Recent reviews by Ammo Monk

This game is terrible - if there was any game that embodied as wide as an ocean, as a deep of a puddle it would be War Tales

Character development is weak. Effectively each weapon type corresponds to a class and there is almost no room for any kind of creative character building. You can increase two attributes from a choice of 5 every level, which in practice is a choice of 4 because each class scales exclusively off one of two damage attributes - making the other a non-choice. You get one choice of ability every three levels except for the first two to a maximum level of 15, and from these options it is a static choice of 3 on every level. This culminates in a failure to offer any reason to get invested in or care about your party on a mechanics level.

This then leads to combat system feeling underdeveloped, which is unfortunate because you're going to be seeing A LOT of it. Most enemies have a very basic, specific attack they will use with no variance. You also always control the exact initiative of your party, and will always act first in a given combat round. As a result, the combat feels incredibly rote because as the player you will always have the opportunity to alpha strike and deny your enemy. This might sound like a good thing, but in practice this means every combat encounter is solved once you have faced an enemy once (and honestly, once you've seen what each archetype of enemy does, I doubt you will be surprised by a minor variant). This is compounded into an even worse problem by the fact that you will need to grind an ABSURD number of enemies for levels after the first area - level 7 to 8 took me about 25 combats with level 9 bandit groups. If there's a faster way to do this, it was never intuitively demonstrated by the game.

To make matters even worse, the campaign map/strategy level is incredibly lenient in what is supposed to be a gritty no-heroes mercenary adventure. Even on the highest difficulty, there's no actual pressure on the player to ever fight enemies stronger than what the bounty board has on offer. As a result, gold is an inexhaustible resource where the only bottleneck is how much time real time you're willing to waste grinding for it. Making things even more trivial is that the profession system will quickly introduce mechanics that make things even easier such as reducing food requirements, sourcing your own food and most materials, and general just making the experience so boring for how much time the game expects of you manually fighting every combat to see the content available.

At no point in my playthrough through the first three zones was I even remotely challenged - I lost a single merc while fighting the first zone's boss and that was it. Play battle brothers instead, this game just isn't worth it. If you 100%'ed battle brothers and you're looking for something else - keeping looking, this is not it.

literally the future of gaming

thank you chris

Might actually be the best co-op shooter I've ever played - easily clears anything released in the past few years. Might make a more detailed review later, but this game is an easy 10/10 and GOTY, which considering the competition in 2024 should say a lot.

But whoever chose mouse 3 as the default keybind to aim down sights - why? just why? Thankfully you can fully rebind keys.

V Rising is a fantastic game, combining many of the best elements of ARPGs with impressive base building. On brutal difficulty, the game offers the best boss fights in a survival crafting game I've ever seen. Where the game falls short for me are the elements where a PvP focus hurts the overall experience - I understand that some might enjoy the PvP aspects, but honestly I've never really understood the appeal of PvP in a survival crafting sandbox.

Strange things like crop up like not being able to use teleporters bidirectionally while gathering resources, or even use certain late game travel options at all if you are carrying certain items - while you can mitigate the restriction on teleporters in the server options, there's no native option to fix the later problem and all the game's official servers have the teleporter restriction built-in, anyways.

Shards are also a weird case - it's very jarring, when, until that point in the game, resource collection was something for the player to actively engage with at their own pace. All the sudden, progression is gated off by an event that is only active for 20 minutes every 2 hours - and there is no option to really fix this when setting up a server; the best you can do is make rifts more common and last longer, but there's still some downtime. And, once again, on official servers the settings are the default 20min/2h cycle. I would suspect this whole convoluted system is there in order to encourage late game PvP, but on brutal difficulty those later bosses really do require the gear optimization they enable.

Servants are a feature that feels very... underwhelming; when I first encountered the mechanic during early access, I assumed it was a work in progress and that it would be fleshed out as the game neared completion. Unfortunately, it remains the same as it was in 2022 - and it really does feel like engaging with a mobile game a là Farmville, which seems like a serious missed opportunity to make your castle feel like a bustling hub, or even just make the process less tedious such having it so that a servant will just continuously collect resources from their designated hunting grounds.

There's also edge cases like able to die and rejoin boss fights in multiplayer, or even just drop combat and heal to full, which seems like a strange decision because the bosses otherwise feature dynamic scaling based on player count. The final boss specifically has mechanics to prevent this - and I can't help but think that a similar design approach to the game's other bosses would have enhanced the experience, had more focus been put on the PvE side of things.

I enjoyed V Rising, but I can't help but feel it was a missed opportunity to make an exceptional, genre defining ARPG/survival crafting hybrid, and a lot of its potential was tarnished by the idea of Rust but Vampires taking away from fully realizing the best features of the game.

This one's going to the moon, boys

Really enjoyed the game on release; however, nearly all content released after the launch has been of very mixed quality. Combined with the recent degradation in performance, would recommend any prospective buyers wait until those issues are resolved, and maybe wait until some kind of complete edition is available.

Sweet liberty we actually won

One of the very best shooters of all time. It's as simple as that.

Game is great port is ♥♥♥♥

Best game ever.