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

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition

 

Its been a long time since I've played the first two Metro games. Back in the early 2010's I was blown away by Metro 2033, its tight linear gameplay, horror elements, amazing graphics and careful resource management. Then I have brief memories of Last Light shortly afterwards and remember not liking it as much, thinking it was more "consolized" and dumbed down/easier but my actual memories of Last Light are really fuzzy and I need to play that again at some point. But I got Metro Exodus not really knowing that much about the latest installment in the series, but also because I got a new graphics card and I've heard (and briefly seen) that this game has some of the nicest graphics out there nowadays, thats really all I knew about Exodus before I installed it.

First thing is that it asks what difficulty I want to play. It was Reader,Easy/Medium and Hardcore, then "Ranger hardcore". The difficulties give a description and it said for Hardcore is "reccomended for experienced FPS players". I guess I would qualify as that so thats the one I picked.

The game starts crawling around in a bunker, you get a taste of the later gameplay by being equipped with different weapons and getting in a few fights with some monsters, then you get rescued by a squad and are introduced to many different characters and situations in the game. Its a very story heavy game and full of cinematic sequences where its not uncommon to sit there watching cutscenes or following NPC's around for 20-40 mintues at a time before you ever shoot a bullet or do anything. In the first introduction of the game though, its kept relatively brief and you are shortly sent out in a mission to leave the Metro (finally?) to explore the desolate winter landscape in search of answers. The graphics are pretty amazing, the enviornmental details, the sound effects, the whole game has a very immersive atmosphere with a minimal HUD that tries to suck you into the game world. You have to put on gas masks, change your air filters, manually wipe sweat and dirt off your mask with a button press, listen for radiation, and so on. The graphics are mostly "hit" but there is some miss. Sometimes the physics can glitch out or be subpar, and some of the facial models and textures can sometimes be less than impressive but for the most part its great, the lighting and general attention to details and interesting things to find scattered around. Its very much reminiscent of Fallout at times, you have to search the enviornment for resources and crafting supplies, opening crates, boxes, lockers , but also there are frequently little unique objects scattered around that help the areas have enviornmental storytelling that makes exploring the areas that much more interesting.

You get introduced to the main cast of the game especially the two main characters, Anna (your love partner) and her father Miller. You get sent out and encounter the first stealth segment of the game. Its this factory full of enemy soldiers and the game really encourages you to sneak around here. Thankfully, the sneaking is really overpowered in this game and as long as you are crouched you can pretty much sneak right up to enemies and almost always remain undetected. Theres a mechanic where on your wrist you can see a light on your watch shine, that tells you when a potential enemy is able to spot you, which is also helpful. Also, the game allows Quicksaving from the main menu, but only outside of combat. Its easy to almost 'exploit' this behavior, you can keep checking for the precise moment when it allows you to quicksave, its pretty forgiving in this regard and makes progressing not too challenging usually.

Then finally after this 'prologue' you are in the "real game" I will say. Metro Exodos, unlike previous games in the series, is a psuedo-open world game. I say psuedo, because the game is still level based, 12 levels infact, but many of them are giant open segments where you can proceed in any direction at any pace you want. While other levels are very linear indoors type levels similar to the previous games. After you've completed a level, you cant backtrack to the previous map, so its not quite truly open world, but the parts when it lets you 'free roam' are very much in the same spirit. The game moreso than ever before feels very STALKER and Fallout inspired in these open world segments.

The first main open world map is this big winter landscape.
The entire games premise is that your team has found life/hope outside of the underground dwellings of the metro stations, and now you have a train where you travel across the country completing various tasks and overcoming problems. Its a great premise and opens up lots of opportunities to have interesting, organic locations come about through the storyline. So I give props for that idea. This first open world winter landscape area was very captivating. You have a Map which shows you an icon of exactly where the next main objective is, and a compass which points in the direction. Your character has to physically take out the map and look at it while moving slowly, so its not like you can just stare at the icon the whole time you still have to foucs on the game world, you can only open it to quickly get your bearings then put it back down. At this point in the game you encounter both enemy monster beasts, and enemy humans. Its a great mix of threats and dangers and really feels like youre traversing this deadly, hostile apocalyptic wasteland. For the most part, I simply ran past the beast type monsters, but at least for the first bit of the game, when coming across human enemies I chose to usually sneak past them - simply because I didnt have that much ammo, or even any guns. Again, the stealth is pretty effective because its so forgiving on being detected, plus you can easily sneak behind enemies and either knock them out or kill them, then take their guns and ammo which I used to my advantage for the first bit of the game.

One of the first main quests is to enter this religious cult base which was both fascinating and entertaining. Eventually though, I started to really engage with the gunplay and generally fighting enemies head on. The combat gameplay is fairly tactical, strategic, and penalizing. You cant just rush in and shoot full auto. Ammunition is in short supply, so firing more than one bullet at a time usually felt like a huge waste. Every bullet almost always was important. This had a fun dynamic of resource management and trying to weigh pros and cons of when to shoot or who to engage with or when to run away. Though, since you can loot both ammo and dismantle enemy weapons for resources, shortly into the game I had an AK that was stocked with over 100 bullets so I was feeling pretty well equipped and could engage enemies more confidently. The guns feel good, they are very weighty and pack a punch when you shoot the enemies, theres tons of voice acting and the enemy reactions to getting shot is both viseral and gives good player feedback. The enemies can kill you in just 3 or less bullets so I always had to play carefully which kept the combat engaging. The game doesnt have regenerating health - instead you must either find health kits or press a button to place your backpack on the ground and create a mini-crafting station (in real time) where you have to hurrily craft med kits (and other equipment) in the middle of battle which I thought was both an immersive and exciting mechanic.

