Recent reviews by Arece

A very pretty and unique game that is, unfortunately, heavily flawed.
Thanks to a combination of cut content and good old fashioned bad game design.

What I liked:
- It's a Dragons Dogma game, so lots of really neat tech and cool gameplay ideas.
- Every vocation feels great to use, is a ton of fun, and overpowered in their own way.
- There's two (2) bosses that I really enjoyed.

However the game is held back (ruined) by:
- Blatantly unfinished, rushed, extremely short and honestly just terrible story
- Most of the characters, both main story and side, are heavily undeveloped and uninteresting
- Packs of the same enemies every 10 feet so you're constantly in combat and can never simply enjoy the scenery or the journey
- Very little reward for exploration as almost every bit of loot you find is either a material or a consumable (finding equipment from exploring is extremely rare and often is just items you find in shops)
- Unless you're playing warrior, have endgame armor or specifically go for the extra knockdown resistance bonuses (grab the knockdown resistance rings from the wandering trader in Melve), you will be getting staggered and stunlocked constantly

And for some reason it's missing quality of life functions that were in the first game such as changing your gear at storage and selling/buying to/from storage? In a game with a lot of inventory management, the removal of these quality of life functions is just baffling.

If you haven't played the first Dragons Dogma, play that first.
If you have, and want more, wait for a sale.

warning: you are in range of enemy artillery

oops all dopamine

I went into this game expecting it to be Fallout 4 with a new coat of paint.
But somehow, it's worse. Much, much worse.
Why the devs thought it was a good idea to make existing systems worse instead of improving upon them is a complete mystery.

So what's so bad about it?
- Loading screens. Loading screens. I hope you like fast travelling!
- Exploring is practically pointless. The "thousands" of planets are almost entirely barren, with a handful of copy paste locations that are shared between every planet, so once you've checked out a few locations on one planet, you've seen them all. The only reason you might have to explore, is to either find a cool location to build a base, or to gather materials, but then:
- Base building is pointless. Any normal reason you'd have to build a base, your ship does for you. Crafting, storage, a place to rest, a hub for followers.
- Manually gathering materials is pointless. You can just fast travel to vendors to buy any materials you need for dirt cheap.
- Just about every quest is a fetch quest, ESPECIALLY the main story. As you can imagine, very boring.
- Combat is practically the same as Fallout 4, but without VATS. Also legendary enemies now have 5x their health because "difficulty".
- Do you like melee? Too bad, there's only 5 melee weapons and they're all terrible.

Just about everything in this game feels incomplete or completely void of polish.

It baffles me that Todd said this was "their most ambitious game ever", because the only thing ambitious about this game is the price tag.

fomo of every flavour! wow!
even old expansions and the entire original main story is gone!

so cool, thank you bungie for removing content I wanted to play but will never have a chance to now.
the only content left is grindy, repetitive garbage (at a high price tag per dlc! what a deal!)

see someone wearing some cool armor? want to figure out how to get it yourself? sorry, you should've been playing the game 4 years ago when that armor was available for a month.

terrible game and even worse devs.

It's a pretty short game, which probably explains the slightly lower price.
But you can tell the developers had a lot of fun making it; it's an absolute blast to play and every aspect of it feels amazing.

If you're considering getting this game to the point where you're reading reviews, go for it!

stealth updates keep breaking my mod installations :(

only ever frustrating, never satisfying.
game ignores inputs extremely frequently, to the point where I can be standing still attempting to use an item and it takes 10+ button presses before it finally does it. guess what 99% of my deaths are caused by.

I want to enjoy this game, with how nice combat can feel when it does work, but with how often it breaks it is just frustrating.

honestly far more polished and well made than most triple A games released these days.

very well worth for the price tag, if it looks interesting to you, go for it.

can't rip doors off their hinges anymore :(
game still fun though :)