Recent reviews by Razzyl Dazzyl

I played the hell out of Vermintide, and Vermintide 2. Loved every moment of them.

This game I originally played on game pass but then caved and got it on steam to play with friends.

I cannot recommend this game.

Vermintide got a cosmetic shop after the game was fully fleshed out, patched up, and balanced, and the player base asked for more cosmetic items.

Darktide however started with a premium cash shop on day 1, when the game felt like it was a beta at best. It's been buggy as all hell, and filled with performance issues that the devs seem to simply not care about because they can just keep making money selling cosmetics. Cosmetics that I can't even see on people half the time because when I load into the lobby (why is there a lobby of 20ish people in this 4 player game, anyway?) half of them don't have torsos, or are just floating heads.

Being able to play solo would be nice so you can grind up to play with your friends, just like you could do in Vermintide, but apparently that's just not happening.

The framework for a great game was already there, but they seem to have lost their touch.

This game is just... awful. Right from the main menu I was already rather annoyed. Out of all the volume sliders including Ambient sound, special effects, etc... WIND SOUNDS ARE TIED TO MUSIC???

Then it drops me in a house with no indication of what I have to do, obviously I need to leave the house. Ok. No button prompt. F??? I tried left click, right click, up, E, space, shift, Q... It tells me AFTER I open the door that F is the key to 'use', now I know.

I walk past a bunch of NPCs... I can't even see them. They blend in to the background and the foreground, which is all the same color. Pretty poor visual design already.

Enemies have no real.. composition. It's just.. a random blob of a body with random assortments of limbs, sometimes they shoot projectiles which.. go through walls and floors, making it hard to see what the heck is going on.

I played for 30 minutes and my head hurt. It's SO HARD to see what is happening around you. Sometimes the camera zooms out and pans over so you can see a large area, but then you lose track of where you or the monster you were currently fighting are.

I got next to no world building or lore at all, nothing about this screamed lovecraft. It's just.. slop.

I would like to first preface this by saying this review is not simply because of the creation club, i was going to leave a negative review before that. That matter only adds to it.

Starfield is probably one of my biggest disappoibtments of the year. The game sounds and looks like it would be amazing, at first glance. But the tedious work, lifeless world, and boring fetch quests just leave you wanting.

Often times the quests were extremely long dialogie scenes- which i expect occasionally from Bethesda, however it often felt like that dialogue only existed to be long, and not to tell an actual story.

Quests were often just "go to point a, grab thing, go to point b, back to point a, back to point b, go to point c, back to point a...." rinse and repeat.

Traveling in this space game also felt boring as you can just fast travel everywhere and space travel felt like a chore.

Not to mention that this is a space exploration game with... only humans? I would understand from a series that hadn't worked with different 3d models for other races but.. for Bethesda the frame work is already there. You already had lizard people and cat people- hell you already had aliens in previous games!

To pile on to this mediocre game you decided to charge for mods?? Again??? This game feels like it needs mods to be fun at all, but I'm not paying $7 for a single quest line, when your idea of a long game is "randomly generated quests for infinite busy work".

Editing your character is locked behind a *one time use* paid DLC item.

You are not allowed to start a new game, and even if you do somehow manage to get into the files to restart your game, your character is saved on their servers and wont be edited.

"Fast travel is for games that make travel boring", oh but apparently fast travel is a $3 DLC, to give you an item that was *free* in the last game.

The ability to buy camping gear in game is also a paid DLC.

Combat feels exactly like the first game, same progression, same skills, everything. Nothing feels like it changed. On one hand that's nice, because I don't have to learn anything new. On another hand... There's nothing new about the combat and that's kind of boring.

I feel like they only put in anti-cheat so that they could persuade people to buy all their little micro transactions. Making the in-game inns expensive for early game and then saying "oh well you can recover health at a camp site.. that you have to pay for DLC to be able to buy" is pretty garbage.

At the moment I cannot recommend this game. Wait for a big sale, and wait for some updates because right now this is ridiculous, and the pure and utter greed has left a bad stain on one of my favorite action RPGs of all time.

I had this on my wishlist for at least a year and finally got it. I went into this game fairly hopeful, but I was left.. disappointed.

The first disappointment comes to the game being tagged as a souls-like. What I expect from a souls-like is generally respawning enemies when you rest at a checkpoint at the bare minimum. The enemies in this game only respawn if you *die* before reaching a new checkpoint. Enemies do NOT respawn, and you can't grind exp or resources at all. Thus this would be an action RPG, not a souls-like. That is more on steams tag system than the game itself though.

First gameplay issue I would have to say is the combat was just.. not interesting. Enemies get briefly stunned from light attacks, and you need to build up a heavy attack to stun them when they use a yellow attack. That's it. I did the first two bosses hitless first try by just dash, strike, dash, strike, repeat. Didn't have to learn patterns or anything.

The enemies themselves weren't that hard, the game only tries to be "punishing" by throwing pure, utter bullshittery at you. This includes ranged enemies that can attack you from off screen, flying enemies that you cannot attack unless they decide to stop hovering over a pit, and enemies that have delayed attacks that still go off even if you officially "stun" them, meaning you counter attacked them successfully but still also took damage.

The game is also riddled with at least two kinds of collectibles- both of which are not really explained to you. They are just mentioned and then.. they are there. The first bestiary page gives you two sentences of dialogue to read, but then after collecting 6 more I had no more stuff to read still and was just confused. I was also for some reason collecting spiders with 0 explanation as to why. I assume it tells you what they are for later, or when you get them all.. but I felt absolutely no drive to play that long.

All of this with the fairly average story, and numerous spelling errors just took me entirely out of the world.

