Recent reviews by Loom

I've played in the previous playtests for many many hours and I think the direction they're taking this game is going to end up something akin to Gundam evolution and how it quickly died a year later due to the choices they made. I really like the core of what they have going on with the multiplayer gameplay but everything around it, needs drastic work.

I'll bullet point the issues, expand on them a little bit, then further expand below for ease of reading.

1 • At the start, you'll have a very limited selection of strikers(playable characters), The match to match grind outside of completing limited missions is very long. With some strikers requiring upwards of 30+ matches to gain the required resource to unlock them outside of missions.

2 • The game is not friendly at all for multi-region friend groups. You don't have save data across regions and the mandatory non-skippable tutorial itself can take upwards of an hour+ to complete it. Meaning: onboarding your friends or to play with friends in a different region becomes needlessly tedious.

3 • There is a lootbox mechanic that can give you mods which increase or change the stats of your striker. Compensation for issues or other related events are also through lootboxes. Meaning that different players will be compensated differently due to RNG.

4 • There are a lot of unintuitive menus to sift through in order to find what you're looking for.

5 • They have designed the game in such a way that you will feel forced to engage with gamemodes that you might not like in order to make the grind less painful.

6 • Certain parts of your character will not be able to be re-edited unless you pay for it.

7 • There can be a lot of bots in your game without you realising,

1 • Limited selection & grind
Once you start playing the game, you'll quickly notice that different strikers(mechs) cost wildly different amounts of currency, progressively getting higher as you go down the list. This is pretty strange because singularly they don't widely excel over the other, they're all equally good at different things. This would lead you to believe that the higher costing strikers are just wildly better than the low-costing counterparts. This will run you into a few problems, there might be a striker you really like the look or feel of, but you wont be able to get it unless you go through a very tedious grind if it's one of the higher costing ones. Which means you'll spend a fair amount of time playing strikers you might just flat out dislike.

Also at the start of the game you'll be bombarded with missions to complete that reward enough currency to get one or maybe two strikers. I'd say combined with currency you get from matches you'll be able to get one medium-high tier striker assuming you don't spend your currency on anything else. Which you'll most likely want to buy a cheaper tier of striker early on because the default striker just feels horrible to play.

Outside of missions, the match to match reward of currency is very low. In order to unlock the entire roster you'll likely have to play hundreds of games to get there. Or if you've already completed your missions for the day, you'll be grinding many matches to try and force out a single striker.

This from my subjective perspective just feels terrible, I wanna sit down and play a multiplayer game in its' full capacity and I don't have the time to dedicate many many hours for grinding classes.

2 • Regions, playing with friends and the tutorial
This is something that western games have thankfully gotten ridden of, but for mecha break, your account data is tied to the region in which you play on. Meaning that if you change regions you'll have to start all over again.

Now what this means practically, is that if you have multiple friends who all play, but are different regions, they'll have to be forced to switch regions, lose all of their progress, items, grind, etc, which the grind can be very very long to get to play a striker you actually want to play. So now you're stuck with the issue that you'll run into ping problems and also no one will have the characters they want to play.

In addition, the tutorial is extremely long and unskippable. From personal experience, I've onboarded around 3-6 of my friends onto this game, but on average it takes them an hour+ to complete the tutorial. This feels terrible, you're just sitting there awkwardly playing more matches or waiting for them to finish before you can all play together. But to wrap back around to what I said before. If you had a friend that was in a different region, you then had to switch over to their region, replay the entire hour+ tutorial again, and then have no currency to play the characters you actually want to play.

3 • Lootbox mechanics & compensation
Lootboxes are pretty apparent in this game being one of the main forms of rewards you get for completing missions or progressing in their batlepass.

From these lootboxes, you can get mods which change your striker's stats. They come with an increase and decrease to certain stats. So while it isn't directly a full boost in power, you can easily boost up a striker's strengths much higher than their non-modded counterparts. Which this feels very pay to win or progress to win instead of it being something more reliant on a player's skill. We're still pretty early into this system so this is more based on assumption, but having seen a few of the higher tier mods, the changes they make can be drastic.

