Recent reviews by toastypoast

This game is an insanely frustrating masterpiece.

During your first 20 hours, even basic aspects of gameplay will force you to google, browse forums, and watch video tutorials. Even a few hundred hours in, you'll be learning new shortcuts and features.

Once you begin to understand how to manipulate the economy and diplomacy, though? The game physically can't stop you from stomping the universe. Mining operations become trading operations become stations become fully self-sufficient supply chains become shipyards. Going from a nobody in a small fighter to the owner of an interstellar empire is satisfying, especially because you'll earn it all piece-by-piece. The early game is characterized by learning difficult systems, and the endgame is all about using what you've learned to fund never-ending wars that you yourself can dogfight in and call audibles on the fly.

If you master the vanilla gameplay, there are some really compelling mods out there that rebalance the difficulty so that a new playthrough feels fresh.

Basically: do you hate yourself enough to have the time of your life? If so, your wife will threaten to sue you for loss of consortium. Do I hear birds chirping outside? I thought it was midnight? Too bad. Listening to Germans deliver the worst voice acting performances in gaming history is better than sleep.

Buy it.

P.S. Cheesy early game tip if you don't like missions? Buy advanced satellites from equipment docks and sell them to wharfs/shipyards to fund your first few miners and traders. Get out there!

If you like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or, for those unfamiliar, walking simulator-esque looter-shooter games that require careful inventory management and feature survival elements, you'll get enjoyment out of this title that's about worth the pricetag. I do have to issue a bunch of caveats, though--there are countless bugs, and several parts of the gameplay are kind of tedious.

Disclaimer: I have only fully played through S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and I only know what Veteran difficulty is like. The gunplay is good. There's a bit of aim sway. You can lean with E and Q like Tarkov/Deadside/PUBG/Siege. Healing is blocked behind either an inventory opening animation or a healing quickslot animation, and your inventory closes when you are damaged, so you can't ever just mindlessly binge consumables to get back to full health: there is a real sense of danger when outside of cover. You strafe more slowly while leaning. There is equipment degradation. Headshots are by far and away the only way to deal damage on the hardest difficulty, although I expect this extends to the lower difficulties. Overall, the shooter gameplay loop is solid. I do have a bit of a gunplay issue, though: I CAN'T SEE PERFECTLY IN THE DARK AND I CAN'T SEE THROUGH FINE METAL MESH. MY ENEMIES CAN SEE PERFECTLY THROUGH ALL OBJECTS THEY CAN SHOOT THROUGH. Basically, I am afraid to peek from basically any object without actively thinking about how much I'm going to have to pay on armor repair. Speaking of which:

The economy is rather frustrating. Equipment repairs eat up a sizable chunk of your gains on any given expedition, which makes you feel like you'd be better on the Mainland letting uncle sam stimulate your prostate (lovingly) as he takes your taxes from you. Your build in this game results largely from your armor which contains your relics, so it's not as though you can skimp on armor to save tons on repair costs. If you don't have a thunderberry relic (legendary stamina recovery rate relic), map traversal is much, much too slow. It's not like you'll forgo this just to be economical. Consumables for healing are abundant, but money is not. Maybe make consumables higher in monetary value? Plenty can be found around the Zone, and selling your excess would be a nice way to guarantee cash without fiddling around with too many heavy guns. It's seriously depressing to play without abusing autosaves and then get hammered with a $30k bill for your armor after earning $42k on said expedition. It's also seriously depressing to play while abusing autosaves to guarantee your armor takes little/no durability damage. In either case, you're just farting. You're farting altogether too damn much. You lie on your back and bring your knees to your chest, but no relief ever comes. Just more gas. No matter how hard you squeeze your abdominal muscles, there will always be more farts. This gameplay loop feels like gas pains. YES, I LIKE TO FART, BUT I DON'T WANT SO MUCH FART SAUCE THAT IT HURTS. I LIKE GRINDING MONEY TO COVER MAINTENANCE COSTS, BUT, LIKE... LET ME HAVE ANY BUYING POWER AT THE END OF THE DAY, YEAH? Whatever. I'm over it. We're over it. The one good thing about the expense of equipment maintenance is that it encourages you to intelligently plan bringing the weakest viable gear and/or saving your personal gear for important missions/activities. Sometimes it's fun to live off the land and use only skif's pistol/found guns. Either way, though, remember: ARMOR REPAIR. YOUR BUTTHOLE. ARMOR REPAIR. ETC.

