Recent reviews by JUUDOLF

Don't get me wrong, there's still quite a bit of janky mechanics, the localization and voice acting is subpar and the game is still being developed. In fact this game should be labeled as "early access." And as for the gameplay, I can see many people find the resource gathering as a chore.

But my God, does it feel good to reach a point where the hardest difficulties become a stroll as you build up an outpost that's a straight up "Tower of Hellfire" that just deletes any and all enemies the game throws at you.

PS: For those who know what is what; Heheh, 10 Hellfires go brrrrrrrr.

I want it on record right now that as a fan of the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy, I despise this one. Somehow the people who made this game completely missed the memo on what made Crash Bandicoot fun. Forget about Tawna and Dingodile, I can't care about them when the rest of the game is this infuriating if not plain broken.

You're supposed to run around, jump on boxes, do some platforming, have a few rides here and there, find some hidden gems that you can actually see and get clues on how to get them, the lot. Meanwhile this game makes everything just frustrating for all the wrong reasons. From puzzles that require precise timing with WOODEN BOXES THAT SPEW FLAMES with inconsistent flames that seeming randomize upon death and thus making the puzzle locked until you die and see if RNGesus is on your side next time to actually annoying hidden boxes that are straight up out of your view or you simply cannot see as them they're hidden in spots you expect to be part of background or straight up death pits. Even the very basic mechanics are occasionally just straight up broken. How can a game studio justify being able to land on a Nitro box, the one thing some people have accepted as a "universal box of instant death on touch" and just bounce off it while (although rarely) your spin attack deals no damage to basic boxes when you spin right next to them?!

Just... no. This is just not a fun platformer that runs itself dry faster than I can drink myself to alcoholism to keep my sanity through this excuse for a Crash Bandicoot -game.

---EDIT 23.5.2024---

Done. Took me just under 78 hours to get through the slog-fest. And boy howdy do I just despise the way how the people who made this game decided to force people to playing their garbage. Just because they gained access to Crash Bandicoot's IP doesn't mean they were good and sensible at making a Crash game!

Like I said before, doing things like smashing all crates and completing a time trial are fine, that's what Crash is all about. But the way how some of the crates are hidden in a way that they're straight up impossible for some people, including me, to find without some help. Platforms you simply cannot see in what you assume to be
nothing but a pit of death were the biggest offense in this regard. And then there were the hidden gems. I understand that the idea behind them was for them to be hidden, but straight up hiding them inside walls so that they are completely out of view simply enraged me.

The way how the devs of this game also force out more playtime out of people by flipping the levels, adding horrible Instagram filters and moving the hidden gem was also a horrid design choice. Especially the filters. For example, who the actual fffffF*** allowed the comic book -filter to be a thing? It's a genuine health hazard as that filter alone gave me two headaches. Yes, they're that bad. Go ahead and look up some comparisons, preferably videos, so that you can see how much of a genuine eye sore the filters were. Granted, not all of them were bad, like removing the colors of the world and having you spray paint that colors the world was a charming idea... but then they screwed it up by making the spray of paint look like clown diarrhea that covers you so much that you can't properly see what you're doing every time you try attacking something. At worst when the camera was a bit too close, the paint effect would cover pretty much your entire screen!

It also has to be said that after almost four years since the release of the game, the devs should've been able to fix some of the actual bugs in the game. For example the level "Crash Landed." Alien world, wild animals, weird alien environment, all that jazz. Oh hey, there's slippery goop here that replicates the behavior of ice. That's fair enough, can't expect for what is effectively a wild alien jungle to have clean floors. But when that goop bugs out so that you can stand on regular ground normally but your movement during every single frame you're in the air after something like jumping has the physics of slippery motion and they've been amplified to be even worse, that's when you know that the devs simply either do not care or they've too inept to fix a bug that is more than enough to kill a run. Or what about Cortex's blaster? Did no-one think that it might be a major inconvenience for the projectile to have a larger hitbox that the model of said projectile, especially when in some places you might end up shooting at walls next to you? Or how about those spinning wooden discs in Cortex's castle you have to jump on? Did nobody think that it might be more than just a whiff of bulls*** when you can fall through them and die to either the pit of acid or the spiked trim surrounding the wooden part? I could go on with other examples but I think I've written enough about such run-killers already.

