Recent reviews by Bot (Error 404)

The game's charming enough but for a platformer the character controls far too loose to be engaging in any other way than annoyance which ends up bleeding into the quite amazingly lacking and repetitive combat and the "puzzle" levels that end up suffering from how loose jack's controls are and end up being annoying. And that's not good for a game where it's core gameplay loop is meant to be based around precise movement where the challenge comes not from lack of skill but just how poorly the character controls.

In the end I just played the game until it crashed and was so not bothered with it I couldn't even muster the small will needed to hit the play button again.

Has this one really fun bug or easter egg where when you walk through one of the outpost houses a gunshot goes off scaring the absolute ♥♥♥♥♥ out of you

(Spoilers.. Obviously)

Was really enjoying the DLC despite it's problem with the authority system I was really enjoying curing the various different plagues on mega brutal until I got to the bio weapon. The bio weapon on any difficulty that isn't casual is single-handedly responsible for ruining this DLC and any fun I was having with it. This is meant to be a strategy game and the fact the bio weapon requires so much lucky completely erases that from this. It didn't start in one of the like 3 or 4 ideal starting countries? Run lost restart. It showed up in that country but you were just under half a second late (not joking) too bad it's now instantly spread to a country with a sea and air port and cost you the run. Restart.

judging by the tools that are given to mange the bio weapon it seems clear that the intended solutions to this are to either survive with a handful of people left and let the bio weapon infect and then kill all it's hosts or lock a country down, kill any host that tries to break quarantine and let the bio weapon kill the rest of it's hosts. But that more interesting darker way of handling the virus is nearly impossible with how fast the authority decay is. Which is why all of the mega brutal strategies I've seen for the bio weapon include restarting until it lands in one of the 3% of countries where it can be managed

Great idea especially for an experimental asset flip but the game has it's issues.
(rated positive but I would still like a mixed option)

Spoilers... Obviously...

Update for post 1.01.1 patch.


Everyone's gone on about it endlessly now but the lack of coms is genuinely a terrible idea in a team based game.

No text chat, no voice, you get a ping marker. The game is a rogue-like team game where good communication will be key with the way you will have to share items and plan a path ahead of time to make the most of a run and give the best chances of winning and with certain character abilities needing to be stacked to get the most out of them with short windows for getting them perfect. The lack of coms for random play will kill so many good teams and runs when you have no idea what everyone is thinking, needing and has.


This might be due to the previous complaint but the bosses take ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ages to kill.

We are talking a 3 v 1 boss fight lasting up to 10 minutes at times depending on how the boss feels about constantly spamming attacks that make it impossible to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ get near and then ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ off to the other side of the arena in true elden ring fission so they can start the whole projectile and AOE spam to run away cycle all over again. Mix this with the massive health pools that are very clearly designed for optimised teams and you take the final fights of all the areas from possibly tense fun final bosses into multi-minute long projectile and AOE spamming snore fests.

update for 1.01.1
It seems I was right about the bosses becoming a lot more engaging once you get a decent team if you're playing with randoms. Since I got past the 3rd boss most of the teams I've been getting have been on have been pretty on the ball which is a shame but there's not a lot that can actually be done about this other than going into single player. Leaving the last complaint up though since it will more than likely still be a problem for new players and people who don't have friends that want to play the game.


♥♥♥♥ Gnoster wisdom of the night.

All of the frustration of the twin gargoyles fight from ER with the boss spamming clouds of poison mist that deal damage as they apply poison with a thrashing around scorpion looking thing mixed with the second phase of the fight where the boss has this really annoying tenancy to start continually charging across the arena WHILE it spams clusters of homing projectiles up to 4 or 5 times during the charge WHILE the lower half of the boss becomes fully active with damage for the duration of the charge. ♥♥♥♥ this boss.

Post 1.01.1 patch
Happy to report that with the exception of boss 2 and boss 3 all the other bosses (even including Libra surprisingly) have not been too spammy and have been rather fun to fight.


I Kinda wish the camera was a little further out.

with all the things going on all the time and the fact a majority of the time you're fighting bosses or multiple bosses that barely fit on screen it gets a little suffocating and honestly kind of mentally fatiguing to try and keep track of everything going on all time.

