Prodeus

 

As I'm always looking for either oldschool "boomer" shooters, or co-op games, I somehow came across Prodeus as being both co-op campaign, and oldschool FPS. That was all the information I needed to be interested, and also was able to pick it up for very cheap.

The game starts up with a big splash screen showing that its a Unity engine game, so already I have the impression its a low budget indie game, which I later find out is a kickstarter project. That's okay, that doesnt automatically mean the games gonna suck. But it does set expectations a bit. You can select Campaign , or Multiplayer on the menu, and its easy to get a co-op session going. Everything is laid out in a sensible way to getup and going, so I have praise there because other games make it a clusterfuck to get a session going. Then the game starts, there are no cutscenes to speak of, it just drops you into the first map and straight into the action. You roam around picking up your first gun, A pistol, and fighting the first enemies. Just like Doom 1, really. Probably the most unique or differentiating feature of the game is the visual style. It has this simultaneous modern but retro look to it. The environments are all modern, high graphics with fancy lighting and shiny effects, but then things like your weapons, the enemies, look like retro spites like something out of Duke Nukem 3d, complete with the funny looking enemy corpse angle sprites depending on which way you look. Its a striking look, and helps set the game apart from the rest.

 The game also strikes me as being inspired by Brutal Doom, with the over the top particle effects and especially enemy deaths spraying blood all over the place in a extreme fashion and gibs. Its not really...a good thing, I think more grounded and simple death animations could be better, like take classic Doom for example, I dont think Brutal Doom makes those games better, it makes them worse, comical, and stupid in my view.

Surprisingly, after you finish the first level, you then get taken to a sort of Mario World/Mario 3 style overworld map. Where you can choose what path to take towards each level. You can skip optional levels, or do them for rewards. This is another interesting unique feature, that you dont see often at all in shooter games, maybe ever? There are shops on the map you can enter which you can buy various permanent upgrades or weapon unlocks, that require resources such as Ore  that you can find secretly scattered around the maps. So we keep playing through the levels in co-op, with a good first impression, excited to see what else the game has to offer.

Many of the enemies, weapons, and style of the game is very derivative of Doom, which isn't automatically a bad thing, sometimes you just want more of the same thing. The enemies here are essentially clones of the Imps, flying skulls, cacodemons, basic troops, and hitscan chaingunner except in this game its a hitscan Sniper. I cant really think of that many new enemies, maybe 1 or 2 but mostly they are just copies of doom enemies in both visuals and abilities. Theres this one monster with big creepy wings that shoots some beam at you, he looks cool but eventually I just realized he was a clone of Archvile. At some point in the game for some reason all the enemies are blue for a few levels, which made them really uninteresting and blend together in a boring way. Like what is it about Doom enemies that makes them so iconic? its the fact they are so distinct and at a moments glance even across the map you can tell what they are, but thats not really the case in this game.  It's also a mix of modern doom inspiration,  mostly in the controls and the whole explore for resources to use at the store aspect. The game is a retro shooter, but its not locked to just simple left/right mouse aim like oldschool games are, you can jump around and look around freely, the controls are very slick, responsive, and fast paced. You can eventually unlock a Double jump which makes the game even more fun to control. Probably the best thing about the game is the movement and controls, really. Thankfully (for me atleast) the game doesnt copy some things from modern Doom games, such as glorykills or enemies being loot pinatas (which I didnt like about those new Doom games). Its weird because it almost looks like this game did have glorykills, because when you shoot them they kinda glow red for a brief second just like how it looks in new Doom, but really there isnt any glorykill system here its just a weird visual design choice, which I thought was kinda stupid and confusing.

The weapons also are all mostly copies from retro doom games, The Pistol, basic shotgun, Super shotgun (except this one has 4 barrels), rocket launcher, chaingun, Dual machine guns which I suppose is a new addition, plasma rifle, and later in the game you get this weird weapon that shoots goop that I used for 10 seconds and then never again. Theres also a rail gun that can be used as a sort of sniper rifle which I suppose wasnt in Doom, so thats different. But mostly its just more derivatives. There is an alternate fire mode, though, that each gun you can right click to do a different attack, this is things like shooting all 4 shotgun barrels at once, zooming in with the rail gun, aiming down sights and burst firing the pistol, and so on. It was a neat addition, but it didnt really add much to the gameplay besides maybe the super shotgun ability.

The levels are for the most part standard sort of industrial complex sci-fi maps. Its not very hellish or evil like some Doom games, its more on the exploring metallic complex and scifi hubs. Lots of pushing switches, elevators, buttons, that kind of stuff. There is some keycard hunting, but its not very extreme. The maps mostly progress in a linear fasion, I mean its not like Doom Eternal where you walk into a circular arena and the doors close behind you and you have to fight waves of enemies, its more like a standard level where you go through hallways, open rooms, walk outdoors a bit, instead of arena fighting - which I much prefer. There is some arena fighting here, but its not the main part of the level design. I do like what they were going for with many of the levels, and after each level you beat theres even a button to rate the map, Bad, Okay, or Good, which I wonder what kind of statisics that gives the dev or what impact it has for them. Theres a handful of more 'gimmick' maps that you have to do random oddities to progress, like having to shoot monsters through this magical window, or platforming levels, or this one level where you have to go around shooting yellow triangles to unlock different areas of the maps. I thought these were kinda bad and more annoying to figure out more than anything, they tried to add variety to the game but sometimes it just was annoying and "what the fuck do I do" but it wasnt nearly as anything as bad as some of the later Doom 2 maps atleast. But a lot of the maps are more standard fare, with some outdoors areas traversing past toxic waste, and other hazards. For the most part its just a lot of the same metallic looking sci-fi industrial complex levels, so actually the environmental variety is kind of lacking and a lot of the maps blend together in your mind, nothing much stands out.

But really the game seemed like it has mostly everything in place to be atleast a decent shooter, but quickly I saw many things that are unforgivable that kind of ruined the whole thing for me. For starters, in co-op, there is no easy way to find where your co-op partner is. In other games, for example, like Serious Sam, there would be a little arrow in the top left pointing you towards the general direction of your friend. Thats a great system. The game doesnt add anything interesting by not being able to find where your friend is, we would just try to move as slow as possible and constantly have to ask eachother where they are, that kind of sucks and hampers the pace. (We did find out towards the end of the game theres a fucking option in the Esc menu that says Teleport to player, so you can just teleport to your friend instantly without any penalty. What the hell kind of system is that? if we noticed it sooner it would of helped, but it just feels so slapped together and half assed).  But more importantly the game has a fatal flaw which just killed my enthusiasm - the difficulty, or lack thereof. While there are difficulties you can choose from , Very easy, easy, medium, hard, very hard etc. The problem is, there is simply no penalty for dying. When either of you die, you can simply just respawn from the last Nexus checkpoint, which about one every 30 seconds, or you can even respawn directly ontop of your friend...infinitely. It makes the game almost feel meaningless, theres no tension, theres no challenge anymore. You stop caring about your health, you stop caring about even trying to play good, why care? Theres no penalty for dying anyway. A sure-fire way to ruin almost any game and make it feel pointless is to add no penalty for playing bad. This is game design 101, this is a rookie mistake. How do these devs think a game can be interesting if everything you do is meaningless? Its baffling. Why would anyone think this kind of system is acceptable? Even if they had something in the game like a lives system, if you or your co-op partner dies 3 times, then reset the level. That alone would do a lot to make the game more interesting and add a sense of urgency and meaning to your actions. But without it, everything falls flat. We even put the difficulty up to second hardest to try to compensate, but It barely did anything to change my attitude. If anything it just made it more annoying to die every 30 seconds and respawn where I was. As soon as I realized this was how the game works, my enthusiasm plummeted.

Sure, the game has other flaws, like the lack of interesting unique enemies and weapons, the kinda bland copy paste scifi industrial complex environments, even other seemingly minor flaws but actually are a significantly bad thing, such as health packs being hard to identify at a glance, they are blue and almost look identical to other pickups such as the plasma ammo, why is the health blue? Why couldn't they make it some identifiable color like Red, or even pink. Just more rookie game design mistakes, showing its low budget or lack of game dev experience. But I could forgive these things a lot more if the game had real challenge and really engaged the player to play good. But it doesnt, so what the hell is left here? Not much. A mindless kind of speedrun to the end of the game where you dont even care about anything. At least we still cared about trying to unlock things from the store, but even that isnt that rewarding or interesting. The only thing we really unlocked is first the Super shotgun, which frankly isnt that fun to use or that effective. And then the Double jump, which single handedly made the game more fun to play, so theres that. And lastly the Plasma rifle, which is probably the best gun in the game. And as for those optional levels, some of them are little time-trial optional levels like "Break all the targets" or "Get to the exit as fast as possible" , they kinda reminded me of Super Smash Bros optional levels actually, funny enough. I liked them, but even those were kinda weird like you can finish them, it would say level complete, but it was unclear if we even got the reward? I don't know.

Towards the end of the game we had a level completely bug out on us, the last exit door would not open.So we had to redo it and run around shooting the yellow dorito triangles over again, which sucked, showing its indie budget I guess. The last few levels were okay, one of them was this big castle complex where you had to run around unlocking doors and shooting this ball into a big bell to spawn waves of enemies, the architecture looked interesting, like a medieval castle, reminded me of Quake, but at the same time made me kinda say "I wish I was playing Quake".  The last level was kind of a joke, its just a tiny square arena where enemies spawn ontop of you, theres a new unique enemy type of this...beast thing, which spawns like 5 times and you just spam bullets into him. You kill a few waves of enemies and...the game ends, no cutscene, just a popup with a piece of text on the screen talking about you escaping to some unknown dimension, achievement unlocked Finish Campaign and then I quit and uninstalled...pretty lame.

It could of been a good co-op retro shooter, but I guess this indie dev with lack of experience just made too many fuckups for me to say I had a great time. Its sad because many of the games problems could be fixed with like an evening or two of editing the code, its nothing major, a few simple fixes could make it significantly better, but oh well this is what we have.