Compensation is also handled through lootboxes for things like server downtimes, or game breaking issues. Compensation regardless is very nice, but since they're handled through lootboxes, the actual amount you'll be compensated can either be extermely low or somewhat high. As a player this just feels very strange and bad. Because even if you suffered from the same issues, your compensation could drastically change because of RNG.

4 • Menus
The game is pretty heavy on its' menus, often requiring you to click through multiple times to get to where you need to go. Other times the menus are so densely compacted that it can become overwhelming to navigate if you aren't already used to it. It isn't make or break but can put a new player off very easily

5 • Engaging with gamemodes
Currently as of writing, there are a number of missions and currencies you can only complete/get from doing their PvPvE gamemode. If I understand things correctly there is also a striker that you can only get via a currency from this PvPvE gamemode as well.

Because of how upsettingly long the grind is, you'll feel forced to engage with these modes in order to make it less painful. If you only wanted to play this game for the multiplayer mode then you're looking at drastically longer grind times than someone who engages with both modes equally.

This just doesn't feel nice to me personally. Also outside of lootboxes, you can only get mods through this PvPvE gamemode.

6 • Paid edits
In a strange turn of events, you can freely customize every part of your character aside from your body, which seems to take a very considerable amount of paid currency. The amount of currency you would spend to do this is amount equal to or a little higher than a medium priced mech.

This feels super weird and the logic there just really doesn't check out. You have to grind to level 9 in order to even unlock the ability to customize your body to begin with, which takes a while, but then you're faced with having to use a paid currency to edit it.

7 • u]Bots[/u]
There are a lot of bots throughout all stages of play, they become less with a higher rank but are still there regardless.

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I'm really struggling to recommend this game because while I love it dearly for its' gameplay, everything around it just feels like I have to endure to enjoy what I actually like about the game.

Honestly this games feels like it's a concept test instead of an actual game. Even on sale, I still feel like I have wasted money with this title. I would not recommend it.

The AI is too simple. the visuals look like something out of a 2008-12 game, and the actual gameplay consists of moving to a zone, clearing said zone by killing enemies, then moving on. That's it until the game ends. There is nothing new or even interesting about this game for it to be worth actual money.

Highly recommend that others find a different game for their FPS needs, as of right now this game feels unfinished and clunky. Honestly this is more comparable to an early alpha than a fully released game.

I'm not into writing fluff so you'll only get the information you actually need.

1. Most complex fighter to date(true 3D fighter).
2. the music is legendary - you'll see what I mean during the main menu.
3. Smooth controls.
4. Great practice mode.
5. The most wonderful and relaxed yet competitive community I have ever seen.
6. Nice story, along with comedic character episodes.
7. The customisation beats most other fighting games beside one or two older Tekken titles.
8. New player friendly ranked mode. You'll only ever be up against people of the relatively same skill. It gives you a feeling of true and rewarding progression.
9. 36+ diverse characters with a few more coming later on.
10. Fun offline modes.

To clear up a few things Black Desert Online is in no way a "Pay to win" experience. It is so much so, that the mention of BDO being pay to win has become a sort of meme within the game.

Secondly the pricing, let's compare this to World of Warcraft, also one of the most popular MMOs to date.
BDO(Black Desert Online) Is a pay once play forever mmo, with WoW(World of Warcraft) being a subscription based mmo.

Yearly cost for just being able to play the game: for WoW if you had brought the six month pass(which is the best price), that would total up to $155.88 every year. While BDO on the other hand, you only pay once without additional fees - Price ranges between packs.


