Recent reviews by MatteCrystal

Can't end my turn to finish tutorial. Instead the only option is to restart the turn. There is no play possible that would kill the enemy commander in one turn.

Games only been out for 3 years so maybe my review is a bit harsh.

This game is amazing

UI in this game, doubly so for controller players it shockingly bad and frustrating to use and navigate around. For instance your character has multiple moves they can choose from a list, multiple enemies they can target, and a special resource called focus to increase hit chance. Every time you start a round your character targets the first enemy by default, and your 1st move is selected. (nothing wrong with this). Now, lets say you select the 3rd enemy, and your 2nd move, and you use 2 focus.

well here's what happens. first, the moment you use focus your players move menu will shrink down to just icons so you can no longer read it. There is absolutely no reason for this since it's not like it's making room for any other ui elements. Once the menu is hidden like this it's not clear what move you have selected, making it easy to get into situations where your questioning, "wait did i apply focus before selecting my move?". Well at least you can hit the back button to unhide the menu again. Except be careful because doing so will change your move selection back to your first move. But even more infuriating, is the second you clicked a to use your ability, it will change the selection back to the first enemy, remove your focus, but keep the 2nd move selected. So now you need to remember to re select the correct enemy a second time and re apply you'r 2 focus in order to complete your move. This make it extremely easy to accidently target the wrong enemy, or fail to apply focus. This is made worse by the fact that focus is a rare resource often used in important life or death situations. The number of times I've gone to attack an enemy with focus, only to fail to apply it, or worse yet remember to re apply it but select the wrong move because the game likes to randomly change your selected move is multiple.

Secondly, lots of info is poorly conveyed or not conveyed at all. So info seems impossible to view unless you use a mouse, but even with a mouse there are bits of information that are not conveyed at all. Take this other example. I chose to play a herbalist since it sounded like a medic and starts with a cure ability. This being a turn based game, wasting even a single move to effectivly do nothing is extremely bad. So while in game, if you hover over cure, there is zero description unlike some other moves. It just says cure. Ok well i tried to use it to heal and alley, it did nothing and completely wasted my turn. Extremely annoying, the only silver lining, I had a suspicion it might only be for healing status aliments, though it would of been really nice to know that before hand. Ok fine, lesson learned moving on right? But later in the game in an intense boss fight were one of my characters is nearly dead, he get's an aliment that called unwell that reduces vatality by 30 points. That sounds really bad, so instead of using my powerful mage attack move to kill a powerful enemy that's about to do damage i decide to use cure on the ally with this aliment. Excepts guess what, It does nothing, becuase apparently cure doesn't even heal all stat aliments just some of them. But again 0 indication in game about what those might be. And because this is a turn based game with each encounter only afew rounds back an fourth, trying to take time to test out stuff like this manaully to naturally increase you're knowledge of what it does and doesn't work on is extremely disadvantagous. But even if you wanted to play devils advocate and say it's intended game design and they want you to discover that naturally. Well at the very least that should be conveyed in the non existant description for cure. something like "may cure some stat aliments but not all". BTW, turns out that aliment I had was a curse, had to look it up online. Zero indication anywhere in ui that that was the case.

I'll end with this though don't be fooled there are even more ui issues. There are various tile effects that can be applied naturally via weather or abilities. But there is zero indication of what they do. For example there is a wet tile. what does it do? who know, it doesn't seem like casting lightning does extra damage to people on wet squares. Maybe it makes you slower and hence lower in move order? But idk for sure. But standing it it evenetually will make a wet status effect show up. does that mean it does nothing untill your marked wet? Also i could be misremembering this part but i'm pretty sure despite a wet alert showing up, there actually is no status aliment indicator above your character portrat, so i don't think it's a true status aliment the way other aliments exist. However, this also makes it extemey unclear when you character is wet or not. And this is just one of multiple tiles, but as of yet it's unclear to me what any of the different tiles i come across due since they seem to be less obvious stat changes.

The game otherwise is actually good and i loved the first game, but actually WTF is this interface. It completely ruins the game for no reason, an 95% of it seems like common sense alterations could completely solve the issue.

Great game so far, controller support is way better than it ever was in POE 1. The biggest factor preventing me from really getting into POE 1 was no wasd and controller support. They eventually added controller support but in my opinion it sucked. POE 2 fixes all that and feels great.

Extremely good, very surprising/unique. And I'm in the credits!

Why the actual F does target corrupt not work at all. I'm consistently have 2-3 ticks of corruption each round despite all my front towers being set to target corrupt. but 80% of the time they just ignore corrupt enemies and just target normal enemies. So finally I'm fed up and decided to make a bunker of 8 Guns and 1 flamethrower in the middle. All set to target corrupt. This is far more than the groups of 2-3 guns i used before. The moment I do this these tower completely fail to shoot down even a single corrupt enemy. Now I have 5 ticks of corruption I need to deal with.

