Recent reviews by WINKOИER

It's over 2 hours of music by Paweł Błaszczak, what else is there to say... of course I recommend.

So this is a great action-adventure game. A proper one. And a really solid addition to the Indiana Jones franchise. Might even be my favorite one, right after RotLA. But in no right mind I can recommend to anyone a video game that asks for 70-100€ and is this unstable. The technical state of the game is abhorrent and easily destroyed what could have been my favorite game of 2024 (that title goes to Stalker 2, which should tell you I have a very high tolerance ceiling for bugs and poor tech).

+ perfect blend of action and adventure
+ cinematic opus, firmly holds a candle to the original Indy trilogy
+ clever level design and beautiful level art
+ stealth that doesn't feel stupid
+ meaningful exploration (there's collectathon component, but doesn't feel mindless)
+ variety of puzzles
+ (probably first) good use of ray tracing tech
+ Troy Baker nailed Harrison Ford impression
+ Gordy Haab nailed John Williams style soundtrack
+ visually stunning at times

- abysmal performance and stability (played on 3900X/4070S)
- enemy AI is super unreliable and malfunctions often


If Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was a car, it would be DMC DeLorean. Timeless beautiful design, comfortable interior and a well-know icon of the industry but overpriced and breaking down each time you try to shift a gear.
Not only the game is very hungry in the performance department, it's also straight up broken. When the game works, it runs stable 55-75fps depending on the location (DLSS ON, Framegen OFF), but DLSS keeps bugging out so often I cannot do a play session without at 2-3 restarts of the game. FSR is even worse, game is uglier and stutters a lot and their frame-gen gets you 3-6fps (not added, but total). The main issues including, but not limited to:

- DLSS turning itself off with every boot up
- DLSS turning itself sometimes after alt-tab
- DLSS turning itself off after fast travel
- DLSS turning itself off randomly on a whim
- game randomly dropping from 70 to 12 fps until restart
- frame-gen straight up not working (doesn't generate frames, but rewards you with 500-1000ms input lag)
- occasional stutters and frame drops
- critical bugs (one that prompted me to give this game a thumbs down just happened to me when I fast-travelled to different location, after loading to the world I couldn't walk or use any items, even after reloading or restarting the game... I couldn't continue playing the game until I realized the only thing I can do is to punch and dodge... I kept dodging trough the map until I found a weapon to pick up and when I did the game finally started to function again)

It's just too much man. I enjoy the game, I really do, but it just breaks too often... and that's more than 3 months after release. Bethesda in its true fashion simply cannot resist ignoring technical issues of their games and I for that reason I can't recommend this. And it's a shame, because otherwise this game is amazing. MachineGames absolutely understood their assignment and created an Indiana Jones title that puts both of the recent movies to absolute shame. The story, cutscenes, levels, puzzles, Indy's lines, music... it's all so true to the original Indiana Jones trilogy. For fans of the franchise this is absolute must have! Hell, if you like even just one of the movies you will definitely enjoy this game. But only under condition you will be somehow able to run it well. Which right now, at least for me (and plethora of players describing same or similar issues) is not possible whole 3 months after launch. Shame.

DISCLAIMER: I'm recommending this as a co-op experience, I didn't and would not play this alone.

Return to Moria is a decent survival crafter with emphasis on mining and a reasonable price-tag. While it doesn't do anything particularly different or better than its competitors in the genre (besides putting you underground for the whole game), it offers a serviceable cozy adventure in the dark depths of Moria that didn't overstay its welcome after 40hrs of deep delving. The experience would be much better if the game wouldn't suffer from ever-present technical issues, but if you are either fan of LoTR or you have a group of friends looking to spend few gaming nights together, you might want to give it a chance. I wouldn't recommend it as a single-player experience however.


