Käyttäjän Bottle of Acid viimeaikaiset arvostelut

Putting a thumbs down only because there is no sideways thumb. Will update to a thumbs up once further improvements are in.

The idea is great, and there is a lot of potential. If you ever wanted to play an RTS where you control the military guys in a zombie outbreak, this is it. However, there are some really big issues that cause a lot of conflict with how the game works overall.

Mainly, the game was designed firstly as a squad based granular RTS. Your soldiers have classes and abilities, and you assign them to squads (Forced and you can't choose not to btw), you use blackhawks and vehicles to deploy them into hot zones to capture territory. This is great and fun for the first half of the battle. You tactically decide where to send attack squads, and slowly capture zones which increase your unit cap. Each squad requires you to manage their formation, position and refill their ammunition as well as control their individual tactics.

So what's the problem? Well, for one, on top of the granular squad focus, the map is a giant map which is in a constant territory struggle. The main island is a contiguous mass of land where each zone is directly connected to 3 other zones. By the time you reach the mainland, 3/4 of the zones are already infected controlled. This is normal sure, but the midgame becomes a constant large scale RTS tug of war, where you have to manage 5-7 conflict zones individually all at the same time. Each infected zone is a source of an endless swarm of zombies pouring forward towards your zones.

You no longer have time to manage and send tactical squads as you did in the early game, because now your territories are constantly at war, and your units dont have the autonomy to refill their own ammo, even if you drop an ammo box beside them. They can get infected randomly, and when they do you have to send them back to a hospital, even more micromanagement.

Vehicles cant be cleared, and the AI has trouble pathfinding around them. Your units will break formation and get slaughtered. The devs said they will work on pathfinding so Im not harping on it.

The AI leader is a moving superweapon that can singlehandedly decimate entire squads. She can randomly run into your base early game and kill everyone, or if you're lucky she does it late game when you have the tech to fight her. Its random.

An analogy to this situation is to imagine you're a mother hen. The midgame onwards you have 6 chicks spread across a giant forest. They are constantly under siege by predators, and for each chick you have to keep going back and forth to check on them and manage their defences. After 20 minutes of exhaustive back and forth you finally got 1 minute break before the next siege to attack. Well, now your attack requires massive coordination because you need multiple prong chicks to siege the target that is entrenched in difficult to reach places. Within 5 minutes the game is telling you that you have chick 2, 5, 6 infected and need to be sent back to hospital, and chick 1 is dead. Randomly, an apex wolf decided to walk into chick 1's enclosure and eat it up without warning. If you want to break out of this stalemate, you need to build chick 7, and that is ANOTHER commitment to micromanage.

There is a distinct lack of warning cues, the UI is cluttered and unyieldy, and the game's design choices are often at conflict. From what Ive gathered people achieve success by cheesing the game with certain weapons. Some randomly won the game because the boss ran past a squad with special ammo. You have very little control, and trying to play the game in a battle of calculated attrition is a failing strat compared to going LEEROY JENKINS. The game ultimately wants to be a large scale RTS like Red Alert 2 however they want you to individually control each squad like XCOM. Perhaps coop might make it better, but who knows really.

Dont get me wrong. I like the game. Its fun. The devs seem responsive on talking to us, I just think that some of their ideas are so entrenched they are not seeing the issues that are plaguing the game. There is GOOD potential. I recommend keeping an eye on it and seeing how it changes.

The floor doesn't actually kill anyone.

Used to be an amazing coop wave shooter with progression systems to keep you grinding.
Classes were mostly well balanced ( Except for survivalists being useless ) and the shooting is satisfying. Great potential with a community still playing it despite the numbers somewhat dwindling.

