Recent reviews by Surprised

The game is a terrible installment to the we were here series, the entire series revolves around the 2 players having the info the other player needs so they have to communicate it in order to progress this game has nothing that made the previous games great.

• most of the puzzles are extremely obvious and half I wouldn't even call puzzles, it mostly boils down to, is there hole or ledge up cube player needed, item far or have hook, grapple player needed, I didn't have a single section where I even had to think due to this design and nothing sucks more than doing a puzzle just to realize you need to swap places since only the hook can take the item
  
• and speaking of the hook/cube not only do they trivialize most puzzles but they just suck, most puzzles feel like they were appropriated to need these tools, so you end up with a lever you can reach by hand but need to hook to use or ledges that are just out of reach to force you to use the cube rather than feeling like puzzles they more feel like excuses as to why you need these tools
  
• needless to say, the cube is just boring, I mean you telling me my partner got a batman grapple hook, and I get a glorified battery with sticky function, at least the sticky hand puzzles have you reach for things far away and pulling them, most of the cube puzzles could be completed with a rock, throw rock at button instead of cube in hole, place brick to reach high ledge, throw rock at fan to break (yes those are all the cube puzzles in the demo)
  
• This demo only had me use the radio 5 min for one puzzle, for everything else the only communication needed was to swap places, and even that puzzle was beyond simple, being able to complete it on the first time with no double takes of confirmation (and i was giving terrible descriptions for the symbols)

Yet another franchise where in an attempt to "innovate" the devs instead take away what made the franchise great

• the world has a cool creepy vibe, most enemies have interesting designs and the setting/story is unique enough
  
• The first person camera does help it mostly since usually in soulslike no matter how great the enemies look you lose the details due to the camera being so far away, but here the monstrosisties being in your face really helps, seeing an abomination made of people mushed together charge at you in first person is just terrifying and every execution just feels so good due to it being so close (similar to doom executions)
  
• The combat is fine parrying didn't feel too hard to pull off and while most attacks seem hard you can learn them quickly leading to this fun combo of difficult but once you master it you just plow through everything

• The "bonfire" placement needs some work, the perfect example for this is a hidden miniboss at the start of the map, to get to it you will need to have found the fire spell and then backtrack to it but due to there being no lamp nearby when you do die (which since its a miniboss will be a lot) you have to take a 5 min walk back, so you end up spending more time reaching him than fighting him
  
• the upgrades just feel useless, most upgrades give negligible buffs, most upgrades even maxed out just dont give you anything noticable, 5 hp upgrades totaling to like 4k souls? now you can take one extra hit, 5 stamina upgrades? you can swing your sword one more time, most of them just feel like a waste of time
  
• and the other half is the perks which are just pointless, found 2 one that makes potions give mana instead of hp and let you heal with magic dmg and the other that lets you heal on sword dmg but disables potion healing, by themselves they are basically useless but even combined they are average at most, since the combo basically just reverses the normal gameplay (where attacks generate mana and potions heal) but this reversal just feels pointless especially when you realize one upgrade makes you generate potions so you would be better off spamming them for health
  
• The combat feels too unbalanced while most souls likes let you focus on one aspect (light vs heavy, ranged vs cq, status vs instant dmg) here everything other than swords is weaker even when maxed out, you have limited bullets and mana so you are forced to use the sword but even if you had infinite they are just weaker, for example the fire spell needs like 5 sec of constant uninterrupted attacking to set the enemy on fire this is with max upgrades for status build up and being interrupted doesn't mean you have to start over but that you fully failed since you no longer have enough mana to actually finish it even with upgrades (making the minimal upgrade issue even more apparent), I mean even the upgrades on this side come with caveats like being able to slow down time when aiming but you deal less dmg so you have no reason to actually focus on them.
  
