Recent reviews by Rance

At it's core, the game's fine, and I would say it's worth purchasing for $15-20 - but it kind of missed the point of Bloodlines. Bloodlines combat sucked, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but that was fine. It wasn't the strong point of the game. Bloodlines had small, dense maps for each act that heavily rewarded exploration. In Santa Monica, by the time you were about half done with that area, you felt as though every building likely allowed you access and had something rewarding to offer in turn for exploring them. This continued on through the rest of the game (though a little less so, as the later areas were larger, but they were still peppered with surprises to find that almost always lead into short little questlines or experiences.)

Still, the most empty areas of Bloodlines felt much, much more dense than Bloodlines 2 does. It falls into that new-age trap of "big open world," except it fails to populate the area with anything, and honestly, it's not that big to begin with. NPCs are ludicrously repetitive, you will hear the same 3-4 spoken dialogue lines over and over again (often from NPCs that are making out with other ones while they say it, somehow) and there's no benefit to talking to any of them. Bloodlines' standard of semi-common unique NPCs that might not have a quest or anything but at least provide a unique experience is out the window. There's some very underwhelming mini-system where some of the randomly generated NPCs have 1 of 3 types and it kind of rewards you for feeding on them. That's it.

It feels more like a melee build in Cyberpunk to play. It doesn't necessarily feel bad, movement is snappy and starts to feel fluid once you get the feeling down, but there's no need for it. Combat is incredibly easy even on the harder difficulties. I don't really like the way disciples work, which is a problem given that I picked Tremere. Also, you'll get all your clan abilities a couple hours into the game. Like... 4 or 5. It really doesn't take long.

This leads into probably the game's biggest issue - there's very little roleplaying. Bloodlines lent itself well to multiple playthroughs not simply because of Malkavian existing as a clan but also because of the massive number of different ways you could approach most situations. Seduction, intimidation, stealth, lockingpicking/hacking around obstacles, etc. All of that is out the window. Narratively, this is because you're playing an elder, not some new fledgeling, but that narrative excuse doesn't make the game fun. I assume being an elder is why your character also refuses to use guns or weapons, but again, this also sucks. What a baffling design decision. The combat feels fine, but it doesn't feel THAT fine.

In practice, this is a Vampire: The Masquerade themed light action/adventure game. It lacks the rewards (physical or emotional) that could make exploring the city fun, it lacks almost any trace of roleplaying that would make it an RPG, It would be a fun, functional indie light-RPG, like Transistor or Bastion, except it's not, it's a full priced, supposedly fully-fledged 'RPG.' Really, really underwhelming. As a big fan of the first game, I wish they hadn't cashed in on its name for this, but the damage is done.

Perhaps most damning, besides the lack of weapons and the lack of inventory, is the quest system. You do not pick up quests and then investigate whatever you stumble onto as you go around. You pick up a quest, you are locked into it, you do that thing and only that thing until it's done, and then you are released to start another quest. I have no idea how this made it into the game in this state and can only assume it's the result of some massive design concession due to not having enough time to make multiple quests run at the same time without breaking everything. Or maybe it was done intentionally, to try and keep you from wandering around and exploring like you would in the first game, because there is literally nothing to find and no buildings to enter, just some graffiti you pull down.

If you like the vibe and tone of VTM, this fits it, but sadly it has nothing else going on. Wait a year and pick it up at a fraction of the full price. I don't think I could recommend this to a friend for more than $20-25, even if they really liked Bloodlines or VTM tabletop.

Creepy visuals, eerie performance and characters, the explored themes and this game's take on the 'other world' make this an undoubtedly Silent Hill game. I suspect people saying it doesn't feel like a Silent Hill game are either not really that familiar with the series and don't understand how closely cutscene and performance direction adheres to the old formula, can't get over the change in setting (which is reasonable, honestly) or are took taken out of the game by a major gameplay shift in the 'other world' equivalent that will continue on from there. It's pretty anime and another very reasonable complaint.

Unfortunately, like every other entry in the series, it is marred by glaring design flaws, some of which serve to ruin sections that would otherwise be transcendent. There are many encounter prolems that start at the design level and never should've made it through testing.

