Recent reviews by squid (◕‿◕✿) mode

Addicting.

It's aight.

Addicting. Amazing value.

One of my favorite co-op experiences with friends.

This is the only sandbox building survivalcraft game I've loved just as much if not more than Minecraft.

I wanted to love this game. I invested a lot of time and money into this game, but it's been nothing but disappointment after disappointment.

Visuals: 8/10 - Beautiful game with great scenery, landscapes, lush immersive foilage, good lighting, decent water, amazing topography.

Audio: 8/10 - Great sound and immersive reverb on mining, tree felling, distant action, sounds within caverns; etc, etc. It's kind of a shame because it would be great sound design for a game focused on dynamic open world PvP, if the game had any of that. The in-game proximity voice chat is fun-- when it works.

Story: 2/10 - You land on a hidden supernatural island, there's some oogie boogies, virtually no one can die on this island, FIGHT!
The quests themselves are also the simplest most repetitive of any game I've played. Most quests are virtual copy paste from one territory to the next.

World: 5/10 - Set in colonial era, Aeternum is an ancient and supernatural island with some varied biomes. For the most part, territories seamlessly blend between borders and are governed by Companies (guilds) under their respective faction-- of which there are three factions: Covenant, Syndicate, and Marauders. Each territory has a town in which Companies get to dictate taxes for things such as crafting and property tax for your player house. Aside from reduced fast travel cost and instant storage transfer, controlling territory doesn't provide much meaningful benefit-- and depending on the type of player you are, it may not matter to you at all.

Gameplay: 5/10 - The gameplay mainly involves gathering, auto-running from town to town, or town to quest and back and forth again, all while ignoring MOBs chasing you. Then there are generic dungeons, open world hostile node spawns, and opt-in PvP.

Combat: 3/10 - As far as action combat goes, this is one of the worst "action games" I've played. It's essentially just maybe attack and maybe dodge, sometimes block. There's no depth, no combo system, no breakout mechanic, and the gameplay is overall clunky and often unresponsive. Fighting MOBs typically feels either trivial and mindless or obnoxious and annoying.
There are some redeeming qualities. Ranged is generally fun, for the satisfaction of needing to actually aim or lead to land your shots; but the fun stops when you encounter the overall clunkiness of combat, or when you realize PvP is imbalanced and not as skill-based as it appears.

Build Diversity: 2/10 - Unfortunately, there's too many builds that feel like they have right or wrong answers, and there's virtually no designed synergy between weapons. Putting the meta aside, each weapon generally does see use, even if it is for niche or style purpose. But as for "class-building" or weapon builds go, this game has little to no build diversity.
Avatar Customization: 1/10 - Character creation is subpar and no transmog system. For an "mmorpg" that offers cosmetic skins, there's a surprising lack of a transmog system. There's very little you can do to personalize your avatar's outfit other than to buy mediocre skins to look like everyone else who enjoys using the few skins in the shop.

Crafting: 8/10 - It's very intuitive and easy to get into and has a good foundation for adding more depth if the devs choose to. One of my favorite aspects of the crafting is the amount of freedom I'm given for which materials I'm allowed to use for certain recipes.

Endgame: 1/10 - Now this is where everything becomes meaningless-- and I mean everything. Basically all you do is gather, craft, zerg corruption portals, zerg PvP missions, work on your item drop value to undermine your crafting, occasionally do a dungeon, or just run Outpost Rush all day because it's the only actual fun activity in New World and you get some decent gold income out of it.
Everything in the endgame is meaningless. You're either going to zerg content with a dozen other players, which completely undermines the game's "skillful action combat" design; or you'll just farm loot drops which potentially makes crafting pointless; or you'll participate in helping your faction control a territory for no other reason than to change the color of the map because it makes little to no difference for most; if you haven't done so already, you'll stop gathering and crafting when you have all the gear you want; you might decide you feel brave and flag for PvP but then realize there's virtually no dynamic open world PvP-- which is surprising for a game with so much emphasis on PvP; but you're still craving PvP and you hear Outpost Rush is finally working so you just play that all day because there's nothing else to do, and then you realize you're spending all your time in one simple instanced battleground, completely removed from the rest of the game, having no effect on the game's open world-- so the entire concept of playing a "PvP focused player-driven mmorpg" is reduced to one instanced battleground in a terrible action game that wishes it were an mmorpg.