• The guns are just too broken, not yours obviously but the enemies', since while they do have a flicker. seem borderline impossible to avoid, tried parrying, blocking, dodging and still got hit, only reason I say borderline is because once out of the 100 times I somehow managed to nullify the dmg, no idea how but it happened
  
• Parts of the map feel like they were made for third person, right before you reach the second lamp you will have to go through a carriage and upon entering 3 corpses will wake up and the door behind you will close, but you will only realize it closed when you try to dodge back and it stops you getting you killed in the process, even if there was a sound effect to let you know of it the game has explosions and gunshots in the background every couple of seconds so it ends up blending in

the game has everything it needs to end up a great title, but it's dragged down by bad game design choices

Edited for easier overview + dev response
They added content only for legacy players, hard to recommend someone purchases a game if they have less content than old players;

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Legacy players always were getting some rewards for supporting the game early, this was usually a nametag decor and some skins for thigns in game (hat, wallpapers) but now they added a class that at the time of writing is the only non-combative calss as well as the strongest one giving you higher starting stats than the others

I consider this similar to fomo/kickstarter rewards, I'm not saying it is but at the end of the day a new player will get the exact same aftermath, where they see something cool like the slick hat or the class and ask how to get it and the answer is "sry you can't its for old players only" (meaning they missed out on it)

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The immersive update obviously was centered around immersion the issue is that a lot of fun/qol mechanics were removed/changed for it and some of these changes even highlight issues that game had before. examples:

• Camera too close, character takes up half the screen (you can change it in settings but even the furthest away is closer than the original)
  
• Slowed down combat, all attacks feel like slow mo and stamina runs out in seconds, this took the old fun and snappy combat and made it be closer to souls likes(go in. swing sword twice, back away to regen stamina) this slowness really hurts since its a shop game, technically most mobs are glorified lootbags for you to sell so having to spend so long to take them out is annoying
  
• Hidden features locked and hidden behind trait progression, so for example you will only find out about parrying at lvl 5 when you see you will unlock it at lvl 10, this is even worse for returning players who have no warning of these features no longer being active who are stuck wondering why the parry is useless
  
• You can no longer see the value of placed items, so now when you do supply runs you have to pick up every single item off the ground to see its value, inventory full sucks to be you gotta remove an item to pick up that sword just to find out it's worth less than a box

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While this game is a shopping sim most of the content is rpg based, the shop part is pretty bare-bones and a perfect example of that are the shelves:

• New shelves are shoe horned in, the last updated added some shelves but they are starter shelves and don't work with the old ones, what do i mean by that, not only are the old normal shelves worse in every way from the looks of things (you start with a 2x4 slot shelf and and old 2x4 shelf can be gotten at the middle of the tech tree, there's a big shelf but before you unlock it you first unlock the new big double shelf taking a quarter of the space while having 2 slots) but they even have a completely different way of construction with old ones being crafted at a bench and free placed while the new ones are placed with a hammer, If that's the way they want to pivot the shelving its fine but maybe add them in a dedicated update with a full rework of old ones
  
• no end game shelf variety, once you reach end game you have 3 options for specialized shelves, kitchen shelf, clothing shelf, and fish displays, want to make a gun\weapon\furniture\... (basically 90% of the items) shop? welp you don't have any shelves for those, not only that but the fish shop is the only one with variety for kitchen and clothes you will be stuck spamming the same shelf everywhere for that liminal feeling
  
• Multitasking shelves, The kitchen and clothing shelf while not having variety they have versatility, On the same kitchen shelf you can put foods drinks and appliances so you can have a pie next to grape juice and a toaster, clothing shelf is arguably worse letting you hang shoes next to your jackets
  
• You now have to manually shelve the items with no ui, you either drag them from inventory and risk placing it instead or you first drag to hot-bar, select in hot-bar and then use on shelf. its also not clear for the clothing shelf which "slots" are full and the multi stack per slot leads to clipping between sections

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• Badly choreographed attacks, this game had an attack indicator for heavies i say "had" since the new shading makes it borderline impossible to see, this combined with the fact that their attacks unlike yours don't need a 2 sec build up makes for some insane attacks like them slow walking towards you and then insta slashing you or the boar that walks into you dealing dmg in the process
  
• Bugs, too many bugs, while rewriting this review i hopped back on to test some things and in the short time i spent i had items be placed inside shelves instead of on leading to me having to remove it, the store ai crying about not being able to reach things that were in front of them and blocking each others paths when they did finally find it, leading to that seagull scene from finding nemo but instead of "mine" it was them spam saying "can't find shelf/cash register"
  