But really one of the most fun combat mechanics the game has is the weapon customization. Every enemy you kill you can scrap the attachments on their guns with the press of a button, this then permanently adds those attachments to your equipment 'pool'. Then, at any time you can open your backpack and swap attachments on and off your guns. I always looked forward to finding more of these and playing around with all the different weapon combinations because they really do make a huge difference both visually and gameplay wise. You can totally transform a wimpy looking pipe gun into a real military tactical rifle type thing.  One thing I found odd is that some of the weapon sights/scopes didnt make much sense. Like the red dot sight, you can barely even see the red dot. I actually usually found the Iron sights more reliable than the red dot, especially guns with glow in the dark Iron sights. Is it just because its a post apocalypse and the red dot sight has low batteries or some kind of graphics bug? I dont know. Also things like Night vision scope, when would I ever want to use that? and the fact that the Laser sight took away your crosshair (which glows red when youre pointing at enemies)  , something too valuable to give up. But regardless it was always fun to explore, loot enemies and the enviornment to find new guns and attachments. It's also kinda odd how the previous Metro games were all about hoarding bullets as currency and trading with merchants with them, yet this game has no merchants at all.

One gripe I have is that the UI at parts could be a lot more clear. For instance, when youre picking up guns, you have no idea what the gun is called. The only way to find out the name of the gun is to go to a crafting station and swap through the guns there. It should tell you the name of guns when you pick them up. Also, other minor thing such as your gas mask can break and get a hole in it and you can always choke to death, despite replacing the air. I kept dying and reloading my save wondering why my gas mask wasnt working - You can just press a button to patch up the gas mask. Well that was not clear to me at all. Maybe it should have given me a button prompt or something. Just small gripes, but eventually they added up.


The open world levels also have side quests, though its unclear what the point of doing them really is. The characters will sometimes stress the importance of doing them to you, and I did do a few of them, such as obtain the Guitar from the bandit camp for Stefan, and free the slaves from the slaver boat on a later mission, but nothing really came of it. No quest reward, cool weapon or attachment, not even really a thank you. I guess for the Guitar one I got to see some scripted events of him playing the guitar and that was pretty entertaining, but the whole thing felt a little unfinished and jarring in its implementation. Theres not even a quest log to track them or anything. A little strange.

More missions on this first open world winter map are doing things like capturing an enemy bandit ship, going through radiated underground tunnels fighting monsters, and eventually going on a quest to obtain this railcar to be able to take more civilians with you on the main train ride. Theres a huge bandit gunfight here when you drive the railcar back, which was probably one of the highlights of the game for me. A lot of long ranged tactical shooting, and picking my targets carefully. A fun challenge fighting these bandits at this car park facility place. Reminded me a lot of STALKER. The human enemy AI is average in this game, sometimes I saw them repeat the same action over and over through my rifle scope. Like ducking to one corner, then jumping to another wall, back and forth for 2+ minutes. Like weird script loops. But other than that they didnt do anything overly impressive or anything overly stupid, it was a good challenge considering how fast you can die.

Something weird happens after this , though.
The game takes a surprising turn. The winter map ends, now you're on a brand new big open world set in the desert. "This could be bad or good" I thought. I was kinda hoping the whole game would be set in this wintery post apocalypse but guess not..Well at least the beginning of the desert level has you going into this headquarters of some commanding supposed allied army. But it turns out when you arrive, they are actually bloodthirsty cannibals that captured you and want to eat you. Alright, well this is both awesome and horrific. So the first 'level' of this desert episode is great, actually. But unfortunately the enemies in this level are mostly a push over. They use melee weapons and just rush blindly at you, making it a cakewalk to just mow them down with your guns. After this brief but frankly awesome cannibal level, youre put back into another kind of open world map, where you leave from your train and have to go around this desert wasteland completing the main objective. At first its just to kill some bandits, but then the game introduces a new mechanic: Vehicles. Oh no. So this next big chunk of the game basically consists of you driving back and forth in this vehicle across barren, rocky wastelands and if you dare go off the beaten road path then navigation becomes a total chore. Like really theres not much gameplay here. All you do is drive around and try to naviage this desert plain. It sucks. Its a real problem with why sometimes open worlds can just be way worse. Its because now, the game is designed with this focus around the fact you'll be driving around, so no longer do they expect you to be traversing on foot. That means if you do happen do choose to traverse on foot, its even less exciting, its a total waste of time basically. You have these big stretches of land that only serve as filler to go from point A to B with nothing really substancive in between. Yeah theres the odd building here and there, with probably some supplies or maybe even a unique event in them, but I found the whole driving thing so unappealing that I was hoping it was only a short segment of the game so I was trying to get this part over as fast as possible.

