Recent reviews by The Classy Muffin

Cons
- ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ optimising
- Complicated config options
- Boring late-game PvE content
- Online experience is terrible
- Not very noob friendly
- Clunky building interface
- Buggy

Pros
- Fantastic mid-game
- Large array of maps
- Lots of content to chew through
- Highly customizable settings
- Console readily available to fix glitches and bugs.
- Decent modding community to help supplement some of the cons
- Dinosaurs go brrrr

Summary of PvE gameplay:
Game is highly dependant on game-knowledge. For early-mid game you need to constantly be aware of what areas in the game you can go to with what dinos or you will get absolutely shafted. TL;DR there's awareness of how dangerous a dino is and being able to spot them, then there's equally being aware of how easy a dino is to tame/kill.

Late-game is about learning the optimal way to accrue every resource, optimising every process and then automating whatever is possible to automate. The very end-game, if you consider bosses that, is a boring grind-fest of repeatedly breeding the same dinos together for hours or even days on end in trying to mutate them enough that they're strong enough to beat the most powerful versions of the bosses.

Personal recommendation: ascend at the gamma level on each map (easy bosses), moving to the next map afterwards, beta (medium bosses) and alpha (hard bosses) level are just painful to grind for and not really worth the effort they require.

Side note: single deaths are EXTREMELY rare, even one death often leads into a cascading spiral of subsequent deaths, get used to it.

Arguably the worst Souls game in the series...still a very good game, just doesn't compare to the two goliaths next to it imo (DS1 and DS3).

Horrendous levelling system. Other than that, god-tier game. Getting mods to specifically fix said levelling system is highly recommended.

Arguably the best Lego game.

Fight pits suck, everything else is great, all I need to say.

TL;DR at the bottom.

This is a review from an experienced player of the souls series. The reason I've chosen to go for a positive review is that whilst my opinion is definitely negatively leaning and I'm able to think of more cons than pros, if you're a more casual player, half of the cons I list here probably won't bother you.

Let's start off with cons:
I'll get this out of the way at the beginning, compared to the souls series this game has been catered to a more casual audience, I found all of the bosses to be pretty easy compared to the other titles in the souls series.

The telltale motion is completely unintuitive. What do I mean by this? If you've ever played a game like this whether it be a souls-like or just generally a game where you have to dodge, you'll know what a telltale motion is; in a game with well-made telltale motion, you will be able to intuitively respond to the boss' movements if you're good enough without having to take free hits. In this game, bosses are intentionally designed with unique and incredibly irregular telltale motions that are impossible to guess without losing to every boss a couple of times just to learn the telltale motions. Bosses will often wind up their swings for a seemingly random amount of time and then release long after than what should feel natural, this is a timing you cannot guess and have to memorise to beat, it's not hard to beat once you've memorised it, but it's not fun game-play.

The reason this has been done is whilst all the bosses have a relatively easy move-set, you can't just instantly sweep it and as such, casuals will come across a boss, get defeated, and then beat it in just a few more attempts and get that instant "woo hoo" feeling they get when they think they've improved. You'll find that even the worst players will beat bosses in a couple attempts and there will be little discrepancy between them and even the best of players, pleasing the casual audience, this has been done intentionally by HARD gimping the telltale motion.

One of my personal key issues with this game is that previous souls games reward you for exploring. On the other hand, this game PUNISHES you for NOT exploring. I do not like the lack of freedom I have with my play-style and an example of this is listed below:

There are 9 weapon upgrade tiers unlike the standard dark souls 4 tiers. This means that upgrade materials for each tier are spread incredibly thinly and therefore each slice of the game for each upgrade material is also significantly smaller, making it much harder to narrow down where each material would be. Not only that, but because there are SO many tiers, it's much more likely for you to miss a material for at least one of the tier and end up progressing far enough for the earlier tiered materials to no longer be around. E.g. I discovered the ember to upgrade my weapon to +15 when I still had a +3 Great Epee because I had not discovered any of the previous embers to upgrade my weapon beyond that; I had to look up a guide to find those previous embers because they are hidden in seemingly random parts of the map and I could not progress without doing so because I was literally tickling bosses for smidgens of HP.

