Recent reviews by Scarfy

A charming game that lest you interact with random people, your friends, or just go solo and have something on low-stakes but fun in the background. The only downside right now in public lobbies is that the game lacks security, but the developer has stated they're working on it.

:)

For your sanity I would recommend steering away from this title unless you're willing to accept losing and the fact you simply can't do anything against some match-ups without extremely good reads. I've seen too many people including myself (when I don't usually consider myself a tilter) become absolutely fuming after the 10th bad match-up in a row.

It's not even that people will play the meta characters, especially at lower MMR where instead they choose noob-stomping characters with hyperarmor or 3 light chains that people don't know how to deal with. At a point there was both with Highlander pre-nerf that allowed people to stomp people who were newer to the game- but most of this cast is being left behind imho as power creep becomes more and more evident due to the size of the roster.

It has taken 600 hours of "getting good" but I've finally been accused of cheating for my ability to light parry consistently, which has led me to making this review. A *major* problem in FH is that you can just spam lights if your opponent doesn't know they can block them to stop most character's light chains (most, some come baked in with superior lights to continue chaining evne on block) or know the timings to parry most of the cast (since the timings change per character).

A lot of this game is knowledge check on knowledge check, some characters are double or even triple- maybe even infinite reads in the case of Ocelotl where they can infinitely chain unless you perform an explicitly defensive action. There are also some characters that you might find yourself enjoying that simply aren't good at higher level due to being reactable- which means no matter how many times you mix up their *entire* kit can be countered simply by staring a little bit; like Nobushi with her 500ms lights and the 600ms kick that's essentially required for her to continue her chain which are both considered reactable.

A lot of the characters are samey enough that after playing them all, the only one that really stands out in recent memory is the newest- Sohei- which I like and dislike because it means as long as you like the base mechanics you should be able to find a character that suits your playstyle. Unfortunately I tend towards the off-meta/reactable characters that require more reads to get value out of their kit- but someone might like BP who has a kit that allows him to deal with practically any character or Afeera who has every piece of kit minus full guard.

Dominion is an entirely different beast to duels, I personally prefer duels (2459 duel matches vs 481 objective matches) because it's more centered around individual skill instead of general team cohesion; though don't think that means you can't carry 4v4s yourself. I've seen it time and time again, if you're unfamiliar with the game you might want to look up Faraam to understand what I mean- those people are few and far between but they exist in nearly every bracket.

People can be especially toxic in this game for no reason, sometimes for good reason too- try to not let it bother you if you're interested in playing this Rock Paper Scissors type fighting game. If you're interested for ranked you can play it but be warned that Ubi isn't known for being very on top of banning cheaters in that mode, beyond that the world is your oyster. Take breaks and remember to learn basic mechanics, especially revenge tagging so you don't get upset when you don't get revenge in a team-fight in 4s due to your ally hitting one of the 2 people attacking you; and you can get far even if you don't study specific character movesets.

They're listening to the community and trying to make small adjustments to not neuter classes while encouraging healthy play. The next 2 hot fixes prove they're listening and I'm looking forwards to seeing them cook with some patience this time on both sides.

No more rushed updates though please, the community can not handle it and its clear that a long term investment is not what the community wants when it comes at the cost of dealing with bad balance for a long while

Such an awesome game for early access under the work of a singular developer.

The visual style is the most divisive part of this game where you might love it or you might hate it, I've had a few friends outright refuse to buy this game because of its visual style and I see some distaste for it on the discord. However, it is of my opinion that the style is intentional and lends to the exact style of the game perfectly, even if right now they might even be temporary; since we don't know exactly everything that's gonna change yet.

The monsters themselves are very well designed to work altogether and separately, you can find yourself with an entirely different mash-up of them each game and have to find ways to work around that combination through your gear and with your team. My only real complaint is that some of them are a little under or over-tuned at the moment, but that's to be expected when there's only a singular dev- and it hasn't even remotely ruined my experience of the game. The under-tuned monsters are a great opportunity for new players to learn the game a bit more even if they don't provide much difficulty in it of themselves, and the over-tuned monsters still have counter-play that allow you to play around them even if they are a little too strong. The lore of each of them is somewhat comprehensive, mostly taking up a single terminal page of information or more, with a select few exceptions, and there are logs scattered around the world for you to collect.