Unfortunately, the driving parts of the Desert section is only one reason why the whole chunk of the game is kinda shitty. You then go through these underground bunkers but the only threat and enemy here is spiders. And the thing is, they hate light. So you just end up doing some like Alan Wake shit where instead of engaging in fun combat, you just shine a flashlight at the spiders and stare at them tediously until they die. Its just boring and bad. This is like an entire hour long section of constantly spinning in circles looking for the next angle a spider will come at you while you stand there shining a light on them and then slowly proceeding. Sure, the atmosphere and general tension and idea is great, just the execution was lackluster. I especially like the graphics where you can see spiders crawling on your screen/characters arms it really gives you the creeps. So good job on the presentation, again, at least. A few 'side quests' open up on the desert map too, these are marked by various icons on your map. But again, theres no quest log, so theres no way to remember what the hell any of them are. So, since I hated the vehicle, and felt like the map was filler, I had little interest to do these  side quests. However, at a certain point the important Anna character keeps reminding you to "At least go save the slaves at the ship" so I did that. I went down to this big ship area, side quest, made my way in and killed all the bandits, which was fun. The game utilizes these sort of 'boss fights' where you sometimes have to fight a bandit wearing a full suit of plate armor wielding a minigun. Hes slow and clunky and sprays  bullets around the room so you gotta just crawl around him taking pot shots. Its a fun little change of pace and challenge but slightly frustrating with the AI events. Like theres a small window where he walks in the room where hes invinciible and you can just waste ammo shooting at him (I think) which sucks. Anyway, I saved the slaves (which wasnt obvious how, there was a tiny lever somewhere) but then....nothing came of it. I went back, and Anna didnt even say thank you or congratulate me or anything. What was the point? Why was it so urgent? The side quests are so loosely put into the game it just feels like more filler and half-baked ideas, its totally unrewarding feeling.


Eventually (thankfully) I get past the whole Desert map, and the plot progresses where Anna has been constantly coughing and needs medicine. So you set off for literal greener pastures and arrive at this green forest type area. You get separated from the rest and get captured/kidnapped, lose all your equipment, and have to start sneaking past these tribes of enemies. So I was really looking forward to getting out of the desert, getting away from the shitty spiders, but then all it takes me to is basically an entire episode of almost forced stealth where I lose all my cool guns and have to use some shitty crossbow. Sad. Atleast the writing here is interesting. Its not just gangs of bandits, its these two tribes of relatively peaceful people who are just trying to establish law and order in a chaotic world. The only reason theyre hostile to you is they think youre a bandit. But they atleast give you warnings and dont shoot on sight. Because of that, I felt like it was worth sparing them, so It was enjoyable to be this shadowy figure sneaking past them all through their bases and listening to their conversations. So that alone made the episode atleast somewhat fun. But thats basically all I did for 2 hours.Sneak past group after group, quicksaving reloading, getting into these psuedo boss fights aganist this giant bear that really al you have to do is climb up a ladder...and then...more spiders in more underground bunkers. Sad. Towards the end of this segment you come across an elevator in a radiated area that needs power but it took me too long for me to figure out how to turn the power on, so I wasted almost all of my gas mask. I kept running out of air and dying and reloading. Well you cant leave the area (I dont think) so I think I almost bricked my whole game? I would of had to atleast reload to a way earlier save. I somehow managed to just barely get enough gasmask air to complete the objective (by grabbing those green crafting goop balls and crafting air) but yeah I can see how that would be really fucking frustrating if It became impossible because I didnt have enough air, and It almost was. It makes me wonder how youre supposed to progress in this game in other similar times, there are quite a few times where youre forced in some area , but what if I have no ammo? What if I have no gas mask? Are you just supposed to reload from hours previous? luckily It never happened to me, but I was really close a few times to being screwed.

In between the 'open world' segments you have a few brief individual linear levels, usually crawling through bunkers and facilities, those are for the most part enjoyable changes of pace. Its weird how the game goes back and forth between open world and linear without the ablity to backtrack, but it kinda works. After the desert, then after the forest, thereyou get to the last segment of the game which is back in the kind of winter biome. You find out anna needs some special medicine locked away deep in some heavily radiated complex.  Unfortunately, the game doesnt really get any better here...after the past few hours of disappointment after disappointment, this segment mostly sucks too. For starters, you dont really do anything until 30+ minutes of listening to dialogue/following an NPC around. Seriously. You first drive through this linear straight line, then get to a bunker. Then, you just follow this old guy around the bunker while he talks to himself and giving you huge plotpoints. The story is decent enough, but its like way too much exposition. Narrative dumping without gameplay...not something I usually like. When you finally do get to play on this segment, its just standing around in a small room while a few waves of enemies come at you, you kill them, then it goes back to following the guy around and listening for another 15 minutes, repeat. Not great. Eventually you get separated and finally are by yourself to play as you see fit. This part is pretty cool, you go through a heavily radiated, rotting pungent disgusting bunker/tunnel system, boating through these rancid tunnels with weird creatures spitting goop at you ,getting attacked by radiated monster beasts which are pretty damn challenging and I just barely had enough ammo. Theres a few parts where youre on a boat getting attacked by sea monsters where I had to just kinda shoot at them randomly until it let me progress, which wasnt very clear and I died a few times that was kind of annoying , since the area is so radiated you get a bunch of scripted events of your character going mad and hallucinating, its got great atmosphere and is emotionally impactful here but, the gameplay is still pretty lackluster. Nothing really happens gameplay wise, its all driven by narrative here. Which is fine, but it leaves a bit to be desired.