The combat is not bad, there is a strong foundation here and it is very playable, especially by survival horror standards. However, the enemy/encounter design is rife with issues, not the least of which being one particular enemy (the one with shackles) having clearly been designed to be avoided initially, but made a frequent forced encounter later. His attack patterns carry that Dark Souls 3 vibe of constant, flurried attacks, but is in a game where stamina is incredibly clamped, even with upgrades. Later on, player skill and upgrades make this less painful, but overcoming groups that include him never feel like an accomplishment, just a relief. The same can be said of a boss-turned-basic-enemy that was never well designed but an acceptable fight the first time. Every time thenafter is a chore and at one point I caught myself saying "really, her again?" No part of fighting this hp-bloated, slow-attacking enemy is satisfying or feels good in any way, but she's the one they choose to use as a forced checkpoint over and over again in the last act.

Speaking of - the game's last act drags. A lot. There is a major gameplay change at some point before it that it feels like the devs intended to be this exciting payoff, but it feels awful and I was sick of using it an hour in. They set you up with many situations from there on to show it off, but since I didn't like it in the first place, all of this turned into an annoying drag. It's at the point where the narrative should take over and combat should serve to punctuate it, but instead the two are at odds in combat trial after combat trial that wore on me quickly with hours left to go.

Still, this is a genre that has never had particularly good combat, and there is enough exploring in the second half to satisfy the survival horror itch. It could do with more puzzles, but as flawed a game as it is, it is very enjoyable and probably the best non-indie survival horror game since the last couple Resident Evil entries. This is a genre dominated by the indie sphere now, but if you're itching for something with a bit more polish and higher aspirations, F is the best choice in years. Just be prepared to be irritated at the combat from the third act on.

For clarity, my first playthrough was on Hard combat and Hard puzzles. On hard difficulty, the combat is challenging enough to be satisfying some of the time, and I exhausted healing items somewhat often, while donating all that could be donated to the shrine. Spending donateable healing items on actual healing could likely have made this easier. At least on hard, the game is rather challenging, and I have pretty significant soulslike experience to fall back on. If you don't want to struggle a bit, pick the Story difficulty.

Lastly, your NG+ run offers much, much more context, with new notes explaining a lot of what is missing from your understanding in the first clear - and the endings provide even more, especially about the game's male characters, which will likely feel shallow and incomplete until a relevant ending has been viewed.

For context, I've completed P3FES and P3P (both MCs.) Before that, I played original P3 as well, but did not complete it.

P3 Reload is a fantastic, almost slavishly accurate recreation of the base game. A few extra optional progression systems ease difficulty a bit, but extended interactions with the entire cast are well-done and enjoyable, and difficulty was never P3's strong point anyway. Much of the issues with the original games (mechanically) still remain, but P3FES fixed the rest of them, and those fixes carry into P3R. At this point, P3R would be the entry I'd recommend to anyone wanting to try P3 for the first time, uprooting P3FES from that spot before.

The remake might be good enough to convince me to slog through The Answer again, even, which is really hard to believe.

The game also runs extremely well on Steam Deck, you need only disable "Reflections" in the graphics settings.

A good game at its base plagued with terrible balance problems that is dragging it down and making it a chore to play at higher MMR. Welkin has been broken since beta 2 - Beta 1 was dominated by Panther, but he got rebalanced, and since then Welkin has been king. Seasun got tons of feedback reflecting this from the best players, but they just keep buffing him up over and over again, and now he's even stronger than he used to be. Stellaris, one of the new mechs, is also incredibly broken and impossible to disengage from, with a tether literally twice the range it should be and far too much re-stagger potential.

It's a fun game to dive into but once you get into high tier where Welkin and Stellaris are required, a lot of the fun burns away (unless you enjoy playing those characters, but this is why in grandmaster every pub lobby fights over who gets to play them.)

If they start taking balance seriously, it has the potential to be a great game, but letting these problems ruin the early launch is going to make a terrible first impression.

I wish anyone loved me as much as these devs love Welkin.

Undisputed king of the last CBT, only to get an entire new skill and huge buffs for this OBT. Baffling.

Unsurprisingly, in Grandmaster and above, there is a Welkin on both teams every game, and if you don't have one, you lose. He's designed to be a brawler character, but a combination of the melee pursuit mechanic and how incredibly valuable all his skills are for contesting carts, points and keys makes him just the best choice for literally everything.

Besides the terrible balance problems and the... unnecessary pilot customization, this is a solid game that feels good to play most of the time. Has potential, but the awful balance needs to be addressed first.