Speaking of the runs, I have one question. N. Sanely Perfect Relics. Complete a level while you collect 100% of the crates and without dying single time. Why? Why just? What was the point of that besides inconveniencing the players and forcing yet more playtime out of them? We have to smash all the crates and complete time trials already, which require you to speedrun the level without dying. Just thought I'd mention and especially question that "design choice" as well.

The last thing that genuinely got so far up my nose that I considered ditching the entire game early were the time trials. No, the time trials themselves aren't the issue, they just need a bit of muscle memory. But the way how the levels live differently, that's what got me. Most commonly at the start of almost every level, there are things like platforms and static hazards moving and performing other attacks in their own timed cycles. If you start a time trial at the wrong 1/10th of a second, you will most likely mess up the timing you need to run through the level from the start. In other words the devs made sure to inconvenience the players from the very start of the trials by not having a prefixed starting position of the map objects. Sure was funny to watch the ghost of a dev to just run though a moving platform that was conveniently just sitting there in my way right at the start. And the rest of the levels were rarely any better, especially when you, as a player, don't know where exactly the triggers for things like activating platforms are, unlike the devs. And I swear, after following some of the actual dev ghosts (the ones you need to beat to gain purple time trial relics), they just live in their version of the game. Damage-boosting through hazards with Aku Aku is one thing, but when you're literally doing the exact same things at the exact same time with the dev ghost to a point that you spend almost as much time as you'd spend foreplaying a girl but still get f***ed by moving platforms because they're not synced with the dev at all, then you're going to get mad. Because at that point, that's it, you've lost.

But now I'm done and out of this mistake of a purchase and an insult to the fun the Crash games are supposed to. And thanks to this game, I may never buy another platformer again because of how inexcusable annoying this game was forced to be. Or, well, I might. Probably will the next time I see a platformer that looks like actual fun and I happen to have a platformer-itch, but I will never ever buy another game that has something to do with Beenox or Toys for Bob.

It's nice to play a game that surprises me positively for the first time in a long while.

Graphics are candy, taking some inspiration from Borderlands 3 by the looks of it, getting all the perks and items is a helluva trip, devs recognized that collecting weapon cards by getting enough kills with them and enemy cards by getting their card to drop randomly by killing said enemies for the "museum" was gonna be more of a chore than fun so they made it possible to unlock those cards by buying them from an optional vendor, zero microtransactions and music that was so good that even I decided to keep it on. Of course some builds just aren't viable and some of the weapons are pretty much just straight up hot garbage. But with with a total of 73 weapons, some of them must be bad. Looking at you, Dragoon Mortar, you know why.

My only few gripes with this game are as follows:

#1: The way how enemies sometimes seem to shoot at up to 90° angles (especially when playing with a friend), most commonly the shots occasionally coming out from the side of their guns.

#2: Enemies and especially bosses having a complete tracking capability through things like Ranger's cloaking. If a boss activates an attack and targets Ranger, the boss will keep attacking the Ranger even if he activates decoy and invisibility before the attack begins visually. In other words, activating invisibility and decoy(s) a wasted effort if you're already being targeted.

#3: Some of the functions have a bit of an overlap, causing some mild confusion/irritation, especially with doors and grappling hook. You press E to open a door and you press E while looking at virtually any surface that's close enough to use the grappling hook. Double-tapping on a door, be it by accident or on purpose, tends to result to you getting yanked through the door and in the middle of the next group of enemies. Whoops.

#4: The color of the robot in victory/fail screens does not match the color of your chosen class and is always the default yellow instead. This is a tiny yet efficient enough of a method to activate an OCD reaction.

Yes, #4 is serious BTW. That's how hard I had to look to find faults in this game. Not a single crash during my playtime is a good sign. That said, I'm already waiting for the Endless Update to eventually come out because I want to see how far I can push both myself and the game and which one breaks first!

Good work!

Do not buy. Straight up do not buy.

I caved in after 8 years of laughing and my God, I would've been better off saving my money. Not only is the game boring with repetitive missions and the exact two types of space stations (normal and pirate base) in every inhabited solar system, but the way how things like game mechanics, from missions to just trying to buying or selling equipment, are handled and the bugs are just unacceptable.