Then monetization got insane and they started charging actual weapons behind paywalls on top of existing cosmetics lootboxes and FOMO sales. If you want to see how greedy companies can drive amazing games down the drain, this is one example. Events were rehashed from last years' with the same monetized systems to push sales. The free lootboxes from gaining 'dosh' after matches was a facade as they were limited to drop only terrible pajamas and a few skins, whereas all the cool skins and cosmetics were paid-only. Free weapon updates were only modified versions of existing guns, done to appease players while enticing sales of new paid weapons that were so much more powerful than the free alternatives.

A lot of the paid cosmetics came from community created cosmetics that were released for free on the workshop, lazily taken and slapped into lootboxes that require paid keys to open. I honestly don't regret my time with KF2 and I will miss it dearly. The witty dialog, style and the potential fun to be had with 6 player coop was one of my favourite gaming moments.

TLDR: Great game to buy on sale, don't support their lootboxes please

First off, I would like to say that Fallout76 is a GOOD game. It is a decent MMO shooter looter that has decent story content, large, immersive world filled with lore that is oftentimes beautiful, a fair and interesting free season track, amongst a whole list of other positives. However, as good as it is, we need to address a few glaring issues that hamper the game and could potentially push players away.

Sure, inventory is a good system. You have to make informed decisions on what to hoard, bring or grab. Strength builds are great for the inventory boost. Getting new backpacks and mods to increase carry feels amazing. However, the inventory system as is, is way more clunk than it is worth. There are tons of materials, and crafting and maintaining your guns means that you constantly need to loot these materials, even so far as to specifically go to specific locations in the case of rarer materials that you NEED to repair your gear. Stash space is a premium, and the 1200 pound limit is easily hit. Bethesda offers a solution - FOR JUST 18 BUCKS A MONTH, SUBSCRIBE AND YOU GET AN UNLIMITED MATERIAL STORAGE! I will leave it to you.

There are a lot of events that pop up in the open world, however only 3-4 are really worth anything. The big issue with these events is that the events reward everyone the same when its done regardless of contribution, but each mob killed rewards loot and exp, so in most events the bulk of players are more concerned with selfishly tagging and killing mobs, and nobody wants to be the sucker who does the important task of collecting objectives and missing out on tagging mobs. Ever so often you get a level 600 with what they call 'legacy weapons' camping the mob spawn, killing everything and denying everyone else from tagging mobs for rewards.

Legacy weapons are an issue, and what they are is essentially weapons obtained back then when Bethesda didn't realise how a certain combination of rolls on energy weapons could make them Overpowered. Legacy weapons easily deal 5-6x the damage of the best weapons that exist in the game now. The issue? Bethesda stopped the loot pool from dropping these powerful combinations, but they let players who have it keep them. This causes an extreme power differential between older players and newer players that you will never reach because you CANNOT earn these anymore, short of being lucky enough to trade one from a player with a legacy. The community is largely against fixing this issue, as they have these OP weapons and don't want to relinquish them in the name of fair game. "Just trade one LOL"

CAMPs are amazing. They are plots of land you can designate where you are given reign to build your own structures. Furniture, vending machines, and many cool stuff can be used. There are a ton of amazing and creative camps, and visiting them to shop is a cool experience in itself. However, most of the cool stuff are locked behind the MTX store on a FOMO-based rotation system.

Grinding is heavily restricted due to very low daily limits on almost everything. Endgame currencies exist in the form of Bullions, Rep, Scrip and Cap. For Bullions and Scrip, there is a very low maximum on how much you can trade in with the vendors for. It is very easy to hit the limit in an hour or less of gameplay, and yes, earning further legendary gear becomes a liability as most of them become dead weight that cannot be scrapped, exchanged or sold. Its a system designed to force you to play daily or miss out on the small amount of progress you make per day. There is also a very low limit on how much of each currency you can hold on to before the game stops giving you more. You HAVE to spend within the week, or you lose.

