Recent reviews by Nipukka

The gods mods elevate me this game

Nothing I can say that has not been said before. Brilliant turn-based strategy combat.

This game even offers an easy mode in the form of summoning so if you ever get stuck on a boss, just "jolly co-operate" through it to make it trivial. Just remember that you haven't truly beaten the boss unless you do it solo.

Surely people wouldn't brag about killing Nameless King with summons, right?

Right?

They do

Now that that's out of the way, keep in mind that you are not allowed to criticize any aspect of this game without at least seventeen fanboys jumping at your throat, all gurgling out the words "Git gud" in perfect unison. These creatures are not actually people, they're pre-programmed NPC's and you can safely ignore their wails. They've latched their entire identity around liking Dark Souls fanatically and so they feel that their entire being is insulted if you do not blindly praise every aspect of these games. Please be patient if you encounter one of these creatures in the wild, just nod in agreement and slowly back away from them.

This game is brilliant in many aspects. The highlights to me are the atmosphere, scenery, weapon and armor design, music and bosses. The good/great in this game heavily outweigh the terrible in it. There's a big learning curve to this game but it's well worth getting past IMO.

As for the garbage in this game:

- Gimmick bosses ( Wolnir, Ancient Wyvern, Deacons, Yhorm etc. ) are very boring to fight, especially on subsequent playthroughs

- Swamp slowdown. From Software loves their swamps. You are slowed down significantly within it and it just makes it a huge drag to go through. In addition to the slowdown you also get poisoned to further enhance your suffering. Fully exploring Farren Keep is just an awful experience

- Jailers and greatwolves from Ariandel

And more but that's just what comes to mind right now.

This is a fun and straightforward musou game with a good amount of playable characters. Graphics are very nice for conveying the anime artstyle, nothing like the abomination that is Jump Force. The game has three primary game modes and I haven't even gone through the first one yet which is the main story. The game's just so fun that I felt I had to drop a review already.

But it's only really worth it if you're a fan of One Piece. This game does go through the storyline events but in an extremely condensed manner. It skips over entire arcs like East Blue, Skypiea, Thriller Bark, Impel Down, Fishman Island and Punk Hazard on top of only showing the bare minimum of what happened during the arcs that it does cover. So unless you've read the manga or seen the anime, you'll have no idea what is happening and who the characters are.

Cutscenes are also in 30fps so they look hideously out of place and choppy. A lot of the story content that has you going through dialogue boxes just looks very flat and emotionless.

Personal score: 8/10

Positive points:

• Scope system is great. Adjusting for wind and distance is fun and rewarding
  
• Bullet cam is decent, heads explode in an amusing way
  
• Graphics look great and the game runs without a hitch
  
• Decent cinematics and voice acting

Negative points:

• Absurd level design. Complex paths and tall grass everywhere but very few places to actually snipe from. Sight lines are very limited so you have to kill more than 50% of enemies with a suppressed pistol if you want to stay in stealth. The level design combined with enemy placement means that it is impossible to kill most enemies with a sniper rifle without being seen. The level design funnels you into close combat and the interrogation mechanic encourages you to get close to an enemy which is stupid. Just far too many pathways and not enough open space to actually get to use your sniper rifle.
  
  
• Takedowns from behind are noisy and alert other enemies
  
  
• AI is baffling. When they notice they're being shot at they just hide behind cover doing nothing. Sometimes they send an armored vehicle towards you but it can bug out. They're also ridiculously accurate with their assault rifles at almost any range. Sometimes they're dumb idiots and sometimes complete gods.
  
  To give an example:
  
  I set down a poison mine along the route of a patrolling pair of soldiers and then retraced my steps to a known location to look for a vantage point so I could shoot towards the facility. When the enemy died to the poison mine, the entire base sounded an alarm. Slightly bizarre since the soldiers were not in direct view and there was no one close to where the mine was. At this point I was 300-400 meters away from the facility and somehow the enemy knew where I was. And I was being shot at. I tried to look with the binoculars to find what was shooting at me. At first I thought it was a helicopter or something but it was the enemy soldiers. They were shooting at me from hundreds of meters away. Once their aggression reaches a certain state it seems that as long as they have a direct sight line to you, they are able to shoot you accurately no matter how far away you are.
  