Right now I would not recommend this game. The controls feel kind of clunky, and it seems very poorly optimized. I have a really good system, I can run most games at high or ultra unless I am streaming- but this game I had everything set to low and was still getting lag spikes. It seemed no matter what I did, the game was eating ALL of my CPU. I closed every single other program on my computer and it was still spiking my CPU. ESPECIALLY in umbral areas or areas with fire. Not to mention that in the one hour I played I crashed twice.

The game looks amazing, and the combat seemed okay from what I got to play so far.. but it's not enough to keep going if it's going to be super frustrating.

Character creation seemed needlessly obtuse. There are triangular sliders for everything, but it seems like positioning the sliders doesn't just change minor aspects, if you slide it over 1 point too far it will DRASTICALLY change. For instance, if you are at 9 on the bottom left face slider, then go to 10, you will go from looking like a teenager to a decrepit old man. On that same note, the age presets are broken. Middle aged looked young, and then "Young" and "Old" were both wrinkly old man with 0 differences.

TLDR; Burns the hell out of my CPU, lots of minor issues, and game crashes. Probably look into getting on console with a sale instead.

Very much enjoyed this game. It had a wonderful aesthetic, great music, and the story was great!

There were a couple of minor details that could improve upon user experience. One being let me tab out without the whole game pausing- especially in a game with lots of dialogue and very little to physically do while dialogue is playing through. And having more things to physically do in the studio would be nice, other than just throw paper balls and move a couple of objects around.

Especially if you are achievement hunting, because you will have to play two or three times to get them all.

Without giving any spoilers, the story was amazing, and since the majority of it was an audio medium, the voice acting was superb. I felt pretty invested in it by the end. Definitely worth a shot, if story games are your jam!

I really wanted to love this game, and it's SO CLOSE to being great in my eyes. But there are a few quality of life touches that are missing that would send it over the edge.

Right now I'd put it at maybe a 6 out of 10, still recommend playing it, but it can be frustrating.

The game does not hold your hand and sometimes doesn't even really *hint* at where to go next.. which would be fine.. IF they let you place map markers.

A metroidvania with backtracking and progression abilities that does NOT let you place map markers is.. well.. Rough. There are things that will be important later that are not marked by default and you simply have to just.. remember.

The story, the art & aesthetic, and the general vibe are all wonderful. I love all of it.

The gamepad controls confuse me a little bit, but weren't a gamebreaker, and I was able to get used to them with time. (I've never seen Left Trigger be the default jump button with A/X is not used for anything except dialogue.)

I'm hoping they take some feedback on quality of life updates, but the game is quite lovely and worth a look.

Dying Light 2 was probably the biggest disappointing that I've had in months. I absolutely loved the first game, nearly everything about it was fun and felt good.

Dying Light 2 somehow takes everything from the first game, and makes it worse.

The parkour does not feel fluid, and at many moments you just slide off of objects or seemingly trip and fall to your death. Not to mention that your stamina is INCREDIBLY low and you can't run for more than a couple of seconds at the start, and have to advance the story a ton and do LOTS of exploration to get it to a decent level- and if you focus on stamina you wont have a lot of health, so you'll die in two hits from the weakest zombies.

Speaking of, combat feels like it was made to be a chore, something you need to avoid at all costs. Weapons break faster than breath of the wild, so they feel pointless to upgrade- but if you don't upgrade them they will be too weak to make a dent in things. Level 1 zombies can dodge 8 times in a row and hit like trucks. Sometimes they die in two hits, sometimes they die in twenty. Also if you get in a fight with a zombie, or a human for that matter- it makes noise. Noise attracts zombies. *always*. No matter where you are, zombies will spawn and swarm on you. This will go on until you get to a safe house. I am not talking about night time hunts, this happens on rooftops during the day as well. There are zombie spawn points all over the map, and all spawn points are infinite. They can crawl from under cars, vents, holes in the wall, etc. Oh what's that, there's a locked chest in the middle of the street? Too bad, zombies are going to continuously crawl from the bottom of the truck its next to, and jump out from the back of another truck nearby until you leave or die. No time to pick locks.

The story was ok. It wasn't terrible, but I had a hard time feeling attached to it.

Side quests were boring and repetitive, the stories of them often nonsensical and just boring. Most of them are just plain fetch quests, or simply "bring me x crafting material." The only thing that drives you to do these quests is that they give you more exp than you can possible get by actually playing the game, so you feel obligated to do them.

The game is buggy as hell, and none of the bugs I encountered were 'fun'. Enemies attack hitboxes are bigger than their animation swing, so sometimes you will be out of range of an attack but still take full brunt force of it- tightly made parkour areas are scary not because you're afraid of missing something, but because your character might decide to vault off a ledge you have to climb over and leap to their death. Or you can tap a lightly and you'll leap off the side of a ledge, even though you have the 'ledge protection' setting turned on. NPCs will sometimes walk into a campfire and start burning to death, then freak out and try to kill you. UV is supposed to keep zombies at bay, but sometimes they will just sprint into the UV areas and attack you, then die. You can spend a great deal of effort clearing out a building to get loot, then it can 're-roll' spawns and suddenly the building you just finished clearing out is full of volatiles and you die.

I played for 12 hours online, and 4 offline, and frankly I didn't have fun a single moment of that. If you have a friend to play with it can be a lot more enjoyable, because jank games with friends are fun. Alone, however? Do not recommend.

If you are looking for a fun mario-kart alternative on PC this is actually pretty good. The AI can be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the single player races, but it's fun as hell to play with friends! People memed the hell out of this game but it's unironically fun to play.