Recent reviews by DAOWAce

Infinitely better than Code Vein, despite not being the same genre.

TIL that Tose made it, while Code Vein was the God Eater team, whoever they are internally. Makes sense as it was their first time using Unreal, unfortunately for us.


Some tech info: The game stutters when not set to 1920x1080 or 3840x2160: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmJsRzhDhd8

Hitting enemies and all dialogue progression stutter. I don't know why it's only these 2 resolutions that work properly. I've tried to get this to the attention of the studio, but despite my forum post and contact with support directly, the game was never updated.

The game also runs FAR better if you force it into DX12, and I mean like 3x higher performance; not a joke.

No ultrawide support just like Code Vein; needs community fix.

Wish they had added an option to hide the "skip" and "photo mode" text during all cutscenes, but nope, game never had another patch after the one that implemented it, so all the story in the game is marked by this annoyance. Why it wasn't implemented as an auto-hide after a few seconds like many other games is beyond me.

I'm not sure this is even worth the $4 it cost on sale.

Played it pre-release.. still a buggy mess today. Even worse is it now looks pretty ugly, both the 3D graphics and UI.

Clockwork Empires, Spacebase DF-9... I don't understand why these more unique management games turn into a disaster, abandoned by the devs, if not fully dissolving the company.

Might actually be better than Elden Ring.

I'm in shock Nexon of all people (well, Neople) put out one of the best Soulslike games in the last decade.

I genuinely went into this game expecting it to be bad, both gameplay wise and technically.. yet it runs great (UE4, not 5), looks good enough (aesthetic helps), supports ultrawide with playstation prompts (disable steam input), has a number of options not seen in other games (individual vibration control) and I really don't have much of any complaints at all (so far).
Heck there's not even a loading screen after you die.

If Code Vein was made as well as Khazan, it would've actually been playable.

As an aside, Devcat made Vindictus, but I strongly feel Vindictus elements in Khazan (c'mon the Javelin is nearly 1:1). Dual wield feels like Lann, greatsword feels like Hurk... and the skill tree unlocking new moves and mechanics (which you can respec for free at any time!). It's great.

Just needs rebindable gamepad controls.

Eagerly awaiting the full release.

Slowly being able to recommend this game as more and more fixes (and QoL) get implemented through patch cycles.

Originally I would've given this a heavy thumbs down because the amount of bugs in the game was extremely impeding to actual play. There were points where I couldn't go more than 20 seconds without having to reload the save due to a bug. It was infuriating and caused me to quit playing, especially as it compounded ontop of all the other issues.

Now, there's still a lot of bugs, and the game performance is quite poor (both FPS, stuttering and load times; more on loading later), but a lot of the severe ones have gotten fixed. The game still has high memory consumption, and presumably memory leaks, which leads to lower performance and more severe stuttering the longer the client runs. I will not give it a "thumbs up" just yet..

If you're thinking about trying the game, I would recommend looking at Quill18's playthrough of it, either the first livestream he did, or his Youtube series. It's a good starter for breaking the ice and learning the basic ropes of the game (especially without immediately failing).

What I want to really focus on here is getting more word out about the save/load system.

Currently, and presumably for the last 4 years, the game has used an archive system for its save files. Everything is in JSON files, which are then archived (zipped). Save files are extremely large when uncompressed (2 day old save is 200MB). The compression and decompression process heavily slows down saving/loading.

But, the worst thing about this process is that every single time you load your game, the archive is unzipped into a temp folder, loaded into memory, then deleted. Even if you do absolutely nothing in the save and just quit to menu and reload it, it does this whole process over again instead of using anything that's still residing in memory and matching the data.

In simpler terms: When you load your save it's writing 200MB+ to your disk drive (probably an SSD).

If you've been playing this game for any length of time, you have gigabytes upon gigabytes, probably even terabytes after a year, of save data writing.

Another user and I have tried to bring this issue up in the Discord, but it hasn't really had any attention.

The developer must add a way to uncompress the zip archive into memory directly (which we discussed is possible in Unity), or rewrite the entire save system to be something other than massive JSON files which JSON editors struggle to even handle (browsers crash, vstudio doesn't support, vscode struggles and no plugin works properly). Even just using the uncompressed files themselves would avoid much of this data writing issue.

In the interim, I recommend anyone who's playing this game symlink the game's user folder over to a HDD. It's slower to save/load, yes, but it avoids eating away at your SSD's limited write cycles.

