Recent reviews by SkacikPL

Let me get this straight, the game is so single thread CPU performance bound that 7800X3D cannot maintain 60 FPS in cities.
RTX 4090 is just laying about, doing nothing because it does not get fed enough by the CPU.
DLSS implementation is plain horrid, also no DLAA. Frame generation and RT reflections are also nowhere to be found.

Other than that i's a real fun game, if you liked the original, you would like this one as well but there's no way in hell i could recommend getting it right now.

The basics:

• It's not even a souls like, it's an outright 80% dark souls clone with couple twists of its own.(Not a bad thing i guess)
  
• It has barely anything to do with original 2014 game besides taking couple lore concepts.
  
• Features actually enjoyable "arcade" coop with no invisible walls or kicking of clients when failing or killing a boss.

The good:

• Probably prettiest souls like so far.
  
• Fair amount of equipment.
  
• Decently open environments.
  
• Ammo design for ranged weapons is way more fun.
  
• Sound design and area reverbs are pretty great (except umbral thing - who thought having child cry on loop was a good idea)

The neutral:

• Combat is quite floaty, relies on unique parry/stamina system for best results.
  
• A lot of world/lore/NPC handling is taken straight from FROM software games, at least NPC mouths "move" when talking but they still only move around when resting/warping.
  
• Super weird handling of area names, only couple of areas really have names and they are only displayed in specific spots.

The bad:

• Even on a beefy hardware, there are spots where performance takes a nosedive, especially with whole umbral thing.
  
• Umbral thing is a gimmick at best and quickly becomes super tedious with how relentlessly it spawns enemies, even at zero "dread". There are times you cannot interact with environment, since it has low priority lock-on and constantly spawning zombies will steal the lock-on from those objects.
  
• Progression path is not obvious, two rooms next to each other can have same enemy types where ones are manageable and others will wipe the floor with you.
  
• Not too many enemy types.
  
• Point above is usually combined with encounters designed around hiding enemies behind objects/corners to push you off ledges and/or having a lot of ranged enemies to spam at you from KILOMETERS away.
  
• Dark souls jump mechanic sucks - there's a reason even FROM gave up on it with elden ring.
  
• Doesn't use UE5 up to its potential, absolutely no raytracing and texture quality could be
  better.
  
• Human character models, especially faces/eyes/hair are absolutely atrocious.

Overall it's a competent game that's fun most of the time but it has its incredibly frustrating moments. With time and some patches and balancing passes it could really be one of both better looking and better playing soulslikes and i really hope that happens.

Idea sounds nice on paper but it doesn't work on multiple levels.
Firstly, why bother customizing units that you're meant to very likely lose as core design element of the game.
Secondly, available customizations aren't anyhow meaningful as they're mostly color pallette swaps.

The DLC is mostly just a paid appreciation token for the developers but at the same time the game is not being patched any longer so you're not getting much in return either.

If you are looking for a turn based game to just fool around with, this isn't it.
The premise of the game and the core idea are interesting but the execution revolves around (very) punishing difficulty and forcing the player to constantly retry missions or entire story segments.

Past certain point it just feels like forced padding to compensate for low amount of content the game has, if it was played linearly, start to end without any retries.

There's no way of avoiding unit losses or defeats as enemies will cheese you mercilessly, sometimes a lower difficulty mission will be an order of magnitude harder than supposed higher difficulties and it's hard to predict.

I really tried to like it and give it a chance but i don't really appreciate being cheesed only to repeat same segments with extra crutches to simulate some sort of power curve.
I wouldn't mind a sequel but not with this design.

There are also bugs which were never fixed from release, ranging from getting stuck in UI to some random gameplay issues.

It has that specific Tango DNA where core game is relatively short and it relies on side content to pad out the gameplay time.

The issue is that besides side quests, there's an absurd amount of collectibles that don't really do much.
Main offender are the spirits, which are spinned up as a main plot point and saving them all is a gargantuan task that takes by itself several hours of blindly running around the city.
Once you achieve that, lo behold - it changes nothing, the ending is unsatisfying and mediocre and all of your effort changes nothing in that regard. You get a bunch of cheat items for NG+, if you decide to do a NG+, except you already 100% the game so what's the purpose?

The combat loop incredibly sucks until you reach near max level and get all damage upgrade items, so rushing main story is not recommended.

Beyond that it's an okay game, probably best replication of Shibuya to date with decent graphics and raytracing support. Performance can be all over the place at times but is nowhere bad as The Evil Within 2.

Story is okay but it's an one shot with none of your actions having impact on it. You could rush it within 5 hours or less or try to 100% the game and forget what the story even was about.

Overall not a bad game but i wouldn't recommend paying a full price for it.

Frankly - i don't even know why it got delayed for a year and i don't even want to wager what was the state of the project a year ago.

Simplistic to the bone, 5 minutes long deathmatch rounds with a minor twist. Characters deliberately control very poorly to compensate with nearly godlike doges - with other end of the spectrum being stunlocks which will cancel whatever action you were doing.

Very little content, very few maps, but hey - there's a battlepass!

On top of that it requires you to make a Capcom ID account which is a hassle of its own.

TL;DR don't bother - it's a waste of bandwidth, it's not worth the effort even if it's _free_ alongside RE8.

