Recent reviews by gwarlek

Very "kind" and wholesome game with impeccable art style. It was drawn so well, in fact, that you can easily take many of the game stills and put them as a wallpaper - on your desktop or in your house. I sadly cannot say the same about the music, but it is easily equalised by an absolute masterpiece of a track "Just looking for warmth (feat. Sigur Rós)", listen to it even if you don't end up playing the game.
It is rather easy in the difficulty department and suitable for children, which makes sense considering the source material. The puzzles and quests, however, are still stimulating enough for you to not get bored.
Overall it was time and money well spent and I recommend this game to anyone looking for a chill beautiful game or nostalgic about Moomins.

Who would have thought that you can take one of the most hated features of videogames - playing inventory tetris in order to fit everything into your backpack - and make it into a phenomenally addicting and thoughtful process that will turn hours into minutes.
If you like finding synergies, optimize and minmax your character builds in RPGs this game is for you.

Release launch was hindered by issues with servers, but nobody will remember that in a few months, because the game is otherwise great. It's a very compelling amalgamation of all current most popular ARPGs that at the same time inherited very few of their annoyances.

Despite what the name of its parent might suggest, the game has no depth compared to other survivors on the market. There is barely any synergy between weapons and items (artefacts), none of the latter I've unlocked so far can change the course of your run substantially.

For some reason you have to do dry runs with weapons you picked for the first time, before you are able to overclock them just to artificially extend playtime.
Without being able to face the direction you want with your mouse, directional weapons such as minigun or shotgun feel miserably unfun with the added insult of your best guns targeting the weakest bug in your vicinity when you actually want to focus your efforts on the boss.

The only novel feature for the genre - digging and shaping the arena - does not seem to impact much and just there to be a convoluted replacement for dodge to get hordes off your back.

All in all, I think for this stage of Early Access this a horribly flawed survivor that wouldn't get even a fraction of attention it got without the DRG wrap. Refunded.

Pretty good set of ideas plucked from various soulslikes and grindy ARPGs and held together by very competent gameplay paired with solid progression and itemisation schemes.
The length of the main story even together with DLCs is pretty humble and probably the result of budget constraints. Instead developers put their bet on replayability of small self-contained parts of the story called adventures. And it kind of works, especially if you are a goal oriented person that enjoys collecting gear pieces you are missing and trying new builds.
Most bosses are really well designed and executed with the exception of few lapses in creativity, where cool moves and abilities were replaced with endless minion spawns. All attacks worth their salt are telegraphed very clearly and completely avoidable. Rolls feel good and fair, perhaps even forgiving.
Arsenal is not enormous, but supports enough variety of playstyles to have something for anyone's taste. And that is further boosted by build enabling armour sets and swappable mods.
Overall it's a good game and now I am looking forward to picking up Remnant 2 at some point as Gunfire Games proven that their formula works.

Not ready and I lost any hope it will ever be.
I'd forgive this game a lot if the core gameplay was fun or at least was moving in the right direction, but nothing of note was done in that department in the past year of development. Gameplay is in the state of placeholder or proof of concept, but someone decided it's good enough and everyone moved onto adding new weapons and maps and deem it fit for release under v1.0 banner. Gunfights are boring without any rise in heart rate and the only suspense if a silent flanker will beam you right in the head or let you explore those dull corridors a bit longer. Interfacing with doors should be the focal point of any SWAT game, but it feels so clunky I don't want any of it and rather just blow them straight off the hinges. Okay, let's assume for a second you didn't die to a thrice VAC banned for aimbotting suspect and managed to clear the map from the hostiles, now you are in for a special treat of looking for the last civilian sitting inside some nook for the next 20 minutes.
Just no.

I had very little exposure to WH40K universe prior to this game and it never really interested me nor games based on it. The universe is caricaturely grotesque and seemingly only operating in extremes, which is why it is somewhat hard for me to suspend the disbelief and treat it as anything but a parody exploiting all the tropes. However this game provides the player with necessary nuance and detail for it to not be considered a WWE-analogue of dark fantasy and probably as good of an introduction someone uninitiated like me is going to get.

