Recent reviews by A Lonely Sack of Potatoes

Hammerwatch and Heroes of Hammerwatch are two of my favorite games of all time, and I am also having an overall great time with this game in both singleplayer and multiplayer. If you enjoy the previous titles or open world ARPGs then it is probably at least worth a try, but there are a few things that really stand out as issues to me that keep me from fully recommending this.

First and foremost is performance. Specifically, I think there is a nasty memory leak related to auto saves and loading zones. I just built a new PC. At full price, the parts would have cost around $4k and even with a rig like that I can usually only play the game for 30-90 minute sittings before the game starts freezing for 10+ seconds at a time (my longest session I ever did before needing to restart was 2 hours). When the game recovers from a freeze, it will sometimes make my keyboard stop responding and have my character start walking in random directions, requiring me to plug in a controller to open a menu so I can save before restarting the game.

Second problem I have is the fact that a lot of the optional content doesn't do a great job (in my opinion) of letting you know it is optional (an admittedly common hazard in open world games). When coupled with the fact that a lot of the optional content is extremely cryptic or otherwise impossible to do at the stage of the game that you first come across them, it makes for a sometimes frustrating and unrewarding experience full of backtracking for already outdated loot.

My third problem is some of the art. Overall, the art is really quite nice... as images... I have found that the art is much less nice for gameplay. I have died quite a few times to not even seeing the attack because the art is just so busy. There have also been quite a few times where I completely relied on the map to navigate an area because I couldn't see anything at all because there were trees and rocks and weird perspectives of slopes and such being in the way of seeing where I am going (I understand that sometimes this is to obscure a secret area, and sometimes this is a fault of the semi-random generation, and some of this is normal jank of a 2D game trying to show slope of hills and mountains, but I'm still going to mention it). There are also a few animations that look flawed. For example, the red flowers you can see in the grass some places (not the harvestable ones) have some random yellow pixels that flash for just a frame or two in their animation, and the white flowers have some red pixels that flash in their animation. It looks almost like the artist straight up forgot what color of flower they were animating for exactly one pixel

My fourth problem is the merchants. They are annoying. Really annoying. They each have their own schedules within the day/night cycle, which is cool at first, but gets old fairly quickly (particularly if you don't have the money needed to rest to quickly pass the time so you can hurry up and sell stuff). Also, merchants have specific lists of things they buy and sell, which is also cool at first, but some don't always even buy the thing they say they buy (a great example of this, I found a fish merchant that doesn't buy marlin... is marlin not a fish? It's a fish in real life... and you get it in game by fishing... so why exactly can I not sell it to the fish merchant?)

There are a few other things I noticed (mostly other QOL gripes), but I noticed that others have already covered those points thoroughly enough.

Slightly easier than Dark Souls but less forgiving, and higher health totals means longer interactions so there are more opportunities for mistakes. Overall an incredible game, easily game of the year imo.

Pros:
+ solid souls-like game play
+ great story
+ lovable characters
+ incredible soundtrack
+ beautiful aesthetics
+ good level design
+ able to almost completely freely mix and match abilities, allowing for some really interesting builds
+ game gets much harder in ng+

Cons:
- no pvp
- feels a little too short, I completed my first play through in 38 hours (finding literally every item in the game), and it took me another 8 hours to get back to the final area in ng+

The lack of local co-op is a little disappointing, but that is pretty much the only negative thing I can say about the game. An amazing expansion upon one of my favorite games of all time.

I'm not personally a fan of the CCG genre, since they feel too uncontrollable and grindy for my taste. However, Duelyst does a great job of counteracting the grindyness by having a generous F2P model, and the uncontrolability by making great use of a 5x9 playing board and allowing the user to replace one card per turn.
It's not a perfect game, and the devs sometimes add some absolutely broken cards, but overall it feels like they are listening and trying their hardest to make a great game.

terrible music, terrible controlls, not really any tutorial or instructions, and the gameplay is stupidly close to driving around in gta4. as much as i hate gta, it would be more worth your money to get gta (or just get an xbox360 and burnout: revenge,)

don't make the same mistake i did, thinking it would be good just because it was called burnout

This game was dropped like a rock right as so much potential was emerging. If I was going off of what it could be, I would not give it a good review, but I'm going off of what it is, and I say it's pretty good