PvP: 2/10 - I really thought I was going to have fun in this game at least for the PvP. But in addition to the game having terrible and shallow combat, being clunky in general, and not being as skill-based as I had hoped, the game is also egregiously imbalanced.
Most players probably run with Great Axe because it has everything: Damage, sustain, reach, damage reduction, 4 gap closers when other weapons only have 0-2, constant AoE, mobility, survivability. It'd be easier to list what Great Axe doesn't have: skill; but that's a plus for most.
Then if you want to play a healer, well... you don't have a choice, this is an "mmorpg" that released with only one healer class (weapon): Life Staff-- and they don't believe in death.
Then there's ranged, which hands down your best option is going full Mage: Fire Staff + Ice Gauntlet-- which is your only option if you want to play a mage because the game launched with only two magic DPS weapons.
There you have it, there's your holy trinity for New World. There are some players who like to play some of the other weapons, but they're just weird or don't know any better.

Design: 1/10 - So this is probably the game's worst offender. This game is fundamentally flawed. I'll just list some of the things I find wrong by design:
- No sustainable economic model. There's nothing that removes items from the economy. When everyone has the gear they want, they won't have any reason to gather and craft or run dungeons or anything.
- No WPvP incentive. Virtually no one flags for PvP, of course because there's no reason to.
- No PvP server. For a game that has such an emphasis on PvP and uses an opt-in PvP system by default, there's surprisingly no PvP servers.
- Lack of weapon synergy. Virtually no designed cohesion between weapons.
- Terrible tagging system. You need to contribute % amount to attacking MOB. Can result in zero credit for everyone.
- Weird loot value system. So there's this hidden mechanic in New World where the game keeps rewarding you with better and better gear in your loot drops as you continue to get loot drops. What this means is, the more you mindlessly grind and get better loot, the better loot you'll get. Not only is this a scary mechanic in and of itself, but it completely undermines the point of crafting for gear.
- No transmog system. I just personally find this to be a crime for an mmorpg.

Bugs & Exploits: 8/8 gr8 b8 m8 - There's no shortage of bugs and exploits here. New World has everything: multiple invincibility exploits, multiple duping exploits, attack speed exploits, chat exploits; then after all the gamebreaking exploits there are all the gamebreaking bugs; weapon swap bug, dodge stamina bug, camera movement bug, gathering bug, free look bug, armor class bugs, Hatchet damage bug, damage mitigation bug, AoE bug, chat bugs, housing lag; and countless more!

This review was originally twice as long, but limited space. Watch YT for more in-depth explanations for everything wrong with NW.

It's the most fun time I've had playing rock-paper-scissors. You can float and do flips. 9/10

Play as Black. Anyone think you're sus? Accuse them of being racist.

After all these years of using Steam, I've finally been compelled to write my first review. That should say something in itself. I can in full confidence say Sanic The Hawtdawg: Da Movie: Da Game 2.1: Electric Boogaloo 2.2 Version 4: The Squeakquel: VHS Edition: Directors cut: Special edition: The Musical & Knackles is a masterpiece. If you enjoy 7th grade humor, Sanic The Hawtdawg: Da Movie: Da Game 2.1: Electric Boogaloo 2.2 Version 4: The Squeakquel: VHS Edition: Directors cut: Special edition: The Musical & Knackles is for you. Sanic The Hawtdawg: Da Movie: Da Game 2.1: Electric Boogaloo 2.2 Version 4: The Squeakquel: VHS Edition: Directors cut: Special edition: The Musical & Knackles has my vote for Game of the Year 2019.

I give Sanic The Hawtdawg: Da Movie: Da Game 2.1: Electric Boogaloo 2.2 Version 4: The Squeakquel: VHS Edition: Directors cut: Special edition: The Musical & Knackles an 8/8 gr8 b8 m8.

R.I.P. WildStar, you will be missed...