Recent reviews by MD7

This game is fantastic.
The negative reviews are idiotic.
This game is suffering from success, that should tell you everything you need to know.
Dev's are already all over it, increasing server capacity and fixing bugs, etc...
To all the childish complainers, go cry in your pillow. You don't have what it takes to be a citizen.

Good looking game, that's about it.

-Your character moves as fast as a snail. In a game where you have to explore and back track to different rooms once you acquire the right keys, it's infuriating.
-They managed to make something as simple as the character turning around feel incredibly awful.
-Can't re-bind any keys. (For some stupid reason, they set "B" as the back/close button. Why not ESC or TAB. Open map with TAB, should be able to close it with TAB. Common sense.)
-You can't just select your resolution. You have to cycle through them until you find the one you need while your monitor goes crazy adjusting to all the ones you want to skip.
-The QTE's on keyboard are terrible. QTE's in general are not fun.

It's a pretty chill and stress free experience. Love the interactive building system. The management aspect is unique. Cutting trees feels really good. Great experience so far.

Fantastic game. Just get it.

-You start by just magically appearing in front of some warehouse that is now your base. There's no intro.
-You technically can build stuff but those things have all been pre-placed in your base/around the world for you.
-There are tutorial images that you can't re-read from the journal/notes, so you better memorise them.
-You get a quest to "Destroy transmission signals to clear the area". When you do get there and destroy them, nothing happens. You just get the next "quest". This whole thing is poorly explained and lacks feedback.
-Why am I taking pictures of stuff? What is the purpose of this?.
-Melee combat is not good.
-Switching weapons through a slow selection wheel instead of hotkeys is irritating.
-On the plus side, the game pauses when in the selection wheel.
-On the negative, it doesn't pause when in inventory menus or reading journal entries. Ok if it was multiplayer but it's not.
-Enemy spawning is wacky af. They'll spawn in your base. You can climb a tower, see nothing around you and then all of a sudden there's an enemy behind you.
-Your inventory will very quickly fill up, making exploration a tedious chore.
-Another quest has you needing to climb to a roof but you need to build the pre-placed crates. The problem is that you need a saw to craft them and the location the quest has you going to doesn't provide a lootable saw. You would think it would considering the first part of the quest is to search the industrial warehouse. What was the point in searching the warehouse if you aren't going to provide the tools necessary to continue the quest? Time to walk all the way back to base to craft a stupid saw. This is poor quest development.

I'm sure there's more to say but this is based on a short playtime (about an hour) of which I had already gotten bored.

-Why is the fire so damn red in the intro? lol
-No mouse support in menus or dialog choices.
-Camera feels too close to the character.
-I constantly feel like I can't see enough because my character is in the way.
-The choreography of that cutscene with the three raptors is straight up awful. Why are they so close to him? At that distance he's still trying to talk to them like pets when they are clearly hostile. He has a sword that he doesn't unsheathe. The whole thing feels ridiculous.
-Dev's thought "Hey, this would be a great time to introduce the combat by reading 7 illustrated pages then fight three creatures you can't kill in this dark cave where you can barely see anything".
-The main characters voice is too low, it sometimes doesn't even sound like it's coming from your character.
-Can't skip through the slow dialog. Had to replay the intro due to power outage, found myself watching youtube videos through the cutscenes and dialog.
-Tags above NPC's are blurry.
-No pop up telling you what you picked up. If you don't first stop to read what the item on the ground is, you won't know what is was.
-Terrible lighting. Some areas have the brightness cranked up to 11.
-Quest info/tracking is laughably bad. First quest tells you to go to the "Exchange Zone". What is that? Where is it? No idea. Also no map at this point. Run around for an hour but can't find anything, or maybe I was there but no quest updates or anything. Finally figured out that the quest wanted me to talk to some NPC named Cayden. Why couldn't the stupid quest tell me that?
-Kept coming across wolves that I couldn't fight. Tried to get closer to them, but they just attack. Tried to lock on but nothing happens. After reading 7 pages that were supposed to teach you about combat, they don't tell you to first press "R" to unsheathe. You'll learn that only be going to the controls menu.
-Graphics get all messed up, like some serious AA issues when Alt+Tab out.
-Too many steps just to exit the game. Alt+F4 is faster.

I couldn't keep playing this demo. It's so bad.

What a great game.
For us Canadians the price may be a bit high but I enjoyed every minute of this game.
The sound/music and atmosphere are really great, the visuals are very pretty, cat animations are fluid and I rarely had issues with the camera.
You can meow.
You can scratch the hell out of stuff.
You can take naps.
Great game. Looking forward to the sequel/DLC.

Where to start with this one.

Drakkar Dev is a small studio of around 5-ish people based in Italy. Blackwind is their 8th completed game. The majority of their catalogue is mobile games so it's nice to see them get more ambitious and branch out onto the PC market. If you take a look at some of their previous work you can easily see the improvements they've made as a studio.

-This game has some very bad English voice acting. So bad that they should never have added them and just had text boxes instead.

-Melee combat feels terrible. Every time you swing your blade you also travel forward some distance, making it very difficult to hit anything directly in front of you or to chain any meaningful combos. Very bad.

-The camera is by far the worst part of this game. It's always at an inconvenient angle and just when you think you're finally getting a good view, it will change to become inconvenient for you.

-Level design is very linear but made super annoying to explore thanks to that awful camera constantly changing around and the lack of maps in open areas. Some of the worst level design bits are the platforming "puzzles" that involve the dash-jump. There's one in particular that can't be completed using a mouse and keyboard. There's a platform you have to dash-jump to to the right but you can't just dash-jump right because it's also slightly north but if you hold right and up to jump diagonally you still miss the jump because of it's terrible position within the game world. I had to use a controller to do this, then switched back to M+K.

-I wasn't going to talk about the story because of how generic and boring it is, it's just something that's there to help move the game along. You won't be playing this for the story anyway.

-The sound design could have been better. Some of the sound effects were either too soft, too low, not impactful or simply didn't exist. The executions are supposed to be these epic moments, yet because of the sound design it's made far more underwhelming.

All in all, this game is not good but I hope the devs have learned from this and haven't been scared away from making more PC games. The only way to succeed is by failing, so keep trying.

Everything about this game is great. For a team of only 12 people this is quite the accomplishment.
The models, textures, sounds, music, atmosphere, voice over, gunplay, etc... is all top notch.
Turn on ray tracing and sprinkle a little DLSS in there and this game is truly stunning to look at.
I can't wait to see what Neon Giant does next.

Yup, pretty good game. Just like the last.
Looking forward to see where they go with that story line.