Recent reviews by Grampa Swood

This game feels like it shouldn't have left early access yet, many of the mechanics don't feel polished and the story feels like an afterthought. I played it co-op with a friend.

Spoilers, obviously.

The story of this game feels like it's just smth slapped together with absolutely no thought put into it. There are only 2 items you need for the ending which you can get in a few minutes. It felt like there was absolutely no story for the whole game and then suddenly the game's story ended.

The building is incredibly wonky and only the pre-made buildings are decent. The cannibals are able to destroy your entire roof by just hitting it a few times. 250+ logs ruined in less than 10 hits.

Eating and drinking in this game is a joke. Deers don't run away after you hit them once, so there's no challenge to killing them. In contrast, it's nearly impossible to kill a bunny because they're faster and the hitbox for spears is horrible with absolutely no crosshair or anything to aim. There is no punishment for eating cannibals or drinking water from a random pond. It just makes the game's survival aspect feel like an afterthought.

The cannibals in this game are beyond annoying. Sometimes they attack with 10+ people at once and it's beyond annoying. They really should have toned down the amount of cannibals just randomly attacking your buildings.

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Unfortunately, I can't recommend this game over the Dark Souls games purely because this game (at least for me) has a lot less replay value. It's really a one-hit wonder for me, as it mostly relies on exploration for its game's content. If you've already done this once, there's not much point besides the bosses.

The bosses themselves aren't really that replayable either, a lot of them felt kinda mediocre especially after the spectacle that was Dark Souls III's bosses. I've had several bosses in both DS1/3 that I've wanted to co-op on, but for Elden Ring I didn't really feel like any of them.

As for the combat and the areas, the areas look amazing and it's by far the best-looking FromSoft game so far (maybe except for Sekiro). The only gripe I have with the combat system is the thing where enemies immediately attack you the first frame of your healing animation.

The Spirit Ashes and focus on Ashes of War are cool, however, the game's focus on the usage of Spirit Ashes means that people who wanna play solo will have an infinitely easier time if they do start using Spirit Ashes.

My main issues with the game are things such as the enemy placement, combat, bosses, its approach to difficulty, and world design. There will be some spoilers below, mainly boss names, area names, and intro spoilers.

Enemy placement:
This game has a lot of enemies in a lot of places that serve as a "challenge", rather than making the actual enemy placements and engagements challenging.

Combat:
This ties into the first point, because your weapon's durability drains so easily (whereas in DS1 it was an occasional issue and DS3 it's a non-issue) there's a very real chance you will be in the middle of a boss fight and your weapon just breaks. You either have to carry repair powder with you or you have to carry 2 weapons. There's a ring that mitigates this slightly, but combined with the health drain ring it basically makes it necessary to use 2 out of your 4 ring spots to be able to not be as punished for simply playing. Queueing up inputs is very inconsistent, they seem to randomly decide when to work and when not to work. At some points, there's a complete lack of feedback from getting hit. You'll see your health bar go down, but you won't hear a noise, you won't see any particles from your character or see your character affected in any way.

Besides that, I've found myself very often getting hit by an attack the frame after I stagger the enemy. I played with a Strength build for my first playthrough and very often I found myself going for a swing, hitting them, and then seeing my health bar drained a bit /anyways/ even though the enemy got staggered. Additionally, enemies traversing the boundaries of time and space so their attacks hit you when you roll behind them is very annoying.
There's also an issue with the AI being able to immediately attack the moment you go for a heal, I've seen clips of enemies literally going out of their death animations and killing a player.

Another issue is with the healing: Both the Estus Flask and the infinite supply of lifegems the game gives you which trivialises things a lot of the time. The Estus takes ages to consume and the health isn't instant but goes up slowly, this means that a lot of the time you'll start drinking at a time that it seems obvious you should be able to drink, but get smacked down instead. Lifegems simply trivialise healing, as you have access to an infinite supply (even early game).

Bosses:
Now when it comes to bosses, it's very simple. There are a ton of bosses to the point where most of them don't really feel special anymore. They start becoming glorified enemies who have dedicated music and a big health bar. Out of the 32 bosses, 17 (arguably 18 or 19) are just fighting a humanoid with a sword. That's not counting multiple bosses in 1 arena as a separate boss (such as the 3 grave robbers or the Sentinels). The summons are also insanely terrible, they don't have a brain whatsoever. They run at the boss and hug it until they're dead. They just keep swinging, do terrible damage (they don't scale with NG level either), and just get themselves killed very easily.

The boss runs themselves are also some of the worst in the series, but can be partially mitigated by killing all the enemies 12 times, but it's incredibly boring to do so.

