Recent reviews by ndee

Every update to the game has made the game more tedious and more unfun to play:

the pop-up spam; the tedium of not being able to save your equipment designs in the designer and being forced to rebuild the same planes, ships, and tanks every game; the micro required to keep your frontlines from collapsing as the AI continuously shuffles your units around (sometimes resulting in disastrous encirclements); the constant clicking through menu after menu after menu just to find a submenu with a funny number you need to reference buried deep in the UI; the absolutely terrible AI; random naval invasions or focuses that create a puppet which cause your frontline to be cut off without notice.

The answer to some of these is to "git gud," which practically requires the time of a second and third full-time-job to invest in watching YouTube guides.

Every victory feels ultimately feels pointless after the tedium of a long-drawn out game. The game is unoptimized and its interface and engine was not built to handle all of the systems that the DLC have freakishly mangled into its engine. Overall, the game is frustrating to learn to play, and the juice is not worth the squeeze.

I recommend staying away from this game.

Unfortunately, a month after release, this game is still completely unplayable. Like many PC ports, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has been completely neglected. While console versions have received several updates, there has not been one single PC update since release on April 5, 2022, to address the numerous softlocks and glitches that completely break and prevent further progress. This does not count the numerous other bugs and glitches that cause frame drops, CTD, and prevent events/collectables from being able to be 100% completed. Tech support for the game merely suggest restarting your 100 hour savefile if you encounter any game-breaking bugs. It's pathetic that a game can be released in this day in age in such an abysmal state and not one single reviewer (paid off or not) made note of any of these tech issues before launch. At this point, I have no faith that TT has any desire to fix all the issues the game faces (especially the minor ones that are somewhat cosmetic and are annoying, but not gamebreaking, like everything you've discovered in the Databank always being marked "new" when you restart the game). It was wrong to release the game in such a state, as many of these are obvious issues I encountered only during 6 hours. Regardless of whether or when these issues are fixed, due to their lack of care for their own product and their abject failure to communicate with the community over the progression of any bugfixes, TT has lost me as a future customer, and I STRONGLY recommend you stay FAR AWAY from this game.

EDIT: THREE YEARS later, and the game-breaking bugs preventing completion are still not patched.

As someone who avidly enjoys other FromSoftware titles, I cannot recommend this specific game. Elden Ring is FromSoftware's first attempt at a true open-world game, but I would skip this installment and wait for Elden Ring 2 if you are hoping for a truly engaging open-world Soulsborne game.

There certainly are very pretty vistas to gaze at, but these in themselves are not reward enough for the amount of exploration the wide open map asks of the player. Exploration feels largely pointless and aimless, as the biggest flaws of FromSoftware's "git gud" game-design philosophy mean that you are dumped into a large area and given no direction or heading at the beginning of your quest. While this is much more manageable in their earlier titles, the open map is simply too imposing in Elden Ring. Additionally, exploration feels unrewarding as the way map fragments uncover the map mean that player exploration feels largely pointless in and of itself.

Personally, I found the mounted combat and crafting systems to be more of a chore than anything entertaining. The crafting system feels like a shallow way to justify such a large open world, and Torrent the horse is anything but responsive to the player's input. Furthermore, the game is not well designed for PCs, as many players, including me, faced tech issues (such as invisible enemies and leaking memory usage). The game itself, as bought on Steam, automatically assumes that the player is using a controller, not a mouse and keyboard. The lack of care and attention still paid by FromSoftware to PC controls (let alone their failure to label keyboard input by default) make this port feel more of a careless afterthought.

If you are a new player, perhaps interested because of all the hype, I would suggest picking up Dark Souls I: Remastered instead, if you are interested in FromSoftware's titles or the Soulsborne genre. The design philosophy issues that plague Elden Ring are largely mitigated within the remastered version of the first game. If you enjoy that game, you may then move on and find that you enjoy Elden Ring. Personally, I plan to stay away from this FromSoftware title.