Recent reviews by SeriousBug

This game is actually really amazing. If you don't know anything about it, Kingdom Come is set in a very grounded, realistic setting. Don't expect magic, dragons, or monsters. Instead you have medieval politics, ruthless bandits, and war.

The game takes great detail to your armor. Unlike other games where you might just equip a "plate armor", you might equip a padded inner outfit combined with the plate, then a chaimail to guard your neck, along with other parts to complete your armor. These are all stacked on worn on top of each other like they would have historically, or so I presume.

Combat is a little janky. You make directional attacks, and you need to time your blocks. Timing is pretty forgiving, but what makes the combat actually difficult is the realism. Unless you have some great armor, don't expect to get hit a bunch of times with a sword and live. You can't dodge-roll, you just step out of the way. Your enemies in turn can't just snap onto you but rather walk towards you and swing realistically. And if you get attacked by more than one or maybe two people, maybe tuck your tail and run because your enemies aren't going to wait for their turn to attack while you parry every single one. They will surround you and murder you. On the other hand, the game obviously recognizes this and doesn't pit you against large numbers of enemies, usually only one or two, rarely more.

I also love the attention to detail about the game in general. Without giving spoilers, there is a quest where you rescue someone who was tied up by bandits. After a failed attempt, I realized that they had separate dialog and animations whether you sneak in and quietly rescue them, or you kill the bandits first. That really gained a lot of respect for me, too often you see a game either just reuse the same animation or not let you do that at all!

There's also a good wealth of quests and things to do around the world, even after 10 hours there are still lots of areas I haven't even gotten to. The game does a great job at pacing things.

Oh and I have to praise the story of the game as well. It's just top notch. Honestly through every step of Henry's journey so far, it has made sense to me. The character's motivations and goals, desires, they are all obvious. Even when something "lucky" happens and you get thrust deeper into events that a commoner wouldn't normally get involved in, it makes sense given what has happened that Henry got involved in them.

Is it to say that the game has no flaws? Graphics are a bit rough. Combat is a little janky, with target lock sometimes being too strict (not letting go when you try to run away) and sometimes too loose (unlocking when you were just trying to aim your attack). The movement is kinda sloppy. Travelling around is exhausting and a little boring until you get a horse. And the game doesn't do a great job of explaining its mechanics during the opening hour of the game. But I love everything else so much that it has completely enamored me.

This gets a strong recommendation from me. I am looking forward to finishing this game, and starting the second one right after that.

The combat is far too difficult, with enemies quickly surrounding and killing you. It's very annoying to repeatedly die, run back, and repeat. It doesn't help that traveling from place to place takes a decent amount of time because there's no quick travel except for quick travel points you construct yourself, which are limited.
Getting swarmed is somewhat manageable on land as you can dodge and run away to recover your stamina and heal, but it's not possible while sailing which makes combat practically impossible if you encounter more than 1 ship at a time. And most enemy ships seem to travel in groups so you can't really do much. The ships are too sluggish and too evenly matched for you to outmaneuver or outgun your opponents.

Oh and talking about ships... they really behave like motorboats rather than sailing ships. If you open your sails to max, your ship travels at full speed regardless of your direction. There is no impact from wind.

Base building is pretty impressive, and the game appears to have some sort of mechanism to have workers man production facilities for you. But almost 6 hours in, I haven't gotten to that yet and don't know when I might. So building anything at my base means I must painstakingly do everything myself from scratch, mining rocks and copper, chopping wood, and running through the jungle stripping all the foliage.

Now the in the game's defense, it's in early access so likely a lot of this will get polished and improved. But I'm not writing this review in the future, I'm reviewing the game as it is today. Right now I wouldn't recommend the game. I'd suggest waiting and letting it cook a bit more. It might get much more polished in the future and then it might be worth it, but it is not right now.