Nice little classic survival horror jaunt. You won't have to deal with inventory management, which can be a positive or a negative depending on how seriously you take your position as a boomer, but the game feels like an old campy RE clone and mostly plays like one too. It has the old problem of fixed cameras without tank controls (expect pirouettes when the camera changes unexpectedly) but tank controls ARE technically available. Combat is unimpressive but not awful, there's just enough enemy variety, and budgeting ammo and health does feel pretty rewarding. By far the weakest aspect of the game is the voice acting, and not in the original RE way, it's just kind of really bad and takes you out of a lot of the situations. The puzzles are fine though (except one, in which the developers really should've had a trigger for 'Oh, maybe I should do it the other way,') and there's a couple of different endings, which is nice, but none of them are very satisfying. It's a respectable length, feels a little on the longer side if you played a bunch of RE clone era games, which is nice too, and I got it on sale for $6 USD, so I definitely felt I got my money's worth. Pick it up on sale if you're into those classic games and are expecting a campy, mediocre story supported by solid era-appropriate RE clone gameplay.

There's potential for this game, but it's still very, very far away. There needs to be a long developer's meeting in which they analyze what short-term fixes are possible. It's early access, so performance issues, crashes and incomplete design is to be expected, but it's also the foundation of public opinion on the game, so some things need to be tackled quickly to keep them from hamstringing their game's possibility.

Positives:
+ While there is little gun variety, the gunplay is usually satisfying, when the server's connection is stable. You'll know when it's not from stuttering every few steps. Under good server conditions, the weapon's reports sound impactful and meaty, the hit registration seems fine. Reflex/Holo need to be held closer to the shoulder as the sight picture sucks right now, but this is a pretty quick fix.
+ The world is pretty at high settings. Current performance makes high settings without artificial frame generation pretty unrealistic, but it'll eventually look nice. Weapon modeling and animations are pretty good especially for such an early point.
+ Early quests that include coordinates and descriptions are vague enough to be engaging without being so loosely defined that you can't reasonably complete them without screenshots. It's a good middle ground.

Negatives:
- Helicopter system is fundamentally broken and needs a complete overhaul. It is very common to spend 5-10 minutes unable to use the helicopters at all, and just constantly getting refusal due to all 4 being tied up. This is mostly because squads are often on the other side of the map calling helos, which ties them up for very long periods while they go across the whole map. A queue system would make this less frustrating, since at least you could put in your request and then go get a drink or something, but it would still feel very bad overall. Sadly this makes it very difficult to really play the game in any capacity since you are designed to use the helicopters extensively to start and finish deployments.
- At this point in the game, there is basically no loot. This could very well be a result of the early access state, but there's very little reason to loot anything from the bodies or areas you cross. You can sometimes find usable gear in boxes, but it's rare. Weapons don't vendor for anything and it's usually more efficient to rip the optics off them and just sell those. It's very unsatisfying and shifts the core focus of the game to the gunplay, but the gunplay isn't so remarkable that it can carry it alone.
- Tasks/Quests in and of themselves aren't all that exciting. So far, they're a step up from Tarkov's, but Tarkov's quests have always kind of sucked, so that's not saying much. They've decided not to have PVP quests, but most of Tarkov's best questlines (such as Punisher) were PVP based, which limits what they can do without changing their mind.
- Tasks/Quests get worse over time. They stop providing coordinates, they stop giving you enough information in the quest description. I'm not sure if they just need another pass in the development cycle, or this is some kind of intentional "ramping difficulty" but there's nothing difficult or engaging about wandering around an area you cleared out of enemies trying to figure out what the game wants. Normal people will just wiki the solutions. It's bad.

Other:
~ Solo play is heavily discouraged compared to Tarkov. Note, first up, that this game isn't a direct competitor to Tarkov, so how much this matters depends on the player's perspective. However, seeing your teammates on the map cuts the advantage solo players have against squads considerably, and the total lack of useful loot means that solo play isn't really rewarding even in your best runs. If you're looking for a squad based conga line milsim experience, you shouldn't care about this, and the game seems to be in line with what you want. If you enjoyed ruining your sleep schedule doing stupid solo runs on Tarkov, this game cannot ever scratch that itch.

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In conclusion, I would definitely wait on this game. There is absolutely potential for it to be worth playing, and it feels better in its original early access iteration than Ready or Not did for more than a year of its release. But it has tremendous pitfalls in its current state, and no longevity whatsoever due to the shifted focus away from PVP. I struggle to see why even people who really like the PVE aspects of Tarkov and similar games would like this - there's little to collect and loot, no equivalent to the hideout to build up over time, and so on. Right now, it's either the skeleton and framework of a good game, or it's a fad cash grab that'll fall apart before it achieves any of its potential. Unless you're desperate for a semi-milsim game right now, wait and see which it turns out to be.

