Recent reviews by Generic Gamer

Rating: 9.5/10
Fun as hell, still has a few minor bugs & balance issues. Lots of replayability, and plenty of future content. And one of the BEST monetization methods of all live service games.

So, the major controversy involving the Playstation Network login requirement is now over. Sony has stepped back.

The game is still fun as hell, it never stopped being fun as hell. Every match feels like a movie with how cinematic and enjoyable it is. The developers deserve praise for creating such a beautiful masterpiece. I am hoping that other negative reviews from the Sony bomb are updated in the future to reflect just how enjoyable this game truly is.

I hope the folks at Arrowhead are proud of their game, and just how much people love it.

This game is a very unique blend of idler & civ-like, with some rogue-like features that encourage replayability.

The game runs really well for me and has not crashed once, which is rare for Early Access titles. My biggest complaint so far is the lack of map variation as it's been the same every single time.

I would also like to have more types of tiles in the future. I hope that through the early access process they will address some of these issues.

For the price, I will give this a solid 8/10. The game is very much playable as is, and at a fair price.

-Amazing world-building. So much detail in everything from background character interactions, to fantastic attention to detail in every little corner you can find. You hear stories from fellow students, there is gossip about what is going on in game, the suits of armor in Hogwarts interact, everything!
-Exploration is amazing once you have the key elements (Alohamora, broom, get these ASAP). This map is way larger than you think it is. This map was easily 10x larger than I thought it was going to be, and still packed with details and interesting locations.
-Long playability time, I have 35 hours in game and I have been grinding side-quests and exploring like crazy and I still don't even have half of them done. You can easily get 80+ hours out of this game without a second run. The side quests are actually fun to do unlike most games. I found myself getting lost exploring and doing side quests without even getting anxious about the main story quests.
-Combat is great, I'm playing on normal and so long as you don't over-level your enemies by too much, it can still be fun/challenging. Definitely better on controller though than mouse & keyboard IMHO. Avoid combat lock on with mouse & keyboard though.
-The atmosphere/music is on point. Every little sound effect, and musical cue is just so darn good!

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-Performance on PC is dodgy, some have serious stuttering issues after the sorting ceremony. I highly suggest turning graphics down and whatever DLSS/etc option you have on. This is definitely something that needs attention from the devs.
-Immersion breaking stuff (The Unforgiveables), minor spoilers but using the Unforgiveables in front of any of the professors doesn't cause any sort of negative reaction from them. I would expect at the least a lot of disappointment from Professor Fig. This is a killer for me, would have been cool to have to deal with Aurors coming after me for using the Unforgiveables .

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Yeah there are some performance issues, and a few tiny things I would like changed/updated, but everything else is just so damn good. I found myself lost in this game and didn't realize how buried into the game I was until I realized it had been 12 hours and I was starving for Dinner. This is definitely the best Harry Potter game we have had so far. I am excited to see what the developers do for DLC in the future. Very few games can truly immerse you into a world so well as this game succeeds in doing.

I don't write a lot of reviews, but this game was so darn good I just had to leave one.

I'll be honest, I really didn't want to buy this game because it looked far too much like a LoL/DOTA2 Vampire MMO with minor base building at first glance.

It's so much more fun than I thought. My friends and I play together all the time and it's an absolute blast. Since you have the ability to play either privately, privately with friends, or on a public server, there are multiple ways to play. I personally didn't get this game for the PvP or public server stuff, I got it so I could play with my friends, and hot damn is it an absolute blast to play.

The amount of content in game is pretty good for early access, and stability is surprisingly good (performance is not so great, but no crashing yet). The content was more than enough for 40-50 hours of casual gameplay with my friends, and the developers have been extraordinarily transparent about what they are working on next, and responding to player feedback.

The combat is very fun. Lots of focus on skills & abilities though. Sometimes the combat can be almost Souls-like with certain enemies when you are lower level. Any enemy that stuns you are locks your movement, can kill you incredibly fast if they hit you. Movement and timing is pretty much everything. Later levels you want to make sure your abilities stack well, that way you always have some abilities that can stun, and some that can heal.

