Recent reviews by Emu™

I saw the recent reviews being mostly negative and entire game's reviews being mixed, down from overwhelmingly positive around a month ago.
Haven't played the updated version till now, and whoever approved the new Doormaker version really hates their players and having fun, it's really that bad.
If you haven't tried this game yet, try to download an older version from somewhere, and until it gets fixed, probably just wait and check if it's better in a month or so.

If you have spent money on the 70$ WOA (World of Assassination) Edition of the game, only to discover that you need to buy extra DLC to finish the main campaign, welcome to the club.
I did that, I then purchased this DLC. By the way - game opens the 30$ 3xDLC Package, you don't need whole package, only this one to unlock the missions.
Well, I spent my money to play the mission, I watched the cinematic, read briefing, chose my gear, clicked play only to see 'ERROR STARTING CONTRACT' "There was an error starting the contract. An unknown error occurred."
Amazing experience, not recommended.

Local single player game mode has limited number of characters/saves and if you click 'get more' it opens steam purchase for 2$ to get more character slots,
this would be understandable in a free game in multiplayer mode, but in singleplayer?

Small scale arcade dirt racing game.
Most importantly, very fun to play, easy to learn hard to master type of game, although it's a bit on the easier side. If you start a race with fully upgraded car of any category, you will get 3 stars. Maybe you will need a restart or two if you really mess up a corner or two. The only challenge is competing against other players on the online leaderboards.
Music, sounds and copilot voice are solid.

Spent around 3 hours playing with "try before you buy" methods online, then bought it here on Steam cause it was fun and I knew I would want to complete it.
Then spent additional 7.5 hours to complete the last championship and get 100% achievements.
I will probably play a few hours more, it's just an overall fun experience, definitely recommended.

A few words of critique:
-Changing oil, washing your car... those serve no purpose whatsoever, it's only additional downtime for the player (i assume someone coded those things in, added animations, made steam achievements, and now we have to spend around one minute every few races going through different menus and watching the same animation over and over).
-It's a bit grindy with B and A class, they are so expensive. Game is easy, I had to replay challenges (those give the most money/minute) over and over to farm money to get B and A class and upgrade those to full. In my opinion, giving a really bad higher class car as a reward for completing lower class championship would be nice (you complete C class championship, we give you the worst B class car, so you can compete in new races without farming money). Either that or lower their price, or increase rewards.

And a few words of feedback to the developer of features that would be really nice to have in a game like this:
1) Ghost cars. With your previous attempt and your best attempt and maybe with best online attempt.
2) Minimap with current position instead of the straight line with % completed.
3) More races against opponents, ideally on the same track with collisions. Or at least race on the same track against enemy ai ghosts (collisions off).

Doubt those will be ever added to this title, but one can hope.

Cheers.

I don't see the appeal of this game, gameplay loop: place a card, wait for a minute or so, read, repeat.
Saw how positive reviews were, decided to give it a shot, not for me.

Amazing game, played and completed it in 2019. Went for 100% of map completion, but sailing through skellige to reveal and finish all the '?' got me so tired I never picked it up again to play either of the DLCs...
Until now, end of 2025.
With recently purchased RTX 5070 Ti.
It's unbelievable how beautiful this game still is, 10 years after release, with all graphic settings set to maximum (but no fake frames and no upscaling) and RTX on.

Completed entire game on "new game +", meaning i keep all my stuff from previous playthrough, which is a nice touch to have in a game that big with different choices and endings. First I finished main game, then heart of stone, then blood and wine.

Definitely recommended, buy it and play if you haven't yet.

Tried it 1.5 years ago for only 45 minutes - did not like it, combat was sluggish, gameplay boring, not my cup of tea.

What made me revisit this title on steam store is: today while cleaning my computer (software, not with a brush) i spotted "TavernWorker for Dark and Darker" developed by IRONMACE still installed, even though this game already has a "Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat IRONSHIELD" label on steam, I suppose they have one extra anti cheat or software that they don't fully inform you about, that you have to manually remove after getting rid of the game.

Slow and tedious.
First couple of runs are fun, but after the first hour or two playing this game you will realise that there's almost nothing more to explore, nothing new to learn in terms of gameplay. Just playing for the sake of completing achievements.

During my 3 hours of playtime:
A few games to learn that I need to plan my escape route and always have a weapon and never end a round next to a zombie or go into fog of war with no APs left to run away.
First victory run - firefighter on normal difficulty, killed over 100 zombies, definitely took my time and planned my every next move.
Second run (no deaths) - easy difficulty no violence speedrun as an athlete, less than 3 ingame days to reach terminus.
Currently on my third playthrough I've gotten bored half-way to terminus. I collect books to learn more passive skills but I've realised I already got enough to finish the run, it's just going to take 20 minutes playing in real life. There's no challenge. There's no fun. And 20 minutes for 3-4 achievements, or completing runs with every survivor class for the sake of getting 100%, not worth.

Typically I like roguelikes and spend a lot of time playing them, this one just doesn't do it for me.

I can run Cyberpunk 2077 on mid-high settings with stable 120 fps (rarely dips below 100).
Forager runs on around 40fps, peaks at around 45fps, sometimes dips even lower than 35.

AMD GPU, AMD CPU. 2 monitors set up, one 240Hz, second one 60 Hz, both 1920x1080. I use the first one to play games.
Never had problems with my hardware in any game, except some really old ones that requires windows xp compatibility mode. Forager is the only one of newer games that struggles for some reason.
Doesn't matter if it's fullscreen or windowed mode, if it's VSync on or off, it still runs extremely poorly.

On gameplay side - as a player I lack any purpose or reason for the grind in this game, it feels like grind for the sake of grind. Maybe was fun 6 years ago when it released, now it's way too repetitive.

Steam says my last time played was Nov 6, 2021, nearly 4 years ago.
Still, I have over 180 hours according to steam and probably at least 100 more before I bought it here.

Back in the day, this was the unique medieval zero to hero experience. Would always recommend that. And if you ever got bored of the standard version, you could always download complete overhaul mods - lord of the rings, star wars, naruto, warhammer, what have you. Some of them were really solid, others were just something interesting to try out.

However, M&B 2 Bannerlord was such a big graphical and technological improvement that I cannot say how well this one holds up today.

Recommending it for the old times sake.