The last few moments of the game is being chased by this big Yeti monster as you run through a series of bunkers pulling switches and opening doors, finally finding the medicine for Anna, passing out then getting saved. Driving back to the train, almost dying, the old man dying from radiation -- then the ending happens and the NPC's were saying they need to donate blood to me. Little did I know this game has 2 endings, good and bad. In the bad ending, the main character dies because you didnt save enough NPC's to donate blood to you. Well, the whole game I had so many NPC's saved that I dont know how I didnt get the good ending. Right up until the very last cutscene I was surrounded by all sorts of NPC's that I didnt let die -- yet in the very final cutscene there was only 1 guy. NO idea what happened, really disappointing. I read online that apparently the game has a Morality system!? well that WAS NOT obvious at all. Its something like when you do a moral action your screen flashes grey? I literally never noticed anything like that. So if thats true, the game does a terrible job informing you of any such morality system. Fail. And apparently to get the good ending you need to play the game really stealthily the whole time making sure not to kill certain enemies and only killing bandits or somthing...convuluted stuff... yeah not happening. I just got the bad ending, quit the game, then looked up the good ending on Youtube. Good enough.


Metro Exodus has a compelling narrative, great presentation and atmosphere, interesting enviornments (mostly) and encounters, but in the middle of the game it starts to really fall flat with some design choices such as changing locations too much, leaning too much on expecting stealth, unnecessary driving segments, and some rather boring (spiders) missions here and there. Its interesting that it has an identity of its own compared to previous games, where it tries to merge both linear gameplay and open world gameplay, and takes hints from both Fallout and Stalker, but sadly it just missed the mark on being a great game. If it leaned more heavily into the Winter segments and really dialed in on unique combat encounters, maybe even some more 'boss' type human enemies or mutant instances, and had less filler and downtime in between combat the game would have probably faired better. 

6/10

Sniper Elite 5

 

I've been playing all of these Sniper Elite games routinely as they come around. They all offer co-op campaigns, and not much seems to change between them. The biggest jump was from 1 to 2, I hated the first game and I thought 2 was pretty enjoyable. 2, 3, 4, are largely feel like the same sort of game and even roughly use the same engine just various upgrades and tweaks to it as the years go on. For Sniper Elite 5 I was expecting more of the same and thats fine, because I think I rated 2,3, and 4 all the same rating of 7/10. Will this one be the homerun, or just another alright decent co-op campaign?

We choose the second hardest difficulty, as the game suggests thats what you should play if you're a veteran of the series. Before each mission you can choose a loadout, and theres a handful of snipers to choose from, as well as secondary submachine guns, and then pistols. Most guns are locked, and you have to complete various challenges on each level to unlock them. We pretty much ignored this part of the game, and if we accidentally unlocked a weapon here or there, cool. But the system wasnt that engaging or fun really, it could of been more exciting to unlock new weapons but they didnt seem to be a big focus of the game. You can put attachments on your weapons too, but again it wasnt that big of a deal, except maybe putting a silencer on the machine gun. I only switched weapons a single time(!) in the whole game, and my co-op partner used the default stuff the whole time too.

Anyways, the story and plot this time around is...weak. The story is this typical modern "diversity" thing where theres these two strong girlboss women characters fighting the fight and giving you orders and stuff. This scottish black lady and this french woman. They dont really have any depth outside of being shoehorned into the game seemingly to push some progressive agenda. Because the personality and writing here is just very boring. Luckily the cutscenes are pretty short, each level you just get a brief slideshow introduction overview of what you'll have to do and maybe a minute here and there of these characters and then you're off to deal with the big open maps as you please.

The first impression was that somehow the graphics are worse in some areas than previous games. I don't know what it is this time but they've somehow screwed up the engines anti-aliasing, or this game just has more objects and details in it, but theres "jaggies" or jagged lines all over the place and it really kind of ruins the presentation. The graphics overall have impressive moments, but still it doesnt feel like its this high value AAA game, its rough around the edges. Some of the lighting looks good like that beach level where the sun hits off all the rocks and everything looks wet, the draw distance is great which is essential for a sniper game, but yeah not amazing. It seems like most attention to detail went into the models and especially kill cam shots with the classic X-ray system. Not much has changed or been improved here compared to previous games, if anything I suspect the X-ray system has gotten slightly worse or less in depth. There weren't that many crazy killshots this time around, and especially when shooting through one enemy, the kill cam doesnt seem to keep going showing you multikills which is disappointing. Sometimes I would shoot two guys lined up but the second guy wouldnt even be affected it was weird. In previous games it would show you the bullet going through multiple enemies.

The first time we played this game we were struck with how challenging it was. I guess we werent in the right mindset at the time so we dropped it for a week and came back later. We couldnt get past the first level and was dying constantly. It's a game that rewards strategy and playing slowly and really scoping out the map (literally with your binoculars) and planning your approach. Once we realized that it was almost smooth sailing. I'm saying "we" a lot because its a very engaging co-op experience. You have to coordinate almost every move with your co-op partner. One wrong move could mean one of you goes down and then you have to help eachother up or its mission over, so you cant be too far away from eachother. Although, the controls can be janky at certain times, like pressing E to help eachother is hard to get activated sometimes. The controls in other areas of the game are rough too, sometimes you can press a button to hop over an object, other times you cant. Its inconsistent. And in the heat of battle or trying to escape, that can be really frustrating. The mechanics of the game are largely unchanged from previous games (if my memory serves right). I still find it odd how these are games about being this really tactical 'realistic' sniper assassin, you can dial in your scope distances, you have to account for bullet drop, you have to choose ammo types like armor piercing in order to go through helmets - Yet there is this mechanic where you hold Spacebar and your character holds his breath and the game literally will tell you exactly where to aim to account for bullet drop. Like, in Sniper games (and real life sniping) I thought almost the whole point is learning exactly how to account for bullet drop and learning how to aim, but in these games it basically has a built in aim-bot. Weird. I'm sure on the absolute hardest difficulty it takes it away, but still its odd that its even a feature regardless. The game is still lots of fun and still can be brutally challenging, though.

