Recent reviews by kaius

this game would be so great if the balance team actually played the video game they make sweeping changes on. tenacity mechanic just makes almost every tank useless, and vanguards were already a thankless role with far too much weighted against them.

every time a tank is slightly good, they get butchered, but duelists get to go seven whole seasons before getting a slap on the wrist and supports get microbuffed over and over only for the dev team to be shocked that they're suddenly hard meta picks.

the tenacity change has to have not been tested at all because otherwise the only justification i can see for the changes is pure unbridled malice toward what few of us actually enjoy playing vanguard.

and now there are going to be even less of us, so, good job zhiyong lol

on top of this, there are also so many issues with the game that are literally never ever fixed. you consolidated the file-size only for it to be the same bloated file-size in the very next update, and you never acknowledged the issue again. i'm just sick and tired of a really enjoyable game idea being squandered by developers who cut corners and don't listen in the interest of making new weekly updates with 2-3 skins that have more effort put into them than the actual user experience of the game.

I'm a huge fan of UMK3 and MKT. Having these games as well as the legendary piece of MK lost media Wavenet MK3 preserved is wonderful. With that said, I cannot recommend this collection in good faith.

I know that the lack of online lobbies has been talked about already, but it's still worth mentioning - fighting games should be launching with stable netcode and online lobbies purely as the standard. I know they are releasing lobbies later down the line, but the lack of transparency regarding this delay until hours before the game launched is nothing short of scummy.

But I suppose this could be forgiven if the netcode was good, right? Okay, well, it isn't. The emulation on netplay starts to crumple hard. I have played Human Smoke in UMK3 for over a decade now and very often my combos would simply drop due to chugging inputs or delayed beyond recognition. The input delay is also reportedly an issue even while playing offline in the console versions, but it doesn't seem to be a noticeable issue for Steam.

Moreover, matches can take an extremely long time to be found in the first place. This is because Digital Eclipse had the excellent idea to not only launch the game without lobbies, but also spread out the random matchmaking queue between an extremely large amount of ports and titles while only allowing players to queue for one title at a time (for reference, highly acclaimed fighting game collections released over the past two years allow you to queue multiple titles at once).

Online matches are borderline unplayable and plagued with not only horrendous input delay but also ear-bleedingly bad sound emulation. UMK3 often sounds like someone poured an ice cold bucket of water directly onto the cabinet's speakers. It's dire.

Several input types aren't supported because the way MKLK handles the non-attacking buttons such as BK or RN are handled in an extremely arbitrary way. Many legacy fightsticks that MK fans have been using for years simply do not work on this collection.

Additionally, while this collection claims to preserve the games in their entirety, this is blatantly untrue. Famous secrets like the Genesis MK1's Abacab and Dullard codes apparently do not work at all. This may be because they've introduced the blood setting as something pre-baked into the game's front-end, but for those of us who wanted the nostalgic feeling of entering the code ourselves, this is a really disappointing absence. Even with these quality of life features made available, these games should be presented with as minimal changes as possible and it's frustrating that MKLK seemingly didn't understand this.

Also in classic Digital Eclipse fashion, several no-brainer features like Training Mode are absent from a large portion of the collection's titles. This makes it really difficult to try out or demonstrate things for other players, and it also becomes a very irksome design choice once you realize that one of the games missing its training mode is Wavenet MK3, a game which was lost media for nearly thirty years and as such is actively being uncovered by players, both professional and casual, who are experiencing balance changes that have never been documented prior.

The emulation is terrible. Dropped frames, buggy sound, the works. MK4, especially, is riddled with bugs that were exclusively seen prior in older versions of the MAME emulator which featured imperfect and buggy emulation. Why is this in a commercially released collection? It just makes no sense.

UMK3's standard in high level play is usually 2-on-2 Kombat. This feature is not usable online against other players unless you do a really convoluted setup that requires a specific fatality in a specific stage. No, really. This is because Scorpion's infamous Subway fatality bug that resets the entire game is still present in this collection.

Yes, they dedicated the development time to remove actual game features like cheat codes but did not feel that a game-crashing bug required the same amount of urgency and resources. Obviously I don't know what goes into game development when it comes to patching up 30 year old games, but I do know that the game should probably not have been rereleased with netplay still containing these and issues like this probably should have been treated with a little more urgency.

