Recent reviews by Ralta

A friend joined my game, and he just grew and harvested weed over and over while I worked on my meth production.

He made my setup far more efficient and earned me tons of money.

Replaced him with an NPC :-)

Die a lot, learn a lot, get paid to sleep with everyone, ride a t-rex while a small child with a bow rides on your shoulders, play the lute at the casino and get stoned to death for being terrible, kill a ghost/gangster/cloud/snail and eat their corpse, challenge a snail person adventurer to a duel and throw salt water on them to win immediately, try to convert the altar of a God you don't worship and suffer the consequences (or the victory?), visit another player's village and accidentally murder a child because you clicked the wrong option...

Genuinely surprised at how much this game has completely sucked me in. It needs a more comprehensive tutorial, because there are a ton of mechanics that aren't really explained and you'll just have to figure them out (or use the yvlapedia wiki[ylvapedia.wiki], which I highly recommend).

Regardless, I love how open the game is. There's a ton to do, so many ways for your character to branch out and try different things regardless of your starting race/class.

At time of review, it's still in early access and that can stick out sometimes (like the lack of crafting recipes for weapons and armour), but there have been several small updates in the couple of weeks I've been playing and there seems to be a lot planned for the future. Really excited for the future of this game and can't wait to go back to accepting quests from my pet dog who needs, I kid you not, 9 units of ♥♥♥♥ to build his dream home.

I made so many excuses not to play this game, fearing the amount of reading required. Having been convinced to play it at long last, I don't think I can do it justice, to be honest.

The quality of writing is phenominal. I finished the game in around 30 hours after doing a reasonable amount of side content (I'd say there's easily another 10 hours of side content that I missed in my first playthrough), and I feel that the game is eminently replayable, too.

Please give it a try. This might be one of the greatest games ever created, and it has so much to say about people, society, history, and more.

I bought this last night, and could not put it down for 8 hours. It starts off feeling a little simple - some fun mechanics and ideas, but the first map is pretty basic. And that's intentional, I think. It's after I got a couple of levels and started interacting with more systems that I realised how much depth this game has.

I won't bore you with details - plenty of other reviews have that - lemme just confirm what everyone else is saying:

- The gunplay feels like Destiny (this is a compliment, I swear)
- It has interesting metroidvania elements
- There is a surprising amount of polish for an Early Access title
- It gets better/more intense after the first map

I've still got a lot left to do, but I will be keeping an eye out for more content moving forward!

Edit: At 20 hours, I've hit Gnosis IV (similar to World Level in Diablo) and have experienced most of the content in EA (not including levelling all weapons etc) - I'm missing a couple of items and haven't completed a couple of bosses yet.

I stand by my initial review; this is a spectacular game that has so much potential!

Skipping over the microtransaction and TOS issues (which are legitimate, but there's plenty of good coverage already), the game is just 'fine' and couldn't hold my attention for more than a few hours.

Voice acting is just okay most of the time, with a few above average performances here and there. The writing is often terrible and robotic but again, there are a few lines and scenes that stand out.

More than anything, the combat is boring and slow. Taking 'cues and inspiration' from Destiny 2 and Warframe is fine, but they're both fast-paced action games - The First Descendant is cumbersome and monotonous. There are plenty of weapon drops, but few of them feel vastly different to one another, and the abilities are...fine. Unlocking new Descendants (akin to Warframes, or heroes in most hero shooters) requires a lot of grinding and just isn't that fun.

Solid 5/10 game. Fun for a few hours, but really starts to wear out its welcome.

Playstation account no longer required: Sony has been defeated. Time to go back to squashing bugs and breaking bots for freedom and Managed Democracy.

Wonderful game. It's visually impressive with shockingly good performance. The music is what gets me, though. Check out the song 'Feel' from the Lies of P soundtrack; the rest of the OST is really good too.

Like so many others have said, it's quite like Dark Souls in gameplay with strong Bloodborne vibes. That ought to be enough for those interested in the genre, to be honest. It really is worth playing, I promise.

Updating for MW3:

The main redeeming feature of MW2 was its campaign. MW3 has the worst campaign of any COD game I've played. The 'open world' missions are tiny versions of Warzone (most of them are about the size of a multiplayer map); obnoxious AI, terrible cutscenes and some frankly braindead story decisions lead to a decidedly boring campaign.

Oh, and it's incredibly short. I finished it on Hardened in 3-4 hours at most. Usually I'd go back and play it again on Realistic but I have zero interest in replaying any of those missions. I didn't come away feeling excited for the next game; I just felt disappointed.

Couple other general things: the amount of advertising to even get into the game is disgusting. The menus constantly bombard you with ways to spend more money (COD points, battle pass, upgrading your pre-order etc) and they're partnering with all kinds of weird IP's to sell skins. Here are a few operators you can buy:

- Nicki Minaj
- Alucard (Hellsing)
- Spawn (Marvel)
- Homelander (The Boys)
- Lilith (Diablo IV)
- Inarius (Diablo series)
- Shredder (TMNT)

A bizarre collection of characters, which gives COD some strong Fortnite vibes, and not in a good way. I feel like an old man, complaining about skins like this, but it's such an obvious cash-grab that it's painful to watch.

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Everything below this line is my review for MW2:

To get it out of the way, the Story is great - surprisingly long for a Call of Duty game with a couple of interesting mechanics in some of the missions. But the story alone is not worth the price of entry.

In multiplayer, everything falls apart. They've gone for a more 'realistic' approach with a much faster time to kill (TTK), reduced radar pings (you don't show up when shooting for example) and less obvious HUD info. Problem is, you can still dash around like Sonic the Hedgehog hopping round corners and diving in and out of buildings, which gives the advantage over anyone playing more slowly/methodically. Thus, you either sprint around the map hopping 'round corners spraying wildly, or you sit somewhere elevated and try to snipe people.

This becomes even more obvious in the returning Ground War mode, as well as the new Invasion mode. For those unaware, these two modes are much larger with 64 players on the map as well as very stupid AI running around aimlessly (there are also vehicles, but they're not really worth mentioning). In both these modes, you'll get picked off more often than not by a sniper on top of a building from across the map, or one of the aforementioned speed demons. Not so different from normal Call of Duty games I suppose, but it doesn't feel like there's any middle ground whatsoever. You certainly can play it however you like, but success feels less likely.

All the same graphical bugs from the previous MW are here again, too. I'm using a completely different PC than when I played the previous game and still get various issues with colours going to a blindingly bright neon to a mix of pink and purple (as if my GPU were overheating, even if it's not). This is far more apparent in the 2-player co-op mode (which, by the way, currently has 3 missions - an area defence mission, a stealthy nighttime mission and a nighttime sabotage mission), which also suffers from bizarre lag spikes even when both player's pings are <50ms.

There's a solid foundation here, but it's mired in poor balancing and a muddled gameplay focus. CoD has never had a focus on realism and while I very much enjoy more simulation-style shooters (Arma, Insurgency etc), I also enjoy more arcadey games like Call of Duty. Right now, the devs have failed to strike a balance and they'd be far better off leaning more heavily into one or the other, in my opinion.[/strike

I've been searching for something to quench my thirst for a unique but ultimately 'fun' open-world survival experience.

This ticks every box for me: build a shelter, progress through tiers of weapons and equipment, fight monsters in varying biomes, traverse an interesting world...and you can do these things with up to 9 other people.

Wonderful game, highly recommend it.

I didn't think I'd be scared of a game like this. Then the door closed behind me while I was talking to a ghost and I forgot how to use my keyboard.

10/10, would void my bowels again.