The levels do have a good variety among themselves. There are 9 of them, though the last one is hardly a level (I'll get to that later). So 8 levels. Some of them are pretty memorable, theres one where you arrive on a beach from a little rubber boat and have to infiltrate some headquarters, another one where you are on the hills overlooking some big fantasy looking castle you have to infiltrate, and theres a lot of missions just around the fields of France sniping your way inside bases and various underground facilities. There is a few night time missions too which seem to reward stealth gameplay but we didn't really want to do that as much as just going guns blazing. Each mission is at least an hour long, which I kind of found to be a bad thing. Would have preferred half as long missions, but double the amount, because it makes it feel better paced and give you good stop and start points to take a break and go get a glass of water or something. Also, our games crashed multiple times or had network disconnects, and since the missions are so long, it makes you replay the entire mission. You cant just reload from a checkpoint, that was pretty frustrating. Overall the mission design and variety was decent, but it really is more of the same. None of these games really have these super memorable "blockbuster moments" like something like the Call of Duty campaigns where years later you can remember key plot points or "explosive moments" theyre all kinda just you start off on some field or mountain and snipe enemies standing around their fortress, make your way inside, grab some documents or explode some things, then leave.

A big obsticle in the games mechanics are the alarms and sirens. Much of the games strategy and thought revolves around preventing enemies from turning on alarms, causing waves of respawning enemies. So you scope out an area and look for the alarms and either snipe them to destroy them or walk up and disable them manually. Sometimes the alarm icons can be confusing or glitchy(?) because you shoot at it over and over but it still gives you an icon that looks like its still enabled, it was weird. But the whole dynamic of revolving combat around these alarms is something familliar to the whole franchise, I think its a good system and makes sense.

The game is non-linear like the previous ones, meaning it gives you a handful of objectives to complete but you can do them in any order you want. Also, the objective marker usually doesnt pinpoint exactly where you must look, but gives you a large general circle of where to look. Sometimes it was quite annoying having to blindly search around an area after every enemy was dead just to find that one object required to progress (Such as this random radio on a table on a second floor that we could not find for an hour) but usually it worked fine enough and made you use your brain in order to complete objectives. The objectives were nothing special or memorable, just go to some area and pickup an item, destroy an object, blow up a tank, or kill enemies, that kind of stuff. No hostage rescues, or big imaginative things going on.

A major new mechanic that Sniper Elite 5 introduces that gives it a distinct personality from its predecessors is the Invasion mechanic. It really is true that FromSoftware and the Souls game design has a significant impact on gaming culture and trends in general, because even Sniper Elite is having the same sort of mechanic brought into it. Yes, at random times, a random real life player can 'invade' into your game and hunt you down. Thankfully, this isnt as annoying as it might sound. For starters, as soon as you get invaded, it gives you a checkpoint so you dont just waste tons of progress every time you get invaded and killed by some pro player. Second, there are phones scattered around the level that you can take which show you exactly where the enemy player is at the given time. Of course he can just sprint away (because it tells him you've spotted him) but it gives you a broad idea of where to look for him. If you successfully kill the enemy player, you get another checkpoint AND your co-op partner gets instantly brought back to life if he died. So in every mission we would get invaded (even multiple times) by enemy players - but we never thought it was a detriment to the gameplay. It was actually really exciting and hype. We had lots of fun trying to hunt these players down, and getting a headshot kill camera on another real player felt really great like a total fuck you "You think you can invade me? get shit on, buddy". It added a lot of tension to know some real experienced player could be lurking around one of these giant maps searching for you and your buddy. Really, I thought it was a brilliant addition to the game. Even something like trying to sprint to the level exit while knowing theres an enemy player searching for you, dodging past his bullets zig-zagging, was a ton of fun. If any game is going to co-opt this Dark Souls mechanic, Sniper Elite is one of the more appropriate choices, with the giant open maps and non-linear gameplay. This alone is what makes SE5 stand out from the other games. It could of been really easy for them to fuck this mechanic up, by say not giving you checkpoints, or not having the phone to find eachother, but they pulled it off surprisingly well.

After the initial difficulty hump and calibrating our senses and expectations of the games mechanics we got adjusted to what the game expected of us and the difficulty wasnt that bad anymore. The game has 3 skill trees that you can dump points into after each level, its very basic stuff like more health, more ammo, enemies automatically getting marked when they shot at you, carry more items, and so on. So I guess putting points into these skill trees also helped a fair bit. As the game goes on, you start to feel like a killing machine getting back to back long distance kills and getting in a real flow with the combat that feels satisfying and good, because the kill shot graphics and sniping mechanics are rewarding and fun to engage with. The second last level we struggled with, though. It's this giant city level at night where there are constantly sirens going of that you seemingly cant disable. So we would just go around shooting enemies and get overwhelemd by the infintie enemies. We were also getting invaded by other players the whole time, making it that much more a pain in the ass. It got to the point where we desperately disabled invasions for the level so we could have some breathing room to wrap our head around whats going on. Turns out, I suspected it was this kind of psuedo forced stealth level. Since as soon as you get found out, you get swarmed by enemies, really what you have to do is simply not kill any enemies and sneak around. There is a secondary objective you can find by picking up a piece of paper that lets you disable radio communications, I figured that would stop the alarms - we snuck our way over to it and disabled the radios but still we could hear alarms. Ok then, that was stupid. From there we just slowly made our way to the objective (without shooting anyone loudly) and managed to make our way past the whole level. So at times the game heavily rewards stealth. From there we invaded this submarine complex, and it was easy going. Blew up a few submarines and level complete