6/10

Monster Hunter: World

 

 

Finally decided to play a Monster Hunter game after being aware of the franchise for a few years. Decided to just go with the moust famous one one Steam, Monster Hunter:World. Its advertised as a fully co-op campaign playthrough so that was a big sticking point for me. Didnt really know anything about Monster Hunter other than its a long running franchise dating back to PS2 and theres lots of them, and that the general idea is that almost the whole game is a series of long lasting big epic boss fights and its a third person action RPG type game. Sure, sounds good enough for me. It took me awhile to decide to actually install it and play through it after purchasing it, though, because I had heard the game is like 50+ hours long so its definitely a commitment once you decide to sit through it.

The game starts off having you design a characters appearance, then surprisingly you get to choose your pets appearance. Then you get into the game and get introduced to the main hub-world and all the various quirky characters. The story is...I dont really know. The characters are just not captivating or endearing really, its mostly annoying and hard to get into. I tried to care about the dialogue and writing for the first few hours, but eventually everything was so whimsical and zaney that I lost interest. Like the characters are rediculous. You have the main quest girl that is like your waifu companion that follows you around earnestly hyping you up being an almost personal caretaker, shes got a really high pitched cliche stereotypical like Japanese anime girl voice that gets grating after awhile. Then you have all these random cat characters like the Cat chefs that cook food for you and play elaborate cutscenes of making food, which are unique and memorable at least, but the whole world comes together to be a giant mishmash of "So Random!" rediculous bullshit that it found it kinda hard to get invested in and take seriously. Theres this one Goku looking guy that shows up and its just like, what the hell am I playing? It doesnt help that the dialogue is just super drab and dull and generic. They never say anything interesting and the voice acting is sparse and few and far between, its mostly reading lines of text. They just say basic things like "Theres a big monster coming this way, hes super bad and evil and we gotta stop it!" for pages and pages. I dont know, the story is just not engaging. And its funny because I heard this is the one Monser Hunter game where they really put emphasis on the story and apparently the other games are more light on it. Well it was a pretty big miss. At least the characters are sort of memorable, but not for the right reasons. It doesnt really come across as having its own distinct personality, but more just a mishmash of random Japanese cliches and fantasy pop-culture.

Its no big deal though, because no one really plays Monster Hunter for the story or super deep engaging dialogue, do they? Nah its all about the epic boss fights and getting new powerful gear. Well I played the ENTIRE game co-op with a friend. And let me tell you, it took a long time for us to wrap our heads around how the hell this convuluted shit system works. Its bad, real bad. The co-op experience is abysmal and I cant fathom what the fuck they were thinking when they strung this together in such a way. For starters, you have to invite your friend to join your party. Ok, simple enough, I'm in. But that doesnt do anything, you cant see eachother walk around town. You can see eachother type, you can see youre in the same group, but its seemingly pointless. After a bunch of hours we finally found out that theres a place called "The Gathering Hub" where you can go to actually see eachother walk around outside of a quest, but why cant we just see eachother everywhere? Why design it like this? They werent competent enough to program it in? It sucks. If I go start a quest, my co-op partner doesnt automatically come with me, or even get asked if he wants to join. Nope. One person has to host a quest from a Quest Board, and then the other person has to go find the Quest Board and go through about 6 menu's to find the quest and press OK on the various prompts. THEN the Host has to wait for everyone to ready up, then you can start together. Great! Except no. There's a catch. You cannot join eachothers quest until you EACH view various mission cutscenes at least once. Essentially what this means is every single time theres a new mission, you both have to start it in single player, run around aimlessly for 10-20 minutes looking for the next path towards progression and then a cutscene, then it will say something like "SOS Flare available!" meaning you can now return to town and host the quest from scratch and then both start the quest together. Sometimes it wont even say "SOS flare" but if you leave directly after the cutscene it will work anyway. Its a mess. Why is it programmed this way? Why cant we just start every mission together and watch the cutscenes together? Why cant we see eachother walk around in town? Why does the co-op partner have to keep flipping through handfuls of menus just to join each quest, why cant it just automatically join when the host starts a quest? It all comes together to turn into this draining, annoying process that really drags down the game. For the first 10+ hours we barely understood WTF was going on and had to keep googling stuff to try to piece together why the hell we are kept getting barred from joining eachother. The advertising that its a "fully co-op experience" is almost false advertising, it feels so half assed and fucked up its amazing. Eventually we got an understanding of how to do it, and we could almost sift through it in a coherent manner, but it still sucked.


Once the initial hours of frustration figuring out the co-op system were over, we got into the core loop of the game. At the Quest Board, you have various categories. Main quests, optional quests, Investigations, and Events. The first two are self-explainatory, then you have Investigations which are a series of seemingly randomly generated quests which you can manually select from an NPC which allow you to specifically target farm/hunt certain monsters. Events are these more special quests that usually unlock something back at the base or some new feature. The basic idea with pratically every main quest in the game is that you enter some big open map, and need to run around (at first aimlessly) tracking down a specific monster it wants you to hunt. You do this by collecting clues in the form of footprints, mucus, feathers, dung, etc. By doing so, it fills up a meter, that once leveled up enough times reveals more and more details about the monster, eventually even automatically putting him on your minimap to find hassel-free. In theory it sounds good, and makes sense. Of course you have to track the monster down, like a real hunt! but the execution can once again, feel like a chore and become draining. The problem is the extent at which you have to do this. Sometimes you will be running around doing nothing but looking for footprints for upwards of 15+ minutes at a time. Then you fight the boss, but they always fly away or run away and go through these chase+hunt phases. More running around looking for him. It makes the overall pacing of the game feel like it has way too much downtime. At first I was kind of getting into it, enjoying the slowburn, but since the game is so long, the whole process becomes arduous and not something I look forward to. Even with the fact that once you collect enough evidence you dont have to track them anymore, the problem is that every second or third mission you come across some new monster that you have to do it all over again and it makes the pacing feel really dull. Theres no exciting moment to moment gameplay. Its like one moment youll have a decently engaging part, then the next youre bored again. It's just too much.

The actual maps and level design is varied, they arent gigantic open worlds but more like medium sized open maps. You can walk from one end to the other in probably 5 minutes. You start off in a typical grassy fields or tropical island type place, but as the game progresses you unlock more maps that inhabit different creatures, and as the game goes on these maps get more and more fantastical. The graphics and designs are intriguing and strange, some parts do a good job depicting this otherworldly almost alien environments with the weird purple and blue environments and strange looking spores growing everywhere.  Theres a more mountianous, rocky lava map towards the end of the game that feels more threatening like a crescendo of the games difficulty and hostility. The main problem I have with some of the games maps is that they are just too vertical. You'll spend more time climbing up and down left and right than actually doing anything else. One moment youll fight a boss, and then he'll be flying away up 20 flights of vines and other things you have to climb across. And the minimap doesnt usually do a great job trying to indicate where youre supposed to go, so it makes navigation feel more like an annoying chore than exploring an exciting well crafted environment.

As for the actual combat of fighting the monsters, its hit or miss. There are two categories of monsters. Small, and large. Small monsters might as well not even be in the game, they are so inconsequential and irreelvant they basically just stand there doing nothing only serving to richen up the visuals or to be standing loot pinatas to skin for resources. But fine, the game is all about the big boss fights. The game is a third person action game, and the controls are pretty similar to Souls games actually. You have a roll button that you need to use constantly, theres a lock-on system that is completely worthless and actively fucks you up that I never used, there are strong and weak attack buttons, theres health potions coupled with a long drawn out animation each time you sip them, and the combat is fast paced and skill oriented demanding good reflexes and strategic fighting. You can see damage numbers when you hit the enemies, but you cant see their health bars, which is an interesting design choice, instead the only indication of how weakened the boss is, is visually looking at if hes limping or if youve broken off pieces of him. I didnt mind that you cant see the health bars, its unique from other games and keeps you guessing and makes you never let your guard up. There is about a dozen categories of weapons, and surprisingly each one of them has drastically different controls, button combos, movesets, and even modes of play. Some of them like the Great Sword will not allow you to jog around with it equipped, but does big damage. Long swords have a system where there is a gauge on the top left that you must fill by doing various combos. Other weapons like Switchaxe lets you switch between Axe and Sword modes at the press of a button, coupled with its own gauge. But really, I have to admit I never found any of the weapon types satisfying or enticing to me. Particularly because the designs of them and visuals were just not that appealing. They artstyle and tone of the game at times isn't really my cup of tea, its too over the top and Final Fantasy-esque. Gigantic weapons, nonsensical designs, and so on. At first I used the Great Swords, but it annoyed me how slow it was, and no jogging. I tried the Long sword but I hated having to rely on and learn convuluted weapon combos like some fighting game. Eventually I switched over the plain and simple Hammer. This is just a big two hand hammer that lets you jog while holding it, and doesnt rely on complex button combos, but still does massive damage. Its the most simple and easy to grasp weapon type. It has satisfying animations where you can hold Rt to charge up three different times, each with its own corresponding move. The third charge lets you do a whirlwind spin attack, which is fun to use. You can also tap B fast to do a sort of repeating "Bonk" move where you just slam the hammer down vertically over and over, which I used to great fun on bosses heads. So atleast I eventually found a weapon type I enjoyed using --- But there is sadly a crippling and frustrating aspect to the combat that I could just never overlook or come to terms with. The stuns. There are way too many fucking stunlocks in the game, and of various types. First you have Screaming stuns. The bosses can scream, which due to loud noise, makes your character stand around holding his ears and you lose control. The next stun is simply called "Stun". This is a move where you get hit too hard, or knocked down a certain way, that your character will stand up and have stars spinning around his head and you have to spin the stick to regain control of your character. This shit can last like 15 seconds. Then theres Paralysis, a kind of stun that happens due to electricity or something. Theres even fucking SLEEP stun where some bosses can literally put you to sleep and your character will fall to the floor not responding to controls. ITS TOO MUCH. I felt like half of the fucking time during combat I wasnt even playing the game but just waiting for my character to recover from constant stunlocks. To make matters worse it takes so long to use a healing potion you'll frequently go through these cycles where you do nothing but walk up and attack the boss once, take damage, run away and do a 10 second long heal, run back hit once, take damage, run away use 10 second heal, REPEAT. Its just so annoying. Why is everything so slow and tedious? I got so fed up with the constant stunlocks ruining the enjoyment of the game that I started to google if theres a way to mitigate it, because the game does such a poor job of explaining its systems. Well it turns out theres a Skill system where pieces of gear have various skills attached to them, and you can stack these skills together by equipping more and more pieces of gear with the same skills. So there is equipment with "Stun resistance" which gets rid of the stick-spinning debuff, and theres also "Earmuffs" which gets rid of the screaming debuff. The entire game I was desperately trying to rank these two skills high enough just to be immune to most of the stuns. It wasnt until probably halfway through the game that I finally got Stun resistance to maximum which made me immune to the stick spins, and it wasnt until the last quarter of the game that I finally got immune to Screaming debuffs via Earmuffs stacking. What the fuck! This stuff should of atleast been easier to obtain, or been massively reduced because it made the combat so damn frustrating. I cant think of another third person action game that has so many stuns, why is it like this? Theres so many more that I didnt mention, so many things from simply bumping into the boss will knock you on your ass, tripping over rocks, getting tapped by a small explosion, almost every piece of damage knocks you on your ass and plays a long drawn out animation. You cant even cancel attacks mid-animation. Once you let an attack happen, its committed. Other action games if you do a 4 second long attack animation, you can atleast cancel it, but in this one its very common to commit to a giant animation and just be stuck doing it until its over, despite your best attempts to stop it and get away. It makes the controls overall feel clunky and bad to control. I understand that there should be a consequence to your button presses and your actions should have meaning, but the combination of shit here comes together to at times make a really annoying experience.