This DLC once had one weapon less than others, which is the primary reason it was poorly rated. Crytek recently implemented the Katana as a weapon, and then immediately added a katana skin to this DLC at no additional cost. The negative rating it once had is no longer valid, and the Miko has become one of my favorite legendary hunters, along with my favorite throwing knife and bow skins. Admittedly, there's a lot of them for both, but hey.

Lobotomy Corp is a fantastic story wrapped in a game that tries very hard to apply its themes and logic to gameplay. Many of the gameplay features are explained in-world over time, and there's very few glaring issues with the plot (though you might need to do a little bit of digging to really piece it all together.)

Unfortunately, the gameplay is not very polished. The game is difficult, but often this difficulty is through tedium and pestering rather than actual challenge, which takes away from the experience. There are a lot of very poor design decisions, interesting and neat concepts that were not refined into good gameplay, and the nature of the game means that the majority of them will continue to be a problem throughout the very lengthy playtime.

Regardless, the story is good enough that I would recommend consuming it however you can stand. There's mods that take away some of the more tedious aspects of the game, and unfortunately much of the exposition is backloaded, so unless you have a wealth of patience, consider mods or alternative methods to viewing the story over playing the game in its natural state.

Signalis is the closest I've seen a "we miss classic survival horror" game come to absolutely nailing it. The very short version is that it is a miserable but well-contained and interesting story, with combat good enough to pass (better than the Silent Hill 1-2/Resident Evil 1-3 groundwork it's based on) and a playtime that doesn't overstate its welcome. I bought it basically on release with a $20 pricetag and have no problem recommending it to my horror friends at that price.

Spoiler free warning: If you think the story was unclear or that the ending wasn't complete, the game's not over.

I'll keep my pros/cons vague so as not to spoil anything significant.

Praises:
- Surprising amount of weapon variety, a lot more than it really needed. I made it through two thirds of the game using nothing but the shotgun and pistol because I thought the end was closer than it was and was hoarding ammo for the boss. This could also be a gripe, since you really shouldn't feel as strong as you do in a survival horror game, but whatever. Not like RE2 didn't fall for this same problem.
- Visuals are quite nice. Given the size of the team, they did a lot with a little and it works. Things are expressive enough. Most of the areas have pretty immersive sound. Enemy aggro soundtracks are a little obnoxious (and someone really liked SH1's soundtrack for it) but that's about it.
- Enough enemy variety not to feel short. Could've done with maybe one more design, but I think the baddies here are enough.

Gripes:
- There are minor control problems, primarily with interacting with doors. Poor controls are to be "expected" from classic survival horror, as jank, unfriendly combat systems suit the idea that you really shouldn't want combat. The issues lie elsewhere, and the most obvious ones are that you can come out of a door into an enemy and take a guaranteed hit, and that dialogue pop ups don't pause the game, and every item you pick up has a confirmation before you pick it up. Meaning that if you try to run past an enemy and swipe an item off the table, you'll definitely get hit unless there's a huge head start. It's not really a gamebreaker because the default difficulty gives you way more ammo and health than you need, but it is annoying and could've been easily avoided.
- I like limited inventory systems. This game limits you to 6 slots, including key items, healing items, ammo, your flashlight, and your weapon. I feel this is a little too tight. A 7th slot would round it out, I think, or take from RE and give a bag-like item that gives you an extra slot later on.
- It's a little artsy. Your mileage may vary on how much this bothers you, I'd have liked it to feel a little less like an art project, but it's kind of thematically appropriate.
- The transition between chapters 2 and 3 is a little too subtle and easily missed. I personally know 2 people who didn't realize chapter 3 exists, and judging by the times on How Long To Beat, there's more out there.
- Not a big fan of the art style and the intentionally blurry/pixel stylization. This, like the artsy complaint above, is largely subject and maybe I just have bad taste.
- It's okay to take inspiration from SH2, and to make some of these, like one of the opening scenes, obvious homages, but maybe tone it down a bit. By chapter 3 I'd seen so many I was half expecting a "hole here, gone now" reference. Thankfully there wasn't one, but still. There's a lot.

Conclusion: If you like classic survival horror (I mean SH1-2, RE1-3 when I say this, that style) and don't mind a really miserable story, then pick it up. It's probably the best indie love letter to those games, barring maybe Forgotten Memories.