Recent reviews by DaBa

I have bought this game to play it on Steam, not Playstation. I do not need a PSN account to do that. So forcing me to make one and link it to the game AFTER I bought it and owned it too long to refund it is scum behavior.

This should make the game eligible for a refund immediately as it is no longer the product I paid for originally, it is now objectively worse and the customers were never told this was going to happen.

The game is good so far. It's more Dragon's Dogma, which is exactly what what we wanted. So why am I not recommending the game? Because in it's current state the game's optimization is in shambles.

Let me set the stage: I have a 4090, literally the BEST gaming GPU available right now. It's overpriced, overpowered, and the only reason you buy it is because you don't want to compromise between image quality and the framerate. It's a GPU that should run every single modern game at 4k 120fps.

Meanwhile in Dragon's Dogma 2 you can't even maintain a stable 60fps WITH DLSS ON! Yep you heard that right, the game dips below 60fps in busy areas or when it's dark and there's a lot of lighting (ex: in big caves). Which isn't an insignificant portion of the game. The game should be able to pull off 4k120fps WITHOUT DLSS, but it can't even do 4k60fps with it turned on. It's so bad... They even sneakily start the game off with the option for interpolated rendering just to pretend it runs better than it actually does, which is something you don't even want to use because it creates a lot of ghosting issues and makes motion look horrible. It's like a bad joke.

So, unless you have a 4090 or a similar setup that has plenty of spare power to run this unoptimized piece of sh*t yourself, I seriously do not recommend this game to anybody, you won't enjoy it because it will run like absolute crap. I didn't even talk about how a game that cost more than 60$ still has micro transactions in it, but the performance issues are so bad they completely eclipse even that. Seriously, stay away from it unless you are absolutely sure your setup can handle it.

This game would've been fine if it was made a decade ago. But the gaming landscape has greatly changed ever since. Independent developers have made amazing strides and keep making great video games left and right. And I'm afraid in modern day a game such as this doesn't make the cut anymore, especially considering how long it took to make.

If Secrets of Grindea has been fully released in it's current state when it first entered early access it would've been considered a good video game. Not amazing, not great, but definitely good. But now? In 2024? It is well below par in every aspect:

- Game design is basic and feels extremely old, flash game level of old. 2010 is calling guys! We've had infinitely superior top down RPG/Adventure games since. Well, from any genre really. This game feels like a museum exhibit.

- Considering how long the game has been in development and how long the devs had people who supported them wait for the full release, it has very little content.

- Production values are no longer impressive, they are barely passable. A game that looks and sounds like this would've been nice back when it first went int early access maybe, but nowadays you have competition that makes this look like some kind of old school PS1/2 era game. Even your average, run of the mill indie devs can nowadays do better in this regard.

- And on the technical level the game is a travesty. Guys, this is 2024, how does your game not support resolutions higher than 1080p? Heck, you don't even have any proper scaling for your pixel art so it can look sharp at higher resolutions. You know, BASIC stuff that is an absolute standard for a game like this in modern day? Instead, the whole game is a blurry mess, like I travelled 20 years back in time to watch a 480p Youtube Let's Play. This doesn't even qualify as an issue, this is quite simply not acceptable anymore. I want to remind you this is a product that costs money, not some freeware student project. And I don't even want to start pointing out what kind of games you can buy for 10$ instead and how they stack up to this one because I would be here literally the whole day...

Here's who I recommend this game to: people who are feeling nostalgic for simple games from the past, who have literally nothing better to play and have somehow exhausted all the other better options, of which there are hundreds upon hundreds in the RPG genre alone. To anybody else: it's not worth your money. I will commend the devs for including the demo, which I recommend you try out before you buy the game, it will give you an accurate representation of what you're getting into.

I had high hopes for this game when I first saw it a long, long time ago. But if this is what 9 years of development have amounted to, then I cannot call this anything else but an utter failure.

A bunch of upstarts have made a video game Game Freak should've made ages ago. No idea why they didn't but hey, their loss.

Moreover, it's a pokemon game on PC. Something else Nintendo should've done ages ago to tap into this market and reap the massive profits. They never did and now somebody else decided to fill that void, and in the process became millionaires practically overnight.

Who would've thought? Definitely not Nintendo or Game Freak, that's for sure. Too bad! Seems indie devs are still way smarter than huge corpos.

I recommend this game if you like good platformers and metroidvanias with engaging boss fights. Or if you're into anime bunny girls.

