Recent reviews by Redwynne

"We found that players who made the specific choices to build their characters in very specific, min-maxxy ways were producing excessive results. So we're nerfing them heavily for everyone :)"

Please tell me who thinks that an excess of Additional Player Turns, which you have to make the choice to create for yourself, is "negative to the player experience"?

The premise of the game is extremely fun, but it relies too much on cheap tricks in order to maintain a semblance of difficulty.

If your enemies need super armour, and don't take Stagger Damage while blocking, then we should be able to do the same. Forcing enemies to play by different rules than the player just leads to a feeling of frustration and artificial difficulty.

Ultimately, $60 is a lot to ask for what amounts to 5 levels, with very little in the way of depth or customization to it. There's very little incentive or reason to replay the missions once you've beaten them, other than to have a younger Starting Age (essentially how many lives you've got left), which will only matter up until the point you have beaten the fifth level.

I'm so proud of this community. We won.

We dive together. Or not at all.

I thought this was Granblue Fantasy Versus, what the ♥♥♥♥ is 2B doing here she hasn't been relevant in literally 7 years.

Continues the trend that the more screen time you give to Rise, the worse the game, story, and every other character, becomes.

Watching her straight up tell a character off for doing the correct thing, informing them that the answer to the situation is to do what they were doing in the first place, and then reminding them not to do the correct thing, AFTER exposition-dumping her entire backstory in the middle of a crisis, and having that character go "wow rise you're so smart thank you for being such an inspiration to me" and running off inspired by her?

Someone on the writing team loved Rise too much. Someone on the writing team should not have had a job.

At some point in time, there was someone who came up with an idea that only one as deranged and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane as The Dude could come up with. "What if we made a Boomer Shooter for Postal?"

I wish that guy only the best in life.

So ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ buggy. The game is fun but the moment they fix one bug, they break 16 more. This game crashes harder than Princess Diana. It's been a long time since I found a game this unstable.

it's ok i guess

The core gameplay is rather janky, a lot of things that even older games like Baldurs' Gate 2 could get right. There's a lot of good in it, the combat was fun and I enjoyed the classes, but it's the little niggling things, like the pathing getting stuck on someone despite the fact that there's a clear path to the side if they just take two steps to the left.

The story was phenomenal. I loved every step of the way. It had a lot of fantastic story-telling tips, that let it tailor itself well to you, and a lot of things that DM's could learn for their D&D campaigns. Making the companions truly feel like they matter, instead of just being followers.

But the part that gets this a No instead of a Yes despite the jank, is what I offer as a warning.

Despite the fact that The White March Part 2 does nothing to draw you in, and make it feel worth continuing (due to how perfectly they end Part 1, and the intro to Part 2 feeling so disconnected and unrelated to it), if you do not complete it, it will impact the ending in a way that is incredibly unsatisfying. Absolutely do not skip it.

Frankly a disappointment. FromSoft have absolutely dropped the ball, and not in a Cyberpunk 2077 way.

Let's start with the bad. There's some good, but we'll get this out of the way first.

I'm not going to go into the performance, because countless other reviews already have (though it is a little on the disappointing side). But the game is riddled with gamebreaking bugs.

Enemies just straight up not spawning. I walked into a Boss Arena. The health bar appeared, the music started, but the boss was nowhere to be seen. I wasn't attacked, he just wasn't there. 40 seconds later, he spawned in on top of me (unfortunately I'd walked right over to his spawn point) and smacked me about a bit. The same issue applied outside of the boss arena, too. I decided I'd explore some of the open world, maybe get another couple levels and some upgrades under my belt before fighting him. Only a single enemy spawned. I knew there was supposed to be two more right next to him. They were not there. I killed him and wandered the area around him. Noone to be seen. I knew there was supposed to be 6 more knights in the bushes. Noone there. I walk all the way down the path, and turn around. I see the knights there, some advancing towards me, others preparing their crossbows. Another pack further up the hill that I'd walked past had spawned in too. The two by the door and the first guy were still nowhere to be seen. I've had Lost Grace (bonfires) that I've walked up to, been able to see, but been completely unable to interact with.

Buttons just deciding to no longer work. I've had my Right Bumper just suddenly decide it's no longer going to work. Dying multiple times doesn't fix it. Using the Grace doesn't fix it. But I know it's not my controller, because I can open my inventory and navigate it using my Right Bumper, but as soon as I close it, I still can't attack with it. Heavy attacks and my offhand still work, however. On my last try before giving up and writing this, it also happened to my ability to dodge. Mid bossfight.

Speaking of dodging, if you input anything while staggered, even if it's mere frames after you get hit, you will IMMEDIATELY perform that action the second the stagger is over, even if it's near enough to (if not actually) an entire second later. This is extremely awkward and leads to you getting hit by followup attacks because you've dodged at the wrong time, and undermines the philosophy of the genre being hard but fair, where your deaths are because YOU ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up. I didn't want to dodge then, and wouldn't have gotten hit otherwise.

Unfortunately, my gripes also extend outside of just bugs. The game falls into the classic trap so many in the genre falls into, where they decide to make an early boss 'easy' by giving his attacks 3 entire seconds of telegraphed windup...but the attacks also have 80% tracking and only a VERY quick execution. Once I get the boss into the second phase and he gets harder, I find the fight genuinely easier. I just struggle to GET to that phase, let alone to have enough resources left for it. This gripe is a personal issue, but I'm not the only person with this opinion. It doesn't inherently make the game bad, but I'm the type of player who got Gascoigne on their first try and got stuck on Cleric Beast. The faster it is, the easier it is for me to actually dodge. I've also played a bit of the way through Nioh 2's NG++++, and all the way up to it, including the DLCs, so it's not like I'm just bad at this genre of game. This kind of boss design just ♥♥♥♥♥ me up and I don't like it. It's a personal opinion, but it's also MY review.

This isn't to say that there isn't anything good about it. The core mechanics of Elden Ring are extremely fun. The open world (when everything spawns in) is delightfully fun, finding little caves and dungeons is great, sneaking through camps to try and stealth kill enemies and avoid fighting too many at once is great fun. The addition of a jump/jumping attack is something that I personally believe benefits the game greatly. The crafting system seems like it has a lot of potential once you get more recipes.

I would be willing to push past that distaste for that particular boss' design if it wasn't for the bugs. That's usually an issue that only happens in the earlygame, and as you get to the fights that are meant to be harder, you don't run into it.

But the bugs just make it not worth it. What's the point of pushing past it, when I'm going to just run into more issues of being unable to attack suddenly, or having enemies not spawn in until I've run past them and they shoot me in the back?

For now, I will be refunding the game. But if they fix the bugs and the performance, I'll come back to it.