For starters, the very start of the game is just a slog of a tutorial that has you run on a planet for 30 minutes. Alright fair enough, a slow introduction and time to admire the world. Then you get your first ship off the ground and you think you're good to go. lmao nope. The game then proceeds to spam tutorials, mission and build instructions left and right. Okay, so you suddenly have a settlement you absolutely didn't even want but the game doesn't give you an option to decline and be done with the quest. What's that? You want another star ship? Alright then, first you just have to cough up a few million Units (one of the currencies in the game). You scrape enough money for some ship, any ship, but it's not enough. Don't worry, you can trade in your old ship to get a new one! So then you find one that has more space than your old ship and you go for it because you're just begging for more inventory space. That's cool, just remember to empty out your cargo and your upgrades, otherwise you straight up lose all of them!

Skip forwards by about 20 hours, you finally figure out that you can scavenge some ship from wrecks if you're lucky. You pile up a few of them, fix them up enough so that they can fly and you wanna sell them. You sell ships by taking them to a space station and salvaging them, which actually gives you a pile of items which you have to sell. Fair enough. Wanna sell another one but not the ship the game decided to default on? Okay, just walk to the other side of the hangar to use a portal, teleport to your base, call in the ship you want to sell, go back through the portal to the space station and back to the salvaging station. That's gonna take you about two minutes and two loading screens and that's as efficient as you're gonna be when "selling" starships. Because you can't change your ship while in a space station and there's no menu to select which ship you want to fiddle with. This is the kind of hoop-jumping you'll have to deal with.

By this point, you will have learned a few key facts about this game, including but not limited to:

-exploring planets becomes an annoying repetitive chore after 15 planets (especially if you try to truly 100% a planet, which will then require you to scan ever single rock and leaf while not highlighting anything un-scanned besides animals),

-space battles are always the same nausea-inducing garbage: the enemy rushes and flies by you, does some fancy maneuvers and if you use target lock-on, your ship will spend about 2/3 of your life just spinning around trying to even see the target, during which they tend have turned around and come at you again, repeating the process,

-trading becomes a game of buying goods from a shop of a space station, jumping through a portal from that station to another, selling the goods from the first station, buying the new goods the locals are selling, repeat,

-finding any sort of upgrade to anything is just luck, because there are no ship shops, starships must be bought or traded for in stations and platforms or scavenged, and you're just buying pigs in bags when you try to shop for weapon and equipment upgrades, as the stats are not shown until you have them installed,

-the largest amount of population you'll see in the galaxy is in space stations, the best the rest of the universe has to offer are trade platforms on planets, the next best thing you'll get are outposts that populate up to two NPCs so the universe is still quite barren,

-you're not allowed to be neat because there is no sorting or searching of any kind: no inventory sorting, no searching for something specific in the Catalogue (basically an index of all the knowledge you've discovered, from crafting recipes to trade items and from animals to solar systems), none of that. the best you can do is go through your caches and just throw anything anywhere and hope to Gabe you spot what you need when the need arises and

-you will come across some obscure limitations like not being able to build a house in the settlement that was forced upon you. Just to name a few things.

Even during the event where I got to play the game for free, a mission required you to fly through a black hole. Easy enough, right up until the black hole didn't work. Saw about a dozen people having the same problem with the same hole. But fear not, apparently it caught up to me for some unknown reason not 15 minutes ago as of writing this review. Made my way to the center of the galaxy, ~3,000 light years away on the closest solar system I was able to get to, decided to go check the Anomaly (a big-ass space station you can just call in because reasons), tried to fly back outside, WHOOPS, the game decided that I actually wanted to warp 700,000 LIGHT YEARS AWAY TO A SECTOR I LEFT THREE HOURS AGO!

This is straight up atrocious. Once I'm done with this pile of junk, I'll happily continue laughing at this game and people who support it.

--- EDIT 28 Feb ---

Done. And wow, what a fantastic challenge when you have to sit in your car for a total of 12 hours on an extreme planet. The challenge of survival doesn't really exist when one upgrade negates the suggested challenge, don't you think? But I mean hey, whatever it takes to force out some more play hours to make the stats of your game look better I guess.

