Recent reviews by greywolf00

Great presentation, and other than having to wrap my head around LT to show play art rather than RT the controls made sense. The game play is more mixed. The passing feels good, but blocking doesn't last long, and the CPU never missed a throw. The swat animations need working, often just resulting in a stationary player completely out of the play if they miss, often giving up much bigger plays than they should.

Edit: Drops have gotten much better since 0.1.0c, but the stability is still garbage. Crashing every other hour rather than every hour these days.

Slower combat, improved visuals, still a blast, but it crashes about every hour. Much less stable than the original POE beta was unfortunately. Most of the difficulty is a byproduct of gear check bosses that take too long to kill when you're under-geared (which happens regularly) due to the currently awful drop rates for gear.

Better than 1, but much weaker than 2 imo. Props for the attempted innovation on the portals and city fights, but the portals especially just turn this game into a massive slog that stays well past its welcome. Couple that with a bunch of very poor DLC deliveries and pricing and the Mixed score is understandable.

The build your own demon prince was a great addition and I hope this become a core feature they continue to build on.

I would never recommend this over 2, and unless you really want to play one of the new factions you can pretty safely skip it. And unless the portal suppression mod gets fixed strap in for incredibly long, drawn out games.

I had a lot of reservations about Larian doing a BG game given how amazing the first 2 are and generally finding the DOS series to just be ok.

This is just stellar. If you like the Forgotten Realms setting there's so many easter eggs. The adoption of the rules was well done, the freedom of approach design pillar is on full display, and the writing is pretty good.

Most of my complaints are limited to the final act. I found the pathing in the city to be awful. Performance also took a bit of a hit. I played shortly after release and run into several bugs (which have probably been fixed).

I obviously wish there was more content that got cut, or follow up DLC, but this deserves the acclaim it received.

This is one of those games where I wish we had a more nuanced recommendation choice than Yes/No.

TL;DR – depends, weigh the Pro/Con list (very subjective are Cons for me).

Ultimately, I asked if I would tell someone to buy the game. My answer is No, because there’s a lot on context/caution I’d feel compelled to provide. Even after sleeping on it to see if I felt compelled to play today it really just hasn’t hooked me.

Just as a background, I’ve been a big BioWare fan, including Jade Empire, KotoR, and SWotR. I even have Anthem and ME:A. In the DA series DA:I is the first game I didn’t finish, because there was too much slog (poor pacing, poor level design, war table time slogs) to overcome for me to stick it out.

I was cautious about DA:V but after reading through the divisive takes on the preview I knew I’d give it a shot. I was less optimistic after watching several pro and negative reviews coming up to release but decided to lean on the Steam refund policy (which I’ve never used before) as a safety net and give it a try.

1 ½ hours in I’m still mixed on it. It is better than the negative reviews lead me to fear, but several things I saw in those reviews have resonated even in this short playtime.

Pros:
Pacing is way better than DA:I.
There’s a lot of action right off the bat which picks back up quickly after the first break.
So far, I’ve enjoyed the story – might be because I never finished DA:I.

Cons:
Some of the voice line delivery is very flat for the scene, undermining the intensity.
Level design is improved compared it DA:I (which I found too large and bloated with busy work icons), but at least early on it feels a lot like DA2 where it’s very linear and limited.
I did encounter a crash to desktop ~70 minutes in for “physically removing the GPU” during play. I’m running an i9-13900KF 3.00 GHz, 64 GB RAM, and a GeForce RTX 4090 so hardware isn’t the issue. I did upgrade to the newest driver released last week, but haven’t played long enough to confirm if that fixes the issue.

Very subjective:
Combat
Action combat is my least favorite system (turn based > RTwP > Action). Even among Action combat games this feels simpler, and I always hated the ME take on commanding teammates. It has not improved here. That being said, one of my biggest complaints with Action combat systems is they don’t always feel responsive, and I do not have that complaint with DA;V. I can get my character to do what I want, when I want which is a core requirement. I had complaints about how spongy enemies got over the ME series where the last ¼ of ME3 was just unbearable for me, so I’ve just been playing on the lower difficulties to avoid it. I can see spongy being a concern at higher difficulties.
Art
Obviously, a turn towards cartoony which I’m just not a fan of, especially in a series that has been darker in themes historically. I really despise the Qunari overhaul too.

Conclusion:
I would not recommend this outright. If someone asked how I felt, I’d say it’s ok. Nothing really stood out or is compelling me to continue. It starts off pretty good, but I thought ME:A and DA:I did too before the shine wore off and I couldn’t bring myself to force my way through it.
Given some of the great releases we had in 2023 and early 2024 (BG3, Rogue Trader, Horizon Forbidden West) this doesn’t come anywhere close to the recent RPG quality. I would say take advantage of the refund window to kick the tires and decide for yourself.

I actually prefer the post battle shuffle mechanic for acquiring Persons over the random question approach in some of the other games.

Too many weapons fire the direction you're facing, without a good way to control the way you're facing due to a constant need for mining. Far better off getting decent move/mining speed to exploit kiting bugs in groups and clearing with explosions. A way to control facing direction separate from moving ala Soulstone Survivors would be welcome.

The idiotic anti-consumer hill they're choosing to die on isn't something I will support. Disabling updates on all CAPCOM games to play offline and won't buy anything CAPCOM touches until this policy inevitably gets rolled back.

The idiotic anti-consumer hill they're choosing to die on isn't something I will support. Disabling updates on all CAPCOM games to play offline and won't buy anything CAPCOM touches until this policy inevitably gets rolled back.

The idiotic anti-consumer hill they're choosing to die on isn't something I will support. Disabling updates on all CAPCOM games to play offline and won't buy anything CAPCOM touches until this policy inevitably gets rolled back.