Recent reviews by dabomb20001

A lot of the core gameplay elements were kept much like its predecessor, but Red Hook has simplified the combat system so rather than giving arbitrary buffs to heroes and enemies alike there is now a token system that signifies many of the core offensive and defensive elements of the game. Some buffs still do exist, but they mostly focus on stress, debuff, and DoT resist. Rather than getting afflicted, heroes will now have meltdowns that negatively affect that hero's relationship with all other heroes in the party. Positive and negative relationships can VASTLY make or break a run, as negative relationships will lock in a skill that would otherwise be useless or provide nasty debuffs to your team while positive relationships have the potential to provide free healing, stress heal, positive tokens, or DoT removal. All in all the game has its ups and downs, but nothing feels better than finally beating a boss that's been giving you trouble and seeing tangible progress in both the story and your experience as a player.

This game has such amazing potential to be one of the greatest PvE coop shooters ever made and once the devs add more content and fine tune the existing content it'll turn into a straight upgrade from the original; however, it should be noted that the game is absolutely littered with technical problems currently, some of which make the game literally unplayable (crashing to desktop often, game not launching, etc). Thankfully the devs are fixing these as fast as they can so if you're on the fence about getting this game, I'd recommend waiting a couple of weeks until most of the post-release kinks get hammered out.

It's ok

Don't have anything new to say that hasn't already been said, just sucks having to wait for matchmaking simulator 3 to finally work.

Having played the game from EA release, I think the game gets buggier with each update which is honestly impressive. Map design is also pretty bad, Asteroid vault is literally just a death trap if there are any kitted out campers watching the stairs out of the drill area as that's the only way out.

The game is phenomenal and there's always something new to learn or some new piece of equipment to build. The maps are gorgeous and the monsters are a blast to fight (except for the wind dragon). Even with end game gear the toughest bosses are still very challenging, rewarding players for exceptional use of skill with their weapon and learning the monsters' movesets instead of brute forcing a fight. While the story can be a little lackluster and the grind can be quite overwhelming at times, if you go into the game expecting to fight monsters you're almost guaranteed to have a blast. Other note would be the game does a very poor job of explaining many mechanics so you might have to consult a wiki every now and then. The community also does a good job of explaining said mechanics if you're willing to watch a couple Youtube videos regarding it. 9.5/10 game

This is truly one of the rouge-likes of all time. 10/10

Nothing injects more serotonin into my monkey brain than beating Nidhogg and getting to watch the closing sequence every time

Fantastic game with a wide array of weapons and armor sets plus an additional feature of mods, special power-ups that you can attach to your long and short gun that can make the difference between defeating a boss with ease or struggling for hours. Learning how to synergize all the different armors, weapons, and mods can make for a very fun and rewarding experience and since you have to replay the campaign and adventure modes several times to unlock everything, it encourages replayability if you enjoy that. The traits system acts as a nice bonus to further boost your characters resistances, damage, and other modifiers that will give you an edge depending on how you further customize your "class". The only gripe I have is that normal difficulty is a little too easy, but thankfully this is offset by playing on hard or nightmare (a true challenge for this game). The addition of hardcore mode also provides a nice challenge to those that want to make it through an entire campaign even on normal without dying a single time (otherwise your character is deleted).

The game allows for challenging boss fights and even basic encounters can pose a risk if you're not prepared. The RNG aspects of the game actually allow for more interesting fights since the core mechanics would be heavily abused if that aspect didn't exist. It really boils down to learning how to mitigate risk vs reward. Oh, you found that secret room with treasure worth over 10,000 gold but your inventory is already full? Well you can either choose to discard gold that you may already have that's worth less OR you can try and make it to the end of the dungeon without any more shovels, bandages, etc. THIS is how the game can effectively and unexpectedly punish you hardcore.