Recent reviews by Hand

TL;DR:

While its not a "perfect" game, great characters and a good story combine with an incredible vision of what early 15th century medieval life was like to produce one of the best RPGs I've ever played.

LIKES

+ While the story of KC:D2 isn't meant to be 100% historically accurate, it does an amazing job of placing itself in a "real" setting. The characters and locations are set squarely around or directly involving some real life towns and figures from Czech history. As someone from the U.S., I didn't learn anything about the wonderfully deep history of the Holy Roman Empire, the Hussite Wars, or any of their major figures. Thanks to this game, I'm aware of a chapter of world history I would not have otherwise been exposed to.

+ The graphics are incredible and reasonably performant. I averaged ~50-65 FPS at 4K with all "Experimental" settings on a 13900K / 4090 combo. While your mileage may vary, other titles released this year have struggled far worse on the same hardware. Plus, its nice to see a CryEngine game in a landscape full of UE5 titles.

+ Fighting multiple opponents is a rewarding challenge and incentivizes you to pick off less-armored targets, utilize the terrain and your movement to reduce the amount of enemies surrounding you at any given moment, and pay attention to openings where you can strike back. More than 1 enemy can hit you at the same time, so you can't get lost in just swinging away wildly.

+ The writing and voice acting felt like the verbal responses Henry gives for dialogue choices were never unnecessarily wordy or out of place.

+ Hardcore mode! After spending ~90 hours on my first play-through, I didn't hesitate to jump at a second play-through when Hardcore released. An all negative perk play-through provides an extra welcomed layer of challenge and was enjoyable to experience; most specifically whenever Somnambulace kicks in and you're left staring up at some random tree canopy in the middle of the forest.

+ The "survival" mechanics of hunger, energy and hygiene naturally coerces you into role-playing like a normal functioning member of society; eat regularly, bathe at least once per day and get a decent nights sleep.

+ Random encounters; whether its out on the trail between towns or in the heart of the villages themselves, the experiences are worth stopping for. My personal favorite is stopping to watch when random fist fights break out between villagers to see who wins.

+ Incredible soundtrack! Bravo, Jan Valta and Adam Sporka.

DISLIKES

- During combat, the camera can be a bit finicky to control when fighting multiple enemies and may lead to you accepting a few additional hits.

- The timing on weapon combos can be a little.. hit or miss (pun intended).

- Prior to the Legacy of the Forge DLC, amassing large amounts of in-game money is pretty easy, even with the nerfs to bandit loot.

Cities: Skylines II has been an on/off/on/off/on affair since it was released. Its buggy and crashes a lot, but as time goes on there are some new community mods and asset packs that makes it worth reinstalling again.

Played for ~90 hours no issue.
Go to reinstall and play again a couple of years later, game won't even start.
My recommendation: find something else to play.

It'd be fun if it wasn't Gacha.

Original: Basically like ESO, except more clunky.

Expaneded: Oh... but tis only the beginning.

Don't like that guy hitting that mining node you wanted? No worries, just get your entire faction to mass-report them and the nuisance is automatically banned for a day!

Did you happen to transfer servers to join your friends, only to have your server population die to due game-breaking bugs, loss of access to trading, and malicious harassment from salty defeated foes? Fret not! They're totally working on it! When, you might ask? Ha, well you see... they're looking into it... they promise...

If I'm totally honest, Amazon had themselves a promising fledgling MMO. It was fun, relaxing at times. The sights and the sounds are definitely center stage in this game. But bug after bug, misstep after misstep, Amazon Game Studios is shooting itself in the foot.

Customer Service is non-existent. You WILL be met with generic copy/pasta which requests infinite amounts of patience while ignoring the details of your ticket. It would probably be a more honest effort to just say, "F*** off".


Oh well, at least I got a waiting emote for all my patience right? However much of a back-handed "reward" it really is.

Once you dig through the layers of casual racism, frequent cheaters, and raging teammates you are left with the king of all competitive FPS games.