Recent reviews by B1ERMAN

Such a solid game. UI (menu navigation, inventory maintenance) needs some work, but gameplay is sick.

If I click on someone's head, they die.

If they click on my head, I die.

So it goes.

Can definitely see why it won game of the year. I picked this up on Steam Sale and it was well worth the $41 I paid for it. I am around 75 hours in and can't get enough. If you're a FromSoft or SoulsBorne fan you'll enjoy it, if you're a fan of RPGs you'll enjoy it, if you're a fan of high fantasy you'll enjoy it.

Pros:
- Story is fantastic. The lore is deep, consistent, and well established.
- NPCs are interesting and varied in their interactions and personalities.
- Quests are dynamic, varied, and can be done at whatever pace a player's comfortable with.
- Skills and attributes are entirely up to the player (no archetyping).
- Difficult enough to be rewarding.
- Nearly a bottomless pit of optional content and quests.
- Beautiful graphics.
- Easy to master controls.
- High replayability.

Cons:
- Some of the boss battles can frustrate due to cheese level of the boss.
- Somewhat slow start until a player is high enough level to fight the first boss.
- Easy to miss stuff because of the bottomless amount of content.
- Easy to fail quests accidentally or have quest lines go away if other content is completed.

...Some Souls fanatics might tell you that the pure magic builds makes the game too cheesy to be a true SoulsBorne game. I disagree. The magic fits in well with the world and makes for more unique playthrough opportunities than the Souls games.

The anticheat makes the game unplayable. The game won't launch half the time. There are several "workarounds" to get the game working, but the way anticheat errors isn't consistent so you'll end up dealing with multiple workarounds. Embarrassing. Steam refuses to issue a refund despite knowing the game is broken. DO NOT BUY THIS TRASH.

Golf with your boys.

Simple premise: Stay alive.

Love it, especially with friends. Infinitely replayable because everything is randomly generated and there's no such thing as "winning". You just survive as long as you can. All sorts of achievements, unlockables, items, characters.

Everything runs on an algorithm that is basically:
# of players x time + level = difficulty
Where difficulty is defined as the rate at which enemies spawn, how much life they have, how much damage they do, and how much items cost. Forces players to move relatively quickly and find a balance between farming items and beating levels.

I really wanted to like this game. I've pumped around 800 hours into Total War: Attila and Rome II. I enjoy the historical Total War games so I had high hopes. I love the time period, there's so much potential in the Viking conquest of the British Isles. But CA just really, really fell flat on their face with this game.

Upon release, the game was far too easy. The map is small enough you could roll through the game quickly. Your largest constraint is your own ambition and your willingness to deal with rebel outbreaks. Once you got rolling nothing was stopping you. Invading Normans and Scandanavian clans appear later, but wilt under your might within a few turns.

That was just the beginning of the problems. They've stripped down a whole lot of the functionality in an effort to "streamline" the game, making it feel totally hollow. There's was no strategy, really, to controlling your kingdom. None was needed. They really dumbed down the way characters level, they added a sloppy and underdeveloped Estate system to keep lords happy, and they nixed the ability to have multiple building types in minor settlements, or to even pick the type of building you had in the 1-2 building slots minor settlements offered.

Pre-patch, this game was a total mess. Post-patch it became completely unplayable. In order to make the game more difficult, CA adjusted the cost and bonuses given by level-ups and upgrades, lowered general public order (due to a public order penalty for even the lowest level of taxation), lowered noble loyalty, and tweaked the underdeveloped Estate system. Only now the STILL underdeveloped Estate system is so monetarily burdensome that it really only serves as an massive mandatory annoyance with zero benefit. They wanted to make the game harder and what they've done is make every kingdom broke, starving, and rife with dissent.

There's just no point. They stripped away all the good elements of Total War games, then botched trying to "fix" the stripped down game by making all those stripped down elements worse.

The one thing I'll give them--- boy the battles are beautiful. They are. The battlefield designs, especially in the provincial capitals, are stunning to look at and interesting to tackle strategically.

But that's really the only positive thing I can say after TRYING to like this game for 60 hours.