The attacking to revive down teammates is actually a really fun concept that's bastardised by the fact not a single person I've played with or myself can get their character to consistently aim at the floor to hit their players that are on the ground.

I believe this is partially due to the fact it takes multiple attacks to revive a downed friend in a battle and because characters using melee will take steps forward. This causes the revive-er to be shunted around the hitbox of the revive-ee
also the demon-souls-borne-ring series has never really been the best when it comes to aiming at things that are a lot shorter than the player. This is a minor thing though.


I do understand that this game is a rogue-like but.

I do really really wish the boss drops and chest drops had a higher chance of dropping weapons more appropriate to your character than they currently are because when you get a boss drop with 3 options and 2 of them don't apply to your character be them weapons or buffs. It then is not a choice you're making you're just going with the only ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ option.


HDR is still broken. This goes for ER and ER:NR


The ray tracing setting was removed... I'm not mad or critiquing it I just find it odd.


The matchmaking system seems to break sometimes.
If you enable character remembrance quests and when I say break I mean it can take what is normally a 10 - 20 second match queue and make it 15 minutes to over 1 hour long.

Game desperately needs a bug fix update.

between the enemies wall banging me so much with in the first 40 minutes of me playing the campaign I genuinely considered uninstalling,

Shots not seeming to register around 50% of the time causing me to die while the suspects mag dump me.

and one extremely annoying problem that seems to cause suspects and civvies to get frozen being unable to surrender until their offed making an S rank impossible if you can't get the AI to refresh by melee or beanbags.

I think skipping the game and just watching other people play it is your best option if you're interested.

Balatro is not only the reason I know how to create every single poker hand and what their values are even the ones that don't appear in game. It's the soul reason I lost 3 days this month when I'm sure I only played the game for an hour.

I really like this software. Just wish it had a "Universal" option so I didn't have to open the software and change the settings for every single thing on my desktop. Also become extremely laggy and slows down my whole system after a few minutes of being open even although it's consuming basically no resources.

Not my cup of tea but I certainly see why people like it. It's very solid.

There will be spoilers. This review is partially out-dated as of the 11th of September 2024
(Editing this 10 months late to fix the spelling but better late than never I suppose... Unless you're having a heart attack then you wouldn't want the ambulance to arrive late, You'd be well ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dead.)


The first and second DLC play-through were both started on characters that were around level 120 +- 10 levels.

The changes recently made to the Shadow Fragments did basically nothing to address the core issues of the DLC.

Separate upgrading system:

I love a lot of the areas in this DLC but I just don't get the feeling I'll ever want to play it again a lot of the enemies are far too strong I can't tell you how many times I was 1 shot or 2 shot by a base enemy in the first few hours because of the DLCs separate scaling which ended up becoming a chore because instead of exploring just for the hell of wanting to find all the cool ♥♥♥♥ I was exploring to find the DLCs upgrade items so I wasn't being 1 or 2 hit killed constantly... Not that it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ helped by the time I got to THE Final boss (not the man in the red pyjamas) I was walking into the arena and then being 2 shot by this Lorian wannabe.


The Camera:

♥♥♥♥ this thing, Just ♥♥♥♥ this thing. I know the camera has always been an issue in Darksouls, Bloodborne and in this game but the more flashy the bosses get the worse this problem becomes when a massive enemy starts having a seizure. A fix for this would be the camera backing up so that the reason you die is because you saw the enemy wind-up for 20 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ seconds and then a further 3.4 after which you've already animation locked yourself into an attack and are about to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stomped into mulch by a 20 hit combo, don't worry though you wont get to be there for all of it because you'll be dead in the first 2 hits.

The story:

I actually do quite like the lore, as with all from software game's it's found in mostly the item descriptions and as always is; deep, inscrutable and full of atmosphere like the sweaty jockstrap of an American football player.

