Recent reviews by Peent

Alright, the review protest worked and Sony relented on forcing players to make/link a PSN account.
So in good faith for Arrowhead alone, I'm replacing my negative review with a positive one. As of May 6, 2024, the game is fun! The content packs have been decent.

It has a lot of potential but it really needs some big improvements. Mostly in game balance and combat feel. The exploration and building are good. I enjoyed the game in the beginning when everything was new and novel and exciting, but the further we progressed and the more I became accustomed to things, the more frustrating and shallow it felt.

Melee sucks, nothing flows well and you're basically just spamming attack. I constantly ran into issues where if something interrupted my blocking input it wouldn't come up at all. So I'm just standing there expecting my guard to come up as soon as it'll let me while I'm holding down block and it never does. Or it'd drop the input? I don't know, I feel like the game only accepts an input when you press it, rather than constantly while it's held.

Melee attacks also drag you forward REALLY hard, especially if you're a specific distance away from an enemy. Annoying to push both yourself and an enemy off a wall with only 3 attacks.

Parrying is.. well, it kinda works but many enemy attacks happen so fast and in a tight string that you're either going to parry the first attack or just not bother. Especially with the timing on your own animations.

Magic, specifically staff spells are incredibly strong even if it's slow to start. There's really not a whole lot of reason to not use magic as it stands.

Talents on the skill tree feel weird as well. You have to unlock the ability to do relatively basic melee things? (Backstab, jump attack, and whatever the strong frontal attack is when you've broken an enemy's guard.)
Meanwhile you can get unlock explosive mana-based arrow shots, multi-arrow shots, or just make your magic crits chain lightning to everything.

Also the crafting investment for arrows is a little silly as a core combat type. Again, why do any of that when you can throw a fireball.

Stamina is another sore point. It shouldn't be used outside of combat. Your glider is already limited distance wise by height and falling speed. Mining and chopping trees is already limited by durability and your own finite amount of time here on this planet. You can't do any BoTW-style wall climbing, so stamina isn't important there as a way to limit where the player can go yet. All it does is make the game slower and rougher on the whole right now. It feels fine in the context of dodging, that's about it.

Mining in this game isn't a quick endeavour. It was really, really annoying to have to stand there and wait for my stamina to come back just to continue mining again. Or the very limited durability decide that no, you can't gather here anymore after making the trek to the resource.

Durability. It's awful in this game for melee weapons and tools. The first big castle town area of the game, you WILL be going back to your base several times just to repair your melee weapon. You need to go back anyways because without your Well Rested buff your stamina regen sucks.

It's like they looked at existing game systems and ideas and implemented them without understanding what makes them feel good or why they're there in the first place.


There is potential here. It's just genuinely very early access and it needs some serious polish and refinement.

if you like exploring, building, and casting spells? I think you'd enjoy it as is. If you're looking for something with engaging combat to sink your teeth into, hold off and see if this improves.

Absolutely wonderful and unexpected co-op puzzle game. I recommend going in as blind as possible. Just play it, it's worth it.

It had some fun moments, especially as a co-op game. The best parts were just roaming around, finding loot, interesting setpieces, and doing random side missions as we blundered into them. The story was pretty hit or miss, I was mostly engaged with cutscenes involving Anton and his son.

Spoilers past this point.

The biggest problem I had with the story was Juan, and how the ending of the game has you buddy-buddy up with him again for the weekly target post-game content loop.

On our playthrough we went against him on the decision to let the sleezeball businessman go for a huge payout. He ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the big assassination by trying to shoot a child. And we as the main character just accept all this, don't even MENTION it in the post-game intro? Maybe more of this unfolds as you do go through the post-game mission loop, but I wasn't interested personally. It really made the ending feel bad. I can live with not getting gratification because of Anton's final moments, stories don't have to end storybook satisfying. But it has to at least make sense, and Anton's actions tracked with how messed up of a person he was.

Not confronting Juan is just one-size-fits all story wrapup for the sake of a smaller workload. Which I can understand from a development view, but as a player it was pretty bad.

It's not a terrible game, but it's for sure not worth the current price point. I didn't know it had a "hero pass" DLC planned this early after a particularly weak launch. (I was gifted the game and hadn't read into the game.)

Over 125 CAD for the Full Edition? Yeah no.

A delightfully cute game that really had me captured. Lost in the joy of exploration and play, not worrying about things. A touching story to boot.

Legitimately the most fun I've ever had in VR, plus it's quite the workout when you really get into it.

Wish there was some sort of modding support for increased longevity and replayability, but there's a good selection of songs and weapon types to master to keep you coming back.

It feels so damn FUN to play. Combat is energetic, the animations have great weight and motion, the music slaps - It's all come together to be super satisfying!

It wants you to understand the flow and technique of combat fairly quickly though, so expect some difficulty and be on your toes.

Edit after beating game:
So, there are a couple complaints. It's not a perfect game, I still heartily recommend it, but I'm going to talk about things that may put some people off.

The flow of the game - Combat is hard and action packed, levels are all puzzle/mazes. The puzzle concepts themselves are strong, the problem comes in when some levels just feel too big when there's little variation on the puzzle mechanic for that floor. When you're going around in circles, staring at the same tilesets with fairly harsh colours, it can be a bit much.

Personal gripe, the alternate gauntlets you can unlock to change your attack style, they're really drastic in change and I struggle to wonder how half of them can be employed given how fast the game's combat is.

Also I found a lot of the Specialty Techniques kind of not worth bringing along. Maybe I just wasn't employing them well?

Anyway, it's still an immensely fun game with a kickin' soundtrack and a style I really appreciate. Would recommend, but consider the puzzle and colour palette issue - They could be a dealbreaker for some.

Strongly recommended. Great price point, nice visuals, and adrenaline-pumping if you're the kind of person who wants to go fast and push the flow of action as hard as possible. Also acceptable if you're the kind of person to take your time. Very good action all around, and the audio pushes all the right buttons.

As of writing this, Bullet Visibility Assistance is only in the Beta branch. This is mandatory - for as much as I enjoy this game, the enemy's projectiles get completely lost in the barrage of explosions and effects you cause.

When you figure out the wonderful ways to make spells synergize, your brain goes from smooth to wrinkled beyond belief.