• Teleporting timer, teleporting currently takes around 5 sec to charge an extra 1-2 sec for animation and a loading screen leading to around 10 sec, this is very annoying and will be especially bad when boss farming since they only respawn after tp and since i go full glass cannon and learned their patterns that would be longer than it takes me to kill the bosses

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This game was one of my favorites and i was recommending it to everyone, and while the current state is bad i do have high hopes for it, the devs responded to my original review in a couple of hours and based on the past I'm confident they will listen to feedback and fix it in the near future so while it is a not recommended review it isn't a forget about it, I would say you should just come back at a later date and check it out again

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For anyone else reading i did edit the above post:
I don't care if new and old players will have access to some new content what i care about is the fact that there is non cosmetic content available only to old players the edit in the review should hopefully clarify what i meant

I do like the snapping of the new shelves my issue is that it feels out of place when the old shelves still use the old system, my main issue was the lack of shelf variety in the endgame, currently it seems like only option is a clothing shop since they are easy to farm(unlike fishing and kitchen appliances) worth a lot(unlike foods and drinks) and only one with price boosting shelves

Haven't played in a while so i mixed the indicator up, i was thinking of the heavy indicator which i did not even notice post update until i went looking for it specifically, If you say the attacks didn't change than it might be something else like the camera art style makes them harder to read, Before every update i would rush to leysoon (2nd boss) with the starting bamboo bat parry the outside samurais and kill them to get better gear and then kill him using that gear in the first hour, so struggling to the starting ronins is definitely weird

I removed the graphics complaint since it might just be a preference thing (i do usually enjoy more cartoonish styles) or simply the fact that the change is so big that it feels wrong

The review will stay negative until i feel the game deserves the change but I will continue to check every update for changes (not doing every patch to not burn myself out) and i am hopefull for it.

Extremelly repetitive and obnoxiously rng heavy, for reference once i reached the final area i think i got 1 item for my build from chests and 1 from reforging 6 times everything else was garbage, your input doesnt matter since if you are unlucky you will lose, it's very similar to those slot machines where you can lock rows or poker, no matter how good you think you are if the new items dont match yours you don't stand a chance which sucks because some items have really nice synergy

TLDR: this game has dailly caps and rng heavy gear grind that leads to it feeling like a job where every day you hop on to do nothing but grind making it a missarable experience

The base game is fine i trully wish i could recomend it since i've been having a blast with hunting bosses on legend difficulty thanks to it having solid combat/great bosses

The real issue is the grind for the gear, you can get around 25 gear pieces a day due to energy cap (+20 from grinding) out of these only a couple will be of the max quality and then even fewer will actually be usefull for your build due to gear type/set, so out of the around 50 drops you will likelly only get 1 thats good for your build, and after days of grinding to finally get a good gear set (not great just good) guess what? now you hit the breakthrough so you can level up and your gear is obsolete This means that its time to go back to the grind what a great experience.

Not only that but you can't even enjoy hunting bosses since they level up to your level, meaning if you level up you will be too weak to beat even the first boss thanks to your ex gear set being a paperweight, so once you get past the level cap you cant fight the bosses anymore until you reach the current level cap and grind the best gear for it which would take ages.

For reference in my 70 hours i reached lvl 60 (which was the cap) killed half the bosses (had to stop once i reached lvl 50 due to the above issue) and had yet to actually get a single full set of gear, the closest i got(after 2 weeks of dailly gear grinding) was 1 full set and 2 half sets with 2 of the gear pieces being of lower quallity/level for the set bonus.

Quick edit for the "pros":
I was playing the game on max difficulty (Legend) and killed all but 2 bosses i've met (last 2 being Tian Ying and Wolf Maiden who were the hardest of the starting area) when i tried to do the wolf i was struggling a bit and thought that leveling up to 50 would make her easier instead she got a massive stat boost making a gap that could only be closed by min-maxing, maxing out everything except the gear rarity/level and sets still had me doing less than before the level up which is why i quit, this game is like a Sisyphus simulator and every level up is you letting the rock slide down to the start, Meaning this game is either a grind fest or a game where you shouldn't level up

TL;DR You could pay 25€ for a half finished repetitive broken game and fork over another 92€ for the missing content (+23€ for cosmetics) or you could buy terra tech (a game 100x better) for the same price and have an optional 25€ worth of cosmetic dlcs and a new mode for 10€

