Recent reviews by Kietharr

Definitely has the bones of a good game. I bought it awhile ago and started playing today, still a lot of missing content and limited progression but it's one of those games I'm sure I'll be checking back in on every year. Keep it up!

Overall, the game is about a 6 or 7/10. I felt the need to review this because most of the online reviews I've read are totally off base, not in that they're over/underrating this game but in that they're mad about the wrong things.

The story (which I see getting panned) is fine. Pretty good even, if you have the context of prior POE games. Most decisions have some moral ambiguity and don't boil down to "do what any reasonable person would do vs be ridiculously evil just for the fun of it."

2/4 party members are good, 1 is whatever and 1 is cringe, that's above par for a modern WRPG. Combat is fun and movement is responsive, much better than an Elder Scrolls game. Platforming is good and there are some little puzzles here and there, dungeons are generally well designed though they definitely follow the post-Skyrim dungeon philosophy. Overall the world design is pretty good.

There's a lot of attention to detail in how people react to you based on your prior actions, how party members react to your decisions, to each other, and to where you're going/what you're seeing in the world. The pacing of the game is also pretty good, it didn't overstay its welcome.

There are three main negatives are pretty significant ones

-Enemy variety. You pretty much have skeletons, xaurips, 'zombies', beetles, mushrooms, elementals, spirits, spiders, kith and BEARS. Bears everywhere. Skeletons, Xaurips, 'Zombies' and Kith are functionally almost indentical/interchangeable and constitute the overwhelming majority of enemies. Despite combat being fun, it ends up getting very repetitive. Enemy distribution is also cosmopolitan, so every area feels kind of the same but you get a new color of Xaurip or beetle.

-Cities are DEAD. There is no theft system, NPCs don't react to your actions AT ALL. NPCs have no schedule and just sit in the same place 24/7. In my opinion there is just no excuse for this. Baffling design decision, considering the Pillars games, and basically every first person WRPG of the last 20 years had at least a theft system.

-Performance. I have a RX 7900 XTX and was encountering severe stuttering and even 10-15 second total freezes in cities in particular. Even turning down to medium didn't completely fix the issue. I mostly played on Linux but tried booting in windows to see if it was a Linux/Proton issue and no such luck. I can only assume this is some AMD card issue but I don't have a lot of tolerance for that.

Overall, if you liked Pillars of Eternity and want to see more of that world, I recommend it. If you like "run around in the wild for 30 hours and click things" games, it's also pretty good there. But there are a few critical flaws that leave this game feeling just OK rather than great.

I never get why all of these reviews are always hung up on the quality of the port and not the game. Game runs fine, turn your settings down toasterbros, especially volumetric lighting. I can run 30fps at med using a core i5 and 670, low is 40-50ish most of the time. The game's nothing spectacular visually even on highest so you're not losing much of the experience. On consoles this game ran around 20fps during combat most of the time and they didn't have the option to fiddle with settings to increase it.

It would be the best monster hunter game with more weapon/monster variety. The core game is solid and accessible to first time players while containing a large number of quality of life features/improvements over past titles on the Nintendo DS.

A simple, intuitive game that grants you a wide degree of freedom to play how you want. Multiplayer is OK but requires a good connection otherwise it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Even the standard ♥♥♥♥♥♥ US west pings will ruin it.

This is the best in the series and given the fact that Sid has his head 500 miles up his ass it's probably going to remain that way.