Immediately repetitive and not fun. Here's how the game works: You can only hold one item at a time. You need to drop the item you're holding onto the ground before you can pick up something else. Nothing in the game has an "interact" button, you instead interact with them by dropping objects on top of them. This is interesting at first, but it gets boring really fast. You can't just refill your bucket from the river. You have to drop your bucket into the river, run after it if it tumbles away from you, and pick it back up. Next you have to pour that water into your pan, but you can't just interact with your pan. You instead have to aim the bucket correctly for the water to pour in. And that wouldn't be such a problem if the bucket got poured where you aim. Instead, it gets poured a feet to the right of where you aim, so you have to aim to the left of the pan. You then have to add dirt to your pan and use a brush on it, but again you can only hold one item at a time. So you have to pick up the shovel, put a shovelful of dirt into the pan, then drop the shovel onto the ground. Pick up the brush, click once, drop it onto the ground again. So you're constantly grabbing and dropping objects, and they do all have physics so if anything rolls away from you, better start chasing!

Okay, you finally have a bunch of ores and gems. Great, right? Well except "you can only hold one item" also applies to these. So you can't just pick all of them up. You either have to keep them all in your pan and carry your pan, or move them to a cart and pull the cart behind you. If you do put them on the cart like I did, woe to you because once you get to where you sell them, you can't just sell everything on your cart. You need to move each ore and gem, one by one, onto the merchant's table (in the game's defense, if you keep everything in your pan then you can put the whole pan down on the table).

Yes, now you have sold the fruits of your labor and you have some cash. Except, again the "1 item only" applies to the money too. You can't just put the money in your pocket. You have to carry it around as a physical object, haul it to the merchant where you buy stuff, and drop it into their payment bucket. It is also funny to note: if you put two piles of money together they merge, but you know how you split a pile? You have to use a saw. Like this is just ridiculous, I can't just right click to split a stack or something. No you have to use a saw. Wow.

And the worst part is you do all of this, and they you have a tiny amount of money. So you're gonna have to keep repeating this a bunch so you can earn enough to buy equipment so you can start crafting things like jewelry to make a bit more money. After about 20 minutes, I've had enough. I don't want to have to spin my camera around chasing a shovel and a bucket so I can make a tiny bit of money, to maybe see what the game has next.

Honestly i don't have much to say, except that I really enjoyed the game. Climbing mechanics are really satisfying, even if it leaves you a bit confused at times as to what the game considers a good spot to grab and what isn't. I didn't love the survival mechanics, but it was okay. Where the game really shines is the scenery, and writing. While you get the story in small bits here and there, it really made me feel things.

The mechanic of dropping items when you fall combined with the relatively strict grab range means you end up with items stuck in places where you can't get them back. Because the game doesn't allow you to save and reload, you can't even go back to a save before you dropped the item. The only way you can get the item back is restart the game from scratch and hope you don't drop it this time.

The game is a lot of fun. It has some base building mechanics, you can build both on land and on your ship. There are several locations that you have to revisit often, which makes it valuable to build them up so you have resources there.
Travelling around on the ship is fun. It bobs and sways with the waves, and it seas really do feel choppy when weather gets rough. The general atmosphere of the game is a lot of fun.

The bad sides are, hopefully, related to it being in early access. Over my playthrough so far I think I had 5 or 6 crashes. And encountered some minor bugs like dialog overlapping, or minor issues like some functionality not being explained clearly. I did hit one crucial issue though where an elevator got stuck, blocking progress. Thankfully on an optional objective, but still. It was enough for me to say that I've had my fill of fun for now, and I'm going to wait for the full release.

I do recommend the game. With it's current condition if nothing was to be improved, I think I would recommend it but not at the current price. Once issues are ironed out and the game has some more content, it would definitely be worth the money though.

Extremely confusing. I selected a salvage mission. I tried to target the destination I need to go to. Did I target it correctly? I have no idea. I think I somehow deselected my target? I managed to finally make my way over there, and grabbed the salvage. Hurray. But then suddenly a ship lands near me, 6 NPCs pop out, and shoot me dead on the spot. I die and respawn. Do I need to go back down to grab the stuff again? No the game said I didn't lose anyting, and the mission now seems to be telling me to go back to the station I got the mission at. I do so, but when I go to turn in the mission on a terminal... nothing happens. Did I complete the mission? No idea. Am I missing the stuff I need to complete the mission? Haven't got a clue.

It seems like in the pursuit of immersion, they made the game unapproachable to all but the most dedicated players. Don't get me wrong, I'm not some spring chicken. I have played World of Warcraft on and off for the last 15 years, I played Eve Online. But this game just offers no explanation for anything, and very little feedback what you're doing right or wrong.

