Recent reviews by Corbun

I want to like this game, but Christ they make it hard.

Some of the updates they put in are done with zero regard for current players, whether you play game modes like conquest or play on Ladder. New clans are dropped in with zero balancing or bug-testing done, and updates often bring in new bugs that might never be fixed.

The netcode for online can be an absolute mess and has little to no support (or even acknowledgement). If you want to do something simple like play conquest with a friend, you are at the mercy of the servers deciding if you are allowed to play or not. It is easily one of the worst netcodes I've seen in any game with how consistent the symptoms are. It's almost as if the server isn't built the support the game as it plays out (in some causes, spamming pause slingshots you forward, which is just strange on it's own).

Overall, this was a cool game with a lot of promise at the start, but in the last year and change, it feels like they're just trying to milk the game with effortless paid DLC that they toss out every now and then with the occassional paint-job to give the illusion of something new. In the end, however, it's just polishing something that is fundamentally broken.

If you have issues with the game freezing or getting stuck, don't bother. If you don't close the game properly, it will treat it as a death to prevent save-scumming, which means if you were to get stuck in the village and have to close the game, it will treat it as a death, including all consequences (losing all gear and money).

Good game overall, but some scaling feels awkward. There's a lot of "learning from experience", including which mobs are simply never worth fighting if it can be helped, as some have abilities to suicide attack you for 80-100% of your hp.

Solid game, some unique mechanics and a novel approach to the genre. Interesting approaches for each character with little overlap (Unique playstyles for each). Some are quite new player unfriendly, though they are also locked behind progress to prevent new players trying them first.


Biggest gripe in the game are the occasional bugs that can ruin a run. Two attempts to reach wave 120 were sabotaged when a building glitched out and prevented me from using any of my structures actives (As Builder, no less), effectively forcing me to end the run. These runs can take several hours, which makes this quite frustrating.

Game can be very unforgiving for players that might try to be a bit too greedy, as the margins of error are very fine and a single mistake will cost you the entire run.

Game has great potential, hope they update it further. Definitely worth the buy if you're into these types of games.

Darkest Dungeon offers an appealing aesthetic with it's grim tone, which extends to it's gameplay. The game has incredible music and artwork, and the theme is appealing, but I cannot suggest this game due to it's aggrevating RNG based gameplay. While RNG does have a place in keeping things interesting, and in this game, the idea being that there is no perfect strategy (The community begs to differ, see 4 Man-at-Arms builds), this game relies so much on it that it barely has to think for itself. The Speed mechanic is typically out of your favour, where a med speed enemy is scarier than a high speed enemy, due to the fact they can go from being last on one turn to first on the next, resulting in a two hit combo that can be bring a party memeber down immediately. This would be fine, if it weren't so cumbersome to recover from this by week 50.
This can also get aggrevating when you have a particular string of bad luck and lose core characters, such as healers. In one such run, the only characters I lost were vestals, and they were lost in quick succession due to poor fortune (in one case, as mentioned above, due to two consecutive hits from the same enemy). The game ramps up it's difficulty at champion to a degree that is almost masochistic, where you have to find strategies to abuse the game or be at it's mercy, where enemies scale significantly faster than you do, in terms of crit, dodge, HP, and damage.
The issue with the game isn't even in it's mechanics, but the scaling of it. Stress is easily managed and abused with a crusader or bard, and light is no different. It's the crit RNG that seems to always be out of your favour, in that one crit fo you can kill an enemy, but their crit costs you weeks in game to recover that character (Which can interfere with your time limit, and after a few choice deaths, ruin the run altogeher). An occurance of this type basically ends your previous 20 hours and forces you to start again, and often having learned nothing. You can abuse gimmicky group compositions to get 100% dodge, or complete damage immunity, but at that point you have had to break the game to be able to contest the unforgiving punishments for simply playing. When everything comes to a dice roll, you aren't really playing anymore
While I think this game is enjoyable to play up until champion, I feel like the game as a whole is what should be judged, and as champion & darkest are considered a part of the game, I cannot reccommend this game at the price it is. The over-reliance on RNG could easily be handled in other ways to instill hopelessness in the player as is the theme. The creator's past comments, however, have shown there is explicit intent for this.
This game is thus built for a masochistic player, one who enjoys chanced failure, and putting the pieces back together. Over several hours.