Recent reviews by Tacgnol

Closer to Gothic than TES, despite the comparisons that mostly seem to focus on the fact the game is primarily a FPP RPG.

Good exploration, world design and writing. Serviceable (if not very ambitious) combat. Good zero to hero character progression that makes you feel very powerful in the mid to late game. Hub based rather than a true open worlder (which is no bad thing, the hubs are pretty huge).

Loses some marks for polish issues in the late game (last chapter feels quite rushed), also fairly inconsistent performance (thanks Unity).

Overall a very solid RPG that should appeal to fans of the Gothic series. With a few patches it will be a superb game, though even with some polish and performance issues is still a very good game as of this review.

The game is a complete and utter mess. It's an inconsistent and chaotic mess of conflicting design decisions that feel like different parts of the game were designed and created in total isolation.

Early game is an utter slog. You move slow, take lots of damage and do very little damage in return. The areas are huge and slow to navigate. Enemy packs feel too large for the low DPS. Conversely the later parts of the campaign become an absolute cakewalk for any half way decent build. Considering the main portion of Path of Exile is the end game, the slogging campaign just feels like a total waste of time before you can get to what should be the main meat of the game.

The end game is half assed and underdeveloped, which is somewhat expected for an early access, but it feels like something that would fit better in the Path of Exile 1 style that has been pasted over to POE2 (which the devs claim is meant to be a slower paced game.) It's essentially a worse version of the POE 1 mapping system, with less interesting content and a jagged and confusing system of adding content and modifiers.

The above issues were mostly present in the original 0.1.0 release, but the recent 0.2.0 has doubled down on these issues rather than trying to resolve any of them. Multiple specs, that for most players without streamer sweatlord investment were barely passable, have been nerfed to the ground. A blanket 30-40% nerf on damage has been placed on most abilities, presumably for the sake of the "slow paced" vision. The new class, huntress is extremely underwhelming and the new ascendancies (if they even function at all) are very poor.

"The vision" is being prioritised over fun and the vision isn't even coherent or consistent. The game is meant to be a "souls-like" in ARPG form, it's meant to be D2 reborn, it's meant to be a slower paced version of POE1. All of these have been presented at various different times.

Also it was promised that Path of Exile 1 would be maintained and would not suffer. We haven't had a single proper seasonal league on POE 1 since 2 launched, despite the fact the first game still has a lot of players. Shame on GGG for leading people on and not keeping their word. Bad behaviour that is becoming ever more common for this company and I suspect will get worse with the departure of Chris Wilson. I didn't always agree with Chris but he was always honest and open.

An improvement over the first game in almost every way. More epic and grand in scale and with a lot of refinements to gameplay mechanics, otherwise more of the same.

Runs super well and I also only had a handful of minor bugs across my 70 hour playthrough.

Just an amazing game and anyone who enjoyed the first one should pick it up immediately.

This is by far the most creative expansion pack released for AOE 2 DE. Instead of the usual format of multiple unconnected campaigns for the new factions, it instead has one huge campaign in which choices made persist through multiple missions.

One choice I made in the Athenian part of the campaign even had an impact in the Spartan portion of the campaign about 8 missions later. This is a new and very welcome mechanic to AOE 2 and I hope they continue this grand campaign tradition in future expansion packs.

The new factions are fun and quite unique. Some things are simple reskins, i.e. the Lancer/Shock Cavalry/Imperial Cavalry line just being the knight line. Others like the hoplite line for the Greek factions are new and unique. All three factions have unique mechanics involving mutually exclusive techs and, in the case of the Spartans, a unique hero unit commander trainable at the town centre who buffs nearby units.

It felt like an Alexander campaign was teased at the end of the grand campaign, I'd really love to see this!

I thought this was a good Runescape clone up until the fact I discovered that your combat levels are chapter/zone based.

Everytime you advance to a new part of the game your combat progression is reset and you have to unequip everything you've found and regrind your combat level in the new area.

This is a totally bonkers mechanic that kills any desire to progress or raise your combat skills as it's entirely pointless.

No idea what the Gower brothers were thinking here.

An extremely polished and very fun game in the style of the old Piranha Bytes Gothic Games.

The game has an amazing zero to hero curve where you start extremely weak, have to grasp every advantage early on but end up god-like in power in the late game. It rewards exploration and has a small/medium but extremely content dense world in which every corner has something to find, from a herb that might permanently increase your stats when brewed into a potion to a powerful piece of equipment.

Much like Gothic it retains the narrative structure of joining a faction which follow slightly different variations of the same main plotline. This adds replayability as, although the main plot likely unfolds in a similar way, it's worth seeing the variation and how it unfolds from the opposite perspective.

The game has a unique Celtic mythology type setting, with nature gods/spirits and the ruins of a powerful ancient civilisation dotted around the world. It has interesting world building and very competent writing, with a cast of interesting characters.

As previously mentioned this is a very polished game. In 40+ hours of play I noticed one very minor bug during a side quest which required me to load a save a few minutes previously. The bug did not re-occur.

Overall, highly recommended for fans of the Gothic series and fans of RPGs in general. This is a truly fantastic game and I hope Just2D have much future success with this series and any other endeavours.

"Character creation locked."

"Waiting in the queue."

"Game server disconnected."

See these messages and more as you attempt to create a character and play the game.

I haven't played this a great deal yet, but what I saw impressed me. The game gives you a lot of approaches to most situations, letting you talk your way through, fight or sneak. The world seems to contain a lot of rewards for exploring and using your skills, including finding skill books and resources you need to survive.

The melee combat is pretty fun and it's really amusing seeing groups of enemies trip over each other and the environment and accidentally hit each other in chaotic fights.

I think the only thing that needs improvement is the game has a few bugs and can sometimes crash (though not super often). The dev seems to be fixing these quickly and listening to reports.

Definitely worth a shot in my opinion.

Terrible performance on an i7 10700k and a 3080. Low fps and stuttering. Can't even maintain 60 fps in some areas. Capcom have dropped the ball here. If the engine couldn't handle all these NPCs then they shouldn't be in the game.

Filled to the brim with predatory MTX (Yes you can get everything by playing but the fact it's even sold in the first place is horrible). Also the fact the game's director rants on about hating fast travel yet the game includes a paid way of getting more fast travel points is utterly disgusting.

The game itself seems good, but it's impossible to recommend it in light of the performance issues. Capcom should immediately remove all these MTX from sale and issue a proper apology rather than a generic non-apology PR statement. They should share concrete information about the steps they are taking to improve the performance, including adding options to cull NPCs that are not relevant to quests or content.

Also let's not even start on the questionable decision to add denuvo (a super CPU intensive DRM) to a game that already is known to be incredibly CPU intensive in the first place. No wonder reviewers were apparently getting better performance (though still bad) on their unprotected review copies.

Capcom is morphing back into Crapcom.

Dev has fixed the terrible performance issues after disappearing off the face of the earth for 2 years, and whilst it still isn't perfect, it's much much better than it was.

Seriously fun boomer shooter with dark visuals that remind me a lot of Witchhaven. Has enjoyable level design and well hidden but not frustrating secrets. Nice variety of weapons.

Highly recommended.