Recent reviews by grimphoenix

well worth the cost for a few hours of good roguelite fun, if the devs see this review you seriously need to make explosives deal less damage to yourself, particularly at early levels, but other then that pretty great.

second game review,
Feels good, better then current cod zombies for sure, while I have a couple gripes with mechanics I definitely think would be relevant if this title was $60, at $20 this game is well worth the price if you like cod zombies.

The gripes
THE DLC SELECTION OMG
The dlc selection is a problem, I felt the need to tab through every single dlc because the game was more then twice the price with them included, turns out each dlc is just a skin for your character but it feels awful to have the game have a barrier to entry of reading through all those pages, this problem is more on steam then the dev, but if dev could slap a "cosmetic" label on the splash art for the dlc that are cosmetic I think you would get more first time buyers.
I dislike having difficulty selection, I understand it being important for the game to be accessable but the game feels significantly easier then the cod version on almost every setting, I think a few difficulties could be eliminated with just having a difficulty where you press a button to start the next round but maintaining the enemy damage and hp so you can practice the easter eggs.
melee feels weird, quick melee has an odd delay between swings, I understand the balancing effect here but it just feels bad. I would rather have it do less damage and have less delay then the other way around.
I still do not understand how miracles work, particularly the ones that seem like they would be passive, do the new miracles replace the old ones if you dont use them? are they stackable? what actually causes you to gain a miracle point?
I dislike tiered "pack a punch" type mechanics, while it is inoffensive here and allows for weapons to scale to lategame better I would prefer that the tiers be devided into different machines or something else to give more of a feeling of each tier being special besides the first and last tier.
Edit: 5th game, the wonder weapons are a further gripe (I have been grinding the first map, will do other maps once I clear the boss) both the plague and the thunderbolt feel less like "wonderweapons" and more like what cod ww2 special pack a punches were, the same weapon with some additional particle effects and a little bit of AOE, while they are way better then standard weapons numerically (un upgraded they do similar dps to tier 2) I do not think they do enough to feel special compared to standard weapons.
Lastly: honorable soduku. I understand the feeling that you need to balance people extending rounds to do challenges, but honestly, let us just run zombies in circles if we want, dont make them explode for no reason after 5 minutes, its dumb.

BE WEARY! the edition you buy matters a lot!
Zombies Chronicles deluxe is usually the cheapest version with all zombies content!
Avoid zombies Chronicles (normal) edition!
DO NOT BUY THE MTX, infinite gobblegum mods are available free on steam workshop!

Still the best cod zombies, we prey gulf war is good.

TLDR
Buy on sale for zombies, possibly story, pay $20-$30 at most and its honestly a great deal

Long version
So, multiplayer is mostly (entirely) dead, and the loot box shenanigans dont help, dont buy this for multiplayer. Buy it for zombies and the story (story is mediocre but man, is it nostalgic for me who grew up with world at war) the zombies mode gets a lot of complaints from longtime zombies fans but its quite fun, and possibly the last game that really captures the "nazi zombies" experience, everything since has had the "nazi" filed off for corporate reasons, it has a nice dark tone with more grounded fantastical elements that feel like the kind of thing red skull would be studying in a captain america movie. If you want to try to figure out the easter egg yourself rather then going to 8 year old youtube videos this is also pretty much the easiest game to figure out the easter egg for, being that the menu gives you steps for it and there are two "levels" of egg, the "casual" which is pretty simple, there arent any steps where you think to yourself "but what the hell does this have to do with spawning the boss?" everything makes sense. if you chose not to do the thing that ends the game after you beat the casual easter egg you can start in on the "hardcore' easter egg, which includes a lot more elements of what the treyarch eggs have, picking up random garbage and doing things that have nothing to do with anything and secret codes and such.
But really, the only reason I can recommend this game is because of how old it is, it goes on frequent sales and you should never buy it without one, at this point the sale price is just the normal price and the base price really should have been marked down permanently long ago but at least most of the mtx are dead and gone (except the season pass, if you like the base zombies I believe it has more maps, I have not played them) and if you get it for $20-30 for the base game there is far more then $20-30 of good fun to be had.

Edit with double the playtime
Still good, still just doing occasional zombies, beginning to wish I had the season pass after 4 hours of play (♥♥♥♥ games that go "hey this is 8 years old but the game and season pass are still separate, no GOTY edition or anything, screw you") one big negative, difficulty scaling in this particular zombies is way worse then in other zombies, I used to be a player who would chill with a farming weapon/starter weapon for 10/15 rounds just to build points and have fun, you cant really do that here because of the way the zombies health scales as well as the fact that special zombies are tied to both rounds and map completion and it bothers me, I wish more mods existed for this game so that I could tweak this stuff. also the elite enemies start spawning as soon as you get pack a punch, so there's basically never a point like in the treyarch titles where you get to feel op for a few rounds when you first get pap. I speedrun the pap machine and i still feel weak because of scaling and the amount of hp they put on specials.

