Recent reviews by Enceladus

very conflicted on RE9. the game is definitely fun and has plenty to like about it, but it also feels like the weakest of the RE Engine games (From RE7 and onward) barring the RE3 Remake.

As per usual with survival horror in general this game is split into different sections that all play and look differently to the last, and the game honestly nails the atmosphere for all of the areas you go through. the issue lies in what is in them.

Puzzle spoilers The puzzles in this game blow. HARD. the main puzzle of the first area is ripped straight out of RE7 in design and barely features any sort of interesting gimmick when looking for the required items. its just grab thing use it here and read a log for the code. most of them dont even feature the second part.

Spoilers for that creepy ass monster from the trailer. The game tries to have a stalker enemy like in past games, but botches it by only having the stalker appear for maybe 15 minutes in a very small and short area before you giving you 2 hours until her next appearance. She also doesnt feel even remotely threatening despite having a genuinely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrifying design cause she is piss easy to shoo away once you're past the intro.

One thing i do really like is how they split grace and leons sections up and how drastically different they feel. Graces sections, as expected have a very RE2 remake feel to them and are more horror focused. it even uses the same style of inventory and health as RE2 remake and RE7. Leon's section are much more action packed and combat heavy, and uses the inventory and health systems of RE4. I will say coming from RE4 Remake, the combat takes a bit of a dive here. It still feels good but its not nearly as interactive or smooth as it is in 4.

Grace however is given the single most overpowered crafting system in the entire series. its genuinely not even close. she can collect blood from around the area and use it to craft everything from ammo to full heals using 1 herb to one shot items that permanently kill whatever its used on with very minimal limit to what you can use it on. By the time i got out of the first section, i had so much ammo and healing items just by looking around the area that every single enemy in the area was long dead and i blitzed past the next with minimal issue. i can count one time i had actually felt like i was in rough shape and it was because i tried to kill this games ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemy. If you play it you'll know exactly what i mean by this. i died a single time as grace throughout my whole playthrough.
Needless to say having such an abundance of resources in a survival horror game kinda defeats the point (i have not done an insanity run yet but that doesn't really change the fact i find this to be a problem).

Story wise, this game is fine. Nothing crazy by RE standards. This series has never been known for its storytelling and thats not changing anytime soon. It has some neat reveals, important franchise developments and some cool sequences but nothing left too crazy an impression on me. Grace as a protagonist is a solid POV from someone who has absolutely no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue how to handle any of the crazy ♥♥♥♥ going, especially compared to Ethan (i like Ethan but the dude kinda just shrugged off the single worst bioweapon in the series, twice). She's a wreck for most of the game, has no idea what the hell is going on but makes some very smart decisions that show her capabilities despite the situation. She has good progression throughout the game and i never found myself being particularly frustrated by her actions with the exception of her insane social anxiety in some parts. Leon is leon, and leon is perfect. He gets some really nice humanization later in the game and is relentlessly funny throughout.

And finally i cannot deny that a lot of this game is kinda just nostalgia bait. Its well done nostalgia bait mind you, but a lot of the interest people like myself are gonna have is about going back to the RPD and Raccoon City, and of course the first inclusion of Leon as a character since RE6. Its a kinda cheap way to drum up hype for a game that as already going to do well just because of the IP its in. This is more of a personal issue rather than something i find to be genuinely wrong with the game itself, but i dont think i'm alone with this. Unless i am, which if thats the case, oh well.
TLDR: Games good, not very scary past the first hour, characters are good, bit of a downgrade from 7, Village, and The Remakes (except RE3). Not the franchise best but definitely an enjoyable entry.

Always follow the voices and shoot the weird body on the ground your team will love you for it

This game had me tearing up in the first 30 minutes

TLDR; Good, Mostly serious story, Good characters, Hilarious new weapons, Amazingly streamlined farming, But a (Currently) lackluster and repetitive endgame, UE5 performance issues, And a somewhat flawed open world.

