Recent reviews by Skimt

This game makes the old "Drug Lords 2" look like an excel spreadsheet, which to be fair, it essentially was. So, this is a bit of an upgrade for me.

It's a time consumer, but a pleasant one. I enjoy the game. It's not too realistic, not too childish, not too complex, nor too simplistic. It hits the sweetspot.

Kudos to that 1 guy who made this, and now sits with nearly a billion NOK in his wallet I guess.

By outsourcing this game to a distant land far, far away where creativity still thrives, Marvel finally delivered something genuinely entertaining. Hats off to the team -- and to a hiring process that, for once, prioritized making a great game over ticking boxes.

Phew, risky review! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be refreshing Kotaku to enjoy the "outrage" over it in a few days!

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game.

- It is one of the few games out there that relies heavily on reading from disk during runtime (the slowest possible way of storing to- and reading from memory), so much so that you are required to install the game on SSD unless you want music and sounds to become choppy (I mean, it feels like you're streaming music on an ISDN connection). No other game has this issue, because they don't rely this much on the disk during runtime.

- If you play on an i5 / 2060, then you're going to have to play on the lowest graphics. Swapping quickly in- and out of menus will result in garbage collection issues (FPS drop), which can only be resolved by clicking ESC (menu). If you're busy with i.e. ship building, then you will be stuck with that FPS until you're done building your ship (so make sure you resolve this first).

- Outpost building is a joke compared to Fallout 4, and more or less pushes you out of the game loop (questing and exploration). One could argue that there's some exploration in the process of looking for habitable planets with the resources you need, but this is a shallow treat at best, and doesn't really make you bump into anything "new" which will lead you down a new path like in the Fallout franchise. Trying to figure out what planets have what types of resources is a chore, because the game doesn't know, nor does any internet guides know, whether resources can be extracted with a miner (outpost) or a cutter (handtool). You have to go down manually on all the 1500 planets, and check if this is a resource you use a miner on or a resource you use a cutter on. You can ship your resources between bases, or to a central hub for processing, but there's no way of organizing it, so you end up with resource bottlenecks, leaving the whole cargo link feature they've added to the game useless.

- The UI is unintuitive. Where you are-, or where a thing is-, is probably the worst aspect of the UI. I don't even care to go into details. "I opened the map, and now I want to close it again." Ok, exit terra map, exit planet map, exit planet system map, exit solar system map, exit galaxy map... every, single, time. Lest I forget the annoying labels that are stacked on top of each other. Oh, and you can create POIs that you can't really navigate to, which is amazing. I have a headache right now, and it got worse just thinking about this horrendous aspect of the game.

- What to do with all the loot? You can spend hours selling to merchants all over the place, and/or "exploit" the in-game wait mechanism. For what? I guess, to buy a new ship.

- The story isn't really all that compelling. Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult to be curious or emotionally invested in thingamabobs. I'm at a point now where I'd rather go on YouTube and have the story spoiled for me.

- They've added a highly unnecessary step to modding armor and weapons. You now need an additional perk (research perk) to unlock the mods that you want to build. So you now get the research perk, AND the weapons mod perk, THEN you research the weapon mod, THEN you build the weapons mod, which also means that you need twice the resources. Do you need to be able to modify your spacesuit and weapons, to make your character more powerful? No! Because the game drops so many guns and suits on you that you will undoubtedly find what you're looking for without the need for upgrading anything. At best, you will spend countless hours getting research and weapon/suit mod perks, building outposts and cargo links, and crushing your soul to gather everything you need and unlock everything, for a single mod on a weapon that's already top tier, for an additional +2 damage or accuracy, which is nothing.

What we're looking at here, are several factors that make it clear, that there's only one way to play this game:

You should prefferably play this game on console, not PC. You should only play this game like an FPS, and follow the quest-lines. You should only pick up rare/legendary items that you need, and sell the ones that you've outleveled. Ignore resources, and ignore outpost building. Ignore the perk trees that aren't directly involved in increasing your damage, and increasing the damage and jump distance of your ship. Just focus on speed running, so that you can quickly run through the story and delete the game.

You spawn on a beach naked with nothing, then you get ganked. Then you respawn on the beach naked with nothing, and get ganked. Then you respawn on the beach naked with nothing, manage to pick up a bit of wood or something, try to build a house and build something wrong and can't demolish because the controls are not intuitive, you run out of wood and try to farm some more, then you get ganked. Then you respawn on the beach naked with nothing, and get ganked. After roughly 10-20 rounds of this over the course of 30-54 minutes, you go get a refund, because it's just not fun.

