Recent reviews by Dworkstein

Played the demo before the full release. The developer has done excellent work to make this game on his own. All the feedback given was reviewed and many of the quality of life improvements were made.

Booted up the game 2024-02-16, could not connect to servers and play it.
Booted up the game next day (2024-02-17), was able to log in, play tutorial and then be set free to do missions on the war map. Played two missions solo (apparently this is not advisable).

The first was saving colonists from robots, second was destroying fabricators. First mission I manage to stumble upon the doors I needed to open and have colonists run out of. Turns out playing this solo is almost impossible on anything except Trivial or Easy. Died 6 times in a row, was prompted to extract somewhere, no indication of where, failed the mission.

Second mission was blowing up robot fabricators. I have no idea what those are or what they look like. Spent 10 minutes running around trying to figure it out, only to be wiped out with ease by the medium sized armored robots. Quit the game and refunded.

Listen, I am open to learning curves if there is actually some queues as to what to do either from the environment, NPCs, or something in the world. You don't get that with this game. It doesn't have to be the Ubisoft model of everything on the map has a giant arrow pointing to it, but some happy medium. Would a couple slides in a military briefing context before each mission be too much to ask for? I don't think so. Show me a couple pictures of the thing I need to shoot, or the place I need to go and that's it, I can manage the rest.

I've played the majority of the Souls games, and am OK with not having everything spelled out to me, but my time is valuable to me and I don't want to have to get slaughtered a bunch of times and be punished for not knowing something the game could easily explain without ruining some kind of artistic/mysterious atmosphere. The character you play is in the military, give us a briefing!

Overall
Graphics 9/10
Performance 9/10
Gameplay 7/10

I like to hit monster with the big stick. 8/10

====== Good ======
Rewarding progression system.
Mastering a weapon type makes you feel like an anime character.
Compelling lore tied into progression and environment.
Very cool armour and weapon designs. Many options for custom builds.

====== Bad ======
Little to no tutorials for combat and advanced techniques for each weapon type.
If you don't have experience with action games where you fight big enemies this will be rough for you.
Long IRL time spent on each Hunt/Mission.
Gear system a little unwieldy for newcomers.

It's like Vampire Survivors + Diablo (gear system) + Hades

This is my prozac.
Sometimes I play games for the challenge, but as I'm reaching a busier part of my life, my patience for adversity in a digital world dwindles. I deal with enough IRL, I need a break. This game is that break. No time pressure, unless you voluntarily do the time challenges. You just wash away the dirt and filth, cleansing the world and your soul. This game is unadulterated catharsis.

I bought this game for like 3 bucks and it has given me more enjoyment than some 80$ AAA titles. The developer has built a solid little game here with addictive/fun mechanics. I've only ran into one technical issue where the game started lagging, but for the most part it's been stable. Recently the developer added Arcanas, which is another layer of interesting mechanics. 9/10.

Launched the game and had zero issues for about 5 minutes. Then my framerate started tanking. Got booted to the main screen with an error "Frame rate too low for online mode, returning to main menu". Well that's too bad, because now I'm at the main menu stuck there, unable to exit the game properly or switch to offline mode. Verified game files, restarted my computer, no luck. I'm running a RTX 3080 with AMD 3700x...Hardware limitations are not an issue. I close out the game, try to relaunch...and the anti cheat says that it can't launch the game. Abysmal PC launch. Clearly the network testing was not good enough for this level of usage.

*Revised After Figuring out how to Stabilize Game*
Looking online I found many suggestions, all of which I followed. I re-installed the game, and that managed to get it to be stable again. Since then, I have been having a blast and enjoying all the things people have been mentioning.

10/10 masterpiece. Combat can be kind of stiff at moments, but if you take the time to learn it, everything falls into place. Read about the monsters, learn their weaknesses. The storytelling in this game the gold standard for RPGs. DLCs are actual full expansions with equivalent story quality to the main game. Gwent is kind of rigged though.

Atmospheric doesn't come close enough to describe the vibe this game has. It is visceral, heavy, and engaging. Gameplay is plentiful, and goes beyond deliveries into world building and indirect collaboration with other players. The story is cryptic as expected for a Kojima title, rife with metaphor and extremely blunt character names. Read the lore, there is an interesting world there. The environments...my god are they gorgeous. At max settings I felt like I was back in Iceland. Put on a podcast, listen to music, and trek (or drive later) through majestic landscapes. Deal with cargo obsessed hazmat men, throw blood grenades at dark matter wraiths. 10/10 keep on keepin' on.

Praise be the Omnissiah!
Finally a good WH40K game, yes yes besides the first two Dawn of Wars.
This is a beautiful merger of XCOM like TBS without the nonsense of chance to hit and the lore rich Adeptus Mechanicus. The music is exactly what you would expect, a sort of crypto-gothic electronica. Everything in this game is a perfect recreation of the tabletop figures.
My only gripe would be that it gets to be very easy earlier than anticipated.
By late game not even heavy units posed a challenge for my Tech Priests.
Such is the will of the Omnissiah I suppose...