My big problem is how simplified the gameplay is. Most enemy weaknesses are just a simple "use this for +10%" more damage. It's all numerical and doesn't actually change the way you play. How cool would it be if there was an invisible enemy but you could brew a potion that gives you daredevil style sonic vision? That would be way more interesting than just a "numbers go up" bonus. Most of the talents are this way too, and a lot of the things you can do aren't very impactful. Bombs and signs never really felt like they did much for me, and the archery system is a complete waste of time. Each arrow hit doesn't even move enemy health bars visibily because the damage is so poor. That leaves swordfighting which is far and away the most effective and therefore most enjoyable aspect of the combat to the point where I just ignored everything else and did fine. But even then its pretty basic, just your standard light, heavy, block, parry, dodge roll system. No special stances or techniques for the most part. Ciri is a little more interesting because she gets spatial warp powers to augment her swordfighting, but it just feels kinda gimicky after a while. I wish they made the combat more tactical. Item management is also not a concern, once you craft something it just refills every time you rest and there are no consequences to resting. So prepping to fight specific monsters goes out the window. The story setup is also kind of tedious. Basically its go to three seperate places that are all level gated and look for clues. So obviously Ciri is going to be at the highest level area right? Yup. So much of the main story is just pointless side quests that don't accomplish anything. I liked the Bloody Baron storyline, but the rest was kinda meh. The one thing Witcher 3 does really well is make you feel immersed in a fantasy world. Playing it actually made me more intrigued about the books, whereas the previous two titles didn't accomplish that.
What this game does well is adherence to 40K lore and visuals. The atmosphere is fantastic, you really feel like you are a Rogue Trader in 40k environments. That is where the game stops doing things well. The story is incomprehsnible and disorganized, basically being a string of seemingly unrelated events that don't make sense until the last 5 minutes of the game, and even then only with a lot of squinting between the lines and deductions. It feels like the writers just said "wouldn't it be cool if this happened next" and then ran out of budget and desperately tried to tie everything together in the end. Its very much "and then" storytelling instead of "therefore". It relies a lot on exposition. Villains and plot threads get setup and then abandoned suddenly without explanation. The writing is likewise mostly insufferable as well. Its overly verbose most of the time, not quite as bad as Divinity Original Sin but still completely unrealistic in terms of how actual humans talk. There are also tech priests that constantly meander through paragraphs of bizzare, inpenetrable techonospeak, characters that speak in riddles, and other nonsense. Its basically "kid trying to sound smart by using lots of big words" kind of energy. That said, there were a few interesting companions but they hardly spoke enough for it to matter. The combat is easily the worst part. Everytime you level up, you have to tediously read dozens of options, most of which are garbage, a few are ok, and others are totally overpowered. Some talents give +4 to damage when enemies have thousands of health, while others let you stunlock entire armies. And they're also overly complicated too with quadratic formulas for calculating the stat effects. The progression is vertical, getting bigger and bigger numbers and not actually tactical with abilities that allow you to make interesting moment to moment decisions. Its all about optimizing your math to do silly amounts of damage. Very dissapointed.