All these systems are a shame because underneath it is a great game. The world looks and feels great, exploring places and doing quest, uncovering content feels fun. For seasoned Fallout players, FO76 since Wastelanders has moved so much closer to a traditional Fallout experience. Sure, its choices are largely inconsequential, even so far as to be less impactful than in FO4 (LOL). But doing the story and learning about the lore is still an amazing experience to get lost in. The game as a whole is still very fair, and the perk cards system is a great system that allows for very different builds. We are getting new story missions from time to time, and content is being added with events.

Bugs are a thing, yes. Though they are not as frequent to be very frustrating. There is a fast travel bug that requires you to keep clicking travel 5x before it works. Enemies can spawn behind walls and get stuck. UI glitches and CAMP bugs. The game lacks QOL in many places. If a legendary dies in a grass field because there is no body highlight you can lose sight of it.

When you die, you drop a loot bag that holds all your crafting mats you had on you. Most of the time, its not so bad, as your mats are stuff like steel, copper etc. This bag is FREE FOR ALL open to anyone who sees it to loot. Players will nab your stuff. Be prepared. The issue comes when doing world bosses, as rarer crafting mats DO drop in this bag. There are actual TRAP CAMPS where players build elaborate traps that lure other players to walk in, then the base drops punji boards on them and kills them, and they await cloaked to loot the bag. Always stash your junk ASAP.

I could go on and on, but there are many other reviews you can read here. DO I recommend this game? YES. But Bethesda NEEDS to fix these issues. Wait for a sale, or try it on game pass.

Cyberpunk. The most hyped title of 2020. Does it live up to the hype? Well, yes and no.

Story - The story isn't really something mind-blowing. Much of it so far is pretty straight forward, hitting some cliche tropes, you can pretty much tell who's going to be who and what's going to happen to them very early on to obvious character design and hints. If you're expecting an insane story that will blow you out of the water, its not here. However, that said, the story delivers extremely well. Very well. Every scene and chapter plays out like an intense action movie. Characters talk and feel real, and there are lots of voice lines that add to the immersion. You will definitely enjoy your time here. This is akin to going to a cinema and watching an Avengers or Transformers film. The story isn't going to rival RDR2 or Interstellar, but its fun.

Presentation - This is the strongest point of this game. Night City is very well done. Buildings are chock full of details and colour, streets are lively, trying to write it down here is doing it no justice. Set pieces are all very well done. Luxurious hotels and buildings feel like they should, seedy alleys and nightclubs feel like they should. Every place has its own charm, filled with life and makes you want to explore more. The amount of detail and variation of props and buildings makes the game very pretty. Downside of course is that on a mid range or lower end PC the game looks a little blurred, which might be due to settings, but the settings are a little confusing if you are new. The game looks very pretty, downside being a loss of detail when you are up close to something, but its still a very good looking game.

Missions - The game plays out like a standard AAA open world RPG. You have main quests, side missions and open world free roam activities. The main quests are amazing, and this is where you get to see the best parts. In between you do side missions, which are really just small missions that can be done in 10-15 minutes max. They are often about a small story in the area, though nothing deep. Most of them are pretty shallow, but there are quite plenty to do. The free roam activities are standard stuff, like attacking gang areas, or rescuing hostages.

Shooting - The guns feel great. They sound good, have a heavy thud to their shots and operating them feels good. The downside of course is that because CB is firstly an RPG, for several encounters the enemies are straight up bullet sponges, which make shooting feel pretty terrible when it happens. There are quite a few guns, although most of them are just copies of the same few sets. There are "smart guns" and "ricochet guns" that add some effect, though I have not found much use for them.

Sound - Another amazing aspect well delivered. Music is great, sound is amazing. It feels like you are playing Blade Runner as a game. Downside here is that quite often voices don't have the proper spatial mixing, so it feels like the person is talking and shouting in your ear when they are in the other room. This might be a bug.

