor's pool once again did nothing. NPCs have extremely limited responses. Inventory is laughably small. Massive opportunities wasted to keep me entertained. Once I was 20 screens past leaving my yard I was dead bored. Dodge> run> dodge> 1 shot death> dodge> use item to distract ONE enemy while 3 more bear down on you. No attack, just run run run.... Pointless and ridiculously shallow. Being able to select from music you've picked up would be nice too if you get one you don't like. It feels like a graphically upgraded NES game but many NES games were deeper than this. I only gave it the 3 for the music and art style, but there needs to be far more game here than just presentation. Not nostalgic enough to tickle that bone and too shallow to stand with today's games. Indie =/= an excuse to have below phone level gameplay. Sorry, but this was uninstalled within 45 minutes. The boring slog isn't worth it to find out if it gets any better.

Zero to help balance the obvious paid/NDA reviews. Game itself is a solid 7-8. On the game itself.. This is easily the best damn Souls-like game I've ever played and I'm having a blast. Being open world fixes the vast majority of my gripes about previous Souls games. Dark Souls should have gone open world long ago and this game proves it. Having space to dodge and roll around your OP enemy is like the first time you've tasted your favorite food. It makes you realize "I'm the problem, I just need to figure this out" vs "this is impossible." I absolutely adore the DS method in an open world environment. Mad, MAD props to FromSoft for going open world. This is likely where the reviewers stopped and posted OMG100/100 GREATESTGAMEOFALLTIME!!1!11! Cons that warrant my rating? Most overrated game of all time? Easily. I'll skip over the massive performance issues for now as they're well documented. As a game DS was very niche to begin with. It followed a steep learning curve of "figure out your enemy's move set and work around it to win" formula. In this Elden Ring has shined. The problem is enemies have ZERO ai and it shows in an open world vs standing in a hallway. Stand on a rock and they're completely broken. I was able to defeat several bosses and many mini bosses by abusing the terrain while completely ignoring their move set. Not to mention if you range hit a mob his buddy will completely ignore you while you gank your target. WORST AI IN HISTORY. (Sidenote: Throwing knives and arrows move like they're going through Jello but ignore gravity. Even f*cking Minecraft takes gravity seriously.) The menus, oh god the menus. They're about as intuitive as building a piece of IKEA furniture with no instructions and 4 screws missing. Every spell, weapon, or item you equip has almost no description, is clunky to equip, and has no stats outside of weapons. In a game where stats are crucial this is a massive failure. This was solved 30 years ago in games and only makes FromSoft look incompetent. There's no popup tooltips when you hover over stats and you have to resort to looking up stuff online to make any sense. I don't mind trial and error when fighting mobs. It shouldn't be in the menus too. Fans will claim "realism" to defend it. **** I'm killing waterlogged zombies stretched out like a rubber chicken with their flesh literally falling off their bones that magically can overpower me if I get too close. Don't talk to me about realism. Good luck figuring out how to change native control popups from Xbox to KB/Mouse. It's under SOUND controls because that makes total sense. (Settings>sound>onscreen prompt device if you need to fix this) I mean, what's the chance a PC user would want to use a keyboard and mouse instead of an xbox controller? That's unheard of. /s This was solved a decade ago on PC but FS wasn't at that meeting. Targeting. Why is there no target tabbing? If there's a little bastard in my face but a hulking monstrosity trying to annihilate me standing over him guess what gets targeted? I have to move my mouse a full screen swipe towards the big guy to get the target to change before I can dodge meaning I'm already dead. Ironic when you need to turn the mouse sensitivity to it's absolute minimum to make it even usable. My last con> PERFORMANCE. We all know how **** this game runs, and it's well documented. It can't maintain 30fps on PS4, can't maintain 60fps on PS5, stutters wildly on a fire breathing PC, but looks like an early PS4 game? When I see suggestions that it's best played as a PS4 disc (lowest quality) on a PS5 that's a problem. There's no way in hell this is a 100/100 game and this proves reviewers were either paid or under a hard NDA to not mention performance prerelease. When I'm playing on a PC that runs Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps in 4k but this runs at less than 60 with constant dips into the low 20s while looking like a game from 2016 that's a big issue. I honestly can't name another title that runs this badly. Maybe RDR2 but that looks vastly better than this. As a Dark Souls game this is easily 12/10 and everything I could hope for. When you take all other games into account? Solid 7, maybe 8 and that's being generous. There's too many problems here other studios solved decades ago. All my problems have also been all over reddit so I'm not alone. Any reviewer that calls this a 100/100 game meaning perfect should never be trusted again. TLDR: I absolutely LOVE this game, but it's far from perfect and DS fanbois need to be honest with themselves. Hard does not equal good. Now you're playing with the big boys and this is mediocre at best.