Final edit:
Uninstalled without booting up since my last review, the fact is that I am still reccomending it, four hours for the $20 i spent and maybe coming back later if i want more of the atmosphere of this zombies, but really the season pass zombies maps should be included in the purchase price at this point as the fact is most of the rest of the game is worth very little. the only reason I am uninstalling is the 100gb install size, I would still stop by for some atmospheric zombies if it didnt take up %10 of my HD

honestly one of the best shooters in recent years, good bosses, procedural generation done right (most things are handmade, but where those handmade things are and the halls connecting them are randomized within very controlled parameters to give more replay-ability) the best level scaling I have seen (areas are locked to the level you are when you enter, so you feel stronger as you play through, and the next area always starts at the right level, this is exploitable but also feels good if ignored) the shooting feels really good weather it is a boss fight or just normal mobs and the things between the shooting (easter eggs hunts, puzzles, secrets, hidden areas) are just the right length and quantity and high enough quality that it mostly does not feel like you want to rush through to get back to shooting (ala destiny) and you feel rewarded for going through to get the bonuses included in most of the challenges (all bosses at end of worlds have alternate kills with differing loot and difficulty, many puzzles and challenges have additional rewards/conditions if you do them a particular way, some items have multiple options for what you do with them and you can skip doing certain quests to turn the quest items into powerful weapons.) the dlc is also extremely solid and worth the money, its a whole new adventure which works into the main plot via procedural generation.
If you just want to know if you should buy the game, stop here, the rest is just a few very specific and pedantic complaints that I would love the devs to see.

The three complaints I have are with the hiding of certain items, the scaling and with certain items that have had "events" to help them drop in the past.
hiding items, this one is simple, most of the additional classes in the game are hidden in ways that you would almost never come across without a guide. the engineer is a prime example of this, it is off the side of the map and difficult to find even with a guide, without I don't know how non data-miners could ever find it. I highly suggest looking up guides to areas to make sure you aren't missing key things like classes or cool weapons.
Level scaling, while done better then anywhere else here is still exploitable and can feel bad if you learn about the exploits without being able to execute them because you already leveled/upgraded your weapons too much, I would prefer to see a "difficulty slider" on adventure mode at the very least, where you can lock the level a few levels lower then yourself but reduce your rewards somehow or set it a couple levels higher for increased rewards.
Lastly event items, this mostly applies to the supplies used to "corrupt" your weaponry, while most of the corrupted gear is mediocre there are a couple really cool ones, but unfortunately farming for the supplies is extremely time consuming now because the event that increased the drop rate to reasonable levels is now over and I am not certain if it will ever return. the current process is to re-roll a certain mission until you get a specific event to spawn, then beat most of the event and reset until the item drops, but because of the way this works its time consuming, and sometimes if you get the event to spawn its still not good enough because the tile is "low intensity" I have 41 hours in-game, I have beaten the campaign, I have two classes and a weapon maxed (and a mutator close to max) so I am near max level scaling but I have never seen one of the special enemies that drop the corrupted bits spawn naturally, I may be unlucky but it seems that the system was balanced around the event and the only way to really use it would be to wait for the event to come back if it ever does.

A strong soulslike, but with the anime twist, the other big gameplay difference is that its a little bit more combo'ey, meaning that unlike elden ring/souls games rather then each button press doing the same thing or a very slight variation (attacking does a left slash, then a right slash at approxamately the same speed and damage) this game you have to learn how each hit of the weapons combo works, and judge based on your stamina weather you will get to the part of the combo that does the actual damage. you can work around this and play more like the souls games by using heavy weapons which do one big hit (note the reviews/discussions asking why the zweihander is so busted, not having to use combos is why) but you will deal a lot less damage then a 1h or spear user playing around their combos.
also hot gas mask vampire zombies with more angst then the average 13 year old, so thats cool.
Also, bandai namco basically screwed the DLC from what I can see, I have only played hellfire knight so far and its just lazy.

Great game at the price, roguelite with poker cards

The one issue I have is some of the progression/unlocks, it runs into the same issue as many roguelites where you have something that unlocks when you have/use a ton of it but your run sucks because you have not unlocked the powerups for that thing until you are forced to use it. in this game for instance its "have 30 hearts in your deck" to unlock the thing that gives your hearts X2 multiplier, but trying to force hearts without the unlock means you are gimping yourself, though it is still fully possible to win this can be a bit annoying.

So, this game is a bid odd, the upgrade system is way more fleshed out then most survivors style games, great right? not really, it makes the early game SUCK, so many of the upgrades feel required to have a decent run, it runs into the same issues as many other survivors games where rerolls feel required to have fun, but moreso because of the addition of the active abilities system (get up to 5 "weapons" each has tags such as "physical" "magical" "frontal" "AOE" or the element they use, upgrades can either be universal but have low numbers, based on a tag with medium numbers, or high power for a specific skill) the problem arises in the early game when you lack rerolls, if you do not have 5 active abilities (including the one you start with) you are forced to chose one of the three and the three active abilities on offer often have nothing to do with your build, as soon as you are forced to chose one of those options that does not work with your build your run is just kind of... over. every level now has a chance for your high rarity drops to be for the skill or tag that you do not use, and because you dont have rerolls you are stuck with it unless you reset the run.
give us some rerolls in the early game, say 3 to start out with, even make them only work for active abilities,
In short, the only efficient way to play before getting tons of rerolls is to start, get a couple skills, reset if the game decides to screw you over, repeat until you get your skill build that doesnt have a "screw you" skill, then go as long as possible to stack up resources. you can replace the skill later but then all levels you have to put into that skill become useless meaning you have wasted a levelup for the level where you took the skill, another to replace it, and every level where you got bullied into leveling that skill or its tags.
its the biggest improvement you can make, if you do that then this game will feel a lot less annoying to start playing.
recommending it in spite of this though, the game is good, the upgrade system is good once you have tons of rerolls, it feels like better vampire survivors in a lot of ways, you just need to push past the early game, which is a shame in my opinion.

borderlands+roguelite, love it