Then we figured, okay, we're at the last level. This is gonna be hard. This is it. We entered the last level and we were sitting on a hill over this big mansion with the objective like "Kill commander". We're thinking "okay, we have to infiltrate this big mansion and figure out how to do this crazy level" -- Nope, to our surprise the commander just lazily walks outside, we headshot him, and boom end credits. What? 15 second last level? Ok, thats pretty disappointing. What a waste of assets! they had this awesome mansion level where you could have worked your way to the big bad end villian but they just make him walk out like a sitting duck for you. Did they run out of dev time or what? I thought that was odd.


All in all Sniper Elite 5 delivers an experience much like the previous games, I dont know if they will ever make an outstanding Sniper Elite game, for the past 10 years they all seem to hit just the same for me. They're all decent games, fun co-op experiences, but they never achieve true greatness, impactful memorable plots or cutscenes, or reach amazing heights. I think if they just had more interesting unique set pieces, level designs, and memorable villians and enemies they could eventually one day create a masterpiece, because the formula is there, its just everything around it seems a bit unimaginative every single time.

7/10

Vikings: Wolves of Midgard

 

 

Viking: Wolves of Midgard is another under the radar Diablo inspired Action RPG. As usual for these kinds of games I'm not overly interested in playing through it just by myself, but they usually offer co-op campaign playthroughs so thats the main draw. I'm a big fan of the genre and gameplay style so as long as it offers co-op then it should be a decent time.

Viking starts off asking you to make a character. You can do small customizations like hair type and tattoos, then it asks you what kind of weapon style/archetype you want to focus on. One hand with shield, Two hand big weapons, Ranged etc. These are like picking your primary skill tree. As usual I like to do just the generic warrior archetype with big axes and two hand swords so I chose that one.

It then asks you what difficulty you want to choose. We briefly googled around for advice on this, and saw some people say that even on the hardest the game is still barely challenging. So we chose the Very Hard difficulty.

The game starts off much like any other in the genre, you go around these snowy tundras fighting wolves and bears and other type beasts until eventually coming across a village. Here in the town you can interact with multiple different merchants, and you can even upgrade them using resources such as Wood, Iron, Gold, etc, so they offer stronger items. Sadly the co-op isn't implemented very good or fully fleshed out because only the Host gets to experience all the upgrading of various town assets while the co-op partner sits there unable to look at any of it. Also, this is one of those kind of ARPGs that feature only one main village. I kind of like when these games only have one central town, though, it makes you have a very concrete foundation of a gameplay loop to come back to this safe town throughout the whole game in between killing monsters.

Surprisingly, this is not an open world game. What I mean is usually in other kinds of ARPGs like Diablo, Titan Quest, or even Van Helsing you can leave the villages and go explore these big open fields and maps, but in Viking:Battle For Midgard it uses a more linear, mission based level structure. When you leave the town, the Host can choose to either warp to various repeatable Side missions, or warp away to the next predetermined main mission Level. It is kind of refreshing to have a game like this not rely on just randomly roaming around open fields and have you warp to designated levels, but the execution here isn't really that exciting, I'll get more to that later. One upside is that it makes the game at least have a decent feel with the pacing, as theres always a designated set beginning and end of each mission so it lets you easily take breaks or know when you can stop for the day. Although it does kind of suck that if you quit mid-mission you lose all progress and have to do the whole thing again.

The game also features a checkpoint system which is pretty uncommon for the genre. Usually in games like this, when you die you can either warp back to the closest waypoint or take for example a Town portal, but in this game there are no town portals but instead you will frequently get checkpoints, that if both of the players die, you lose any experience and items gained and return back to the latest checkpoint. This is pretty odd, because you can find good items or get a lot of experience but then be rolled back. Its not really a system I find approproiate for this style of game, frankly.  

Besides the weird checkpoint system, the game also does a lot of things to try to stand out from the crowd. For instance the Right mouse button is a dedicated Roll button. Its like they noticed that Souls games were becoming increasingly popular around this time and tried to incorporate some of these ideas into their game, but to very awkward results. They thought this feature was so important that there are THREE (3) dedicated roll buttons. Right mouse button, WASD, and Spacebar! In reality, all you end up using the roll for 90% of the time is to move faster. Because for some stupid reason, you move a lot faster by just spamming roll. So for the whole game you end up rolling all over the place like a jackass simply because its the most efficient way to move around the game. Actually using the roll in combat feels clunky and pointless most of the time. I suspect there are Invincibility frames (I-frames) sometimes, but its so finnicky and hard to achieve that it mostly feels pointless. Yeah, I sometimes use roll to dodge out of the way of enemy attacks and stuff but maybe its just because im otherwise so bored that I throw it in there just for something to do, I don't know if it actually really helps all that much.