Zero to balance out the obvious paid reviews. As a game it's a solid 7-8. As a DS game it's a 12 out of 10. 100/100 means it's perfect. Mario Odyssey didn't have massive performance issues and it was on archaic hardware. Most of this world is dead or has the same enemies per area. PS4 level graphics run like PS6 level graphics on a PS5. Clunky menus. ZERO enemy AI. They came really far fixing the Dark Souls formula, but this only shows what was wrong with DS to begin with. This isn't even close to Breath of the Wild levels of quality.

Reminded why I've left..twice. Ahh, WoW. A victim of your own success. I've been playing on and off since 04. As someone who used to get big into lore I'm leaving out the details so someone who wants to get back in and geek out will get little from this. Instead I'll speak of the overall feel as a -video game- that's far since long in the tooth. TLDR: This is an expan$ion for expan$ion'$ $ake. Story: They're far past milking the IP at this point. The story feels meh at best. "We need magic doodads from dead people and we're not getting it anymore. Boo Hoo. Help us!" I've never felt _less_ excited since WoD to help. It's obvious we need Chris Metzen back in a BAD way. The story feels like it was twisted around game designers' ideas and patched together by writers in a Frankenstein way. BFA felt like this but at least it had a cohesive overall arc. It feels like a sidestory that should have been omitted from a movie but that's not a bad thing if it's done as masterfully as Mists was. (My 2nd favorite expansion.) If you're coming for story the base price isn't worth the price of admission, let alone monthly fees. This should have been a content pack, not a full expansion. Gameplay: This one's easy. It's a treadmill. Problem is WoW has long since been a treadmill that was FUN. Now it's 10 different treadmills you need to jump through with unrewarding results. Forget alts. Your main is going to need stupid amounts of time to build up to timed gates. Fetch quests aren't even hidden under fun. Flavor quests feel like the chef was only given salt. Timed gating to milk subs, repetitive boring quests that are obviously just busy work... It's turned into a grindfest Free2Play Korean P2Win MMO but charges a sub fee and has no P2W. Literally the worst of both worlds. The good news is Blizz finally broke the pattern of good>bad>good>bad expansions. The bad news it went bad>bad instead of good>good. This is the 1st expansion I actually regret buying, let alone paying the sub. I think I'm done for good after giving Blizz literally 1000s over the years for me and the wife's accounts. This game is dead and only has subs because we're stuck with nothing else. This game should have dropped to $5/month long ago or gone free. Anyone that rates this 10/10 is an idiot fanboy. It's meh at best but deserves a 3 for still being the best MMO but that's only testament to the absolute garbage the field has become.

It's funny how polarizing reviews for this are. It's like politics. Too many of the reviews are only about if someone can handle bugs or not. The premise of the game is a strong 8-9, good story if a little shallow, but mostly suffers for the perceived depth really just being a ton of repetitive side missions just like GTA5 or RDR. Hold on... both of them launched with massive bugs too but get better reviews cause Rockstar gets worshipped? I'd have liked the overall story arc to have more twists and branches but the foundation is there for a truly great game. If you have no patience for bugs wait a few months for them to get ironed out. If you're used to beta releases (which most modern games are anyways) at least on PC the bugs aren't really game breaking. I played through to the end with about 70% side mission completion and never crashed once but seen plenty of collision issues and graphical glitches. Rockstar needs to take note on what CDPR did _right_ which is character customization (would be more meaningful in 3rd person), stats/upgradability on gear and weapons and multiple paths for the story to take. Without the bugs it's a solid 8-9, I knocked 1 off for the beta condition but I'm not a child that gives it a 0, demands a refund, then freaks when steam expects the game back too. (This is actually happening and a sad testament to today's modern entitled gamer.)

