Recent reviews by CoderKat

Meh. It's okay, I guess. For context, I played the remakes of 1-4 as well as 7-9 before this game. This game felt jarring. It's practically not horror at all. While RE4 was a bit more action-y, this game is practically more of a generic shooter. Graphics feel rough even for 2009. Story feels weak. And the weird way they executed flashbacks had me thinking I missed an important prereq game.

I didn't have anyone to do co-op with and frankly, it felt like the co-op held the game back. I'm biased because I've been binging the entire RE series, but this game being so blatantly designed for co-op felt very "gamey". The AI for Sheva is... okay, I guess? She's got great aim and is good at rescuing me when I'm dying, but on the flip side, she get stuck sometimes and managed to get herself stupidly killed a few times. Frankly, I am just not interested in co-op, especially from a series that is otherwise mostly survival-horror.

Inventory management is the worst since the first game. A fixed 9 slots. Technically more like 18 slots because two characters, but it's annoying to move items around. The worst part is that the game doesn't pause when the inventory is open (presumably because it was made for coop), making it very difficult to use healing items, swap items, etc in combat). The saving grace is that it's easy to get to the out-of-game inventory screen where you can free up space, but that ease honestly makes me question why they even bothered to have limited inventory.

The boss of chapter 5-2 is basically invincible unless you cap frame rate at 30. Took me a few tries to realize it, as it wasn't obvious. Wild that was never patched.

Controls are very not-modern. Inability to move while aiming or reloading is absolutely wild and felt very jarring to me. The very first level of the game was absolutely brutal to me because it throws you right into a massive horde with these painful controls. Probably died more there than everywhere else.

The villains are the main silver lining, though the game takes its sweet time introducing them. Felt like I was spending forever going through generic African villages without the story moving along.

Overall, my verdict is to wait till they remake it. The only reason I didn't was because I expected that they'd take too long to remake it (if it even got remade) and it was getting harder for me to avoid spoilers for the games I hadn't played. I say watch a video summary if you want the story till then. But the story ain't much and RE9 seems to retcon some of it anyway.

Probably my new favourite resident evil game. The Grace sections are very scary and have the old school survival horror style gameplay (especially early on, where ammo is scarce). The Leon sections are action packed and play even smoother than RE4R. Bosses felt reasonably balanced. Story is great, with plenty of neat lore. The stalker enemy feels well balanced and scary.

One complaint is that the Leon sections aren't very scary. Heck, a good chunk of his gameplay takes place in broad daylight with largely wide open spaces. And while I really liked Grace as a character, she moves awkwardly slow and her random monologues don't seem to grow as the game progresses. She's always acting very scared, which feels at odds with how much ammo I always had later game.

Amazing game. Multiple missions of the level of incredibleness of the first game's Ashtray Maze. I was a bit skeptical of Dylan as a character, but he grew on me. It really manages to go above and beyond on being novel and interesting. The way streets twist at all angles and many other trippy things that I won't spoil as they're best seen blind. And there's so much detail! I found myself reading all the whiteboards, as many were unique and intersting.

My one criticism is that perhaps there's a bit much combat (enemies respawn after killing each "resonant" boss), which gets repetitive after a while. While combat is fun and different, I did find myself missing the telekinesis of the first game. In general, this game really wants you to do pretty much all combat in melee range.

As long as you go in expecting this to be more of a visual novel where you don't really have meaningful choices, you'll probably enjoy this. I liked the story and found it compelling, though it did take me a bit to adjust from how the game seems like choices would matter and would have branching paths, but it largely does not (and it can feel jarring to not have that choice).

I liked the story for the most part. It did make me cry in the end. Unfortunately, outside of the very narrow main story, it's quite unfulfilling. There's a *lot* of unanswered questions, disappointingly dropped plot lines, and just a general lack of resolution in the story.

I consider it a weak recommendation. It's not nearly as fun as similar games like Life is Strange (I won't compare it to Disco Elysium as many have, as the likes of LiS is closer to the linear mystery walking simulator style of game). I think they really should have added more choices and they badly need to expand the ending to provide more closure (an epilogue might help).

Never played the original. Only other RE game I played was the RE2 remake. I enjoyed the RE4 remake a lot more. RE2 is so stressful with invincible enemies. In RE4, I can and did kill *everything* and had a lot more fun because of it. Perhaps a bit less scary because of it, but it was still more enjoyable. The guns handle great and the upgrade system makes it very customizable.

Gameplay is solid. Decently scary without being excessively so (particularly, I don't recall any jump scares besides the standard "enemy from behind during combat" kinda stuff). Pretty sharp learning curve, though, as the village at the very beginning felt so hard to me. I probably died more there than anywhere else. It wasn't well explained, but once you get a hang of the whole "headshot then melee" style of combat, the gameplay picks up.

Far better game than I expected. I played this because I saw enough people say it was "like Elder Scrolls", which is a white whale I've frequently chased. I didn't actually expect it to be even close, as the Elder Scrolls is stiff competition and I had never heard of the studio behind this game before. But I think they've succeeded, especially for the size of the studio. It really does feel a lot like Elder Scrolls in terms of size and versatility. No, it's not a perfect replacement, but for an indie game, it's the best I've ever seen.

