Recent reviews by XOR

Started playing in 2016. Took a long break prior to the release of OW2. Came back only to find many cosmetics I'd previously owned are now locked, either needing to be rebought or unlocked. My stats page is messed up with several heroes having percentages that are impossible. I look on the forums and I'm not alone, many seem to have had the same issue, but support merely tells them to make a bug report and nothing else.

The game did seem to be in a better place then when I'd left, however there's still many heroes so wildly unfun to play against, and others that have been nerfed so hard into the ground as to be nearly unpicked.


Monitization is massivly increased, where before you could earn, now you pay.


Much of the original spirit of the game is gone. Characters have voicelines, emotes, and more that are: condescending, toxic/rude, arrogant and more. While this might not seem like much when compared to many modern multiplayer games, it is a stark departure from the mentality the game started with.

A game that originally didn't let you see others stats on the scoreboard, because the devs thought it promoted toxicity and focusing on individual success instead of team success. Now has a voice line for one its most positive/nice characters (mercy), that goes "Want me to call you a whambulance?" but with a delivery that is sure to evoke anger from an enemy (and by design I'm sure). Again, it might seem odd to point this out, but it really is a shocking change in direction IMO.

it can be fun, but the AI is lame. The AI just charges you head-on, there's not really much you can do in combat. Your sprint covers a couple dozen feet, your roll also takes stamina and your only other option is the rare waist-high cover you can shoot over, but it will break in a couple of bullets. Combat feels like an MMO in the sense that, if your gear isn't good enough, you cant pass the DPS or HPS check.

If you do get it, I would recommend the Third-person viewpoint MOD. Its on the workshop and makes the game much more enjoyable/engaging

EDIT: The writing so far, is only getting worse.

I'm leaving this so early into my time with the game, not because I agree with how much this game is praised, but to temper your expectations.

This game is a solid first for the studio. The visuals are beautiful. The writing is, at-times, very good. The music is wonderful, though I think the composer leaned a little too much on the same chord progression(s) across tracks and caused the tracks to sound/feel very samey.


If this is your first, JRPG style, turnbased combat game, it will probably be a fun if at times overwhelming entry-point, depending on your difficulty choice. However, if you've played other turnbased JRPGs in this genre, like the Trails series, Valkyria Chronicles or Persona, you'll know right away that it's far from breaking new ground.


The UI is maybe one of the worst aspects of this title. Skills and attributes are both increased at this games 'bonfires' and the menus for each look identical in style and layout, but they're two separate options with transition animations and no way to go from skills>attributes without backing out to the main bonfire menu and selecting the other option (two transition animations) to go to an identical looking menu, there is no reason skills & attributes cant share a screen with a tab for each. Changing character equipment and skills requires sub-menu>sub-menu>sub-menu and you guessed it, transition animations each time. The menu's themselves are just black backgrounds with your character/weapon model and options. Combat menus and UX is fine (think Kingdom Hearts 2).

Considering how much "inspiration" they took from other games in this genre, the fact that they failed to copy the very functional management-UIs of any of them is disappointing.

Overall, this game offers an above average experience generally, and an average experience for the genre. I have every intention of finishing the game, and suspect I'll enjoy my time with it enough to justify the money spent, but it certainly ain't no 10/10 or GOTY, like I was led to believe. My hopes in tempering your expectations, are that you'll enjoy the game more than if your not somewhat letdown compared to the hype, like I was.

The worst camera controls I have ever experienced on a controller. To the developer. No need to reinvent the wheel, just give me normal aiming. To explain as best I can (you really need to experience it to understand), as you aim, your right stick feels like a semi-sphere stretched and projected onto a plane, if you want to draw a straight line you have to account for the natural curve that would exist when drawing a line on a globe, WTF!? The intent seems to be that your character is the resting point of the joystick and all aiming is 1:1 with the physical joystick position, but it feels terrible, as you move the stick the distance your aiming changes, aiming up left puts you further from the sticks center point, but if you want to aim straight at the same distance, you have move the stick right AND further up to account for the fact that your closer to the stick center point, AKA you can imagine a globe where the closer to the center you are the more sensitive everything becomes. it feels terrible. Just give me a 2d plane to aim on. How much work was done to make the camera behave like this? Unfortunate as the game seems like fun, but I literally felt sick trying to control the camera.

This game is entirely too long, overstays its welcome, repeats copy paste content over and over again and like most other souls games, the story is just nonsense held together by the wiki and youtubers. This game will make you ask so many questions, no answers will ever be given for 99% of them. I tried, god did I try to finish this game, but I cant. I've spent 112, hours and after doing the single thing I understood and was working towards for over 100hrs, my reward was being teleported (no cutscene, or anything to explain it, you just goto sleep in a prior cutscene, a character does stuff and then you wake up in a random place with no explanation or even a vague idea what your doing, you just awake in a new zone that is never mentioned and you have zero idea or reason to take a single step forward.

I still don't know what an elden lord is, or have any reason to care or want to be one.

the open world is at first impressive, but quickly becomes a chore, as you realize you'll have to navigate that massive castle or castle, or castle, or cave, or tree, and you do that without any reason what so ever, besides the vague "become an elden lord". WHY I'm just some dude that gets woken up, and told to go kill all these people who haven't done anything to me.

Playing this game is like being the main dude from memento, its just a bunch of loosely connected zones with the thinnest thread of story linking them all together and the whole time your forgetting what your doing or if you even ever knew what you were doing.

I wish I could go back in time and not buy this game. I kept pressing on hoping it would get better, hoping the time I'd invested already would be worth it, hoping the end of the game was near, It wasn't. Save yourself the time and go play Silksong or literally any other souls game. I am done with fromsoft games, this has completely killed my enjoyment for their games.