Misc Downsides - There are a number of bugs. Some are very frustrating, such as when your character keeps drawing their gun in a conversation and you cannot change the conversation choice. AI tends to walk into walls, get stuck on geometry or doors and can derp out, though it doesn't happen THAT often to break your immersion. The interface can be tricky to use at times. Trying to reposition yourself just so you can loot an item on the floor is a thing. Hacking feels like its too many steps to do a simple thing. Watchdogs did hacking better imo. Here it takes more process to do a simple hack, and even then your hacks are limited by a resource.

Overall the game is still a solid recommend. If anything just for the first playthrough experience it is well worth the asking price. I think the RPG aspects don't feel good here, as the looting makes you lose a lot of the intended immersion flow when you do a mission and have to run around groping bodies and boxes. Inventory management becomes a slog as you have to dismantle and check your weight, and I really don't think this whole system is needed. They should have made it similar to RDR2 where your guns have no levels, and you buy new guns or acquire them and they are forever yours, instead of having to throw the exact same gun away 100 times just because another copy dropped with +1.2 damage. Once again, the world design, sound design, visuals and delivery as a whole is just excellent. Buy it if you have disposable income, if you are strapped then wait for a sale.

Decent coop shooter, might be repetitive after a week.

--Gameplay--
Its an FPS. There are 4 characters available at launch. The minigun girl and the grenade launcher dude are clearly leagues above the soldier girl and the stealth dude.

What do I mean?

Character A: Powerful Minigun, can bring an airstrike item, can place electrified barriers and passively repairs her armor.
Character B: Powerful Grenade Launcher, ability to call a laser strike, can ping and reveal all dinos and mark them with highlight, can bring equipment refill and ammo refill so he basically self sustains without needing anyone to refill him.

VS

Character C: Soldier girl who's big schtick is being able to carry two primaries. Okay, so you can bring an Assault Rifle and a sniper or a shotgun. cool. What are her other abilities? Well, she can dodge away in a line, and her ult is to unleash an adrenaline burst. Her concept is cool, but really she's just pale in comparison.

Character D: This one dude thats completely focused on stealth. Sure, his masking ult might help sometimes. But really? Does anyone even stealth? Even on hardest maps people easily clear the dinos. Explosions, miniguns and spamming strikes just clear everything efficiently.

Shooting the dinosaurs feel impactful thanks to good sound design and gorey blood and effects, chinking armor off and dinos falling over. Sometimes though, the guns don't register a hit even if you are directly aimed in on the target, which is weird and I do not know the cause of it.

The dinosaurs are your usual horde game enemies. You get raptors which are the bulk, some are armored, some are electrified, and some spit acidic goop. There are a few bigger dinosaurs, like the ankylosaurus, triceratops and T-Rex, and they are the 'specials' of the enemy horde.

There is no team scaling, so if you solo the mission you are playing a much harder game. Trying it solo I had to funnel enemies down corridors, rush to spawn burrows to destroy them, and it was generally way harder (Then again I was on the soldier girl which really dealt very little damage). In a team of 3 it was almost too easy. We ran a minigun/Glauncher/soldier girl combo and we were just wrecking house even in the red zones, which were the hardest zones in the game.

Missions are structured into main objectives which then end with an extraction finale. Side objectives are available. If you stay to do the optionals you get more points and rewards like skins and materials at the end screen. However, I can't confirm the efficiency of plowing through the main missions exclusively and moving on compared to staying and farming.

Endgame is basically grinding missions to earn research points and materials. These then go into unlocking weapons and the upgrade slots on them to improve your weapons. While fun at first, I do see the grind ahead and I am unsure if the grind lasts too long past the game's initial 'wow' week.

There is polish in the visuals and sound. It feels closer to a AAA title than an indie game due to the visuals, high detailed models and sound design. If you ask for a description I will say it feels like Evolve, but Coop and without the main hunted monster.

At the end of it I really don't know if I can recommend this game. I bought it at 22 dollars and for that price I think its pretty worth it. Theres more content promised so who knows where we will go with this. The first few missions are definitely fun and addictive... Until you've seen the dinos thrice each. Still, if you like these kinds of games, why not? The price is decent.