Approach to difficulty:
This is mainly the cause of the awful boss runs. This game's philosphy is "people liked Dark Souls 1 because they died a lot, so let's kill the player constantly" and it achieves this through gank squads, straight-up removing max HP on death, and the continuous invasions.

The way this game treats difficulty is very obvious from the start, the intro cutscene talks about how you'll "lose your souls over and over". The achievement for dying is also called "welcome to Dark Souls" and it feels like the developers massively misunderstood what the difficulty in the game was meant for.

World design:
While I think this game has some really interesting places (Majula is the number 1 hub out of all the games, or the castle being visible throughout a large portion of the game), I think overall its world design leaves a lot to be desired. 3 examples I can think of is the placement of an entire castle changing when you go through a tunnel, going under sea level but somehow ending up at a pier, and going up an elevator (that you can't see from the outside) to a mountain with a big lava lake and castle (that you can't see from the outside).


"Quick" points:

A lot of animations look weird and stiff and the movement feels off a lot of the time (both animation-wise for the player/enemies, but also when controlling).

ADP and the i-frames tied to it may be the dumbest thing ever invented. Completely unnecessary. There's no benefit for this mechanic.


Every time you die, you lose 5% HP up to a maximum of 50%. This is just punishing for no real reason. From a quick Google search, this mechanic in Demon's Souls (as it's a PS-exclusive, I have not played it yet) seems to have a lot more of a purpose besides "Here, get punished for no reason, you idiot". Dying is one of the main ways to learn the games and its bosses, punishing you this heavily for dying is just contrary to the Souls series. As stated earlier, there's a ring to reduce this effect to 75%, however it requires you to use 1 out of your 4 ring slots . The fact that there are 4 ring slots means rings are much less powerful than in DS1 (understandably so), but then having 2 rings that are basically needed to have a decent experience means you are basically just running nerfed rings.

Alternatively, you can use Human Effigies (the DS2-equivalent of DS1's humanity and DS3's Embers) to completely remove it, but it's not like those are infinitely available like Lifegems. DS3 did this system way better with rewarding the player for using an Ember by giving them a lot of extra HP, but losing it upon death.

Multiplayer is terribly done. Soul Memory is a sh¡t mechanic and you can get invaded whenever so I've been invaded by the same person 4 times in a row and had to physically pull out my ethernet cable in order to get them to stop (they were twinking, so I had no chance whatsoever). There's no way to turn off online mode in-game, instead you have to either go offline mode on Steam, have no internet connection, or pause the network process via the task manager's resource manager. It doesn't help that you have to spend an Effigy to PREVENT being, so it's an opt-out multiplayer instead of opt-in.


There are some things that I think DS2 does good:
Certain animations are really cool, such as the riposte and backstab animations.
Bonfire ascetic and powerstancing are really cool mechanics that I wish they brought back.
It has NG+ content, which makes it feel a bit more unique.
The lore is really cool, with some characters like Vendrick, Raime, and Velstadt being super cool (and one of my personal favourites out of the entire series, Aldia).
Majula is probably one of the best hubs designs, similar to DS1 it's the main hub where a lot of the NPCs gather, but it feels like a really cozy place due to the sunset and music.
Demon of Song.

It's been out for a while now and I can't say this feels like a finished game. I played maybe under half of the first day and I already notice a ton of issues.

The game feels very janky, you can interact with stuff through walls, a lot of small things are just straight up missing textures, I knocked a guy down and he kept crawling at running speed, a random NPC vanished after I hit her, it feels like there are maybe 5 voice lines in total (screams kept being repeated, especially a low quality one. The first quest had the same voice line every single time), around 80% of the time I'd hit an NPC and they would stop working entirely (no voice lines, no reaction, just the same pose).

Overall, within 1 hour experiencing this lack of variety in the gameplay, it just doesn't feel worth it. Postal 2 never felt like it had any of these issues even after playing the whole game and DLC.

I have 2 complaints about the game:
One of the optional bosses just threw things that you learnt out of the window, which made it quite unfun.
When jumping at the edge of something (A branch or a cliff), you're being blocked by an invisible wall until you completely lift off the ground, which doesn't feel very good.

Other than that, literally everything this game does is perfect. Exploring is fun, the combat is one of the best I've ever seen in a video game, the bosses are very rewarding to kill, the world is beautiful, and in general it's just a great game.

Many complaints I see people have in the negative reviews boil down to "This game isn't Dark Souls 4" because none of the stuff that Dark Souls has is in this game, which is a very bad and completely invalid criticism to have.

Have to edit files (That even specifically say "Don't edit this") in order for the game to even function in the first place, just shows up with a big white screen at the start.