My previous points still stand but along the way, I realized something: this game must've been made with console players in mind. Because when you think about it, how many other games like this exist on Playtation or XBox? Especially when you consider the fact that after 8 years, Hello Games hasn't even bothered to make the final jump to the core of the galaxy work properly if you're using mouse and keyboard.

No seriously, if you try to use the galaxy map with a mouse and keyboard, the keybindings don't work. The only way I was able to jump the core was by selecting it using my controller. "Oh you're trying to follow the mission path to the core? Yeah, sorry, you can't select it, try one of the finicky tricks people on the internet are using. Wait, you have controller? Oh sh*t, nevermind, just push the stick towards the core and we'll select it for you!"

The option to select the next jump destination for your selected mission pops up and works perfectly when you so much as touch your controller.

Yeah I'm done. Goodbye No Man Should buy.

You know the game has done something right when a single kill is enough to put a smile on your face. Try keeping it on when there's another thousand baddies coming your way in every mission.

While the game is still indeed a work in progress, a bucket-full of QoL-features still missing (including the game itself giving a thorough explanation on what each of the used terms and mechanics mean exactly) and top-end difficulty getting quite ridiculous if not impossible, it's still a f***ing excellent show. And if you say you're not smiling when you vaporize a horde of 40something enemies with three shots from a Plasma Gun, you're a liar. My biggest problem is that as someone who makes videos, I can't listen to the in-game music to make editing easier for myself. Case and point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS1KMzSc5M4

I enjoyed revisiting the franchise of Robocop and being what was essentially a terminator. Especially when I reached the point where I managed to upgrade the Auto-9 to what was essentially a semi-auto sniper rifle and then to a fully-automatic handheld minigun that needed no reloading, it was great. Not to mention all the upgrades I managed to get for Robo himself.

But when I reached the end of the game, it gave me a slap in the face. A hard slap that stopped me from playing the story again: no NG+. After going through the game, spending all time completing everything you possibly can, the game only took 17 hours for me to complete. And I was fully expecting there to be an option to start over with your upgrades. No. Instead the game puts you on the final checkpoint before the final battle if you select "Continue" in the main menu. The only other actual option you have is to load a previous auto-save from an earlier point of the game. And, you guessed it, the game remembers what upgrades you had at that point.

There are so minor bugs here and there, all the characters are as stiff as Robo himself, the story gets a bit bland and stuff you weren't prepared for happens, sure, I can forgive those issues. They just remind me of the original Robocop movie with their brow-raising details and questionable factors. But here, when the devs essentially take away the things you've done and then expect a you to start over just to see other parts of the Fallout -style ending slides, no, the fun-factor is just taken away along with your upgrades.

I'm sorry but this just isn't worth the price tag. Until NG+ is added, this game is a 20-hour game that's worth 20€, 30€ tops.

As was to be expected from developers like the "people" at FromSoftware. Once again, challenging for all the wrong reasons, starting from game mechanics that only apply to you but not your enemies. Enemies, especially bosses, being able to dodge and move away while "stunned" while you get stunned in place with zero options to do anything even with the tankiest builds possible stopped being funny exactly one hour in to the game.

All the bosses have their own gimmick, from having a shields and armor that makes you essentially useless (until you find a counter-gimmick and spam it) to being able to fly and have effectively infinite dodges, making non-rapid-firing weapons absolutely useless. And every single end-game boss boils down to them being able to just fly and dash around and then attack you with attacks that you simply cannot get away from or even protect yourself from. No dashing, no jumping, no shield, nothing is there to help you.

Besides the bosses, the rest of the game is almost painfully simple. Who would've thought a heavy warship that has laser-weapons and artillery dies to just two shots from your AC. But don't worry, even the little guys have some tricks up their sleeves. For example, infinite missiles and rockets they try to spam at you even while you're behind cover. Don't worry, the rockets will just splat on the wall but it doesn't matter to them, they'll just keep spamming. I even watched one little guy spam his missiles at me for 20 minutes.

Rusty sniping the Ice Worm from across the horizon was cool but you even managed to milk that dry by making him do that three times.