Recommended but with huge caveat: Expect an extremely unfinished game at this stage. The aesthetics are great, but the polish on mechanics is still lacking at this stage.

The game is mainly a survival/crafting game sprinkled with MMO and building aspects. If you're reading this review by now I am pretty sure I don't need to reiterate all the features the game promises or has. At this point in time I have experienced the following: Combat, Building, Crafting, Dungeons.

Combat is decently in-depth for a survival game, much more akin to light MMO systems. You have skill trees that offer passives and actives, and each time you gain experience to level up you spend a point to develop your build. You can either pump into Melee Combat, Basic Moves like dodge and air dash, Magic spellcasting and general gathering skills. The problem with the skill tree however is that almost 90% of combat skills are actives, these actives don't exactly synergize well with each other as well, they are very isolated and you don't feel incentivized to bother buying most of these skills.

My biggest gripe with combat is the way you and the AI moves. There is no lock-on function, so when you do a swipe or lunge, it is often going to miss. Your character is animation-locked when casting anything, and you can't even do a dodge cancel. Enemies have no weight or drag when moving, they dash around you and the terrain with extreme speed like skates on ice. A bear can dash up the mountain with the same speed it does on the ground. Enemies will often move around randomly, and half the time you don't even know if they are even fighting you.

The music is serviceable, but the problem with sound is that sound effects is mostly lacking. There is almost no sound made by enemies. They are almost always completely silent, even the boss fights. The only sound effects you will hear come from your spells and attacks, which even then sound pretty basic. Dungeons are basically just hearing the same music blaring loudly as you can barely hear anything else.

UI is decent, and the art is pretty pleasing to look at. My problem lies with the lack of UI feedback when taking damage. There is completely zero feedback on UI or screen to let you know you have taken damage, other than you manually eyeballing your HP bar and noticing you are low on health. Words can also overlap into each other. Tutorial is pretty slim and not very well made but most of the game is pretty straightforward and easy to guess if you have played similar games before.

Crafting works as well as it should. It is easy to understand and functions like most other crafting games. There is a pretty decent selection of stuff to craft. It has tier unlocks similar to Satisfactory, which will let you craft better stuff and machinery.

Overall really if you are looking for a survival game this is decent enough because the survival part of the game is decent. The MMO / RPG part is quite underdeveloped, while I have not played enough to experience other parts such as the vehicles. Props go to the use of currents and elements to propel you and gliders (BOTW stuff), your character can also climb cliffs and hold onto things, which funnily enough you can hold on to the side of a large enemy, though you cant attack while doing so.

I am sure the game gets better both with time played and hopefully the devs work on this way more. For 20$ I would say its a good buy if you can handle the current state of the game.

---------GTFO---------
A hardcore coop game that plays like half a strategy game and half a shooter. Set in a rundown abandoned mining complex, players are tasked to work in groups of up to four (solo with bots is available but not recommended) to complete objectives and extract out alive.

GTFO markets itself as a hardcore title, it makes no attempt to hide the fact. The game punishes you heavily for slipping up, and a single mistake or a miscalculation in resource usage early in the map could lead to a team wipe which sends everyone back to the last checkpoint or the lobby.

///Replacement of levels, good or nay?///

GTFO utilises a "Rundown" system, where every third of the year, all campaign levels from the current lineup are deleted and replaced with a new set . The plus side of this is that you are essentially getting free new levels and entirely new challenges that provide a fresh experience. This unfortunately also means that any levels that are incomplete will be inaccessible to you forever once the Rundown changes.

The rundowns do recycle modular rooms from previous sets, but the layout, challenges and enemies are always drastically different enough that the experience is still new.

///So what is GTFO?///

In essence, GTFO is more so a strategy puzzle game than a shooter. While shooting skill, recoil control and aim are integral aspects needed for dissolving the complex's many mutant enemies, what is more important is being able to understand what to do, where to go, how to tackle each room or obstacle.

