Recent reviews by Karate Walrus

butts

I saw a bunch of stuff about false positives on the malware side of things. I didn't get any when I installed the game. No problems whatsoever. Maybe it was generating false positives but every post I've seen has successfully disputed it and proven the user wrong. There's not one that says anything of merit that I was able to find. Anyhow, as of now, no problems in that regard.

The game is really well polished. I like the level of character customization although your choice of race is white or slightly tan white person. My character has a huge freaking nose and mouth is always open in surprise because I'm special. The kit system to increase movement speed (climbinging/hang gliding/snow boarding) is awesome to get to where the action is. The vehicles are fun and well-polished. Getting in/out of the vehicles is smooth. The UI is nice. I press tab and I can see all my stuff and what numbers correspond to equipping/using what items. Health kits are 8 by default.

Pressing q on the keyboard places a marker down at the object you are looking at and can be seen by other players on your squad. Awesome. I don't have to spend 100+ hours with the same team members to fine-tune our verbal commands. I just say 'marked the enemy.'

You pick your starting location in the beginning and everyone starts with a pistol. You can change your choice if other people pick a spot near you or whatever you want. Awesome. You can start in/action or out of it. Either way, you're probably getting into some action in the first 6-7 minutes unless you really try to hide out in the hills.

You can take ski lifts!

You can actually hit what you shoot at. The weapons do have bullet drop, somewhat realistically so, but if you shoot something it actually gets hit. You don't have to play for 1000 hours to figure out where you should really aim to compensate for the weird net code.

Snowmobiles!

I did encounter an issue where I couldn't hear my teammates but they could hear me through in-game chat, and one time when I tried to pick up a downed player (player who lost all his health on my team) I pressed f and nothing happened. The bar didn't move up. So I let go and tried again and it worked. So a little buggy in that respect. I imagine that'll get worked out. The game already has so much polish.

The loot crate system is also stupid. I appreciate that pubg is successful but we need to stop with the random item stuff. It's predatory at best. It's a predatory business model and it's harmful to the game industry. Google it if you don't believe me there's like a bazillion articles written about how and why it sucks, and better alternatives. It doesn't affect gameplay, only the cosmetics, but randomly getting stuff is degrading to us, especially when it's stuck behind a pay wall. If they want to charge real world money to just straight up buy what you want cosmetically, great! Just knock it off with the loot box stuff. This game is really sweet, and it has the option to be a leader, not a follower. I hope they choose to be a leader. Obviously they've taken some innovation from other games, largely pubg, but they've innovated and polished the mechanics, and they can polish the business model too. Free price for the game is awesome as it keeps player base high, and they'll make more money off of the cosmetics - ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ loot boxes knock it off. Say it with me fellow gamers NO MORE RANDOM LOOT BOX ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Awesome game.

Damn this game is awesome. I love lemmings and campy horror movies. The abilities are fun and the art and music is great. Found it via the humble monthly bundle.

butts

If you think this is too long of a review, you can see the summary at the bottom (tldr)

I really like the story and the ability to choose different options. The tutorial is very good and the ongoing tutorials as you learn new things are very good. gwent, the card game, is also pretty good too. It's not hearthstone, but it's good (not that hearthstone is the best game ever).

The combat is very tedious and boring. Once you click to attack you can't get out of it, You have to wait for the flourish to go before you can block again. Many games have successfully implemented changing an attack into a block or dodge. Also, you get a crossbow that does piss poor damage. It's a crossbow! It does about as much damage as a punch. It's ridiculous. They could have made it so it takes a while to reload (as crossbows do irl and in most fantasy games) but nope, it just shoots the equivalent of an arrow with a boxing glove on the end and is fairly quick to reload. The leveling of the various spell trees you get doesn't really do a whole lot to change them. Boring percent stat increases similar to borderlands, with the rare skill change which lets you do something new with the spell.

Enemies have very similar combat styles. Rush in, attack, back off, repeat. If you attack they will dodge, parry (if possible) or block. Sure, that sounds like it could result in some variety. They tend to do a lot of standing around and waiting. They also will just block a lot sometimes and do little else. Mostly it's the same pattern of going in for an attack, and then backing off. It's a pretty simple system. It's very easy to parry attacks. Very easy to dodge attacks that they do. Some have ranged attacks. Even the first witcher contract is tedious. The beast has very standard pattern of attacks. It's little to do with combat skill and everything to do with memorizing the pattern, which is a simple one. It looks totally badass though. All in all, the combat is very well polished but lacks variety that even much older games have. The AI is not brilliant for sure. It doesn't feel like it's a step forward in gaming or even for the series itself. If a game isn't improving upon itself, then by the designers own standards, they aren't doing so well.

Humans should be all rushing you at the same time. It's typical for one or two to approach while the rest file in behind them. Wolves tend to attack in groups a lot better than the humans.

Health bars - so, I chop an enemy 10 times in the head and it's totally fine, but that 11th hit kills it? Shouldn't it get progressively slower and/or weaker the more beat up it is? Shouldn't it run away or attack more fiercely? Shouldn't it give up?

No fear - I kill 9 out of 10 guys and the 10th guy is like 'yup, I'm gonna win this one for sure!' and he's wrong and I kill him too. Why wouldn't he surrender? Maybe he offers a bit of gold or just runs off?

Nobody gives a ♥♥♥♥. For all the stuff I did for the soldiers and townspeople I should be a hero! Farmers still spit when I try and talk to them. What you do doesn't change the game all that much. Sure, having different dialogue for all npcs could be hard. However, most of them share similar dialogue. That could just be changed to a more positive version once you prove yourself to them. Still, the story is good enough for me to want to do the things.


No nonlethal way to kill dudes? Yah, geralt, lets just kill EVERYBODY. How is there a good ending for this game? I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ killed everyone but it's ok cause they are 'deserters.' I tried my fists but it keeps switching me back to my main weapon automatically. Sure, I love killing bandits and rapists and thieves and all that. Don't get me wrong. Maybe a guy who stole some money during wartime to feed his family is not so bad though. Plus, wacking people upside the head with the flat end of a sword would be funny.

I get that the combat is similar to how it was in the witcher 2. That doesn't mean it's not 'poop status.' Ok, maybe it's a very polished poop.

IF you are into the story, this is the game for you. Mostly though it's just quests to go kill some things. That'd be great if the combat wasn't poop. Once you experience a few battles, you've seen all the game has to offer for combat outside of the big bad boss fights. You might say that the combat does change down the line but I've killed hundreds of every type of monster except for the corporeal ones. Even they were just like wolves except they could teleport. IF you have kill tons of enemies the same way to see a slight difference in combat, that slight difference is going to get old as you'll then see that a hundred times.

To me, it's 2010 combat in 2015. It's borderlands-level of dull. Very sword-spongy. I chopped a guy with an enormous sword and I'm the size of captain america. I've had a lifetime of training and my enemy is not wearing any armor. He's tough though so he can take four or five of those godly hits. I think it must have been all that training he did growing up as a farmer. Farmers are tough.


tldr:
Combat = yawn
Story = hearts of love

Freakin most boss game ever! Like a boss..

update, this game is dead now. few community servers and the public ones are just endless mic spamming bots that could easily be permanently blocked but valve can't be bothered :( My fav game of all time is dead.