Recent reviews by The Ham Wizard

Delightful game, cheaper than your average pint so no excuse not to give it a go.

Unfortunately I cant refund this as I sat on it for a while. Really just not feeling it compared to 2016, maybe misremembering but there seems to be a lot more hop-and-bop jumping around platforming nonsense than rip-and-tear fun from the first game. Also not too keen on the using specific weapon attachments to crit enemies, I'm just here to mow demons down.Probably not the game for me, just going to go replay 2016 again.

A decently fun game but hopefully they improved the AI in subsequent titles. It gets tiring playing against single city states that can support 3+ doomstacks on like one farm and a corner shop, hiding behind their walls waiting for you to turn your back so they can teleport to your settlement and go "nothing personnel kid" nuclear holocaust and waste the 4k gold you spent building it up. The amount of time spent watching gangs of homeless ♥♥♥♥♥♥ orcs/beastmen can be asinine.

Just go play Mordhau, better combat, fashion, and less gank squads.

Wow, a game where I can collect funky pops and browse r/funny just like irl, all for £1.69! Very cool.

Be me.
Boot up Darkest Dungeon.
"It wont be so bad this time".
Do a run with my A team, complete 100% of the room battles.
Beat about 90% of the room battles, one room remains, team doing pretty well, stress levels manageable.
Enter the final room, Houndmaster sees the enemy and dies from 4 simultaneous heart attacks.
RNJesus decides to give the enemy team 8 SUBSEQUENT GOES.
Team is blitzed by this bollocks.
Plague Doctor healing bleeds left and right, dies due to hyperventilation.
Rest of the team quickly killed by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ crits of like 38 damage a hit.
Mission failed, good trinkets gone.
"No biggie, Just do a few low level treasure runs and I'll train back up another team"
Run a ♥♥♥♥♥-boy easy run on the Weald, Crusader, Vestal, Hellion, Antiquarian.
Complete 100% of room battles.
Beat about 90% of the room battles, one room remains, team doing pretty well, stress levels manageable.
Enter last room, 4 spiders appear.
4. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Spiders. And they are all surprised. Should be manageable.
All 4 spiders become ninjas and dodge literally every attack I throw.
Each spider hits for at least 6 damage to all my guys.
Crusader gets a heart attack and dies. From ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spiders.
Hellion just cant hit any of the spiders, Antiquarian buffing the team with as much dodge as possible, Vestal healing the entire team at every opportunity.
Gradually whittle down the spider gang down to 1.
REINFORCEMENTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cult brawler and acolyte turn up uninvited.
Office_Michael_No.mp3
Finally kill the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spider and somehow kill the cult brawler, team in bad shape but hanging in there
Acolyte gains 60,000,000,000,000 dodge so now not even light can hit her
Hellion furiously swiping at the ♥♥♥♥♥, but to no avail
Vestal trying to strike her with Judgement, but to no avail
Antiquarian furiously healing with her stupid censer
REINFORCEMENTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2 dogs turn up.
Hellion tries to hit them but you know the drill at this point.
Hellion bleeding from dogs, on last legs.
One dog takes a stiff fart at her, Hellion's struggle is finally done.
Vestal raped to death by dogs
Antiquarian killed herself back when the dogs showed up, her corpse eaten by the mutts.
Left with ♥♥♥♥ all.

TLDR: This game abuses you into liking it, just don't play it in the first place, there are better things to do with your time.

This is the second time I have written this review, because while I don’t recommend this game, I do like it and want to play it, but the issues I have with it lead me to hate playing it, hence why I have uninstalled this product from my account with no refund. My initial review was more vitriolic than I would like it to have been, and I want my criticism to be constructive.

Spoiler free TLDR: The game has great visuals and soundtrack, but is let down by an unoriginal story, and rubbish mechanics concerning healing and boss health bars.