The combat isn't all bad, though, there are plenty of times where it feels really great and satisfying to take down these big beasts. There are plenty of moments when there are multiple monster bosses on screen at once, sometimes triggering a "Turf war" where the bosses fight eachother. They cant actually kill eachother, but they do get weakened to make it easier for the players to kill them. Its an amusing spectacle to watch, the animations are well done, and the graphics and model and texture design is striking a lot of the times. It can be a pain in the ass if you just want to get away from one of the bosses and take on the main one yourself sometimes, though, they follow you around the map for ages and at times seems even scripted to do so, which is kind of a bummer. The visceral feeling of the combat shines through at times, I played the game with a controller and the vibrations in particular make everything feel impactful and weighted, lining up a good combo and striking the bosses in their various weak spots feels impactful and fun. As you collect tracks and various clues your Monster Guide updates and you can even go in and look at a detailed account of each boss, telling you their weak spots and what kinds of rewards you might expect. So it does a good job making you actually feel like a Monster Hunter. In the heat of battle there are all sorts of temporary buffs, potions, herbs you can use to give yourself an advantage. You have this hotbar you can select items with the D-pad, mostly I just used various health potions (And mega health potions) but you can also use things to increase your health temporarily , and antidotes for poison. You also get these Mantles which is like a cloak you put over yourself to give yourself a temporary buff. Theres a few of them, One is for vitality mantle that makes you tank free damage for awhile, the other cures all ailments, others let you sneak better, and so on. We just used the Vitality mantle for the whole game, so it was fun to try to wait for the perfect moment to put this cloak on and then go full DPS race on the boss tanking damage for a short time. Though, like other downfalls in the game, all fun things must come to an end. Because as youre having fun fighting the bosses, they will frequently run away, requiring you to chase them across the map over and over and over. Sure, this sounds fine on paper, and makes it more like an engaging hunt where you have to keep progressively fighting and then tracking down the monster. I don't have a problem with that. The problem is that its done to excess. They can run away from you 10+ times before you finally take them down. Requiring at times 20+ minutes of doing nothing but running around randomly in between battles. Its just so much downtime. A common problem the game has is that the moment-to-moment gameplay, overall, is just dull and boring. It feels like a lot of busy work, chores, and meandering, before you finally get to the good parts. And the good parts are few and far between. Theres just too much filler!

Each of the bosses has their own kind of gimmick, like some of them will poison you, others will make you bleed requiring you to stand still and crouch, others will put you to sleep, others will barrel under ground and arrive ontop of you, others will spin around at you, others are based on various elemental features like lightning,fire, etc that you'll have to find a way to deal with. Which is fine, they each force you to adjust your playstyle to figure out a proper way to deal with them, so they each feel distinct and like youre not just fighting some copy paste monster the whole game.

As for the boss variety themselves, its mostly dragons/monsters with wings, and more grounded dinosaur monsters, thats...basically it. I was a little disappointed when I came to realize this. Its not really a grand creative spree of exciting and varied monsters, its more like variations on a theme. They're okay enough, I guess, and are memorable in their own ways. You have guys like Pukei-Pukei which is this big green bird that spits poison at you, youve got Anjanath which is like something out of Jurassic Park, youve got Tzitzi, which is this little dinosaur guy that screams constantly but is kinda a pushover, theres a Barroth which is this big guy encased in a thick armor shell that you have to keep breaking pieces off, theres this big white fluffy Bat guy that puts you to sleep, and theres a Radobaan which is this like spinning porcupine type boss that can be a real pain in the ass. Theres also another boss we called "Dig-dug" that does this move that keeps burying himself under the ground and then popping out ontop of you, dealing massive damage, and stunlocking you for 15+ seconds. This was the boss that made super frustrated with the constant stun-locks and made me google a way to get stun resistance. It was awful. Theres a lot more than these, but yeah theres a big list of unique monsters to fight but their designs arent particularly creative or anything. Its not like youre fighting Demon monsters or any crazy creatures, its more like Dinosaurs, Birds, Dragons, more naturalistic kind of beasts. Which is fine, I guess, but after awhile the 'woo' and 'mystique' just got lost on me. It was like "Oh, another different colored dragon"  "Oh, another bird"  "Oh, another dinosaur".  and it can be especially annoying because it seems like most of the bosses in the game have wings and constantly fly away from you mid battle, like the previous problem I mentioned it just gets annoying to have to keep tracking them down.

The main quests arent really that varied, they all have the same formula. Its just go find this new monster and kill him. They arent really like hand crafted levels or missions or anything. They are all kinda the same thing...The main and side quests almost feel exactly the same, other than the fact that side quests involve monsters youve already killed. There was like one single main quest that involved this big hulking monster called Zora Magdaros which is like a Godzilla type guy where you do nothing but shoot at him with cannonballs or walk around ontop of him (which is just looks like youre walking around on a big rock) and have to destroy his Lava cores, then you go back to shooting at him with cannonballs for 20 minutes. Eventually you win and he just crawls away under the sea, I didnt really understand the point? Theres even an event that keeps popping up like "You can go kill zora magdaros again, only lasts for 3 quests!" like its this big important thing. Well we did grind him out a few times, and crafted some of the pieces of armor, but it wasnt really that useful or last that long. Kinda weird that there was only really one main quest in the entire game that had any sort of difference to it or hand-craftedness/scripted events. Other than that one quest I cant really remember anything else that was substantially different.

Speaking of tracking things down, there is this green dotted mist orbs that appear around you, acting like a sort of guide to help you find things in the world. This thing took so many hours to understand what the hell it was trying to do or show me. Its just not very intuitive, lots of things in the game arent. From a UI standpoint, from a design standpoint, just a lot of the things in the game are confusing to understand whats happening. The green orbs, by default, just point to whatever is nearest to you to collect (I think?) so it will try to lead you towards a random herb, a rock, an ore, some tracks, etc. However, you can click the stick to manually select a thing for the orbs to focus on.  This works pretty horribly, and is a confusing mess, the green orbs constantly get messed up and resets the path, frequently making you walk in circles doing nothing. You can put a pin on an object on the minimap , but it wasnt until halfway through the game that I realized that on the minimap there is a tiny green dot that shows that this is what the green orbs are trying to lead you to. Ok, so once you find the boss you can Pin him on the minimap, and then follow the green orbs confidently knowing it will take you to the right spot. The problem is the pathing or coding of this thing is frequently awful and will keep throwing you in the most random places, only to just stop abruptly and do nothing, forcing you to run around randomly until it "rethinks" and readjusts where to go. Its just bad, even after dozens of hours I was still complaining and struggling with this damn system. Im glad theres something in the game to try to give you a helping hand in guiding you through the big open maps, but the programming on this thing just sucked.

So besides the loop of accepting main quests, being unable to start co-op together until you each go inside and manually watch the first cutscene, backing out, and restarting, fighting the varied main monsters, etc - the game is still chock full of different features, mechanics, and things to do. Almost so much so that its like they just threw everything at the wall and wanted to see what stuck. I dont know about other Monster Hunter games, or if this game just gave into the survival game craze trend of the times, but theres all sorts of resource gathering/mining you have to do in this game. Every moment youre walking around in the game maps you can be spamming the B button to pickup anything you walk by. Herbs, flowers, ore, rocks, mining, random bugs, honey used for crafting mega potions, bonepiles and so on. You use these resources back at the base in a variety of different merchants. Theres a Melding guy that lets you meld items together, which I didnt really bother using. Theres another NPC that lets you grow a little farm of sorts, cultivate various different herbs and grow your own things like honey, health herbs, antitdotes etc. Theres various merchants for buying basic supplies. There is an NPC you go to which lets you pick from a long list of Investigations to do, and turn in Bounties which are various tasks you must complete to get rewards. There is a research center guy you talk to which you bring your monster clues to and then he updates your Monster Guide with more information. Theres the Chef's that let you eat all sorts of food with various temporary buffs. You even have your own room and house-servent cat which you can send on these Safari missions to bring back stuff for you, but I never really used it much.

