Sons of the Forest

 

I was hesitant about the first game, The Forest. On the surface it seemed like just another trendy survival game influenced by Minecraft and the like. But after spending some time with it, it turned out its not really like that at all. Yes you can craft a base, and do all sorts of building, but its actually a horror story experience which was pleasantly surprising and all the crafting is mostly optional. After finishing the first game, I ended up really liking it and was eager to see more from this developer. To my surprise not long after and they've released Sons of the Forest. Of course I ignored its initial Early Access release, as I always do, but it didnt take too long before the game was finished and able to be played through in full by anyone. I got it on a decent discount sale, too, so I had little doubts that this game would be a good experience, I wasn't very concerned if it would suck.

Sons of the Forest has a similar, albeit slight twist of a premise as the first game. In the first game you're just a simple regular guy whose plane crashes on some remote island and your child gets taken away by creepy cannibals, the goal is obvious, find your kid and escape. In Sons of the Forest however, you're a part of a team of special operatives whose sent on a mission to explore the island and discover some missing politician or powerful man, something like that. Your helicopter ends up crashing, and then your objective is to find the bodies of your fallen allies. Thats the basic premise. And frankly its not as gripping or exciting as the simplicity of the first games premise, just being an ordinary person finding yourself stranded on a creepy island is more intense and immersive than being this spec ops military dude.

The game of course features a full co-op playthrough, which was the main draw in the first place. So we played through in co-op, it has multiple difficulties but as usual we just did Normal. Hosting and joining is simple enough, but there is a bug where sometimes the client cant load in and has to quit the game which was a bit annoying. The co-op, like the first game I think, isnt flawless though. Cutscenes only play for the first person that gets there, while the other guy just watches him do the animations. And at the beginning of the game youre not quite synced up with eachother on the helicopter, which caused some initial confusion until we timed things right ourselves manually. But for the most part the co-op is just as well designed as the first game, with the standard helping eachother up mechanics once you go down, and a basic trading system, although cumbersome and often times more hassle than its worth to interact with.

But the games mechanics and general idea is largely the same as the first game, you wake up at the crash site, and have survival mechanics such as Food, hunger, sleep to keep up with, as well as having to check your GPS map to try to find points of interest to progress through the game. Weirdly enough, Sons of the Forest now has allied NPC's you can come across, which immediately struck me as a strange design choice, and that feeling never really went away. Not before long you run into Kelvin,  who is a friendly NPC but he seems to not be able to speak. The explanation is something like: In the crash he hit his head and forgot how to talk...Yeah, real convenient. It comes across as silly, and gamey, and takes away from the atmosphere. This guy is just a goofy eyesore, you can walk up to him and hold up a notepad to tell him to do basic things, like collect logs, stones, or food, but I largely just saw him as a joke and a stupid inclusion into the games mechanics. It even takes away from the psychological horror aspect of the game, its hard to be quite as unnerved when you have this silly guy running around. You cant even give him weapons, when you get in fights, he kinda just stands there and does nothing, or often times himself dies, only to respawn later as if nothing happened. Its just a very weird design choice. You can also run into another friendly NPC, this woman with 3 arms and 3 legs, which is a disturbing sight to see her sneaking around in the bushes , stalking you throughout the game. At first shes skittish, almost like a rabid animal, but the more you interact with her, and the more you give her things, she warms up to you and starts following you around the world and enjoying your company. Yeah, shes kind of neat and amusing, but again, it kinda just takes away from the isolated horror feeling of the game, and theres not much point to her either, than than looking at her for amusement.
I just looked it up, and guess what? It turns out you CAN give the woman guns, but not the guy. What kinda sense does that make!? You cant give the guy weapons so naturally we think ok, we cant give her either, so we didn't try. Inconsistent, incoherent is like this all over the game.

Even weirder, is the fact that Sons of the Forest seems to take away mechanics and quality of life features that made the first game enjoyable and seamless to progress through. For instance, in the first game if you ever needed to know what to do or what objectives you've done, you had a journal notepad where you cross off caves you've been to and things youve done. This is completely removed from this game, leading to many hours of aimless frustration and boring repetitive wandering around without a clue to do. Indeed, most of the gameplay spent was roaming around doing jack shit, desperately trying to find the next thing we had to do to progress. Its even more confusing because sometimes as you play through the game, in the bottom left it will actually show you an objective being crossed off, as if its a relic of this notepad system - but theres no notepad to be found in the game anymore. Like, which one is it? Why even show me this objective being crossed off If I have no way to look at the notes of what I'm supposed to be doing? Its a mess.

Another example of a strange and out of place inclusion into this sequel is vehicles. Thats right, you can come across goofy vehicles to drive. These include, Golf carts scattered about, a Knight V which is this tiny little unicycle type device that is very silly and stupid to control, Hang Gliders, which at first was fun and impressive, but its far too easy to crash and then permanently lose them, and since we're playing co-op, its no use for just one person to use it so we briefly used it once then never saw it again. And theres a Sled that we crafted, but never bothered to use. So, Golf Carts is the vehicle you'll be trying to use most of the time, and yeah the controls and physics are absolutely laughable. Some of the most stupid, pathetic vehicle physics I think I've ever seen. More often than not its faster to just stay on foot than try to drive this thing, because of the amount you'll be crashing into trees and other small debris. Still, if you stick to the road you might get somewhere. The passenger seats work, which is nice, so the co-op partner can just relax. But the carts take no physical damage, this means you'll be doing stuff like flying golf carts off 500ft mountains and not even getting a scratch, its just ridiculous. What kind of game are they trying to go for here? A silly, unserious meme game? or an intense, psychological horror survival game? Its like they cant decide what they want to make, and the game suffers because of it. Lots of things seem out of place, like the inclusion of the friendly NPC's, the vehicles, and especially the sci-fi elements that start creeping into the games narrative, are just not very appreciated for me. The game even leans into guns pretty hard, but the execution just misses the mark and again feels out of place.

Some more inclusions of mechanics that just rubbed me the wrong way is this Strength mechanic. On your hud, you see a little icon of a Muscle arm. After some experimenting, it turns out that the more you swing your axe or do strength related things, the higher this number goes up. What does the number going up do? Well we werent sure, because the game does such a poor job representing its self to you, but we looked it up and allegedly it increases your health, and stamina. So for hours we would go around swinging our axes like dumbasses increasing this strength number. Yeah, not good. That's just bad design. I always hated games that use this sort of mechanic, like "The more you do something, the better it is!" On paper its ounds fine, but in practice it always ends with the player abusing the mechanic like this, because why not? It reminds me of Morrowind and Oblivion where players would just spend the whole game jumping nonstop, because it slowly increases your Athletics skill ,which makes you run and jump faster. Anyway we eventually got our Strength number to 15 and got so sick of swinging our axes that we just gave up on it, but frankly I didn't really seem to notice much of a difference in my damage, health, or stamina. I still was dying in one hit after being revived, it never seemed to do much. Just more incoherent sloppy design.

As for the "survival" mechanics, such as food, eating, and sleep, its supposed to ruin your stamina when its depleted and blinking, and sure enough it does, but its not this dire life or death situation you might think. Even if youre starving and thirsty for hours, your stamina is still plenty to sprint almost nonstop and traverse the map. It isnt as meaningful and significant as it should be, I get they were trying to not be annoying, but it feels like it trivializes the entire survival system when its not that impactful. For much of the game I'd just ignore the survival mechanics because it didn't seem to matter much. Eventually I did start caring, and eating and drinking became second nature, and sleeping too, but it was more because I had an abundance of resources moreso than actually feeling immersed and wanting to keep up with my stats. They should have actually made you die if you dont eat, or make it so your stamina is absolutely ruined, but balance the amounts of food so its not very annoying, to atleast make the survival system feel meaningful. In its current state, it just doesnt add much to the immersion or gameplay. And the only time we would sleep is when it was turning night time, just so we could skip the night and go back to day. But there is an annoying thing with sleeping, where you can frequently get interrupted and enemies will teleport ontop of you, preventing you from sleeping until youre safe. This often turns into entire night times of getting ambushed as we try to sleep, only to get killed, respawn directly ontop of an enemy camp, and spend the entire night dying and respawning because the game stupidly spawns you ontop of a damn enemy camp! I even tried stealthing my way out, but the game barely seems to have stealth mechanics, atleast I could never make it work. Another pretty big missed mark, the whole survival mechanics and this frustrating spawn system.

Still, the initial objective seems simple enough. Look at the GPS, and go towards these purple icons which are bodies of your fallen allies. Sure, so we did that, and they got marked off as we went to them, indicating progress. Until we reached the last one, where it required a shovel. Ok, get a shovel, that should be easy enough, right? I mean if it was real life or basically any other game, you could just craft a shovel made of stones and sticks, it does the job. But much to our surprise, we spent almost the entire duration of the games campaign looking for this damn shovel! I mean it, we got to the require shovel objective at like hour 2, and it wasnt until hour 15 that we actually found the thing. What the fuck! Its like this massive epic quest across the entire island, just to find the shovel. We spent so many hours scratching our fucking heads walking into random caves, wasting our time, making no progress, in search for this mysterious shovel. It wasnt very fun either, it was like annoying, exhausting, boring, our patience was running thin. The exploration in this game isnt as fascinating as the first, either. The sights and sounds arent as memorable or have near as many interesting landmarks. Like in the first game you would go into a cave and find insane sights of guys crucified, strange plane seats full of passengers in the caves, cult like rituals, all sorts of crazy shit. But here, in Sons of the Forest, the games are quite tame in comparison. Theres barely any memorable landmarks or interesting locations, all the caves are just...empty, except for a few times when you find like a space ship towards the end of the game, and frankly thats about it. The caves are a massive disappointment, so roaming around the map, spending 30+ minutes slowly walking to cave after cave, trying to find this damn shovel, started to wear our patience thin.

It turns out we've been to multiple caves we had to, but we managed to walk right past the tiny paths which led to mandatory progress items. For instance one cave, has the Rope Gun, which is required to use one time to slide down a rope. We actually found the cave with the rope, but we were confused why we couldnt slide down it. Why would you have to use a rope gun? Just wrap pieces of cloth or something around your hands, we thought we had to go craft something so that took more hours of wasted wandering around. We even found zipline hooks, excitedly we ran back to the rope cave, but nope still nothing. Frustrating.

