Recent reviews by Malavok

Starting with the bad first, since this is EA and is being worked on:
-There needs to be an option to make nights less dark. On an OLED it’s totally ridiculous, can’t build or see anything.
-There also needs to be an option to reduce fog intensity in the shroud, similarly it can be too difficult to see what's going on.
-Building controls need work, they need a more zoomed out build mode. Adding a roof is way too finicky.
-Better targeting controls are needed in combat.

The good:
-World is super fun to explore.
-Good sense of progression with quests and leveling up.
-Despite rough controls, building IS super fun and there's a lot you can do, love that you can dig underground.
-Combat is enjoyable so far, just needs more

This game has promise but just needs more work and QOL features. Excited to see the world when it's complete, it's already really big.

The world is enormous and beautiful. The Pal designs are adorable. The gameplay loop is addictive. This is already a large and fun game. I can't wait to see what they do with it going forward!

Not looking great yet...

Only 1 save file.
Lots of graphical issues like flickering shadows and shadow striping that are hard to minimize even at max settings.
Horrible voice options for arisen/pawn.
Pawn is super freaking annoying, worse than in first game. I already want to kill him after an hour with him, yet I loved my pawn in DDDA.
The AI is somehow even dumber than DDDA. The first thing my pawn did was run up to a goblin throwing a rock, get hit by the rock, then run away. I asked for his help as a goblin got to me, and he just ran in circles while I died.
Photo mode is awful. The biggest joke of a photo mode I've ever seen.
Camera is annoying.
Performance is terrible.
Can't customize keybinds.
In-game currency microtransactions. Really? Not just regular little DLCs, but actual currency purchases disguised as "DLC". Yikes.

Going to try Palworld and Enshrouded while I consider whether to go beyond 2 hours and lose my chance for a refund.

Somehow it's an online game yet you can lose all of your save data? Totally useless! Don't waste your time unless you're ready to lose everything you've been doing when something goes wrong. Wish I had never purchased. I hate these "online" games that aren't really online. Either be fully online like an MMO or don't.

If you love Skyrim, you should play this! I'm amazed how much I'm enjoying it. It feels like playing Skyrim for the first time again. The intro was a little off-putting, I didn't get sucked in until I made it to Ark. Now I can't put it down.

Skyrim is my favorite game of all time, by a huge margin. I'm pretty picky with mods that include quests, stories, or new locations. Enderal is by far the best "mod" I've played, Its a completely separate game made in Skyrim's engine. The game is quite large, I predict I'll be at 150 hours before I finish (playing on the hardest difficulty).

The dungeons are phenomenal, the environments are really cool and diverse, and the quests are pretty interesting. The in-game books are really interesting reads, too. I wouldn't say Enderal is "better" than Skyrim, but it's certainly almost as good. The main quest is definitely better than Skyrim's main quest. The game feels quite balanced and I do like that food is actually super useful. There are a lot of possible character builds you can do, but you have to plan them out a bit in advance. You can really only focus on 2-3 talent trees and 3-4 main skills, along with a couple "crafting" skills (enchanting, alchemy, etc.)

My only complaints are some bad voice acting here and there (but most of it is surprisingly good), a weak intro, and some rather boring talents. The talents do not feel as rewarding as Ordinator in Skyrim, but they're ok.

Oh yea, and most graphics mods will work with Enderal, so you can make it look very pretty. The game will tell you on launch if a mod is not compatible. I use all the same texture mods that I do in Skyrim, along with some UI mods.

I think this may be in my top 10 favorite games ever, and it's free. As fun as Starfield can be, it's not a fantasy game and it's not Elder Scrolls. This is something that is very close to Elder Scrolls and can help fill in that gap until ES6 comes out in a million years.

All right, have to type this fast since I just want to be playing this game CONSTANTLY!