 But most important of all, you have the Forge and Blacksmith location. This is where the main hook of the game is. In between fighting new monsters and bosses, you come back here to unlock brand new sets of armor and weapon upgrades you can craft. Since the game has no real Level up or Skill system, all of your character power comes from simply buying and upgrading your gear. There is a (HR) hunter rank level system, but it serves no more than just a symbol of basically how many quests or bosses youve killed, it doesnt make you stronger, only lets you accept certain quests.  So there is all sorts of armors and weapons to make in order to get stronger. At first, you can only craft very basic weapons. Iron, and bone. And for many hours into the game, I was so confused why I could still only create Iron and Bone weapon categories, despite in the upgrade tree seeing all these crazy new weapons I cannot access. Well like I said previously, the game isnt very intuitive at times. the UI and various menu's do a bad job explaining themselves, at least to me. It took me maybe a dozen or two hours to realize that while you can craft very basic weapon categories, the way the upgrade system works is that you must start from a basic weapon, and then upgrade into another tree. There is a white line on the upgrade tree showing you various 'crossroads' where you can decide to stay on the same weapon category, or upgrade into a completely different one. Once I realized this, my frustration with the lack of weapon upgrades and boring weapon selection was mostly alleviated. It opened up so many possibilites. Now I can have a strategy and plan to upgrade my shitty Bone Hammer into this epic Lightning hammer or crazy Anjanath hammer that does fire damage, etc. The equipment are mostly based on, or modelled after the bosses youve fought. So it can be an exciting and rewarding feeling to discover a new enemy, with the knowledge that once you take him down you can use his resources to craft stronger equipment. I suppose thats the main draw to the game, and what keeps people coming back. Its overall a very simple idea and system, but its engaging and keeps you looking for the next upgrade, keeps you wanting to grind side missions, farm for resources, etc. So I like that RPG side of it. Its simple but not too simple. I eventually ended up going with the Lightning Hammer weapon tree and sticking with it until the end of the game so I think it served my purposes well. As for the armor, there are dozens and dozens of different sets. You can even visually preview them before crafting them. Lots of them look ridiculous and over the top, but some of them are more typical knight equipment. The designs are atleast weird enough to be memorable. The armor is simple, you just buy whatever increases your Defense as well as elemental resistances (if you need them for the current boss). Each armor piece also has a Skill attached to it, these can be things like slightly buffing attack damage, even things like "Wide range' which lets you heal your partner whenever you use a potion, and all sorts of other skills that I didnt really care much about. Because like I mentioned previously, as soon as I found out there were Earplugs and Stun Resistance gear, my main and only goal was to maximize these as much as possible to reduce the annoying fucking stuns. So there was no other room to care about other skills, which is, for me, a pretty sad flaw overall for the equipment system, that I feel so forced to stack these skills that all the other skills became pointless, because without them, the combat is just that much more annoying. You get armor shards from optional quests and various tasks, and these are used to further upgrade and increase the gear youre wearing. At times it became mandatory to go and farm these things to make ourselves just that little bit stronger to be able to try to finish just one more main quest. But it was fun constantly upgrading your characters equipment regardless and something to look forward to.

Something really stupid is that the game throws all this blatantly overpowered equipment at you. Called Defender and Guardian equipment. They explicitally say this equipment is solely made to speedrun through the game as fast as possible and is basically cheating/easy mode for people that want to speedrun to the Expansion pack. Well it was extremely confusing for the first few hours. "Why the hell is this gear so good?"  "What is this Guardian and Defender stuff"?  We sadly used it for a couple main missions, maybe the first 3 hours. But we thought "This cant be right, lets look it up" and found out that yeah, this stuff is basically cheating. We forced ourselves to never use it. Its a shame that the game even has this stuff in it and is so poorly explained as basically being a cheat code for speedrunners. There should of been a giant disclaimer, or make it harder to obtain this stuff, I think a lot of noobs and newcomers to the game probably ruin their experience by using this gear without even realizing. There are a lot of instances of poor design choices and unintuitive annoyances like this to be found all over the game.

So there is a lot to dig into here with Monster Hunter, the game is LONG. It took me and my co-op friend like 3 weeks to finally beat it. We would play daily for sometimes 3-6 hours and some days barely make progress, or not even complete a single main quest. The game is difficult. There are no difficulty selections, you have to be ontop of gearing yourself properly or the next main quest will destroy you. You can only respawn 3 times total per main quest, if you run out of lives, you go back to town and have to start over. I'm glad theres a penalty for dying like that, I have no complaints there, it definitely made the game more intense and our lack of skill feel meaningful. Theres nothing worse than games with no penalty for dying, that makes you feel like the whole thing is pointless, or theres no room to improve because it doesnt matter anyway. But yeah, the game progressively gets more and more harder, and we would find ourselves smacking our heads against a wall unable to progress unless we stopped trying and went and grinded a bunch of side quests, just to get some more resources to get just that little bit stronger. And the side quests are really nothing novel or interesting, they are mostly just repeats of the main quests. Just fighting bosses youve previously killed. Or the few side quests that are awful such as carrying eggs back to base, and its really easy to drop the eggs and start over. Or stupid quests like go collect a few herbs. Theres other side quests like Capturing a boss, which is waiting until he starts limping and then throwing a net/trap at them to capture them, those were a nice change of pace. There are other side quests that take place in an Arena that let you chose a loadout that is nothing to do with your own equipment, its cool it lets you test out different weapon styles here, but the rewards didnt really seem worthwhile. But really its almost false to say they are "optional quests" because to us it felt pretty damn mandatory to grind these things out just to become just powerful enough to progress the story. The game is really long and drawn out, it took us 72!! hours to get to end credits. Because half of that time is just grinding side quests of bosses we've already beaten again and again. I think my main complaint with the game is theres just too much filler, its too long, too repetitive, too many chores and in-between annoyances, the combat can be frustrating as hell with the clunky controls and constant stunlocks...uninteresting story. Towards the end of the game we were struggling pretty hard, sometimes multiple hours long sessions where we make virtually zero progress, failing main quests, having to grind out side missions until we finally unlocked another piece of gear with Earplugs that made us immune to screaming. As soon as we did that, we barreled through the last few remaining main quests. The third last guy is this lava dragon that will randomly explode, sometimes one shotting you, We failed on him for a few days, until we decided to grind out side quests to get stronger. After we got earplugs though we took him down first try. Second last guy is like this poison dragon thing Vaal Hazak that does this move that instantly halves your healthbar, requiring you to use a Nulberry item to get your health back. Once we went back (and did chores) to grind out nulberries we took him down first try. Last boss is a big Ice dragon (The arena and boss looks very much like Seath the Scaleless, is it just me seeing Dark Souls everywhere or is this game just influenced by it a lot?)  and we actually managed to kill the last boss first try. It was an epic fight, taking place in multiple phases and arenas, but you basically just have to run around and avoid his fire beams and smack his hands over and over for 10 minutes. Then you get some ending cutscenes showing everyone happy at the base partying eating food and drinking (even the cats are getting drunk) and you get end credits. Horray. Finally. I was begging for end credits around the 50 hour mark, by 70+ hours It was hurting. After the end credits the 'end game' seems like it just raises all the difficulty of side quests/investigations where you can go grind for better equipment and fight upgraded versions of the bosses, I dont know, wasnt really interested. I walked around town for a few minutes after end-credits to see what was new and to my surprise I somehow triggered a cutscene involving fucking Geralt from the Witcher...What? I dont even know what to say about that, I was kinda just shocked and awe'd. Then you start playing a mission as Geralt. At this point I literally just quit to desktop and uninstalled. Thats enough for me. Okay theres some goofy fourth wall shit after the end credits, great whatever.

So thats Monster Hunter World. Great co-op game? Not really, still cant wrap my head around how they made the co-op experience so annoying. Even if the co-op system was more seemless the game has a lot of annoyances to still be amazing for me. Would I play other Monster Hunter games in the series? Yeah I'd give them a try, out of curiosity, to see whats different from this one. Theres an expansion, Iceborne, I might entertain playing that in like 5 years. But for now thats more than enough Monster Hunter for me.

6/10

Saints Row

 

I really liked Saints Row 1 & 2 back in the day. The first one I have a lot of fond memories and nostalgia for as at the time it was an exciting new GTA clone in an age where we didnt have that many. And Saints Row 2 was a great co-op game that had a perfect balance of serious Gangster stuff and more random wacky stuff. The franchise lost me as a fan after SR3, 3 lost its way with any hint of seriousness and was cringy zaney humor and bad aesthetics. It only got worse then there with 4 and the weird spinoffs like Gat out of Hell which I also hated and even went more stupid. Now, after some downtime Volition has returned and released this sort of reboot of the whole franchise with this game titled ... Saints Row. When devs do stuff like this are they like trying to rewrite history and pretend this is the REAL SR1? Why is it just called "Saints Row"?  Saints Row was already released, in 2006. I don't understand it. Well I heard through the grapevine that this new reboot is a total sham and a joke and everyone hates it. Still, I had played all the other games in the series, and at least they are co-op. So I figured worse case scenario I'd just be able to laugh at a stupid over the top game with my friend and we would crack jokes about how bad the game is the whole time, or even be pleasently surprsied if the game turned out to be any good.