Lastly, there are accusations that Digital Eclipse used generative AI for the menu assets.[imgur.com] Honestly, I do think these assets look extremely sketchy. Digital Eclipse has since claimed on Bluesky that these are not generative AI assets, but I personally don't think it's a very convincing argument. This is an actively unfolding situation so I won't really speak much on it, but so far their response has been really cookie cutter and it's like, not good enough.

The documentary stuff is pretty neat, though. Unfortunately for most this would not make it worth the price of admission so I really need everyone to be acutely aware of what you're getting into with this collection. Even if they patch it later, even if they release a big statement going over all of this, I think this snapshot in the game's history needs to be preserved, because Digital Eclipse sure as hell aren't pulling their weight in regards to preserving things.

genuinely one of if not my favorite game ever made. it's a beautiful look into a world where your actions impact the lives of people around you in communities who ultimately do not know you even exist, all wrapped up in an excellent puzzle game with a quirky and memorable cast of characters

constant, blatant disregard for the players and what they see, what they feel, what they need fixed. BHVR only fixes issues when they begin to hurt their public image. they only cared about the mass DDoSing issue that started over two years ago when it started to happen to them on their stream with a big celebrity. it's absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ baffling how blatantly self-driven these devs are.

New perks are pretty boring. The Killer's design makes no sense, visually or mechanically. Her power stops working the moment a Survivor becomes injured, meaning her anti-loop is only going to work half the time, and her stealth is barely workable into a gameplan. The Survivors are OK. If you really want their perks, buy the characters with shards. I'm pretty unambiguously dissatisfied with this chapter, I don't have a lot of good to say about it, which is saying a lot because I was willing to give Knight a pass despite suffering from pretty similar issues. The Skull Merchant is just all of the issues Knight's design had with essentially none of the upsides. Anti-loop is worse, music is worse, power is less versatile... if you think you'll like The Skull Merchant, you'll probably like other stealth/anti-loop Killers, like Ghost Face or Artist, whose respective DLCs don't cost £10.

I had a lot of fun with the time I spent playing this game! But it's difficult to recommend it in confidence.

First of all, you can only play with friends by buying a premium pass - I wouldn't necessarily mind this if it weren't exclusively private matches that you could play and host with friends. A lot of the fun of the Battle Royale genre is the concept of going up against a bunch of people and impossible odds with or against your friends, limiting friend interaction to just private matches makes it feel like you're paying more money for a mode that doesn't give you the full experience of the game, especially since you'd seldom be able to get 63 friends together to experience a full match, lol.

Second, the loading times are... pretty dire. And getting in and out of matches is a bit of a pain. I thought it was just because the laptop I used to play this game is pretty janky, but from the other reviews this is evidently just an issue with the game itself.

It certainly feels like a game that just came out, but it isn't -- this is just an expanded release of an 8-month old game. These criticisms should have been addressed by now, especially the performance issues. But hey, you can get an asset-ripped Fall Guy for free I guess, so it's all peachy.

Hoping for an update to this game in the future, but my expectations are low given the game's nearly a year old.

In my first session playing this game, my friends invited me to do a jigsaw puzzle featuring a nearly white image of Todd Howard. After somehow clammering our way through a large portion of the puzzle, I used the flick tool and every single piece in the puzzle became crooked. Some of them still haven't talked to me since I did that. 9/10 I recommend.

I love eSports. Once a year, I go on EVO and PogChamp incessantly on the chat. I really love eSports. Sometimes I bludgeon my college classmates with a bottle and yell 'wombo combo', they're angry with me and usually injured afterwards, but it's all worth it because I just really love eSports, and then I found this game. This game is so eSports that I saw Ryuji Yamazaki's Twister Drive and jumped for joy so hard that I gained an umbilical hernia. I plan to get it checked out, but without this hernia, my love for eSports would never be shown.

There are absolutely no CDs in this game. Trust me, I've looked. Even in the musical themed 'Stardust Speedway' round I failed to find any CDs. Don't buy into this game, absolutely false advertisement. Plenty of Sonics, though. So that's a plus.

it's ok