*most of my playtime is on PS5*
Performance is still awful, 5070ti gave me around 75-90fps with DLLS balanced @4k, but the frame times make it feel like 40-50. My 7900xt stock runs at 60-80fps with very stable frametimes, making it look much better in motion. With my EVC2 soldered to my 7900xt, power and voltage limits pushed to max, I get 90-110 fps while maxing out my power supply's PCIE rails. Devs released a 'performance' patch that was just them sneakily changing the resolution scaling so the settings in the menu lie to you--so you get more FPS because they made the game look worse, what a patch!

In general at native 4k, the game looks very nice, but not good enough to justify the poor performance.
For most Players, you'll be using DLLS/FSR and the game does not look good--the best explanation I can offer, it looks like a PC game that also had PS4 release with a performance setting.... your playing the PS4 performance version. Visuals look soft AND pixelated at the same time :/

From the description I was hoping for combat closer to NIOH or Kazhan, instead its a mild improvement of Fromsofts Souls combat, and that's not really a compliment IMO, it just feels oddly dated, compared to what others in the genre are doing right now.

Level design is closer to Demon-souls in how the levels loop back on a central hub, but the Hub keeps moving. Unfortunately level design also suffers from the same issues as later souls entries. Shortcuts rarely surprise, you often know what will be a shortcut, this takes away a lot of amazement when you realize where a path is leading.

Levels are often tights and leave little room for maneuvering while being packed with mobs, but other times you have large open spaces--and few enemies. In-terms of enemy placement, the Designers LOVE ambush enemies, and not in a fair way. There are many times where you have no way of preparing for/spotting an ambush, enemies can break thru solid walls that have no indication they are different from other walls (there's also no other ways into these rooms for you to see the enemy ahead of time), other times and enemy will be up in the rafters past a door such that your camera cant see, and the attack is fast enough that you cant doge in response--I found myself juking in and out of every door/opening in the game. many normal enemies have a lunge or a long-reach grab, that will do 1/2-2/3rds of your health and have little wind up or time to doge.

Bosses often felt either way too easy, or spam combos/non-punishable attacks, this is not limited to early bosses, late game bosses have this same rubberbanding in difficulty. If you build into magic or clash this isnt so bad, otherwise prepare for fights to really drag on as you wait for the bosses attack RNG to select something with an opening.

Story is as good as most soulslikes, that is to say, it exists. Reading the Wiki or watching a youtube summery will provide a very interesting story, playing the game however will give you a lackluster narrative.

Overall having recently played/replayed a bunch of newer soulslikes. this failed to impress. I'll likely revisit the game when I'm looking for a new souls like after completing better ones.

Spam doge roll a few hundred times during your 15-20 minutes of running circles around the bullet sponge boss, just to be one hit because you got stuck on 2 adds--this is every boss so far, I got bored in act 3

Itemization is incredibly dry right now, I've not gotten even a little excited about loot--my first and only legendary was worse than any blue I could pick up from trash mobs.

It feels more like a weird souls-like than an ARPG, and that's very disappointing

Despite the many updates the game received, it's still a hollow theme-park ride that fails to live up to the promises of the developers.

The CDPR forums for the game are heavily moderated and any criticism is "aggressive", "harassment" or, "insulting" resulting in a comical amount of locked threads that leave you scratching your head as to what got the thread locked.

The developers gaslight their players pretending they've delivered on promises made or walking back pre-release statements and acting as if they've turned the game around--they haven't; for the price better products exist, itemization and skills are boring, uninspired, and most importantly . . . not fun. Driving feels like crap compared to nearly any other game released in the past 15 years.

Before release they were promising an uncompromising 'mature' story, what we got is little better then Bethesda level writing, coding, and design--that is to say, the game succeeds at being a shallow theme-park ride with a surface level attraction that will leave you wanting for what could have been.

Been a CDPR fan since Witcher 1, and they're reputation is ruined in my eyes, they put in the bare-minimum amount of work to fix their broken, uninspired product and somehow people see that as redemption. The writing was on the wall with The Witcher 3, a game that showcased the increasing drift toward quantity over quality with poor writing, laden with plot holes and poorly thought out scenarios. Just look at the Possession quest in Witcher 3 and tell me a well-read high-schooler wouldn't stop to point out how the 'trick' stands no chance of working in-universe unless Geralt were a moron or willing to be a baby murderer, which he isn't.

Thank you for coming to my TEDx Talk.

It's like Terraria, without the crazy amount of weapons, cool items, monsters, bosses and charm that keeps it fun for 100+ hours.
It's like Rimworld, without the depth and story telling that make it fun for 100+ hours.
It's like a lot of games from different genres mashed together, but without any of the charm, depth or uniqueness that made those games fun.

Killer soundtrack though.

Gameplay: there's almost no grind compared to other jrpgs and the combat system is fairly enjoyable (dont make my mistake and try strength builds, Arts are so much more powerful).

Story: This isn't some grand adventure full of intrigue and peril 24/7--at least not until the finale. People describe this as a slow burn and I disagree, the story its telling moves quite quickly.

This is a story about personal growth and living in the shadow of a legendary hero. Your not the main hero, they are gone on another adventure and your a greenhorn with a lot to learn. The story is constantly moving, at least in terms of character development, and that to me is the main focus of this first game. Later entries in the trilogy focus more on grand adventure, this is the story of how you proved you were capable of undertaking those challenges to come

I've developed and irrational fear of penguins after playing this game, 10/10.