However it didn't take long for even my low expectations to be met with disappointment and frustration. First, the game has muliple difficulty levels, and you can even adjust a bunch of silders yourself to tweak it even further. But thats kind of a red flag almost like the devs couldnt really figure out a perfect balance for each difficulty and just said "You know what, fuck it. Just let them do it themselves" Still, you can pick predefined difficulties, so we just put it on the second hardest one. Now you have the typical character creator, and theres lots of wacky ridiculous things in here, from penis size, body sliders, all sorts of wacky gestures and animations you can do, to even choosing different voices and even changing the pitches of them. But beyond the first 10 minutes messing with it, it didnt hold any lasting excitement for me.  Then, the introduction of the game has you playing these almost sci-fi soldiers going into this desert Western village and killing baddies. And it drags on for far too long. What game am I playing? The introduction doesnt feel anything like even the worst of the Saints Row games. Its like some weird disconnected third person shooter game that seems like some generic military shooter like "We want the Call of Duty audience". After the disappointing, generic, and bland introduction we meet the games cast and supporting characters. And its...really bad. Its this strange mix of preppy, 20 something college kids who are all hecking wholesome and friendly and overly friendly and tight-knit. Its all eyerolling shit. The games writing and cast is devoid of any amount of cynicism, grit, or real character depth. All the writing and characters are one dimensional "Best frands for life" childish and lame stereotypes. This shirtless guy, some generic nerdy woman, a nerdy geek minority token black guy, if there was another one I cant remember now. These guys will constantly be yapping in your ear nonstop and none of it is funny or interesting or have any weight to it, its all shallow annoying bullshit trying to get cheap laughs out of you but its never funny. The writing is just tone deaf.

Then you just go around completing random missions by opening your phone and choosing the Missiosn menu and picking them as they appear. Theres not much more to the game. There is this big open world, and at some point we stopped doing main missions to check out what you can do in it, and we quickly decided that none of it is interesting or worth doing. Basically all there is in the open world is clothing store after clothing store , cosmetics stores, and gun shops. Then you have the side activities, but whats the point of doing them? Atleast in earlier games they were sometimes mandatory for progression or to get interesting unlocks, but the problem here is that the gameplay is utterly trivial and shallow (I'll get to that in a minute) or the side missions are just not interesting, at all. There are other collectables you can get, but really who gives a shit. So we just started grinding all the main missions back to back.

Remember I said the game starts off with this sci-fi space warrior kind of shit? Yeah, that keeps draggong on well past the intro. First quarter of the game youre going around as a sort of Mercenary for this company killing all sorts of soldiers and it feels like a really medicore, dull third person dollar store game. Its not awful, its just extremely bland. The game uses a lot of On-rails sections, too. Parts where you just hang on the back of a vehicle and shoot cars and stuff. Very boring. None of it is even partciularly over the top, too. Thats the biggest disappointment. Like, previous Saints Row games like 3 & 4, while they were stupid and I didnt like them, atleast it was so absurdly over the top that it was a spectacle of stupidity to laugh at, while here its just so medicore, bland, and uninspired that you cant even laugh at it, you're just half asleep the whole time. Like what game am I even playing?

Eventually you stop doing these stupid sci-fi soldier missions because you get fired from that job or whatever and you go off to start up the new Saints Row gang in some church main headquarters , then the game branches off to where you are doing more 'normal' missions but things really dont pick up. None of the missions in the game are memorable, exciting, or fun. Most of them are just extremely mundane shit like driving to a location and doing combat with a group or two of enemies then driving to another place and doing it again or picking up some object. Yeah a lot of open world games are like that but theu underlying mechanics  here are so unengaging it just doesnt work at all. Even worse, a significant chunk of the missions have you doing just tedium and busywork like minimum wage jobs type stuff just cleaning shit up or doing unfunny 'ironic' collectable minigame stuff. I finished the game just a few hours ago and I cant even remember any of the missions, really. It's all so bland. You hardly even notice the police in the game at all, either. Like it felt impossible to actually make the cops mad at you and get into any sort of meaningful police chase or consequences for your action...they just do nothing. It makes everything you do feel irrelevant and the game is just trivial.

The actual gameplay mechanics are so plain and unexciting that its hard to care about anything. The shooting, is as barebones and middle of the road as possible. I only used two guns the entire game, the SMG and 3 round burst assault rifle. It wasnt until almost halfway through the game I cared enough to even go to the gunstore and buy a new weapon or upgrade. The driving feels extremely arcady and stiff and doesnt have much weight to it, made even worse by the atrocious physics system the game has to where you will frequently run over fire hydrants that for some reason launch you 50 feet into the air  randomly its just stupid. Atleast compared to previous Saints games you actually have to drive vehicles in this game, unlike having all sorts of stupid superpowers that render them pointless like other Saints games, but still. The real huge issue with much of the gameplay is twofold: A) The AI is complete fucking dog shit and are brainless and barely pose a threat, and B) the game is extremely buggy, like maybe one of the buggiest games I've ever played. Constant problems connecting to eachother, crashes, missions breaking, AI breaking, scripts breaking which increasing made the game more and more intolerable to sit through.

Even on the second hardest difficulty the game was a joke, hardly any challenge or threat at all. This is mostly because the enemy AI is so poor that all they do 90% of the time is stand still out in the open and dont even move. Most of the time I barely cared to even get anywhere safe and I'd just run straight up to the enemies and shoot them in the face point blank, its laughable. Goldeneye in 1996 has better AI than this. DOOM has better AI than this. Really I cant think of a game with worse enemy AI than this one? its that bad. How did they make it so shit?

Not sure what else to say about this abomination of a game. The Saints Row identity has been brutalized since after SR2 but this is a whole new level of lame. Like I keep saynig, atleast 3, 4, etc I can laugh about how stupidly over the top they were, but this one just does everything so safe and dull that I was either falling asleep the whole game or just feeling pain by playing it from all the bugs and medicority of everything. The constant cutscenes and tone-deaf vibe of "Hanging out with the gang" was constantly eyeroll, the game has this weird disconnect of trying to be a gangster game but at the same time being really politically correct, safe, and non-offensive that it just comes off as worthless poser shit appealing to the lowest common denominator. Like its trying to sell some "moral of the story" to you, it makes me cringe. The fact that I cant remember any specific missions just after beating it is pathetic and an indication of how boring it was. I mean, theres a significant chunk of the game where you have to go around doing these pretend fight missions where you LARP and dress up in this stupid cardboard box Knight outfit and attack waves of enemies with these toy guns...as if the base combat could of gotten any worse this is even more boring and stupid. And It just goes on..and on..and on. You cant even use your special abilities on these segments. Oh yeah, the game has perks, unlocks, and special abilities but they are so worthless that I barely gave a shit. Like on the second hardest difficulty the game is already a joke so why do I need to even care about unlocks and skills? I just used the one skill that makes you tank more damage and thats it. The rest was neither here nor there and its so half-assed and barely fleshed out it didnt matter.

Positive things to say about the game? Well at least It was co-op. But again, the bugs made that system barely work. Constant problems of not being able to see eachother or the game breaking. The graphics? They arent impressive. The artstyle is (surprise) especially dog shit, bright neon colors all over everything like the Cops having these stupid Teal colors and pink and purple overly saturated shit, I dont know why modern (especially the BAD) modern games have aesthetics like this but it looks so childish and stupid its hard to respect. The games world takes place in this mostly Desert type place, like why desert? Desert is like the most uninteresting type of game world and thats what they choose to go for? Theres like an overarching Western Cowboy theme going throughout the game and I just dont understand, its not appealing. I just want a Gangster game like Saints Row 1 & 2, What the fuck are they doing? None of the locations in the city stand out or are memorable. I can remember specific locations and places from SR 1 & 2 despite not playing them for over a decade now. Do you think im gonna remember a single detail or location of this game in a few years? Not a fucking chance. Generic as can be.

Probably the most fun and interesting part of the game for me was the music on the radio stations. Theres a station for Nuclear Blast, a metal label, which was fun to laugh at the shitty generic metal music, it was atleast novel to be blasting death metal and talk about the bands with my buddy while playing the game. Other music stations is this like Alt-rock indie thing that had some entertaining bands on it, its got other stuff in it like DMX and other rap artists and stations. yeah most of the radio sucks like annoying Fiesta music station but compared to everything else it was atleast interesting to scroll through the stations, especially when youre just sitting in the passenger seat. Too bad the music isnt synced up in real time between co-op partners, why cant any game do that so we can talk about the music in real time? When the most interesting part of a game has nothing to do with the game but rather just random licensed music they put in it, thats when you know its bad.  There is this other stupid 'pranks' feature in co-op where you can randomly press a button and prank your buddy it does random things to do them like put Shit clouds on them, make it rain money, turn them into a cactus, random goofy shit that was atleast mildly amusing to mess with as well as the other stupid gestures like constantly jerking off gesture, rolling around like an idiot, and playing the guitar gesture. At least gave us some cheap laughs here and there.

The game eventually wraps up with this dumb twist where one of your friends backstabs you and wants to take over the Saints or some shit, you get stabbed then go into this dream sequence where you run around these child playpens collecting fucking baby elephants and giraffes and shit or whatever, like yeah its really trying to solidfy its self as a shit game isnt it? Theres just nothing of value in this game, you never do anyhting cool, interesting, or even stupidly over the top like previous games. You finish the last mission with this joke of a last boss where you just face rush him and tank all the damage, shoot down his helicoptor, End credits roll and then theres another final 'mission' that basically just tells you to 100% the game. Yeah you cant pay me to do that. Somehow this game is maybe even worse than SR 3 & 4 , and Gat out of Hell, and I hated those games. Most people like them, but its just not for me. This new Saints Row? I don't know WHO its supposed to be for. At least I got the game for like $2, I was actually excited to play this game and get it for cheap because I thought maybe there would be a good chance it would atleast be amusingly stupid and bad but really it was just tedious and annoying to get through. So please just stop  with this new stuff and bring SR1 to PC or Remaster SR2.

3/10

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

 

I'm at the point where I'm willing to play basically any co-op Diablolike ARPG. I've heard about Wolcen for awhile, and even leading up to its release I heard famous streamers and influencers call it A "Path of Exile killer" like its going to be this next big thing. Then I heard that after its release, it totally flopped and no one liked it. Thats the extent of the information I had about the game before buying it. I managed to buy it for like $2 so its no real loss to me either way.

