As the title says, this game is crippled by bugs, and a barely functional combat system. There is no responsiveness to your actions, you just mash buttons until you see a poorly made death animation. Additionally the movement is extremely rough, adding no nuance to melee combat. The naval combat is extremely basic, but at least somewhat polished. Imagine if you're playing gmod and you kite around something in a circle while mashing the attack button. The ships themselves are boring to look at, though there is decent variety. The campaign is nonexistent, nothing to do and plenty of empty see to sail in. This might pass for an early beta build. What saddens me most is that because this studio utterly failed at making this game, then GW will think nobody likes Man o War. Thereby pouring salt into my wounds.
I'll say it out the gate: I feel this game has been judged too harshly. I am a Warhammer Fantasy fan and all too often we have to contend with half baked garbage, and with a 3 star average rating this game is supposedly on par with vastly inferior contemporaries. What you get here is a solid ARPG experience set in a beautiful rendition of the Warhammer Fantasy setting. Environments are lovingly put together, everything from the epic hub level, to the desolate dunes and temples of the Tomb Kings expansion. As for gameplay, there is an effective ARPG loop that is addictive in a good way. And mechanically, it tries to be different and succeeds, while not being overly ambitious. You get 5 classes in the base game, and while I have preferences I wouldn't say any one is neglected. The most glaring flaw of this game was voice acting and plot, and well the plot is good enough certainly not worse than Vermintide (another favorite of mine). But the voice acting WAS bad, it has since been rectified. For the ARPG fan, maybe look else where, I'm sorry but you will not have your expectations met. For Warhammer fans, this is worth taking a look at and you may end up loving it as I have.
TL;DR: for those that love games like KOTOR, this is something for you. An overarching plot with character driven subplots winding around a beautiful and interactive world. Gameplay: it's all about sneaking and solving puzzles, the best aspect is that you are rewarded for exploration. Investigating your surroundings is a must, and you will find characters, items, and paths through your work. Controls: the weak point of the title, occasionally janky and needs some getting used to. Graphics: gorgeous, though some computers may struggle to keep up. The design overall is phenomenal and immersive. Story: mainly in the form of text, though a lot of world building occurs in the environment, a lot of love and tears has gone down into making a believable and interesting fantasy world with endearing characters. That's my take on the game, a work of art if you ask me, I hope we will get a Ghost of a Tale 2.
This game is unplayable due to a spinning camera bug that is seemingly unfixable. Another shameful EA pc port that really shows how horrible of a company they are.
At it's core this is a great game. Frostpunk has an amazing atmosphere created by lovely graphics and good writing. The art style and game mechanics complement each other nicely to create a grimdark world that will suck you in and tug on your heart strings. With a believable human dynamic responding to your every move you will be prompted to ask yourself difficult questions and make hard decisions in order to ensure the survival of the last city on earth. But all this good stuff proceeds to fall flat on its face due to issues with the programming. Already at startup you are greeted roughly half the time by an immediate audio crash that will demand a restart unless you don't mind playing the game in total silence. This is not recommended as most of the atmosphere is lost without the music and sound effects. If and when you start the game without the sound dying, there's another 50/50 chance that you get an infinite loading screen while trying to load into a city. And when you are in your city, the audio will occasionally crash requiring another restart. But what is perhaps worse is the abysmal optimization that everyone is talking about. Even on a cutting edge computer you will experience significant lag and frame drops, a problem that has persisted since release. My suggestion is to get this game on sale, it's worth a play but not worth full price for the lamentably buggy mess it is. I will change my review to 4 stars if and when the developers fix these problems.
At its core this is a solid RPG set in a beautiful and flushed out world that makes it into an exceptional open world game. Along with a charming art style and nice graphics; this game does an excellent job immersing the player. But all of this potential is marred by an abundance of bugs and an abysmal control scheme. The game tries to imitate Mount and Blade in its combat controls but fails completely. Combat is unresponsive, sticky, and ill adapted for multiple opponents. You will find yourself desperately trying to apply what you learn from the games tutorials just to have it all fail as the game fights your efforts to play it. And considering that this is a combat centered game it kind of ruins the whole experience if the combat doesn't work. I simply cannot recommend this game to anyone because they will have their experience ruined by the catastrophic design choices made by the developers, and because of the numerous game breaking bugs strewn about it. Many have also pointed out that the save system is deeply flawed, and while I was prepared to overlook this, I quickly realized that the save system compounded with the aforementioned combat makes for a very frustrating experience. You will find yourself killed by a gang of bandits you weren't able to even defend yourself against and then be set back 30 minutes of gameplay. Very sad to see such a promising title end up like this.