Fighting mutant creatures almost ever is heavily disincentivized: they have far too much health and eat up tons of ammo (even with all headshots), but they universally offer 0 loot. Humanoid enemies, by comparison, require only a few headshots and will offer tons of loot. This is a shame, too, as the mutants are, for the most part, pretty fun to fight. I think mutants should drop consumables that offer compensation for the bullets they take to kill. High-level mutants potentially offering relics would make them super engaging, but it's not the case in vanilla gameplay. I enjoy fighting them, but I often find that the best solution in a game where I'm constantly strapped for cash that it's just not worth my time to enjoy combating them. I often just run until I'm no longer in combat and drop an autosave unless I have a shotgun on hand.

The presentation of the plot is often pretty awkward. The writing is passable, but often a little confusing if you're not already versed in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. lore. I'm only getting a clear sense of who I am, what my motivations are, and what motivates each faction in my second playthrough, which isn't exactly a glowing review of how well-presented the story is. The voice acting is usually downright horrible. I think the developers might not have a good sense for how authentic English sounds when delivered with conviction. Either that or they're aiming for campy? In either case, the voice acting really took me out of the game with the tonal mismatch from heavy realism and darker themes. The game's plot feels thoroughly Russian. Each of the factions is evil in proportion with its level of power. There's no single group of guys who has beyond a certain threshold of power that doesn't questionably misuse it. There's an element of realism in this. It does, however, mean that your choices often feel like choosing what you feel is the lesser evil. If you like this, great! If fiction is your escape from reality, uhhhhhhh... middle finger! The noosphere, this shamanic woo-woo ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ field force cradling Earth that basically represents all of Life's shared consciousness is often used as an excuse to introduce some pretty lazy macguffins into the plot as well, but this is generally to be expected from a video game story. It results in a pretty cute mythos about individuals' right to sanctuary from authority. They also offer plenty of endings, so you do feel a good amount of agency in your choices during the story.

All in all, I would say you should pick this up only if you understand that combat is not constant, you must be vigilant with your resources, and you will be exploring a dangerous territory at all times. If you like that experience, don't pass this up. It delivers, overall. It's just liable to drop your guns through the floor or break questlines or break enemy AI or blah or blah.

THERE IS A LOT OF JANK. SAVE FREQUENTLY AND EXPECT SOME ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. ENEMIES HAVE X-RAY VISION AND ARE VERY WELL ENDOWED. SQUEEZE TIGHTLY. BITE THIS PILLOW. Carefully study weight:price ratios. PROSPER.

Or just visit base frequently idk

ok bye playthrough 2 time ok bye

The central gameplay loop of V Rising is pretty interesting and satisfying: acquire resources, upgrade your gear and castle, hunt new bosses to unlock new spells, abilities, forms, and recipes, and repeat. If you're willing to tolerate a grind or want to play offline with custom settings that reduce the grind, you'll enjoy the gameplay.

Some have likened it to Diablo or PoE. Given that it's WASD, I'm not sure I really see the comparison-- the combat is a little more technical and skillful than most ARPGs. The bosses usually require good timing and footwork and a focus on mitigating your own greed if you're properly/under-leveled. It's more like a Hades or Heroes of Hammerwatch type game minus the roguelike run-based upgrades. You have abilities on cooldown, like D2 or D3, but precision and timing matter, unlike D2, D3, or the first 90 hours of PoE. I love D2, but the difficulty is much more gear-based than skill-based. Most of my buddies are struggling with the late game bosses while gently overleveled. The first several bosses will be rather easy if you're familiar with Dark Souls type patience, but the latter bosses become genuinely interesting and require some practice and planning to take down. They're easily the best part of the game.

V Rising is entertaining, but you need to understand that a given playthrough (in online or on default server settings) is 90% grind and 10% gameplay.

The first 10 hours of a playthrough communicate this poorly: they're consistently fun. You're upgrading your gear and abilities with solid pacing, and it takes an hour or less to acquire the resources you need to upgrade that gear once you unlock the needed recipes. Each time you acquire a new ability, it's fairly likely you'll feel significantly more powerful and more able to collect the resources you like without worrying about the ads guarding them. The most frustrating grind during this stage of play is acquiring enough stone and wood to wall in your castle to maintain a decent little workshop while keeping out the sunlight. Eventually, each tier upgrade for loot is much grindier than this.

