marelooke

Game has an interesting narrative and settings, the gameplay, on the other hand ... Mechanics-wise it's a Warframe-clone with Destiny 2's combat, however the devs don't seem to understand why things worked in those games so everything just feels clunky with mechanics contantly working against each-other. After about a year of hyperinflation when it comes to damage numbers everything is an extreme bullet sponge that one-shots players, pretty much requiring meta-builds to get past.

I'd conditionally recommend this game as a single player game with some light multiplayer elements as to play endgame runs you afoul of the P2W aspects of the game. Additionally this game contains ridiculously priced gacha elements; children, and really anyone unable to ignore these, should stay away form this, and similar, games. Outside of that there's limitations on how much you can play in a given timeframe before you're hitting "caps" and no longer get rewarded (different caps for various currencies, and even a daily cap for regular gear drops from mobs). Fighting bosses uses a limited "energy" system, thus your progression is limited this way too. The story and world-building are quite good, but without knowledge of the historic period and legends surrounding it can be extremely hard to follow without help from outside sources. This is not helped by the translation that appears to, in big part, be done by a machine, leading to literal translations of idioms and the like. tl;dr I very much do enjoy my time with the game, but the monetisation, P2W aspects of the former, and the terrible translation keep it from being a game I'd recommend to everyone.

I'm not sure what people giving this a good rating are doing, because this game is unfinished and beyond broken on top of that. Shadow of Chernobyl was an unfinished game on release, with a clearly rushed second half, but compared to the state of Heart of Chornobyl it was a completed masterpiece, hell, even Clear Sky, notorious for being a mess ****, even to this day, and even by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. standards, felt more playable than this game. Heart of Chornobyl simply is not done, not even close, this game needed another year in the cooker, realistically probably more than an extra year. The only areas that feel somewhat "complete" are the first few, but even then the player is plagued by barely implemented systems, like the absolutely immersion destroying way enemies spawn (always in the same quantities, and always on top of the player, and always already aware of the player), and the absolutely broken balancing of the mutants in the game. And that's not even touching on the various technical issues this game has, don't even bother without top-tier hardware. Additionally the defaults are clearly set up for consoles, making aiming feel horrible on PC without applying config file tweaks to disable input smoothing, and having various shortcuts limited to "hold to consume" rather than being able to bind them to individual hotkeys (like in the previous games) English voice acting would, quite frankly, have been better if it didn't exist. It's just terrible, do yourself a favour and switch to Ukrainian with subtitles. In good news, the world is very detailed, and much more expansive than before, and old locations are still there, though visiting them is just a bad experience due to the absolute state of the game. Don't get me wrong, there is potential here, but most of this game is alpha level quality, maybe beta for some parts, so unless you really must have your S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fix check back in a year or so, if the devs still haven't fixed the game, maybe the modders will.

Criminally underrated immersive sim with such a great payoff and one of a few games I actually felt playing through multiple times was worth it. The game does start off slowly, which may put some people off, nor does playing it as a shooter lead to the best experience, since combat isn't really the main focus. But for those who like immersive sims, and are willing to take the time to immerse themselves there are few better out there.

Given the upcoming monetisation changes I would recommend anyone considering getting this game to hold off and see what happens with the "Age of Sorcery" expansion which will introduce FOMO mechanics and a cash shop. At the very least I'd recommend peole do some research before they commit. As it stands now what we have been confirmed the following: * there will be a time limited battle pass. If you don't make it to the end before it expires...tough luck * there will be a cash shop with rotating items * the prices in the cash shop are 10 to 100 times(!) higher than the previous DLC pricing model, which already was pretty expensive compared to other, similar, games. I'd argue that even people that are indifferent about FOMO, funny money, and similar practices and how these are ruining good games, should be raising eyebrows about the kind of markup that is coming with the cash shop. As for the game itself, it's decent, I didn't put in >1500h because I hate it, obviously. That said I mostly enjoy building and PvE exploration. Given the state of combat, server stability and game lag I wouldn't, personally, recommend it to anyone looking for a solid PvP experience. There's supposed to be combat improvements coming with the next expansion, however, many of the issues are technical and have been there since release, none of the adjustments to the combat system so far have addressed the core issues and honestly it seems highly unlikely they will "magically" be fixed now. If nothing else I'd await proper reviews and/or community response to the changes before getting the game. Regarding the building aspect, be aware that "overbuilding" (aka building extremely large structures) on official servers is discouraged due to game optimisation. The game will crash for people with less powerful computers and the moderators will remove large structures, relegating builders to private servers and/or local games. On the note of personal servers: * it is impossible to play a LAN game without permanent internet connection, and the game will kick you from the game if said connection drops at any time. * the server does not run on Linux, and won't run stable through Wine anymore, there are docker images floating around that used to work (yours truly maintains one of them) but one of the recent-ish patches causes the game to run out of memory, and crash, in short order resulting in regular server crashes (not to mention that server startup through wine can take extremely long for a modded server, we're talking >20min here)

One would certainly hope the people who designed, implemented, and greenlit this game's monetisation system like demons, because preying on others' weaknesses seems like a guaranteed free ticket to hell. Arguably the same goes for any press that tolerates, or encourages, this type of game. We've gone from horse armour, to this... disgusting. The one, and only, positive aspect is that this "game" is high profile enough that lawmakers might get involved and finally put a stop to these practices.

Writing etc is top notch, however expansion starts off really slow and there's some really weird "downtime" moments. ShB felt a lot more even storytelling-wise. However, much more concerning is the continued "streamlining" of jobs (classes), where jobidentity is quickly being eroded by removing anything that requires even a modicum of skill, while maintaining arbitrary button bloat elsewhere.

Revisionism simulator. Absolutely disrespectful to the veterans that were there.

Game goes to great lengths to push people towards real money purchases with excessive grind. There's also quite a bit of gambling through lootboxes, an issue ArenaNet has been ignoring by just disabling them in some of the affected countries (a list that has not been updated despite the changing legal landscape) To top it off the setting of the expansion appears to be mostly fan-service and brutally drops the storyline from Heart of Thorns (the previous expansion) without ever properly resolving it. Character traits of popular characters were turned into caricatures because they proved popular. The core gameplay is fun, but despite requiring a purchase the game feel more and more like a F2P game with the monetisation.

The core of the (PvE) game is decent, shooting's fun, the story in this expansion actually appears to be going somewhere (unlike the base game which was just weak, story-wise) PvP is a different story. New players are basically just meat for the grinder. PvP is likely only to become fun once you get past the gear hurdle, before that you'll just get killed so fast you'll barely be able to contribute. Conversely enemies appear so tanky that your pea-shooter will do very little. Unless you can put up with the massive grind to get over the initial gear hurdle I cannot recommend this game for PvP (which is shoe-horned into everything btw, so you cannot just ignore it) The game also likes to put timers on everything, this is a game you either play casually or hardcore, there's just no reasonable in-between possible. Hopefully the next expansion sorts that out. But the main downfall of the game is the incessant connection issues, which, unlike other games with P2P matchmaking means you will lose all your progress. it doesn't matter whether it's PvP, a Strike (dungeon) or any other activity (barring stuff with friends/clanmates, possibly), if the game disconnects you lose everything. There's no way to rejoin a squad and to top it off the game will tell you you're a jerk for leaving a competitive game early (despite the issue clearly being on their end) I've verified my connection and it's fine, this is also the only online game with this issue so I'm fairly confident in stating the issue is not on my end. It's a shame that the networking is a serious downer for an otherwise enjoyable game.