As a baseline the game is conceptually nice, however it needs a solid round of patching and QOL improvements.
TL;DR If you enjoyed every SE game prior to this one, you can get this one as well, in any other case i recommend waiting for patches to bring the game up to quality standard.

Graphics haven't changed much, rendering is mostly same. Assets have been upgraded through use of photogrammetry which greatly improves look of everything except foliage, shading is bit outdated and antialiasing is non existant. Performance is also mostly okay although much like SE4, lack of benchmark on game launch makes synthetic testing and fine-tuning harder.

Gameplay is about as good as SE4 is, couple of things got streamlined for better or worse. My biggest issues are with how clunky player handling is as every interaction seems to have a hefty delay before it's actually executed, turn radius is huge and causes issues indoors.

Level design seems to be sidestep from SE4, levels are slightly bigger than in previous game and more detailed (especially urban parts) but they also rely on having a lot of areas that aren't technically accessible to the player, very often you cannot travel from point A to point B in a straight line as you'll encounter large patches of inaccessible areas in the middle, sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don't, like patch of farmland fenced off with hip high rocks and bushes.

AI i don't particularly mind, it's also an improvement from SE4, stealth is even more viable although enemies are easy to pick off outside actual combat and even if combat breaks out it's easy and way more preferable to run away and come back once they settle down. As far as actual combat is, they are way more deadlier than in previous games.

Audio is also a genuine improvement, it doesn't blow competition out of the water but there are now way more distinct weapon sounds, for up close and distance shots plus some nice reverbs which are sometimes used in interiors.

The new featured gamemode of axis invasions is a mixed bag which sounds great on paper but doesn't play out half as fun in practice. Majority of the time people either are ignorant of the fact that they're invaded and you can pick them off with ease while at another end of the spectrum people will stop dead in their tracks and entrench in one position for as long as they can or outright commit suicide or kick you out of their session. In general the mode has very, very little to do with sniping duels as majority of kills will be in close quarters range.

This also leads into topic of netcode for peer to peer modes like Invasions and Survival/Coop, which is atrocious (and has been for many entries in the series now). It flat out doesn't work, there's a huge delay on everything and players/enemies teleport every now and then. In coop modes this is perhaps a minor annoyance but in invasions it means difference between victory and defeat.

In terms of bugs - there are several, none of them gamebreaking but they can prevent you from completing achievements and getting weapon rewards. On my machine performance and stability is OK.
Perhaps biggest and "wonkiest" change in my eyes are new ragdolls which seem to die in very similar but also very unlikely gymnasitc positions like frog squats, heads between legs, trying to suck themselves off and so on and so forth. The frequency of how often each of those repeats is so consistent i consider it a deliberate feature at this point.

In general the game isn't a necessarily a huge evolutional step for the franchise, it has a potential to be a much refined version of SE4. Provided the develoers sit down on it and implement several much needed features and fixes to further polish the experience.

The game may be nice as a game but PC version is like having constant headache.
Unreasonable 60 fps lock, poor performancea and stuttering complete with incredibly bad framepacing and screen tearing even though the game forces VSync. You name it, this game has it.

It has potential but at the moment i would not recommend getting it.

The game is interesting, there's mechanical depth and bunch of content in terms of weapons/characters.
Monetization is quite aggressive - you'd expect that by paying 20 bucks upfront you'd get some higher standard than free to play games like Apex but no - there's exact same monetization scheme with very expensive skins, lootboxes (with dupes btw.) and mobile game like psychological ploys, like the game asking you whether you really want to quit with no other way of dismissing the prompt for more than 24 hours or default interaction for lootboxes being "open one more" even if you don't have any in your inventory. All in all sure enough, monetization so far is only for cosmetics and in future for heroes (along with option to unlock for free - the key will be here in just how much favorable would be the pricing for actual money to unlock new heroes than grind them for free).
Performance isn't as good as one would hope it'd be, the game looks okay but it's nothing groundbreaking, hopefully that'll improve over time with promised DX12 update - in the mean time DLSS is a life saver if you can use it.
Some people also reported severe stuttering issues along with game freezing entirely for couple of seconds during combat, personally i never had such issues but there's plenty of videos on reddit demonstrating it with no known cause or solution.

All in all those are relatively small issues if you're interested just in gameplay.
Gameplay wise there are balancing and small technical issues which potentially could be worked out with time.
The biggest issue so far is high-ping abuse where people can just use VPN to connect to different region datacenter, this results in every match having bunch of such abusers which currently aren't being blocked in any way from doing so.
In practical terms both EU and NA servers are dominated by chinese people, couple of hours in the game or a quick glance at leaderboards clearly explains current status of the situation.
Chinese population on non Asian servers is easily tenfold of what i've ever seen in any other online game, be it paid or free.
To clarify a fraction of that might be legitimate people living in given region due to work/study circumstances but given the unparalleled scale of the occurrence i'm not inclined that vast majority of such people would fall under this category.

I would recommend giving this game a try when (or if) there are some technical improvements made, especially to networking and handling bad actors when it comes to ping abuse - be it from china or any other region.

Not enough to make up for 9 years but still competent on its own

Game is mechanically fun but technically it's an atrocity, if you liked previous Serious Sam games, you will like this one as well but don't expect to be blown out of the water.
IF you haven't bought the game yet, wait out until all technical issues are sorted out. Given current state of the game it might take while.