The game plays out like a much more detailed version of Red Light/ Green Light: stealth sequences where your team must crouch and slowly move and stop immediately when sleeping enemies start glowing, or risk waking everything in the room up.

These sections are mixed in with guns-blazing alarm sequences where infinite hordes zone in on your location while you scramble to deactivate alarms through physical scans that move around the room.

Some levels turn off all the lights and leave you in the dark, some are filled with toxic gases, and some have rooms that are filled with scouts, a type of enemy that act as its namesake which will call in reinforcements if alerted.

///Equipment///

GTFO has a wide variety of weapons, offering the ability to select any one main weapon (Rifles, automated guns- Your workhorse weapon), a special weapon (Less ammo but usually more powerful, like a sniper - Situational weapon) and a melee along with a utility gadget such as an Aliens-style motion tracker or automated sentries.

The gadgets are there as strategic tools, allowing you to foam a door where you anticipate a horde in order to buy more time before they break it down as you rush scans, or setting tripmines to deal with waves.

It is important that your team discusses and bring the correct loadout for each level. Snipers have extremely little ammo but are great for levels where giant enemies are abundant, and certain levels are more swarm-based and favour heavy machineguns.

///Level layout///

While the physical structure of each level remains the same through each playthrough, the enemy spawns and objective keys as well as supply closets are randomised with rules. The levels are huge sprawling maps which can take an hour and a half to complete if done with only one or two checkpoint resets, although it is possible to end up spending three hours to finish a run due to a particularly difficult portion.

A map is provided, and players can draw lines on the map to discuss and plan strategies, important when tackling alarm waves, as planning well is crucial and even stopping a single wave for another fifteen seconds can save your life.

///Mechanical Mastery///

One of the best parts about GTFO is its difficulty. Rather than relying on randomised spawns of enemies in unfair situations that wipe your team, a common trend in horde shooters, GTFO has a very mechanical difficulty that rewards skill and knowledge.

Every enemy in the game is multi-layered with attack states and idle states that behave in predictable manners. Taking the basic enemy for example, the crawler will always aim low for your legs first when it swipes its ranged attack within a certain distance. This allows you to practice the timing and reaction to jump over the attack if you have to run past a crawler. Attacks are not proximity based, they require a physical contact.

This also means that when you are trying to execute an enemy, like an unalerted mob, you will have to be precise, since a swing that is too low will miss the occiput (The weak point - Back of the neck) and in some cases not kill the enemy in one hit, which will give you a second or two to follow up or in the case of scouts, failure will immediately ring the dinner bells.

Contrasting to other games where executions are done with a proximity based key trigger, GTFO's precision requirements mean that you will never be a hundred percent confident of a takedown, so training and practising is rewarding in itself.

Wipes in the game don't feel unfair as well, since you almost always know exactly what caused your death, and are able to formulate a new strategy to overcome it. This loop of learning through failure is a big part of what makes GTFO, GTFO.

///Presentation///

The game looks great, its use of darkness and foreboding chambers and tunnels of the labyrinthine complex are interspersed with visual breaks of overgrowth creeping in from the roof, endless pits of fog and occasionally external environments that all feature a dominant colour theme in each area.

The music is intense and dynamic, its fast-paced beats playing in the backdrop of your team firing loud guns and turrets going off as enemies burst through doors and rush you, alarms and the complex's computer systems voicing out automated warnings.

///Conclusion///

All in all, GTFO is highly recommended if you have a team of friends to tackle the difficult maps and learn together with. Matchmaking is available but not recommended, and while bots exist for solo play, the bots are not intelligent enough to understand how to tackle the more technical rooms.

The game does require some level of patience and dedication, and wiping after three hours without progress might feel terrible, but you do learn to get better each time you retry it. It is a unique experience that lends itself well to tactical and strategic gameplay, coupled with a really good sound design and a visually unique art direction.

Generation Zero.

