Recent reviews by Black Spruce

If you treat this more as a showcase of systems, mechanics, and as a sign of life, then yes this is good. Not meant to be a full experience at all in the slightest. But assuming your PC runs it well, it's solid so far.

It be's a good.

Do you want to explore an untamed universe? Do you want to experience cultures that have developed separately into their own distinct people with the influence of the environments they've settled? Do you want to go raiding and pillaging with your space pirate crew? Do you want to explore interesting planets? Do you want to prepare for dangerous hazards of a hostile alien planet? Do you want a challenge? Or do you just want to experience an interesting story?

Well this isn't the game for you.

You'll be jumping around with loading screens through disconnected bubbles where there's not much to be found, running into the same NPCs over and over again. You get to experience bland 21st century Americanized monoculture all across the galaxy with very little if any distinction even between factions which supposedly hate each other. Almost every NPC in the game is lawful-good and will hate you for any even morally grey decision making. The planets and dungeons on them are cookie cutter, which was expected, but not tastefully done. The procedural generation is bare bones and the AI of alien creatures is laughably basic. Don't expect to find any massive kaiji-esque creatures, either. I don't think I encountered anything any bigger than an Elephant or Giraffe. Doesn't matter how cold, hot, radioactive, toxic, etc a planet is. So long as you don't face two hazards at once, any suit will keep you safe. The game is dead easy, especially with some of the random look. I found an incendiary sniper rifle that does double damage to targets with full HP and already has ridiculously high base damage as random loot. The story is uninteresting, as well. I've never actually gotten bored with a Bethesda main quest and gave up on it before. You have very little player choice, the NPCs you are meant to interact with are generic cookie cutter monoculture lawful-goods, and it's yet another chosen one story.

You'll have a more complete experience by playing Star Explorers. This is perhaps Bethesda's worst RPG to date.

I first started playing SCP: 5K last summer back before the "This is Why" update. The game was in a very early state, and I had said that the bones of a great game were there. I had great hopes in the game, and usually my hopes are thrashed. But now a year later, it's clear that my hopes for this game are set to pay off. After so many SCP projects got abandoned (for games the biggest example is SCP Unity and for other media it would be Confinement), it's awesome to see this game making strides. If it continues the way it's going, it'll quickly rival Containment Breach. I'm glad to contribute more to this game's development.

OLD OLD REVIEW: "Don't buy this yet. Leave it on your wishlist, though. As it stands, it's pretty much just a zombie game with SCP-173 tossed in without a blinking mechanic. Everything it currently has in it is good, aside from some bugs here and there. Why I don't recommend it is because of what's not in it. The game is obviously unfinished and you're not gonna get much SCP vibe off of it if that's what you want. The developers claimed there is gonna be a big update in October which adds more content and SCPs. Definitely keep an eye on it. This game has the potential to be great."

OLD REVIEW: "Definitely keep this game on your radar if you aren't looking to buy it just yet. The latest update, while incomplete, still adds a decent bit of content and makes a few welcome changes. The game runs better, though performance is still a bit of an issue. I stand with what I said about SCP-173 and I think it just shouldn't be in the game at all. You will be getting a little bit more of an SCP vibe now that enemy variety has increased, so I'd say it's worth buying currently if that's what you are looking for. Looking forward to the next update."

NEW REVIEW: Blown away by the progress this game has made in the last year. I have some complaints about that screen hopper and how it's section is a huge difficulty spike that I think needs some tweaking. But aside from that, everything about the game has gotten better. I can only hope that at some point in the future, scripted enemy placement is replaced with a L4D style director system to keep me on my toes for repeat playthroughs (which I do often) Bought the upgrade because I'm so impressed by the progress and will gladly contribute further to it's development.

DO NOT USE THIS VERSION

This game is amazing, but the version on steam is unpatched and buggy (Edit: Yes it was patched and is less buggy. However the CompUSA patches are not present). Anyone looking to play Daggerfall for the first time, look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp1TstKeuLE Don't mind the length. Only the first 10-15 minutes are relevant. This way you can get the most patched version of Daggerfall set up with Daggerfall Unity for the smoothest experience possible. You will also be able to install mods. Which is a huge bonus.

Now before I get started, I gotta make some things clear. I beat the game, I didn’t like it, yes I am a Soulsborne player, no that’s not why I didn’t like Sekiro.

Also before I get into the problems I have with Sekiro, I will list the things the game did well.
-Setting
-Story
-The way you can influence the story
-Lore
-Visuals
-Sound design
-Music
-Movement system
-Controls

Now I will talk about the things the game did badly, from bad to worse.

1. The Stealth System. It’s so shallow. We’ve seen great stealth systems in other games like the Batman Arkham games, where enemies would change how they act depending on the situation. If they knew you were in the area, enemies would be cautious and take offensive or defensive action, and they would even panic if you took out all their buddies, or they got separated from the group.
Sekiro enemies on the other hand have two states: default state, and attack state. Unless you are noticed, the enemies will remain in the default state. If you get noticed, all the enemies within earshot will come running at you in the attack state, but if you simply jump or grapple up to the rooftops and stay out of sight for a few seconds, the enemies will lose interest and go back to the default state, resuming their original positions. It doesn’t matter how much carnage you’ve unleashed, they’ll just forget about it and let you stealth kill them again.