////////////////////Spoilers Below///////////////////////////

My main criticisms with this game are as follows:
- The story is just that of Dark Souls, and many elements are just taken straight from the Souls games and pasted here such as an infection turning the citizens of the kingdom into mindless drones that attack you (Hollows caused by the undead curse), the king trying to save his kingdom by containing the infection in the Hollow Knight but this ends up dooming the kingdom to decay (Gwyn linking the first flame), said king hiding away and being built up only to find that he is already dead (Vendrick), and all of the endings basically boiling down to taking the place of the Hollow Knight and containing the curse for now or ending the infection at its source (Link the flame or end the age of fire). There are many more elements and story beats I can draw comparison to but I think this makes my point, and while this may be a case of parallel thinking, the sheer amount of copied ideas in the story leads me to believe that Dark Souls must have been a large inspiration to a fault. It was very disappointing to me that I was playing this game just to find out I had played it 3 times already, but for those who aren’t huge Souls fans this probably wont be an issue to you.

- The healing system is implemented in such a baffling way that I can only see the developers either wanting to infuriate the player or disincentivize healing. Typically healing works in one of two ways in a game; either you heal for a short period to heal a small amount of hit points (think of running over a med pack or a mushroom from Mario that heals you 1 hp essentially) or you have a longer heal time for a potentially greater amount of health, but this leaves you open to attacks (The estus flask from Dark Souls). Hollow Knight healing periods are long and leave you open to attack and heal a measly 1 HP each time. If you try to do this in a fight there is a high chance that you get hit and lose the HP you just gained, essentially invalidating what you just did, but now you have less soul. This is especially egregious in boss fights but that is a whole point on its own and I will address the healing there as well.


- You are given an illusion of many branching paths but the early to mid game exploration is very restricted. At the beginning of the game you have 2 areas: The Forgotten Crossroads and Greenpath. After that is the Fungal Wastes and then when you get to the City of Tears you can diverge your path of play. I’m not a fan of restricting the players choices by locking them behind bosses, perhaps I have been spoiled by games like BOTW where you can go anywhere, or DS1 where you have 5 or 6 paths to go down from the start, but this early game funnel annoys me. I would prefer to have all areas open but have the enemies in some be more difficult so that if I want to explore other areas I can but it will be challenging. Hollow Knight feels like DS2 in which you can see many diverging paths, but they are arbitrarily blocked off by locked doors so you really have 1 or 2 choices of direction. Hell, even with the 2 zones you get in Hollow Knight you cant do Greenpath immediately and need to beat False Knight so you really have 1 path until City of Tears.

- All of my previous criticisms have been subjective, but this is the only objective issue I have with the game: No boss health bars. I suspect this was done so as to not have a health bar clutter up the screen and detract from the visuals, but it is a relatively minor exclusion that mixes in with some of the other issues I have which makes boss fights completely unenjoyable. Health bars relay information to the player on how well they are doing in the fight, and the player can use them to adjust their strategy. No health bars mean the player gets no feedback on how close they were to killing a boss, its like taking an exam, and each time you fail you just get 0/100 and get no useful feedback to improve upon, other than “Get better at it”. Yes, the bosses play animations a you do certain amounts of damage to them, as in they pause and allow you to get in a free hit or two, but with no health bar I don’t know the context of the animation. If the boss doing a special animation or pausing for a second because it’s got 66% health left? 50%? 5%? I don’t know. This is where the discencentivised healing comes in. Because healing is frankly rubbish in a boss fight, I’m incentivised to try and take as little damage as possible, meaning I’m not in the enemy’s face. If I could see the health bar of the boss, I could make a judgement on if I can rush it down and survive or not, but I only have half the picture, thus I keep having to play boss battles safe due to a lack of feedback.

Hollow Knight comes close to being a good game, and I think changing the elements I have talked about above would make it a game I could recommend. But in its current state I cannot recommend anyone buy or play it. If you do buy it I hope you can see past the problems that I have, and I hope that Team Cherry goes on to produce better games in the future.

The peak of Total War.