It's a fun game. Its difficulty is definitely overhyped, from my point of view the difficulty largely comes from sometime just having completely unfair and RNG-based attacks that you have to hope you don't get hit by rather than being able to skillfully dodge them. Those moments simply make the game unfun and you can't learn from it because you simply did nothing wrong.

That being said, its artstyle and its music are amazing and I still definitely recommend it.

This game, more than anything, needs a health update.

With every update come many unexpected bugs ranging from entire Killers/perks having to be disabled until the next update to changing something fundamental in the game such as vaulting a window. When window vaults were bugged, not only did male and female characters get different vaults (one vaulted with less distance), but they also managed to revert their fix 3-4 times over the next few updates.

The developers are clearly capable of doing good stuff, the Xenomorph's tunnel and Chucky's third-person camera have seemed like insurmountable obstacles when it comes to programming, but they managed to do it. If they put these people to work to either clean up the game or completely rewrite the game from scratch (which is also a gigantic task, don't get me wrong) it would improve the game so much.

They definitely need to slow down their content updates as well, having a Killer/Survivor every 3 months bloats the game with perks and definitely doesn't help that you only see 10 or so perks on 4 different Survivors and maybe ~9 perks on every Killer. It just gives no variety to the games anymore. I would prefer that they only add Killers/Survivors once they feel they are finished and good, than having them add them all on a cyclical basis.

In 2023, most of the chapters have been disappointing:

• The Knight: A Killer that has AI "guards" that chase you down. They are not good at chasing you down, they can only force you in a corner to guarantee a hit. Generally not fun to go against.
  
• The Skull Merchant: Possibly THE worst chapter ever released in Dead by Daylight. Can prevent Survivors from doing the objective for so long that the server closes down (happens after an hour). From her design (a yassified woman with some cyborg-tech looking mask), to her lore (her dad writes Brazilian manga), to her power (locking down areas and making it impossible to play the game), she should have been scrapped during the concept phase.
  
• The Singularity: Brought possibly one of the most boring perks in existence, allowing Survivors to go 3% faster after being injured (a VERY clearly broken perk, but it took them SIX MONTHS to nerf). The Killer is fun, but against a coordinated team he gets destroyed and he requires way too much intense effort to achieve the same thing as other Killers.
  
• The Xenomorph: A decent chapter, but his tail has no counterplay and solely relies on the Killer messing up (very hard to do), and the turrets are a complete waste of time. Two different addons allow him to negate the Turrets and if they happen to get him out of his power he can simply crawl into some tunnels and regain it in 3 seconds. For the first month or so of his release, he had absolutely no punishment for missing his power either.
  
• The Good Guy (Chucky): A very unique Killer, but his ability to go under pallets at an incredibly fast speed just negates most of what the game gives to fight him off. Overall, he has an incredibly strong power that can guarantee a hit every time it's used if the Killer is good. This means that the main appeal of the game (chases) are not really fun and the strategy to beat him involves simply running far away from your teammates so they can do generators. Due to his slower speed, it takes him longer to run across the map. Additionally, they also made the same mistake of giving him no cooldown after a miss.

Overall, it seems like BHVR still makes some very basic mistakes that they have made in the past. The Knight was really strong with 3-gens and made him boring to play against, but then the chapter right after they made a Killer which can have matches that last up to an hour (the longest matches I've played so far were only 20 minutes or so).

The Xenomorph's tail miss having practically no speed reduction (as well as STILL having no way to tell he's going to use a tail attack) for the first month of release, only to have the next Killer ALSO release with barely any speed reduction when missing means they clearly don't learn from their mistakes. It feels more like BHVR is a bunch of small teams that don't communicate with each other, than an actual structured company.

Lastly, the developers were seeing signs of improving last year, but they've thrown that out of the window. Their semi-frequent Reddit AMAs consist of "we are aware of this issue but either can't say what our solutions are or we'll simply say that we're looking into it" and show that they really just show that they're mostly focused on cosmetics nowadays. When asked if they could add things such as level 100 prestige rewards for characters, they argue that it would rely on the fear of missing out (FOMO) too much (when it will always be available, regardless of how much money you have), but when people bring up that their cosmetics rely on FOMO quite a bit at times they give some nonsense answer.

Last year they reworked ~40 perks to shake up the meta, which was really nice, but they haven't really done much since. They really NEED to work much faster on having old content and old Killers be up-to-date. Their poster boy for the game, the Trapper, is one of the worst Killers in the game, while it also took them 3 years to (hopefully) nerf the addons of a blatantly overpowered Killer. The discrepancy between the best Killer and the worst Killer is astronomical.

It's sad to see the state of the game, I hope the new game modes they pitched come any time soon, but knowing BHVR it'll be revealed in a roadmap for Q4 2024 (even though it has been one of the most requested things).

Funny cat! Very fat! Lasogna!