Recent reviews by Wraith

This game turned out better than it had any right to be - it's basically an improved Valheim clone with some Runescape flavoring. The build system is very well done, and the content stays relevant even after you "advance" to new areas.

It's not genre-defining or earth-shattering, but if you like Runescape and/or Valheim, you'll probably get a few dozen hours out of it as is. The netcode is (in a shocking turn of events for co-op survival fantasies) decent and there's basically no weird latency or lag when playing with friends.

It sorely lacks a dedicated server client though.

An incredible remastering of one of my favorite games of all time! The graphics are gorgeous, but there are a number of minor tweaks throughout that make for a better gaming experience.

- Improved level scaling system
- Adjusted difficulty (some parts harder, some parts easier, it flows better)
- Added sprinting
- Completely overhauled faces, a welcome change
- New voices, but only where appropriate
- Rebalanced perks, e.g. to repair enchanted gear you need to be an apprentice instead of a journeyman.
- Plants actually change graphically when you harvest them
- When walking or sprinting, the camera effects match what you're doing instead of sliding along the ground.
- Removed the 15 DLC quest popups when leaving the sewer, you can now hear the locations of houses/etc in rumors and from NPCs chatting.
- Lots of other things I keep noticing the more I play.

Overall, it feels like a labor of love, with a lot of time put into making it right. There are a few crashes and bugs here and there, but I can't fault them considering how many crashes and bugs the original had.

Cashed out and abandoned.

I had a chance to log in and play around a bit, and my expectations have already been exceeded. Notable improvements over Space Engineers 1...

- Huge improvement in graphics, lighting, visual effects, etc. Flying around an asteroid no longer alternates between "I'm blind and I can't see" (too much light) and "I'm blind and I can't see" (not enough light).

- Much better optimization. No rubber banding to speak of, even when moving large grids. Despite the new lighting and graphics updates, it runs really smoothly even on older hardware.

- New grid system is earth shattering. It fixes every problem I had with the SE1 build system... you can actually fill in empty space between blocks, and you don't lose a giant cube of build space because you wanted to put a light in a hallway.

- Destruction isn't something I'm interested in, but I can sit there and chop off pieces of a refinery, knock off panels, cut off the tops of antennas and move the floating parts around, etc. It's very dynamic. It's very dynamic, and I can't think of a game off the top of my head that does it like this.

- The new speed limits are great, and accelerating and decelerating feels smoother than before, as does hitting things at high speed.

Right now the game is pretty bare bones, which was communicated in advance. There's no survival, multiplayer, planets, or any of the other things we've come to expect from the first game.

What we do have is the proven track record of a development team that has loved and cared for Space Engineers 1 for over a decade, that has consistently listened to community feedback, and that is committed to adding all the things the original game had and more.

If you need the roadmap features to enjoy it, then by all means hold off on buying until those features are released, but I'm happy to support the development of this one from the start.

The game is awesome, but it takes a bit of commitment and time to uncover that fact. For me it was about 3 hours of "why am I playing this" until I got to the "wow it's 5:00 AM and I don't want to stop" stage.

Super fun, and if you go into it with lower expectations like I did, you might be pleasantly surprised. I think a lot of people made the mistake of assuming this would be like every-promise-Star-Citizen-made combined with No Man's Sky and a Bethesda RPG all at once, and that's just not a very realistic take. This is basically Fallout 4 in space in my opinion, and I like the setting much better than the Fallout series.

A paragon of modern game development.

I originally started playing Stellaris when it first came out. I went into it with low expectations, expecting a few hours of fun and then on to bigger of better things...

I was very wrong.

The game sucked me in before I even realized what was happening. I ended up being extremely impressed by the level of quality and creativity that shown throughout each session. Every little event seemed to capture my curiosity and sense of adventure. Each time I experienced the same anomaly, I would be surprised by different outcomes. No two play-throughs felt the same.

I played for about 150 hours and then shelved it, feeling satisfied that I had explored what it had to offer. Skip forward six years....

Unlike most games that get a few incremental improvements through DLC, this game has completely transformed. Every single mechanic has been thoughtfully expanded, improved, tweaked, and re-imagined from the ground up. In many ways Stellaris in 2022 is not the same game as Stellaris in 2016. It has been massively improved. They took a great game and consistently improved it and made it into a gem that stands out in a class of its own, with the perfect balance of depth and progression.

Each DLC comes as a compliment to the massive free updates they release. Other game developers today seem to release games and then shrink their development team to a skeleton crew to make DLC and patch bugs. By contrast, Paradox has been pumping out fresh content and changes at a rapid pace since the game released, and are still at it six years later.

Their DLC is fairly priced for the content and in multiplayer, only one person needs to own the DLC for everyone to enjoy playing with it.

This has been one of my best experiences in gaming, and I will continue to enjoy Stellaris for years to come by myself and with my friends.

My friend and I both purchased Oculus Rift S's earlier in the week. I was like "Hey man, do you wanna try Phasmophobia?" and he's like "Sure let's do it."