Additionally, more features that try to make the game stand out from others in the genre besides the weird rolling and checkpoint systems, is the Health potion mechanics. Its standard in the genre to either buy potions from merchants, pick them up off enemies and chests, or the more modern systems like Path of Exile where your potions regenerate when you get kills - however Viking has the strangest system of all. You only start off with 2 potion charges, and the only way to refresh / get more potions is to find these Health stations spread around the maps at specific points to where it recharges all your pots. Its bizarre. I understand they want to prevent stuff like spamming tons of health potions to trivialize the game, but this is just such an odd, out of place solution. Its like theyre treating it like its a First Person Shooter game where you have to go around and collect Medkits. So for the first bit of the game we barely ever had health potions and had to play so slowly and carefully it was kind of annoying. Eventually we found out you can buy enhanced potion slot from a merchant, so instead of 2 charges you now get 4 charges that can heal more or less, still it only marginally made the whole system feel different.

There is another system called Talismans. These are an item you can equip that gives you an ability that has a set amount of charges and then the item breaks. So for example you can use it 9 times, with a minute long cooldown in between, to shoot out a giant fireball or something like that. Well, we found out early on that one of these Talisman is a Healing circle. So naturally, since the game is so lacking on health potions, we ended up using these Talismans as sort of a health potion. You can buy them from a merchant in town, so effectively instead of buying health potions like any other ARPG, in this game you buy Healing necklaces that break when you use the charges, only to immediately equip the next one. Its just stupid because it invalidates all the other Talismans in the game. Why bother using some damage one when these healing ones are basically mandatory to be able to actually progress through the game since healing is so stingy?

I guess that brings me more broadly to talk about the rest of the items in the game...well, its not good. At all, really. First of all the UI doesnt properly update after you equip an item. You have to close the inventory and open it back up again to make it properly refresh the comparison window. Shocking, I know. The stats on items are really plain, but I also dont like the way its handled at all. You have stats that say stuff like "Damage 1.04x"  "Lifesteal"  "Crit chance"  "Life"  and at first I tried to manually look at all the stats and compare them and try to figure out what to use. But quickly I realized theres an "Armor" and "DPS" stat on the bottom of the inventory, so I eventually just blindly equipped items without even reading the stats until the DPS number or Armor went up. Usually some ARPGs will show you a total dps like this, but you still also have to manually look at the stats, but here in Viking since they are so simplistic you dont even have to, really. I also dont like the equipment slots themselves. You only have 1 ring slot, and your talisman is used for those temporary limited buff abilities I mentioned before (Healing circle one). Then the other slots you have a Health potion slot that you have to upgrade,  but you dont even get a slot for your Boots. You have this 'accessory' slot that has all sorts of random shit like these weird effigies, but it also counts (i think) for your belt and boot slot. Its just a mess.  Really, all I ended up doing for every single slot was blindly equipping shit until my DPS went up. It was boring. The only things I really cared about was my Chest armor and Weapon. I used a two hand weapon so it was slightly exciting finding upgrades and making my damage go up. As for actually finding and picking up loot, that kinda sucks too. You automatically picking up items just by walking around the world, which is bad because it looses that impact and 'weight' of having to pick stuff up yourself. It makes the items feel less important. There are chests all over the place, but most of the time they are worthless and only drop Wood, Iron, and random scraps. Items dont even drop that frequently overall, so you can go long stretches of time without even picking up anything at all. And something else strange is going on, its almost like much of the items arent random at all and are pre-set. For example, I was playing co-op, and me and my buddy would frequently get the exact same items off the same enemies. For most of the game we would be walking around looking exactly the same, wearing roughly the  same stuff. So the game proved to us that it has virtually no item variety.

As for the other RPG stats in the game, its just weird. You dont automatically level up, instead you have to "collect blood" and then find one of these altars scattered around levels or in the main town. Except, you cannot return to main town at any time as there are no Town Portals. So freqeutnly you can have a level up ready but not be able to do it because you're nowhere near an altar. Just why? I dont get the point of this system. Again, the game has all this rolling bullshit, and now you have to collect "blood" to bring it to an altar? Its like they really want to riff off the Dark Souls shit. It just doesnt make sense here, though. Whats the point? It just makes the game more tedious for no reason. Actually leveling up is stupid simple. There are no character stat points like Strength, Vitality, Dex, etc. All you get is a handful of stats like Maximum Life, Attack Speed, Damage, and they only go up by 1% each level up. I just got Damage every single level until it was maxed (20). Then I went on to Maximum Health until the game was over. Very dull. Thats all there is to the items and leveling.

There are a few different skill trees, but they seem to be based around weapon type. Theres on skill tree for Bow, Sword and Shield, Two hand Weapons, etc. I picked the Two Hand Weapons skill tree and theres not really many choices to be made. You can eventually unlock every single thing on the skill tree of your choice. But starting out you just get things like Two hand Damage, a lot of points on the tree work around this Rage mechanic where after so many kills you press a button to go into a Rage, and then you have a handful of skills to put points into. You have skills like Ground smash, Hammer boomerang thing, Cleave, and a Stun ability. This is another bizarre thing. It doesnt seem like you can add or remove skills from the skill bar. When you unlock skills, it automatically puts them on the bar. But there are only 5 slots. Does that mean you can only use 5 skills in the entire game? What about the other trees? Eventually I unlocked all the skills on the Two Hand Tree and I guess that was the end of my choices. Now, the game doesnt have a Mana system or any penalty for just spamming your abilities. It works on a basic cooldown timer. You press a skill, and its on a cooldown for a few seconds. Since there is no mana penalty, what I eventually realized and ended up doing is just spamming 1234 any time I was in combat. Thats the extent of what the combat turned into. Something like World of Warcraft skill rotations. Endlessly spamming 1234 and the occassional 5 for the stun ability. Wow. This made the combat feel pretty stupid and unsatisfying but it seemed to do the most DPS so... It seems like the game kind of does punish you for just spamming abilities, though, because they dont generate Rage. Attacking normally seems to be the only way to generate your rage meter fast. So I did wrestle with that idea for awhile. In the end I decided that even without generating rage as fast, its still way more DPS, so usually its more worth it to just spam. Oh well.  More often than not too, the items you pickup on the ground sucks and you can simply go back to town and upgrade the merchants and suddenly they will sell the best shit in the game, further making the excitement of finding items nonexistent.