I find it hard to choose a score for this because I want to give the idea a 10 but the implementation a 1. So 5 right? Epic exclusive. There's a point off. Way too easy to head down a dead end path that you can't see as such and be forced into a full reset to the beginning. There's another point off. This deserves a hard 3 but don't think that makes it a bad game overall, just too many unforgiveables. I've got about 40 hours into it trying to break into what I feel should be a deeply rewarding game and I just never got there, even when I started succeeding with evolutions. Here's a typical couple play hours: Find sticks. Find rocks. Strip sticks. Sharpen sticks. Head out. Stop CONSTANTLY to smell, listen, bark, inspect. Get attacked by XYZ. Sticks break killing XYZ. Find all the dropped weapons that aren't broken. Climb all over looking for mats to heal. Heal wounds on you and clan. Find more sticks and rocks to sharpen sticks, then do that. Everyone is starving and too stupid to eat or drink without you showing them. Find obsidian, thank God. Then try to find them again after your clan members drop them in the grass. After 10 outings you realize it's easier to just go alone instead of babysitting your entire down syndrome clan. Decide to try and keep to trees. Get frustrated by horrible controls while climbing that require precise nonsensical positioning. Yeet yourself into the nothingness while aiming at a branch that was JUST RIGHT THERE. Return to camp to have random members just be gone. Realize once again you don't have enough members for evolution and finding outsiders is too rare for how far you have to travel at a snail's pace. Try traveling quickly and you're terrified of unknown areas making you freak out without inspecting everything around you just 50 yards from your "known" area. Reconsider for the 15th time to uninstall the game. The pacing is punishingly slow. EVERYTHING you do is slow. Sharpening one stick takes 15 clicks(!) if you don't have the right tools. (keep obsidian in your camp) I've got over 40 hours into it but I should have been at this point within hour 5. Rewards for pushing yourself through the soul crushing monotony are pathetic. It's sad because I really wanted to like this game. Graphics are really nice and the premise of the game is intriguing. Unfortunately this is all destroyed by clunky controls, horrible mechanics, and the same slow process over and over and over again. After typing all this out I think it's lucky I went as high as 3. You should never punish the player for playing the right way. Edit: After seeing Desilet's response to less than glowing reviews that we're all stupid or lying that this isn't the greatest game ever made I'm changing my review to a zero. Anyone that egotistical needs to be knocked down a notch, especially if he thinks THIS is a masterpiece of gaming, while in the same breath saying they had to cut corners due to time constraints and lack of resources. Give me a break. You didn't build Assassin's Creed all alone, but obviously you think you did. Guess we see now the talent on AC wasn't you huh?

I can't even begin to describe how amateur and half baked this game is. -Graphics look like 2005 but it runs mediocre on an i7 1080ti. -Music is 10 songs by the same trash rapper that all sound alike with CONSTANT "Arizona Derby, YEAHHH! Nitrous, million dollah cahs YEAHHH" throughout. -Physics feel like you're on rolling wet ground with smooth tires that randomly grip and release with phantom obstacles even in flat areas that will bring you slamming to a halt. Unforgivable in a racing game. - "Modifications" are all wings and pimped out G wheels and nitrous. IN AN OFFROAD GAME? If you're a real car guy you're gonna be offended. Prices for this G'd out ricer flash trash is ludicrous. -Horribly overprocessed effects make even smooth surfaces look like hell. Hope you like bloom and heat effects. -Mouse keeps disappearing on menu screens forcing me to CTRL>ALT>DEL to get out of this diaper dumpster fire. -Sound effects are laughably terrible like an old amish woman guessed at what an engine sounds like. -AI is either on god mode while you take perfect lines or completely lobotomized to the point you can get out and have a smoke without them ever catching up. This is easily the worst game of the decade and almost worth a spin just to laugh at how horrible it really is. I would honestly guess this was a programming student's demo made in his spare time. To think a real for profit developer calls this a release is ludicrous. I would hang my head in shame if I worked for Falcon right now and lie about what I did for a living. Stop getting your game designers from the Home Depot parking lot. Edit: All these 10/10 reviews are obviously from the developers or their friends. Looks like me and Meddi1980 are the only people that actually reviewed it from the outside and don't desperately want it to succeed. I gave thorough descriptions of what's specifically wrong with the game and all the other "reviews" are all "OmG beStest GAmE eveR BUY BUY BUY!!!11!" Go ahead and play the demo so you can laugh at how not to make a game.

Just finished this. Took about 5-6 hours but could be done in 1-2. Most of that time was wasted wandering because there's no clues as to how to progress in this concept/art demo disguised as a game. The best compliment it deserves is it's interesting, but that wears off quickly when you wander aimlessly not even KNOWING you're missing a key trigger let alone where that is. (Hint: There's more windsocks, birds, and kids than you think.) Flying is cool once you get it down but you're going to hate the clunky landing and camera that's not always where you need it to be, let alone want. Traveling on foot is a slow boring slog when the areas are unnecessarily large. The morphing landscape is cool but once that novelty wears off you have sand, rocks, empty ruins, and more sand and rocks. It's not even desolate with character, just plain desolate. The only change is when it's stormy but those parts are simple so over quickly. Ending is anticlimactic. The overall feel is someone had a cool idea for a level in a game, it was implemented, and they ran out of ideas so they stretched it out into a huge empty world and made you travel slowly to milk a 45 minute level into a several hour slogfest through copy>pasted environments. Exploration isn't fun when there's a ton of area to explore, very little to find, and you're really freaking slow. If you see something in the distance you may want to check out you shouldn't feel punished by that distance. Navigating and climbing obstacles on foot feels clunky and unpolished. I give it a 4 because a couple interesting ideas and atmosphere can't make up for the multitude of other issues that keep this from feeling like a completed game. I don't feel like it's worth $20. I have zero interest in playing it ever again and that's sad when it could be beaten in an hour once you know what you're doing. TLDR: If you're not an artsy hipster that gets off on environment you're going to feel very unrewarded.