And healing, oh boy do you need to be careful about taking damage. In this game when you take damage in combat it lowers your health, but if you take too much damage, the max health you can heal to also decreases. So lets say you normally have 500 health, you take 200 damage from an enemy, now you have 300 health, and can only heal up to 350 maybe 375 health while in combat. The only way to heal back to full health is to exit combat to heal, or use blood mend (which rapidly drains your blood pool, more on this next). This can be devastating when fighting later bosses that can shave off half your health or more in a single set of attacks, since you can no longer regenerate the vast majority of the health you lost.

Blood amount, type, and quality are also super important in this game. Running low on blood can be extremely dangerous since you lose your ability to use powers and slowly lose health until you are down to 1 hp, and blood type and quality can change your entire playstyle. You get 80% scholar blood? You are going to want to use magic like crazy because of your magic bonuses. You get 80% Brute blood? You are going to be in the faces of your enemies, looking for finishing blows since that heals you. You get 80% worker blood? Time to go farming for resources since you get a crazy good resource bonus.

There is are a few downsides though that comes to mind, after you beat the current "end-game" boss, there's nothing left to really do besides build your base and upgrade your servants. I imagine this isn't an issue on PvP servers since there is constant raiding you have to worry about. I think this is a uniquely singleplayer/private server issue. The only solution is to pretty much restart from scratch again (which I am going to do).

My second issue is that the base-building needs some love. You cannot remove floors you accidentally placed outside without having to remove ALL walls and pillars that border that tile. Which is a huge pain in the rear if you already decorated the walls with stuff as you will lose those resources. You also cannot easily move your castle heart, which is annoying as when you first start you tend to build closer to the roads since you cannot claim that much territory, but later on you want to build further away from the roads since you can just claim a path of territory directly to the road. Also, you cannot place paintings on walls decorated with curtains... why?! Those two should coexist like humans & dogs.

My third issue is optimization. I have 16 GB of RAM and a 3080ti, and I struggle to get 60 FPS. That might be because of a minor CPU bottleneck I have (I only get about 80% of the performance of a 3080ti), but considering the graphics on this game are nothing mind-blowing, I should be getting way more FPS. Also, the game eats up literally all of my RAM when I play with friends, and performance degrades over time pretty significantly. This is an issue the developers have talked about and said they are addressing, so I hope this will be fixed in the near future.

Overall? A definite 8/10 with maybe a 9/10 once they have added more content and fixed the performance issues. The game is still an absolute blast and has plenty of content for casual players to sink 40+ hours into.

Still the quintessential pirate game from Sid Meier's. Does have some issues with crashing if you alt-tab, but I have yet to find another game that plays like Sid Meier's Pirates.

Ghandi still likes his nukes!

This game does have some VOIP issues, which is key to gameplay; however, these issues are solved by setting your audio to 16-bit audio, and disabling then re-enabling your default sound devices. This game is amazing, the teamwork is what Battlefield should have been. The gameplay is fantastic (but brutal).

Owned this game and played it quite a bit. But the game has some SERIOUS performance/optimization issues.
The source engine is going to rape your CPU and I am not joking about that.
I have seen some people online saying they get 100+ fps with the same GPU I have (GTX 970) and yet I barely get 30 with massive amounts of stuttering (down to 15 FPS and unplayable).
Now this problem didn't appear until the most recent update, prior I was getting a solid 70-90 FPS even with a slight bottleneck on the GPU (using an old FX-6350). But now it is just unplayable.
DOn't get me wrong, the game is fun as hell and the multiplayer coop is fantastic (although RPG's are annoying and the grenades falling from heaven get on your nerves) it is an overall fun game that I can imagine playing a solid hour or two each day after coming back from a hard days work. But the performance issues that have occured because of the producer publishing the most recent update killed it for me and I can no longer recommend this