Forget the Noob Filter -copter in the tutorial, try actually playing the rest of the game. Or better yet, don't. You can get so many better games for your money.

I will 100% the hunk of junk but let it be known, I'm personally just done with this game already.

---September 4th edit---

100%'ed and done. Again, just find the gimmicks that work for each level/boss and you're done. Some weapons are essentially broken, like dual-wielding miniguns.

This shall be my first and last time I buy anything made by FromSoftware. I had heard that the way how you make games is so-so besides some trolling. But making the player a sitting duck until they figure out the specific build that has enough power/gimmicky attributes to kill a boss is straight up bad design. Thank goodness you can't do weapon balancing either so you can just abuse the OP ones.

Oh, and for anyone else who tries to get S-ranks on all the missions, you need to kill a sniper hiding in the icy crevice on the right side of the bridge you drop down to when you're attacking the Refueling Base. And f--- you Rusty, I'm absolutely not your "BUDDY" you keep calling me, repeatedly.

Looks pretty, don't buy if you wanna act like a would-be-Sauron -knight, possible fun for fans of QTEs.

Looks fantastic but combat and thus half of the game is painful for all the wrong reasons. You're a blacksmith's boy who doesn't know anything about anything beyond your home village, you start with zero experience on almost everything and you must practice to get good at anything. Yes, I get that. But when the combat system punishes you for trying to combat people, you know it's gonna be bad.

To elaborate, if you try to attack an enemy and 80% of the time you're rewarded with a perfect counter on your face, there's no point in being an active participant. Just wait for your enemy to attack you, press Q at the right time and perform a counter on them instead. That's what the combat boils down to on higher levels. Or if you're against an enemy that's basically as useless as you are at the start of the game, they're probably gonna die in one or two hits. Fun.

Using stealth is also a bit of a pain at the start as you're not actually as stealthy as you think. If you sneak up on a couple of sleeping people and stealth kill one of them while your stealth skill is relatively low, you're 100% gonna wake up everyone around you. Come back later with maxed out stealth and would you look at that, the exact same animations with the exact same sounds at the exact same volumes play but now you're completely fine.

Diplomacy is also an option but the best it can do is skip a few combat sections, you're still stuck on the narrative train tracks laid before you but that's understandable in a game where your decisions have no actual impact on the story.

The graphics are great though quite resource intensive. But boy howdy did I appreciate being able to see the light of a bandit's torch through a tent's fabric as I was trying to sneak through and away from said bandits.

The DLCs offer some extra spice but not much new to what you'll see in the base game, except for rebuilding a certain town. Some of the cutscenes and interactions quests in general were hilarious as well. But I still want to punch Capon in the face myself.

Yeah, I did enjoy some of my time with this game, about 30%, but most of the time was more about farming for XP and doing what to me felt more like a chore, 50% and the rest of the time was just frustration. Sure was fun to lose 5 hours of progress on Hardcore mode because I died from fall damage as I got off my horse while I didn't expect to die anytime soon as I didn't want to sleep in a bed half a map away, get nightmares (stat debuff on Hardcore mode), wait around for it to go away and then ride back to a mission while also not being able to use Savior Schnapps (yes, an actual consumable item you need to have in order to save without a bed) because I didn't want to level up my drinking skill too much in order to get sh*tfaced in one single quest I didn't essentially fail in my previous playthroughs. If that sentence feels like a chore to go through then you are not prepared to complete Kingdom Come.

I'm sorry, there's some really good stuff like history, graphics, even actual real places (Warhorse even got the actual river by Rattay right) but man, half of what I can remember of this game are just all the grinding for levels but not the actual rewards.

There are good kind of difficult games that require you to get good at the game. And then there are bad kind of difficult games that are difficult because you're completely at the mercy of RNG. That said, Noita is HORRENDOUSLY bad kind of difficult.

Not only do you need to get lucky at getting perks that make a run doable but you're also at the mercy of RNG to get even decent wands and spells to help you keep yourself alive. Yes, there are some cheeky tricks you can do, but in order to do said tricks, you STILL need RNG to be on your side. However I'm 90% sure that the game is hard-coded to give you perks and spells from certain pools, rather than being truly random. Oh and even if you do get lucky and get a wand that can kill the final boss in five seconds, you're then gonna die to something like acid or lava, which essentially mean insta-death if you're not moving.

