Recent reviews by Mky

I always enjoyed this game, defintely well made. The studio did great.

BUT

They're releasing too many DLC and they sell them for like 10€ the cheapest, some are at 30€...
I paid my game 60€ and i bought 50€ worth of DLC already last year. I realised today that if i want to play the full game i'd have to pay 70€ more for DLCs adding mecanics and cultures PLUS another full 70€ for a full cosmetic pack.

The game already costs 180€ + 70€ of cosmetic detailing cultures even more.

It's way too much, most of us are not insanely rich in a world where everything costs more and more. We can't follow such a greedy market anymore.

This sole fact deserves a negative review imo.

Despite enjoying the game since the first playtest, nothing motivated me to recommend this game until last patch.

The core concept is funny and enjoyable. A "loot extractor" with a dungeon and dragon vibe is realy funny.

The gameplay is in line with some melee games i like the most. Even if the mecanics are not as developped as chivalry or mordhau, at least it's in the same line which is enjoyable. They could have released a simple "action rpg slasher" type of gameplay which is the easy way to go for every deleopper having melee element in their game but they went for something more complexe instead in line with the best studios that ever worked on first person melee games like Chivarly and Mordhau i mentionned above.

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The only issue, in my opinion, was the extreme importance of gear and the fact that in a same lobby you could end up facing some opponent having a gear score ten times better than yours. Let's be honest, even if there's always something you can do to win and thus you'll never have 0% chance to prevail, it was nearly impossible. Obviously ruining the fun of many players based on raw math instead of a true skill diff. The feeling of fairness wasn't there.
On the other hand i never enjoyed winning easy fights and realising my opponents had little chance to win due to my gear being superior. A flavourless victory.

And then, they released a patch reducing the difference between the best gear obtainable and the starting gear you can have, as well as lowering the time-to-kill (number of hits required to kill an opponent). Pushing the importance of team play, individual skill and global understanding of the game way further than before.
Which, from a competitive point of view, is a step in the right direction.

Yet, as you can imagine, it led many people to spam bad reviews and negative comments on forums because they can't abuse their gear anymore to mindlessly one hit kill low geared players that are now a threat to them.
And you know humanity : most of us are not fair competitors with knightly valors but more abusers enjoying to bully people that can't retaliate (videogames be like).

Now that this is over, it's the perfect moment for new players and more competitive / pvp players to dive in this game and enjoy it in a fair and healthy environment. Comme get your fun, you'll have your moments like any others and maybe you'll even become a fierce opponent to face while crawling in a dark dungeon !

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Changing my recommandation as they reverted the changes due to PvE crowd pressuring them using different manners.

Game is back to gear based RPG like any others.

Highly recommended for friends playing together in custom games, it's quite fun and perfect for chilling together.

However, the quickplay option is now full of either toxic or sweatlord try hard players mastering the clumsy and sluggish physics and controls of this game (made on purpose) thus ruining all the fun more casual players could have otherwise by solo-carrying whole games.

I'll post here one of the most relevant comments i've seen illustrating what i'm talking about :

From the player/steam user CrispFlake answering to a thread titled "too many sweatlords try-harders ruining this game" :

I actually agree, I get people will always say "skill issue" but yeah man, I do maybe have one, but I bought a party game, I didn't buy the game to get flung away by a group of people who know the physics system of the game so well they are olympic throwers. Every match theres atleast 1 guy who knows the exact punch timing and will just K.o you 1 second into the match then fling you to ♥♥♥♥ space. Im not a bad loser, I dont care about winning, but I wanna atleast be able to play for 1 second, I spend more time waiting in spectator mode after instantly being flung away, and I know people will make fun of me for saying that, but that just isn't fun in any way. Why do I need to be an absolute pro at the game in order to even be able to properly play it for more than 1 second per match? For me it's only reaaallly a problem in the black hole thing, I keep getting that one guy who will at the start of the match instantly jump kick me and fling me away. I wonder why this whole "skill issue" thing is only a thing in gaming, would people find it normal if a sports newbie always had to fight a tournament level athlete?

80% of the games i get today are what CrispFlake is describing.

i'll also add that if you're a keyboard users then you should just either avoid this game or accept being less potent than controller users as the WASD in this kind of gameplay is less efficient than an analog joystick and the game and game physics is based on move sets fully exploiting rotations executions made possible by analog joysticks mainly (doable but way harder on keyboard and trully less intuitive).

As much as i like the gameplay of this game i've never been a huge fan of viking stuff and even less since it became a never ending hype since decades now. Which made me stop playing rather fast.

Adding new culture to this superb game gave me an opportunity to get into it again and fully enjoy it for both its gameplay and the connexion i have with western european cultures rather than nordic ones.