I really wish i could recomend it but the bad out weight the good too much

Most of the issues are in theory easy to fix but instead of doing that the devs are too busy adding new stuff that in turn is also broken, this game is basically like a house with a broken foundation but instead of fixing the foundation they just ignore it and build the walls anyway, Some examples for this are basic things like the controls in the pioneer mode, some examples include:

*The F key will by default be used to swap vehicles but it also makes your character leave the vehicle so sometimes when you try to quickswap from your car to boat for example you will instead leave and get hit my your car going at mark 5 instantly killing you

*Aiming is just straight up impossible, most guns have auto targeting but you also have cannon barrels that dont do that and you have to aim yourself only issue the crossair is relative to the canon not the screen so if you point it right on top of an enemy you will miss by like 20 meters meaning you basically have to guess where the shots will land while aiming

*Blocks just not working at all an example would be the fenders that you can not but wheels inside because obv if you place down a fender you want it 1 m above the wheel with a hole, some players found out you can glitch the wheel inside but having to use glitches in order to use a block in a fully released game is insane

* the pioneer gameplay loop just sucks, every mission i've seen was basically go to point A pick up X bring X to point B repeat, not only that but most parts are unlocked by simply exploring except it feels random, you'd go to a chest on a coast line and instead of finding a boat part you'll find a pipe pack or get cosmetic parts like a beach ball launcher while not having suspensions so you'll just go around desperatelly looking for a usefull part to make your box on wheels an actual vehicle nad not find anything

*The original crashlanded mode while fine is pretty easy, by the 20 min mark you'll be able to make a truck that can collect half the parts and most of the other half can then be collected with a heli meaning that after you make each of these 2 vehicles you'll be doing a glorified fetch quest where every like 15 min you'll make a minor adjustment like adding decor or changing the wheels and thats it.

Now the most egregious issue, the price the base game costs 25€ but the dlc total up to around 115€ and were also not talking about cosmetic dlcs but straight up entire packs and modes that feel like should be part of the base game, want to make a boat but dont have the 10€ sea pack well sucks to be you since you'll only have like 10 parts to work with half of which only have a single variant and have to use it on a map that wasnt designed for boats

And the main reason this price is trully egregious is that you can buy terra tech for 25€, a game similar but 100x better having no arbitrary limits and way more content like ai vehicles, factory building, actual quest variety, a comprehensive progression and the dlcs only cost 35€ eur total and only one of them adding a new mode (10 €) everything else being purelly cosmetic

P2W garbage, enemy had a premium tank that was immortal, hit it with 2 artillery strikes, 5 at grenades and 20 at shots (which couldn't penetrate), had multiple games where the enemies getting that tank meant we lose because its unbreakable, stay away and don't support this garbage, Gaijin doesn't care about making quality games they only care about money at the expense of the player experience

Watching nuggets go from stick and stones to colonizing planets is my favorite past-time

{Played using a quest 3}

Game feels like one of those kick starter scams.

-for some reason to start the tutorial you have to talk to an npc that is hard to find, this lead to the hub being filled by people asking how to play
-boring level design, simplistic areas that are one of three types Parkour, Arena, Collect orbs
-had no sounds other than the bgm and voicechat
-found only around 5 enemies (hard to tell since half of them have the same skin but a different weapon) and a boss that was impossible to kill (you get 10 mins and i had a randoms help yet only managed to deplete half of its hp before the time ran out)
-beyond easy, it might actually be possible to teach a chimp to play it, no penalty for dying and you get rewards even if you fail events
-boring combat, all you have to do is basically flick your wrists while holding the grip and you'll kill everything, no other weapons(like the melee you can see in the last city) and the skills you unlock deal less dps than just the normal attack even when you run out of mana
- controls are bad and boring, spam a button to do the parkour sections and occasionally hold trigger to grapple (which btw snaps your camera and most of the time carries absolutely no momentum) most of the time the time the climb grip wont attach or would attach inside objects making it impossible to climb.
-no character customization during creation, gotta search the premium shop in order to change face and hair(it was free but it showed a cost of 0 rather than nothing meaning it might cost in the future)

Complete trash game and it made me go from following and really wanting to get the last city to making me want to stay away from anything they might ever make

This game gave me arachnophobia.