We missed the path with the Rope Gun because the game is too cryptic. The paths you must go are obscured in darkness, with nothing interesting or memorable nearby. There are so many ways you can subtly guide the player towards mandatory paths, without coddling them or making the game trivial. They didnt do anything, theres just tiny little hidden paths you must find and if you dont, you can find yourself roaming around for hours doing absolutely nothing. They could of put a weird statue, ritual site, flickering red light, ANYTHING nearby the path to indicate its special , memorable, or a unique place. But they did nothing. And its a common problem throughout the game, theres just shit pacing, and a general complete lack of direction or guiding the player, to the point where we lost patience after playing for something like 15 hours and still not finding the shovel that we just started Googling things. After trekking back across the map, getting the rope gun, trecking across the map to the rope cave, sliding across the rope. We also ran completely past the Rebreather, basically scuba gear required to progress the game by diving into caves. Same story, there was just one tiny path that had nothing unique or indicative nearby, that we managed to walk right past. We had to look this up too. They just do such a bad job at subtly guiding the player towards progress, the game has such a bad feeling of pacing and progression that it ruins a lot of the excitement and wonder and instead makes you feel like youre wasting your time, and doing nothing. But finally we began to make progress towards getting the shovel after sadly having to Google these two items.

I'll quickly note that another strange inclusion (omission) , is, like I said previously, in the first game it checks off cave youve been to on your notebook. Well in this game that notebook doesnt excist, instead the game seems to expect you to manually drop these "GPS Locator" items , which basically act as landmarks on your map, well it wasnt until halfway through the game we realized what these things do, and by this point its too late to start using them, because we've already been inside lots of caves so we dont know which ones to use it on. Another failure of a mechanic, missed mark, and example of devs being terrible at directing the player or setting up your expectations of mechanics and how to progress the game.

The game also features 3d printers, which you can find in a few of the bunkers and labs you come across, but this mechanic seems kinda half baked and pointless. Like, you cant make anything that interesting. A water canteen? Ok, I crafted it but never needed to use it. A Red mask to put on to trick the enemies? Ok, a silly novelty item, but I never used it. A sled? Ok we crafted it, but never used it, another novelty thing. I mean, what else is there? Just another weird inclusion that felt out of place.

After all that, getting the shovel, and going back to the dig site, the reward was a Shotgun. I thought it was going to be something to help give us direction throughout the game, guess not. This leads me to mention how this game has a much larger focus on guns than the first game. In the first game, you only get guns about 85% into the game, in Sons of the Forest, you get a pistol in the first 2 hours, a shotgun, another revolver pistol, and a rifle, among others. Thats an interesting design change, but the problem is the execution sucks. The guns are worthless peashooters. The pistol in particular is pathetic, needing like 10+ bullets to kill a basic cannibal enemy, forget using it to try to take out the other bigger monsters. The shotgun isnt much better, at times taking 6+ shots point blank to kill enemies. This could of easily been re-balanced and fixed. All they had to do was make the ammo much more scarce, but make each individual bullet more impactful and satisfying. Instead, you have bullets all over the place, but the guns feel like shit, making the whole gunplay aspect of the game fall flat. Even the controls for the guns are senseless, like the shotgun has two ammo types, Buckshot and Slugs. Well we kept wondering why cant we reload the shotgun, when we stil have some ammo left? It turns out you have to LOOK DOWN at your feet to change ammo types and reload...What? I've never heard of something so stupid. Just why? They couldnt figure out a button to use, they thought it was more realistic to have to look down? We didnt realize this until over halfway through the game. Just insane design choices.

The enemy design like the first game is still wonderful and creative. You've got all sorts of deranged cannibals, and as the days go on and the game progresses you start to see more and more crazy monsters showing up all over the island. Cannibals start wearing armor, or even flesh of other victims, creepy masks, their AI is still amazing, the way they stalk you, they climb trees, they sometimes almost act friendly, the AI for the monsters in general is one of the best things about the game, as well as the plethora of different designs. Still, I feel like it misses the visceral horror that the first game had, falling into a cave and seeing these guys was a real shocking experience in the first game, but here in the sequel its more tame, maybe its due to the emphasis on the guns, or how the game generally feels more action packed, but something about the monsters isnt quite as gripping or disturbing as in the first game. They are still very interesting though, you come across blobs of flesh that have tons of giant fingers popping out of them, all sorts of monsters that are almost beyond description. You still have the creepy babies crawling around, and you get these weird red skinned cannibals that show up that are quite the unnerving sight.


But, there are lots of annoying, stupid little small things, that after adding up make the whole experience in Sons of the Forest feel like a grueling slog moreso than an intense & interesting survival horror story experience. For instance, the GPS map, something you'll rely on the entire game to try to progress. You can't see the whole GPS screen, even if you zoom all the way out, you still cant see the entire island. This is a crucial flaw, this means just to simply glance at where to possibly go, you'll have to spend sometimes upwards of 20-30 minutes just aimlessly walking a direction just to scroll the map! So much time wasted just running in one direction just to be able to scroll the GPS screen to at least see whats on the screen. Just why? What purpose does that serve? None, just to waste your time. Its not even realistic, on a real GPS you can of course zoom all the way out, so what the fuck?

Theres so many other poorly designed things it can be endless, how about the cumbersome overwhelming controls? It seems like from my memory, that this game has far more controls and things you can do and equip compared to the first game. This makes the entire control scheme bloated and a mess, you press buttons to hold certain items such as Flashlights, lighters, on the left hand, and the right hand is reserved for other certain items. Even the simple act of putting away an item from your hand is a clunky mess because the control scheme is so bloated. While I appreciate the big immersive inventory system, showing you all the items youve collected on one screen, gives each item this real feeling of weight and significance, like they are real items not just sprites on a game screen - but again, compared to the first game, this game has so many items that even opening your inventory to find something you're looking for is a massive hassle and takes so much time its like digging through a needle in a haystack. There are so many ways this could of been improved, how about the last 5 items youve picked up glow in a very obvious way? Well, I think thats supposed to be a mechanic, but it doesnt seem to work very well at all. I noticed a glow sometimes, but its never for the item I'm looking for that I JUST picked up.

Believe it or not there is a mechanic to try to alleviate how cumbersome it is to try to equip items in tense situations or swiftly, theres a Backpack you can manually add some items to. Well for atleast more than half of the game I couldnt figure out what the point of the backpack was , or how to use it. You just put things in it, and thats it. Eventually I got so confused by it I caved in and looked it up. Well it turns out you HOLD a button and he brings up the backpack, like a quick-select menu. How was I supposed to know you have to hold certain buttons to make certain mechanics appear? The game does such a terrible job of explaining the mechanics to you, theres not even any popups or hints to tell you the controls or how to interact with the game, it just expects you to I guess Google how to play the damn game? It sucks, and again, like wasted a significant amount of fun I could of had if I realized this backpack system sooner into the game instead of fumbling around with the full inventory while in the heat of battle.

I can keep going with gripes about the mechanics, so I will.
How about every time you go down, and get revived, you come back with 1% health, meaning you often get stuck in loops where you die, get revived, repeat endlessly because theres no slight invincibility period and the getting up animation takes too long. It just feels sloppy and like shit game design. How about when coming back to life you instead get 50% health so you die in 2 or 3 hits again? Constantly getting one hit isnt fun. Its even more senseless because you'd think eating food and drinking would give you health , well it doesnt. Ok maybe some specific items give you health, but its such a laughable amount its just mindboggling. They'll give you like maybe 5 health. The only real way to get health is by finding Meds, but you can go long periods of time without having any, being stuck on 1% health dying in one hit over and over, it just sucks.

How about the GPS icons being tiny  and barely able to see anything? At least for me and my resolution, maybe the game doesn't scale well on some resolutions.
The GPS player indicator is at least this tiny yellow triangle, I can barely see what direction im facing or where I am on the gps at any given time , the whole navigation system sucks, which is a really bad thing to fuck up in a game like this. To add insult to injury, the games map is very mountainous and vertical, so rarely is it as simple as just running in a direction - no, you'll have to navigate annoyingly around giant mountains, or abuse the games shitty physics to jump your way across or slide down the mountain like its some janky Bethesda game or something.

After finally getting the shovel and shotgun we thought we'd have some sense of direction and what to do, but no. We're left at another standstill, with no idea what to do. Cue countless hours of driving around, walking around the island aimlessly trying to figure out what to do. Multiple back to back sessions doing essentially nothing, making no progress, being out of patience and frustrated at the whole game.

But, the game does have some silver lining. For one, the graphics can be quite impressive and beautiful, especially the draw distances and vistas on those aforementioned mountains.
The biggest source of enjoyment, believe it or not, came from the Radio and music in the game. Thats right, when everything was dull and dreary, we atleast had a smile on our faces carrying around this stupid boombox listening to the games soundtrack. You can equip a boombox and just walk around blasting music, and theres a lot of it. The soundtrack seems to hae dozens of songs, to various amusing qualities. From depressing post-rock music, somber piano music, cliche but hilarious rock n roll music, to upbeat infectiously catchy jingles such as "Hey you" and the Crunchie Wunchies theme. This melody gets repeated in atleast 5 different songs  in the games soundtrack, and ofter the days playing the game it got stuck our heads like a damn virus. You can even find a guitar in the game where you can walk around playing guitar riffs in first person, and of course this Crunchie Wunchie theme is one of them you can strum out, the small details like this made the game a lot more of a happy experience than it otherwise wouldnt be. You can even put the radio on in the Golf car, but we didnt realize this for far too long because it also uses the same stupid control scheme as reloading the shotgun, where you have to stop the damn kart and look down at the ground to turn the radio on.

