Recent reviews by Nikey

Monster Hunter Wilds is a true rollercoaster of emotions. While it improved on certain aspects of Monster Hunter, most of what this game does is better done in other titles of the series. It feels like the directors forgot what makes Monster Hunter a great game. So many different things make this game a tedious rather than fun experience.

The first and main complaint are the graphics and performance. Monster Hunter Wilds looks and runs worse than World and looks like a Switch game for players without a high-end PC. There is a high-resolution texture pack, though I have yet to see someone use and run it smoothly. In normal gameplay I reach about 40 - 50 FPS, but since the latest update my game stutters every few seconds, which leaves the game unplayable. If you're in certain parts of a map, or fight certain Monsters (MIsutzune) the FPS can sink to 32 FPS. So much effort is being put into the graphics, even though only a fraction of players can enjoy them. Because who cares about optimising a game in 2025…

The second complaint is Focusmode and the new monster wound mechanic. Focus mode is a new addition any weapon can take advantage of. It allows players to turn and adjust their hunter's position without having any downsides. But it robs the game of so many different things. An example would be the setups players used in Monster Hunter World to hit a Greatsword TrueChargeSlash to wake up monsters. That is unnecessary since you can turn your TrueCharge in focus mode by about 180 degrees. There is also no need to pay attention to your positioning since Focusmode does it for you. Being able to move in between most attacks removes a lot of vital decision-making.
While in Focusmode, players can see wounds they've inflicted on monsters. Wounds are created by hitting a monster's part multiple times and grant bonus damage when hit. But players can also decide to use a Focusmode-exclusive attack to destroy the wound, deal significant damage, gain certain benefits and guarantee a stagger or topple the monster. While this sounds great in theory, wounds are created too frequently. Monsters can be almost completely shut down, thus making learning monsters and their moveset almost pointless. Knowing that a monster uses a certain follow-up after a specific attack or jumps to the right under certain conditions and being able to abuse this to your advantage felt amazing and is missing in this entry.

It goes on and on with the bad things. As a third, I'll focus on the game's difficulty.

It is at an all-time low because of new mechanics, which isn't always a bad thing. But Monster Hunters wasn't known to be easy. Especially when you look at other Monster Hunter titles, this game's difficulty feels lacking. Most of the monster attacks inflict very low damage and don't stagger the hunter. This allows players to just face-tank the living hell out of monsters without any real consequence. As a result, farming monsters for better gear feels optional; dying feels like a choice. In addition, most of the new monsters added have attacks that don't cover or have a lot of range (or AOE), making it more unlikely to get hit. This imposes a problem with certain weapon types that actually want to be hit (greatsword/longsword/switch-axe/charge-blade) in order to stay efficient. In certain hunts I stood still but was missed regardless.

Some of these difficulty complaints go hand in hand with certain weapons changes that were made. While Gunlance is literally a "blast" to play and is well designed (you can dish out big damage at the cost of leaving yourself open), longsword and Sword & Shield are the complete opposite. By adding the ability to move in between attacks, you can evade most of the monsters attacks while dishing out a consistent amount of damage. There is no risk-reward here; just pressing buttons allows you to win. This also applies to Greatsword. A weapon known to be difficult to play but very rewarding if you manage to hit the monster. Greatsword gained an "offset", which essentially functions as a parry. An attack that, while dealing damage, is extremely safe sounds abusable, and it is. Greatswords ability to be invincible during 2/3 of an attack and afterwards being able to instantly guard (and repeat this sequence) and gaining a guaranteed true charge for being attacked by a monster is ridiculous. You can literally shut your brain off and beat the game this way. This offset outclasses any other playstyle and allows you to gain maximum reward for minimal risk.

The next bad thing is the story. It was meant to be one of the main selling points of this title. Though it just underdelivers. It lacks in multiple aspects and feels so unconvincing. Certain scenes with Nata just feel so artificial and are a pain to watch (no human would act like Nata did). The story of Monster Hunter 4 was so much better than this. I will say it again: Monster Hunter DOESN'T NEED A GOOD STORY; it was never the focus of the series, and most players skip it anyway because they play this game to hunt monsters.

Running down the list, we have arrived at the multiplayer.