The game plays like a roguelike in that each save keeps your knowledge of each monster in the bestiary and all your logs, but it doesn't let you retain items, or ship upgrades between runs. It also plays like a multiplayer action horror with carefully crafted SFX and proximity chat that makes you really feel immersed in the game; though it is also possible to play with Discord VC if that doesn't suit your fancy (just try to be courteous about it in publics, ask if people are alright with it!).

Then there's the actual gameplay itself which involves going into a building on a foreign moon with its own distinct lay-out, changed minorly by RNG or weather modifiers that can sometimes appear to hinder you. These maps are consistent enough that you can learn them with muscle memory to know exactly where to go to reach the entrances and fire exits, but the interiors of the buildings themselves are constantly randomized with some variation as to what spawns based on the moon itself. This lets you in a way choose the experience you want, but it's somewhat lackluster at the moment since a lot of the moons have the same tile assets for the interiors and only mix up the monster and gadget spawns.

You might run into a monster around a corner that you can't handle on your own, or get snatched away right in front of your friends- they might even hear your mic cut out through the wall. You may pick up a heavy object worth a decent bit of money only to not make it back to the ship in time and have to brave the outdoors against nocturnal monsters. It even gets to the point where there are monsters that act differently based on how you interact with the world, it isn't just a one-dimensional horror game like all the others where the monsters are purely there to hurt you and add difficulty- it actually feels like they are alive and acting upon their own personalities.

All in all the only thing holding this game back right now is a lack of content and that's purely due to the workforce of one and the early access, and while that's certainly not a guarantee that it'll continue to be amazing, it's already come this far and has the support of over 100,000 people.

I have a very deep love/hate relationship with this game, which I'm sure will improve with time as I understand the intricacies in more detail- but right now I'm not enjoying myself. Despite that though, I do genuinely believe this is a game made by passionate developers, even if at times the decisions they make can leave you scathing with rage.

I wholeheartedly believe that the end-game relies on artificial difficulty in the way of gank-fights, unending wide angle multi-attacks that leave you very little time for openings, high HP bars to pad out fights, enemy spam with enemies that have enough damage output to one-shot a person with 60 vigor whose wearing armor, and more unfun mechanics that help to shape your experience from one that was absolutely magical to a ♥♥♥♥ biscuit.

Despite having all these complaints about the game though, I still genuinely have to recommend it for the experience leading up to this point and for the potential for it to get better- as you most certainly can get to a point where these problems are nonexistent for you with enough time and practice- but this game is very much not beginner friendly in that regard.

Despite being labeled the easiest of the souls franchise, that doesn't mean that there aren't moments that the game itself feels like it had the artistic direction of an 11 year old with a crayon trying to make a "cool" boss fight- and other times it has the artistic direction of twenty famous renaissance painters with enough soul put into it to make even Satan blush despite possible glaring flaws in design philosophy.

If you like Souls games for the experience of learning a boss' move-set and actively making improvements to how you approach them to defeat them, I can not in good faith recommend this game for those purposes because at times it feels like the enemies are just quite literally rolling the dice and requires you to be reacting to the moves. Sure, knowing the general move-set helps in this regard but it's still a guessing game that you are on the receiving end of and it begins to really show in some areas.

There are also some areas in the game where it quite frankly feels like they lazily took a brush with an enemy and just at large placed it there, sometimes multiple variants of annoying enemies just to give you an extra bit of flavor to your pain- but there are also areas where it feels like they spent literal weeks just on a single room.

All in all I enjoy the game a whole lot with regards to playing it for the exploration, and I'm giving it a genuinely fair shake, but it has very quickly become an unfun slog to explore the entire map just to get slapped in the face with enemy spam or a gank fight boss because they couldn't think of any other way to make it difficult- it just gets tedious and old quickly. Take a lot of breaks with this game though and you'll probably be fine overall and be able to find enjoyment in it despite perceived flaws.