So we eventually got so impatient and sick of making no progress that after like 18 hours of gameplay and no clue what to do, we had to look it up again.
So you have to find 3 keycards and use the keycards to go to these maintenance bunkers, to progress the game. Well we already have been to some of these bunkers, and of course we walked past some important path or missed some item. More hours of frustration, looking things up, getting really pissed off and sick of the game, we finally stumbled our way through some underground bunkers, used the key card, found this like weird corporate building place with a room of zombie people and a big creepy armed monster? Thats about the most eventful thing we've seen. Then you swim down in some cave, come across this spaceship thing with a weird question mark artifact in it, and a few more sessions of trying to find the location of where to use the rest of the keycards, we go into this luxury place with big TV's on the walls, come across a cutscene of a human NPC with a mutant arm, he puts his arm up against the wall and says "The door wont open, it needs something"  Clueless, we had no idea what to do. What do you mean the door wont open? What do we do? We tried for an hour to figure it out, but were clueless. Again, the games pacing and direction being terrible. We had to look it up. You have to run outside the bunker, and craft some fucking grave thing, put this Ancient Armor inside the grave, to infuse it with magical sci-fi powers, then go back and open the door....What? How the hell is anyone gonna realize that? Thats some cryptic, Simons Quest tier bullshit! What the fuck is wrong with these devs? Did they get anyone to playtest this?

So for the first time in the entire game, youre forced to interact with the crafting and blueprint system. We spend an hour doing nothing but literally carrying fucking stones back and forth to this crafting object, do the stupid sci-fi ritual with the armor, go back down and the door opens. Bad. Then you're in this firey hell cave place full of enemies, being escorted by an NPC which shoots at the enemies for you, and you come across this big boss, which was actually cool and exciting. The game actually has a boss fight! Something is happening! Its a pretty intense fight, we died but made our way back, killed him and actually felt accomplished and had fun. Well guess what? Thats the end of the game. Yeah, we turned a corner and its like "Achievement unlocked, beat the game!" I was jawdropped. Thats it? I felt like we barely fucking did anything! What did we do, go around and find a few bodies, go through caves to find a shovel, go to 3 copy paste bunkers, drive around like idiots in a golf cart for hours clueless, craft some stupid sci-fi armor , and the games over? What the fuck, man.

Well its not over quite yet, theres one more joke of a boss fight. Its this big mutant guy who swings a damn helicopter at you, the thing is, hes a pushover. The fight lasted 30 seconds. Shoot him 10 times with a shotgun and hes done for. Then you get asked if you want to stay on the island by interacting with the lame out of place sci-fi item, or leave. Naturally leaving the island seems like the canon choice, so we did that. Then you get some cutesy cutscene of you and the NPC guy and 3 armed girl flying away, you get a humorous cutscene showing the NPC guy in some brain damage hospital playing with toys like a toddler, and you get a scene showing the three armed girl going into surgery to remove her extra limbs. Then, it shows the three of you driving off into the sunset like a happy family. I mean its comical and goofy, sure, but still, its like they just cant tell what kind of vibe they're trying to go for with the game and the story, just bizarre.

We reloaded our save to see the other option, staying on the island. Its about what it sounds like, you just stay and can keep playing, implying it wants you to go find the rest of the optional mysterious sci-fi items to make some magical epic item or something, but yeah we don't care.

Thats Sons of the Forest. A game that doesnt really know what it wants to be, a mishmash of confused mechanics and plot lines, the sci-fi narratives were just bad, and the lack of direction and a real plot, among with the countless other annoying design choices, made it a bit of a slot to get through. Its kind of bittersweet, because I was really fond of the first game, what with the big giant chasm in the middle of the map, it just gave you suh a sense of wonder. But in Sons of the Forest, I didn't have nearly as much wonder or amazement with the game world, it all just fell flat. They couldn't capture that same magic again, unfortunately. That said, its not all bad, the game does have its moments of fun, it is interesting collecting all these items and having a backpack full of stuff to interact with, it is a realistic immersive game with all the animations, everything you do feels like it has so much weight with the animations, it is quite a combat heavy game, both melee and guns, so it is more of an action game compared to the first, which can be exciting at times, the graphics can be quite stellar, the soundtrack in particular is highly entertaining, but sadly the game has too many flaws to be a great experience.

6/10

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

 

I finished the previous game, Shadow of Mordor some years ago and remember it as a decent sort of open world button mash combat game with weird Assassins Creed copy mechanics. The theme of the Tolkien universe with the high polish and cinematic fidelity is interesting enough to want to play more of this kind of game, so I eventually got the sequel at a good price.

The game asks what difficulty you want to play after hitting start, and theres a lot of them. It seems like the last two hardest ones are unique for people already very familiar, like a Nemesis difficulty and then an even harder one. So I just went with Normal, cant go wrong with that, right? After a pretty lengthy, but impressive introduction sequence and cutscenes where it sets up the premise where you play as Talion, a combination of a stoic ranger and melee fighter, he also has this companion side kick ghost being that resides within his body that comes out and talks to you, and a few other select characters throughout the story. The premise is something like the basic Tolkien thing where you have to find a way to get to Sauron and defeat the evil presence of the land, mostly. But as the game goes on, you start to grow your own army, taking over fortresses and gaining power over the land, so this starts to become the main plot as well.

Then you're set off into the open world to do the quests how you please. When you go to the menu, there is a quest category which shows you quests for each main character in the game. There are about a handful of these quest branches that you must complete to finish the game, its easy to understand what the main missions are, and what you must do. Then you are set off into each of the open world regions (theres a few different maps) So you open the quest menu and pick whatever category and mission is avalible , and try to fast travel near it, or travel there manually. The game is very fast paced, as in when you move around the world, you have an ability to super sprint where you run so fast you move faster than a car, its like Superhero stuff, the movement capabilities in this game are insane. Super sprinting across the world at 100mph, Spiderman climbing up almost any building or mountain, jumping 50ft each time, jumping from gigantic towers leaping across the world taking zero fall damage. The movement in this game is ridiculous, but it is kind of fun to control. And it is nice to be able to get to the main quests with ease. Once you get to a quest, you usually get a highly polished cinematic with one of the many memorable characters in the game. The general writing, and characters are well done here, and are interesting to watch and listen to. You have that spider lady, who you intiially give the Ring in trade for your ghostly companion fellow, whose a reoccurring character of mystique and she has wondrous powers, then you have the famous Smeagol, which plays a small role for a few missions during the campaign where you follow him around and do stealth, with perfect voice acting. Too bad he doesn't pay more of a larger role, guess they couldn't spare the change for the voice actor. You have other characters like the returning Ratbag from the first game, whose this small comedic sidekick, cracking jokes but having a rebellious side. Early into the game you run into this warrior lady character that at first seems like a love interest but turns out to be a completely pointless or mundane plot point where she just runs off with some other guy and then you never hear from her again, and this subplot about her father. You have this tree lady whose like the mother nature who controls the forces of nature, you have an allied Orc that you control, called Bruz, which at first is your enemy, then becomes another comedic ally, with this sort of weird Scottish accent (well, a lot of the orcs have this sort of accent). Theres something kind of..bad, or offputting, about how some of these characters feel more like children's mascot or childrens cartoons, it kind of takes you away from the immersion of the world, I don't know. The comedic relief characters are fine, but theres a few too many. Each region has a percentage of the story quests that are completed, which is easily viewed from the quest menu. You simply go from region to region completing the quests, until theres no more quests in a region, then you move onto the next one. Thats the general progression of the story.

The game is basically a modern beat 'em up. Meaning, the combat largely consists of mashing the X button over and over to do basic attacks, and then once in awhile over an enemies head you will see "Y" or "B" , almost like a quicktime, telling you to press the button in order to dodge or counter...and thats pretty much all there is to the combat. Its this strange clone of Assassins Creed combat system that I still scratch my head at. Honestly, it sucks. It sucked in Assassins Creed and it sucks here. For the first half of the game, the combat was so stupid and mindless that I was literally holding the controller in the air and pressing nothing but the X button with one finger, demonstrating how silly it is. The game can be played with one finger for most of its duration! Now you might say "Oh, you picked Normal difficulty, idiot!" thats the difficulty the developers thought was appropriate to introduce as the default option, why they thought this was a good middle ground, I have no idea. I think fundamentally the combat system just sucks, no matter how much you tweak the damage variables wont change the foundational issues. Later on, the difficulty does ramp up, mostly in the form of enemy chiefs which are invulnerable to pretty much every type of attack, which feels very cheap, annoying, and stupid. Like you'll come up against guys who block all your attacks, you cant leap over them, you cant grab them, you cant stun them. What the fuck are you to do? Chase them around the arena and wait until they stand at an explosive barrel and rinse repeat? Sucks. Or the difficulty gets introduced in the form of the controls being terrible because 1) Theres no lock on 2) You'll be surrounded by 100 enemies, and you really only intend to attack one specific guy, but because theres no lock on or targeting, you frequently are accidentally grabbing, attacking, the wrong fucking guy. Even more jank is the fact that you can get enemies into a stunned state with stars above their head, there are two stun stats: On the ground, and standing up. Confusingly, each stun state has a corresponding button combination to execute them. On the ground its Y+B, standing up its Y+X. Yeah, this works as janky and shit as it sounds. Frequently I would try to do the execute and it wouldnt register, because its attacking the wrong guy, or because I'm pressing the wrong combo for the wrong stun state. The controls actually are just terrible. Even something simple as just walking around the environment sucks. It copies that like GTA 4 movement system, where if you just push the stick, you walk, and you have to hold A to sprint....Why would you ever want to fucking walk in this game? Why? Just why is this even a thing? But, while you're holding A, you also automatically climb all over everything, like in Assassins Creed. The problem with this is , since you need to hold A just to run, you'll also frequently be accidentally climbing all over the damned place when you dont mean to. Was the first game this fucked up ? I can't remember, it probably was, I might of just had higher tolerance for shit games back then. For instance, about halfway into the game when you unlock the Dominate ability (Hold B at a weakened enemy) , I had constant problems of accidentally targeting the wrong guy, in the heat of battle where quick decisions need to be made, this was very frustrating. Additionally, you can also hold B to suck the life out of enemies, which is about the only way to actually get health in this game - Well the same problem there. You have to hold B for 3 seconds on some enemy, but I kept targeting the wrong guy, getting interrupted, which is clunky, frustrating, and sucks as a combat system.

