Recent reviews by theBlackDragon

Given the upcoming monetisation changes I would recommend anyone considering getting this game to hold off and see what happens with the "Age of Sorcery" expansion which will introduce FOMO mechanics and a cash shop. At the very least I'd recommend peole do some research before they commit.

As it stands now what we have been confirmed the following:
* there will be a time limited battle pass. If you don't make it to the end before it expires...tough luck
* there will be a cash shop with rotating items
* the prices in the cash shop are 10 to 100 times(!) higher than the previous DLC pricing model, which already was pretty expensive compared to other, similar, games.

I'd argue that even people that are indifferent about FOMO, funny money, and similar practices and how these are ruining good games, should be raising eyebrows about the kind of markup that is coming with the cash shop.

As for the game itself, it's decent, I didn't put in >1500h because I hate it, obviously. That said I mostly enjoy building and PvE exploration. Given the state of combat, server stability and game lag I wouldn't, personally, recommend it to anyone looking for a solid PvP experience.

There's supposed to be combat improvements coming with the next expansion, however, many of the issues are technical and have been there since release, none of the adjustments to the combat system so far have addressed the core issues and honestly it seems highly unlikely they will "magically" be fixed now. If nothing else I'd await proper reviews and/or community response to the changes before getting the game.

Regarding the building aspect, be aware that "overbuilding" (aka building extremely large structures) on official servers is discouraged due to game optimisation. The game will crash for people with less powerful computers and the moderators will remove large structures, relegating builders to private servers and/or local games.

On the note of personal servers:
* it is impossible to play a LAN game without permanent internet connection, and the game will kick you from the game if said connection drops at any time.
* the server does not run on Linux, and won't run stable through Wine anymore, there are docker images floating around that used to work (yours truly maintains one of them) but one of the recent-ish patches causes the game to run out of memory, and crash, in short order resulting in regular server crashes (not to mention that server startup through wine can take extremely long for a modded server, we're talking >20min here)

Single player game with always online DRM and the publisher decided to pull the plug. Game is literally unplayable now.

Outriders starts of promising enough, but the further in you get the more obvious it becomes that the latter half of the game's campaign has barely been playtested, if it was playtested at all.

The result is that combat after the halfway point becomes extremely unbalanced. Multiple waves rush at you in short succession to make sure you're out of counters (many classes get multiple charges on abilities, Trickster does not). Common-level enemies have sniper like accuracy with assault rifles from across the map. Enemies spawn behind (cutting off retreat. Note that I'm aware they also flank, which is a good thing), or outright on top of you. Enemy "casters'' will cast abilities at you without ever having seen you, sometimes even just hitting you through walls and flushing you out of positions they really shouldn't be able to.
As trickster lacking pretty majorly in the ranged CC and AoE department you just get murdered in short order on anything but the lowest difficulties (and even then). Quality of your gear barely matters at that point as you barely get the chance to *do* anything.

Pretty sure that some lucky drops can change this, and/or that this balances out once you get through the campaign, and into the endgame, but the frustration levels playing through the latter parts of the story, even on a low "world tier" (aka difficulty) means the game isn't enjoyable at all at this point. Getting through a tough fight doesn't feel rewarding, it feels like just getting lucky.

You also outright lose massive chunks of world tier XP on death, so the game really punishes taking risks, or trying out new things, if you want to progress your world tier levels. Diablo 3's way of handling this is far superior (on which many systems in this game are heavily inspired. Hell, it even has those horribly spinny beams of death from Diablo 3, though they aren't quite as bad here)

As to the story, up until this point (just past Convoy) has best been summed up best by someone else "story is good, and has potential, but the writing is bad". However, at this point it looks like the story starts to really go into one of the worst tropes of a direction it could have gone. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm not particularly hopeful given how close I must be getting to the end. Assuming I'm not just shelving the game, which I'm rather tempted to do at this point.

The UI is a typical console port, it's certainly not the worst , but I wouldn't call it "good" either, let's just go with "functional".

On the subject of the UI, credit where it is due, the autoloot functionality is great, and really something more looters should really have.

In general I'd give this a 5/10. The game certainly has potential but needs some serious bugfixing, and a good balancing pass on the campaign before I'd recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore looter fans.

Story is great, the characters are great, the world building is great. Just make sure you are ready for an existential crisis.

Even if you're not used to playing with a controller you can get by quite decently on normal (used xbox360 controller, personally). Imho don't even bother trying to play with keyboard+mouse.