New mechanics, skins, goals, etc... is very much welcome. Thanks ShiroGames ! 100% worth the price imo.

Bad UI

Bad mechanics miles away from what the game is from (age of chivalry source mod that was a super melee game), even mordhau did a better job and yet it's boring asf as most mechanics are useless cause they designed it around one mechanic only : delays and drags. Everything else is just fancy useless mechanics.

Animations are bad

Class selection is bad

Mouse sentitivity restriction is infuriating and badly managed (kinda like in chiv 1 btw). No dancing trully allowed.

All the bad sides of modern melee games trying to have fancy animation and all but resulting in unresponsive game with absurd 3d movements on player's screen.

Just go for Mordhau if you want to experience something well designed

Amazing job from a small studio.

This title is offering a good experience to players looking for a game that finaly tries to mix 4X Grand Strategy Games and War Games without being turn based.
Digging into the right direction to achieve that, it builds solid fondations around which even more improvement can be built (and will be made in the future i am sure).

Could have been a good game if they actually took the time to adapt most of combat mecanics to today's quality level of similar games. Sadly they just did some incomplete copy/paste of Mortal Online I.

"Incomplete" because this game does not even offer a quarter of the content available in Mortal Online I.
But they made the map way bigger anyway (6 times).

We end up with an insanly big but empty map, an obvious lack of content + inadequate NPCs respawning timers, a directional melee combat system that hasn't been improve but still sadly slowed down since MO I (along with global movement speed), a mage gameplay that is probably the worse i've ever tried in decades of playing different kind of mmos : extreme lack of dynamism and lack of solo-options, a poor balance between classes as most players opted for the exact same race and classe, a very low skill ceiling preventing better players to trully shine and be clutchy (which makes the essence of competitive games) and mainly unfinished character's options (missing skills, half released specialisations, some abilities not working yet, etc..)

It currently looks like an alpha and yet it has surprisingly been released. If you haven't bought it yet, give it a solid 6 months + before eventually becoming worthy of interest if devs are not led in a wrong direction.

Shiro Games did a great job again.
Pretty much like Northguard, Wartales is taking a lot of game mecanics from several games and mixed it together in a succesful way. The final product is very enjoyable and surprising.

Navigating around the campaign map reminds me of Mount&Blade solo. Turn based fights are simple enough to easily get into it while offering enough mecanics and details to have enough depth and tactical choices.
Adding a RPG character building on top of that and a scenario that lets the player free to do his own choices make this game even better and complete.

Not close enough to D&D ruleset.
Larian took too much liberties with fight mecanics and creatures abilities that are not true to D&D. Making BG3 a turn based game was not a bad idea but a risky one precisely because it would tempt Larian to design this game much more like a DoS2 knowing their game was well received. And this is exactly what they did so far.

To me Owlcat studio would have been a much better choice than Larian knowing they did a wonderfull job with Pathfinder:Kingmaker ruleset adapted on PC. This is how a PnP game should be made into a Crpg : being true to the original ruleset.

The writing, world details and artwork are good tho. But it quickly fades away when fights are taking place, bringing the player from DnD universe to DoS feeling.

As a RPG player i realy didn't like DoS because of its mecanics but i admire the way how they designed player choices and campaign progression. Yet I avoided their game in favor of other Crpg like pillars of eternity and pathfinder that felt closer to what i experienced in old crpg like BG2 or neverwinter nights.

I had hopes that Larian would realy try to put DoS concepts aside when making BG3 and try something realy new but so far they didn't.
Pretty much like a bad actor not being able to quit its most famous role, Larian seems unable to make something original and different from DoS.

Playing this kind of games since Age of Chivalry, an old source mod, i must say that Mordhau is a wonderfull title.

The team picked many ideas from here and there and combined it in a sharp game (M&B chambering and feinting, Chivalry stamina management, Battlefield game mod/supporting roles, wargames character creation, ...), they also added some of their own mecanics like weapons clash, attack morphs and weapon stances mainly, giving to Mordhau an incredible gameplay.

Their vision of the player's feelings about ranges, dead angles, attack types&timing, drags, accel and weapon variety is entirely correct (a spot where Chivalry Medieval Warfare failed imo).
The player can realy manage his fight in different effective ways depending on his own style and weapon(s). There's no over-superior weapons in duels (tho there is on the battlefield, as it should, but there's always different tactics to play around or to counter it) as it realy feels that most of the fight rely on your own awarness, reflexes and combat readability combined to your own weapons knowledge.

Edit : Also, there's a lute !

There's a few problems tho about map design, some unbalanced gamemodes (frontline) and the prominent presence of dragging that should be reduced even more.