2. The Camera. While some of the problems with the camera also apply to the Soulsborne games, it’s particularly vile in Sekiro. The camera snaps to the direction your character is facing, this is typical in these types of games, but it can cause an annoying issue, especially in boss fights. You’ll be trying to lock on to the enemy, but the camera keeps snapping away, and sometimes it feel like you have to be facing the enemy in order to efficiently lock onto it. This can get you killed. Another problem is the grappling depends on the camera angle, leading to some nonsense where you jump towards a grapple point, but no matter how much you mash the grapple button, you plummet to your death because you didn’t position the camera just right... Also if you are up against a wall or cornered in a fight, you can’t see anything.

3. The Replay Value. From Software is notorious for making games with astronomical replay value. Tons of different playstyles, weapons, magic, challenges, and multiplayer to boot. Sekiro has none of these things. There is only one playstyle, one weapon, no magic, no multiplayer, most of the skills are useless, and only a few of the prosthetic tools were worth using. This leaves the player without much of a choice in how they play through the game.

4. Dragonrot. The more you die, the more NPCs get afflicted with a disease that prevents you from continuing their quests, and they can only be cured by using a very rare and limited item. I shouldn’t have to explain why this was a terrible decision.

5. The Combat System. It’s clear that From Software wanted to have a different combat system for this game rather than recycling the Soulsborne combat formula yet again. There’s nothing wrong with that, however it had poor results. You see, the entire combat system revolves around building the enemy’s posture bar in order to deliver a death blow. How do you do this? You attack, and you deflect. That’s how you beat the overwhelming majority of the game’s bosses. In order to get players focusing on attacking posture rather than health, they gave all the bosses a ridiculous amount of health, cut the amount of dodge iframes in half compared to the other games, made the bosses track you like they’re standing on a record player while attacking, and take off half your health every time you get hit by most of the early bosses. But since the enemy posture bar depletes so fast when their health is high, their health bar is usually really low by the time you break their posture and deliver a death blow, defeating the point of the posture bar and the high health all together. But to make it so really good players couldn’t destroy the bosses in seconds, they made it so you had to kill the bosses twice in a row, three times in some cases.
All this creates a combat experience where you only need to press two buttons in order to win. Attack and deflect. You don’t even have to have great timing, either. So long as you tap the deflect button at least half a second before you get hit, you get a successful deflect. Mashing deflect is less effective, but you can still succeed with mashing if you REALLY mash it. This overly simple system is subverted by two things. Perilous attacks, and flat out bullsh** attack patterns (which I will get into later). The perilous attack are unblockable and mostly undeflectable. This mixes things up a bit, but there is a massive problem. You get a big bright red symbol to tell you that a perilous is coming, but it doesn’t indicate which type of perilous is coming, and the game is so fast paced already that by the time you see the indicator, you have almost no time to look at the enemy animation to tell what action you need to take, that you really can’t make effective counters or evasions unless you’ve already been victim to that enemy’s attacks many times.
TL;DR, the combat system railroads you into a repetitive and overly simple fighting style.

6. The Bosses. Fighting the bosses in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is uneventful at best, and a chore at worst. Fighting the regular enemies makes you seem like a highly trained shinobi, easily able to cut down any in your path, as most of the enemies in the game can be defeated by spamming the attack button, with few exceptions. But fighting the bosses is completely different. They have massive health pools, massive posture bars, do so much damage to you (especially in the early game), usually have to be killed twice in a row, and often have attack patterns that are genuinely unfair. The fact that bosses are copy-pasted repeatedly throughout the game doesn’t help Sekiro’s case.
Let me elaborate on the attack patterns being genuinely unfair. Many of the bosses have attacks that start and finish faster than a human being can reasonably react to without specifically watching for that specific attack. These attacks usually have such subtle tells, or even no tell at all, and it doesn’t help that these attacks often follow the Sekiro tradition of doing absurd amounts of damage. The average human reaction time is 250 milliseconds, that translates to 15 frames in a 60fps game, and any attack animation that starts and finishes in less than 15 frames is bordering on cheap. Granted, Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne have that same attack problem, but at least Bloodborne gives you a way to deal with it that’s fun and makes it a fair challenge. This kind of nonsense in Sekiro turns many fights into sort of a Mexican standoff prediction and twitch reaction game, even if you know the boss in and out. The reward for beating these slog fests is being able to continue the game, and maybe a minor attack boost or 1/4th of a health and posture increase.
Personally I only like Guardian Ape and Divine Dragon, though the latter only for the spectacle and lore.

Conclusion: I tried really hard to like Sekiro, and there is a lot to like. But unfortunately it left me bored and unmotivated. It’s not often I find a game that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, but Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is one of them. It made me less interested in the upcoming Elden Ring. It’s unfortunate. If you like the game, more power to you, I’m glad you do. I just can’t bring myself to enjoy it. I finished it just so I could feel credible enough to write this review. Thumbs down.

... Also terror sucks.

What? No pumping newborns full of hormones?

0/10 Try harder next time.

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