Even worse, like I mentioned previously with the floating prompts above enemy heads, indicating to press to dodge or counter, well since theres no lock-on, and since the position of these prompts are just floating above enemy heads, and since you'll frequently be fighting like 50 enemies at once, its very easy to spin the camera the wrong way and not see these prompts. So actually the combat largely consists of desperately swinging the stupid camera around just to try to keep the prompts in view, all the while mashing the X button like an idiot over and over. Frankly the entire combat system is shit, which is a very sad flaw to have in a game like this. Its the prime example of how NOT to do a third person action combat system. Pretty much any other system is superior than this slop. I hate this button mashing, Assassins Creed, Batman Arkham Asylum combat system. Its trash.

You can also find gear to improve your stats, like sword damage and health, but its a very minor part of the game. Like once every few hours you'll find an upgrade, and its only marginal improvements. Its very barebones. Like you'll find a sword that goes from 50 damage to 54, once every few hours. Or some piece of chest armor that goes from 150 health to 175. Theres not much to it. Apparently there are Sets you can wear, that give extra bonuses if you wear all pieces, but I never cared or found an entire set, so its probably some end game grindy stuff. There is also a level up / skill tree system, but this too is very barebones and boring. There are multiple categories like Melee combat, Ranged, Stealth, Riding enemy beasts, and then Campaign. Pretty self explanatory. At first I just got all the Melee buffs, but many of them were confusing or like fighting game combo's to memorize, so I barely cared. Unlocking abilities of stuff like "Hold Y+X At this specific time to do this specific Move!" Well, Sometimes I'd try it, but because of the aforementioned combat issues, it felt like half the damn time it wasnt registering or doing anything, probably because I was accidentally attacking the wrong guy. Ugh. So Instead I just focused on basic passive buffs, like an additional revive if you die, or the ability to freeze enemies if you leap over them (Best skill in the game) , or things like more Energy to use moves, a system I still barely understand even after finishing the game. Theres like this energy meter, and when its full you can do some combo move or something, the whole thing is stringed together in such an incoherent, clunky stupid way that I found it hard to give a shit or really want to interact with much of it, especially when brainlessly mashing X works most of the time. Its like a weird bastardized version of a shit fighting game and a shit beat 'em up.

If you die, you get a quicktime prompt to press a button at the right time to get back up and do a last stand. By default I think you have 3 of these revives and then you die for real, going back to your last checkpoint (Or if its a siege, failing the siege). There is a skill point to make this 4 revives, which is one of the best buffs in the game.

The graphics and presentation are polished and mostly well done. The depiction of Middle-Earth is great, it has the various locations which are separate entire open world maps you can fast travel back and forth, like Gorgoroth, Cirith-Ungol, Minus Morgul, and so on. Each with their own distinct look and set locations. The maps mostly have nothing in them, but encampment after encampment of goblin enemies, or these big towers you must climb to use one of those floating eyes of Sauron to survey the area. The actual technical graphics are fine for a 2018 game, but its nothing spectacular or the greatest thing youve seen, but particularly the Goblin models and facial animations, especially when you confront their chiefs, are exceptionally well done.

So the plot has you entertained with various interesting characters, what are the actual missions like?
You're mostly doing things like going into enemy camps, either through sometimes forced stealth missions, which arent too bad. The stealth is very forgiving, or youre going in and rescuing some tied up people. Missions arent always dull or mundane, though, there are quite a few explosive and memorable unique moments and objectives. One time you're doing flying sections riding a dragon shooting down enemies in their forts or fighting against other dragons on a field of ice. Another time you commandeer this sort of big hulking tree beast as a sort of like mech section, fighting against another big boss. Its kind of cheap and lame, and feels like a series of quicktime events or mindless button mashing, but it is different. The game even has missions where you're  put up a siege against enemy fortresses, capturing the points, breaking down the walls, and even customizing your enemy force for the best way to take it over. There is a decent variety in objectives to keep you interested and to break up the pacing, there are a few boss battle moments, too. There are sections of the campaign where you're fighting against these ghostly Nazgul warriors, which is pretty cool and interesting. Mostly the only way to take these guys down is to ...just mash X like a brainless idiot and wait for the Y prompt to show up, counter it, and then rinse repeat. Oh well, at least its visually cool.

But really the bulk of what you will be doing is interacting with the Army system. What this means, is that there are thousands upon thousands of generic goblin enemies all around the map, but there are more higher up, unique captains that are also roaming around, that once they start fighting you, each give a brief cinematic and voice lines announcing themselves and showing their personality. They each have their own unique personalities, weaknesses and strengths, which you can inspect in a menu if you so desire. This is of course the same system from the previous game, which I finished, so this isnt anything surprising or new, but it probably is expanded upon more here in this game. So many of your main objectives and purpose in this game is to defeat these Captains, to weaken the enemy encampments and eventually take them over. At first, early into the game you are just simlpy killing them. But shortly into the game you unlock this ability to hold a button, and Dominate them once their health is low enough,meaning you then get choices of what to do with them. You can choose to kill them, which means they will drop a piece of loot. You can Recruit them, which adds them to your own Armies pool, which is visible through a menu (Either Garrison, or Army pages, but I admit the graphics and UI for these are confusing as hell and even after beating the game I still barely understand what the hell I'm looking at there, unfortunately.)  - Or, you can choose to "Shame" them, which is useful for in the case where you cannot recruit them because they are too high level, if you Shame them, they lose some levels, run away, so the next time you encounter them you can probably successful Recruit them.

Probably the games greatest strengths are its cutscenes, interesting characters and dialogue, and the enemy captains talking to you and battling eachother. Everytime you get into a battle and suddenly theres a cutscene of an enemy captain talking to you and trying to intimidate you, its like an "oh shit" moment that really makes it intense and fun. But unfortunately since the combat system is pretty bad, it loses much of its impact. Not only that, but actually managing your army through the Garrison and Army menus are clunky, confusing, and unintuitive, which actually made caring about my own soldiers hard to do. Like you're supposed to take troops from one map and swap them around to other Fortresses? and theres this whole Garrison menu where you can level up your troops, give them Legendary status, or remove them from a fort to put in another? I dont really know how it works. The thing is, you don't really have to care or know, because its almost superficial. There are only a few moments in the entire campaign where you actually have to interact with your own army or troop system. These are all four different Siege sequences you must complete to be able to unlock the final mission. These sieges let you pick a few of your troops to lead the battle, and thats about it. The sieges are cinematically cool, sure, you get epic cutscenes of the enemy warchief standing ontop a tower, taunting you, you stand there with your huge army and rush into battle, climbing over his tower walls, destroying his fort and capturing points.. but thats all you have to know about the army system. It doesn't do enough to entice you to care about it, during normal gameplay otherwise, it has virtually no effect that I can see, maybe once or twice one of your troops will randomly show up and save you from death, but stuff like that is rare. Its like they built this whole grand system to tout how unique the game is, but really you barely have to interact with it, and really its not much of a big focus in the game. Like, most of the main missions dont have anything to do with your army or your troops. Yes, the main missions do task you with killing other enemy Chiefs, so in that sense you are interacting with the army system, but in terms of actually having to put your own army to use, not really.

The game does a good job of giving you that grand Tolkien cinematic experience, its depictions of the characters and Middle-earth are captivating, like I mentioned earlier, but the actual gameplay its self...leaves much to be desired, sadly.

Towards the end of the game my enjoyment started to plummet even more. First of all, you get to a point where its like "In order to do the final mission, you must capture all 4 fortresses" Well, the menus and UI are kind of bad, especially the main world map. I found it hard to figure out what the hell this even meant, even after Googling. I couldnt tell if the Siege quests were optional or not, well they're not. You have to do all 4 siege quests to unlock the final mission. Sure, cool enough. So I did 3 of 4 sieges,  but I got absolutely floored on the last siege at Gorgoroth. For some reason, during some sieges, when you get to around the final capture point, you have these Chiefs show up that just one hit you. I cant figure out what the hells going on. Out of nowhere I'd go from taking barely any damage, to all of a sudden these guys show up and tap me and I'm dead. Super frustrating, this happened on a few sieges, but I just jumped around like an idiot waiting for the capture meter to get full so I could atleast bypass it without killing them. Fine. So in this Gorgoroth siege, the capturing went well enough. Each siege though, has a final arena where you go inside the castle to fight the Overlord. All the rest of them were piss easy, no problems. But this Gorgoroth overlord battle was just fucking broken. It gave me this guy who is immune to virtually every sort of attack, he blocks every attack, I cant jump behind him, I cant assassinate him, I cant freeze...almost nothing. But to make things more insane, he also fully heals his entire health bar every 10 seconds or so. What the fuck!? Ontop of that, the arena also spawns infinite enemies chasing you around. In utter confusion I ran around trying to wittle this guys health down for 15 minutes, only for him to fully heal over and over. Extremely. frustrating. But then I realized how this game works. You know how it works? So the Captains aren't manually handcrafted. They just have randomly generated abilities and stats. For example, I looked up this same Siege on YouTube and they had an entirely different boss, with entirely different abilities. This means the game just happened to randomly generate a boss fight for me which is nearly impossible, and I just happened to land on health-regen ontop of it. Just terrible. Fucking garbage. Why waste my time like this? This is why hand crafted bosses are way better. I eventually slammed my head against the wall and got past him, mostly because I noticed I could summon an ally to help me.

Then you do the last mission "The Bright Lord" which is just a straight bridge, a gauntlet of your army VS a bunch of random enemy Chiefs. Easy enough. Funny how the last mission is way easier than this stupid RNG generated Siege boss I had. Then you do a few boss battles against a Nazgul guy, then finally you fight Sauron himself, first as this humanoid elf, then at half health he goes into his metallic armor demon form. Hes...pretty easy. Once again, for the last boss, all you do is mash X like an idiot, wait for the button prompt "A to leap over!" and rinse repeat. Literally all I did for like 5+ minutes straight is tap X twice, press A for leap, repeat. It looks so lame and broken and stupid. Once in awhile he will do this ground slam whch makes a circle you have to jump over or you get stunned and take a bit of damage..but thats about it. So I defeat Sauron, cutscenes play about how I've been betrayed by my Ghost friend guy and this other woman, then the game ends, right? Well, sort of? Not really. The campaign is over. There are no more story missions. But the end credits dont play!