As it ties into one of the previous points, I'll mention that to me, the middle area of the game felt incredibly rushed. I experienced the early and late portions of the game to be great, but when it came to the middle I just wasn't having fun with the bosses or the enemies. In the middle section you'll find that almost every enemy has boss-level HP, boss-level damage and has move-sets vast enough to be equatable to a boss. What this does is encourages you to skip passed enemies which negatively ties in with my point about exploring, meaning you are punished for essentially not taking out re-spawning bosses.

I almost forgot to mention the amount of copy+paste jobs there are in the game. You fight the EXACT same bosses, even looking the same, MULTIPLE times at different parts of the game. There is even mix and mash jobs where they put multiple bosses you've already fought together in one arena. I can name at least 2 bosses off the top of my head where there are at least 4 encounters with slightly varying appearance and move-sets. Not to mention the same goes for mini-bosses, you can find many of the same mini-bosses copy+pasted all over the game.

Now that's enough of my complaints, onto some pros:
Horse combat, this vastly changes the game in the sense that you can fight bosses in two ways, on horseback or on foot. Whilst on foot, you are significantly slower but you can dodge for immunity frames. Whilst on horseback, you cannot dodge for immunity frames but you are however significantly faster, which means if utilised properly in certain boss fights, will make for a much easier time.

There is a LOT of content, ranging from dungeons dotted all over the map to roaming enemies and somewhat (?) random encounters as well as a WAY longer storyline than all of the other games. What this means is even if you're going just for a single clear with no intent to replay, you will get your money's worth in time spent on it.

The game-play is extremely fluid, not once in the game did I experience a movement that felt off or clunky, everything moves in a way that just seems natural. Alongside that, the game is visually astounding and holds up in terms of modern game standards.

There are a lot of secrets to be had which aren't necessary to progressing but also don't directly make you stronger in the game. Like all other souls games, there is at least one secret ending to be had, provided you complete a set of optional actions before progressing to a certain point in the game. This makes for good replayability.

TL;DR if you go into this game looking for Dark Souls 4, you will be very disappointed. It's a great game in its own right, but it does not scratch the same itch the souls series does. If you've never played a souls game, you'll probably love this game and even if you have, as long as you go into it knowing this won't be like the souls games, you should still enjoy the game.

Seems pretty sick so far with re-playability, good accessibility to new players and multiple play-styles. Not to mention it has a steam workshop which I haven't even touched yet.

Ride wife. Life good. Wife fight back. KILL WIFE. Wife gone...think about wife...regret.
If have chaotic friends ooga booga caveman brain says good.

If you play killer, maybe a third of your games you will face a pre-made group (SWF), trust me even if they say "We're solo", they're 9 times out of 10 a SWF. You will know when you're facing a SWF. Statistically you're 4 times more likely to face a toxic survivor so don't feel disheartened when almost every game there's somebody spam t-bagging or being rude in the end-game chat.

If you play survivor solo, you need to accept that not only are your teammates often going to be either bad or selfish, but escape is entirely out of your control as a solo queue survivor. That's why I strongly recommend just making your own fun/contribution on a per-game basis, because you're going to get frustrated having to rely on your teammates. Hence, I recommend you follow the 1-1-2 rule which means:

- Complete 1 gen.
- Get 1 good chase (between you being found and you getting put on the hook a gen gets done or close to that amount of time).
- Get 2 unhooks/saves.

If you can complete these 3 things, you can consider the game regardless of if you escape. They are of course interchangeable so if you're playing the game full stealth you can just pop 3 full gens and consider yourself as having contributed, or you can do a 3 gen chase, unhook basically every survivor etc. whatever gets you to complete any 3 of those 3 criteria or more.

ALSO, stay off the Reddit, the Reddit is toxic as hell but the game itself is actually pretty chill, most toxicity you may have heard of the game is going to be from the Reddit.

I've always just had a blast playing this with friends, although sometimes it can be toxic when played with community members.