Recent reviews by Frog

I like numbers going up so...

.3 Update

A lot of my complaints below have been addressed. Playing Deadeye this league felt great and much more like the experience I was hoping for at EA launch. There are some negatives still, especially around how premium both move speed and action speed are to making the game feel 'good'. Many other ascendancies struggle to feel good due to this and my fear going into .4 is that GGG will, instead of bringing other classes up to Deadeyes level of fun/QoL, will decide to orbital nuke movespeed and actionspeed/tailwind, making the game feel like you're walking through soup again. That would be a horrible decision IMO and really kill the game for me.

Crafting was vastly improved this league with new omens and currencies items. Async trade is an amazing QoL improvement and a really great addition.

End game feels bad and the infinite atlas has a lot of problems. This is supposedly being addressed in the next major patch and I'm hopeful they'll make it more engaging. Today, a t1 map feels much the same as a t15. Towers suck and having to spend 2 hours finding overlapping tower layouts to maximize at most 5-6 maps feels bad, especially when you barely drop any big currencies after all that juicing.

Overall, huge step in the right direction but a lot of questions remain. Was this patch a fluke or a measured response to player feedback from .1 and .2? GGG has a history of waffling on product direction.

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tl;dr - Ruthless 2.0. IDK, maybe just not for me

Tough review as I love GGG and PoE 1. Played every league, spent a lot of money on its MTX, and generally like slower paced games with engaging combat. I didn't go into this game expecting PoE 1.2, I knew full well it would be harder and slower. I embraced that, and you should to if you want to enjoy this. A. As it stands, I think its worth your time, but it still has a number of issues.

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**Right now, the game is difficult in a way that just isn't fun, just often tedious. EDIT: This has been improved with the 12/9 patch but the endgame is still a slog.

There are multiple encounters that will one-shot you, so you're forced to dodge roll for 10 seconds between attacks and slowly chip away at a health bar. If you die, the boss / encounter resets and you try again.

IN MAPS, IF YOU DIE, YOU LOSE THE MAP. This SUCKS. White mobs can 1 tap you even with 4k ES + CI. Some wonky stuff happening right now with scaling.

Some builds (summons, magic) feel pretty strong early game, but melee and other martial archetypes feel absolutely dog-water until you can craft a decent item. This is a huge issue right now - balance is all over the place and *most* early game skills scale heavily on weapon damage (unless, again, you're a spellcaster, in which case its really all about gem level and generic damage mods).

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Some progression areas (looking at you, trials of chaos) are INSANELY over-tuned and unfun. Spending 30 minutes per attempt only to die to a juiced rare mob or the last boss (1 tap btw) while having the best crafted gear you could make feels incredibly disappointing. Why was it shipped in this state after numerous closed/private betas?

Love the atmosphere, animations, overall encounter designs. Great stuff, you can tell they put a ton of heart and soul into this game. They absolutely need to bring the rest of the classes up to the level of spellcasters/summoners.

Overall, a fun but often frustrating experience that I'll continue to play and hope it gets better with gear/levels. Many people claim the game is 'too hard' - I think thats silly. Most bosses can be played around or stunned/frozen and dismantled, even in late game maps. Optimistic for the game but I'm worried that the 'vision' is going to make it too niche for me.

This is a tough review, but right now - even as a huge fan of the franchise and the first game - I've gotta recommend waiting on this game.

Dragons Dogma 2 needs its own Dark Arisen expansion to really flesh out the endgame. The core gameplay loop is fairly fun and engaging... at first. After 10 or so hours of wandering around, you've seen 90% of the enemy types and you'll quickly start to get bored of the hundreds of random skirmishes the game throws at you to keep you 'engaged'. There are not many fights outside of boss/scripted encounters that feel interesting.

The endgame is nonexistent (which is weird since the first game nailed this with its expansion... why regress here) and the MSQ its mid at best. There is also a weird point where the game just ends and you have no warning of, "Hey, doing this will end the game for you." I hit this point with maybe 25% of the map explored. What?

If they release an expansion that adds an endgame and increased monster variety, I'd probably pick it up again. Until then, honestly, I'm going to play other games. Huge bummer.

Space vietnam and bug stomping.

This one is hard to evaluate. I love the improvements to the UI and QOL, but the game feels really unfinished. I don't regret my purchase necessarily, but I find myself going back to TW:WH2 more and more due to the much more polished feel of the game.

The DLC team has their work cut out for them, considering the launch team has moved off the project after the 1.1 release. I'm hoping WH3 ends up being a worthy successor to WH2, but as of 5/5/22, I can't recommend it if you already own WH2.

Immortal Empires edit:
Game is much better now, many of the aforementioned issues have been resolved by the DLC team. Immortal empires is fantastic and latest DLC is exceptional. Game is worth purchasing in the current state. I would say that in the future, perhaps hold off on pre-purchasing/release purchase if CA keeps releasing games in a state where it requires 4-5 months of patching.

Good game, infinitely replayable. Mod support makes it great as you can easily fix anything you don't like with a good set of mods.

Maybe being a clone forced to build an ever-increasing and all-consuming factory an engineer wouldn't be so bad?

Grom is a big daddy and I cant wait to cook him a decent meal.

Maybe not a classic but it is a good game and deserves your time. If you enjoyed the previous game, you'll likely find something to love here. The new(er) turn based mode breathes fresh air into the game if you've already beat it once, giving it a more tactical feel, especially at the higher difficulties. Fans of Divinity OS 1 and 2 should enjoy it when played this way.

PROS:
1. Great voice acting. Every NPC is voice-acted and usually to great effect.
2. Combat is good for a cRPG, and you have two ways to play it - RTwP or turn based. More on this in the cons as well.
3. Enjoyable story with player agency. Want to tell a god-thing to piss off? Go for it. You might regret what comes next, but you usually have an option to go your own path.
4. No paragon/renegade bar system. Dialogue choices aren't spelled out. There is nuance to decision making, with plenty of skill checks for additional actions.

Cons:
1. Setting. Some people love it, some people miss grimdark from the first game. I don't know. Pirates are okay, but I would've preferred a more grounded setting than the high seas.
2. Combat can feel wonky in turn based, largely due to trying to balance and translate things like duration or free actions between real time and turn based. Some builds are completely busted in turn based, and some are unusable. You'll want to do some research before investing too much into any one direction of character growth. One plus side - you can respec anytime after the first area provided you have the coin.

Overall - good, almost great, game. I'm looking forward to PoE 3, which will hopefully come one day.

Haven't really played it that much, but it seems good so far.