The game is a walking simulator with the option to build a home that serves no practical purpose besides storing a few items that will never be returned to, as everything that needs to be explored is too far away. It stands as an example of developers trying to be creative, in the wrong areas, whilst copy-pasting formulas that seems to have worked for other games. They've wanted to make the game as realistic as possible, even at the expense of the player's enjoyment, by over-complicating the most mundane actions. Some structures such as the fish trap have no functionality yet, but since the rest of the game, such as crafting structures, and utilising items and controls is counter-intuitive in every respect, you end up questioning your own intelligence instead, spite having played computer games for 30 years.

Unfortunately, almost none of these issues can be attributed to "early access", as it is quite clear that many of them were intended to be a part of a fun experience all along, which it isn't.

Hogwarts Legacy is a game that keeps you engaged, which is a surprising change that needs to be praised, but its content seek to disrupt your immersion every fifteen minutes to hammer Liberal American dogma into your face. The game is worth trying, and worth buying, but it is also worth criticising.

Audio: 10/10
Graphics: 10/10
Combat: 9/10
Quests: 9/10
Story: 9/10
Exploration: 8/10
Voice Acting: 7/10

Computer Requirements: 5/10
Invasive Breaks in Immersion: 1/10

Everyone should give the game a fair chance, especially considering how the developers seem to update the game weekly. However, I'm giving it a thumbs down in hope that this message will reach the developers.

You could say that this game has no end-game content, but that would be the wrong way to confront a problem that I felt was prevalent throughout the game since the start. Instead, what should be looked at, is the way in which the player progresses throughout the game, by which I mean that it is not necessarily how the player stumbles upon resources or opens up the tech tree that is a problem, but the player's lack of reason to explore beyond the safety of their first home.

The player will spawn near roughly 4 caves, and although there are more caves than this in the region, these are the only 4 caves that the player needs to explore, for eternity. Heck, the player only really needs to explore 1 large cave, and repeat this cave by restarting the game, because every single variant of resources in the game that the player needs are either right outside that cave, or inside it. This excludes the snow that can be picked up with a shovel at the edge of the grassy summer forest where the player starts.

Another thing that struck me by surprise is that they've created an additional map with a different kind of forest, a jungle, that contain lakes filled with alligators that will aggressively charge out of the lake to kill you, and that takes several dozen spears or hundred arrows to kill, at the start of the game, when you're only level 1.

Instead I would propose that the original map contain BOTH types of forests, where the player is forced to start in the easy forest, and are progressively forced to move through the desert region, snowy region, and finally the jungle, to obtain resources such as iron, platinum, and so on, which are spread throughout each region. Furthermore, I would add that it would be withing reason to create an animal such as a horse, that could allow the player to traverse more quickly between regions, because the current possible mounts are only found in the jungle. These mounts could on top of it all, slowly die or decay as a result of extreme cold or heat, requiring the player to quickly create a stable in which these animals can survive when they're not used.

Anyway, my friend and I stopped playing before we reached the final tier, because we didn't see any purpose in reaching it, and we haven't touched the game since.

This is definitely not a bad survival, or bad building game, though, and I'm excited to see what they will do with the game in the future.

TL;DR

Does the game content feel cohesive, balanced and polished? No.
Do I recommend that you try this game? Yes, absolutely.

I tried this game when it came out. It bored me.

Today, I received an announcement that I was banned by Lost Ark's developers from ever playing their product.

I am amused. Their game may be free, but my thumb's down is also free.

It's not a game. It's a chore. Like doing the dishes. Except the task is to clean used needles, with urine, in rubber gloves that have holes in them.

UI:
- Extreme clutter
- Not intuitive
- Fails to display or explain important info
- Bombards with useless info
- A disgraceful amount of popups

Gameplay:
- Extreme micromanagement
- Every action towards winning is a contradiction
- Good memory beats comprehension of strategy
- Pure chaos from start to finish
- Unnecessary amount of features, and features in features, and hey, I heard you like features, so we put some features in your features
- Increase the game speed to fastest, move your fleet from one side of your empire to the other, go to bed, and wake up the next morning to see that your fleet is still two solar systems away from their destination
- 5 minutes into gameplay and a Fall Empire (x100,000 times stronger than you) takes your entire empire in less than 1 minute