Recent reviews by Armok: God of Blood

I wish I could leave a neutral review. If you're buying this, you probably know what you're getting with Elden Ring. There are new items and a new world to explore, accessible after you beat an endgame boss. There are also more of some items that are limited in the world per run. The design of the items and world is very good. No notes.

The content in this is much more difficult than the base game, as one would expect from a post-endgame area. However, it's kind of insane. There are respawning enemies that have ludicrous amounts of poise, massive health bars, and a five hit combo. Not only are the enemies far more difficult, sites of grace are few and far between when compared with the base game. Stakes of Marika are also a little more rare. I really wouldn't mind bashing my head against a wall if I didn't have to do a runback over random field enemies. I feel like after 180 hours, I should not be dying to regular enemies in most cases.

This is somewhat mitigated by a collectable item that boosts your attack and defense, but they are scattered all over the new world, and you don't start with a map. Speedrunning the entire world map to get, what are honestly decent at best stats, is not really the experience I was hoping for.

If you get this, either be prepared to suffer or be prepared to spoil yourself by opening an online resource to guide you.

The game is beautiful, but it's pretty brutal and not a lot of fun to play alone. I did maybe 15 runs in 2.5 hours and extracted twice. For spending all of this time, I came up with basically nothing. If you think you'll be able to play with friends enough to make the $40-$60 worth it, then get this. Otherwise, I'd give this game a miss until something fundamentally changes.

The best arena shooter released in the last decade. I can't recommend this enough.

This is one of those games with immaculate vibes. I haven't played it a ton, despite how solid the gameplay feels. However, if you like settlement building or RTS/RPG games at all, I would say give this a buy for the aesthetics alone.

Buy it on Bandcamp instead to get FLAC files.

Third-person looter shooter. You can get everything with mechanical benefits without paying any money, although the time investment might be significant. You can install modifications on all your gear that changes its stats, and swap them out in between missions.

A "cozy" town building game. The theming is sweet and on point, but having to square the circle of freeform, painted roads with prefab, "square" buildings leads to all of my cities looking like spaghetti. Adding in the requirements of certain families agitates this quite a bit. It would probably have been a better idea for buildings to have a shapable footprint bounded by the road on all applicable sides and some maximum distance at the back, such that there is a minimum area for the building to generate in.

Old-school arena shooter made in GZDoom. The worldbuilding is exemplary. The starter revolver makes an M1 Garand ping when you reload it.

I spent $40,000 learning how to use Unity just so it could get upstaged by this.

An isometric ARPG/MOBA style PvE game with the item unlock system and "broken build" gameplay of Risk of Rain 2. It's similar to another game called Gatekeeper, although this one feels more refined. You get abilities and modifiers during a run that you can swap out or augment your current ones with. A very good game, although it is a bit annoying how progression feels time-gated. It's a lot of fun to play on your own, and even more fun to play with friends in co-op. You can turn down the visual clutter of your allies' abilities in the settings.