GOOD: For the first time in like a decade, Gearbox managed to write an actually solid story with some good to even great characters. Returning characters are done with great respect, while not going super overboard with it either. This game doesn't try to pull the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ they did with Maya in BL3, and they seriously cut down on the humor. Whenever there's a serious moment (Which is most of the game surprisingly) They rarely try to make it funny with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ dialogue, the characters actually react to stuff in a way they should instead of pulling out some snarky quip. its good to see.
The gunplay is on par with BL3 (i give that game ♥♥♥♥ but in the place its in today it's a ton of fun), and while i REALLY love BL3's insanely fast paced gameplay, BL4's is perfectly fine and still a blast. Its closer to the speed of BL2.

Obviously farming is the most important aspect in a borderlands game, and they actually managed to improve it GREATLY. Not only are dedicated drops included ON LAUNCH, they added a way to repeatedly farm the same enemy in the same instance without having to save quit for a "fee" (Though you can just quicksell the stuff the boss drops to practically get infinite money without ever having to load out). This feature makes farming so much faster and easier, and it helps that any and all farmable bosses are permanently marked on your map after you find them.
This game also, out of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nowhere, decided to bring back BL1 hybrids back, and it is easily one of the funnest things about this game. If you played BL3 on launch you probably remember how ridiculous torgue weapons were with its sticky nades, now imagine you can get those same sticky nades but on a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SMG, or jakobs revolver, or getting impacts on a maliwan shotgun and basically getting a pocket nuke. its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hilarious.
The games just fun as hell.

BAD: The game isn't perfect obviously, performance is STILL a problem (Though it seems they've managed to improve it by a decent amount already. Still needs work though). The story, while pretty solid this time around unlike in BL3, is pretty long and has a good bit of dialogue (Still much MUCH better than BL3), and the map can be pretty annoying to get around without a mini-map.
Worst of all, the endgame is pretty lackluster. The process of getting to it is tons of fun, but once you breakthrough to the hardest difficulty (UVHM5) it drops off quite a bit. You basically just redo story missions with harder enemies and incredibly intrusive modifiers, and what makes it worse is that gearbox didn't bother to make any changes to the missions, meaning you still need to hear all the dialogue, watch unskippable cutscenes, and do the occaisonal busy work for missions you already played through. If they just made an endless mission grind à la Path of Exile, or at the very least cut down the repetition, it'd be way more enjoyable. BUT i don't see this as a super deal breaker as gearbox has promised a lot of stuff down the line and with what ive seen so far i think they might actually follow through with it

this is my favorite non persona game in the persona series

mithrix is my ♥♥♥♥♥

david vs goliath except david is a twink and the goliath is usually a bigass robot

>be alive
>realize you'll never have an android gf fight through hell to see you
whats even the point

The Good:
Great Gunplay that makes every gun feel fun and impactful.
Genuine Difficulty that is aided by the games slower pace (compared to payday 2, this game still goes a mile a minute sometimes)
Fun heists that aren't absurdly complicated or drawn out
Fun albeit limited build variety
New stealth system is fun

The Bad:
Horrid progression system that limits all player xp gain to annoying, tedious, and boring challenges (that you cant even track in game) that will get old super fast.
No way to play offline, meaning even in solo matches you'll experience Payday's legendary desync and other server issues.
Really REALLY bad economy involving the new C-Stacks currency (how much it costs to get them and how many you need to get the items locked behind them) as well as preset guns costing $10-$20 million.
This one really boring heist mechanic that shows up in half the heists where you need to stand in a bunch of circles for like 10 seconds each.
Genuinely laughable UI that feels more like you're browsing you computers files than going through a menu.

Overall the game is a lot of fun and thankfully overkill seems to be listening and is planning on changing things i listed which is nice, but unfortunately in overkill's overwhelming wisdom they decided to launch the game with missing features that even payday the heist had.

great game but the performance issues make me want to rip my fingers off