Haul things around so you can build bridges and roads, so you can haul more things around so you can rebuild more things... It's a surprisingly enjoyable gameplay loop. The graphical fidelity of the game is pretty amazing, and it does very well at giving you the feeling of playing with heavy vehicles.

It's nothing incredible story-wise, but it is satisfying to see things get completed as you repair facilities, reconnect power lines, and bring life back to an area. I will say it does sometimes feel like it drags on, primarily because the current maps available at launch are repetitive as they are all basically either an "African Desert" or "Eastern-European Forest." But I suspect there will be many other kinds of maps as DLC comes out.

If you're coming from SnowRunner, do mind that this is a completely different game. Almost all your vehicles are essentially capable of traversing any terrain, as opposed to SnowRunner where you'd have to choose what vehicle you're taking where very carefully. Your focus then is more around restoring enough of the infrastructure that you can get through completely impassable areas like deep rivers. I do wish this game was a bit more of "SnowRunner, but you can fix the roads" but that's not what it is.

The game could also use more vehicle customization, like picking different attachments. But right now any customization comes from buying variants of vehicles, like the same base vehicle with a truck bed or a crane attached. So I don't think customization is likely to be coming.

I think this game is actually more of a factory builder than a city builder. While you build housing and build stuff to feed and entertain your badgers, the badgers are not too fussy and won't just start getting mad at you like citizens in city builders often do.

Instead, once you secure basic necessities the game becomes a problem of optimization and building up. Place resources, storage, and housing strategically to optimize how quickly your beavers can work. Or even if you don't like optimizing, just keep building more and more because you can.

Within a couple hours after completing the tutorial, I immediately found myself trying to build grand projects like building dams and rerouting rivers. You can get really ambitious, and you can build some crazy cities as you get more advanced. I especially love how easy it is to build up vertically, it really creates these amazing looking cities.

Totally worth the price, event with just the content available right now during the early access.

It feels like I'm the only person in the world to dislike this game looking at other reviews on Steam. But I didn't really like Doom Eternal. What irked me the most are:

- Too much exposition. This is one of the greatest aspects of the previous game, with the somewhat-famous scene of the Doom guy pushing away the screen with the exposition dumping character. This game? You have the "Jarvis" narrator constantly talking in your head, and explaining that you need to go here and kill the hell priest and that something happened... just tons of exposition that was not necessary. Doom shined by telling its story through the environment, Eternal loses me with the story.
- Constant tutorials. Did you know this big shiny part of the demon sticking out that glows when you hit it is the weak spot? Did you know hitting them in the weak spot is good? Did you know you can stagger demons? Did you know you can punch them when they are staggered? The game starts out with a constant barrage of tutorials that just never end. Every new enemy you encounter, the game stops the world and shows you a tutorial of how you can defeat that enemy. It won't give you the joy to discover that yourself. Thankfully this can be disabled in the settings, but what you can't disable are the short cutscenes that constantly point you towards where you need to go. You do something to unlock a door? The game takes control away from you to show you that door, even if it's in an obvious spot where you can clearly see it. The early levels I played through were pretty linear and had obvious paths running through them, there was no need for this kind of distruption of the game.
- Doom guy, as a protagonist, had been almost a non-entity. He's just the avatar of the player, and this works well. it feels ilke Eternal places too much emphasis on the Doom guy though. We now get third person cutscenes of the Doom guy putting on his helmet, or walking around, or doing stuff. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen his face in fact! This is minor, but it feels antithetical to who Doom guy has been in the previous game. He's not Master Chief or Blazkowicz, he's more of a force of nature. He's so much of a non-entity that he doesn't even have a name!
- The combat has become puzzle-like. You get very limited ammo, and enemies take lots of hits to kill. You have to constantly use your chainsaw to regain some bullets, and you have to utilize the "right" way to kill every enemy. You can empty your every bullet into the Cacodemon and barely kill it... or you can throw an explosive into its mouth like the tutorial showed you to kill it in one shot. This takes the fun out of this being an FPS! I want to shoot things, not run around executing a predetermined set of actions.