The game now introduces this "Shadow war" end-game system. What this is, is essentially a giant slog of a grind about doing various siege missions over and over, probably for a dozen hours, to complete Shadow stages, after so many sieges or so many Shadow stages, you get the final cutscene and end credits. But look, I decided I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it! I finished the campaign missions, there is nothing left but copy paste repetitive grinding just to see one more cutscene. I tried to do one, I got 75% through a defense siege and then failed, and it took 15 minutes, and I uninstalled the fucking game. I beat it, OK? and infact, I looked up Longplays on youtube, and yeah everyone just calls it finished after The Bright Lord, no one does these Shadow Sieges as party of a longplay. Why didnt they put the end credits after The Bright Lord mission? You know whats even funnier and stupid? Initially at the games release, during this Shadow Siege part, they had fucking microtransactions! and it was 10x longer and took HUNDREDS of hours to finish! You could PAY to speed up progression here! But apparently in 2018 they released a patch which removed the microtransactions and shortened this Shadow War segment, but still, I'm not doing it. I'm already sick of the game. You know what, the game was about a 6/10 before this bullshit cropped up. But now its 5/10 because they expect me to sit here and do a boring grind just to see the real end cutscene+credits. No thanks. I've already played 14 hours up to this point, I'm not playing another 14 hours of zero campaign missions. Its not happening.

So thats Shadow of War, a game only kept entertaining by its cutscenes, dialogue, characters and premise, and its unique but underutilized army system, but the actual combat is just shitty. I can't really remember if I had these same complaints about the former game, but I'm sure if I replayed it nowadays these same issues would crop back it, The two games are basically the same, just more content. Unfortunately, the gameplay just doesnt do it for me. And that bullshit Shadow Wars really crippled my enthusiasm for the game.

5/10

Fallout 76

 

Being a fan of the Fallout series, the idea of a multiplayer game always excited me. Roaming the wasteland with a buddy, going on missions and looting and playing the various roles the games are known for, why wouldn't it be fun? So I've been keen to see what Fallout 76 was all about for awhile now, I heard whispers that people hated the game, but I wasnt sure why. I didnt buy it for a few years, because it just wasnt clear at all what kind of game it was. Is it a campaign game, where it has a straightforward story, beginning, middle, end, and credits? Is it just an MMO without much of a story? What is it? Even for awhile there it was a subscription based game! I'm not buying some subscription MMO, so that alone put me off. But they actually stopped with the subscriptions not long after the game released, and is a one time payment (But with microtransactions and other payments, I'm sure). Still, I couldnt figure out if it had a co-op campaign or not, even after researching it. It sounds like for the first few years of the games existence, the story wasnt even finished. Like they kept putting in the main missions in a piecemeal fashion. I saw the game on sale in late 2024 on a big discount, so once again I googled what the state of the co-op story was. It sounds like by this point the actual full story is made, theres ending credits, so you can actually beat the game now. The whole way they handled this co-op presentation was just poorly done, it shouldnt have been this hard to figure out what kind of co-op gameplay it has, and being vague about if the campaign is even finished sucked. But finally me and a buddy picked it up to see what its all about.

There are no difficulty selections, and there is a fairly straight forward but not very memorable or exciting introduction which you wake up in a vault surrounded by robots and not much more and simply exit the vault. Unlike Fallout 3 or New Vegas theres no exciting premise or alluring setup here. Its just plain as can be. You create your characters appearance (I just hit the randomize button) and arrive outside Vault 76. Then theres some vague plot about the Overseer leaving and she leaves you a note to find her? But then none of the main quests have ANYTHING to do with the vaults Overseer, infact the Overseer quest is marked as a side quest. I genuinely have no idea what the fuck the protagonists motivation or objective was supposed to be. Like, in Fallout 3 its simple: Find your father. New Vegas? Find the guy that killed you. Fallout 76: ??? I dont know. The whole plot feels so aimless and pointless you don't have a reason to care about anything, its so ambiguous and poorly put together even after beating the thing I don't even know what the hell the protagonist was motivated by?

Anyway.. after a lackluster setup you can then play co-op. The whole reason I finally wanted to play this, is because its Fallout: Co-op edition. Great, I'll play the whole game with a friend! Well you easily enough invite eachother to a party, and can now roam around the open world doing the main quests together. Great, right? ... Not really. You'd think you just share quests and objectives, but no, you each have your own quest and you each have to complete each objective. If one friend falls behind, the other guy can progress through the whole game without him. So you have to make sure you're constantly on the same objective of each quest. To make things even more fucking confusing, at the games release there was a specific amount of Main quests, but then through the years and months after the games release, they started adding more and more "Main quests" that are basically a second campaign. But nowhere in your quest log does it separate the "campaigns" out, everything is just blended together under the same "Main quest" category. We were only interested in, at first playing the initial release "campaign" set of quests. These all center almost exclusively around non-human NPC quests and objectives. Because at the games release, there were actually no human NPC's. Something I heard people give the game shit for. And yeah, its pretty shocking to make a Fallout "Role playing game" ...where you don't even really play any role. Theres no one to talk to or choices to make. So what we had to do is look up a list of the Main quests on release, and do those. But for the first while, we were accidentally doing non-release campaign stuff and massively confusing ourselves, the whole thing is stringed together in such an awkward, intuitive, clusterfuck way. The pacing is atrocious and nothing makes sense.

As for the open world, the game takes place in West Virginia (I didn't even notice until more than halfway through the game) but what that means is that there are mountains everywhere. The map its self is annoying to navigate, its rarely just a straight path to the objective. You frequently have to instead take these long winding roundabout ways around big mountains, its honestly just a shit location for a video game. I dont want to spend 10 minutes walking around a damn mountain. But in typical Bethesda jank, if youre ontop of the mountain and need to get down, You can slide your way down the side of it without taking damage. But other than this, theres not much to remember or look at. The graphics and colors are like Autumn from what I can remember, a lot of yellows and oranges...but there are just no interesting locations. I dont even remember a single location, or anything. There arent Towns or villages, theres nothing like that. Theres just boring destroyed buildings and no memorable landmarks. Honestly how did they make a game map so dull and forgettable? Just like everything else in this game, maybe the only thing that isnt forgettable is how bad the whole thing is.

The games presentation is...very hit and miss. For instance, it does a nice job with the Fallout aesthetics and decorations all over the map screen and menu's, with the iconic Fallout boy and various decorations and prompts, but the games graphics are just ugly and dated, it times it looks worse than an Xbox 360 game and especially the lighting system can be very lackluster and janky. But there are some more serious crucial flaws with other aspects of the presentation. For instance, its a co-op game, and something you want to do in a co-op game is follow your friend easily, right? Well here the only way to find your friend is a tiny icon on your compass, a yellow square. The problem is, EVERYTHING on your compass is either yellow squares or yellow dots. Now you have dozens of shit on your compass, and your friend is just one of them. Most of the time its near impossible to decipher which fucking icon on the compass is your buddy, making the entire co-op experience even more annoying and incomprehensible. Even worse is the fact that when youre slightly too far away from your friend, the icon wont even show up on the compass! So you have to open the big map and aimlessly scroll around until you find him and try to work your way towards him. Yes, you can fast travel to eachother for free, but often times the fast travel doesn't even put you near eachother, making these issues even more frustrating. Every single aspect of multiplayer gameplay is just fucking butchered in this game, what the hell were they doing!? The whole point is to make a cooperative,  multiplayer fallout game. THEY FAILED. Guess what. Theres not even any fucking text chat! How do you make an "MMO" and not even put Text chat!? All you get are these stupid little gestures, theres like 10 of them. I think theres voice chat, sure, but I cant fathom no text chat.

Finally when we understood a list of quests to do, and we understood the stupid "co-op" mechanics where we dont even share quests or objectives, then we could make some progress. Except it gets even worse. There are sometimes areas that are "instances" where only the leader can complete the objectives. In these areas, the co-op partner just has to follow along blindly and not even be able to see the objective, and essentially wait his to turn to become the party leader and then do everything all over again.  How do they keep fucking up all the co-op mechanics? Thankfully these instanced areas are few and far between, atleast on the initial release date "campaign" quests. But I think on the post-release quests , they actually added human NPC's to try to damage control aganist the backlash, and these ones are filled with instances that are just a massive pain in the ass, having to wait your turn to talk to NPC's and do conversations over and over. And yeah, we played a few of these post-release quests with the humans and its still awful. The dialogue choices are bloated as fuck, probably to do damage control against people hating on Fallout 4's limited dialogue choices, but none of the characters or plot or premise are interesting at all, you simply don't give a shit, and talking to people doesn't accomplish anything or do anything interesting anyway. But we didn't do much of these post-release quests involving humans, we mostly only did them accidentally before we understood how the clusterfuck of a quest system works.

So anyway, after a few cumbersome hours, we understood the awful co-op quest system. We understood what quests we must do to complete the initial release "campaign" and 'finish the game'. The thing is, every single main quest and objective in the game is just garbage , not fun, menial bullshit that no one cares about. Almost every single objective in the game is go fetch some item, or go use a terminal. Terminal this, terminal that. The lack of human NPC's means they had to put computers and terminals all over the damn place as some sort of half assed attempt to put lore and structure behind your tasks. It sucks, isnt engaging, and is just downright boring. After the first 20 terminals or so I just stopped caring entirely and didn't even bother to read anything anymore and just spammed the buttons until the objective completed from then on for the rest of the game. Its such a joke. There were no interesting or memorable locations or objectives or quests in the game. Hey dude how about going to the DMV and renewing your license by talking to hiiilarious humorous robot butlers? And being attacked by lazy waves of enemies and running around looking for DMV cards in the trash? Hey how about being told to craft meaningless boring items at a work bench but you lack the resources so you have to walk around aimlessly looting random bits and bobs of garbage for HOURS until you can craft the stuff just to progress? How about going to some generic building and picking up some pieces of paper and then reading 6 terminals and then leaving after fighting a handful of robots or ghouls? You'll be doing that a lot!