It's still a reccomend from me, although caveat being that you should only really buy this on sale or if you really really enjoy open world shooters. Id get into the specifics below, but the gist of GZ is that its a robot shooter thats is obviously better in coop, that looks beautiful in the engine, but sports design choices that feel very unpolished.

GZ looks beautiful. The Avalanche engine is the one used in Hunter:COTW which is an amazing looking engine that provides awesome vistas and nature. Take that engine and design a map with a unique 80's Sweden style to it and you get this. Color is done pretty well here. The towns have quaint beautifully colored houses, pharmacies have bright neon green signs that look awesome at night, the fields and forests just look amazing.

The robots look cool as well. All of them have pretty good detail to them, which extends to how you can shoot off parts, armor plating, and the sparks and explosions are multiple, which makes shooting them feel more impactful. I like the gun models as well, and the electronic attachments make the gun look sweet.

The addition of Rivals did add some content, although this one isnt exactly all great. Rivals is basically a nemesis system, where you have certain spawned robots that will gain exp and level up when they kill you or you kill other robots in the region. They carry the chance (CHANCE) to drop the best loot, known as experimental weapons and clothes. The clothes are really just your regular clothing but now you get a +1% bullet resist for example. Its not exactly very enticing, but its there if you want to minmax. Ive killed quite a fair lot of them and so far Ive either gotten nothing, or just got experimental pants, so its really down to your luck.

The game is decent, and it really revolves mostly around the same loop of you running from town to town or base and shooting at robots weakpoints. Its decent enough but there are some decisions with the game which make it not a solid reccomendation from me.

Firstly, the game gets very repetitive. And Im not talking about the robot kill loop. The world is a literal copy and paste hell. Every town uses the exact same ten or so buildings, carbon copied and pasted just in different layouts. All buildings even have the exact same interior and furniture! This extends to the industrial warehouses, the military bases and bunkers, and other structures. Bunkers are the worst, as they are really a network of copy pasted corridors and rooms built in confusing layouts. Airbases can have entire stretches of nothing as their hangars. Theres no big city, or change of urban scenery. Everywhere looks pretty much the same. Military bases and airfields have entire stretches of fences surrounding a large territory, that impedes movement and cant even be shot or blown off!

The story is delivered in letters and radios throughout the games campaign. There are no NPCs in the main game. It really feels devoid of life, which can be quite a disadvantage to the story. I lost interest in it midway through. It was only in the DLCs that I pivked up interest more, and even then dont expect a stellar story. It has all the cliche notes like heroic sacrifices and whatnot. My point is, dont buy this game for the story.

I find myself spending way too much time holding E opening doors just to loot ammo boxes and bags.

This game uses the same terrible system from Hunter where scoped sensitivity is much slower than normal, and maxing out the scoped sens in setting still doesnt fix it. I had to rip off all scopes on my guns brcause if you put a scope the game thinks its fun to simulate a WWII tank turret on your character.

For sale price its pretty good for a few hours to sink. But I reccomend playing it with a friend because in solo these issues feel much more pronounced.

UPDATE: Trying the game again after launch, I still stand by my original points. Some QOL changes to how skills and gear works have been made to the developer's credit since Early Access. The game suffers from stutters and lag. Add these on to the game's clunky controls and lack of skill cancel, and you have a rather frustrating experience that does not feel like a snappy aRPG at all. The price has massively increased since Early Access, yet those issues have not been fixed.

Wait for a sale.

---------Original Review (Long)-----------

Until lifebound mechanic is completely removed, this game should be a pass.

Devs are still being stubborn and refuse to accept that lifebound as a whole is never a good idea for an arpg.

For the uninitiated, lifebound items are items that are marked to be lost forever when you die. After the latest patch, they made it so that you opt in to apply lifebound on your items, in turn making them more powerful than the normal version.

Yes, that is right. For an arpg, a genre where the WHOLE POINT of the game is to minmax your gear, enjoy knowing that you will never theoretically get the best gear unless you subscribe to a roguelite system that deletes your gear on death.

