Recent reviews by ObsK | Cold Crescent

Game's art style and vibe are fantastic but I've not being enjoying my time sadly due to a couple of issues;

1) The devs really need to take a step back and think about what the factions are actually doing and accomplishing on the field when a raid starts. Are various squads converging and making a push to assault one of the bunkers that's being held by an opposing faction? Are they sweeping for useable junk in the nearby shanty town? What units does the squad need to do this? (you probably don't need two giant mechs and a 'flying' tank to wipe out a few groups of unarmed cyber-zombies). The better laid out the grand stage of battle is, the more immersive and interested the players will be because at the moment it feels like I'm just getting dropped in the level and the game master haphazardly opens the pick and mix bag of various janky enemies and hastily pours them over the map. It's boring at best and extremely frustrating at worst.
I hope that a system for 'scav intel' gets added to the region screens where intel and lore you grab can tip you off regards what the factions are doing or planning in a given map on your next raid. Are they looking for a fugitive? Expect lots of flying drones on high alert. Area crawling with cyber-zombies and the other faction is on orders to neutralise them? Expect troops with flamethrowers and shotguns on mop-up duty. Faction mechs on-site? The other factions troops might have grenade or rocket launchers and send their own heavy weapons in.
Cook up a 'world state' system which affects what spawns where and what's going on, that's be my suggestion.

2) They've made changes to the water system (an in-game system that causes you to lose most of your items and upgrades if you don't farm the water currency, which ticks down in IRL time) for the better but it still needs more work if not straight up removing. It's mobile-game levels of retention strategy, but can be farmed to the point that it doesn't become an issue, so why include it in the first place? Have the water function as a type of Base XP to access rarer vendors or unique upgrades etc.

3) The performance sucks ass, i'm on a 3070 and an i9-11900K and the game barely hits 35-40 fps at medium settings with most of the bells and whistles turned off. I've got no idea how they can improve this but it definitely needs optimisation sweeps.

4) The game is extremely buggy in places but I can forgive that due to the Early Access state it's in. Enemy aggro is all over the place and the enemy AI and animations are just not up to standard yet, you can accidentally get out of bounds and lose all your stuff because you can't get back into the level and have to abort the raid, tanks and mechs suddenly start floating around out of nowhere, gunships spawning in walls, the list goes on. Expect jank if you pick this up, like un-patched S.T.A.L.K.E.R levels of jank.

I'll be back in a year or two to change my review to positive if the project doesn't get canned before then, but for now; 'Forever Winter' is going to be 'Forever Shelved'.

Very quickly becomes a frustrating loop of needing to pay increasing amounts of taxes for merely existing in the game world, to getting mobbed by huge swarms of extremely anti-fun enemies in the randomly generated dungeons that delete your items and steal money from your inventory, permanently degrade your equipped gear until they actually increase the already ludicrous amounts of damage you take and then combo you to death with annoyingly designed status effects, all in the hopes of scrounging up enough useless junk to sell for barely enough money to pay the next round of taxes. You then start contracting some weird magic disease which punishes you for not progressing the story (in a sandbox adventure RPG), which pits you against some extremely hard boss encounters that you just aren't going to beat with your haemorrhaged inventory and minus three stone mace.

I'll be back in a year or two to see if this odd little title has improved (and to hopefully change this review into a positive one), which is a huge shame because I'm feeling really REALLY enamoured by the art style and overall theme of the game. If you're a big fan of old-school JRPGs and really enjoyed Dwarf Fortress's Adventure mode, then definitely add this to your wishlist and come back later but I can't recommend it at the moment, sadly.

YOU SHOULD GATHER SCADUTREE FRAGMENTS, NOW!

The game itself is fantastic but the subpar performance and constant crashes are completely unacceptable and really take away from the experience.
Wait until they fix it, if they ever bother.

FromSoftware's Souls series has always been a bit of a 'Marmite' genre; it's either literal crack that you can't ram into your veins fast enough or you bounce off it really really hard.

With Elden Ring, it's definitely a souls game at heart, no doubt about that. There's no 7-8 minute pre-rendered cut scenes of some NPC rambling about some evil plot or whatever bull, you just grab your weapon, run off into the closest brick wall with a health bar then spend the next few days running around finding levels, experience, weapon materials or skills which lets you paste that health-bar-toting wall into a fine powder. Then you'll run into another brick wall and it just happens over and over until the end credits roll.
It's so good.
But not everyone likes that, some prefer a tight story narrative with hooks and twists which gets all tied together at the end. Elden ring isn't that game at all, It's exploration, combat and action 100% of the way.
If you want some tough combat you can really sink your teeth into, some fantastic open-world exploration with hidden nooks and crannies all over the place, some gorgeous art direction and world design, and some absolute bangers of boss battles then this is the game for you.

If the first "DLC" is anything to go by, avoid this like the plague.

An absolutely fantastic top-down, race-against-inevitable-doom sci-fi zombie survival game.
Just don't touch the Plasma Launcher with a 10ft pole if you're running permadeath. I did. Now I'm salty.

It's a real blast of a game, but bear in mind a fair chunk of the progress is grinding and using different weapons before selling them to buy and level different weapons.
There's quite a bit to do to keep you occupied, premium currency is tradable so you can access almost everything (Except for steam community items) if you aren't socially imparied and just trade for it.
The game will run on anything, I swear if you were desperate to get the daily sortie done, you could play it on a tablet.
Worth a shot, given that the game is free. Only costs your time I suppose, however valuable that might be to you.

Smashed out all the story significant endings (yet to 100% it tho) and had a real blast;

+Fast paced, fun as heck combat. Really enjoyed the hacking minigames and the side-scroller/bullet-hell gameplay
+Really pretty world design, not so large as to make travelling a nightmare but just big enough to give you plenty to do
+Pretty nice graphically
+Really good alternate ending choices
+Waifus everywhere (and husbandoes if that's your thing)
+Sweet OST
+Tons of hilarious self-aware dialogue, but enough serious development to balance it out too
+Great character development

-Quests are generally "go here, talk to person, run across half the map to give x materials to other person"
-Enemy variety is a little low
-Storyline feels a little rushed and smashed together in the latter half
-A few cutscenes are a bit too melodramatic (but generally OK)
-Not that well optimized performance wise

If it's on sale, deffo pick it up.

10/10 Could listen to 15 violators on repeat 24/7