Recent reviews by Spectre

I'll be as transparent as I can be.

DA:V is a subpar, miss-developed Dragon Age game and suffers critical writing and narrative flaws, all uplifting a pretend happiness and lightness. We're fighting for the end of the world, but feels like I'm on the hunt for my groceries just can't find the right store for the ingredients. Although there were some decent moments, overall - I wasn't quite immersed, often skipped dialogue and just couldn't feel the game and felt little to no urgency.

Sadly an in justice for decade old DA fans that have come to expect a certain narrative and game style, this game is not for the fans, it's for attempting to capture a crowd with no specific direction or soul and can't recommend it therefore.

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However, if we treat it as an independent game, if we were to pretend it was just called Veilguard and unattached from Dragon Age, then I'd say it was an alright game, 6/10 game, nothing memorable but reasonably enjoyable.

Let's be fair, combat is relatively fluid, the world building and atmosphere is not unpleasant and I appreciate work goes behind these things. Politics aside, my closest comparison in terms of feeling and how I treat and view the game, is like the annual release of CoD. You get it, play it, dump it, and you'll never remember that game again.

And that's a great shame, I ultimately felt unattached and disagreed with many designs.

I have a rather long playtime with this game and have extensively tested various aspects of the game.

Analysis:
As many other zombie mmo survival games, H1Z1 targets a speicifc audience who enjoy the thrill of having to find loot, killing zombies and potentially avoiding or killing very hostile players, likewise some seek a social experience within the game.

The game focuses strongly on pvp, forcing many new players to play a very passive playstyle and be very carefull as they learn the game, they may expect to be instantly killed on sight without cause, hence grouping up with a few friends is highly recommended and a lot more fun.
Additionally, the game has another interesting focus on building infrastructure, or bases if you like to call "home".
These bases can be built on small, medium and rather large scales to accommodate the needs of the one or multiple players, however foraging and loot gathering is required for the items necessary to construct these bases.


Positives:

• The crafting system in functional and will be updated over time to add more recipes and greater functionality.
  
• Combat is quite fluid and straight forward with few glitches that are not note worthy or gamebreaking in my experience.
  
• Voice communication functions very well, (fully dependant on the user's microphone).

Negatives:

• Items, guns and general loot, there is ample of at server restart bu tquickly reduces to minuscule quantaties a few hours after, at least as of a recent patch on the 27th of January.
  
• Performance is poor at times and the game requires more optimisations with high and low end users. At times, fps may drop severly and appear lackluster.
  
• Glitches casuing instant death, getting stuck or at times unable to operate the user interface ingame, which can be frustrating at best (but is resolved with a relog).
  
• Zomies that are knocked down with (Q/ push back action) become inexorably immortal until they get up while being able to attack you. (So stay back if you knock one down without killing them).

Evaluation:
This is the highly subjective part of my review, so beware of that!

I find the game entirely playable, I do not have a supreme pc spec of any kind and run it fairly well at most time, however I do seem to suffer from a prolonged memory leak after 2+ hours of gameplay causing some serious fps problems in densely populated areas such as Pleasant Valley (But a game restart fixses this for me).

Loot is a non-issue as of current, resources are plentiful on low-med servers and rouhgly 50% more scarce on high populated servers. However, after having played several characters on a multitude of servers I would estimate that around 2 hours would allow one to become fully geared with a gun and some ammo.

I would also like to clarify that Air Drops are NOT Pay to Win, they have low drop chance of obtaining high quality loot, and even when good things drop they are contested for by other players. Lastly, these items can be acquired in the game with just a little effort and luck. Weapons can be found at random in houses, barns toilets and bathtubs etc... as well as ammo for the respective guns.


Things I would want changed or added:

• Allow eating increments of 5. berries in a time period of 2 seconds.
  
• Reduce time to fill emtpy bottle to 1 or 2 seconds, (down from 5).
  
• Allow the production of 2 arrows from one stick as it was prior to patch.
  
• Reduce general fall game, I find myself taking tremendous damage from jumping down a 0.5 meter ledge, rock or pedestal.

Recommendation
I would recommend this game, especially for DayZ veterans who have prior experience as this is a more solid game with few ai problems, it is also more fun in my opinion than DayZ as it seems more vibrant and has greater variety in what to do, espcially with the crafting system.
However if you cannot find a parter to play with and are easily frustrated by death as well as being intolerant of non-game braking bugs at infrequent times then wait for release or do not purchase this game at all.

Note:
I did find it difficult to spark an interest in this game in the first few hours, but once I went exploring and hit up some friends on skype and met up I found it was worth my purchase.


Enjoy and good luck.

- Epoch