The enemies:

It was going to happen eventually but some of these enemies are just so bad with their attacks to the point where they're not even remotely playing by the same rules as the player anymore one of the points that stuck out in my mind the most was crossing a massive bridge and right on the other side of it was an NPC using one of the new pyromancies and it was completely unavoidable it didn't matter if I was running, walking, swerving, rolling or using what I thought was meant to be cover because this enemy was spamming the pyromancy so fast that by the time I had gotten into cover again I was already at half-health or close to death. That's not where it stopped though because upon getting to the enemy and going in for a good swing, before I had even finished the attack the enemy had already swapped to some melee weapons and poised right through my attack. Then there's the late DLC lion soldiers now I can't levy too much criticism against them as they are meant to be the late stage enemies however going back to the copy and paste they are using nearly all the moves from the Champion Gundyr on fast forward which means if you get hit once you're more than likely to get hit again. Which kills you...

That's not where my gripes with the enemies stop though as on playing through the DLC again on a new character I realised a few things; one nearly every single enemy has gap closing attacks that may as well be teleportation to where you are and number two far too many of the enemies have unbelievable poise to the point where it's nearly impossible to knock them out of any attacks even with powerstanced heavy jumping attacks from colossal weapons.

The Bosses:

I have absolutely no idea what to put here that hasn't been said by nearly everyone already. I really didn't like the shift from attacks that were readable and capable of being dodge with a good reaction speed and attention to attacks that basically require you to die the first few times you fight the boss so you know when to react to an attack that should have come out 2 seconds sooner but didn't to trick the player into a dodge roll or attack that will almost certainly get them killed because of this really stupid need to keep the "These games are hard and not for the faint " tag the Elder-demon-dark-borne-sekiro series has attained and ignoring the entire other half of the "hard but FAIR" equation that makes these games so damn addicting.

There is no skill issue in this because the idea that most of the later bosses in Elden Ring and nearly all the bosses in the DLC require skill and not memorisation fpr half the attacks and standing around waiting for the boss to stop doing flips round the arena for the other half is silly, because there is exactly 0 skill in me just being killed and going "oh ok I have to wait for like 5 seconds for that attack to come out".

There is even less skill involved in standing around after the boss has finished that 20 hit combo waiting for the boss to go back to chasing or neutral because from soft's best idea for making it more difficult was adding in move reading to the end of most of the bosses combos so that if you attempt to punish the boss missing 20 hits in a row you end up being punished instead for not standing around like a jack-ass waiting for the boss to go back to neutral so you can maybe get a few hits in and a good back and forth before the boss goes back to spamming it's 10 - 20 hit combos again.

I feel this is largely a problem of from soft hitting the gold jackpot on there first attempt and not really being able to make improvements to the system that keep the same flow and "hard but fair" mentality; although a good start would be cut back on the number of delayed to light speed attacks the bosses use to trick you into being hit by an attack that you can't avoid after it starts coming at you and go back to the attacks that if a good player is paying attention can be avoided with a well timed dodge instead of a pre-timed one this would cut back on the annoyance a fair bit and go back to the lovely back and forward of the previous games without removing the attack type all together. IGNORE THIS. I was wrong.

Stop every boss from doing constant 8, 9, 10, 14 hit combos at light speed. Look it was cool as hell with Nameless king, Abyss watchers, fried, Gael (to name a few) did it a few times during their fights but having nearly every enemy do it constantly at the speed they do really makes it annoying when it's nearly every attack. Not only does this stop being a special, engaging and dangerous spectacle it just becomes that series of moves that when the boss does it and you get hit the first time, you might as well put down the controller and wait to die because the next attacks will come so fast and hard by the time you get out of the stagger you will be too late to dodge the next attack.

Finally adjust where move reading occurs and how fast it happens, the way it's implemented at the moment is just infuriating instead doing things more like what the tree sentinels and god skin nobles do to punish healing right in front of them without strafing which makes them more engaging because instead of just standing around like a nob while you heal a few feet in front of them they actively try to damage you and will if you're not already moving to one side and preparing a doge for when you're done. The problem is without move cancelling á la Sekiro there really isn't much that can be done with move reading that doesn't make it just a negative experience that remove some of your health because "♥♥♥♥ you, you thought".

The saddest thing about all of this is it's unlikely to change with the way from soft rarely ever make drastic changes to their content after it's released the best that we can hope for is mods to make these changes for us.

Good graphics
a song that I want to listen to outside of the game
and a decent low stress game-play loop