Recent reviews by DEEPS

I'm having fun for what it's worth, but you need to be such a masochist to enjoy this game that I cannot recommend it to anyone. And before you jump to conclusions, I don't mean this in the way that Elden Ring or Dark Souls are meant for masochists where they are in the "hard but fair" category. No, not in the slightest.

What I mean is that this is the most frustratingly balanced game I've ever played. Absolutely nothing in this game's balancing makes sense. It's like playing Diablo but you have to manually make every attack slow and carefully like it's a soulsborne, except enemies typically have so much health that every single engagement is a grueling, bitter experience.

Bosses are especially badly designed in this, having such massive health pools that you have to perfectly play each one, kiting them and striking carefully for several minutes, and the slightest mistake can cost you devastatingly. And, just in case you started this fight when the night was late, you also have to contend with the sun rising and burning you to death midfight if you take too long.

Do you like status effects? Well, this game has 'em. Freezing, burning from fire, burning from the sun that counts as a totally different type of burning, stunning, incapacitating, fear, you name it. If you enjoy fights where you lost control of your character for 50% of them, this is the game for you.

And then there's the metagame of base building and survival. This is without a single doubt one of, if not the, most poorly designed games when it comes to that. You know the day and the night? Well unlike games like minecraft that let you sleep in a bed to pass time, in V Rising you... wait. I've hidden in caves and then gone to do my laundry or make a sandwich in the meantime because I arrived at a boss's lair when the night was halfway over, so I needed to make sure to wait until dusk before starting the fight.

QOL? Never heard of it. The fast travel network in the game is convenient for getting places, but the second you pick up a shiny rock you aren't allowed to teleport. Who benefits from this? When I'm 1.5 km from my castle and want to haul back loot, I transform into a wolf and spend 5 minutes traveling back while watching TV. Your first vampire servant that you get takes 40 minutes to build. And then once you get them, you aren't actually able to give them commands until a dozen hours later when you can build a throne using items from 2 tiers up in the tech tree. You can store building supplies at your castle in convenient bins, but then when you actually enter build mode in your castle it doesn't use the stored materials and you have to go dig them all out, build, then put them back in.

Note: Obviously you can adjust the settings for most things in the world editor. But when you're a new player you don't really know what anything means, you don't know if enemies are balanced or if you're going to have enough materials or appropriate build times, so you'd expect things like "relaxed mode", "normal mode", and "brutal mode" to be somewhat accurate descriptors to spare you the trouble of doing it. In the time it took me to figure out all of these settings to what I considered fair, you could have downloaded Palworld and be on your second base.

This is not a bad game. In fact, I love it, and it's one of my favorite multiplayer experiences.

So why, then, can I not recommend this game?

Well, it's simple. I am a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ animal at this game, and so are my friends. I have played it so much that I know every enemy, every weapon, every stratagem, and every difficulty, backwards and forwards. You give me 3 twigs and a rock and me and my friends will get the mission done.

However, I can't reasonably expect a new player to be obsessive JUST to understand a game. Until Arrowhead gets their heads out of their asses with balance and focuses more on making the existing weapons viable than on nerfing existing ones, I genuinely cannot recommend anyone who isn't already on this train starts it.

A very nice and whimsical game that replicates that feeling of playing Link to the Past ages ago, trying to figure out the overworld by trial and error.

I loved playing Overwatch 1. But that game no longer exists. Overwatch 2 is a poor replacement.

The annual pass is a joke. Both seasons so far have been terrible.

You're just paying $25 for Gjallarhorn. You need to understand that if you want to buy this.

Kind of insane that after 4 years they still want you to pay for this.

I can't believe they charge money for this.

This was an awful expansion when it came out, but it was required to play all the fun parts of D2. Now all those parts are gone too, so there really isn't anything left here. You're just paying to have Stasis, nothing else.

This was a great expansion. But all the seasonal content is vaulted now. I can't honestly recommend anyone new ever try getting into this game.