Upon starting it up you get a difficulty selection of "Story mode" and then Normal. I find it funny the game even has a story mode but whatever. I guess Normal is the hardest difficulty until after you beat the game a few times and it unlocks higher ones? Dont know but we picked that. Then you get a simple character creation where you adjust your appearance, but past the first 10 minutes of gameplay we totally forgot about it. The co-op is thankfully well implemented, you just invite your friend to your party from the main menu then upon clicking Play you both start the game. Then the game starts off, first with some lackluster slideshow still images but then the game starts to impress us with these high budget looking 3D cutscenes that look like something out of Lord of the Rings or something. Its a common feature the game has, it presents its self as fairly high budget with frequent use of action packed cinematic cutscenes that other games in the genre don't really go for. It asks you to choose your combat type, like Melee, Ranged, Magic, or something like that. We both just picked the warrior type, as usual for these games. Then the game starts off similar to any other arpg, you have only bare essential simple gear and you go around killing monsters picking up loot upgrading your gear and stats.

At first everything seems promising, the graphics can be stunning, with these amazingly detailed enviornments and cinematic scenes with nice blurring effects in the distance and impressive vistas. The tone of the game is dark and immersive, the overall interface and UI looks well done and more pleasing than a lot of other games in the genre. Then after getting a few level ups I start to notice this big skill tree called Gate of Fates which is this giant web of interconnected passives and buffs, directly inspired by games like Path of Exile. "Wow, thats crazy" I thought, as if the game would be really challenging, deep, and full of interesting puzzles and problems to solve with my build. The sad reality is that quickly the game starts to reveal its self as phony, like an illusion of being this deep game with tons of interesting mechanics but really none of it is meaningful or matters at all - it's all a facade. And I'll tell you why:

Not long into the game I started to wonder if the game has enemy level scaling like some other bad ARPGs do. This means that everytime you level up, the enemy levels up right alongside you - effectively almost making leveling up pointless or even worse, detrimental as the enemies only keep getting stronger. Even if a game has this, it can still be an enjoyable experience, but more often than not ARPG's with this one "feature" makes it a crippling flaw. Turns out Wolcen does indeed have enemy scaling, but it works in certain brackets, I'm not quite sure, but usually every time I would catch up to the zones enemy level, the next loading screen/zone they would be right back alongside me or slightly higher. So, shortly into the game I decided to do an experiment where we just run past every single monster and see how long we could get away with that and how punishing it is. Well it turns out you can get away with it the whole game, and its not punishing at all. You can simply run past every single monster in the game and they wont even be able to catch up to you, stunlock you, kill you on the way, they effectively do not matter. At least in other games like Chaosbane, Grim Dawn, etc, if you try running past every single monster they will frequently corner you, or do so much damage on the way that you'll frequently die. But not in Wolcen, in Wolcen the enemies will barely do any damage to you as you sprint past massive packs of them, its fucking stupid and makes the whole game feel worthless.

The only punishment to simply running past every enemy in the game is that there are mandatory campaign Boss fights you'll encounter. These fights basically gear/stat/skill check you. Thankfully the game has some semblance of difficulty in that these bosses frequently have multiple phases, and if you die on phase 2 or 3 you'll have to redo the whole fight. So what ended up happening is a few times after sprinting past mostly an entire Act/Episode and we encountered one of these bosses, all we would have to do is backtrack a minute or two, kill a few packs of monsters to catch up to the zone level (which didnt take very long as seemingly the monsters were never that much higher than us desipite deliberately avoiding getting any XP for long periods of time, scaling?)  and then going back to town and picking up a few new pieces of equipment like a new weapon or something. Then we could kill the bosses. The bosses are probably the "best" part of the game, in terms of engagement and actually having to do something. If youre mechanically skillful, good at dodging and knowing when to use your health potions, the bosses are fairly doable even if your characters suck. So it was never too much of a problem for us. A few bosses we would fail a few times and get stressed, but it was mostly because we had to learn the attacks and patterns like a lot of bosses will do attacks that light up certain areas of the arena that you need to avoid or you'll pretty much always die. If a co-op partner dies, you can click him to resurrect him over a few seconds. It seems like you can keep resurrecting even if you are being attacked, too. So it doesnt interrupt you, making it even easier.

After finishing a mandatory boss, we just went back to running past every single enemy again until the next mandatory boss. Rinse and repeat until end credits. It was that stupid. The game tries to fool you by making you think it has any depth to it or the enemies are real threats, but theyre not.

To make matters worse, the itemization loot stats, and skill systems are just not that interesting either. The stats work as items you can randomly find, or purcahse from a merchant. Then you consume this item and it permanently unlocks the skill. The skills are broken up into different tabs on the UI like Melee, Ranged, Sorcery etc again. I just simply looked at/used all the Melee skills. But really all I ended up doing the entire game is using the default Anvil hammer skill for the first half of the game, then in the second half of the game I realized you could buy skills from merchants and used another two skills, this jumping spear that generates a lot of Rage, and a shout skill that just buffs you with more damage. Another staple of shit poorly designed ARPG's along with Enemy scaling is the Generator/Spender type skill system that games like Diablo 3 and 4 are now famous for.  Instead of just having mana like traditional ARPG's, you have weak shitty default skills dedicated to generating resources needing to cast your actually powerful main skills, and then you have your main skills that consume the resource. For me, the main skill was this Anvil hammer AOE slam, and the generator skill was by default the sword slash attack. Eventually I just ended up using the jumping Spear skill as my generator, so the gameplay loop just looked like spamming 123 for my generators and buffs, and then holding down Right click to do my main skill. Nothing exciting or fun really, and I hate the entire generator/spender system in the first place. The skills were so unexciting and uninteresting that I never even cared to use anything else than the default. Maybe a big reason why is because your skills simply level up by using them. So that means if you find some new exciting skill, guess what, it will be level 1 while the one youve used the whole game will be level 30. So it felt like swapping to the interesting Level 1 skill would be shit until you've used it a bunch. This isnt nessesarilya bad thing on its own, but I just couldnt be bothered to experiment much when the default Hammer attack worked well enough, especially considering all the enemies are meaningless and you just run past them anyway. Whats the point of even caring about any of the mechanics or character progression in the game then? Nothing even threatens you to make it matter anyway. The skills also use this weird system similar to Chaosbane/Diablo 3 where you get a certain amount of points you can allocate on the fly, to buff the indiviudal skills in different ways. This is just stuff like 15% more damage, add a big AOE explosion, less Resource cost, etc. Nothing super deep, and usually I would swap these passives around every few levels without much thought and it worked fine.

The itemization is not interesting either. Resistances are something I quickly realized I should care about. Usually in other ARPG's you would put on items like +10% fire resistance. And your fire resistance would go up by 10%. In Wolcen its not like that. Items have "resistance scores" that are dozens to hundreds of points, that then get added to this overall resistance pool (I think?) that then raise your resistances. Like you can put an item on that says "Resistance score 200" but your global Fire resistance would only go up by 2%. Its very stupid and I dont like how its done at all. The other stats are stuff like +health, Force Shield (dont know what that is, assumed it was Magic shit) % elemental damage,  Material damage (Why is it worded like this? Is it just melee damage?, it was always tiny amounts like %2 so I barely gave a shit),  % Rage generation, Cooldown reduction. Just really not that exciting itemization or stats at all. I never dropped any unique colored items or anything that made me hyped. For the most part I barely gave a shit about items at all and only used whatever wepaon made my "Average damage' go up on my main skill. Until the second half of the game I was still wearing random Blue gloves that I didnt even care to replace. The game thankfully has a loot filter, and you can go in and disable tiers of items you no longer want. Very soon into the game I disabled all White and Blue items, some of the lowest most worthless tiers. So that meant for most of the game I was barely finding anything. The game really doesnt have that many loot drops, and the ones that do drop just arent that interesting, especially when you realize most of the enemies dont matter.
The health potion system lets you have two potions, they can both be health potions, or you can use other things like a Rage potion. For the whole game I just used two health potions, and you can get better ones as you progress the game which become increasingly important. The health potions recharge as you get kills, so yet another idea taken from PoE. The potion system is fine, it atleast added challenge and excitement during boss fights but other than that I barely noticed.

And that passive tree I talked about? its almost like you cant really go wrong. Its broken up into different colors, Red for melee/warrior type stuff, Green for dexterity Rogue, ranger stuff, Purple for magic (I think) . All I did was go towards all the Red nodes and the bigger passive stuff for like Health regen/damage.. very basic things. I avoided anything with Criticals cause I dont like how inconsistent Criticals are in ARPGs. Worked out good enough. Barely ever died (maybe 5 times total?) and had enough damage to take down all the bosses. There is this feature where you can select parts of the tree and sort of spin the different rings around to almost totally customize your own path and tree, which I'm sure during the marketing for this game they boasted so much about and probably what made people consider this a PoE killer. But really I only even noticed it was a feature more than halfway through the game, and even then it hardly changed how I played the game. maybe its more important after youve dumped hundreds of hours into the game and progressed to the 'endgame' or whatever, but for a casual one-run playthrough it barely matters, like everything else.

The game has impressive amazing production value with all these cutscenes and tons of dialogue and writing, but its such a bizarre mishmash of ideas that it quickly caught me off guard with how awkward and stupid it all is.  The resemblance is uncanny. Like why the fuck does everyone look like they are taken directly out of Warhammer 40k? meanwhile everything else is like dark gritty horror vibes and then the next moment its like youre watching an episode of Star trek? I dont get it.And then after awhile all the constant cutscenes and story interactions start feeling like something out of a Sunday morning childs cartoon with how cliche, generic, and how much of a trope everything is. Like only a few hours into the game we just started skipping all the dialogue (theres tons of it) thats how little we cared.

Not sure what else to say about Wolcen. Sure, I sort of appreciate how there are these ARPGs that don't require tons of brainpower and googling and researching how to play the game without making shit builds or fucking up, but at the same time these games are way too shallow and forgiving. There is zero challenge or difficulty outside of a handful of boss fights, maybe only 3 boss fights actually. You can respec everything at a moments notice, I was able to just constantly respec both my passive tree and all my skills, it costs gold or whatever, but its such a marginal amount I never noticed or was short on anything. After literally running past the ENTIRE last act of the game, I dont think we stopped to kill a single group of enemies, we were suddenly at all these sorts of cutscenes with the characters saying "This is it! this is the end" type stuff.  Wow, we're at the end of the game already? I barely killed anything. The last boss has 3 phases...and we killed him the very first try!....even though we barely killed any monsters the whole game or gave a shit about loot or our characters. That should tell you how pointless the entire game is. Yeah, we had to tryhard and sweat a little mechanically during the last boss, but it was still very managable and doable considering how little effort we put into powering up our characters. Makes me think maybe we made the whole game easier by not constantly leveling up and making the enemies scale up alongside us, Who knows.

