Recent reviews by Mawnster

Online matchmaking races take years to load (like up to 30 minutes per 3-4 minutes max races) and it apparently has been an issue for years. I played through most if not all the game's singleplayer content (admittedly having a good time doing it) looking forward to just racing people and that's simply not a reasonable possibility.

They're somehow selling an online racing game with (almost, the seasonal stuff which is about to stop being updated still works) no online racing. It's a joke. I feel like I got scammed.

So sure, you're buying a good game. But it calls itself an online racing game and you can't race online.

Very poor balancing all around. Might not be an issue if you take this very casually and don't try to go for the higher medals on weapons, but I've been playing on high difficulty and the more you crank up the difficulty the more you'll realize that weapons, mods and grenades all vary from entirely useless to completely mandatory. Same thing for islands (levels you play in), their challenge types, enemy spawns. From complete cakewalk to deathtrap only beatable with either great risk or overpowering brute force. So many runs I've had that died knowing I would've been doing exponentially better if I'd found different common rarity mods, while on the other end I've also had a diamond run won singlehandedly by a legendary mod I found from a key unlock in the lobby. Of course this genre means there will always be more or less lucky runs, but in the end the difference between the two is much too large, with very little variation of viable builds, leaving me feeling like skill barely matters over just getting the same "meta" mods.

Hunt someone down only knowing their hair color and main hobby.
Set a new standard for invasion of privacy.
Rob everything you can from every location you visit.
Get hunted by cops for helping them with their job.
Break down every door you come across.
Occasionally get shot when you upset someone.
Master travelling through the vent spaghetti dimension.
Inject bloatware directly into your brain.
Sell your soul to Starch Kola.
Drink coffee off of dirty diner floors.
Become one with the trash.
Retire far away once you've completed enough jobs to lose all morals.



Also I guess you solve murder cases from time to time.

- Slow movement with large maps
- Very little item stats outside of the core stats (health, base stats, resistances) and even then in very small amounts.
- Enemies have knockback way, way too often
- Even for an ARPG the questline is bad. Too many blatant "I'll let you pass if you do X, Y and Z for me" moments in the main questline. There's also two almost identical, fairly lengthy secondary quests for seemingly no reason.
- The status effects you apply on enemies barely seem to do anything, except...
- Armor reduction on hit seems to have way too much effect on your damage, especially as a stat that can only be on your weapon. When I realized that in late game and equipped a gem on my weapon, my damage skyrocketed, almost multiplied by 10.
- On top of the aforementioned knockbacks a lot of enemy designs (shotgun attacks, special attacks' windup almost identical to regular attacks, small enemies in large amounts having a large damage range potentially leading in sudden very high damage burst) make it MUCH MORE punishing to play melee.


Very disappointed in my experience after enjoying my time with the first Torchlight game.

Great idea for a game and story. Very bad production. First off this game is not even finished. The amount of bugs is absurd. Second, gameplay loop is boring. I don't mind the simple driving, it's kinda relaxing; but the trading part is really boring.
Third, when the game isn't bugged it's just poorly designed. You have to pick your road, you can know in which state it's in but not if it's a road or a dirt path. Some trading goods are so low in value they're completely irrelevent.

Anyway, don't buy it. Not just because it's not worth it, but because you shouldn't give money to a developer that releases games without finishing them. If you want to experience the only thing good about this game, the atmosphere, just watch a playthrough.

A grand quest to see how many children and goblins one can kill by accident.

Really an amazing game. It has its flaws but I still just kept playing it until I was done completing everything I wanted to. Also an impressively huge map.
Bonus mention for the potential multiplayer.

Thought I'd give this game another try after being a bit more used to racing games.

It still makes me just as angry as the first time I tried.
Completely unintuitive cars that handle differently *without any clear ingame mention of it*, awful learning curve with absolutely no help from the game whatsoever (tips are about as useful as "when your health reaches zero, you're dead" but manage to be even more patronizing and rage-inducing), confusing detection of what is and isn't a drift or how close you need to be to complete objectives.

If you already know how to drift, good for you, but this game clearly does not provide any kind of help for you to learn how to, besides a platform to do it on.

Soundtrack is just generic, uninspired chill music that is so bland the different songs just blend together and make the whole experience even more irritating.