I don't know who had the genius idea to have multiple options to choose from when trying to play COOP. It was bad in the beta and wasn't really improved on. A player who never touched a Monster Hunter game would probably just give up upon seeing "Invite to Linkparty", "Invite to Environmental Link" and all the other shenanigans. Me and my friends spend quite a good time figuring out how to play together. Why not just allow players to invite via Steam directly? If you're in a private lobby, you can't invite friends. You have to share your Lobby ID, which can be found under the Memberlist, or you have to play in public lobbies, which is an absolute NO-GO if you want to play the game blind or don't want to get spammed with annoying messages. SERIOUSLY, WHO APPROVED THIS!?

Moving on, I'd like to talk about the next thing. Set-Building. Someone on the team had the great idea to separate skills/effects/decorations between weapons and armor. What does this mean exactly? You can't slot the Skill Attack Boost on any armorpiece or receive it from one, since it is exclusive to weapons. Since this skill isn't available on any forged talisman, it makes this skill worthless. As a result, set building lost a huge amount of depth and feels boring. It also hurts the game's long-term playability since players don't need to farm different materials.

Followed by all this negativity, you guessed it, comes another weird decision.

A lot of effort was put into the graphical appearance. The Monsters animations are fluid and telegraph attacks well. But since so much effort was put into graphics, the overall content the game can offer was cut short. The game's overall monster count is very low. You are able to see almost all of the monsters within 15 hours of gameplay. And 10 of these hours are just slowly walking through certain parts of the environment because some character wants to tell you their life story. The game forces you to do this, which makes replaying this title an absolute disaster. As already said, I JUST WANT TO HUNT MONSTERS and not listen to an NPC yapping for 15 minutes straight. I understand that the intention is to showcase the pretty environment, but this could've been done in so many better ways. Mostly you don't spend time learning a map's layout anyway, since your mount just takes you to the monster anyway. It just feels horrible destroying a monster (since they literally can't fight back) in under 2 minutes and then having to wait 15 more minutes in order to kill the next monster in under 3 minutes.

Now, after all these complaints, being charged 70 euros feels like a cash grab. Didn't know EA participated in this game's development. Even Wild Hearts, which was disliked because of performance issues, excels at almost every aspect and is, in my opinion, superior. I rather wait for the next hand-held Monster Hunter Title.

Incredibly Fun take on the Racinggame genre.

Build your own track, race on it, expand it and place obstacles and then race again.
After a certain Score is reached by a player the game ends or enters in a deathmatch between the players which reached the threshold. After a winner was decided, you receive XP and level up which unlocks new Cars and Trackpieces.
Simple yet effectivly entertaining.

The Good:
- Simple controls that are friendly to non gamers (Your Father should be able to play this game)
=> Your car speeds up the further away from the others you are
- You can play local or online with up to 4 players without any Issues
- Trackbuilding is fun, since there are quite a few pieces to be used
=> This is strenghtened by the Obstacles the game offers (Fans, Bumpers etc.)
- Levelsystem to unlock different Cars & Trackpieces, which makes playing the game feel rewarding
=> If a highlevel player hosts the game, everyone can use the Pieces which the host has unlocked
- The game has build in Bots, which are not to shabby. (Seems like Bots don't calculate placed obstacles into the Pathing)

The Bad:
- In an online lobby your unable to kick out players
- When you connected a Keyboard & controller player (local or online) you can't disable either of them.
to do so you need to restart the game.
- When in a custom game (Host decides rules) sometimes those are reset. As example: I disabled walls while playing with my friends, though after a few rounds, walls got enabled again. Seems like a bug.

Questionable Designchoices:
- Bumping into other players will sometimes launch them heavily to the side, push you and the bumped player forward or
sometimes push no one at all. It feels pretty random.
- Respawned players (Bump invincible) become really slow when inside another Bump invincible player.
=> This sometimes results in pretty stupid deaths
- No Shortcuts: Since all players are followed by a single camera you can't try to do crazy shortcuts, since when you're outside of the camera, you just die.
- Items.... the best Item are the 2 guns stiking out to either side. The others are just useless or way to difficult to get Value out of.

First, the performance sucks. I'm over the minimum requirements and on low settings still only receive 36 up to 56 FPS depending on the Situation. The average FPS sat at about 40 FPS. It just isn't optimized.

Second, Microtransactions that wouldn't be needed. It doesn't really matter if you can obtain the Items in the game, it's the fact that the option to purchase it is there. It just shows Capcoms true nature.

Third, it contains Denuvo. Eating away at the performance. That every player has to suffer under this is a joke.

Pretty fun, but not worth the 60 euro pricetag. Get it if it's on Sale and the price dropped to about 40 euros.

