Recent reviews by eFTy

I love 40k, I love FTL and I love their fusion even more!

Also, the art style is great and the music is fantastic.

This game is a polished turd. The control is janky and cumbersome at the best of times, the difficulty is more unstable than a francium atom, the content is limited and the classes have nonsensical weapon restrictions. Once you finish the single player campaign, the only reason to keep playing this disaster is the grind for cosmetics over and over on a handful of maps, but there's so many better shooters, better co-op and better Warhammer games out there, what's the point?!

Best co-op game out there. The missions are varied, the enemies are varied, the classes are varied, the weapons are varied, the weapon overclocks make each weapon have varied uses. Even the pre-mission bridge shenanigans on the space station are varied! XD

The music is fantastic. The graphic style takes some getting used to, but it's fine after a while. The physics are on occasion a bit wonky, mainly on the space station though due to all the weird interactions.

Rock and stone!

I really really enjoy some parts of this game. It can be tough at times for a solo player, but exploration is fun, sailing feels great and building viking halls and castles and manors is very nice!

But since a few updates ago the devs seem to have decided to switch design philosophy from fun to sadistic. Mistlands was impossible to explore without a mandatory doodad that invalidates your auxiliary gear slot. Even with it, the mists are so thick they're immersion breaking, as you move through the world and find these perfectly spherical balls of completely opaque smoke. But I powered through it, despite many deaths. I would find a nearby portion of a more safe biome, build an outpost with a portal, and then if I die I'd be able to run back and get my stuff while wearing older gear. Not great, not terrible.

Well, it seems even that was too easy, or too fun. So the devs gave us the Ashlands. This new biome makes the Mistlands feel like a walk in the park on easy street. I died twice before I even reached the shore, because the devs can't or won't have the game give you proper feedback when boiling water is killing you. You just swim for a few minutes, with no issues, and then suddenly *pop* you're dead with no clue what killed you until you go to a third party discord to find out from others who had the same happen to them.

Once I finally did reach the shore, this time about as prepared as I could be (Bonemass buff, rested, fire resistance mead up, frost arrows, mistwalker, best armour), I get waylaid by a gang of basic Ashlands mobs and die. I couldn't stay on the ship offshore because voltures and sea monsters kept attacking me; I got close to shore but then the sword wielding mobs could just walk up to my ship and wreck it, and I couldn't shoot them because the ship is a giant tub and the game can't handle shooting directly down properly.

It feels like the devs wanted to force people to play in groups to be able to play in this latest biome. But the game is theoretically single player with optional co-op... And the fact that I now need to rely upon the kind help of a selfless group of people just to get my bodies (yes, plural) back and maybe get a foothold in the latest biome means there's something inherently wrong with the balance in this game.

Let's start with the good bits:
-Music is fantastic. Jesper Kyd knocked it out of the park, and unlike most of the other good bits this one doesn't get lost as you play.
-The levels are visually very nice. Scale is very impressive, really feels like a giant 40k hive. Walking by a Leman Russ tank is always cool. Lots of cool details, like the auto-scrivener. Most of this will be lost on you though due to the bad bits discussed later.
-Some funny character interactions (ogryn calling the zealot 'Shouty' never fails to amuse me).
-Ranged combat can be quite fun, sometimes.

The bad bits:
-Mobs constantly spawn right behind you. Sometimes they're set to spawn behind you and while they do so you turn and see them show up on the edge of your screen. This is a ♥♥♥♥ mechanic that needs to die a horrible death.
-This is not really a co-op game, unless you play with friends over voice. Vermintide was a bit lacking in this domain as well but in this game it feels much more obvious. There's almost no feature encouraging team play and community (Fatshark is really good at ignoring games like DRG). Instead you have mechanics that encourage the player to run forward as fast as possible and get the level done as quickly as possible to then do as many other levels as possible in whatever time you have to play. In stark opposition to games like DRG where this would be an occasional exception, most of the random players I've met in this game are either ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, morons or both.
-Melee combat feels boring. You want to spam attacks to kill the swarms as quickly as possible before they overwhelm you. Cool bits like revving the chainsword to get more penetration are nice but rarely needed or used.
-The fun shootouts are rare, since mobs mostly just spawn right behind you and try to swarm you.
-Character skins are mostly boring (how many different prisoner skins do you think we need, Fatshark?!), and often plagued by clipping or loading issues (floating head and arms, hello!)
-Many character voices are cool or funny when you initially hear them but get really boring and even grating after a while. And with only 2 or 3 options per character you often end up with players having the same voices during a level.
-Having to rush through the level and being almost constantly swarmed by dudes means you very rarely get a chance to appreciate the great visual design of the levels, which is a damn shame and waste of good work...
-Levels are completely linear. This was an issue with Vermintide too, and it seems Fatshark likes it that way.
-Loot RNG is atrocious. You spend 30 or so hours to get a character to level 30 and then start buying items hoping you get one with 1) high enough item level 2) high stats where it actually matters. I've blown most of my in-game income and still don't have a good lasgun on my Veteran...
-The quickest way to get from point A to point B is to keep sliding. So you always see 'pros' dragging their ass in front of you trying to finish the game one extra minute quicker. This looks dumb as ♥♥♥♥.

I'd like to say that I'll update this review when Fatshark solves some of the issues, but I have very little hope that will happen. They will add updates, sure, but I don't expect any meaningful changes from this point onward. Prove me wrong, Fatshark!

Does exactly what it says on the tin, and does it well. Bonus points for a terrific soundtrack and great voice lines. If you like side scrollers and you like 40k, get this, you will not regret it!

This game is absolutely beautiful, and the flip-between-worlds-with-different-rules idea is brilliant.

But it's simply too damn hard for me to enjoy it, so I cannot recommend it unless you are a hardcore platformer player who loves dying over and over and over and over and over and over again.

Halloween event Geheimnisnacht started on October 28th. Due to schedule issues I could only try it on November 3rd. Played through 4 of the 5 Event maps without a hitch. Then on the last one I encountered a bug in the final boss fight where due to the event the boss becomes invincible at 33% of his health and couldn't complete the level. Googling it seems it's a widely known bug acknowledged by the devs that happens automatically on Veteran and Legend difficulties.

The fact that this bug made it past testing (it happens automatically on 2 difficulties) and hasn't been fixed nearly a week after being reported, making event completion impossible on certain difficulties gives me very little hope for Darktide...

This game is frustration hidden behind pretty colours pretending to be about traffic management. Traffic lights hinder more than help your traffic. Roundabouts don't work as they do in reality. Sometimes on a map with lots of rivers blocking your path you just lose because the game decides to give you no new bridges while continuously spawning houses and malls across the river from each other.
If you want a good puzzle game, go check out Zachtronics' games.

I really wanted to give this a positive review as I loved the idea behind it. At least story-wise. It has such a great potential...

Gameplay-wise, however, it's a bust. It's basically The Weaves but actually WORSE. Not only do you once again play without your hard earned gear, but in this game mode the buffs you get as you play are random. And unlike weaves these take even longer, so if something goes wrong it's even more of your time lost with nothing to show for it.

So it's random buffs over random levels with random modifiers. And this compounded randomness (i.e. 'slot machine') is what they call "replayability" nowadays.

I'd rather play the original levels over and over than go through this. Those levels were polished and nice. The new ones are either rehashed bits of old levels or just... rocks and some floaty bits. You could say "so was the level that introduced the beastmen" but no, that one had flow and was really fun to go through.