Once you're about 20 hours in, you have some of, if not THE, best abilities in the game. Bosses, at that point, essentially only guard recipes. Once you get to the second-to-last tier of weapons and armor, the resource grind slows to a halt. You have to run the most efficient routes for hours to outfit yourself, much less a team. The novelty and excitement of getting what were previously rare items totally fades by the time you finally get a tiny stat upgrade. Most of my friends lost interest here, and I was left playing the game largely solo. It's fair to say that a good number of people that would have enjoyed this game if it were setup like a roguelike became sick of the grind:boss fight ratio. When the progression still feels fun, the bosses will be a bit underwhelming. When the bosses start getting fun, the progression feels underwhelming (grind! Are you tallying how many times I've said the word yet?).

I think that grindy games are fun if you spend no more than half of your playtime grinding, and if that grinding presents varied areas, enemies, and experiences that are roughly equally viable. This isn't that. There's often 1 or 2 areas that are by far the best for acquiring your most needed resource, leading either to boring repetitiveness or acceptance of subpar farming routes in a game that demands a bunch of farming. The scourgestone/dark silver grind is really frustrating, especially because the end game forge requires the equivalent of 3 tool's/weapon's worth of it before you can actually make the tools/weapons. You'll run the Haunted Forest and Dunley Monastery a dozen times to get what you need. You'll be able to farm these areas like the back of your hand. The challenge, novelty, and intrigue will be gone.

On the business side, it seems Stunlock isn't really to be trusted as a developer, either. They've abandoned 2 different Early Access titles already, and they've added expensive "supporter" DLCs to this game without having released a major update in 10 months. This is good news in that old guides still apply if you're looking to learn the optimal routes and strategies in this game. This is bad news if you're expecting this game to become much more than it already is. At the very least, this game is already well worth $20 as it stands.

Pros:
-Satisfying combat with gradually more challenging bosses
-Good upgrade system tied to gear instead of XP (somebody else can grind for you if you don't have time and just wanna do the fun parts)
-Starts out feeling like a Souls title in combat
-Ends up making you feel incredibly powerful with proper cooldown management in combat
-New animal forms to help you navigate the map
-Castle offers more and more functionality
-Lets you run your own server with custom settings to tweak resource and combat difficulty
-Servants can farm a little for you while you're offline

Cons:
-While you do unlock new mechanics to mitigate grind, perfectly using all of them still leaves you feeling slower to acquire resources than you were in the first 10 hours
-Eventually, entire play sessions will be spent grinding. Is the combat fun enough for you to offset this?
-Unlikely to receive many major updates
-If your friends are reasonable, responsible, employed adults, they'll lose interest
-Bosses are much more fun solo than with friends even though this is a multiplayer-focused game
-Can't fast travel while carrying anything important, and you'll travel to the same areas over and over and over. Game would still be painfully grindy if you could fast travel anywhere you wanted anytime you wanted, so it adds insult to injury.
-Game promises you a bat form only to reveal you can't use it while carrying anything important, making it worse than the teleportation network available at the beginning of the game in most scenarios
-Failing to plan around the day/night cycle can result in boss/grinding attempts interrupted or postponed
-Have to log on consistently to make the most of your servants
-Ideal castle locations will be overcrowded on online. You'll have to build yours in butthole town, approximately seven years from all your ideal farming spots.

My suggestion? Pick this game up. The best moments are too entertaining to pass up what it already offers for $20. But don't play online. Play a private server with custom settings with friends or solo. Make resources twice as abundant and recipes half as expensive (Honestly? Maybe even make recipes a third or fourth as expensive). Don't touch combat difficulty (make it harder if you're on a 2nd playthrough or perfectionistic: some of these bosses are so well-designed that they're worth learning to no-hit). Enable the fast travel network to be always active, even if you're carrying "cannot be teleported" items (maybe put this one off for a second playthrough if you love the feeling of exploration). If you really must play it in its full, grindy glory, your second playthrough will always be waiting for you.