Friends vs Friends is a Firstperson Shooter that combines Deckbuilding with the basic shooter mechanics featering a best of 3 system.
While the game is alot of fun when playing against someone you know (a Friend obviously) that has a similar level than you, it kinda dies when playing quickplay.

Wishes for the Gamedevs: Please work on Custommatches. As Examples
1. An Option to set each Cardlevel to a specific level (Useful when you have a friend that isn't
on the same level as you)
2. An Option that would randomize the Deck of each player, just for fun I guess.
3. New Maps obviously.
4. Free for all / Deathmatch gamemode supporting 3-4 players

First of the Pro's:
- The Cardgameplay feels nice and is pretty unique.
- Pay to Win does not exist.
- I like the different characters and their design.
- The Lobby and maps are detailed and look nice.
- Different Cards that grant you different buffs, or inhibit your enemies.

The Con's:
- Quickplay/Matchmaking:
Often you're being matched against Players on a really highlevel. Rounds can therefore feel unwinnable because your opponents cards are stronger than your's. Finding a Match takes quit a long time.

- Weapon accuracy:
I don't like the Accuracy System. It's like Trouble in Terrorist down. You don't have first shoot accuracy and were you're actually shooting at is randomized. At a distance of 10 meters and above, you could whiff shoots even if your crosshair is on your target

- Small selection of Weapons

- The Cards:
Some Cards are really strong and some have next to no Impact on a Match. As Example poison works like a wallhack while constantly dealing 3 damage per second since the Damagenumber pops out where the poisened Player is, or Vampirebullets healing to much when playing with the Brasshopper.

- Leveling:
The Levelsystem is nice don't get me wrong. But the fact that losing a match effectively grants you about 23% of the winners xp and ingame currency, is pretty rough.
Because leveling up gives you currency to upgrade your cards and unlock new Characters. So when playing against a friend and you win more, you're going to become stronger and get more cards than your friend does, which kinda sucks.

- Maps:
There are sadly only 5 Maps while writing this review. All of them are pretty small because you can see your opponents spawn by moving about 4 meters. Also the Maps only support 1vs1 or 2vs2. I would love to see a free for all or Deathmatch gamemode (for about 3-4 players)

- Character passive abilities:
I don't like the fact that the different characters have unique passive abilities. Why not, upon unlocking a character, grant the player their unique passive as a card to use? It forces you to use a specific character, because their passive might be stronger then the character you would want to use.

Technical Issues:
Opponents sometimes glitch into the ground or teleport around. This even happened while playing with my friend in Discord and his connection seemed fine.

Conclusion:
The Reason why this game is rated positiv is because of it's low price tag!
The game has potential, Though it needs a lot of work, as it lacks quite a bit of content. The Matchmaking though suffers a bit as it puts you together with players that have better cards and therefor a better chance of winning.
I would advice against a Purchase when you don't intend to play this against a friend.

A cool little passionate game, which the Devs actually care about.

Perfect Heist 2 is a better version of Guess Who. Seek out the player among the NPC's as Cop or try to fit in as a Robber and steal the Money from the map your currently in. Hack ATM's or Arcades or blow up a Vault and try to shoot your way through, play how you want to play. Here and there are small changes and updates which show the devs care about the Game, even though it's low price. It might be difficult and overwhelming at first, but as you play more, you will understand the gamemechanics as there are alot of different classes to chose from with a different loadout. There to help you is the ingame Tutorial and for the creative, there is a Map-Editor which is supporting the Steam Workshop.
What is missing is actual Feedback about hits. While there are bloodeffects on hit, you never know if you truly hit an opponents Head or not and the Hitboxes feel really janky at times.
If you play a match with Bots, they wont count as real players. If you die on the robbers team while a bot is still alive, the game will end. Cop AI has a simular problem. Ability's that show player positions etc. will not show the AI.

Conclusion: It's better than Battefield 2042 in price and gameplay. Get it with a group of friends (about 4 players needed) and have fun.

Why do Missions? When you have Mods and can destroy everything.

Building a Factory that is 100% efficient is harder than any Math exam.

This game is for creative minds. It offers you alot of options to build or edit creations in various ways. Its really enjoyable if played with friends, making building contests or other fun stuff !

I can only recommend Scrap Mechanic !

How could you not like this game? It has still a huge community. With the huge selection of addons in the workshop, you can modifie the game to its fullest. Just grab some friends try out the different gamemodes and have fun!