Recent reviews by Overlewd

Best of the bunch, leaving the game on a very positive note. Would love more games in this style.

It's $20 for a game with tons of content, so I could never bring myself to press the "no" button despite how annoyed I am at the devs for some of the design decisions they made.

On the artistic side, everything is fantastic. On the combat side, hornet is a joy to play as and everything feels really smooth. The main story bosses (and some optional ones) are absolute cinema and really fun to fight. (Edit after 100%: all the act 3 story bosses excluding the very final boss were awful, which was a rather disappointing turn. The final fight was back to really fun again, however.)

On the game design side, oh boy. The game feels very spiteful and intentionally frustrating in all the wrong places. They have toned down some of the environmental hazards doing 2 damage and lowered the cost of all the things that cost money (which is most things, including benches and fast travel points), but a lot of the problems remain. Lots of enemy gauntlets, lots of enemy gauntles before bosses (unforgivable timewaste, imo), awful runbacks, bosses that spam summons, "bosses" that just spam projectiles and run away from you with an overinflated health pool, mandatory speedrun platforming sections, etc. Around every corner, the game feels like it's trying really hard to wrestle the fun away from you. There are also far too many mandatory (as in, required to unlock story content) breakable walls and hidden passages in this sequel, a lot of which are inadequately conveyed - you won't find them by having a good look at everything, you will have to go out of your way to obsessively check every corner, or look it up.

All in all, the game experience is intensely frustrating. If the good parts weren't as good as they are, I would have dropped the game long ago. As it was, I suffered through the ♥♥♥♥ sadistic design of certain areas and encounters to get to the good parts. Example: major story boss, really cool design, really satisfying fight, but every time you die you have to do a long ass parkour in a floor-is-lava area that does 2 masks of damage and has strategically placed flying enemies that spawn exactly right to bump into you as you try to parkour. Why? Because ♥♥♥♥ you, you're enjoying the game too much. TC didn't notice that even From Software have moved away from boss runbacks with Elden Ring while they were sitting in their basement developing. (Edit, this particular example has since been patched to be much easier, but there is a MUCH MUCH worse runback later in the game, so point remains valid.) Even bosses that don't have a runback often have some long ass intro animation that they have to play out in full every time you make an attempt, which is bizarre to me because they didn't do that in the original game - you watch the intro once, next time you try, the boss is just there. Why make it worse?

TLDR: Gorgeous game with tons of content for price, but feels tedious, spiteful, and frustrating in many places, which REALLY dampens the enjoyment of the experience. Suggest anyone looking to play who isn't a complete masochist consider installing some mods to fix some of the artificial difficulty and tedium.

So far having tons of fun, I missed being able to telekinesis objects around since Control. Everything feels very responsive, and terrain destruction to stun people is a fun gimmick.

Major piece of feedback from these first few hours: in a game that's based around such fast paced movement and combat, having enemies that can freeze you in place is an instant turnoff. It's a neat idea to theme enemies around environments but freezing isn't it, not in a game like this, it feels awful. Maybe a temporary speed/fire rate/ADS/cooldown or something debuff instead?

Really fun addicting gameplay.

Awful, outdated and exceptionally greedy feeling gacha system. Makes hoyo and other modern gacha devs look like saints by comparison.

Worst of all, the servers are still dying daily. Constant interruptions to gameplay with disconnects because every time you blink in the game it has to check with the server first. I can forgive the disgusting gacha because the game is really fun, but if you're gonna be so greedy at least have the decency to have the servers run properly.

My Time at Portia with furries and diving. So far so good.

Edit: After some more hours of gameplay, caution that the game is still very noticeably early access, there is still lots of clearly unfinished things and common instances of bugs/jank/unintuitive gameplay and controls. I am cautiously optimistic because of recent updates and the game undeniably has a good foundation to build on. Portia was also similarly lacking in EA and turned out great by the end.

This game is truly a gem for everyone who enjoys puzzles. Note actual playtime at review is about double what's reported and there's still a lot to do.

I like many others was concerned going in that the RNG mechanics would be overwhelmingly frustrating and prevent solving certain puzzles even after you have a good idea how to go about doing them. This is, of course, present, but was not anywhere near as annoying as I envisioned - the consistent flow of permanent upgrades and sheer number of leads you are pursuing at any one time for most of the game means you are rarely stuck waiting for just 1 specific combo to progress something somewhere. Furthermore, there are a lot of RNG manipulation and bad-RNG-safeguards you unlock and figure out as you go through. The content just keeps going and going and once you "beat" the game and see the credits it feels like you just finished the tutorial.

To the devs, please please speed up some of the menus and animations. It was cool and immersive seeing the terminal do the dial up sound and do an animation to connect to the network but it's just far to long to watch every single time, especially after a certain permanent upgrade makes you do it basically every run. I don't need to see the animation and popup for every item I pick up every time either. I also think it'd be nice to just be able to access the notes we've seen and (especially) books we've read from some kind of journal in-game, there is too much information to commit to memory or write down in bulletpoints so everyone will be screenshotting it anyway.

If you try to play the game "well", it is far from relaxing, and very quickly devolves into a chore simulator.

I enjoyed my time with the first few passengers but after those first few none of them did anything for me in terms of interesting stories or emotional impact. On the whole it feels like for a game where you are supposed to interact with the characters there is very little you can do to interact with them aside from the scripted conversations after you've done the next chore. Between the drop in quality/likeability of the characters (or perhaps it was the novelty wearing out) and the chores getting worse I dropped the game, don't feel like picking it back up a couple months later still.

Game has too many problems to deserve an overwhelmingly positive imo.

Really satisfying and fun game, vibes straight out of my childhood imagination. Runs great and all controls and animations feel very responsive and smooth.

Two complaints so far, controller support for interactions with the menu feel really jank and bug out all the time, and none of the powerups I've seen so far were particularly interesting, although for the latter I think I may just need to play a bit more to unlock some of the higher rarity ones.

Meticulously prepare for conquest, making sure everything is perfect.
2 minutes real-time after starting my conquest, get war declared on me by my uncle I granted independence to in my previous life, my allies request my support in 3 separate other wars, the pope demands my help in a crusade, and a sudden plague wipes out half my court. 10/10 would save scum again.

This game is a hilarious conversation topic, especially when you talk to people who don't know what it's like. Something something incest something something killing babies.

The actual part where you kill monsters is great, improvements over World in the combat departments for sure.

Absolutely atrocious menus, maps, can't find anything in this game, playing co-op with friends and not just randos is a massive chore. The UI for anything outside of the actual combat (which hasn't changed) is bad. NPCs move about sometimes, which I suppose is for immersion, but why can't I talk to them while they are moving? Have to sit there and wait for them to get back to their designated spot to start or end a quest they have for me, unfathomably terrible design.

Optimisation is bad, everyone knows, I can just about get a stable 60 everywhere with Performance DLSS on Medium settings (3080 lol). But while I can live with those frames, dear lord SO MANY GRAPHICAL GLITCHES. Not an hour passes in this game before I experience a horrible jarring graphical glitch, parts of my body going missing, monster fur stretching into a 100kmx100km rectangle covering the screen, weird white countours, flashbangs on mission start animation, some of them completely gamebreaking. I experienced a couple crashes, and my friend crashes at least once every couple hours. I could forgive bad optimization but these insane CONSTANT graphical glitches and crashes are way beyond any acceptable line.