Recent reviews by Ashi

Delightfully adorable and seriously difficult. My first impression of this game was "Dark Souls meets Minions" and while that doesn't do this game justice I don't think it's inaccurate either!

For transparency, my playthrough was on Spirit Guide, which seems to be "normal" mode.

The game is extremely pretty in every way. The story is very simple, but fine - you'll not be playing the game for that, there's no major twists nor character development to be found, but it takes you through the spectacle well enough.

The gameplay has a number of "console-isms" and you could tell it wasn't meant to be played with a mouse and keyboard - much like Dark Souls and similar games, the combat generally still works perfectly fine despite this, but there are a few pain points like having to repeatedly move your mouse back across the mouse mat to control the rot "blobs" and the general lack of proper control you have over which target you lock onto (which only really frustrated me at the final trials mission, where you fight several bosses at once). On the other hand, the bow and arrow is delightful to use with a mouse, so YMMV.

Standout praise go to the three "act bosses", ie the ones where you have to collect relics for their mask, and run into lesser bosses when so doing so. They are all extremely cool, the second one being a great spectacle and the third one (the penultimate boss of the game) being just straight up, well, cool.

The last boss outstays its welcome somewhat, being very lengthy (five phases if I remember right) and with no checkpoints, but it's no major complaint.

The platforming in this game mostly works fine, but it's also absolutely merciless. If you are used to platforming in games like Elden Ring, be prepared, as some of it in this game may surprise you in how it works. Setting aside unique game mechanics like the bombs and the rope flowers, you also have a double jump, but using it is often a trap as it kills your horisontal momentum, often preventing you from crossing chasms you could have if you delayed it more. Moreover, if you are trying to leap onto a platform and you are too far by even the slightest margin, you will bounce off - the game won't edge things a single millimetre in your favour, and if Kena's sandal soles can't make it onto the platform, the rest of her will slide down as well.

In general, my biggest problem with the game is that it's too short! It took me 15 hours to complete the main storyline and all the optional challenge missions, and that is basically all the real gameplay content. You can turn every stone and find all the little collectibles, but that's not much content to itself, and I feel very done with the game now.

This game is awesome! It's the most fun game in its class I've played.

This was previously a negative review due to the impending forced PSN account linking, which would have numerous problematic consequences. This policy was abandoned so I have updated my review - I have now basically no bad things to say about this game. It's truly great. Get it.

This game gets a 7/10 from me, with the potential for an 8/10 when bugs and other issues are smoothed out. It is not as good as BG3, which is the best RPG I have played recently and thus is a convenient comparison, but was an altogether enjoyable experience.


For context, I am a veteran of the Rogue Trader tabletop RPG, so my experiences are coloured by the fact. I played through almost the entire campaign on Daring difficulty, which gives no penalties or bonuses and feels like the most balanced difficulty most of the time despite being a step above 'normal'.

+ This game looks, sounds, and feels great. The developers paid attention. Generally speaking, it is a very immersive 40k game. Standouts include the game's depiction of Footfall, which is my favourite part of the whole game - the environments, music and ambience combines for a simply wonderful experience. The voice acting ranges from adequate to excellent and never took me out of the experience.

+ The combat system is adapted well. Splitting half/full actions into an AP system makes sense, and diversifying statlines for even more granularity is helpful for a video game environment. Land battles feel good, look good enough, and are quite fun in their own right.

+ The story and writing is excellent. I was impressed with how complex the narrative could get at times, and how difficult some moral choices presented to you were, even if you chose to try to play a 'good' character. There are three main moral paths - a generally good humanitarian one called Iconoclast, a fanatical and arrogant evil path called Dogmatic, and a generally chaotic and cruel evil path called Heretical. I am curious to someday play through the story with one of the other two (especially Heretical) to see how the story changes, because (thanks to item tooltip spoilers) it seems you outright get access to a couple of different companions if you do. I have to give extra praise to the epilogue which, despite being essentially a glorified powerpoint, is -extremely- long and thorough, addressing the fate of every significant character, location and decision in the story.

+ Exploration is well rewarded. Rogue Trader is very much about exploration and has always been, and chapter 2 - which is where you unlock the star map proper - is where I spent most of my playtime exploring every system in the game. I wish there'd be more of a conclusive feeling once you had fully explored each optional planet on foot, as it felt like you sometimes made shocking discoveries without anyone addressing it, but generally I never tired of just going to the next star system and seeing what awaited.

- The game is buggy and unpolished. It starts well, but the later in the game you go, the worse it gets. By chapter 5 (the last chapter) I had a softlock bug that required installing a third party mod to get past, and dreadful game performance. Generally there are many odd things though. Vanishing tooltips, abilities with missing animations, one fight in chapter 2 I even had the enemies stuck in T-pose the entire fight. A very frequent bug is enemies getting stuck for 10-20 seconds (after which the game auto passes their turn) which is more annoying than anythjing else, and generally enemy AI makes them sometimes take very weird decisions like running back and forth in a line.