  
  
• Checkpoint save system means you could potentially lose huge progress. At one point I loaded into a checkpoint inside of a hut and the enemy commander that I had killed earlier was respawned.
  
  
• Your own traps are lethal against you and you can trigger them yourself. Completely stupid and discourages their use because for example if you cover your rear with a mine you could forget about it and later on step on it and die immediately, potentially losing huge progress because of checkpoint save.
  
  
• More of a subjective point but the character's blocky/polygon looking mask looks silly

Personal score: 4/10

The game is readily available to play in co-op and clearing out forts and finding collectables is a lot of fun. That is until the game decides that you've been having too much fun on your own terms and now it's time to sit through a linear, highly scripted story mission sequence.

This is because as long as you're doing activities in the game world, in other words playing the game, you get a meter that grows fuller and fuller for the region that you're in. And when that meter gets filled up, the game sends enemies after you that hunt you down. You cannot avoid this. These enemies WILL arrive and they WILL shoot you with a sleep dart. It doesn't matter whether you're in the air, land or sea. They will find you and they will put you to sleep. Because it's scripted and literally can not be avoided by any means whatsoever aside from closing the game.

Which is what I did.

Permanently.

Personal score: 2/10

The time that I've spent in the game has been enjoyable but it stopped being fun far before I completed every main quest or side activity available to me. The last part of this review will focus on the negatives while the first part will describe what the game is about and what I liked about it. This game was very gripping at first and I was highly immersed in it until the blatant gameplay flaws became too noticeable to deal with anymore.

The game is based around gathering materials to upgrade your weapons and build up your little village. You gather fellow tribesmen to join you and also find specialists to join you to get better weapons, gathering skills etc. After that you can build them huts in your village and upgrade those huts for further skills and weapons.

An ability that you gain early on includes the ability to tame many different animals. Wolves, jaguars and eventually even sabertooths. There are more animals than what I just mentioned along with rare variants of them. You get to have that animal follow you around and act as your companion throughout your scavenging adventures. This is optional and you can dismiss and call any tamed beast at any time you like. You can give them basic commands like go here, attack this or call them back to you.

Gathering materials is not at all tedious and is quickly done, especially if you disable looting animations in the options menu (which I highly recommend doing). Different areas of the map contain different materials and you need different animal pelts to upgrade your gear.

There are human enemies alongside all the dangerous animals. These are Udam and Izila tribesmen. They're always hostile and basically just this game's version of bad guys to kill. You capture their outposts to grow your own tribe's influence over the area.

This last part of the review is focused on what I found negative about the game and why I stopped playing it early.

- Weapon wheel is annoying. You have a weapon wheel that comes up when holding down Q. It's fine at the beginning of the game but as you get more weapons and tools it gets very cluttered. You get two different clubs, three different bows and several different throwable items. If you want to change your bow you need to open the weapon wheel and highlight the bow, then use your scrollwheel to select different variants. Same with throwables, highlight the item and scroll through with scrollwheel. This weapon wheel constantly resets the items to their defaults so I ended up constantly scrolling to use traps because it defaulted to bait all of the time.

- Losing in cutscenes. This is common in many games but this game especially annoyed me with it. Your character is a great hunter who can tame apex predators but still gets knocked out or captured in cutscenes because we need to see the big baddies of the enemy tribes. I'd have my sabertooth tiger by my side during gameplay but then a cutscene would trigger and the tiger is nowhere to be seen while I go through my mandatory enemy tribe leader introduction cutscene where my character is completely incompetent and helpless.

- One particular escort mission. One of your specialists goes off on a quest for revenge once he finds out the location of a particular enemy. Your task is to find him. You find him in a cave and heal him up. After that the enemy reinforcements arrive and you have to escape while escorting this person. This person in question rushes forward like a maniac and takes 25-33% of his total health in damage with each spear thrown at him. If you do nothing he dies in less than 30 seconds. So you're forced to rush even harder past him and clear all the enemies as quickly as possible so that he doesn't get himself killed. This is very frustrating since you also get killed easily by rushing so hard but there's no way to tell this person to stay back. Easily the most frustrating escort mission I have ever done in a game.