still not that good. Okay, so I wasn't expecting BG3 levels of quility but this game is just so dry in so many ways. There are a few companions, but they barely talk. I couldn't really tell you much about their personality because I never even felt like I got to know them and their dialogue is very plain. The same can pretty much be said about all NPCs. I stopped remembering names or caring who people were halfway through because they're all the same. Everyone is an asshole rebot devoid of personality and either A) selfish or B) fascist. Speaking of the latter, all the factions are pretty much different flavors of fascist. Its a really depressing world with nothing and no one to root for which is just such boring storytelling to me. It makes a decision to be selfish, good, or evil totally meaningless because basically every decision boils down to survival. I guess this kind of writing is supposed to be "edgy" or mature but it just kills all investment I have in the story. Maybe if it wasn't so faction-based, but like AoD, the factions are the story. Not you. In fact you barely get more than a couple of different dialogue choices sometimes and they don't seem to have much impact. So the writing is not the game's strong suit, but the combat is not all that good either. Overcomplicated, slow, and way too hard. To be fair, I played on hard mode, but in my defense, I didn't know it would be this hard. My character was not a combat specialist but she also had 2 companions who were...and they often couldn't land a single shot, or didn't have enough action points to shoot their guns enough. I guess combat could be fun on hero with a character built for it but IDK, I just don't think its worth restarting to find out if I don't care about the story. Stealth is a little more fun, but also overcomplicated and tedious. Just let me roll a check like you do with dialogue...nope, its a weird minigame with colored squares and guessing if you'll be seen or not, then reloading
This game is absolutely laughable if you wanted to build a psyker character. I'm level 10 and about 11 hours into the game, only two psyker powers unlocked. That's because you get forced into taking powers that have nothing to do with being psyker and scale off of other unrelated stats instead of willpower which is what psykers use. The game also agressively reccomends you to not increase willpower or choose any psyker skills when levelling up and presents you with another assassin type-classes' powers. I've been running around using guns and not casting any spells because my psychic attack deals a pathetic amount of damage and I have nothing psyker related I can actually do. Not sure if this is a bug or what. I would maybe restart and give up my hours of play to roll as a gunslinger or swordfighter, but the game has other problems and even if it didn't I frankly find it silly you can't play as a proper psyker in 40k of all things. Trading is bugged and you get no reputation for selling goods. Alot of other things are bugged too like traps, which don't activate and even when they do its because your character stupidly ran through the trap instead of walking around it when you clicked on the disarm trap icon. Lots of little things like that, like only being able to make one attack per turn no matter how many AP you have, no movement after attacking. Its just a boring and very restrictive combat system where 90% of the stuff a character can do is only relevant in certain situations and so mostly what you do is move, attack, and end turn with 2-3 ap left. The combat is very basic and you can easily win by just spamming the same stuff over and over, most enemies die in a couple hits and can't do anything to meaningfully challenge the player (they did 0 damage most of the time, and thats if they somehow ever managed to hit me at all). Skip this even if you're a hardcore 40k fan.
Do you like running around at 3 or 4 times speed, giving yourself a severe headache and motion sickness? Do you like enemies blurring as they attack you, so you can't even see them and respond appropriately? What about NPCs starting new dialogues in the middle of previous ones, so you get an overlapping cacophony of mindless sound? If the answer of any of these is yes, then this might be the game for you. I'm completely baffled that this game seems like it has so much effort put into it, but apparently the devs never booted up the game and actually played it. That's what I have to think, because thinking they actually wanted it this way is even more difficult to comprehend. This is why I never touch mods. At least that pedo foot fetish mod for Fallout New Vegas actually worked. If Frontier put the bar on the floor, this one threw it in the Marianas Trench.
Every time I launch the game, my mosue gets stuck inside a small box in the middle of the screen and can't move outside that area. It completely stops me from being able to do anything on my PC and forces a reboot. I am asking for a refund. The Steam version of Fallout 4 never had this problem.
What is this, Halo 5? A 5 hour campaign for 30 bucks is unnaceptable. I feel a bit ripped off for the $18 sale price, to be honest. This feels like a tech demo more than an actual game. Sure, it gorgeous. But the depth of content is really lacking. It clearly wants to be like FEAR, but without any of the things that made FEAR great. Sure, there's horror, but its basically unoriginal SCP and backrooms copycat. Sure, there's a story, but its inpentrable and confusing. Sure, there are side missions, but they're basically just horde mode. To be honest, the shooting isn't even that great either. You have no ironsights and shooting from the hip is ridiculously innacurate so the only time you're not spraying bullets wildly is when you go into reflexes mode. But you need to kill outside of it to refill it. I guess in theory this rewards agression but in practice it just made me run into oncoming fire like a mindless berserker so I could actually hit something long enough to refill my meter, causing many deaths. I lowered the difficulty, but it just feels stupid to play this way. Its like the game doesn't know if it wants to be a boomer shooter or a slow and tactical shooter like FEAR. Its also buggy as hell. Floating objects, enemies not taking damage, etc. Stay clear.