This is just infuriatingly stupid design. It could be a good game but putting in a targeting feature like this only to have it be completely ignored is absurd.

Of all the paragon remakes this one is the most promising and best captures the feeling of the original paragon. Movement and impact of attacks is top notch. Fault and Overprime (the other paragon remakes) have a degree of choppiness to their movement and or a lack of proper impact when attacking so this is a major plus for pred.

It has launched with a lot of items to give you a good opportunity to make a vareiy of fun and interesting builds plus more are sure to be added over time. The starting roster of 20 strikes a great balance giving multiple choices for each role without overwhelming new players. Adding more characters is a double edged sword because one one hand more heroes is great but it also means players need to have a better understanding of more characters in order to properly strategies and adapt their playstyle. That said The plans seem to be to release a new hero each 1 to 1 and 1/2 months for the next 6 or so heros so the roster should expand at a good rate for awhile.

Furthermore, the second character planed to be released is supposed to be a fully original creation from the pred team which is great news as it proves they have the skills and talent to expand beyond the original paragon roster.

It appears they've taken there time refining and streamlining development so that this EA will be very content filled and exciting to participate in with lots planned in a short window.

As for bugs, crashes, and performance. I've literally experienced none. It runs perfect, not a single disconnect either.

I highly recommend getting this game in EA. It's highly polished atm and due to it being a moba now is the best time to jump in since the meta and competitive level of play will be higher if you wait.

Default skin type has literally no visual or audio feedback. Audio can be forgiven as that's a more complex feature that would need to be fine tuned for each community made song. But it's baffling and infuriating that there is literally no audio feedback when you hit a key. It makes the game just feel broken and unplayable.

Yes you can get other skins from the community but the fact that this is the default first impression you let people have of the game is shocking. Furthermore, the majority of the community skins also don't have visual feedback when you hit a key so searching for a good one is very hard.

I literally searched through every skin available on the workshop only one met the criteria I would consider acceptable. Which for me would be a basic rectangular 7 key skin with the color scheme of (1,2,1,3,1,2,1) or (1,2,1,2,1,2,1) where each number represents a different color. This sort of color scheme matches the general layout used in Max Respect V which is probably thee most direct competitor with this style of rhythm game. And of course it the last requirement is a satisfying key press visual effect.

Unfortunately of the entire community library of skins only one met this criteria even it has a flaw. That is then when you hit a key there is a visual saying how well you're timing of a key hit was (perfect, good, etc.) Except this skin I have instead used words like (cool, groovy, fantastic) which I find a bit annoying especially because in the after song review it will show how many (perfect, good, etc.) hits you got. Hence what you see in game doesn't match what the review screen shows.

The skin system may be flexible for moders to make a all in one skin but it's not modular at all and that makes it largely suck in reality. Instead of forcing me to install an entire skin that changes key shape, color, effects, key dashboard style, home screen style and all it would be far better if the skin system was setup in a way that let you decided what you wanted to use. For example there was maybe 5 other skins that almost met my criteria but they had dumb key color layouts like (1,2,1,1,1,2,1) for example. This seems like a feature I should be able to set and have all skins I use adapt to the layout I want instead of forcing a particular color scheme.

Also there was one skin that I think had a really cool visual key press visual effect. Unfortunately it also had the terrible color layout. But I don't see why I shouldn't be able to use that key hit effect with whatever other skin I want. This lack of customization is just terrible.

Steam deck review

DRM is so bad that I cant even get the game to work anymore even when I am online. I played all of 40 minutes on my first playthrough. Put game in sleep mode then the next day tried to play while in car without WIFI. Game just froze when trying to load a song. Stupid and annoying DRM requiring me to be online to play. But that was expected. So i exit the game an played something else.

However, later in the day when I was home with wifi connection and tried launching the game. I proceded to just kick me out after booting up. I then tried again and it kept giving me some failed to login retry error. No mater how many times I clicked retry it wouldn't work. I quit the game and relaunched multiple times getting this same error. After about 10 mins and 5 or 6 complete reboot attempts as well as turning my wifi on and off, I finally got it to login. The DRM literally kills this game.

This company doesn't deserve your money or respect. If you can wait I would hold off and wait for other DRM free alternatives of this game to release. ;)

@The developer.

You need to drop all further development and fix the god awful mouse acceleration that is forced on. It's literally ruining this game and has been an issue for years. Not only is mouse acceleration terrible in general but this specific implementation is particularly terrible. I've never experienced such poorly implemented mouse acceleration. But regardless If anything mouse acceleration should be off by default especially when it comes to games.

I'm not changing my review until this is fixed. It's utterly ridiculous that this is still an issue.