Turns out Acts 1-3 is the original release of the game in 2020. But recently in late 2023 they released Act 4 alongside with the Console release of the game. I have no interest in playing post-release content, and for multiple years the games ending was the last Act 3. I'm satisfied with just finishing Act 3, getting the original ending, and not having to play another act of what I know will be more of the same shit. I'm just not interested, I beat the game. Its not good. Its funny because they put out this big advertisement like "Wolcen: ENDGAME update" and stuff. Who the hell wants to play the 'endgame' here? Not me. Wolcen had real potential in the art designs, mostly enviornmental, the UI is decent, great graphics and you can tell a lot of work and money went into the production and cinematics of the game, but the actual core RPG gameplay just totally missed the mark. Also can I point out how the game has a "Story mode" one more time!? The hardest difficulty (by default) is a fucking joke and breeze to play through, so I cant even fathom how easy "Story mode" has to be.
I'm not sure who Wolcen appeals to, gullible people who cant figure out that a game is extremely shallow and is just wasting your time with 'fake' gameplay? Who knows.

3/10

Grim Dawn

 

Grim Dawn is frequently mentioned alongside the top ARPGS, and just glancing at screenshots it takes place in this sort of 18th century Gothic world which alone makes it stand out a bit. It has full co-op so thats another big reason I wanted to try it. The game is made by Titan Quest devs and uses the same engine and loosely similar systems and gameplay. So much so that after playing for awhile it started to feel like an elaborate Titan Quest mod.

My plan when starting ARPGs like this is to not look up any guides and play 'blind' and then just play the most basic Warrior archetype possible. I played co-op. There is no difficulty selection other than ticking a 'Veteran' box, which we decided to do. There is no character creation which is different than most ARPGs. You join servers from a server browser in the main menu, which looks fully featured and gives lots of details of the kind of rooms you can join, you can even see a preview of the players characters before joining the servers. Maybe the game has a bustling playerbase with its own economy in the end game, but I've heard not really because since the files are hosted locally its easy to hack and cheat items in so that kind of ruins the long term online economy stuff. I joined my friend, and sadly the game utilizes these lazy cutscenes like other cheap budget games do. Its these slideshow picture cartoons that looks like a college art project. Not a good first impression, but not a huge deal. I'll admit I didn't follow the story very closely, for multiple reasons. One is that the cutscene artstyle is just not engaging and feels lazy. Two, is that when you talk to NPC's around the game world, the other player cannot talk to them at the same time, and infact the other player flat out just misses the dialogue. This alone made us not really care about the story, a shocking design choice.

So we get into the first zone and start running around the outskirts of town slaying monsters. And instantly its reminiscent of Titan Quest. The core mechanics and systems are just the same, right down to the quest system and that same sort of vague feeling of not really knowing what to do. Sadly, theres still no Tab/overlay map. You still have to press M to pull up this big bulky map screen which is a huge pain and every ARPG needs a good map overlay and its shocking to see that after 10+ years of constant updates Grim Dawn still doesn't have one. Its notable that this is one of the few ARPGS where you can actually rotate the camera, which is an interesting novelty but I felt like it wasnt really necessary. It was more like a clunky hassle to keep having to re-orientate yourself and try to line up the map with the compass everytime I accidentally rotated the camera. Didnt seem like there was any button to automatically do it for you so it was kinda just annoying.  Since we're just going around these grassy fields slaying all sorts of monsters, I got my first few levels. And this is where (Like Titan Quest) the game presents you with your class selection. You can choose one of a handful of classes at the start, Soldier, Demolitionalist, Occultist, Nightblade, Shaman, etc... I went with Soldier as its the most obvious kind of basic Warrior melee class. The skill tree was intuitive enough, its not overly complex and you can make sense of everything and get a good idea of what it does. It starts off by presenting you a few basic skill choices, passives, and auras. And then each skill you choose also is attached with a line to a further upgrade path that just passively buffs it. After glancing at a few of the skills I just randomly chose to go with Forcewave, as it said in the description that it was used with Two handed weapons, which is the archetype I was interested in going for.

As the game progresses the overworld map fills out and reveals its sort of two-pronged design. The first half of the game takes place towards the right side of the overworld map, the center of the map nothing really happens except the starter main town Devil's Crossing, and then the left side of the map is the second half of the game. The right side of the map are grassy fields, rocky dungeons and catacombs, and various fortresses and bandit encampments. We never really knew exactly what quest to go for, we kind of just explored every last piece of Foggy area on the map to uncover new areas, kill all the enemies, and pickup any quest we could incase of accidentally stumbling across them and completing them. The world maps are gigantic sprawling open maps and fields that can take hours clearing before you come across the next major plot point/objective for progression, A similar problem I had with Titan Quest. I feel like it would of gave more direction and again, made the pacing feel better if atleast on the map it showed a general circle or indication of the area where the objective is, but it doesnt show you anything but eventually a Star icon when you physically happen across the objective. Sometimes I would try to manually look at the quest log and try to figure out how to do the objective, but more often than not it seemed like pointless confusion and instead found it better and easier to just ignore the quest objectives entirely until I happened to accidentally stumble across them organically. Thats how little use the quest log/descriptions are.

The game also has a sort of faction system but honestly I never figured out what the point of it is or how to use it. Doing various tasks in the world rewards reputation with different factions, and apparently you can go to these different factions hideouts and talk to special merchants that let you buy special faction items with the reputation but I could never get it to work? Like I would go to areas of people I had high reputation with and find the reputation merchants but all the items for the entire game was crossed out and I couldnt ever buy any of them. So I never understood it. A wasted mechanic? Wasted opportunity? Not explained very well? Who knows. There are a few key quest moments where (one player) gets to decide which NPC they want to side with and this determines what factions you side with but it all fell pretty flat and since the multiplayer dialogue system is so bad making one player miss all the dialogue we just never really cared about most of it and let the chips fall where they may.

The overall presentation and graphics are pretty compelling, though. It has that sort of grimdark vibe to it that games like Diablo 1 and 2 had, but also it can be really colorful and vibrant at times, especially with the dynamic day & night cycle sometimes you can get these slightly purple/green night time effects that are really immersive. The world detail, textures, and graphical fidelity are all well done. Even visually when you equip the various items they all look good and give your character a sense of progression and identity like equipping new helmets and body armors it has a significant difference and are suitably appropriate for the archetype youre going for, my character eventually looked like a menacing Knight/barbarian type guy which is sometimes hard to achieve in some ARPG's believe it or not. I'll give the game lots of praise for the monster variety there are all kinds of beasts , demons, insects, humanoids,monsters you encounter along the way that have unique AI behaviors like some of them are sharpshooter humans that stay at a distance while others are beasts that rush in blindly at you or zombies etc. The game also retains that special unique miniboss system from Titan Quest where you'll come across special monsters indicated by an icon above their head, and killing them gives a bunch of satisfying reward icons notifying you that your Fame with a particular faction has increased and the XP bonus. The overall UI and inventory is decently done, though I dont like the 'candy' look with all the colors all over the place, games like Diablo 1 and 2 as always are the gold standard here with how to do compelling UI aesthetics that other games just cant seem to match. Inventory management can be a pain in the ass, though. You have all these 'components' which I never really found out what to do with other than adding these tiny passive buffs to each piece of gear, but these things stack up all over the place and visually share the same sort of slots as Jewelery that it becomes a pain in the ass to manage trying to find your Rings/amulets in between all this crap. Thankfully you eventually get multiple inventory bags which I used to separate out my Quest items/components/and regular gear but still its not done that great. Theres another really annoying design where you swap between gear pieces and it will seemingly randomly throw them all around your inventory, making finding the item you were just comparing annoying too..aesthetically overall its okay, but mechanically it has some rather painful quirks. And maybe the items themselves dont have enough unique arts because it gets confusing sorting through a full inventory so many items can look the same. As I said though, the map especially sucks, and the health and energy bars look kinda bad (rectangles instead of orbs) but the latter is nitpicking. You have a skillbar where you can equip a handful of skills but I actually only used a SINGLE skill the entire game...More on that later.  The audio in particular is a striking standout of the presentation. The soundtrack goes from spooky Dark Ambient to these electric guitar arpeggiated riffs and at times almost sombre Western guitar tracks , to piano tracks, all with its own melancholic or grim vibes to it. Though, I cant say any of the town hub music themes stand out like Tristram or anything.