- Tank enemies don't make any sense to exist. There are big brute enemies. Pretty basic stuff. Except these guys eat absolutely absurd amounts of damage. In other Far Cry games this could be justified by them having heavy armor but they're just half naked dudes in this game. I could literally shoot ten arrows into their head and they would not fall. Don't even think about trying to melee these guys. I was able to stunlock one but got bored after like 15 swings. They eat far more damage than cave bears, mammoths or sabertooth tigers. It does not make any sense why these human enemies can take so much damage. They will literally solo a cave bear (a massive bear, bigger than a normal bear) and not even break a sweat. The only reliable method for clearing them that I found were traps. Gets pretty boring but it's the only thing that doesn't involve me shooting at their head for 60 seconds straight.

- Trap placement is very frustrating. You have the ability to place down traps. Except half the time you get giant red text that says you can't place traps here. So I ended up spamming the lay down trap button while moving around until the game let me place one. But you could go through the entire animation of placing down the trap and it will not be on the ground because you didn't stay in the one pixel that the game considers valid for placing down a trap. In enemy outposts I'd sometimes go through the animation of placing one trap 2-4 times before it finally appeared on the ground where I wanted it to.

- As soon as you're spotted for even one millisecond, every single enemy in proximity knows your exact location. This is what finally made me drop the game. I was lining up a shot with my bow and the guy turned around. I shot the arrow but the detection meter filled up completely right before the arrow landed in his head. At that point the entire fort was on full alert and enemies started to rush towards my location from all directions. The guy I killed did not have time to shout for help or make any kind of noise. No alarms were raised but because of the detection meter the game told every enemy my location. And even when an alarm does get raised, the game literally spawns extra enemies around the fort instead of just alerting the ones already in it.

Overall personal score: 6.5/10

Best played with a wheel + pedals. Continuous updates throughout the years and very open mod support make this one of the best games in the simulation genre.

Very relaxing to play with music, audiobooks, podcasts or whatever you can think of playing in the background while you drive around.

Overall very fun and I look forward to the full release. The cashier minigame was my favorite aspect.

A few points of feedback:

- The skid-steer loader (aka Rudy) is very sluggish to operate. The turning radius is far too wide, a skid-steer should be able to do very tight turns within a small radius. Aside from that it would be nice if you could hold down LMB while approaching a pile of sand so that you could pick it up as soon as you're in range. The overheating mechanic seems like an unnecessary gimmick to me since it's very predictable and just leads to a routine of LMB followed by RMB because you know the pipes will turn red as soon as you pick up sand. It isn't dynamic like pumping fuel or painting.

- Unable to change movement direction while mid-jump. While this makes sense in practical physics, I don't think I've come across a first-person game that doesn't let me change direction while jumping. It feels weird but hardly game-breaking. Just a small nitpick.

- The menu sound FX were a little loud. I had to turn it down to like 20 while everything else was 70-90. Especially pause menu sounds were a little too sharp and unpleasant to listen to.

This game uses a weird framebuffer and renders at sub 1080p, then stretches the game to fit your screen and applies post processing effects. This causes the game to be very blurry and a fan-made patch is required to fix it.

Before, there was nothing else to compare the port to so people just sucked it up so that they could play they game. But now there's a version of this game on Microsoft gamepass that adds improvements and thus removes the need for the fan-made patch.

This is a digital product. It's unacceptable that they don't also patch the steam version. It would cost them pennies to do.

Encountered a bug that made brightness extremely low and messed with contrast levels, effectively making the game completely unplayable. Brightness settings no longer worked and steam overlay was also so dark that I couldn't see anything clearly. I was able to play through the first mission and when I launched the game for the second time, this bug happened. GTX 1080 with latest drivers installed.

And on top of all that, the game crashed once.