Recent reviews by Elizabeth

this game buses mates

I've been a longtime fan of the Sword and Fairy franchise, going back to the first game that started it all on DOS. I wouldn't call myself a diehard fan or anything like that, but I've kept my interest in the franchise going over the years as games and dramas come out one after another.

Let's get the good out of the way. The series in terms of graphical presentation has come a long way. This game is absolutely gorgeous in every area with RTX enabled and DLSS does maintain the framerate quite well. The soundtrack, while a bit light on tracks is decent. Instrumentation is excellent and the music does add to the overall presentation and give you a sense of belonging. Character models are very well animated and the in-game cutscenes are also well made.

And...here comes the not-so-good. The game is 100% linear, you don't have any influence on anything and invisible walls are present everywhere. The plot is very, very cliche and you pretty much knew exactly what was going to happen the first few hours into the game. It is also quite short, I've done all but one sidequest and only clocked in less than 30 hours. There is virtually no customization, equipment progression is very clear and you don't really have to put in any thought as it's more or less just hit them and dodge their attacks, and the AI isn't really that difficult in combat to go against.

The puzzles are pretty well designed, there is one mini (card) game that you can play and it just feels like Sword & Fairy 7 basically took AAA graphical quality and mashed other proven JRPG ideas together into a very short, cliche and crunched game. Performance can be absolutely awful with RTX enabled in parts, you experience massive drops and every now and then unforgiveable bugs happen, like the boss won't die after fully depleting its HP, hitting Quit instead saves and so on. Texture pop-in is a massive issue and really detracts from the immersion and overall experience, I am running this on a RTX 3080 Ti and R9 5900X and basically getting 100+ fps solid, I don't understand how the frame times are so bad and textures pop in endlessly. It just doesn't feel like this game really has any polish, even though it's not bad and had potential to be great. I guess from a studio the size of Softstar, it's really not a bad job by any means but when really the only good things going for the game are graphics and music, as an RPG I can't really recommend it. There has to be an intriguing story to back it all up and make the experience worthwhile.

You also play for maybe 5-10 minutes at a time only to be forced to watch cutscenes for 15+ minutes at a time. They're pretty and the voice acting is good, but I mean...come on. The game is only ~20-30 hours if you do the sidequests as is, 55-60% of that is cutscenes. As a whole experience, the game fell quite short of its graphical presentation, it's just a pretty-looking shell of something that could've been awesome.

After 1,850+ hours I'm honestly not even sure what to say about this game. It's either you love it or hate it and there is no in-between but those who play it (myself included) often swing back and forth on this endless pendulum.

On one hand, BHVR has definitely made the grinding aspect of the game considerably better, props to them for actually making these changes and making the life of newcomers easier by allowing them to get into the "end game" or an ideally playable state with decent perk loadouts decently faster than before.

Following along on the theme of credit where credit is due, BHVR has certainly invested time and resources into updating the game in terms of perks and maps. They do seem to be listening to the community's feedback and these are all things that a year or two ago, if you asked anyone they would've said no way in hell BHVR would ever listen to their own players.

With the good out of the way, we inevitably get to the bad and there's still plenty of bad with the game. A few major points to consider:

1. Cheating is still rampant, although BHVR has made commitments to addressing this issue and they do seem to be taking some action. Whether or not they're taking enough, from my personal experience with the amount of cheaters I match I'm not so sure we're quite there yet but fair enough--progress is being made.

1.5. A small related note to the first point, I have been matching a ton of VPN killers lately and well, the game is straight up unplayable vs. VPN killers...not sure why there seems to be a sudden surge of them, but something needs to be done about this.

2. The meta did shakeup with the recent rounds of perk changes, but we have now landed once again in a stale, insanely braindead 3-gen war of attrition meta and this is largely due to the last 2 chapters before the Singularity. Skull Merchant and Knight (especially Skull Merchant) single-handedly brought the worst period of DBD to the surface.

3. Map design is still severely lacking. Despite what people say around the internets that the game is super killer or survivor-sided, I believe the game is more map-sided than anything else. Sure, against a Nurse or Blight that has good mechanics there isn't a whole lot to say but for the average killers and survivors playing an average game of DBD, you can have the same map sometimes with a good number of safe pallets and gyms that connect, and other times you have only filler short pallets with a bunch of deadzones and once you've used the 1 or 2 safe pallets the game is over. For a game that is so heavily reliant on its map RNG, this is awful.

4. To add to point #3, it seems the BHVR map design team's overall direction is to take maps that killers complain about the most and "rework" them, and by "rework" I mean really nerf to the ground where now the maps are literally trash and largely unsafe without good loops or strong tiles. Catering to killers isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it does suck playing solo with no one to talk to versus four people that usually are just as toxic as the killer and aren't shy to show it but man, every time a map gets reworked I swear it becomes so much weaker or deadzoned that you have to wonder. Am I supposed to "loop" killers by purely 360-ing in the middle of massive deadzones because there are literally 3 pallets tucked randomly in some corner? It makes me wonder if BHVR actually plays their own game every time I load into one of these new maps, as killer I have a good time since it's an easy slaughter since the maps are so ♥♥♥♥ for survivors, but I really don't feel like I achieved anything or the win was deserved when it's handed to me like that on a silver platter due to RNG and poor map design decisions. I'd rather have fun losing a killer match chasing good survivors than dunking on good survivors that look like babies when 80% of the map has nothing to work with. I play both sides so again, I don't feel like one side should benefit so much at the cost of the other, it is a zero-sum game but this just makes the game really unfun.

5. There is still only one game mode and it does get boring fast especially with all the toxicity in the game. This is the only game I've played a lot where literally everyone plays like their entire families' lives depend on them getting 4 kills in a random game, and most are still worse sore winners even after playing like a piece of ♥♥♥♥ and still talk ♥♥♥♥ without any provocation. The lack of any meaningful content is however, pretty disappointing as it is one of the biggest community asks, but you can be sure more mediocre skins are being pumped out while DBD mobile at least has amazing skins.

6. Lastly, but certainly not the least--the community. This game's community is straight up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You will run into a very chill killer or an insanely cracked and helpful Steve in solo queue once in a blue moon, but the community at large is absolutely a cesspool of the lowest of the low. No shot, no cap, straight up.

I admittedly have a love and hate relationship with the game, but I feel like I still genuinely find it hard to recommend the game to anyone despite the efforts from BHVR. This is not to say that I'm not thankful for the developers finally taking in feedback and taking action, but rather that as a fan of the game I personally feel it is still not quite a the state where I can wholeheartedly recommend it to a friend and have no reservations. Maybe it will get better in the future, it looks more promising than a few years ago but my optimism is very cautious still.

To this day I would continue to say Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of the best horror games to play. Parts of the game still haunts every now and then. The approach taken where you have no way to fight back but hide is perhaps the scariest thing about the game. FEAR, DOOM, Resident Evil and allll you could shoot back at your enemies, but what do you do when all you have is a lamp?