Recent reviews by Cat

A really good shell of a game that would allow modders to create an actual masterpiece of an experience if they ever stopped updating everything.

Unfortunately, Bannerlord takes everything that made the original series so engaging, and drowned it in paint. Sure, it looks nice, but the core experience is so stifled and mundane that once you start commanding armies, everything is going to feel more like a chore than gameplay. The economy is broken in ridiculous ways, diplomacy is a lame horse, combat is fairly repetitive at-scale. You are almost certainly going to have fun being a mercenary, struggling for power, but once you actually get power it's all just shallow 'Wait until you get strong enough' gameplay.

Unfortunately, for all that Taleworlds Entertainment has given us, they don't really know what they are doing- Or at least they do not know how to actually accomplish what they want to do.

I'm too old to be playing this game

This is a really well made game, all considering.
It just suffers from the weird limbo of being too simple to really be engaging unless you're the right kind of autistic, and too mature to actually be for children.

In the opening cutscene, you straight up watch a guy get eaten alive by a dragon. Not super gorey or visceral, but it doesn't hold punches either. There are constant sprinkles of maturity scattered throughout the game- You are actually killing the opponents you are fighting, and the visuals are fairly graphic and intense again without the gore. If it had gore, it would be up there with DOOM. The characters you meet seem to actually belong in a dangerous world, the little lore tidbits and visual effects belong in this dangerous world- Except it's all sort of background noise. There is nothing to really acknowledge that you are one of the most proficient and powerful killers in all of the wizarding world.

And the gameplay is basically your standard open-world collect-all-this affair. The 'puzzles' are about as impressive as what you'd see on the back of a cereal box. The most intellectually challenging variety is looking at a painting that depicts a portion of Hogwarts castle, then leading a butterfly that's at that location back to the painting. The butterfly is always a stones throw away. Other 'puzzles' include pushing a rock down a hill, lighting three awkwardly spaced braziers on fire, a basic math equation where you solve X with a random image that has an assigned numeric value, and pressing R on repeat until you can work out where an unreliable ringing sound is coming from. Combat is fun enough, the spells are all satisfying and combo well together, with decent variety to how you approach it. Except all enemies scale all the time 1-1 with your level, so instead of getting rewarded for tracking down all the extras and fulfilling various busywork tasks, you'll get consistently weaker as the gap between your current equipment (Which determines your stats) and the enemies you face grows. At absolute best, you will always stay at the same level of power.

The world looks really cool. It looks like a place that is dark and dangerous and mysterious, and outside of hogwarts and hogsmead and all the iconic location- It really looks like it was built for a different game. It's just bizarre that Hogwarts is surrounded by a bunch of tombs and graveyards and ancient castles that are all ramshackled and falling apart, with some magical device slapped onto them sometimes.

The main story is acceptably interesting. If you play the game, I'd ignore everything about the open-world experience and focus exclusively on just the story. I'm the right type of autistic to try and 100% this game, but I'm doing it because I'm demented, not because 100'ing the game is a good or fulfilling experience.

Insane potential
If the dev works out the kinks and improves upon existing systems, it would be an incredible gaming experience even with how fundamentally simple it is. There is intelligence in the game design, knowledge of what players want and like, silliness without relying on ridiculousness, and some clear passion.

However, there are too many game-breaking bugs for it to stand in the present condition. Your game will constantly be soft-locked from an unclosable menu or interface, there are severe enough optimization issues to reliably crash my GPU (Which is admittedly failing, but still handles most games regardless of setting), and there is just a distinct lack of polish. There's too much content to call it just a proof of concept piece, but it's not far from that stage. If the dev stopped development now, nobody would find it tolerable, which is why this is a negative review (Once again, we have an example of steam needing neutral reviews).

However, the little bit I've looked into on the dev makes me think they are going to persist on this game. I do not think they are going to drop it. Don't get the game expecting to play it as a game, get it if it appeals to you and you want to support the dev into making it something you play down the line- Or if you want to help the dev out with bugtesting and feedback and the like. Just don't expect things to be fast! This is an impressively ambitious project.

Fun and well-made, but too-little content. About half my hours are because I forgot to ever close this game after opening it. It's still an incredibly enjoyable experience, especially if you are itching for something like Final Fantasy Tactics but in the mood for a more casual experience- But you should go into this game thinking of it as a really well done flash-game, rather than a very fleshed out and professional experience. The devs did an amazing job covering for the lack by making everything extremely versatile and sandboxy, and it is feature complete- No content is missing or buggy, there's just not too much of it.

Suffice to say though, I spent my entire play experience thinking I was in the first section of the game. I ended up googling a boss's name because I forgot to do a special interaction with them (To see if I'd have a chance to do it later in the game), only to realize I'd just killed the game's superboss.


It has a bunch of different systems, and all these systems are clearly designed around being as enjoyable as possible for the player, but there is a distinct lack of any depth to anything. Nothing is badly done, and nothing is frivolous either, but everything is very simple. You'll spend a lot of time sailing around in your boat, and if that doesn't sound appealing to you, it probably will get tedious. But if you're a fan of games like Stardew Valley, it will probably turn more into a zen-like experience.

All in all, it's not a game for everyone, but for those who it is for- You'll be left wanting more, in a very good way.

Mediocre game, zero support, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ DLC, obscene pricing for the quality, and even the forums for this game suck.

If all you care about is making numbers go up, this is the game for you. Otherwise you'll be grinding for four hours so you can garner a crumb of fun before your equipment becomes outdated again and you're back to grinding. And even that- Fine, it's a looter shooter. But the writing is just atrocious. Arena design is bad. There is too much platforming, and it's just pointless. The 'puzzles' are just toddler games that a dyslexic monkey would figure out by accident. And to top it all off, if you are playing co-op with a friend, there is a chance that your progress just won't register, and if you're not paying close enough attention that just means you can cruise through every single tedious, braindead mission just wanting to unlock the grappling hook at the end only to find that you're still on step 5 of 21 and have to do it all over again.

This is an exceedingly petty review, but why tf would you put 'Make your character a permanent max-level god' on a hotkey?
Who does that?

I really want to like this game, even with the tedium. The survival elements hit just right for me.

But the problem I'm facing is disappearing save files. I can't get more than a few hours into a run without the save file suddenly vanishing, leaving me completely unable to continue it. Google isn't helping, and I can't find any menu settings that allow changes. The save files in the game folders are incomprehensible.

Praying for an approved refund despite the hours. This is ridiculous.

A small indie studio made this, so you can't complain about the quality.

A little restoration of faith into the gaming market.

Plainly put, if you want a simple-yet-potential-for-complex FPS and rogue-lite experience, this is a great and solid game with regular updates.