This game is amazing. It will easily be one of my favorite games of all time and eat up thousands of hours of playtime over the next few years. Don't let any negative online discussion dissuade you from trying this game, most did not give it enough time. It has a slow and boring start. The first few locations are dull, the first main quests are boring, and the UI is confusing. The game takes a while to get into (20-30 hours before it really hooks you hard), but once you get there, you'll be glad you stuck with it. They aren't kidding when they say this game is a "slow burn". If you're wanting to 100% it, it's probably going to take 1,000 hours. I feel like I'm just getting to the tip of the iceberg at 70 hours, so 20 hours to get into it is nothing.

The quests in the game are by far the best Bethesda has ever done. There are so many fun and exciting quest chains. Of course there are still many small quests, but also a lot of long quest chains, random events, choices to make, etc. The main quest gets very interesting towards the end, too.

The planets are beautiful, even the more barren moons often having incredible views of planets in the sky or hidden random quests or locations. It's fun just to explore them all and take photos (any photos in photo mode will show up on your load screens, too). Surveying can be a satisfying "goal" that gives you XP and money and can take anywhere from 5 minutes to hours per planet.

Shipbuilding is complex but super fun, letting you change the exterior and interior of your ship, allowing you to have different livable spaces inside and customize weaponry, engines, and crew.

Outpost building is similarly fun to shipbuilding, less complex but still customizable, and allows you to build up to 24 bases on any beatiful location you find. The mod potential for furniture and buildings here is HUGE.

Combat is better than Skyrim or Fallout, though still needs some improvement. Nevertheless, it's a lot of fun. You can shoot enemy packs and causing them to explode, you can shoot barrels near them and blow them up, shoot from the sky, watch their bodies fly on low-g planets, etc. Stealth works similarly to Skyrim and can be really fun to snipe from afar, but it's challenging. The "powers" you get in the game, which there are 24 of, are VERY fun.

Talents are great. There are SO many you will always be wanting to level up to get more. I want at least level 100 for all the talents I'm after.

Music is excellent. The peaceful music that plays while exploring moons is just perfection.

Graphics are overall quite good, with a few typical Creation Engine flaws and a lack of certain options such as brightness. Characters look great and so do interiors, landscapes, and planets, but sometimes the aliasing can be rough or there can be pop-in. The creatures (there are SO many) and the weather effects are awesome.

A few negatives. The UI is pretty atrocious in spots and extremely cumbersome. Ship combat is pretty bad until you're able to spend a lot of money getting a more maneuverable and powerful ship. Locations can be VERY repetitive. Bethesda decided to randomize a lot of locations on planets, meaning you will get many of the same little locations over and over. Still, there's a lot of cool stuff to find if you just keep exploring, and the landscapes are worth it alone. Melee combat is pretty lackluster, I wish they had done more with it. There are also not very many melee weapons compared to guns.

Overall once this game sucks you in, you'll be glad you stuck with it. It's unlike any other game out there. I'm hoping mods can fix a few of the issues (UI, few melee weapons, need for more randomized locations, etc.) and make this one of the greatest games ever.

Will probably be returning this and picking it up later on sale or when there's (hopefully) DLC. I'm a little surprised people have hyped this up so much. It's not a bad game, but far from "the best cRPG ever made" (which everyone was saying weeks before it even came out, so I was already skeptical of this claim)

Pros:
-Excellent graphics, style, and presentation
-Good DOS2-style combat
-Wonderful voice acting and characters

Cons:
-Piss poor character customization. So few options! Have you guys not played many other games? This is on the level of Pillars of Eternity or DOS2
-Can't customize your party like you could in BG1/2, even though everyone asked for this
-Can't customize your portraits, even though a lot of people wanted this
-Still a lot of bugs and performance issues even after being in EA for years
-Only 12 character levels and you barely get any choice when leveling up (thank 5e, 3.5 was so much better)
-Strange combat balance, either unbelievably easy or frustratingly difficult
-Can't even choose who you want to use in dialogue options. This is 2023 for god's sake. Even NWN2 expansion has this option. How is this not implemented?
-Exploration isn't that interesting. These environments are pretty dull, reminiscent of DOS2.

Ehhhhh, this game is okay. I'm giving it a thumbs up, but this is a very lukewarm thumbs up.

