Recent reviews by "battler" "ushiromiya"

tl;dr: this game is worth playing for story alone. the gameplay is tolerable. i wish i could tell you to hunt down TSW classic and play that but SWL is a fine enough compromise all things considered.

this is a game where you're going to have to ignore my steam playtime: i was a closed beta tester for original TSW and had a lifetime subscription with probably hundreds if not thousands of hours in it. there is literally no other game on the market like this one. i really wish it had the kind of after-release support it deserved.

the quest design and map design are truly one of a kind. the lore collections can stand alone as horror short fiction. this game has voice direction so singularly strong that it has ruined english language voice acting in nearly every other game for me. the art direction is peak. i would also clearly state that the game really puts its worst foot forward and only gets stronger presentation and story-wise. i think the final trio of base-game zones (transylvania) are the best and the first trio (solomon island) are the weakest. it only snowballs and gets better and better. if you want to play the kind of game that will hook into your skin and you will never ever forget, try secret world legends.

now for the downsides:
this game is in maintenance mode. it really only received one "expansion" sized content update as The Secret World (kaidan) and when rebooted into secret world legends it received the prologue to more content and then... nothing. for six years. so go into this expecting no conclusions or completed story, unfortunately.

low player population. i think on average there tends to be 50-100 people online, and nearly everyone is at endgame and doing endgame things. i see three or four people in whatever zone im progressing in whenever i play which is nice, though it usually seems to be what i'm doing (veteran player on an alt chauffeuring their friend)

the reboot, so far as i'm aware, does not actually have all the content of the secret world. there are one or two eight-man instances that never made it into secret world legends. so there's literally just content that is lost forever if you dont have a TSW classic account and are also willing to grind to endgame twice

i've sidestepped all of this because my lifetime subscription status transferred to the reboot but this is a f2p game with microtransactions, and it appears that most of that is annoying nagware stuff. the main manifestation is loot crates that you cannot open without paying money. you get one free open per day with a subscription. also i got the DLC for free in original tsw but i dont get the new south africa expansion for free so whats up with that funcom

the combat was 100% completely overhauled in the reboot and i think it's very ymmv. it's fine. i liked the combat in old tsw but that also was ymmv. i just don't think there is much going on with it to be interesting. i think the new equipment system is really unpleasant and grindy but the old equipment system sucked equally bad so whatever there. it's all tolerable and not a dealbreaker

the player characters are very ugly. sorry. they've always been ugly. you kinda have to deal. everything else in the game aged magnificently but the players just look very bad

overall i think the good really outweighs the bad and people should play this. there is no other game like the secret world. there will be no other game like the secret world. this game has brainrotted people like no other for over a decade. taste and see

have you ever watched hunter x hunter? it's a lot like that

i don't know why i'm crying in the club right now

it's alright.

ark is extremely close to being the best game ever made but all its flaws are death sentences. it's been out of early access for years and they seem more interested in pushing out dlc packs than addressing the "optimized around users with thousand dollar graphics cards" problem or the "catering to large scale pvp dedicated servers but ignoring the massive balance issues and rampant exploits" problem. i cant in good conscience recommend this game to anybody but i can say that there is truly no other game out there like it

edit: i put another 112 hours into this game and actually managed to ascend multiple times, but we had to use console commands to kill one of the bosses due to hitting a glitch that has never been documented or reported by anyone else. ark!

bolting a jrpg onto minecraft is a good idea

this is like an inconcievably bad port. i am actively fighting the game for the right to play it

i love four boys

i picked up this game two years ago and forgot about it after about an hour. i recently heard it was leaving early access and picked it up again and i'm just absolutely floored with how much this game has improved into possibly the definitive survival sandbox experience.

i was a recreational scuba diver when i was a teen, and subnautica does a fantastic job of recreating the cool parts of diving without any of the downsides. ok so theres violatile alien diseases and a wide variety of garguantuan nasties, but i won't get the bends by speeding to the surface!!!

the story is also genuinely super cool and i'm excited to see the ending once the game releases tonight. if you want a cool game about carving out a living on an alien planet you wont find a better option than subnautica

ps my deepest dive was 185 feet which is... 57 meters... the real scary part is being an american converting depths to numbers you understand

yall need to put granblue on steam so you can see my literal thousands of hours of playtime init