EDIT: This has finally been changed. Temporarily editing the review this way to not leave out of date information up.
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Regardless, despite my thumbs down, if you're the type of person who enjoys games like this, you will find enjoyment here. It's cheap, a sale knocks off a few bucks, and since the Kitfox deal, it seems there's been more rapid development as they aim for a 1.0 release next year. While I don't think a "1.0" release is really fitting in just a year (content wise), it certainly seems better going than it was previously.

Also, check out the mods in Discord, some are really great QoL and vastly improve the experience.


nb: you can launch the game outside of Steam, so my recorded hours are not representative of my total playtime, which is well over 100 so far

I like/hate this game.

I hate everything about what happened with Nomura and Square Enix. You will too if you read about XIII Versus.

I like the graphics, I like the open world, I like a lot of the mechanics. I also hate a lot of the mechanics.

Ultimately, I played the game for about 50 hours before transitioning to what I'd describe as "Part 2" of the story.

"Part 2" made me quit the game.

It was so bad I just reloaded my earlier save after witnessing the events and sampling the post-"event" gameplay. Put another ~10 hours into it before just, not loading up the game anymore.

The way this game is designed with the story is ATROCIOUS. You can see the point where they took Nomura out of the picture and attempted to rework the game. It's just such a clear difference in direction it shouldn't even be part of the same game. Without spoiling too much: It invalidates everything you did prior to the event. EVERYTHING.

FFXVI is on the cusp of release on PC. Every single FF game I've played, I finished... except 15.

Ultimately, I will never finish FFXV. I quit it over a year ago, and still to this day I'm mad about it. DFFOO (rip), and a friend, is what got me interested in playing it in the first place.

I suggest nobody else play the game either. Forget it exists, move on, and watch as Square Enix never learns their lesson in their misguided quest for "all the money".

Can't rebind interact to E because they hardcoded it to some stupid gimmick mechanic you barely use.

Could rebind it in the beta, but it conflicted with this key which made the gimmick not work. So, instead of fixing it and simply letting you rebind it, they disallowed you from rebinding anything to the E key.

Utterly asinine.

Runs 2 different anti-cheat software (which can bloat to 1GB RAM usage) along with your old favorite Chromium web helper bloat, along with being extremely system intensive the point Windows itself runs like garbage with this game running in the background. (5950x/4090)

Forced to agree to 3 different terms (ToS, privacy, data collection/sharing) to even play.

Runs horribly, still. The 2022 beta was terrible, the 2023 beta improved, and the 2024 release improved again.. but it's still terrible. A 4090 is at 100% usage on the character select screen at 2560x1440.. and not even hitting 100FPS: https://i.imgur.com/baCorm6.jpg

The lighting is dull and washed out. The image is blurry despite options that blur (upscaling, motion blur, dof, AA) being disabled or as low as possible. The shadowing.. what shadowing? This looks like a game from 2007 with modern quality textures. Crysis came out in 2007.

It's a Nexon game, so, y'know. Monetization up the wazoo and cosmetics that completely rip you out of the game world.

I honestly haven't played it too much because I fell out of FPS years ago, but always want to try and experience MMOFPS games ever since Huxley died before it even left beta. From what I've seen of streamers playing the game, the viewers don't really enjoy it and say it's scuffed warframe/destiny, and I have to agree. Treadmills with no point, breadcrumb and carrot on a stick gameplay. It just doesn't look like it has anything unique going for it and is just some out of touch F2P company's attempt to cash in on a market that's too saturated. Like arriving to a party that ended 4 years ago.

Update: Played it for ~10 hours. Feels like torture.

The quests are atrocious, the story is atrocious, the fight design is atrocious. Everything is atrocious and worse than the games it ripped its ideas from (mostly Warframe).

So many of the missions involve you standing around through infinitely spawning enemies until a quest objective spawns or drops. There's no difficulty in the slightest.

Boss enemies are "deplete hp bar, boss invul, shoot 3 orbs to break invul, repeat x times". Some enemies also have an invulnerability shield at 50% of each HP bar ontop of this mechanic. I have yet to see anything different.

The areas make no sense at all. The layouts make no sense. There's giant swaths of unused parts of the map, random cutouts with either nothing or a single miniscule log item sitting on the floor in the center. Platforming that makes no sense. Objects just seem placed in a game world with no thought whatsoever. Also, many things look like stock UE5 assets, especially the rocks back from the old tech demos.

