Recent reviews by Nikpo

sometime in 2007, i would've been about 13/14 - my mom and sister bought me an xbox 360 with a secondhand collector's edition copy of Oblivion after a year of me whining about being stuck playing morrowind on my xbox. that ♥♥♥♥ blew my little mind, and now in 2025, i genuinely think this manages to let me relive a bit of that sheer awe and wonder i had back then

somehow they've managed not only to maintain the integrity & soul of it but actually expanded on it with some of the great redesigns, the old quirky NPCs and hilarious bugs are still around and how i remember them, just with a respectable facelift.

we're so back

idk man out of like all the tactical shooters i've ever played, this is definitely one of them

performance is extremely mid, ~30fps on a 5800x3d (and 3080 but the CPU throttling makes that irrelevant) in the capital city, but outside of the capital cities it runs great
game is rly good, haven't had this much fun blindly exploring and fighting since elden ring

the mtx is unfortunate but irrelevant, regardless of what you may have heard from the half hour tourists. some tick-box checking the devs did to satiate some lil-peen capcom suit that needs to validate their employment, similar to other capcom singleplayer titles likeRE and DMC. only thing you can't cop in-game after a few hours of playing is the tent thing but it's only like one or two kg difference anyway apparently?

the character edit thing is a non-issue, i had enough RC to redo my characters twice over after the first few hours if i had wanted to (i don't, they're gorgeous as they are)

fast travel is dirt cheap (oxcart between towns is like 100-200gold each way, which is about the same value as selling 3 apples) and the immediate fast travel stones are plentiful as random loot/quest rewards

genuine complaints i have:

- the performance is definitely *massively* subpar but fwiw it's only in the capital cities and nowhere near unplayable on my hardware (lesser hardware should probably beware though)
- no new game button (actually wtf?)
- there's no free camera in the photo mode, the camera always orbits the player (also actually wtf?)
- the interact/loot/talk button is the same as the dash/sprint button so i keep sprinting into people and past the thing i'm trying to loot (more annoying than it sounds)
- quests are pretty middling, nothing special, side quests are pretty barebone fetch/kill/talk to people quests for the most part.

main questline is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mess though, (early game spoilers ahead) the first leg of the story builds up to something that doesn't even end up happening literally because of a headache and from there it just throws you around the map and then the game ends out of nowhere after barely using the massive new areas. ending sequence and post-game stuff was pretty cool though.

other things i have to say:

- combat is 10/10, if you enjoyed DD1 combat this is similar but way more refined, each vocation is much more unique and the core skills have been heavily expanded upon.
- exploration is great, good vibes exploring and fighting, there's tons of cave systems and villages and etc to run into in the wild, decent loot and chests EVERYWHERE. fighting/hostile npcs is far too frequent in the wild, you'll run into an encounter probably every 5 minutes or less of jogging, but it's been so much fun that even after 30 hours of basically just exploring around it's a non issue.
- lacking variety of enemy types, mostly gobbos for the first little while but it gets expanded the further out you explore, but they're very fun to fight and the different enemy types are quite different from each other.
- pawns are great, will still do something dumb like throw themselves off cliffs here and there but for the most part way more competent than before, actually healing and buffing correctly and having personalities of their own, even if it's mostly bullying you for having a harem.
- wow you guys that's really a lot of half naked pawns, can't go an hour on the road without running into at least two hot underwear mages which.. i mean.. its fine i guess
- pawns talk a LOT, if you've played DD1 you know this and you may or may not have gotten used to it. there's waayyy more dialogue for them now than in DD1 and the pawns will actually interact with each other this time, but after a few hours you'll definitely have repeated lines. i find it endearing, but you sure as hell may not
- the ""beloved"" system is hilariously as much of an afterthought as it was in DD1, even with the high chance of a completely random NPC appearing as your beloved during pivotal cutscenes

in short, if the combat system wasn't so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥ kino this'd be a mid game at best, but the combat takes it up to good for me personally

yea yea yea

nova, choom

midfield :/

i mean, obviously

Performance definitely could be better, ~50fps on max settings with infrequent dips on my 3080/3600, but otherwise so far, so very very good

this is the successor that SWAT 4 and Rainbow Six fans have been waiting for



jk updates are getting pretty slow now so idk

good game, as long as you don't mind entering a time anomaly in which your hours become mere minutes