The art style is a mess of visual noise. Cartoonish amounts of blood splash out, and every enemy is some kind of either red or blue space bug/goop thing. So pretty much the entire screen is getting filled with these messy effects that make it hard to even tell what is happening. Its an ugly eyesore honestly. And I'm not sure what kind of aesthetic this is even trying to present. The enemies and evironments are totally generic (demons, bugs, demon bugs, zombie men, zombie men with guns, weird things I have no idea what they are, etc.) I never felt there was a clear strategy for dealing with certain types of enemies, or reasons to use one gun over another. The only time I switched weapons was either when I was out of ammo, or bored and wanted to use a different one. Then there is the bizzare save system. Either restart a level, or respawn consequence free? What happened to check points and manual saves? I don't want to respawn immediately because that takes all the challenge out of it, but its better than restarting a whole level I guess, instead of just the fight I lost. Upgrades are dolled out by finding ore, which is mostly hidden inside secrets. So screw everyone who doesn't care about secrets, I guess? I feel like this game just ignores every facet of classic boomer shooters that made them great, and just imitates them in a superficial way like an AI would do. Hard pass on this. I got it on sale for 17 bucks but there was only about 6 hours of playtime so I feel cheated.
The story completely ruins this game. It insists on re-hashing the same "Amicia is forced to kill and people don't like that and she starts to lose herself to rage" theme that was already covered in the last game only now Amicia is also an unbearable brat on top of it. Even though she already slaughtered hordes of knights in the last one, this is apparently a new concept. Which is corny in the first place, a 15 year old girl overpowering fully grown men in armor. I can excuse that as rule of cool, though. But its not like there are even any consequences for killing so its not really a choice. In fact there are a bunch of forced killing sections that are more like battle arenas where you're locked in until everything dies. It would be cool to approach the game how you want (stealth, item usage, killing, etc.) but that doesn't really feature here. There are a lot of scenarios with only one solution so you can't experiment. Even if you put tar on a guy then throw fire on him, he doesn't get lit on fire. So there is no point in trying to get creative with items, which by the way are also more limited in this game. And when you do need an item, the game is sure to leave materials around to craft it nearby. Its your typical scripted AAA garbage that has grand spectacle and photorealistic graphics but holds your hand the whole time. The worst part is the story has no point and the way it ends cancels out everything Amicia and Hugo did. Were you hoping to learn about the Macula? Too bad. Nothing gets revealled, its all still just a big unsatisfying mystery. Which is amazing because the plot jus tgoes on and on and on but does it arrive anywhere interesting? No. But you can bet your ass there is sequel bait because money. Skip this one guys, the series is dead.
This game is horribly balanced and designed. Half the time the enemies are completely immune to status effects such as frozen or burning, making your items and abilities useless. Meanwhile, every single hit from them gives a status debuff that slowly kills or stunlocks you unless you have the right consumable or equipted charm to immune it. So it comes down to raw luck (getting and choosing to equip the right items). Even when you do things right, the gameplay is extremely tedious. Go into a room, get frozen instantly and die. Restart the entire level, this time equiping ice immunity gear. Replay the same level, go into the room, roflstomp the enemy, spam healing and cure items, run around looting everything to get more items, rinse and repeat. It would be one thing if there was a good story, but the game has absolutely no driving plot whatsoever. You just pick a hero, get a cute little backstory, and that's it. Aside from inspecting various items that usually make you go insane (even though you can mericlessly slaughter rooms packed with Shoggoths for hours on end and not go insane), there is no dialouge. You literally teleport from mission to mission with no explanation or plot to connect them. It's dull, mind numbing, and tedious. This is a by-the-books looter shooter/bullet hell game with annoying rouge-lite elements that's simply "skinned Lovecraft". Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Lovecraft fan, and the mythos is accurately represented here, so I don't have a problem with taking the lore and using it in a vasty different way. It's just that the game has to be good. I wasn't expecting some detective masterpiece, I knew this was a looter-shooter/bullet hell game going into it. It's just that the game has to at least be good by those standards.