Carefully constructed (with love), mindless and mindful, tough and relaxing, just these few words barely begin to scratch the surface of just how much of a gem this game is.

Do not add skins just to bump up the price of a content pack, you have a cosmetics store for a reason.

If you don't mind a long grind-fest (It's Warframe, you probably came here expecting that) or some of the weaker mechanics of the game; you will find a great game that you can just mindlessly play every once in a while. The only real downside that makes this game truly unenjoyable at times is the time gating involved with nearly every action you take, so it can feel like a while before you start to see change.

The game itself also has a very complicated modding system that can either powercreep you to high hell, or make you the weakest person in the lobby. I would heavily recommend not going into this game blind in terms of what mods are useful, because then you're just asking for a bad time.

The game itself has a game-play loop but the new player experience leaves a LOT to be discovered because there is a LOT of catch-up to do before you can even get close to certain people; but that's okay. It's meant to be a slow burn and require a lot of catch-up *because* it's not P2W, you can trade blueprints of expensive items for money for example but not the item itself or the resources required to craft it. If you don't have enough of the in-game currency as well, you are incapable of trading or crafting the item as you need to play the game to get credits to fund everything you do. The downside of this system is that it makes Warframe pretty grindy since you have to go out of your way to get all the different resources anyway, so you often times end up farming resources and blueprints at the same time instead of buying them.

The developers also took it upon themselves to start restricting the amount of warframes that you can farm at any given time, this sounds initially like a bad thing but let me tell you why it isn't. Having it so warframes are only available during certain time-frames makes it so there is less loot diversity during those times, allowing you to much easier get the relics for the warframes that are available than if ALL warframes were available at this time. Imagine if this system didn't exist, and you had to go get 100s of relics to get 1 of the 49 warframes currently available, just for a *chance* to get the item you want. So, this is an unfortunately necessary evil that has to be endured, though there *is* an upside; since they do recognize the fact that some warframes aren't available for up to a year or more sometimes (making them expensive, but still obtainable from other players for plat). There is an alternate way to get two warframes that haven't been available, which is through Prime Resurgence, where you can pay for the warframe primes directly with regal aya (real world cash) or the relics with aya.

There's plenty of content too, over 10 years worth of work now. I'll revisit this later to polish up and clarify more strengths but some key weaknesses.

I've come back to the game after a bit of thought and I'm spending a bit more time with it. I still don't recommend it for the average person, and I don't think it's necessarily a fault of the game itself, but rather the addition of Scholar that really tilts my perspective in this direction. I sincerely hope that anyone having a bad time with SotFS can experience the original game for what it's worth, despite all its bugs; I definitely feel like there were some good changes added but I also feel that a majority of SotFS's content leads itself into creating difficulty for the sake of killing the player instead of actually introducing difficulty. I'll explain what I mean shortly.

Most of my own complaints can be mitigated through controller use as well, though I don't have any form of controller and wouldn't be used to playing on one either for this game enough for it to matter. Even so, I think a majority of my points will still reign true for both console and PC.

First of all, to get the PC stuff out of the way, the port for the controls are downright awful and the fact that durability is lost 2x as much because it's based on frame-rate is downright abhorrent. You will more than certainly, if you are playing on Mouse and Keyboard, want to change the controls. There are multiple guides you can look up, but ultimately, change it to something that feels comfortable for you. If you like the default control scheme, I would say you're a masochist or one of the lucky few, but I would also respect your choice to play the game in a way that satisfies you.