I'm a little confused at the praise this game is receiving. If it weren't a Star Wars title, I'm not sure it would have received much attention at all. Nothing it does is original, and the mechanics it borrows it often misunderstands.

Do you want platforming and exploration? Go play an Uncharted or Tomb Raider title-- those do it better.

Do you want soulslike combat? Go play a FromSoft title-- those do it better.

Do you want a story? Play a Supergiant or Telltale or etc. title-- ibid. You get what I'm saying here.

Do you want puzzles? No. No, you don't. These aren't puzzles, they're waiting simulators.

The visuals are nice, yeah, but they're accentuating a largely empty, painfully linearized game world. It doesn't help that the poor TAA makes the game look like it's covered in jelly. Or that the texture streaming is so poor that performance on my system is largely the same on ultra and lowest settings given this one bottleneck. The performance is usually pretty solid, but occasionally drops down to 30 or so frames per second. 30FPS isn't unforgivable if consistent, but the switch between 90 (above what my brain can perceive as a stable video instead of discrete pictures) and 30 (below what my brain can perceive as a stable video instead of discrete pictures) so often is jarring.

The platforming is frustratingly clunky and long given that it also presents no challenge. This is especially frustrating if what separates your spawn point from a new miniboss enemy type you're trying to learn is a minute of repetitive, braindead platforming.

The combat is floaty and awkward. They borrowed lock-on and parry mechanics from Sekiro, but set you against enemies that are frustratingly easy if dodged and boringly difficult if parried: a parry does the same damage as a regular attack, so why would you not just dodge and spam attacks? What's the reward for putting yourself in harm's way? The highest difficulty combats this by making you 1 or 2 shot by everything in the game. Instead of having protracted fights where your reaction time is being tested, you're often easily dodging the same, generic attacks repeatedly. If you do die, it's because of one or two mistakes, which are understandable to make, as the biggest opponent is zoning out mid-boss. If you win, you don't feel any sense of accomplishment: the AI is laughably manipulable and rewards extreme patience (basically, it rewards the most boring way to play the game). You're shoehorned into taking your time and being bored or playing it like Bloodborne and being bothered that the enemy movesets demonstrate none of the mechanical difficulty of Bloodborne. They created difficulty in essentially the exactly wrong way for a soulslike title: highly lethal enemies with bad AI, strangely timed and overly-long iframes, and boring supplementary abilities. At its worst, it's a janky mess. At its best, the game is playing itself in your hands. No-win scenario, here.

The force powers have long enough startup frames that they're usually just a liability in combat. These could have provided extra flavor in group fights like signs from the Witcher 3, but they end up being more trouble than they're worth, and push you back toward generic dodge to enemy side, strike; repeat tactics. I can't say this enough: the most effective way to play is the most boring way. Sacrificing efficiency for variety isn't an adequately rewarding playstyle, either.

The leveling system is largely not impactful. The new abilities are often too slow to be useful. Back to dodge, attack, dodge, attack.

The game map pretends to be varied, branching paths. In the first ten minutes, you'll be impressed with the design studying the map. Later, you'll realize it's actually deceptively linear. The incentive to explore? Cosmetics. Half of which you'll barely notice because the camera does not often focus on your lightsaber. The more noticeable cosmetics are often just retextures of the same generic outfits. Occasionally, the end of a 2-minute-long optional path rewards you with a force echo that gives you 2 lines of wooden dialogue and a codex entry. Who enjoys this?

The story is predictable and forgettable. The characters do not demonstrate meaningful growth, nor do they give me a reason to care about their struggle. The number of cliches in the first 30 minutes alone get the point across: they're going to abuse Hollywood-style visuals as an excuse to deliver cheap one-liners and generic scenarios. There's not a single storytelling device you will find in this game that you don't find used elsewhere with some genuine passion:

1. Coworker you don't care about who sacrifices himself for you after you've known him for about 10 minutes to set the tone (At least I had time to get to know Jackie from Cyberpunk, so I cared a bit about his demise).
2. surprise rescuer who inexplicably won't help you with her use of the force so that you get to remain the story's central macguffin (Zed from BL1 doesn't overstay his welcome, disarms your expectations with humor and charm, and subtly acknowledges his place as a storytelling device)
3. co pilot who exists to exist and is rude but warms up to you over time to give you a sense that these static characters aren't static (Joker from the Mass Effect series is a fully-fleshed out human being with his own traumas and side stories).
4. Hologram of a deceased jedi who provides you with a wild goose chase for the sake of padding the story with visually distinct areas that ultimately are ONLY distinct in visuals and not actually much varied in enemy types or platforming (Avallac'h from the Witcher 3 starts out this way, but eventually becomes a complex character within the story with difficult to discern motives)
5. A protagonist who is intentionally written bereft of personality so you can project yourself onto him instead of caring about him (Doomguy from Doom 2016 and Eternal has barely any voice lines at all, but is characterized wonderfully through body language and choices alone, and serves as a great power fantasy type protagonist for the exact demographic of the Doom franchise)

None of the characters are people with genuine motives. They're cliched storytelling devices. Yes, this is often largely to be expected from a video game, but most video games don't take themselves so seriously in terms of narrative if they're this shamefully written. The tone and what's actually presented clash horrifically.

None of this even mentions that if you were born sometime in the last hundred years you know fully well that Cal Who Cares does not stop the Empire: Vader's two children do with the help of a random smuggler. Why are we here? This purposelessness further saps your interest from a story that was already not worth telling.

One of the problems AAA games face right now is that they're on rigid, pre-planned development and marketing cycles. This often means that time spent on one game mechanic is, by necessity, time taken away from fleshing out others. Any AAA game like this that tries to be a jack of all trades usually ends up feeling hopelessly shallow in all of them, and this is one such example.

I got this game for $5. Somehow still not worth it. If you enjoy video games casually, by all means, enjoy this game. There's fun to be had in it. But, if you've played over 1000 hours of FromSoft titles? If you're used to games that can weave great storytelling into compelling mechanics? If you liked the crisp, tight platformers of the early 2000s? You might want to give this one a pass. It's just not very good at anything it tries, and this will lead you to endless comparisons of more fun games. Your mind will wander to those games like a hapless husband considering pulling the trigger on his seven year itch remembering the one that got away. Go play those games, instead.

Despite a rocky start, I do think overall that I can recommend the game. I'm sure you've already heard this game's praises sung to the high heavens, and I mostly agree that this format for a Soulslike adds some fresh gameplay loops and design elements (if you're not just sick of BoTW style gameplay overall at this point), but this review begins on what we all probably expected: Elden Ring unfortunately continues a trend in FromSoft's lacking PC optimization. What I didn't necessarily expect, though, is that the entire FromSoft formula would begin to feel stale smack dab in the middle of their open world magnum opus.

Let's start with the buggy bits.
If I don't play in HDR, the flickering is seizure-inducing. The game is locked to 60FPS with no ultrawide support, as is standard fare for a FromSoft title, a standard they should have done away with about six years ago since the release of Dark Souls 3. Nobody needs this game to run at a consistent 144 frames to enjoy its visuals and combat, but you definitely shouldn't be dropping under 20FPS each time you fight a large enemy type in the open world. Tabbing back into the game or entering new areas are very likely to cause crashes. Given a few months, I think about 3/10ths of us will be able to play the game stably without crashes or constant visual artifacts. Many never got DS3 to stop frame stuttering or flickering. It's implicitly what you're signing up for when you buy a FromSoft game on the platform they understand least.

Not all of my gripes are purely technical, either. This game's mechanics represent a pretty aggressive return to form to DS3 style combat. The pacing is slower than Bloodborne, and attacks do not seem to track as aggressively. Many enemy types can be stunlocked until death. Giant types can still be cheesed by placing your forehead firmly in their taint and mashing R1. Beast types can still be cheesed by magnetizing yourself to their ass and mashing R1.

This design philosophy was neat when it posed novel questions that demanded strategic answers:
-Should I kite and bait attacks that have long recovery frames?
-Should I stay close, dodge through attacks instead of around them, and retaliate during enemy recovery frames?
-Where do I stand relative to the foe if I want to be closest to safety when he starts an attack?
-How many hits can I land before greed gets me smacked upside the face?
-What's the proper balance between time spent positioning and time spent attacking?

