Recent reviews by Lilac

my accurate face when a bumbling dumbass AI companion walks into my swings while im trying to clear a path for them, then they defect and kill me in 2 hits using a katana forcing me to reload a save
thanks game

The shotgun in this game is actually the most powerful ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gun that's ever graced the planet, somehow outpacing the Doom Eternal BFG. The first few bosses are trivial as you can sit behind cover and plink at their weakspots with the shotgun, which has such a ridiculously tight spread it more or less guarantees every pellet will land on the target at any range, and the damage is so high per pellet it can kill the first boss in a few shots. It's definitely the powerhouse of the game by design which is why the ammo for it only comes in boxes of 2, but if you can save up the ammo through the levels (which is easy to do as even on normal difficulty, the rifle overpowers most enemies) you can atomize the bosses in seconds.

TLDR: VLADiK BRUTAL Shotgun > Doom 2 Super Shotgun

My review for this game will remain negative until the matchmaking ban system is removed. All it achieves is unfairly punishing people who have to DC from matches (pick a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason from the many in the box, including but not limited to the dozens of gamebreaking bugs that occur during gameplay) with temporary gamebans that can last up to 24 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ HOURS in length.

Edit: Just got a 2 day long ban for having to go AFK for 10 mins mid match... yeah. ♥♥♥♥ this game.

RATING: 2/10
OVERALL IMPRESSION: Stay away from this game, and watch a lore recap. You will not miss any good gameplay.
DETAILS:
Positives:
- Facial Rigging and animations for talking/expressions during cutscenes is a lot better than they were in past games.

- Money grind is a lot less strict than past games, you'll find yourself spending significantly less to heal yourself at restaurants.

Now that that's out of the way...

Negatives:
- You spend the first few chapters in an absolute slog being a glorified errand boy. Imagine all the really boring substories from past games, mash them together into a Frankenstein's Monster of garbage, and make them part of the main story, and you have the first 5 or so chapters of Yakuza 3.

- Combat is totally broken. Enemies will spam blocks all the time, so you better get a weapon that can break block early! Oh wait, you can't!

- Coin Lockers, which worked to benefit players who explored the cities regardless of what chapter they were on, have been reworked. Keys no longer spawn in the first few chapters.

- Heat Burn-Out was re-added. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if they didn't make it so you didn't get an absolutely pitiful amount of Heat per attack. Heat Actions are useless to the player until they obtain significant upgrades to their Heat skill tree. Getting grabbed by enemies is basically a GG for atleast half of your Heat Bar as well, because you lose Heat much quicker while grabbed.

- EXP System is bogus. You can no longer choose what upgrade you want to get next, like every single past installment, the game now uses a predetermined skill path for each of the 4 skill "trees": Soul, Heat, Body, and Tech.

- The animations are really clunky, stiff, and overall unnatural. Kiryu can now turn on a dime without needing to take a second to stop his forward momentum.

- Groups of enemies no longer show up on the map until they're sprinting at you. Better memorize their outfits and spawns, cause one unexpected enemy encounter can and probably will send you back to the main menu!

- The new city is cool and all, but it somehow manages to have less explorable ground than Sotenbori, which is a literal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ square.

- Enemies do significantly more damage to an unprepared player if they play on Normal difficulty. You will frequently be using Staminan XX to recover from street fights instead of just using a Toughness L or two.

- The inventory system has returned to the Yakuza 0 and Kiwami 1 system of limited slots and non-stacking items. Refer to the points made earlier about Heat and Enemy Damage.


-------SPOILERS AHEAD-------

The story, if you can even call it a story, is utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You start out, again, as mentioned before, as the orphanage errand boy, slogging through menial task after menial task for the first few chapters. The real story after Kiryu is done with the orphanage has no tension whatsoever, every single plot twist and weird ass plot device is forshadowed by a chapter or two, and the ending where Mine jumps off the roof for no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason whatsoever is a stupid plot point.

I can no longer in good faith recommend Hitman 3. A dev team that really doesn't care about fan feedback combined with poor gameplay changes has made this game purely unfun. Why penalize me for cheesing the system in freelancer, where there are no leaderboards, if you let speedrunners cheese the system for something that actually matters?

If you wanna get your fanbase back, here's a genuine suggestion: Give us the ability to buy/obtain multiple of each item and have a sort of supply of the items in our safehouse. Ex: picking up an additional Bartolli 12G shotgun while already having one in base would give you 2 of said shotgun. if you take the Bartolli 12G out of the safehouse during a mission and die with it or otherwise fail the mission, you still have the Bartolli 12G available for use because you have multiple of the shotgun. This would mitigate the amount of pain felt from losing Freelancer missions, because people can effectively insure their best items by dropping more cash on them to buy multiples. I would even recommend a scaling cost system, where the more of an item you have, the more it costs to buy from suppliers.

Until something is done to make freelancer fun again, if that is adding my suggestion (or any other suggestion that would make it more fun) or rolling back the recent ALT+F4 patch, I will be uninstalling this game and I will not consider reinstalling.

A21 fixed a key issue I had with this game: Perks and Crafting. In this game, it either took you a few hours of leveling up Intelligence to get the Crucible schematic, or get lucky and find it in the mid to late game. Now, you can get one pretty easily by looting bookstores with an Intelligence level of 5 or more. Good change!

I cannot recommend this game in good faith (if it was still available for sale, anyway), since, while the game itself is still good, the devs planned to add a really BS monetization method into the game that would've killed all forward drive it had, meanwhile the sequel kinda just made fans mad at the devs. Disassociate yourself with this game and its developers and save yourself a world of headache.

After reading some of the negative reviews of this game, a large majority of negative reviewers don't seem to comprehend the fact that this game is supposed to be a new spin on The Oregon Trail. Yeah, you're gonna die a lot. Yeah, the game uses RNG, but that's the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ point, like what are you even complaining about? The original Oregon Trail was just like this, RNG dependent and 9 times out of 10 you will not reach the end goal, but that makes it all the more satisfying when you finally reach it, does it not?

Who the ♥♥♥♥ wants to wait 2 hours to be able to play a game again? Legitimately one of the dumbest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ design choices i've ever seen in the gaming industry, and I played Duke Nukem Forever, Hunt Down The Freeman (Day 1 Pre-Patch to current day) and Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Unironically one of the best Sandbox games out there if not THE BEST. You can literally do anything you want in this game. Knock out all of Miami with a fish? check. Kill all of Isle of Sgail in Knight's Armor while wielding a machete once owned by a warlord? check. Knock out all of Sapienza, stuff them all into a meat freezer, and close the door, dooming them all forever? check. Limitless possibilities, Limitless fun, and extremely difficult to complete yet so-satisfying challenge packs, especially when you get those sweet, sweet Silent Assassin Suit Only rewards.