Monetization is up to 20x more expensive than Warframe, for identical mechanics (ie Forma).

The game made me so bored I wanted to sleep 5 hours earlier than normal.

Whoever is actively playing this game has never played Warframe. I now want to get back into Warframe, or god forbid buy Anthem and play that which I haven't touched since beta (yes its servers are still somehow up).

Stop rewarding companies for shoving out FOTM garbage.

DLC update didn't improve any technical aspect of the game.

No ultrawide support.
No HFR (>60FPS) support.
No playstation controller icons.

And to fix all this we have to disable the anti-cheat and force the game offline else suffer a ban. Unacceptable.

In 12 years and 6 game releases, only one has proper PC support: Armored Core 6. Its improvements should've been backported for this DLC release. They weren't.

In addition, the LOD drawing is still terrible, especially for collectables (barely 30ft render). Performance is poor, quite CPU bottlenecked. Particles completely destroy framerate.

There's also a strange glowing halo around characters when contrasted against the environment. Objects ontop of reflections (not just water) also have a jarring white outline to them.

Raytracing.. horribly optimized and just makes the game very difficult to see as it crushes the shadows, making everything too dark.

And, stuttering. Dark Souls 3 had stuttering, ER still does too. And now it's even worse to the point the entire application cripples itself (unplayble stutter) because of some threading issue on certain systems, requiring you to mess with affinities to try and resolve it.

All that aside, the game honestly feels like a test product to me more than a magnum opus.

Adding jumping was a terrible idea. It doesn't feel right, it doesn't look right. It replaces a button that was otherwise open. And it lead to basically exploiting it by the playerbase; though I don't really care about that.

Crouching, another poor implementation. We could already stealth up to enemies if we walked behind them. Now we have to crouch.. and while we do move a lot faster, it, again, takes up another button.

And because we lost 2 buttons....

The two-hand button which has been identical since Demon's Souls is now a combo function that is NOT EVEN IN THE CONTROLS MENU. I had to look up how to two-hand a weapon; that is asinine.
- During gameplay, this leads to really obnoxious issues happening:

• I frequently mis-hand things. Whether two-handing my shield (especially on horseback), or it not swapping at all.
  
• I attack when I don't intend to because the UI is not instantly responsive.
  
• It doesn't queue the two-hand change, leading again to erroneous attacking.
  
• Trying to two hand swap to buff or shield guard is much slower and prone to error
  
• And the biggest problem: YOU CAN'T TWO HAND ON HORSEBACK! You have to dismount, two-hand, then mount again. Change weapon on horseback to buff or do a ranged attack and you're not at requirements to one-hand? SOL.

Why? I don't understand why they changed it. We could already two-hand the left item in Dark Souls 3 by simply holding the button. This is not only breaking for everyone who's played the Souls games up until this point, but it's an objective downgrade in functionality.

The camera is still as screwed up as it was in Dark Souls 3 when it comes to moving against walls. It can randomly, and instantly, shift the camera a certain direction, regardless of disabling all the auto-camera options
- And when moving around the camera gets pulled the direction you're moving. For example: Sprint left, try to move camera right, if the movement is slow enough, the camera will be pulled left (and always pulled the second you start moving it). You have to move it faster to get it to pull right finally. It can feel like you're trying to force a heavy object, barely moving for a few seconds, then it'll suddenly swing 180 in a split second. This is excessively obnoxious and leads to horrible feeling camera control when trying to move around.. in an open world game with a mount, and cliffs with gravity.

In addition, there's yet another useful yet obnoxious feature; the ability to set a hold and directional use of 4 items. This is yet again delayed, and yet again causes similar poor interactions like the two-hand function.. because the same button is used for both.

And the jumping and verticality leads to another issue that's been part of the Souls games: Death at a 20 meter fall. It feels terrible; dying when you don't expect to. The talisman for it doesn't even change anything. Illusory Wall did a video on this explaining it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm-QA4rZPYk

The fall height should've been increased for this game. It makes no sense why they didn't increase it.


Gameplay is fine, I guess. The game is far easier than any other Souls game, to a fault. But it's more or less just Dark Souls with a horse. An easily cheeseable horse.

They removed cutting dragon tails. I don't even have words for this.

I'll probably still beat it, eventually, but I honestly had more fun emulating Demons Souls with RPCS3 than the last 60 hours of gameplay here.

Dark Souls PtDE is my favorite in the series. I'd currently place ER alongside DkS2.