It all blends together into the same bland soup of boredom and repetition. I can only remember a few locations in the actual game. At one point it had us going back and forth through this mental hospital area picking up random items, another point we went through some army camp Basic training course where we just jumped around some obstacle course or shot targets. Another point had us going up and down this elevator in this big tower to talk to some stupid, boring robot character that had voice acting like something straight out of Borderlands (Thats bad). And when the quests werent dull or boring, they were straight up awful and obnoxious. Like towards the end of the game we had this stupid quest that made is keep going back and forth from this gigantic friendly Enclave base(?) using all sorts of dozens of terminals and computers for information, like having to walk 5 minutes deep inside the base just to find one computer just to get the next objective, to chase down these helicoptors or find some key cards. So we'd go do the fetch quest, then we'd have to go back to this base and crawl through 5 minutes of the stupid maze to find the terminal to get the next one. Just tedious annoying garbage objectives. And sometimes the objective marker doesnt exist, or doesn't point you in the right area at all. Like towards the end of the game, the last quest would just point us to random porta potties with a "mysterious button"  but it doesn't do anything. Its actually just the exit of the quest that you do later, the game is just crafted so shitty and buggy they couldnt even properly line up the quest markers. Wasting your precious fucking time playing this piece of shit, frustrating the hell out of you for no reason. A few times we just had to look up what to do or where to go because of stupid stuff like this.

As for the "MMO" features, I don't even know. The game only lets you play in a "room" with 28 other players, which it randomly selects whenever you start the game. Throughout the entire game I've maybe seen like, a total of 6 other real players. Its just pointless, the whole multiplayer aspect of the game feels half assed and pointless. You can fast travel to other players camps on the map, where you can interact with their workbenches and stuff, but its stringed together in such a confusing way most of the time it was more annoying than interesting. There is a feature where other players trigger nukes in areas, and it gives you  a popup about the nuke going off..but its almost irrelevant. It doesnt really do anything. You die from radiation, I guess if youre too close. But dying has almost no penalty , at all, in this game. You just respawn nearby, maybe lose a few caps or drop some random pieces of junk. We never really cared.

But because of the "MMO" features, the co-op and especially single player balance is completely fucked. Like for instance theres hardly any vendors or NPC's you can purchase things from in the game. Throughout the entire playthrough I only found like, 3 vendors to buy stuff from. And they hardly sell anything useful,  Stimpaks for health are almost impossible to buy, if you manage to find a vendor that sells them it will only be a handful of them. Same with ammo. So the entire Roleplaying and item collecting and selling aspect is ruined, too. It makes caring about loot and items way less exciting than it otherwise would be, I guess to be balanced around the notion you'll be trading with random players? I don't know, its designed like shit. How do you make a Fallout game with virtually no NPC's or Traders? What the fuck.

As for the actual moment to moment gameplay systems and mechanics, yeah they're fucked too. VATS is a well known and loved feature from Fallout, where it typically pauses the action so you can carefully analyze your opponent and choose how to attack. Well here in Fallout 76 VATS is ruined and near useless. It no longer pauses when you use it (of course, how can they make it work online? another example of a gimped mechanic to work around the MMO junk) and even more baffling is that you cant even target different limbs or body parts - atleast at first. You have to get an upgrade for VATS just to select different areas. So what the hell is the point of it? I don't know, I really dont. I guess it gives you Crit, but its so hard to even tell how effective it is, most of the time I didn't even bother. I eventually got the perk to select body parts with VATS, but the lack of pausing, coupled with really bad controls, in the heat of the moment it proved more harmful than useful. What a massive shame.

Speaking of pausing, the Pipboy inventory also no longer pauses. The entire premise of the Pipboy system in other Fallout games made sense because it paused the action, giving you time to look through your items and categories and strategize what to do next and what items to use. VATS pausing, and Pipboy pausing, were deliberately done as a neat callback to the franchises origins as a turn based RPG game. Removing pausing from Pipboy, makes the entire mechanic now cumbersome and frustrating to use. Meaning most of the time in combat situations now, you don't get these interesting moments of thinking what to do next, what item to use, looking through your inventory. Instead now its more brainless where you just have to blast the enemy thoughtlessly until they die and hope that you can do it, like bashing your head against the wall. I know youre supposed to use these quick slots to alleviate this, but I dont want to have to keep updating my quick slots every 5 minutes when I find some new item. They just fucked up this entire mechanic, as well.

So what else is there to the combat? Not much. Most of the enemies you come across are Robots, Ghouls (Scorched), Bugs, Bandits, Raiders. We saw Deathclaws pretty early and mid into the game, but they werent as intimidating and scary as in other games. I think this is because Fallout 76 heavily relies on Level scaling, so enemies are always close to your level, meaning they cant be massively more overpowered than you and vice versa. A pretty terrible mechanic that sucks in basically every RPG.  rarely later on in the game some Dragon type things that are near impossible to kill, and a handful of other monster types but they're so few and far between and not a part of the main quests that I didn't care or notice much. Most of the time its just robots, robots, robots, Scorched, etc.

The entire perk system is, you guessed it, totally fucked up and ruined, too.
The level up and perks now revolve around these Cards, and you equip a certain amount of cards to each SPECIAL category, depending on what level that category is. This thing is unintuitive, cumbersome, clunky, and just not fun to do or figure out. Each time you level you get to pick a card, and then if you pick the same card multiple times they combine together, I guess making the perk more powerful? And then you have to make sure the card is equipped or it wont do anything...For like the first half of the game I barely even cared or paid attention and just equipped whatever card because the whole menu and UI was so hard to understand. This is because the first half of the game was extremely easy, like the balancing in this game is off the walls stupid. For probably even more than the first half of the game, I barely had to care about anything. Infact for some insanely stupid reason, the game started off by giving us like 60 stimpaks, thousands of bullets. and so many supplies that we didnt have to care about looting anything. Just why? Why do that. The whole point of making RPGs exciting is this Rags to riches feeling, starting off with nothing and working your way up, thats why looting is exciting. Why would they just start you off with so many supplies? It made looting and progressing through the game simply boring and uninteresting. The amount of shocking design choices made in this game are just off the charts. How did they fuck it up so bad? How do you be a game developer and ruin a game so hard?

Infact when we started the game it asked us the question: Do you want to start at level 0, or level 20 (Recommended)!
Like...what? Why is that an option? Of course we picked level 0, but still it gave us all this stuff. What the hell is going on in this game?

About 3/4 through the campaign suddenly the difficulty shifted, by this point we were long since just running past most enemies, or doing the bare minimum required to progress because we just were not enjoying the game. Leveling up felt almost pointless, except to get more Strength so we can stop being overburdened, because the game has a real issue of just dumping tons of random junk objects at you so you're almost always near max weight it became mandatory to max out Strength just to alleviate it. But then all of a sudden we had these quests with enemies that we can barely do damage to out of nowhere. On the one hand I'm glad it finally got challenging, but why did it take 20 hours? The balancing is just terrible.

Another absolutely insane design choice is how the guns and ammo work. I didn't realize this until literally the last mission. But whatever gun you have equipped, is what ammo the enemies will mostly drop. For the entire game I was using a Combat Shotgun, because I couldn't understand why every single enemy is dropping Shotgun shells? So I figured just keep using the shotgun since ammo is so abundant. But no, its because of this stupid design choice. Its not explained or made clear anywhere, it basically made me ruin my entire looting experience and gun selection choice. Even still, Combat shotgun just seemed to be the most effective weapon. The first half of the game the enemies were a joke, but then towards the end everything was a massive bullet sponge taking dozens of shots to kill it became just a chore.

They also managed to ruin basic things like repairing your equipment.
In other Fallout games, to repair you equipment you can simply find another copy of the same gun or armor, and press a button to combine them together to improve the condition of the main one. This feature is gone, now you have to collect random shit like Adhesive, Scrap metal, Nuts and bolts, This and that. So much so that its annoying to try to keep track of, with a terrible UI that I didnt even bother most of the time. So the entire aspect of trying to hold onto and preserve my prized possessions was near non-existent. Making all the items not as exciting or rewarding. I think I repaired a gun once the entire game. Didnt even try with armor because it felt like such a chore, also trying to figure out what piece of armor I had equipped or trying to compare them for which one is better, the interface was so bad I almost didnt even bother to do that, either. The itemization and caring about items in this game is terrible, which is a critical blow for a game that wants to be an RPG.

Funny enough, we played this game around Halloween, and one of the quests was this truly awful thing to "Collect 10 accommodations"  a very vague objective which basically meant to kill "Legendary" enemies. Well, this game has Seasonal enemies, meaning around Halloween it would randomly spawn these Halloween themed Legendary enemies, which might be the only reason we actually completed this quest, although it still took hours. We mostly just roamed around until we found these Seasonal enemies, because figuring out how to do the quest otherwise proved nearly fruitless and annoying. Every step of the way this game kept pissing us off or being more and more frustrating, so much so that some days we would sit down to play it, and within 1 hour be so upset, annoyed, and out of patience that we'd just quit for the day because its that bad.


Ok so the main story is incoherent garbage that no one cares about or you have no understanding of what the protagonists motivation even is, further making you not care. The co-op experience is butchered, with a bad HUD and quest system that sucks for cooperative play, the Roleplaying is butchered and almost non-existent outside of combat stats and perks which they also ruined as well. The MMO features are uninteresting and pointless, lacking even text chat. Theres no roleplaying elements in terms of NPC's. No vendors so you barely care about loot or wealth. The combat is either laughably easy for most of the game, or bullet sponge chore towards the end. The enemy variety is lackluster and dull. Pipboy and VATS are ruined. Item bloat cluttering up your inventory with constant junk. Tedious, annoying crafting, worthless itemization and balancing..this game is just terrible, hate to say it. I was hopeful people were just hating on this game and being too harsh, surely a Multiplayer Fallout game cant be that bad?! It sounds great on paper, yeah I'd love to play through a Fallout game in co-op! But no, virtually every aspect of the gameplay has been ruined or bastardized so much so that it doesn't even feel like a part of the Fallout franchise, this is some shit game wearing a Fallout skin. It has almost nothing which actually resembles core Fallout gameplay and mechanics. Everything that it was supposed to be has been ruined and tarnished. I cant remember the last time I was so frustrated, disappointed, annoyed, bored, mad, at a game.