This is everything I hoped a remaster of the original game would be. Plus a solid amount of extra on top that makes the game bigger than it was before. If you liked the original, you will like this one even more.

Another entry in the "Vampire Survivors" sub-genre of modern rogue-likes, that sentence alone explains half of the video game already.

But there are some bits here that are worth mentioning. The game is incredibly charming in both it's presentation and humour. You can feel the character and soul seeping through the edges of the screen. It also is a small twist on the formula, instead of the player character directly being the source of attacks, you instead raise an army of various undead (and living) creatures to defend you.

What can you expect from Boneraiser as far as content is concerned? Here the game definitely falls short in terms of the sheer amount of unique things to do when compared to most well known rogue likes, Vampire survivors included. There is definitely a focus here on quality over quantity though, what is here is really well done and of a high caliber. Nevertheless, after spending just about 12 hours with the game, I've already experienced pretty much all the content the game has to offer. I maxed out and played as all the characters except for two, beaten all the stages, purchased every possible upgrade, seen all the items and minions, and completed both of the main game modes.

So as far as the challenge part is concerned, I have conquered the game and seen almost all there is to see. I am done. And for a game like this, 12 hours is a pretty low bar. However, the game IS very cheap, and what is there is definitely more than good enough to justify the price tag. And I don't think I would've preferred if the game had more in it, at a cost of making whatever is in it any less good. In terms of quality crammed into those 12 hours, it easily lords over it's peers from this sub-genre.

But, if there was anything that would've made this game even better, it would be more incentives for the players to replay it and further challenge themselves. Maybe some kind of "ascension" system, where you have to beat the game with progressively more difficult modifiers? Really, anything that would give me something new and more difficult to conquer, to give a reason to play the remaining characters, or replay the old ones to experiment.

X4: Foundations is the most impressive, ambitious and biggest in scope space sim I've ever played in my life. It is also one of the jankiest video games I've ever played, with a lot of bugs and other things that will test the limits of your patience. Which ever one will end up being the winner for you, I cannot really say since it depends on how much you love the space sim genre, how much time you're willing to devote to learning a complex video game, and how resistant you are to things like bugs, interface labyrinths, and general jank.

There is too much to talk about, the game is just too massive so I will try to give some highlights to have you understand what it is you're getting yourself into.


First off, the scale. You know how Star Citizen has a bad reputation for feature creep and being too ambitious, causing it to still be under development and maybe even never release? Well, X4 is in a lot of ways EVEN MORE ambitious than Star Citizen, but here the game actually exists and you can play it. If that sounds too good to be true, I assure you it is not. X4 is an absolute giant of a video game, there is no other space sim out there that does as much as this game, on this large a scale. Massive fleet battles of ships of all sizes, where you can command your AI pilots to do things? Check. Building your own stations and actually being able to dock them and walk around them? Check. Starting your own empire and playing the game like it's an RTS? Check. A simulated economy where every trader and miner matters? Yup. Don't want all that noise and want to just fly a small ships and do story missions and dogfight? Check. This game truly lets you do just about everything you could want from a space sim, the only thing missing would be flying to actual planets, but let's not be greedy, eh? You can still terraform them though!


That sounds amazing, so where's the catch? The catch is twofold. First part is really simple: the game is rough around the edges. VERY rough. Think Skyrim levels of bugs and weirdness. Yup, that's the level we're operating at. Your autopilot will occasionally crash you with a station and your ship will try to merge with it. AI pilots will sometimes do really stupid things and fly your really expensive ships right into their doom, or refuse to correctly point their guns at the enemy. The game may simply crash (although only had that happen once). Quests will get stuck and you won't be able to complete them. We're talking major issues that have actual in-game consequences, and you will be seeing those fairly often.

Fortunately the worst of them are still very rare, in my 200 hours of playtime I only had one instance of a hard crash and one time where my story quest got stuck and I was not able to complete it. But smaller things like AI being stupid, ship hitboxes interacting weirdly, things like those will happen fairly often. To the point where you stop perceiving them as weird and they just become a part of the game.


Second part of the catch is the sheer amount of time you'll have to put into learning how the game works. The fact that the game is incredibly vast and complex is both it's biggest strength, and also the biggest reason majority of the people who try this game will bounce off it. There are a few games worth of menus here to learn, a wealth of mechanics that are not very well explained or not explained at all, and the game doesn't care you're new. You will be thrown into deep water and expected to figure it out. And since it's a sandbox game primarily, you need to understand what you can do and how you can do it before you can actually start enjoying the game. The game REQUIRES you to devote substantial amount of time in order to understand what it is all about, and then another substantial amount of time to learning how to do all the different things that can be done.

