Recent reviews by Satekh

This studio is getting worse and worse. Lootboxes upon the horrible update? Never thought GGG would become Activision.

<3

Absolutely fantasitc. Over the years, they've added so much new stuff that it feels completely different from when I first bought it. I cannot, and I mean that, recommend No Man Sky enough for anyone that wants a space exploration game. Well don, Hello Games. Well. Done.

Very fun experience, especially with a friend.

Now this is a great game.

I had an absolute blast with this one. This is up there as one of my favorite combat-focused metroidvanias of all time. The bosses are great, the presentation, music, art, animation, enviroments are great. The story is the only thing that feels kind of generic, but it does not retract from how great the game feels to play. I could not recommend this enough. Especially if you are a fan of Hollow Knight and the like. Very VERY good game.

Honestly, I wanted to like it. I've played for about 4 hours and it just doesn't click with me. The combat is kinda meh, you just stagger most enemies and they can't do anything, the dash is not a dodge and gives no i-frames, the talents are just here's a mediocre ability for this specific weapon or +1 or +3 more damage, the weapon variety is decent, but it just doesn't feel like each weapon is distinct enough to have a different feel than another. It kinda feels tacked on just to have the illusion of choice, maybe it gets better later, but early on it's basically equi whichever weapon has the highest paperdamage. The story is told in a very weird way, you don't really get a backstory and it's convuluted for the sake of being that way, like it's trying to be somekind of waifu darksouls/Hollow Knight. The platforming is awful in my opinion. Just feels like they've randomly put a bunch of platforms just willy-nilly cause it's a 2d sidescroller metroidvania. The few bosses I fought was just attack, back away, attack, rinse repeat. And since the dash doesn't have i-frames you can't dodge through the enemies for cool counterattacks. It's all just a mess in my opinion. It does look great tho, but the soundtrack and voiceacting is par for the course, nothing bad, but it doesn't really stick out either. Just can't recommend it when there's so manhy great metroidvanias with this kind of exploration and combat out there. If you've played them all and are starved for a new one, try it out, but don't expect anything special.

OLD REVIEW
Disclaimer; I do enjoy what little I have been able to play, there is a great game here, however, currently they are having major issues figuring out server problems due to high demand.

They are a small team, and fixing server problems like these are no easy task. BUT, if you are coming here to play an aRPG online, don't buy it right now, wait a while and come back and see if they've fixed the online problems. On the other hand, if you are willing to play offline solo, buy it, cause there's alot of good things here.

TL;DR
Want to play online? Don't buy right now.
Want to play solo/offline? Buy it.

So, now that I have played through the story and gotten into the early late-game, here's my honest opinion.

First of all, let's get the good stuff out of the way. I do enjoy what I've played, the class I chose was runemaster, and going with a frostclaw leveling build worked really well. The game flows pretty well into each section and each act, the story wasn't really for me, but it's decent enough. Skills and visuals feels good and except for some server issues and long queues the game runs fairly well, and feels pretty optimised. The skills with their own skill trees feels pretty cool in concept, and at least tries to give you meaningful choices. Best part of the entire game so far in my opinion is the crafting (or forging). Being able to costumise every piece of gear is very satisfying and fun to try to build your perfect item, well done. More games should absolutely try to incorperate similiar ideas.

Now, off to the stuff I don't enjoy.
As you might have seen from how short the paragraph was above, you might not like this review at all, but again, this is just my honest opinion.

Let's start with skills and builds;
First off, only 5 skills on the bar? Even Diablo 4 and PoE have more. This limits choices incredibly, and I remember when D3 chose to only give us 6, everyone was up-in-arms and berrated it relentlessly. This in my opinion is by far the worst choice they made with this game. And no skill on left click with force cast/stand still feels so weird coming from any other aRPG out there. The skills also to me feels very same-y. Note that I've only played Runemaster so far, but trying to change around the skills tree choices feels pretty meh execpt for the big nodes. The same problem that many modern aRPGs have are certainly present here, incremental % changes, doesn't feel impactful at all.

Items next; pretty much same problem here. % increases to stats, most of the time fairly badly worded or not properly explained. There are + to skills which is pretty neat, but it's hard to figure out exactly what that does when you don't really put points into skills to increase them, but rather put points in a tree. I feel that LE suffers a bit from the same problem D4 does, with a TON of "Chance to X" and "X increassed by Y%", and main stats aren't really mainstats, Strength, Intelligence and so on are there, but doesn't really feel like stats worthy to have on items most of the time. It's really cool that you can costumise items, and that makes drops feel more impactful and fun, but the item affixes are just same-y in my opinion. I really don't know how to fix this problem, but I do feel that if you hate the itemisation in D4, you should really be able to critisize LE too.

End Game;
I have just about only started getting into this part, and it's pretty fun to work my way through Monoliths and choosing parts to tackle, pretty mjuch the only end game content I've really interacted with, so I won't say if it's great or not, since I don't have enough experience yet, will update when I do.

Re-Rolling or information for Alt-Aholics (like me);
This is ciminally bad in this game. You are forced to go through the campaign (up until a certain point) and do tedious side-quests or you are severly nerfing yourself, since actual power is tied to questlines and side-missions. With how long the campaign is, this feels even WORSE than Renown was in Diablo 4. There's no way to skip this part because of how it's designed, and having to do the most tedious and least fun part of the game again if I want to try a different class feel unecessarily punishing. This in my opinion is something that need to change, and if you, like most people, hated the Renown grind in Diablo 4, should really want this part to change too in my opinion. If you are defending this, then you should've also been defending Renown grind, or you, in my eyes, are a huge hypocrite. Please developers, consider changing this sooner rather than later.

I do like parts of this game, and will continue into the end game and see if I enjoy that part. But I also see glaring problems that to me feels pretty bad, and just isn't for me. It might certainly be for you and I think that's great! Hopefully some of my issues will either be fixed, or aren't that bad in the later part of the game. But getting there will continue to be tedious if nothing changes with you second, third, fourth, and so on, playthrough.

Thanks for reading!

Actually fun, and a good foundation. Hopefully they will add more stuff in the future. Thumbs up regardless!

You like Gundam? You like casually playing Overwatch? Play this. Otherwise, meh. I like it tho, and it's free, so give it a shot.

Obvious recommend, ngl.