So, conclusion in case you didn't get the message yet: I'm tilted and I hate this game; even more so because I would actually like learning how to drift but this somehow fails to help even as a drift-dedicated game.
Up to you if you want to actually listen to an overly angry man on the internet, probably not a good idea.

Well that game was just a lot of fun. Only complaint would be that the game felt too easy overall, and I played on hard. There's a higher difficulty setting after you beat the game but I don't tend to replay games I already finished, so I would have much prefered the very hard option available from the start. Other than that, a few parts felt a bit annoying but not so much. I give this game a 9/10.

P.S: Didn't use the voice recognition. Just used the in game list of options instead, which worked fine.

Okay so I have a problem here. I don't understand why I enjoyed this game. I had to go through so much ****.

(note: I played on medium difficulty)

• I had to reload a save and lose half an hour of progress because a submarine exploded itself before landing in water.
  
  
• I had to jump around crates hoping there were items to refill my ammo and health because they were invisible and I had to guess where they were.
  
  
• I had to deal with a boss I couldn't really dodge, just hop around like an idiot hoping the seeking magic missile didn't hit me (also sometimes it just passed through walls) because it kills in two hits, bypassing armor.
  
  
• I had to reload an older save (again) because I had a detonator in hand while having my weapons removed, which left me locked on the detonator and unable to switch weapons when I got new ones.
  
  
• I had to kill 4 flying vehicles (equipped with machineguns and rocket launchers) and a good dozen of enemies (some equipped with large area of effect explosions rocket launchers) at 5 health without any health or armor refill. Then I got one 25 health medpack and had to kill 2 more vehicles and a boss (that could one hit kill me, too).
  
  
• Sometimes, some of the sound just stopped. No footsteps, most gunshots quiet, no music. I had to save and restart the game to fix it. It happened only a few times.

On top of that, there are enemies that can kill you in one hit even at full health/armor and that can shoot through walls or instantly around corners. And there aren't only a few of them.
And, last little note, the land vehicles feel atrocious to drive. But that's minor.


But somehow I still had fun. The combat was satisfying (except what I mentioned earlier). The fact that enemies can kinda strafe at lightspeed feels a bit cheap but it adds some challenge.

Weapons are okay, some just feel useless though. Mostly the SMG, because it uses pistol and assault rifle ammo, but the pistol is way more accurate and the assault rifle is more accurate too and has burst and auto firing. You also get the assault rifle before the SMG. Grenades were just extremely uneffective. I didn't really use explosives on enemies overall, just sniped people with the pistol, precision rifle or sniper, which was just about as effective, if not more. Also, note on the railgun: you can aim through walls with it, apparently... but I only learned that after I finished the game. Because someone told me. I didn't notice it myself at all and nobody tells you about it.

Vehicle sections... well, not remarkable. They're done in 5 minutes, you get back to the interesting part and forget about them. But atleast they're not really annoying.

The geomod destruction is impressive for a 2001 game... But in practice it just felt useless to me. Maybe I just didn't think about using it sometimes but it didn't feel like I really had time to set up explosions to destroy a building or bridge instead of just shooting the enemies. Only used it a few times, twice because I was forced to do it, a couple times out of curiosity to access other paths (which really wasn't rewarding, only unlocked shortcuts instead of secret items, and since I didn't want to miss on anything I went back to the main path anyway).

The stealth parts were really basic. I just had to not get too close to cameras and guards, and spotting distances were really small so it felt pretty easy once I got the hang of it. And they also just end into more shooting, they can't be finished without just starting to shoot your way through some rooms, as far as I noticed. But since you can't get armor and only have a pistol during these, you pretty much have to try getting as far as you can without having to shoot (or get spotted anyway, which is almost the same). You can hide bodies but I really couldn't find any use for it because when I shot any guard it just directly triggered an alarm.
Still, the stealth parts were kind of nice.

Oh, and also, the game is manual-saving only. No checkpoints or autosaving. Force yourself to quicksave (and sometimes do a manual save in the menu just in case something bad happened) or else you're gonna have to go back to the start everytime you die. And if you don't save often you're just gonna have a way harder time overall.



So, overall, I'm still not sure how I had fun with this game, so I'm recommending it hoping you will have fun too, but be ready for some annoying parts.

Originally posted by Ultor soldier, assault rifle in hand:

Don't shoot, I'm unarmed!