As for the general gameplay, progression, items, stats - the RPG experience?
Well, its very weird. I've played a lot of ARPGs before this, leading up to this, and had a fair bit of challenge with many of them. But for some reason or another, my playthrough of Grim Dawn was insanely easy and brainless. Even on Veteran mode. So much so that the aformentioned Forcewave skill I spoke of, was so powerful I used it the whole game without fail. It just never stopped annihilating waves of enemies with a single click, I don't get it. At the first few hours into the game, I was thinking "okay, this is easy, its gonna ramp up though" and literally the entire game I kept wondering when it would start being challenging or ramping up difficulty. There was a moment here and there where it was a little challenging, but 95% of the time we were just crushing through the content. So much so that I hardly used Health potions. And you get infinite health potions, they are just on a slight cooldown. A strange but notable change from Titan Quest, atleast you had to stock up on them in that game. Shorlty into the game I was going over all the UI statistics and trying to figure out the best way to determine how much damage I'm doing. Well, early on I found it. There is a "Damage per second" stat on your character sheet. Additionally, whenever you hover over a new item, it will tell you if its Plus (+green) or Minus (-red) DPS. So all I did for the entire game was basically stare at this character sheet DPS number and blindly equip items until it went up and equip any weapon that also made it go up. Sometimes (rarely) I would glance at my resistances and equip items that made me slightly lose DPS but massively raise resistance, which were pretty easy to find. Shockingly, this worked WAY too well. This Forcewave skill is this sort of slam where you hit the ground with your 2h melee weapon, and it makes a wave ripple through the ground and kills all enemy packs in its path in a big AOE. It both has big AOE (Area of effect) and also does good Single target damage. By default, it only lets you do it once every second or two. On the skill tree, my first plan was to Max Forcewave (15 points) then I noticed it has an additional passive buff that lets you SPAM the ability as much as possible, and it barely costs mana! What the fuck. It is so broken and overpowered, it seemed. Once I got this ability the game was a cakewalk. From there, there was another final 15 point passive to further increase Forcewave DPS, so the first half of the game was just me cranking up this Forcewave passive skills. maybe I just lucked out and coincidentally picked the most OP skill in the game  who knows. im shocked/surprised using the most braindead archetype of "big warrior guy smash with club" and its insanely good? surprising cause melee usually sucks in arpgs.

Also what was up with the respec system? It only costs 25 iron to respec and i consistently had like HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDs of iron so basically the game has infinite Respec which further adds to how trivial and easy the whole experience was being able to literally just stare at my DPS number and put respec random skills until i found the ones that made it go up the most. I just dont get the game design philosophy here. Did they rework the entire game in the past few years to make it way more casual/accessible? Was it always like this?
I think the last few years they have been steadily updating and even overhauling the game, who knows how much different it is nowadays - but some new feature I do know is the rolling ability. I bound this to Right click and at the tap of a button you have this roll/dodge maneuver almost like Souls inspired stuff...it works okay, it does bring excitement, engagement and feedback to the game and it was fun to kite enemies around by dodging past them, so probably a good addition here. Mostly very useful for bosses and made those fights more interesting.

The game also has Character stats, but only three of them. Constitution (health/defense) Cunning (damage/ailments) and Spirit (magic). I put 90% of my points into Cunning simply to make that DPS number go up. Some pieces of gear needed certain Constitution requirements, so I'd raise that to be able to equip stronger gear also. Its unbelivable how my most braindead RPG planning here has created such an easy playthrough, Im not sure if I accidentally stumbled across the most broken build in the game, or if the game is only challenging when you beat it 3 or 4 times. It has a difficulty system like Diablo 2, where you are unable to play the higher difficulties until you beat the campaign multiple times, probably then giving access to a wider variety of item stats and equipment. But for the sake of this playthrough and review I'm just getting to end credits and giving my thoughts about the base game and its campaign.

So that was much of the general kind of gameplay experience. Nothing really offensive or annoying, but not that exciting or challenging either. Very lukewarm. While the itemization is interesting, and there are tons of different stats that can roll on items, I rarely found it nessesary to make any hard decisions myself. Simply staring at that DPS number sufficed. There are set items, where you get bonuses for wearing multiple pieces of a same set, but I never got a chance to find any good ones. There are 'double rare' items and im not sure exactly what they do but I never really find out amazing standout items that I cherished. Infact I found it kinda weird how the most mundane, basic rarity weapons seemed to give me the biggest DPS boosts, while super fancy looking unique/rare two hand item after item after item made said things like -6000dps. I guess Forcewave only scales with a few very specific stats and thats all you need to care about, so these fancy unique/rarer items having all sorts of stats is just categorically worse usually, kinda making the gearing not so interesting.  I also seemed to come across quite a few items that give +Skills to Forcewave and other stuff, so it is interesting and exciting that you can find items that boost skills. The itemization and stats at their core have a wide variety of interesting stats, its just that during my playthrough it didnt force me to care about them because just doing my caveman braindead DPS check did nothing but heavily reward me which I would consider a design flaw. The game has multiple main-quest bosses but none of them really stand out in my memory right now. I do remember a lot of kiting and dodging projectiles, so it does reward an active playstyle, but the boss designs/arenas themselves I guess arent too memorable because I cant really think of any other than the last boss , which at the time didnt even seem like the last boss or wasnt even obvious I was at the end of the game.

Eventually you get the option to unlock a second character class (Like TQ) and I eventually went with Shaman as it hinted it had bonuses for Melee and Two handed which is all I used him for. Just more passive DPS for two hand weapons. Simple. There is also another skill tree you unlock points with by (I think?) finding and clicking these Shrines around the map. Its this Devotion tree where its like a map of these projections in the sky of stars where you can choose constilations to put points into to get passive bonuses of various colors. You can hover over the general colors of the constilations to (I think) get an idea of the kind of archetype they apply to. For example, it seemed like the yellow ones had to do with Melee/physical/warrior type stuff, So I just put the few points I eventually collected into yellow constilations and got various melee/physical/defense buffs. Not sure about how indepth this system eventually gets but during the first campaign playthrough its very minor and insignificant. I only got a handful of points for it by the end of the game. Didnt matter too much I dont think. 

I was impressed for a bit because I thought the game didnt have level scaling. I was able to backtrack and be higher level than the previous enemies in the zone. Other (bad) ARPGs have level scaling where the enemies will always be the same level as you, I don't want to have to guesstimate whether farming a certain region will actually make me weaker. I don't want to feel like every time I kill a mob and it doesnt drop an upgrade my xp bar is one step closer to making me weaker and I need to get the gear to outrace the bar. But the thing is, Grim Dawn DOES have level scaling. Its just deceiving about it. Enemies will eventually stop scaling depending on certain zone. For the beginning of the game, they stop scaling quickly, something like after level 15 they stop scaling with you. But then other zones in the game, towards halfway mark, the enemies will constantly level up with you and be around your level until around level 50. So I kept grinding zones and XP thinking I was making progress out-levelling the enemies from level 25-50 but they just kept leveling along with me the entire time until eventually (at the end of the game) when it was over anyways did they finally stop scaling (at 50). In a way this system is even worse than other upfront level scaling ARPG's, this one just kind of deceives you and wastes your time. That really left a sour taste in my mouth once I figured that out. Also, you cant even see the zone levels and what levels the enemies scale at, its all hidden from you out of sight. I had to google it to find out this information cause I could sense something fishy was up.

As for the co-op mechanics, its fairly standard. You have infinite town portals, can make them at any time at the press of a button (L) for you and your co-op partner to teleport to eachother with. If you die, you can just teleport back to your friend. Thats about it, really, theres no reviving or anything. At least you can trade with eachother and inspect eachothers gear at any time. Also, before starting the game it gives the option if you want to see/share the same loot drops, or have your own individual loot drops. By default, its set to own individual loot drops, so thats what we went with.

After completing the first half of the game (right side of world map) you progress through the last half on the left side. Now, youre suddenly in a desert area with cowboy enemies and bandit gangs almost like something outta Fallout New Vegas. Okay, well thats atleast an interesting change of pace to the forest plains, dungeons, mines, of the first half. Much of the progression here takes place going through farmlands that are occasionally covered in enviormnetal damage over time effects that you now have to worry about and avoid ontop of the enemies. You get to a new main hub town , Homestead, which has a kind of annoying layout with multiple high stories. Then you start going through these like old Western cowboy towns killing all the local inhabitants but other than that its a lot of the sort of open-world open fields hordes of combat. Again, very similar gameplay and level design as Titan Quest. Nothing really notable springs to my memory though, just more of the same sort of generic fields and dungeons. Theres a part where you go into a Maggot lair which is a quest/area ripped straight out of Diablo 2 which I guess was kinda cool to see. As you get towards the end of the game more magical/mysterious areas you start going into and even Castle sieges and evil dungeons but really theres not many "Wow" moments thats going to be memorable. In the last few hours though, you come across a lot of these almost Lovecraftian Cthulhu inspired monsters and enviornments, which I thought was the highliht of the game. If only the rest of the game had more stuff like that, but its almost too little too late. Midway through the game I also sometimes came across these special zone portals where it teleports you to this creepy alternate realm full of crazy looking monsters that you cant teleport out of. You need a Skeleton key to progress through it to the end. And we failed doing it once and upon going back to the next one we needed another skeleton key even though we unlocked the door once and we couldnt do that content again, even though it was the most interesting content in the game. Sad. But mostly, the same complaints I had with Titan Quest I have here kinda. Theres too much "filler" zones with not enough refined standout moments and experiences. Its mostly just hordes of copy paste enemies in the same looking handful of biomes and areas. Even if the game had cutscenes to introduce different bosses or exciting moments, but theres just nothing to latch onto here in terms of long lasting effect. I cant even really remember the last few hours of the game, I just remember thinking I must be barely halfway through the game, going inside some castle dungeon , suddenly theres a big stantionary insect boss thing hanging off a ledge, I take 5 minutes killing it without much threat and then suddenly the game is over. I go back to town, the NPC tells me congratulations, I unlock the achievement for beating the game, it tells me next difficulty is unlocked and thats it. No ending cutscene. Nothing. Very anti-climactic awkward ending.  I know people say that the higher difficulties and endgame is where its at, and usually I would agree and wouldnt judge a game like this so soon, but strictly as a first time campaign playthrough my experience as of right now is pretty lukewarm and honestly disappointing. I thought the game would of offered much more exciting and interesting combat and challenging memorable encounters, interesting loot, and would be very less "casual". But out of all the ARPG's ive played lately, Im shocked to say Grim Dawn is probably the most casual/easiest one! Maybe some time down the road I'll revisit Grim Dawn to give it another shot as another class and try out the end game. At least it was a decent co-op experience, although we started to find it a bit of a slog at times throughout the 25 hours it took us to finish it. There is all sorts of DLC and expansions, too, that I eventually could be interested in playing through. But my first playthrough impression is just a general disappointment in how damn easy and mindless the whole thing was, even on supposedly 'veteran' mode.  Maybe this is why I've heard people call it 'Grim Yawn'?

6/10