The last quest was particularly atrocious. Its this thing where you have to go around doing fetch quest after fetch quest at the Enclave base I mentioned earlier. first finding this Nuke card from a helicopter, then going around and finding Code tags from random areas, then you have to go to some random Silo bunker and activate a nuke. Well by the time we figured it all out, and got there, (We had to use Google because the game is so shit and vague) we had no ammo left, no supplies, nothing. We have this giant base full of infinitely respawning robots where you do nothing but run around interacting with...you guessed it, terminal after terminal, eventually getting to a point where you plug holes in pipes but youre dying constantly of radiation, then afterwards have to go to some other area and open a big door but you have to craft some shit at a workbench blah blah...We got so impatient and sick of it, having no resources,
(reminder, enemies wont drop ammo for a gun youre not using, meaning if we have 0 ammo for our main gun, we cant find main gun ammo. Also, theres no vendors, so we cant buy main gun ammo. We actually had no idea how to get ammo now, we were fucking stumped)

So, we were  so over the game, I just asked some random level 1000 person on Steam to join our party and help us beat the last quest. Yay! The shit MMO feature came in handy for once! After running through the base letting this guy kill everything, we got to a final terminal where we had to put in some Nuke code, some randomly generated code each day that we're somehow supposed to piece together and figure out ourselves using in game items and terminals (Yeah, fuck all that. We tried, but it was too incoherent) we found some website on google that tells us the current day's code, put it in, set off a nuke, that we didnt even get a cutscene to witness, it just made a tiny little blast in a tube infront of us and ... thats it. Thats "the end" of Fallout 76s initial release campaign. Wow this game was bad.

Took us about 30 hours to "beat" it, as in get through the main campaign. What else are you supposed to be interested in here? Why would anyone play this game for hundreds of hours, or infact pay monthly!? What, just to build your own stupid little base and decorate it to show to random people you cant even text chat with? To do stupid, pointless daily quests and events? To grind for new items, when the itemization is uninteresting boring stuff? I don't know, its hard to see any value in anything this game has to offer. Yeah, it has small moments of fun blasting random enemies and raiders with your guns, but thats all you do in the game and it wears out quick. The gore system isn't even as good as other Fallout games, I barely noticed any gore or brutal gibs or anything, remember the Slow-mo VATS cam from Fallout 3? Theres nothing like that here. The game is almost devoid of excitement. At the very least you can play sort of co-op with a friend throughout this trainreck, and laugh at how fucked up it is together, if that wasnt an option I wouldnt have even gone through the whole thing, no way. A failed single player experience, failed MMO experience, failed co-op experience, failed RPG, failed FPS, failed story game...somehow, this game really is as bad, or infact worse, than its reputation.

3/10

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning

I like to play an RPG every now and then. Sometimes they're too daunting, like overly complex and intimidating. Kingdoms of Amalur seemed to be a casual friendly "consolized" type, being popular on Xbox 360 back in the day. It got remastered and put on steam with Re-recokning. I didn't look up or "spoil" much of the game or mechanics before playing, but I did quickly check what exactly was new in this remaster and if it ruins my impression by playing it instead of the original. Turns out it doesnt add much, I watched a YouTube video comparing graphics and effects and could barely tell the difference. The main changes are slightly improved graphics, quality of life features such as the HUD properly scaling to resolution, FOV slider, some camera tweaks, and minor things like that. So I installed the game to see how it is.

Upon pressing new game you get a few difficulty choices, as usual I just go with the default Normal. Then you get the intro cinematic that strikingly looks like something out of World of Warcraft. Generally the environments in this game look like something straight out of that game. It has that same sort of half cartoonish artstyle. Immediately I noticed that some of the character designs are less than appealing, dorky looking beta gnomes, cliche evil villians colored red, swords and armor that look like they were designed by children. The general tone and artstyle of the game feels immature, not threatening, dark, or hostile. Just generic fantasy slop.
Then you get to choose your characters race, 4 options. All options are humanoids with just different skin colors or pointed ears, nothing crazy or fantastical like other RPG's.  I just picked the most default human looking one. Then you get to pick some passive bonus, again I just picked the most generic warrior one. Typically when I play rpg's like this, I like to keep my character minimal and easy to follow, so usually just a generic warrior using big swords or axes. Theres a minor character creation feature where you change some sliders, set hair styles, etc.

After this introduction the games narrative starts to form. The general plot is all about fate and destiny, and determinism. They mention the word "fate" in almost every damn sentence, like okay, I get it. The whole plot revolves around the main character dying and then re-writing fate or history...or something. Really, its just all quite bad and dull and uninteresting. The writing is silly and childish, shit like "And Azgorn said to Galborg that his Power is too great to defy destiny, so Balzeborths magical energy blocked Mogmorn from travelling to Balgram so you must defy his Powers and break the seals!" ... I just wrote that, but do you know what I mean? Just stupid, dull, uninspired drivel that sounds like a child game up with it, or some chat bot. For the first 2 hours of the game I sat there trying to listen to all the dialogue and take it seriously, but after awhile I finally realized - yeah this isn't worth paying much attention to. Its the same cliche crap over and over, the characters are uninteresting and not memorable. the only slightly memorable characters are the main old guy that follows you around the game as like this beacon of wisdom (I can't even remember his name) and this woman dressed in stupid BDSM gear that follows you around that you do bidding for. No other slightly memorable characters. The writing isn't even so bad its good, like other games (Two Worlds) , its just not even entertaining. Most conversations past first two hours, after I got sick of caring, I would briefly skim it in a moments glance, then just skip without listening to the voice acting. Its not even interesting enough to listen to fully.

Thankfully the actual game does have redeeming qualities. Its a big, open world, that again looks like a MMO world like World of Warcraft. But it doesn't really play like a MMO does. The combat is more Beat 'Em Up, or like almost a very stripped down Devil May Cry. You simply mash X to attack, you tab B to roll, and thats about the jist of the combat. You do a lot of rolling around and mashing X to do little combos, which can feel satisfying because the game has a nice sense of impact when the sword hits. You see damage numbers, which helps gauge how strong your character is. Though the combat has some pretty serious flaws and annoyances. The game does not have a lock on system for targeting enemies, something even Ocarina of Time realized was necessary. Instead, the camera sort of automatically adjusts and tries to revolve around whatever enemy it thinks should be a priority. This doesn't work very well. Far too often the camera would be swinging around wildly, or staring at some angle that was stupid, hiding my character. It's just a mess. Even Mario 64 has a better camera, and people complain about that one all the time. The other annoyances is the game has a real stunlock problem. Any attack you take, you get stunned. Far too frequently the gameplay will just consist of you being stunned over and over, not being able to get any input in. There doesnt seem to be any items or armor you can equip to increase stun threshold, which is stupid and a bit shocking. Thankfully there is an skill, atleast in the Might tree, called Reckless Assault, that once upgraded fully allows you to not be stunned for 20 seconds! at the expense of taking more damage. This skill is very good, and maybe single handedly saved the combat from being an annoying slog.

Speaking of skill trees, there is three of them. Now, this isn't some in depth confusing system where you are afraid you can ruin your character. No, this is very brainless and easy to understand, infact the whole game is. The might tree is for melee. The finesse tree is for ranged. The sorcery tree is for magic. Got that? OK, now pick what playstyle you want to do. I want to do Swords and melee, so Might it is. There, never have to look at Finesse or Sorcery again the entire game! Yeah...theres nothing useful in those other trees for my playstyle, its a bit disappointing, its so watered down and easy theres no point to even look at the other trees and diversify.

Now, a big complaint I have with how the UI and level up system works:
In the early game, maybe first hour or two, I couldn't level up my character, or I didn't understand how.
This is because every time you level, it makes you choose to invest a point into some skills that have nothing to do with combat.
Stuff like Lockpicking, Mercantile, Persasuion, Hidden Discovery, Crafting, etc.
I figured, well since I'm at the beginning of the game, I don't know which of these will be useful. I will hold onto these points until I play more and realize what ones I care about.
The thing is, in order to actually get to the next screen where you actually invest points into your combat stats, you HAVE to spend these non-combat points. For the first 2 hours I was wondering how the hell do I actually make my character stronger? Because I had like 5 unused non-combat points, it wouldnt show me the combat stats! That's just very stupid, and made the beginning of the game way harder than it should have been.
It should have been separated into two different menu screens or something.

So once you start spending points into the skill tree, the combat does slightly open up a bit more. You can now put 4 abilities on a hotbar to use during combat. The whole game all I used was, Reckless assault, Grapple hook (can grab enemies across the arena and pull them to you) , this Berserk thing that stays permanently active that increases your stats the more enemies you kill, ..and I think thats it. There were other things, like Ground slam, but I didn't use it much. I put points into the passive ability to raise my health, I put some points to unlock a few new moves like holding X to whirlwind, but other than that the skill tree is incredibly easy, toned down, and accessible. Nothing is hard to understand, its like impossible to ruin your character unless you're somehow too stupid to put points into the ranged tree when you use big two hand swords or something.
I am happy the game lets you play any way you want, I started off using Longswords, but as soon as I found my first Greatsword I used that weapon type for the rest of the game. Its a big, heavy two hand sword, that is slow to attack but does massive damage. The slow to attack doesnt matter once you activate Reckless Assault for stun immunity, so its just a hulking beast of damage then that was extremely effective.

Really the game is quite dull, often boring at times where you do nothing but hold the sprint button and run long distances across the map for 10+ minutes at a time, doing nothing else. Just running past swarms of enemies because theres not much point to kill them if you're already feeling powerful. Thats a lot of what the gameplay consisted of for me. The game isn't bad, though, it can just be uninspired and dull. The artstyle, character designs, weapon designs, quests, its really nothing too exciting. All the main quests just feel like fetch quests, or moreso "Run half across the world and reach this new location".
But the game isn't bad.
Actually, the best thing about the game is how accessible it is. It truly is babies first RPG. If anyone asked me what RPG to play as someone who has never played one, honestly I would just tell them to play this. Its a perfect introduction to RPG mechanics, its so toned down and easy to understand, I think it would be enjoyable to newcomers. Going around the world and picking up loot from enemies or chests can feel exciting because its so easy to understand whats good and whats not. The general UI and hud are clear, big, intuitive, the controls work mostly great as a controller RPG, the whole presentation of the menus, inventory, skill trees, stats, equipment make sense and are clear and easy to understand. You always know what to do, the quest marker on the compass shows you the direction, the map is easy to understand, and theres even a Local map if you need more information to find the right path. Its just a easy to get into couch controller RPG game.
To compare items, I simply scroll through my greatswords and use the one where the green number goes up on the top right. Done. Same thing for armor. Scroll through all my armors and look at top right for green number to go up. Its stupidly simple, usually its bad for an RPG to be this dumb, and it is kind of bad, but sometimes its refreshing to play a brainless RPG where it isn't super complex and deep, but dumbed down and easy to get through.