The starting story hook is pretty strong, game mechanics feel fresh, music is amazing, companions are colourful and dialogues don't put me to sleep.

I'll probably update this later when I finish the game, but as of right now wanted to get a positive review out of the way while it still matters because I like what Owlcat is doing and want to support them in small ways such as this.

Darktide is a very fun and downright addictive game, can't get enough of it. It takes a few hours of somewhat boring early levels and difficulties to get to the good bits, but I am glad I pushed through those. I am also happy that I bought it when I did, because without talents trees there would be less room for manoeuvre to make your own customised to your needs builds, as well as all sorts of quality of life improvements that were added in the past year like shared currency.

As for the negatives, I had a few crashes and networking issues. Also the game is somewhat reliant on mods to provide players with seemingly basic functionality like scoreboard or tracking blessings and UI customisation. Crafting and itemisation require some nerding out to understand and can take you many cycles of refreshing vendors and farming resources before you roughly make a weapon you want. And even more so for perfect items.

Regardless of the downsides, I am looking forward to what developers will have for year two because the base game is very enjoyable and the rest can be improved upon.

Jag fattar, livet var svårt år 1501. Tror du mig inte? Lyssna då på vad den spetälskesjuke mannen hade att säga: "Ohhh... aj aj..."

You know it, I know it, everybody knows it - the game is really amazing and a worthy successor of the legendary franchise. Saying that, here I will focus on the negatives, which I want to see amended in the inevitable Ultimate Enhanced Definitive Edition:tm:.

The game's difficulty is rather easy. I started on Balanced not knowing what to expect but it quickly became apparent that Tactician is the way to go if I don't want to get bored overcoming supposedly challenging encounters in just a few turns and miss all interesting mechanics bosses have in store for me. On the other hand artificial ways to prolong the encounters like Sanctuary or many stacks of Unstoppable are a bit unimaginative. I think Balanced should be bumped up a bit, otherwise it feels more like an ARPG where you're slaying hordes of enemies untouched and not CRPG.

Balance and itemisation are all over the place. There are way too many "named" items that either essentially useless or not filling any niche, like rings that give you one use of some low level spell per rest. Two-handed melee weapons trump other archetypes for close range fighting. Bows hit harder than melee two-handers without the downside of facing enemies plus you get to use double damage arrows for most enemy types and have much higher attack rolls. Feats are many, but useful ones are few. Among useful ones Tavern Brawler is straight up broken and single handedly carries throwing and punching builds. I don't know if it is by design or unintentional, but curious if it will be addressed and how. Overall I would say the build diversity is not great compared to recent instalments of Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder.

Act 3 pacing feels really weird after Act 1 and 2. At first there is so much to do it's overwhelming and exciting but very soon the prospect of doing all those quests becomes daunting process of ticking all checkboxes, especially once you've reached level cap.

Where Larian really dropped the ball is the ending. It's a tradition for RPGs since the dawn of the genre to have ending slides that go over "what comes after" for each particular choice that players made along their journey, so we feel like we've made long lasting impact on the world. Besides the fates of few companions we were offered none of that. The purpose of all those allies you've gathered on your way to the final encounter was to give you buffs and one time abilities that you can live without. What I can't live without is knowing what happened to all of them after final credits rolled. One or two lines on each is all it takes. This isn't an arthouse film where everyone is supposed to devise their own conclusions.

And finally, can't help but note that resisting illithid powers for the entire game was essentially moot as there is no benefits of doing so or even acknowledgement that you tried to "retain your humanity", which was really disappointing after pre-release marketing tried to convince us that it's going to be an important internal battle almost like red-blue pill.

Despite my issues with it, BG3 is one of the best games in the last decade and all critique comes from a place of love.