DQ 11 starts off VERY strong. I still believe that DQ 8 was the best in the series, followed by DQ 9. I feel like DQ 11 is a little bit overrated, but it's not a bad JRPG.

The good: The first act of the game is overall pretty excellent. The combat system is strategic and challenging. The graphics are gorgeous (get the 4K textures mod). The characters are likable. The voice acting is excellent. The story is pretty good. The double combat speed is a lifesaver. In fact, I would never be able to finish this game at default combat speed. Who has time to waste on that??

The bad: The areas start off nice, but become boring and a little bit corny. I don't mind fantasy games taking some inspiration from real-life places but this feels more like a theme park of Earth culture. And some of the locations are just downright cheesy, especially Phnom Nohn and Lonalulu (seriously?) They reuse almost all the same areas from Act 1 three times! Act 2 and Act 3 are just Act 1 areas all over again with boring quests. End game is not great. DQ 8 and DQ 9 had better endgame. The trials are nothing more than boss arenas or copy/paste of dungeons you already did (there is seriously so much copy/paste repetition in this game it's not even funny). It's almost TOO easy to get to 99 due to the Electro Light ability. You can just summon 1 million XP worth of metal slimes and level up from 60-99 in a few hours. Also the music is by far the worst in any DQ game, I guess the composer went senile. But you can switch to some old DQ themes, which helps.

The really bad: Tickington is stupid. It's so painfully bad that I couldn't even bother. I get that they were going for retro, but my god could they use a half decent combat interface? After 2 levels I was done. No way I have the patience for hard boss fights in that place.

Overall, I had a good time, but once I beat the final boss of Act 3, I had enough. Act 2 and Act 3 were just not the greatest due to the fact that it feels like you're doing the same thing you just did, two more times.

This game needs a much better tutorial and a quest log. It has a LOT of promise, but for now I'm going to thumbs down until these two things are improved. Even the "tutorial" option in the menu barely gives you any information. Where is the full glossary/reference like you find in other 4X games? How are we supposed to look stuff up? There isn't even a lot of info about the game play online... For example what are all the different types of resources and what are their icons. Then there's no quest log, which is extremely problematic when I accepted a quest 2 days ago and then don't even remember I had a quest in the first place or where to go / what to do.

Game has a nice, clean UI, beautiful art, decent music, and very very fun combat. It just needs some more basic interface improvements to make it easier to manage everything and learn the basics. That feels like something that could be added by a dedicated UI person in a month or two. The combat is self-explanatory, but the kingdom management and map exploration are not. This is not a game I'll be refunding or giving up on, I want to play it. I'm just a little frustrated and hope the devs can turn this into something amazing.

First of all, I would definitely recommend saving the DLC quests until after you beat the main game, it gives you a lot to do post-game. Now, coming from someone who hated the first Borderlands game, I think Borderlands 3 is incredible. The gameplay is vastly improved over the previous games. There are a ton of guns and they are ridiculously fun to find and use. The combat is challenging but not overly difficult or frustrating. The UI has also been significantly improved and modernized over the previous games. If I had to rank all the BL games that I've played, BL3 would be at the top due to the sheer fun of the gunplay, followed by BL2 and then Tiny Tina's, with TPS and BL1 far below the rest.

The game is huge. I've been playing over 40 hours already and am only about halfway through the main story, not the mention all the DLC, although I have been collecting everything on each map. The environments are extremely beautiful, large, and varied, with many different planets and biomes. The first planet is by far the least exciting, so get through it to see all the other cool places in the game. There are only 4 characters to choose from, but given how long the game is I think this is fine. I'm loving playing as the robot guy. The talent trees are fun and allow for a ton of customization in how you play your character. There are also a modest amount of skins for characters and guns, providing some decent customization there too, although I think there should be more gun skins than there are.

The only negatives are that story and dialogue are pretty mediocre and annoying, and like all Gearbox games the humor is extremely hit or miss. But those are small cons that are more than made up for by the amazing fun to be had in the gameplay. If you find yourself getting bored by the lack of interesting guns in other FPS games, this is THE game for fun and varied guns.