- Balancing is inconsistent. As mentioned, I played almost the entire campaign on Daring. Like above, it starts out well - chapter one has a reasonable difficulty curve with a very arduous and intimidating (but perfectly winnable, I needed a couple of tries) bossfight at the end, and chapter two is mostly fine as well despite it being when you unlock the 'open world' (aside from a planet whose fight is clearly tuned for chapter four). But difficulty becomes more inconsistent the further you go. The last fight of chapter 3 was the most difficult fight in the game for me, though I struggled for unrelated reasons I will detail below, and phase one of the main boss in chapter 4 was significantly harder than any fight that followed it for the rest of the game - after that point, the damage dealt by enemies seemed to drop off greatly, and your characters weren't in any real danger anymore. Speaking of inconsistent balancing...

- Space battles. This is where I ran into the first real bummer in the game. The first few tutorial space battles ease you into it, but from there, things get quite janky. Difficulty becomes extremely inconsistent - I had to turn down the difficulty in a land battle only once, but I had to do it several times in space battles during chapter 2, as early on your ship is very weak and enemies you run into are simply too overtuned. One such battle saw my ship be destroyed on turn one. Some things are also unexplained and seem to be bugged, and generally space battles quickly became a chore.

- Late game balancing. Early on, stats are tight, but the further you go into the game, the more out of control stats get as exponential stat buffs can be used to buff other exponential stat buffs, creating ridiculous monster characters that melt even enormous bosses like paper. Some bosses do use this against you as well, but as mentioned above, this falls off towards the endgame, and it makes some mechanics (like certain giant chapter 5 enemies with a 95% damage shield to the front) simply be irrelevant because you brute force them.

- Star chart battles. I like the idea of warp route dangers in theory, it is lore accurate and a reasonable mechanic, but it's easy to get fooled into spending insight on making routes green when routes that are yellow usually only cause harmless flavour text. Orange routes on the other hand force you into a land battle most of the time (unless you have spare resources), and this ends up becoming tediously repetitive over the course of the game as quests send you to and fro over the star map.

- Chapter 3. This may be a controversial opinion, and this is where most of the spoiler warning was for. Chapter 3 takes place in Commorragh. Now, to the developers' credit, Commorragh is depicted in a very immersive, lore-accurate and detailed manner. Unfortunately, Commorragh is also not a very fun place to be. Environments are samey, there's some nasty bugs, early on you lose all your equipment and have to arduously get it back and set it all back up again, and you also get two new characters who you may be curious to try out - but doing so is a trap, as the chapter has no respec and almost no party swapping opportunities, and the characters are likely to be a lot weaker out of the gate than whoever you replaced them with. (This is a big part of why I struggled so greatly with the chapter 3 endboss, by the time I got stuck on it I'd have to go back hours and hours to reach a party swap point). Chapter 3 alone is the main thing deterring me from starting a second playthrough.

- Finally, a little minus: the mass of skills and talents gets really dense in the late game, and it starts becoming unclear what exactly contributes to the results you are seeing. The combat log has made a valiant attempt to explain every detail, but it doesn't quite go all the way to explain how I reach a 3000 damage hit with a 30-45ish base damage weapon (as happened on the main boss of chapter 4).

All in all, this is a tarnished jewel of a game, but go in with appropriate expectations and you will have 100+ hours of fun.

I hate to say this because I want to love this game, but this game isn't it. It's pretty, but something is weird about how all the gameplay clicks together. It feels slow yet frantic at the same time and not in a great way. I wanted for this to be Age of Sigmar's Dawn of War but it doesn't quite get there.

This isn't a harsh thumbs down, and many people will have fun with this game. But this game sadly isn't what most of you probably hoped it'd be.

Kudos to the developers for their boldness. This time it didn't pay off, but I hope next time it will.

While Total War: Warhammer 3 had a rocky launch, once the Immortal Empires update launched, it initially seemed as though lessons had been learned and improvements were going to steadily come.

Tragically, things have not panned out well. Updates are extremely slow, and leave gamebreaking bugs in the game for months at a time. Said updates come almost solely alongside new DLC, but said DLC also have a habit of introducing new bugs to the game, creating a problematic circle.

I will not go into too much about the latest DLC here as this review is about the main game, but this game's trend is highly concerning, and the latest DLC - which is very expensive for the amount of content on offer, and leaves many core design issues unresolved - is part of any consideration of the game's future prospects. As things stand, at this time, I cannot recommend this game so long as it stands on its current course. Prospective fans should instead consider Total War: Warhammer 2, as while it has less content, it is more polished by far, and will regardless satiate a new player for dozens to hundreds of hours until hopefully Warhammer 3 has received the treatment it needs.