The first 200 or so hours playing a FromSoft game, you're answering these questions (and many more) for yourself in your head whether you realize it or not about loads of different enemy types. Being able to rely on this library of info too much can make a new experience seem less fresh. Most enemies in Elden Ring fall too easily when years of fighting these enemy types makes you quickly and accurately sort new foes into schemas you've built playing FromSoft titles. It's even worse when entire animations are reused from previous games.

You might say "of course that's the case, it's another FromSoft title; all of their games follow this formula."

Sekiro used many of the game mechanics from their previous titles, but managed to present a completely new experience that had its own distinct learning curve. This made the process of learning a new, but barely different take on the Souls formula incredibly rewarding. Once again, you're posing questions to yourself about a novel stimulus and coming up with answers through your play. You can even manually control the difficulty two ways:
-Giving Kuro his charm back in the beginning of the game allows chip damage if you don't deflect perfectly. "The path of further hardships." Gives a percentage boost to xp gained. Can disable but not reenable.
-Ringing the bell demon increases enemy health and damage. Enemies use the improved loot table of the next playthrough here and now. Can be toggled at will.

A second playthrough is night and day, even if choosing both bell demon and path of further hardships, which I highly recommend on an NG0 playthrough if you've beaten it before. In my eyes, the game demands to be played this way. The process of achieving mastery is what makes a difficult experience enjoyable.

This presents a pretty bad market splitting problem. Compared to a Souls title, hardly anybody wanted to play Sekiro, because you'd only do so if you already had FromSoft experience and craved dex build meets rhythm game: no strength weapons to stunlock big baddies, no shields for braindead mode; no magic for permanently kiting. You face enemies head on, deflect with perfect success to avoid guard breaks, and apply constant pressure to maintain your enemy's posture bar. You'd only want to play Sekiro if playing each Souls game using the build featuring the highest number of decisions per second had already gotten a bit boring to you. Otherwise, the game would seem pretty unforgiving. It's hard to recommend to a newcomer, but great for me.

Should From cater to veterans and make something engaging, or refine the basic mechanics they've honed for the last 13 years, water them down a little, and try to sell the product to as many people as possible? Unfortunately, you can't do both. After loving what Sekiro added to the series, coming back to the DS3 style gameplay reminds me pretty constantly how little you have to focus and how aggressively you can rely on cheese if you are drastically underleveled (sprinting barely in range of boss and back out to kite long attack -> backstab, only hitting the enemy once at a time and playing like a reactionary anus, identifying sweetspots near the boss from which you can attack him but he can't easily attack you, and so on).

Sekiro offered one path to victory: near-perfect execution, or at most 10 or so mistakes, engaging with the core gameplay mechanics before you run out of healing. Cheesing was possible, but tedious. Enemy vitality existed not as health, but as a means to slow the rate at which your enemy recovers their push-me-past-100%-one-hit-kill bar. Cheese strats relied upon killing your enemy via vitality, not posture. Unfortunately, in Elden Ring and the Souls series as a whole, the cheese strats offer quick and effortless victory. When cheese strats are reliable, universal, and effective, that's hardly even a cheese strat anymore. It's just fair play. And the now 13-year-old meta for this style of game is rife with dull fair play. Well-designed games make the most rewarding strategies most effective.

If you're new to these games, there's so much to learn and so much to enjoy. Go have fun. If you've maybe been playing these games uhhhh a little too much, you might find that this formula's finally getting stale, no matter how pretty and big the new installment is. You can only reskin the same enemy types so many times before I get tired of the lack of challenge posed by a puzzle I solved six years ago.

Despite all this, I love this game. It's fantastic. I'm going to continue to play it. But it's difficult to recommend without caveats.

Would I recommend it to:
-Newcomers? Yes. I would sell my left nut to play this game blind.
-Veterans? Depends on you. Would you like to replay DS3 with an open world and higher visual fidelity (in concept, not execution)? Yeah, you probably do. Just don't expect it to light your pants on fire, no matter what the entire gaming journalism industry is screaming right now. And if you haven't played Sekiro yet (what's wrong with you), that's probably more entertainment value to you regardless.

I'll change this to a positive review once the game averages around 40FPS at its stated minimum specs and never drops below 10.

After the day one patch, I'm able to get the game to run solidly with a 1080 on high settings. The game crashes more often than it had, maybe once every 2 hours. Almost no slowdowns anymore, and it is averaging more than 40FPS. Nice cleanup, guys.