And I'm not even going to begin on the bugs, like
1) getting stuck on random pixels you can't do anything about except beg for the game to realize it's BS and delete those three pixels off of you,
2) small gaps you SOMEHOW can get through ONCE, only to realize that it's a dead-end but then the game won't let you back out, killing the run right then and there, OR
3) how the game can stack a pile of enemies inside one another, especially with spiders, which will then trick you to think it's just one spider, you shoot it as you're getting closer to get the gold, only then to be attacked by the other ELEVEN spiders that were hiding in one pile, thus killing you before you can even properly begin a run. Just to name a couple of things.

Don't trust those gifs and videos with wands that basically just delete anything and everything with 50 perks loaded up to essentially nullify all damage. You're not gonna get to that point without mods (which disable achievements, BTW).

This game is just frustration.

Avoid.

That said, I'm still going to 100% this heap of garbage since I'm already here. Pray for my mental health.

--- EDIT 03.07. ---

I should be done with this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pile of garbage but it just keeps bugging out like the pixely ♥♥♥♥ it is. How the ♥♥♥♥ is acceptable that when the game starts stuttering and I save and exit to get rid of said stuttering, the game forgets about your run?!?! What the ♥♥♥♥ is wrong with the morons who made this game?! Not to mention how many times I lost ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hours and hours of progress because of all the crashes that have wiped my progress! And as a bonus, it turns out that because this game has been so horribly programmed, it can't handle Steam Cloud properly. Just today the game decided to REALLY try to sync up the Cloud files and decided to override my files on my computer. So in a nutshell, apparently I lost quite a bit of progress I've done in three weeks. More specifically, 1/3 of all the enemies in the "codec" are now blank again.

How the Hell do people defend this game?!

--- EDIT 08.07. ---

DONE!

Jesus Christ, never in my live have I encountered a game that handles its own data as poorly as this heap of garbage. Seriously, how stupid can these excuses for game developers be when they are perfectly aware of how easy it is to crash their game and yet they can't be bothered to create an auto-save function?! Instead of that, the game will desperately scramble to find whatever bits of data it can find but it often forgets about some of the key parts of the game like, oh I dunno, some of the more recent spells and perks you acquired and the very existence of parts of the world! If your game crashes, the Island on the West side of the map is gone 95% of the time.

Actually, here, a screenshot to show just a hint of the kind of garbage behavior you can expect from this game:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/juud0lf/screenshot/2052001304413311068/

Yes, those are golden outline on "unknown" enemies. If you crash after killing a new enemy, the game will remember that you've killed a new enemy but doesn't remember that you've killed said enemy. Good luck figuring that out with the bosses that only spawn once in the very specific parts of the world! And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the technical issues!

My previous points also still stand. This game is NOT fun for those who actually want to play it. The only reason this game has the "Difficult" tag is because of the technical difficulties, the sheer amount of luck you need to even start a decent run and the amount of stuff you either need to figure out painfully one attempt at a time or open up a Wiki. "Okay, attempt #8 at this boss, this time I have the Omega Saw!" *pew* "Oh damn, the saw actually got- Oh he can copy my spells even after he's dead and he fired about 30 Omega Saws at me, that's cool!

I would rather go through the stress of seeing blood in my urine and stressing out if I have cancer or something else again rather than ever playing this game again. And dare I say, I'd rather play the bot-infested TF2 again rather than playing another minute of Noita.

Seethe'd and poorly cope'd, trust me,

AVOID this game.

A nice little pack for those who wanna run around. I did 100% the game in 19 hours though so I'd recommend waiting for a proper discount. Let's see if Sega can keep up their good work in the upcoming updates.

Oh and have fun leveling up your speed and ring capacity.
You can upgrade your speed and max amount of rings by finding the little creatures known as Kocos and bringing them to one of their elders. No problem there. But when you can upgrade your stats one point at a time to a maximum of 99 in both speed and rings, it's gonna take a while. I believe I spent around half an hour or so just upgrading my stats.