As for the actual loot, its as to be expected. Different colors signify its category of power. White are basic, blue, green, purple, yellow. Yellow being unique/set items, I think. Like I found a Shield that gave +1 to all Might skills, which is crazy good I never stopped using it. Other than that I didnt pay much attention to the actual stats or color of the gear, again I would just look to see if the green number went up, if it did, good enough to me. Its not worth bothering about the individual tiny effects and trying to min max. Its just not that kind of game. It doesn't reward you for spending your time this way. There is a decent variety of items and armors, though. Lots of the might stuff is plate armor, chainmails, big bulking things. The designs are decent, nothing looks too stupid, some of the big swords can look a bit too comical, but for the most part its not bad or good. At least everything isnt all multicolored with all sorts of gaudy colors, its all pretty typical looking.

The enemy variety is pretty good too, lots of monsters, goblins, weird serpents, humans, humanoids, elves, dwarfs, Trolls, animals, rats, bandits, mages, etc etc. I was entertained enough by the enemy designs and variety, and even roaming across the game world you will occasionally get these mini cutscenes of some big miniboss appearing on screen. First time I saw this I was confused and thought it was a boss fight I had to do, but no, its just a random occurrence that can happen to spice up roaming around the game world.

But this is the easiest RPG I have ever played, from understanding equipment, stats, level ups, and combat. I didn't die a single time I don't think.

You can carry around hundreds of health potions and pause the game and use them instantly if youre ever in danger. All I would do is go around to shops and buy health potions and use them whenever I was low.
Actually one complaint with the UI and map system is its too hard to find where shops are. Usually shops are inside buildings, and on the map it does indicate where different NPC's are. But it doesn't specify what kind of merchant they are. It would just say "Shop" or "Merchant". Ok, is it an armor merchant? Weapons? Potions? Magic? etc. I would have to enter building after building trying to find the right place, which sucked.

And infact these shops are super overpowered in terms of items. The greatswords I was using the whole game mostly came from weapon weapon shops and merchants I found. A few times I would find weapons and armor in shops that were easily 2-3x better than what I was currently using, and they werent expensive either. The whole game I had more money than I needed.

One other complaint with the UI or quest system is that it doesn't do a good job differentiating the DLC from the original Main story. Typically when I play a game like this, that comes bundled with all sorts of post-release content and DLC, I'm not interested in playing that stuff, I just want to experience the main release content story mode. But in this game, the DLC quests lump in with the Main quests section, and I think a few times I would be doing these DLC quests when I didn't want to, only to have to look it up afterwards on Google and realize I'm doing something I dont want to be doing. Eventually I noticed that the quests in the log have different looking flags by them, and the main quest I think is just Blue looking flag, but that was not obvious enough and caused unnecessary frustration for me.

So I was just breezing through the game, doing the main quests, traveling across the giant open world on foot. Most of the main quests are simply running across the game world, finding some new town, talking to a npc, and then traveling some more. The game probably could of benefited from horse travel or something, I don't know. Just far too much time is spent doing absolutely nothing but just sprinting across open barren fields. You can fast travel to any location, but only if you've found it first, of course. Sometimes you go into a cave, dungeon, kill some mini boss, but its nothing memorable. Infact the only memorable main quest moment is this part where you get a cutscene of this big siege, like Lord of the Rings, with a giant monster that comes out and is this big boss fight where its a big stationary monster and you have to wait for him to slam his arm down to attack him (What is it with games and Stationary big boss fights? Ive seen it so often, its like they cant be bothered to make big bosses have animations or make them work without standing still). But other than this, theres not that many other notable moments in the story. Theres a few other boss fights, where you get a health bar on screen, but its usually just human looking guys that don't really do anything all that special, maybe float around or teleport here and there, but nothing too notable.

I'm not sure how the arena zone levels work, or the monster levels. It doesn't actually ever tell you the level of monsters, or area zones. The monsters do have different colored names, but the game doesnt ever tell you exactly what they mean. I even looked at the in game Help menu, and it wasnt there. From what I can gather, white monsters mean below your level, Orange means around your level, Red means much higher than your level and actually seems to artificially prevent you from doing significant damage and makes you take mega damage, no matter how good your actual stats are (Shockingly stupid), and Purple means some kind of boss monster that rewards giga experience. So as the majority of the main quest just consists of sprinting across barren wastelands, filled with random enemies attacking you, I mostly sprinted past them when I already felt powerful. I was killing everything in like 3 hits and barely getting any XP, even orange monsters. Now heres the stupid part. About 3/4 through the game, I got to the quest Echoes of the Past. It wanted me to enter some tower. The area right outside the tower was piss easy, killing all the enemies in just 2 or 3 hits, and barely getting any experience. So surely I am not underleveled. But then as soon as I enter this tower where It wants me to go, all the enemies are colored red. Now remember what I just said. If the enemy is red, no matter how good my actual stats are, the game just clamps down on you and says "Nope, your not this X arbitrary level, we'll artificially reduce your stats so you do next to no damage and take mega health, go level and come back".

What this means is my progress got grinded to a halt. These enemies would 2 or 3 hit me, and it would suddenly have to take me 20 hits to kill them.
I had to go leave, and randomly walk around the open world grinding and killing enemies to get some experience to get a few levels, just so the enemies in the tower would stop being Red but be Orange, and allow my stats to work again. This took like 2 hours.  None of the nearby enemies were even giving significant experience! I would kill them, and get like 80-300xp. And I'd need like 50k XP to level. Even if I went and did a 20 minute side quest, I'd only get rewarded with like 2k XP! What is this? What is going on? Why did the pacing and progress suddenly just die? Its incredibly stupid and poorly designed. So I kept just grinding random enemies, doing shitty side quests that barely even seemed rewarding. And then I just fast traveled somewhere else because this area is just not cutting it. I went to some swamp place, full of enemies that were this purple color. Now for some reason, the purple enemies would give me like 800xp per kill! Ok, I can work with this and level up finally.
Heres the thing, the game has this Recoking gauge, where when the bar is full, you hold both triggers and you go into like Super Saiyan mode killing everything in a few hits and being invincible. But when you kill enemies in this mode, you get a like 5x experience multiplier. So the real way to grind experience is to save your Recoking bar until you come across a purple enemy and group of smaller mobs, use the bar, kill them all, then take out the purple enemy inside reckoning mode then you tap A to get up to 100% experience. Doing this I could get 3k experience per group of enemies! Also, there are experience potions you can use to temporarily buff XP gains. So I had to do this stupid shit for like 2 hours, going from level 15 to 18 I think. Everytime I'd level I would go back to the tower to check if the enemies are still red. Then leave back to the swamp and grind more. Once I got to level 18 I went back to the tower and now they're orange, and magically instead of doing 5-10 damage, I'm doing 300! Just such a inane, nonsense system. I get they want to prevent you from speedrunning through the game, but this is the definition of artificial difficulty here. If my character is so powerful that he can crush enemies 10 levels higher than him, let him! Reward my good ability to craft a strong character, this system almost nullifies your efforts!

After that debacle the game progressed swiftly again. Climb the tower, kill the boss on top by mashing X without barely thinking or looking. Go on another main quest where the objective is to, again, simply sprint across the map for 30 minutes to reach the objective. Once there, its basically the end of the game. Arrive at this end of the world red cavern looking place, the BDSM lady talks to you and says this is your fight alone, go in and its, surprise surprise, another big stationary final boss where he does nothing but spawn waves of enemies at you, to make your Reckoning meter go up, once the meter is full use it and it hurts the boss automatically. Rinse repeat a few times, end credits. After end credits, you can keep playing the game to explore the open world and do side quests, or do the new expansion Fatesworn released in 2021, which shows up as a new main quest after the credits. But complaint again, it doesn't make its self clear that its post-release content, it just looks like another main quest for the main game. They really needed to separate the main campaign from the DLC and Expansion better, than just these hard to understand flag pictures. So this confused me for a minute there, why do I have another main quest after the end credits? Should I keep playing? Well no, its just an expansion released 10+ years after the original game.

I beat the whole game in just 10 hours. Thats remarkably short for a big open world RPG like this. I only did the bare essentials for the main story, though, I just wanted to breeze my way through it to see how it is. Even howlongtobeat.com says 22 hours on average, the thing is, the games main story is just so easy and forgiving that theres really not much point to care about exploration or side content. Theres even an additional quest category called "Factions" that I didnt even bother to look at or notice. Why bother to explore, look for new items, take your time, when the game is so easy that I'm already feeling overpowered by doing the bare minimum, and where the shop has overpowered items in it? The game simply doesn't compel you to care enough.  I don't know if this remastered version completely botched the balance or what (You can't even buy the original game on Steam anymore) but even if the balance was fixed and it was more challenging, it wouldn't significantly make the game more enjoyable. The fact that its so stupid easy and simple actually probably adds to it overall, it might just be drawn out and wear out its welcome otherwise.

Its not a good game. It's not a bad game. Its mostly a dull, uninspired, cliche fantasy RPG. But the best thing about it is how accessible it is, if you just want to relax on the couch with a controller on a big tv and play a simplistic RPG, mashing attack buttons seeing damage numbers, picking up shiny new loot and traversing across a huge open fantasy world, its not the worst use of time you can have. Its not frustrating, annoying, or any real negative emotion. The worst offense it has is at times it can just be a bit boring. But the fact that the game was so short for me actually aided in my impression on it. Its a succinct casual RPG experience that leaves me walking away feeling pleased with the experience. I just don't think I'll be coming back to do that expansion or DLC anytime soon.

6/10