To have you understand better: I have played this game for 200 hours, supplemented my learning process with lots of youtube videos that help teach the game, and I still feel like I am behind in knowledge in terms of the actual veterans of this game. I am still learning things regularly that I didn't know before. Heck, a lot of "issues" people complain about on the Steam discussion boards and reviews (not all of them, but definitely a lot) are simply due to not understanding how a mechanics works or doing something incorrectly (things like boarding for example). That's how much there is to learn here, and how fiddly some of it can be to make work properly.


So, after all of this, what's there at the end of all that hardship? A diamond of a game. At it's current state it's one of a kind video game that will give you an experience you cannot find anywhere else. If you're able to tolerate all the roughness and able to overlook shortcomings that I honestly think are unavoidable in a game of this magnitude, this could easily be considered the greatest space sim to come out to this date. At the same time it's a game that only a small segment of people will actually enjoy, because of a huge barrier of entry. But, if you are able to get through that barrier... there is something truly special on the other side of it.

It's like going to a restaurant where the waiters are rude, cooks are shouting, seats are uncomfortable, and you have to wait 2 hours for your food. But then you get served the best damn meal you've had your whole life. It is one of those rare games that will let you experience things so incredible you might completely forget or simply be willing to dismiss a myriad of it's issues, simply because what is there is so great and full of wonder that even game breaking glitches are not enough to ruin the fun you're having. Don't believe me? Read other reviews, they are full of personal stories of wonder and adventure, only to be found in this game.

Terra Invicta is a game made for a very specific audience of people, and if you are a part of that audience you are absolutely going to love it. And if you're not, you're probably going to absolutely resent it. It's also a game that is VERY difficult to properly review in the Steam Review format, because it just has too much going on. So instead, I will give you a few examples of the type of person that would likely enjoy this game. So, if you like:

- Complex mechanics in your video games
- Grand strategy games that are not dumbed down to appeal to the "wider audience"
- Games that respect your inteligence (aka don't treat you like a mentally deficient vegetable) and are not afraid to throw you in the deep waters
- Stories about alien invasions
- Sci-fi settings that try to stay true to contemporary science and laws of physics
- Customizing space ships to a ridiculous degree
- Overcomplicated space battles

... then there is a very good chance you'll get a kick out of this game. And if you tick most of those boxes, you might have just found your new favourite strategy game. And that's in it's current state, which already feels really complete for an Early access game. But yeah, as I said above, if you don't tick those boxes then you will loathe this game and some of it's design choices, as is apparent by some of the reviews that complain about things others would not have any other way. And that's okay, best games are always the ones that try to provide a very specific experience, not some generic tosh aimed at half the market. Terra Invicta does exactly that, and succeeds because of it.

CA, I know you are one of the greediest companies around and you do your best to nickle and dime us at every chance you get. I knew your DLC is overpriced and I endured you objectively anti-consumer business practices so far. All simply because you you created a one of a kind game in a universe I enjoyed, and I had a legitimately good time with it. And from my perspective it was worth the money I paid.

However, all of this was slowly filling the cup in the meantime. And your recent antics have finally overflown it and actually pissed me off. You have just released a DLC not that long ago that had a higher price than normal and justified it by making it relatively content rich. So you know what, sure it was good DLC I will give you a pass on increasing it's price, even though it already costs way too much. BUT, now you have the AUDACITY right after doing that to release another piece of DLC that is significantly smaller and make it just as expensive? And then make some stupid justifications for it, despite everybody knowing you are just price gouging? And then if taht alone was not enough you THREATEN US that you can do way worse then this? The sheer effing HUBRIS on display here goes beyond anything I've witnessed from you before. I love Warhammer setting, I like Total War games, but even my patience has it's limits. And I am certain A LOT of other people feel the exact same way.

So, from this point I will make certain I do not give you any more of my money. And don't misunderstand, I will still play your games and probably enjoy them too, I will simply make sure that you never see any of my money. Even though I have more than enough of it laying around to easily and conveniently buy the games on Steam and play them, I am going to inconvenience myself and stop doing it and instead do it in an inconvenient fashion just to spite you. And I will donate the money I would've otherwise spent on your games to some kind of charity, so at least something good can come out of this greedy abomination of a company CA has become.