This was an enjoyable conclusion to Through the Ashes. The Lord of Nothing is not as tightly scripted as it's predecessor and feels more like playing the base campaign, which I think most players will be happy with. You will see many standard combat encounters in a variety of unique locations, lots of loot, and some difficult mechanics/encounters near the end. There's also an interesting new character with great voice acting. I encountered no major show stopper bugs, but there's still A LOT of janky little issues with the campaign. Minor scripting problems with certain boss fights, weird visual glitches during cut scenes, mislabeled or unlabeled items and objects, items duplicating at the vendors, achievements not firing in all cases, and severe frame rate drops in some specific locations. This DLC also adds some new kits, spells and feats to the base game that are actually pretty great and may be worth picking this up on a sale for that alone.
I decided to buy this game in early access after trying the demo, which I really enjoyed. The combat felt great, I loved the aesthetic, level design, sound effects, music, and boss fight mechanics. Sadly the actual release didn't really live up the demo for me. I understand they are going for a roleplaying shooter, but the game just made me feel like I was stumbling about. I think if it started out with a bit more focus (such as including the Prologue level), then opened up gradually with a bit more direction it might not feel so bad. However the biggest problem for me was the strange performance issues. The demo had a few weird frame drops but usually ran around 144 FPS. In this EA release my frame rate was atrocious. It was dropping from the 100s to as low as 24 and actually making me a bit sick. It really undermined the fun of combat. I don't have the most modern hardware, but as a comparison I got more stable frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077 with RTX enabled than I did in this game. The game does have a lot of potential and I hope it improves before it's full release.
Base Fallout 4 isn't all that great, but it's a passable game. However once you get some mods on top, most notably the ones that fix the horrific dialog system (Full Dialogue Interface) and the one that lets you skip the story intro and play as someone else (Start Me Up). Then a bunch of other ones to fix bugs, balance and performance issues (Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch, Shadow Boost FO4, etc.). You actually have a great game here, especially with Survival mode. The Far Harbor and Nuka-World DLCs are also both top notch and have much better content than the base game, make sure you experience them.
This is a well crafted game in every possible way. It's definitely worth even the regular price if you're a Jagged Alliance fan or even just a fan of tactical strategy games.
Messiah is a unique and engaging game, but it shouldn't be sold to anyone in this state. This release does not work "out of the box". Even with extra effort to get it up running properly, it's rife with issues such as performance problems in D3D, consistent crashes in Glide and missing audio that basically ruins the game for first time players.
