Recent reviews by <3

February 2024 update.

tl;dr - If the game is on sale (20%+), buy it. The game loop is super fun, the art is great, the music is absolutely banging (perhaps the star of the game), and you'll definitely get your money's worth on the maps and basic progression.

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A year after release, this game finally hit 1.0. Many of the issues at launch were improved. If you got a refund back then, it's worth giving it another go.

The game loop is fantastic. It's likely the best coop horde shooter out there. It's finally a worthy successor to Vermintide 2, though, unfortunately, much easier.

Unfortunately, there's a ton of design that KEEPS YOU OUT OF THE GAME LOOP (the thing you bought the game to do). Little things like absurdly long walks at the mission start, medium things like a long and worthless load into the Hub before/after every mission, to the horrendous crafting casino where you sink time and get nothing in return

The crafting is garbage. End game content is locked away behind multiple layers of RNG and material grinding. It's one of the most cited reasons people bail on the game. Want to try a different weapon/talent combo? Roll the dice over and over again and hope you get the stats, perks, and blessings you need to try that new play style.

No matter how many hours you've put in or how many games you've won on the highest difficulty, you gotta keep grinding and rolling. It's stale and the opposite of playing the game loop.

Aside from that, they've overpowered the players. Many situations that should be hard are trivialized by certain loadouts. I suppose this is balanced by the game jank. Fire that goes around corners, trap nets that go through boxes and wall corners, proximity to exploding bursters being largely irrelevant, and more. Games end due to this kind of crap and it doesn't feel good. You eventually accept this is part of the tide experience and play conservatively in those scenarios (if you can), but it's immersion breaking.

So, a fantastic game loop that's sabotaged by a variety of things. Still worth playing, but in its current state, particularly with crafting, I expect the player base to keep dwindling. In 3 months, the game has lost more than half its players and now peaks out under 10k (world wide). This means that even quickplaying results in an empty lobby. Bring a friend.

Hands down, the best PvE co-op game I've ever played. There is incredible richness to the sound design, weapon feel, and an unending skill ceiling to lean into. This immersive co-op experience is the next gen sequel to L4D2 I was looking for.

2k+ hours in and I'm still finding builds I want to use, great people to play with, having (hilariously) catastrophic failures, and sweaty, heart pounding moments of victory.

The early progression system is unncessarily grindy, but its worth getting to the other side.

This is — by far — the scariest game I have ever played, and I'm not entirely sure why. There aren't scary things jumping out and screaming at you from nowhere, it's the ambience of the game. The darkness, the music, the sounds, all combining to raise the hairs on my arms and shivers over my scalp. It's wild. I've never played anything like this and I'm not even sure I'll finish it, but even if I don't, I feel this was worth every cent. A masterpiece.

This game is best on Advanced or Expert where you really get forced into working cooperatively with the other players. If you aren't sharing health, pills, and using your secondaries well, you'll die.

The only problem with this game is that on Expert mode there are a lot of a-holes who come in and team kill since friendly fire is so harmful.