rustchild

Avowed is frustrating for me - Obsidian is one of my favorite studios ever - KOTOR 2 features some of the best RPG writing of all time and Fallout: New Vegas is probably the best of the Fallouts. That, and this following so closely behind the utter masterpiece KCD 2 is why it only ranks a 7. Everything here is aggressively mid. Writing / dialog? It’s mostly OK, but does it compare to Kotor 2 or Pentiment? RESOUNDING no. Not as bad as Veilguard, but not Obsidian at their best by ANY measure. Combat? This is probably the best part. It’s super fun for the first 10 hours or so, but once the enemies start repeating ad nauseum it loses it’s luster rapidly. Visuals? Fine if you’re comparing to like, Skyrim... but for 2025? Come on. Look at Horizon: Zero Dawn or any Ubisoft game from the past two years and it just doesn’t compare. Bugs? I literally had two crashes in the entire 45 hours of playtime. That's damn good. This is largely because they have taken ZERO risks here. All of the NPCs are nailed to their respective spots, you can't kill any of them or do anything that might break quests. They don't react to you stealing the literal food off their plates right in front of them right after they told you their starving to death. Everything about this is just “fine”. I expect MORE from Obsidian.

First off - this game is gorgeous. Everyone has mentioned this, but I really must state - in all caps - THIS GAME IS GORGEOUS. Playing this in ultrawide in PC I've never felt more **** in to a game outside of VR. This was the first time ever I literally felt like I could SMELL a location. Weird, yes, but true. Unfortunately outside of that there are a lot of downsides here. I LOVE Remedy games - the first Alan Wake, Max Payne 1 and 2 and Control are both on my top games of all times list. This, however, is a bit of a slog. As others have mentioned, there is a LOT of walking here. Lots of walking and lots of the same battles over and over again. It's weird but honestly it's not quite weird enough, IMO. Alan Wake had so many amazing "I can't believe this is happening and that they made this work in this engine" moments that I was expecting more here. Yes, there are one or two sequences that are absolutely top notch (the musical section, for one) but they're few and far between. I also can't help but feel that the game is very half-baked. Weirdly you get a TON of power-ups as Alan that you don't really need at all to get through his section, then you get almost ZERO for Saga and SHE does all the heavy lifting and difficult encounters. It's weirdly inverted, and feels like they had planned about 30% more content and then just never got to it, or decided to save it for a DLC instead. I have a high bar for Remedy games, obviously - so take my 8/10 as what would probably be a 9 or 10 from another publisher. Is it worth playing? Absolutely. Is it the best Remedy game? Sadly no. Definitely looking forward to whatever they come up with next!

Wow I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. How is this aggressively mediocre game getting such high scores? The writing (as others have stated) is absolute garbage, there isn't really even any ANIMATION during the cut scenes, which also go on for like 10x longer than they warrant. The music is OK but doesn't change between entire levels so you're listening to the same track on repeat for like 30-40 minutes sometimes depending on how many times you have to retry a mission. The graphics would be fine for a 2003 game. The speed running / card swapping aspect is cool but not nearly cool enough to make this anywhere near a 10/10. I'm truly baffled by all the praise. Did I download an old unfinished version somehow??

As many here have said already this is a decent game. I was super engaged for the first, say, 40% of it. However the fact that there really isn't much nuance to the store or dungeon crawling aspects of the game it gets old REALLY fast. This could have been great with some **** valley style character dynamics (which it's really begging for due to the fact it looks almost exactly like it), or deeper "Shopkeep simulator" mechanics. As is once you've played it for a few hours you've pretty much seen it all.

Made an account just to review this - What an amazing disappointment. My core gaming group STILL plays L4D2 once or twice a month just because it's such a fantastic game. This is a lessor game in every single way, but most importantly, the lack of PVP campaign mode is just an unforgivable oversight. As others have mentioned there are TONS of 4-player co-op games out there, many of them better than this one. Killing Floor 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Dead by Daylight, the list goes on. What there AREN'T a lot of are 4v4 pvp campaign mode games out there. We haven't found even one decent one since L4D2. That's why Back 4 Blood was so exciting. The lack of literally the only thing that could have set this apart in it's genre is shocking, and I have no idea how it made it out of the initial design process without someone at the table pointing this out. Way to lose literally half your user base right out of the gate, Turtle Rock. Whoever made that design call should be fired immediately, they cost you millions.