+ competent open world hybrid of procedural and hand-made levels
+ meaningful and enjoyable exploration, decent pacing
+ servicable graphics, nice atmosphere
+ fulfilling gameplay loop with good balance between exploring, crafting and story
+ solid coop experience
+ dwarfs
+ LoTR fan-service

- mostly on technical side, poorly optimized and also filled with bugs and glitches
- base building is absolutely busted, huge potential wasted on clunkiest building system
- economy and item balance is lot of times all over the place
- janky combat
- sometimes, especially in later phase of the game feels uncooked and rushed, rendering the endgame rather uneventful

Wholeheartedly recommended for any LoTR superfan who would like to adventure into the dark depths of Moria for sure, but if you are here solely for open world survival crafter then there might be better alternatives for you. What could be dealbreaker for many is the technical state of the game which... how to put it... the game runs like piss. And I don't mean you would need a good rig to play it. It will run on plenty of machines old and new, but it will run indiscriminately horribly on all of them. And don't even get me started on bugs which are always waiting behind the next corner. The biggest drawback right after the poor technical state would be the building system which can be summed up only as utterly frustrating. I can see myself spending much more hours building different bases around Moria, but the building is so scuffed you will barely make yourself one main base and then you will hope everything will fit and you won't be required to expand it.

Despite all that the game offers a wholesome coop experience. Mining shinies with your dwarven buddies while singing traditional chanties doesn't get old, same as kicking Uruk butts and admiring huge piles of gold in your treasure room. And if you are avid LoTR fan you will surely enjoy the sprinkles of fan service here and there. While I don't see myself returning to Moria anytime soon, I will always cherish the 40 something hours I've spent spelunking with my buddies. Good adventure, good times.

I don't want anyone to mistake my most played game of 2024 for a good game, because it simply is not. As far as looter shooter time-sinks go this one is easily the most boring of all. It didn't charmed me at first as the whole introductory part of the game drags for too long. As I entered the hard mode it started clicking in some places and for few hours I actually had fun when creating my first Ultimate Descendant build. But that quickly morphed into aggressively dull endgame. Without going into details, the game simply lacks any meaningful content or somewhat exciting gameplay and boils down to gameplay loop so artificial and repetitive that it puts even mobile gachas to shame.

+ gunplay is decent
+ graphics are serviceable
+ some cool art designs (albeit nothing original per se)

- extremely repetitive gameplay that is dull to begin with (Vindictus and Warframe were both very repetitive but at least the core gameplay was fun)
- most basic mission design you can imagine (the few that try to be original are so bad I have to question if the designers ever played any video games in their life)
- no economy, no trading system
- matchmaking, both in design and function, is abysmal... why does it starts the game with two players instead of waiting just a bit longer?
- player's can't join missions in progress so half the time you go to missions without full squad and if someone leaves you just have to cope or leave... WHY
- no way to save whole build making switching between classes a chore
- absent melee (seems like it was dropped mid-way development)
- abysmal UX (not as bad as Fallout 76, but somehow worse than Borderlands)
- very little meaningful or substantial content... all feels laboratory level of artificial
- hard to play solo, stupidly easy in coop
- boring boss fights that all feel the same
- no LFG system whatsoever
- useless chat that is so focused on battling toxicity with censorship that resulted in chat being straight up unusable (sometimes I had to re-phrase something multiple times because chat was afraid I'm trying to swear)
- loot is not enjoyable because it functions only as RNG-based time sink and nothing else
- some event content is gated to a browser interaction so they can get and sell more of your data
- blatant coomer centric content
- monetization model is super greedy
- Nexon

An amalgamation of designs from other games (most notably Warframe systems) that somehow managed to result in excruciatingly dull and boring gameplay loop. While normally I tend not to compare different titles of different studios it's hard not to constantly compare TFD to Warframe which it just so heavily borrows from but does much worse in every single matter. Except skimpy outfits.

2/10, play Warframe instead.

There was hardly any Tommy Wiseau in it, but I enjoyed it nontheless.

I wish killing the dungeonborne.exe process would be as easy as it was for the developer to kill the game.

Avoid.

The game is randomly crashing and when it does, it makes sure to erase all progress. That's gonna be a no from me chief, sorry.

Finally a game in which I felt properly represented.

The epitome of "ahead of its time" trope.

Perfect for pointless scrum meetings.