And before everyone goes "git gud lol I use a broken dustmage build and ezpz no death", theres so many issues that will cause death.

As an always online MMO, lag is prevalent. Half the time the servers chug and that two second stutter could mean an aoe just snap killing you. Not to mention disconnects, bugs and the like. Granted, early access is where stuff gets fixed. However, internet issues will never go away 100%. Plus, if youre like me and live in a country that has no native servers or even in the region, youre going to be enjoying a whopping 200+ ping.

Theres also a distinct lack of cancel, which means that you cant smoothly transition from a cast into a dodge skill to avoid a killing blow. Everything feels much more sluggish than other arpgs, which makes the lifebound even worse!

Lifebound is an extremely controversial topic. You get players who absolutely love the idea of turning an arpg into a roguelike. Risk vs reward they call it, though in my opinion that risk does not cover all the unwarranted deaths from laggy unreliable servers!

Torchlight III was originally Torchlight Frontiers, originally a F2P title, and my guess is that Lifebound scrolls(before the patch where they were used to keep lifebound items on death) were originally meant to be a mechanic to monetize the grind, I could totally see PWE charging these scrolls in bundles.

Fast forward to today, and Lifebound really has NO place in a buy2play game.

Skills are very straightforward. Theres no depth ala POE or even Wolcen. There isnt even a skilltree, rather a set of linear skills to upgrade. As a casual player Im fine with it, but buyer beware.

Im not going to harp on the technical bugs and stuff because its Early Access, but I will say that their decisions with the game have so far been underwhelming, mostly the Lifebound and how the devs are still trying to wiggle it into the game despite countless outcries.

Positives? Its a pretty game. Well, its Torchlight. While POE is dark, gritty, Torchlight has always been brighter and cheery on the visuals. torchlight 3 looks nice. You get pets as per a Torchlight game which is great, and now there is a fort system which is really just your regular town but you can choose where to build and place your stations.

The main issue with Forts are that because they are on a separate instance from the main town, the devs have essentially placed ANOTHER loading screen within your town cycle. You have to go to town after a dungeon or quest, THEN load again into your fort, THEN load into your next map, which is weird at times because they have these intermittent forts between maps which always throws you into some random dude's fort.

Overall, the game is decent if youre like me and just a casual arpg player.

Its still Early Access so who knows. If the devs fix these issues and remove lifebound as a whole, this might be a thumbs up from me.

If you're an aRPG player who doesn't mind:
-Trying to do a quick dodge from a boss killing blow, only to have your character NOT dodge due to sluggish controls, serverside ping and lack of animation cancel, only to die an angry death.
-Knowing that the devs keep doing an "Eh we know you guys hate this mechanic so we made it so you are forced but not forced lulz" with lifebound because they tied the best stats to lifebound so really you CAN CHOOSE not to play lifebound BUT you are NEVER going to get the good stats in an ARPG.
-The fact that even without those negatives, Torchlight doesnt really stand out and offer much compared to POE and other aRPGs.
-Have a lot of time spent in LOADING SCREENS.
-Know that Perfect World Entertainment is the publisher, which really just reeks of F2P shenanigans.
-Forts are really an annoyance after a while.

Then maybe this might be okay for you. Btw it took the devs a major patch AFTER the game launched to realize people don't like the old map which made you stand still while looking at a cluttered map, despite the aRPG map being a staple in EVERY aRPG game out there. This speaks to me of how disconnected the devs are from the aRPG genre. I mean do they even play any aRPGs before making this game???? It feels like they took MMO devs and tried to do an aRPG.

You get to become a proletariat and an industrial magnate at the same time. Its like your standard factory line except instead of overpriced consumer lifestyle goods you produce actual quality products, assembled by hastily located machines chugging parts and materials down a maze of conveyor belts, instead of child labour.

Automation. Its the future.