Having now completed the game, I feel the need to update this review. (Original review left at the bottom for posterity.)

This game is wonderful. It's a solid 9/10, and it could easily be a 10/10 if certain issues with difficulty and late-game bugs are sorted out. The issue with the former lies mainly in inconsistency; I at points struggled severely in both acts one and two, with several miniboss and boss fights that you are seemingly supposed to just go in and fight normally. One such miniboss fight, in a tower near the end of act two, I could not beat on normal mode no matter how I tried, and so I had to resort to easy mode for that one fight only in order to progress.

In contrast, by mid-late act 3, you quickly become enormously powerful. Even major bosses become rather easy (and this on normal mode, too!), and I didn't really struggle with anything at all by this point other than some parts of the ending sequence - but nothing bad enough to require reloading, even then - as well as certain battles that you are clearly supposed to go around or overcome in alternate ways rather than just ramming your head into them (so I very quickly decided to do just that).

As for bugs, act one is very solid, and bugs are trivial. Very minor, easily ignorable things. However, the bugs really begin to ramp up in act three. I never ran into any outright softlocks, but I had a confused journal which didn't update properly as I progressed through certain quests, claimed I had killed a character when there was no indication at all that such a thing took place (and fortunately the character -did- survive to the end, regardless of the journal's claims), misleading map indicators, severely glitched dialogue and other issues that - while by no means a dealbreaker - still are a tarnished spot on this game's well-earned crown.

That said, I have no doubt all these issues will be sorted in time.

In conclusion: this game is worth the money, even at full price. It's a fantastic experience. It's very well-made, fun, the characters are great, everything looks beautiful, it's a fun time all around. Is it a perfect game? No, but with some patching and polish, it can come very impressively close to such a claim, far more so than just about any competitor.


Original review:

Wonderfully charming, bugs are few and mostly ignorable, and it is full of entertaining characters. The gameplay is fun and the customisation options both in terms of visuals and game mechanics are significant. Fantastic game.

It is however brutally difficult on normal mode - quite possibly the hardest game I've ever played - so do not feel bad about turning down the difficulty for a moment if you run into situations that seem unfair.

This game looks and sounds and feels and plays great. While its predecessor is extremely well-polished and rich in content, Darkest Dungeon 2 is so good that I find it difficult to get back into DD1 again. The frustrations of DD1 have all been reduced or removed, and so many things have been improved.

The only real weakness of DD2 is that it is currently fairly light on actual content. It's still highly enjoyable, but it very much needs more meat on the bone. Once more free updates and DLC arrive - adding heroes, enemies, zones, bosses, items - this will be a 10/10 game.

This game is incredibly fun, immersive, thematic and well-crafted. I think most people will love this game, I've certainly had a hard time putting it down since I bought it!

Fair warning though, the game isn't joking with the permadeath warning at the start. I ended up putting down the game because I lost two maxed out heroes in a regular 'grind' mission for resources, which can set you back an enormous amount of time and effort since the final area missions are extremely punishing and you will need everything maxed out that you can before you go there - and while I imagine many players will just roll with it, it was too much for me.

I still do recommend it though. It's worth trying this game.

Possibly the best iteration on the Dark Souls formula to date. Even though I in my first playthrough explored every nook and cranny of the map as I went (which, as a side note and warning, does mean you spend most of the game rather overleveled), I still feel like there is so much left in this game I have not done - so many possible builds and approaches to combat.

The price has not gone down, but it's worth the money regardless.

As an extra note, if you are new I would absolutely recommend using a shield. Defence that is not reliant on precise timing is fantastically useful for learning the basics and how the different enemies behave.

This game is very cool and pretty, and I am enjoying it as I type this.

But if you are new to the genre, beware. It is significantly more difficult early on than other games of its type because it is much more complex. Keep the wiki close to hand (or like me, play with a friend's advice). If you are new to the genre and you want to go in blind, you might not enjoy your experience very much, so if this is your first soulslike game you really should at minimum have the wiki ready to get a proper understanding of everything. I struggled at the start, even though I did not have to learn all the basic gameplay controls the game shares with Dark Souls - a genre newbie would have to pick it all up at once.

Once you get further into the game, though, it starts getting a bit easier and enemies that before were very intimidating become very manageable. The difficulty curve is almost too generous, as I now 20+ hours in am beating most bosses in one or two attempts.

I also have criticism for the controls on mouse and keyboard, as some buttons are not recognised by the game and the menus can be annoying to navigate until you are accustomed to them. If you are going to use mouse and keyboard, like I am, a mouse with many extra buttons feels almost mandatory due to the sheer number of abilities and control functions in the gameplay.

Despite an initially frustrating first two hours in which I nearly refunded the game, my opinion has grown significantly warmer the further in I go, and I now enjoy the game more than I do Dark Souls. If you are willing to look past the criticism above, this game is worth your time.