The game has 26 or so main levels you have to go through, each of them taking anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. Theres not all that much variety in these levels. Most of them are just outdoors wintery places, You do have nice changes of pace with these beach/village levels though.  the game is fairly linear but not quite as linear as something like Warhammer: Chaosbane. There are mazes and twists and turns and detours but its not like a single hallway the whole time.  Another thing this game does to try to stand out from the crowd is that some levels will have Enviornmental effects. These are things like you will slowly freeze to death unless you run around the map and stop at these designated warm areas. Other levels, you will get poisoned unless you run to safe zones. Other levels you will burn from too much heat. Other places, you take this magical Dark damage. This might sound like an interesting mechanic on paper but in practice it doesnt really add any challenge to the game or interesting gameplay choices, all it does is forces you to constantly backtrack and play very tediously. Its one of the largest contributors to making the game suck ass, frankly. You cant just proceed hacking through enemies at a good pace, you have to kill two enemies then run all the way back and twiddle your thumbs for 30 seconds. It sucks. It became a large annoyance especially in the second half of the game where we were just sick of dealing with it. At least there are a good chunk of levels that dont have this stuff, and surprise surprise those ones were more enjoyable.

Besides that the actual level design is fairly straight forward, you usually just look at the map and run towards some objective (By the way, the map is well done, at least). Objectives like pushing levels, solving very simple puzzles (That were not really necessary in a game like this), using some machine to blow up a barrier, or just kill waves of enemies. You have these zones where the level wont progress until two players stand side by side in a circle, which I thought was a strange way to break apart the level sections but it worked. The game has lots of boss fights, pretty much at the end of every level, which was probably one of the highlights of the game. Having to coordinate putting down health totems for eachother and rolling out of boss attacks was probably the most engagement I've had with the game. They usually have some cool designs like huge monsters, I vaguely remember a few of the fights being bullshit with these enviornmental totems you had to destroy first but overall it was okay.

Thankfully (or maybe not) the game doesnt have any level scaling with the monsters, this means that if youre overpowered you can just steamroll through the levels and the monsters wont magically be just as strong as you. However, since we played on hardest difficulty the game wasnt that much of a cakewalk. By the second half of the game, We would beat one main level, then by the next level we would be almost powerless, having to quit to town and go grind one of the side missions. This eventually got to be a really annoying slog, mostly because the variety of side content was just bad. You cant even see the level of monsters before you go into a side mission so you have to load all the way in, just to realize the monsters are 10 levels lower. Also, you cant just go roam around previous levels you beat, you have to pick one of these side missions that have designated tasks for you to do, and they are infinitely replayable so you end up doing the same levels, the same objectives, over and over just to get some XP just to be strong enough to progress the main quest. It started to suck badly. Maybe its our fault for picking too high difficulty, but still the game just had shitty optional content regardless. And it was clear that the difference in just one level up was huge, you'd go from being a weak piece of shit to suddenly steamrolling over the mobs that were annihilating you.

The story and dialogue was just there. Incredibly generic Viking bullshit. I tuned it all out after a certain point, all I need is the vague general notion of what I'm doing, the lore was just not exciting. Some of the voice acting was entertaining in how stupid it sounded, but other than that I couldn't care less.

The game is frequently very buggy. I doubt they even playtested this shit. Like I said before, the UI being glitchy, the game frequently losing connection, levels just straight up breaking and scripts not executing forcing us to redo entire levels, the lazy AI where you can easily exploit them by standing in certain areas, there was even a bug where my DPS number wouldnt properly update unless I equipped my weapon off and on. Like the whole thing was such a fucking mess.

The game ends with this annoying lava level where you easily burn to death from enviormental effects, with few and far between health stations, and lots of backtracking for warmth. Make your way to the last boss, this big demon guy hanging off a cliff side just sitting there looking at you, spawning enemies and dropping cages (?) on your head. All you had to do is stand in the corner of the arena and you barely take damage, wait 30 seconds for his head to come down, then spam damage. Repeat until last cutscene, and the game kicks you to main menu. Wow. It was bad. I didnt even check to see if the game has any sort of 'endgame'. It kicked me to main menu so I instantly quit the game and uninstalled it from steam. I beat it. It was not good. I mean, I can say some nice things briefly: Some of the graphics were okay like the models, although it could easily pass for a 2007 game or something. I like that its an actually melee focused ARPG where you can totally play swinging your big sword at the enemy, believe it or not some ARPGs melee is just the worst choice, I liked how it only had one main village, something about ARPGs with just one central location is comfy to me, I  commend it for atleast trying to standout from the crowd, even though it failed in virtually every aspect. At least it was co-op, it would have been even worse solo.

4/10