Generally, SotFS increased enemy spawns in areas, which sounds fine because generally that would mean more souls and content when properly balanced. You would be taught how to play the game through these means, but the execution of this falls short of what it should be. Enemies are added in locations that make pulling individual mobs or playing smart not a valid tactic, and often times you will end up fighting a group of enemies no matter how you approach the situation. This normally wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that DS2 is one of the only games to have such a punishing healing mechanic where it takes an immense amount of time to activate, though that can be mitigated through ADP and life gems (somewhat). Overall, I don't feel like the game succeeds at being difficult in the way that people originally expected, but I came into this game as my first souls game knowing it was going to be downright unfair at times, and I kept all the negative criticism I've seen the game receive over the years in mind, and tried to just have a good time. I gave myself breaks, and I tried multiple different variations of game-play to find a style that suited me best, and I still ended up going hollow when I reached a certain portion of the game, which led to me uninstalling and ranting about how terrible the game was. This game will test your patience and break you if you let it, so don't sweat about every mistake, you will die, you will be put into unfair situations; just try to make the best of it.

However, when it comes to actually playing the game, you're sometimes just punished for entering a room due to the increased enemy spawns, taking threat from all mobs in a 10 mile radius. This can be especially dangerous if your poise is low since it can guarantee death with a hit or two landing on you. Even with higher poise, you might not be able to roll out of certain attacks and will eventually reach a point where you are staggered if you don't play smart. Even further, sometimes there will simply be gangs of enemies ready to just kill you for turning a corner. You are supposed to mitigate this by playing slow and using a longbow or magic, if you're using strength then you have the option of swinging your weapon, and generally things die when this happens. These strategies dwindle later into the game, especially when enemies begin having poise of the Gods, and the gameplay in Iron Keep slows down to a slog of using ranged weapons, or boss running, or taking 30 minutes just to get to the boss. I'm all for playing the game, but when the game forces you to play the same content repetitively and slowly, meticulously, for 30 minutes only for you to fail at a boss; it begins to become a bit infuriating and downright unfair. Further, there is a mechanic where after killing enemies for a certain amount of times, they don't respawn. People recommend triggering this mechanic to make areas easier, which, while true, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that people *recommend* that you farm enemies into not respawning just to reach a boss, considering what was said previous, but for some it may be the ideal experience that they're looking for.

With my own personal play through, I wasn't taught any new strategies by the game itself, as an example, there are certain interactions with stats that you simply can't figure out without playing the game long enough to get a good sense or looking it up. If you don't like looking things up to progress, or having a stat tax (ADP) just to make the game a bit more bearable, I would recommend looking elsewhere.

Many bosses are generic copy pastes, yada yada, big giant person in armor. That's not my primary issue, but rather, there are some unintuitive interactions for someone just playing the game. Like with Earthen Peak and the Lamia boss, you can burn the windmill to get rid of some of the poison in the arena. For the Pursuer, you can parry him, and that makes the fight practically a cake-walk. The motto seems to be "♥♥♥♥ around and find out", and I think with how punishing certain strategies are, it may boil down to a player simply assuming they are not supposed to beat a boss or scrambling over guides only to find out they just need to do a simple trick or do something they just missed. For the longest time, I didn't even know torches would scare away certain creatures because it just seemed like a way to light fires; but maybe that's my fault for not talking to every NPC? I ultimately am just confused where a majority of the game knowledge is supposed to come from when the primary mechanic of dying is punishing the player, making it rather clear that you aren't supposed to die, but if the motto is "♥♥♥♥ around and find out", you are supposed to die to find out. Further, bosses will have shoddy hurtboxes and hitboxes that make it unfair and difficult, yet you can get around this with experience; which you gain through dying and being punished because of your death. But, come to find out recently, a lot of the time you can even get around boss mechanics and creatures by running around them without even locking on, and it makes the game significantly easier in some areas.

I don't have any experience with the servers being up yet, so I'm probably missing a few player ganks around here somewhere. Just assume I talk about them and let's move on to the finale.

I hate that I love playing this game, ultimately, but if you can get past its flaws, you can find some peace in playing it once in a while. I'll probably go hollow a few times more, maybe I'll even get to experience DS2 pvp at some point, but I don't think this is a game for the sane. I also don't think this is the game for most people who want the experience of a Dark Souls game. I think this game is instead in its own category of souls game, perhaps that's not bad, but for now, I would not recommend this to other players.

Still discovering things about the game that seem like such simple mechanics when you know them. I haven't even played all the different kinds of playstyles yet, either.