Continuing the comparison:

- The story is much more compelling. The basic premise is that King Arthur is your "companion" and also who the story is entirely oriented around, as you try to understand what happened to him and the kingdom. Arthur is a compelling and fascinating character (with fantastic voice acting).
- The combat is more versatile, at least for the first half of the game. Especially for melee combat, since there's dodging and parrying. Unfortunately, the power scaling is a bit off, so the second half of the game becomes too easy, with act 3 being practically a face roll. I'm not a very good gamer either. It's a numbers thing, since you can build a melee character that can literally just stand in front of enemies and wail on them, with lifesteal keeping you at full health. Magic is also a lot of fun, though a bit poorly balanced in how some spells are just *too* good compared to others.
- It's admittedly not the best looking game. In fact, Skyrim looks better despite being 15 years old. It's not distractingly bad or anything, but it's definitely nothing special. The animation of characters when they're talking is the worst offender, as a bunch straight up don't even move their mouths.
- The length of the game is IMO very good. It's a bit front loaded, with the earlier acts being longer, but that's a good thing given the difficult drop-off. You can actually do everything without feeling fatigued. It took me about 70 hours to do *almost* all quests (I missed a couple), doing the first two acts + Sarras DLC as a mage, then respeccing to two handed melee for the final act. By comparison, as much as I loved The Elder Scrolls, I could never 100% the game and always found myself getting sick of it before that point.
- The game rewards exploration. There's an entire secret ending that requires you to have found a number of locations that don't have quest markers (and it's very much worth it).
- The game is divided into 3 major areas (one per act). You can return to earlier areas, but you can't proceed to the next area until you complete the main story in the current area. So it isn't quite the same style of open world as The Elder Scrolls. Still, the areas are quite large and there's a lot more density of points of interest and quests than The Elder Scrolls.

To be very clear, this isn't an Elder Scrolls game. It's not nearly as large nor as open. It doesn't have nearly as many skills nor are the non-combat ones particularly developed. But it is an excellent game with strong story, combat, exploration, and role playing components. The amount that a small indie studio was able to do in a genre that even AAA companies struggle with is impressive and it's absolutely worth your money.

One of the best games I've played in a while. The story is gripping and touching. The characters are all deep and compelling, with good interactions between each other. The music is some of the best game music ever. It looks beautiful. The turn based combat is very fun and has echos of Final Fantasy X (though reaction-based dodging and parrying matters a lot here).

The game respects your time and has a great deal of content. I pretty much 100% the game because I was having so much fun.

What a slog. This is the WotR equivalent of Kingmaker's Tenebrous Depths. It's a very long dungeon crawl through random-looking levels, with limited story spread out across batches of "floors" (islands). It goes on and on. You'll think you finally beat it, but in fact you basically have to beat it 3 times. Once in act 3, 4, and 5. It does have a fair number of different island layouts and also changes the layouts a bit based on the act, but that was not at all enough to avoid being tedious.

I think it messes with the main game's balance a bit, since you get a ton of xp and money from doing these dungeons. The story and bosses felt like the only parts that were actually interesting, but that's a tiny minority of where your time will be spent. Most of your time is just churning through fairly generic dungeons that don't have any story themselves. It can be a bit of an interesting opportunity to try out party members that you rarely use or with new builds, though.

I never tried the standalone mode. I don't know why anyone would want to do that. It's so long and tedious even in the mode that is integrated with the story. Can't imagine trying to do it standalone as well.

I'm leaning recommend but this DLC is really on the fence. It has a *major* issue with its balance and isn't very fun especially early on because of that. The general idea is that you play as a low level party that is meant to be weak and should avoid combat. Sounds like a fun, fresh take, right? The problem is that they didn't really implement good ways to avoid combat. The game's sneak mechanic is very, very rough and practically needs save scumming. They did add interesting ways to utilize traps against enemies, but those often required use of the shoddy sneak mechanic.

At the same time, the DLC has *extreme* resource constraints, to the degree of not even giving you access to useful weapons to start with and being a very slow trickle for interesting weapons. This unfortunately makes the balance very out of whack, as it strongly prefers a party composition that doesn't depend on weapons. It also is a bit jarring as you need to pick classes that come online at very early levels. Monk, kineticist, and anything with a pet generally does best. Annoyingly, the game also doesn't tell you what forced companions you'll get (a rogue and sorcerer in this DLC, plus a bard in the sequel), so it's easy to accidentally choose a poor party composition. e.g., initially I chose a rogue and had to restart the whole DLC because I realized that a rogue was one of the worst choices I could have made.

It gets better past the halfway point. By then, you'll have access to more weapons and in general the first few levels always suck in Pathfinder (and arguably every CRPG). However, I mostly recommend this not for this DLC, but because the direct sequel (Lord of Nothing) is far more worthwhile. Just endure the slog in Through the Ashes to get to that.

It's... interesting, for sure. They certainly tried to be creative with the story and gameplay. The DLC involves multi-verse shenanigans that means you get to experience some parts of other mythic paths. Unfortunately, the devs failed to account for how confusing this would be since you typically just meet some random character that you've never met before and have no context for how the heck they fit in, since unless you accepted a mythic path change in act 5 of the main game, you only ever really experience a single mythic path.

But the real issue in this DLC is the puzzles. And particularly how some of the most prominent dungeons are basically one giant puzzle, complete with a very finnicky teleportation ability. At first it seemed cool, but it got exhausting fast. The locations also look repetitive. Half of the dungeons are just minor variations of places from the main game and the other half are very repetitive and bland in appearance (cool for a few minutes but get boring fast).

And the balance... well, I think there's a reason that campaigns tend to either not reach level 20 or don't spend much time there. On normal difficulty, you'll burn through everything. Mostly the combat is just *boring*. It doesn't go quickly because enemies have a lot of health, but they are just no match for level 20 + mythic 10.

Kinda cool for the lore implications, though.