Couple of things to be aware of:
* tutorial doesn't have a savepoint. Having to redo the entire thing if you fail on the final boss fight is harsh. Dodge is your friend. Trust me.
* a certain area late in the game has some really obnoxious hacking sequences (plural, the entire area is just one long chain of them), if you get stuck there, just put the game on easy and equip the auto-fire and auto-dodge precepts only available on easy mode. Can just go right back to whatever difficulty you were playing on after (don't forget to switch back to your regular chip setup)
* the port isn't exactly great, you'll likely want the unofficial patch
* don't even bother playing without a controller (saying this as someone who generally only uses a controller for race games and, as such, is generally pretty terrible with them in everything else)
* to understand everything going on in the game (and get some additional closure after the final ending) you'll need to do some digging, which will include reading about the novels, the stage play that happened, interviews with Yoko Taro, and the like. Most of these events are described in the game (or part of the previous game in the series), but only briefly. The additional detail really does help to fill in quite a few blanks (and it's all considered canon). The NieR Ark website is your friend for much of this information.

Great looking building assets, unfortunately, as has been pointed out already. Missing a bunch of important building pieces (like wedge wall pieces) making building with this set rather more limited than should be necessary.

The game has a relatively slow start, but once you push through that and start unraveling what's going on it's simply great.

The fact that you can approach problems radically differently and that multiple playthroughs (despite following the same story beats) can feel vastly different is just icing on the cake.

If you enjoy mystery, stealth, some combat, maybe some light horror elements, then you should definitely give this game a chance.

Being a Founder I'm sad to say I cannot recommend this game anymore at this point

Warframe had a bunch of things going for it over the competition:
* a fair monetisation model based around cosmetics and "skipping the grind" with everything being available at all times (there were a few exceptions early on ín the game's lifecycle that were ill-received and they stopped doing it, until recently).
* respect for their players' time: grind was generally fair and there generally was no pressure to "do x now or it will be gone forever" (no "Seasons", in Destiny 2/Diablo 3 parlance)
* a constant stream of content
* no ridiculous RNG on gear: your gun = my gun, your mod = my mod

However, this has been steadily changing:

Cosmetics are now often tied to real money purchases (over using the "premium currency") or partner deals. Despite DE no longer exactly being an indie company prices for cosmetics (TennoGen) have stayed ridiculously high, and have, in fact, even gone up.
Moreover many things are now based around unengaging grind in recycled conent with the argument being that you can just buy your way to what you want.

Riven mods did away with the fixed stats on items, killing a core part of the game for many. The argument that these were optional things that could easily be ignored got destroyed when they added weapons with random stats with the Lich system and the new Railjack system uses mods with RNG stats as well. Slowly turning this game into something most of us explicitly didn't want when we signed up.

As alluded to during the monetisation topic above: the constant stream of content has dried up, despite [DE]Steve citing this as a big reason for their success (after having been told by someone that they'd never be able to pull it off before they started out making the game) they have now basically done away with it and gone the way of most MMOs dropping one, or two, big updates per year with a very long content draught in-between and using RNG on everything to try and fill that gap. They've also started adding something akin to "seasons" or a "battle pass"-system trying to keep people playing between content drops.

The gameplay's still fun, and certainly not everything is bad (eg. the new melee system is still pretty good), however the long content-draughts and excessive reliance on obnoxious RNG are very worrying trends.

In the end the monetisation is stil fairer than most online games, but compared to its past self Warframe has been getting worse, whether that is something that would stop you from getting into the game (I mean, it's free, after all) is for you to decide.

For me, personally, if the game's state had been like this when I started playing (with the RNG stats etc.) I'd probably have given it a hard pass, hence my decision to not recommend this game at this point.

Game is fun, if you can get past the (terrible) PvP that gets shoehorned in at any turn.

However, the reason I cannot recommend the game in good conscience is the incessant server issues. Finishing longer missions is just a gamble as you're just as likely to get booted to the login screen with a useless error code. The same issues plague PvP (but there you also get reminded that you are a jerk somehow because the servers are crap)
This isn't just a "new" issue either, it's been going on for as long as I've been (trying to) play the game, starting almost a year ago (with the giveaway of the base game at that time).

And before anyone brings it up, Destiny 2 is the only game I have issues with. Multiple MMOs just work fine, it's just Destiny 2 that fails all the time.

Bethesda games have long had a reputation for modability and, even more so, a reputation for mods to be necessary to fix all the bugs Bethesda itself never fixes.

As such it is very sad to see Bethesda take such a hostile stance towards the modding community that made their games great to begin with. The main way they do this is by flagging any game with mods as ineligible for achievements, this has never been the case before and even if you're just installing the almost mandatory Fallout 4 Community Bugfixes you get this. There are ways around this issue that they purposefully break with each and every patch.

Furthermore they are now, promoting paid mods through their own store, while actively hampering the "free" mod community that has existed for over a decade around their games.

Oh, and almost as a sidenote, the game is a terrible RPG (if it's even worth calling an RPG anymore) but pretty decent as an open world shooter.

Due to all of the above I cannot recommend this game anymore, I'd even go further and warn people to research very carefully what they will get when buying other games from this publisher.

* overpowered bosses that break the basic rules of the game by getting a turn after every action you take
* no way to turn this DLC off ingame (have to uninstall the DLC through Steam, which will likely break your savegame)
* possibility to accidentally activate the DLC waaaay before you're ready for it