Cash shop Items: WoW being largely cosmetic, while BDO is a mix of convenience and cosmetic items. In BDO You can also buy everything in the cash shop through the player marketplace(Cash shop items have fixed amounts of silver they can sell for, to negate p2w) and a lot of the complaining you see here, is largely due to ignorance over the games mechanics. You get inventory space as you progress along the main quest line. As well as being able to buy separate storage in each of the capital cities within the game. The game even offers you the "booster" as one of it's daily reward(s)(quite a few times I might add)

This is a post to also address the stigma around buying cash shop items. It's a cheap mmo, the prices are what they are for them to make profit and continue to host all of their servers. If you play the game for a year and have only spent your initial entry cost, you aren't getting ripped off in the slightest if you want to buy a cash shop item.

And as a side note; AFK fishing builds up quite a lot of time on steam. My actual play time would be around 15-20 hours(on steam), as of writing this review.

It's alright.

Have you ever thought about the content to price ratio? For example, if you paid 60 dollars for a game and played it for exactly 60 hours. You would be paying one dollar per hour of enjoyment. Terraria is eight dollars(without discount, but to be honest with you. I've never seen this game without a discount before.), judging by the amount of hours I have on this game(Close to 300 as of writing this review.) I can safely say it's worth a purchase.

If you enjoy building; exploring; fighting; general creativity; RPG elements; swords that shoot flying rainbow cats of death(meowmere); fishing; making crazy over complicated contraptions; farming; intense unique boss-fights; pure unadulterated fun. Then buy this game, it's honestly a must have for anyone who uses steam, in my opinion.

Is that dishonored 2 is an amazing game, and if you liked the first one you will love this one. It improves upon every fault of the first one and then some. While it may not be perfect, no game ever is really. This is a giant leap into the right direction in terms of gameplay and listening to the community.

I can't tell you exactly how long I spent just walking around with the heart and listening to what everyones story was. A tough yet gentle fisherman offered me advice on how the guards treat new comers. So I thought he was a good guy. Yet the heart gave truth to his actual nature; a liar, a cheat, and a killer. And then not five steps away from him was another fisher. Sitting on the edge of the dock trying to catch a fish. The heart spoke of how ever since his wife died, he stays up with his daughter reading her stories until she falls asleep. Every, single, night. -- It makes you feel like there's a whole world going on around you. That these people actually matter, you don't want to seem them come to harm. As you do whatever it was that you were doing.

The guards(I play on very hard. which is the highest I believe.) spot you like how you would think someone in the real world would see you. I rattled my sword against a metal gate to lure some of them away then made my way into the locked door they were guarding. Once they came back, they tried to open the door to see if it was tampered with. After they found it to be unlocked, they alerted every other guard in the vicinity that this happened. they even get alerted when one of their squadmates don't come back from patrol in a timly manner.

While this is the first iteration of upgarding powers and the like. I wish they really changed how you would use that power. Instead of it being a straight upgrade. Bonecharms however, seem to fix this issue. The corrupted ones at least; for example, there was one that made Far Reach be able to stealthily pull someone at the cost of needing more mana to cast.( I believe you still need the upgrade however.) things like that really change the way you play. Suddenly I couldn't spam Far Reach anymore, but it gave me this new option to deal with enemies.

I wouldn't recommend buying dishonored 2 right now until the optimisation patch comes out. But when it does, you are in treat for a real gem of a game.

It's time boys, it's finally time.

PRAISE THE DLC \[T]/

I brought it to play for when I had free time. Needless to say, this game feels more like time wasted than time enjoyed. Which is sad, because I wouldn't of refunded the game if it were cheaper.

That's the thing about mid-tier/priced games, if you buy games that are cheep. You can shrug it off and feel fine since it didn't cost you much. Vs buying something expensive and knowing that you're getting quality. But with a game like this, you just get left with a sour taste.

Edit/reply: Dull; repetitive; empty. Are you happy now?

Also, low pirced games to me are between 1-7 pounds. When it gets to 10-30 that is the mid-tier. And so on.

I don't need to give you a wall of text to tell you that a game is bad. And believe me, when I buy a game I play the hell out of it. But when it came to this, I couldn't bring myself to do it.(I do enjoy games like this, just not this one in particular.)

There was something fundamentally lacking in the gameplay; story and overall aesthetic. This game felt like demo you would make up with a few friends for a programming convention.