According to my Fitbit, I have burned 600 calories during the 104 minutes that I played this game. Cumulatively, I have cursed more than I would in an entire week. I have also screamed and flailed at least twice.

If you are looking for something scary and funny and stupid to play with your friends - this is it. If you want to get all the benefits of cardio without the effort - this is it. Just remember that you don't need to outrun the ghost... just your friends.

I've played just under two hours and will be refunding. I knew the basic premise of the game going in and it sounded like something I would be really interested in, but it just didn't do it for me.

I played on one of the U.S. official servers which was maxed on population, and despite the high number of players, the island was desolate. In the two hours I played I starved to death 4 times. This is because the *only* way to get food as a carnivore (I played a Utahraptor) is to kill other players. And despite the large server population, the landscape is just too large for regular interaction. And that was the entirety of my gameplay. Searching for food as I starved to death. There are no small animals to eat. No bugs to kill. It's just.... boring?

I read forums and tried to use tactics to find food, but the "punishing and unforgiving nature of the game" is really just a farce. It isn't something truly challenging but a coin toss as to whether or not your hour of wandering around the landscape will be rewarded with another hour, or if you'll die and start again.

Played it for a few hours immediately after launch. So far it's fantastic - basically Warband but better in every way. I didn't run into too many bugs when playing (most of them were just like "Huh... that's a bug." and I moved on) and they haven't been game breaking. That said, the game has crashed on me a few times, and a friend of mine has horrible FPS despite having a similar system.

I'd recommend this game but give it a couple weeks to let the kinks get ironed out.

Will update this review after more playtime.

Update: I've sunk quite a few hours into this game since release and I have some additional thoughts. Firstly, Taleworlds has been doing very well with the hot patches. Most of the initial crashes and performance issues have been ironed out. As for the gameplay and content...

Combat: I'm going to be honest. I was fairly frustrated when I first started playing at the combat changes. I've never been great at directional-based combat games (Chivalry, Mount & Blade, For Honor, etc) as something about blocking in them just doesn't click right in my brain. This game made it worse than Warband since it took away the auto-directional blocking. That said, since I've been doing more battles I've gotten used to it and I feel competent in tournaments now. The variety of weapons and tactics lend well to the AI changes and it makes it feel like a challenging and intense encounter when you with your life on the line. If I can do it you can too.

AI: Basically the AI is good now. It's not perfect, but it's about as close as I could imagine a game like this can get. I played the multiplayer beta for a few days solid before the main game released, and I can say that I would have some trouble distinguishing the AI ingame from player-controlled avatars. The military planning isn't bad either - the AI is very responsive. They don't simply run or attack based on troop numbers like in previous games. They seem to take into account your troop type and level, and other factors. Lastly, when you enter a battlefield, the AI uses the terrain to their advantage. Archers will often move to a good vantage point, and infantry will form shield walls to defend them while calvary charges their flanks to break up their formations. It's great. It's not always the same either - they change up the tactics a fair bit depending on the troop type and match up.

Quests: About the same as Warband. There's a few less quests overall but they have higher quality to them and a couple different ways you can choose to do them. And gods be praised - cattle are an item that fits in your inventory like horses. There's a lot of complaining on the forums... but I don't think those people actually played Warband, or if they did, I want the version from whatever alternative reality they came from. I played Warband literally the day before Bannerlord, and I can confirm the quests are just as solid. The main storyline is a bonus but it's currently unfinished. I'll admit the voice acting scared me after living in a world of silent voices and grunts for hours prior.

Management: This is the side of Bannerlord that is currently underdeveloped. There are management mechanics you can use, like productive workshops for instance, but they tend to be a little lightly done. Productive enterprises are identical to Warband with the exception that the goods economy is more fluid and dynamic, so profits/losses aren't always solid. Town and castle management seems to use an... almost Civilization style approach. It looks like it's going to be good, but currently it's "click desired upgrade, apply X days of <Production Currency>, repeat until desired upgrade is max level, move to next upgrade.". You have the capability of assigning a governor, but it doesn't do anything yet, and it looks like there are other features that are going to be implemented that will be great, but they just aren't in yet. It's bare bones, but it's still Warband level at this stage.

All in all, this game is what I would consider superior to Warband in its current state. Extra features and improvements will only make this gem shine more.

Worst DLC Wildcard has release to date. Frankly, I suspect they're outsourcing the game's development at this point. It would explain the horrendous communication and terrible QA.

The world is too small and the new content is too lazy. It's also heavily unbalanced. I could see this being a $10 DLC, or even a free addition. $35? No way.

Additionally this is NOT a Season Pass. This is a single DLC broken into two parts. Not like two massive pieces of content - I mean like it's half developed now and has placeholder stuff. And later I expect that Part 2 will just finish what they started. This is a *single* DLC. You CANNOT buy it outside of the "season pass."

Buyer beware. This is not the same quality as Scorched Earth, Aberration, or Extinction.