Recent reviews by WhatDaMath

This game is really good for old school MMORPGers

Casual and hardcore friendly and tons of stuff to do for 100s of hours

I hear the endgame is lacking, but most of us are nowhere near the endgame and even then there is still plenty to do

So I almost 100� this game, but have a few things left to do
This is the Uncharted Waters we needed for years
Great mix of story and action, great exploration targets, lots of things to do and no gatcha mechanics like the in UW Origins
Best alternative we have right now

The only issue that's still there are occasional bugs and a few memory leaks on Steam Deck
But other than that, definitely amazing

As much as I'd like to recommend this title, it's too niche to appeal to most players. Someone once referred to this as "Annoying Dark Souls" as opposed to "Better Dark Souls" and I'd have to say that's even saying it nicely. When I finished Dark Souls 1 a few years back, I felt genuinely accomplished and wanted to try more and more on harder difficulties. Eventually jumping into other similar titles. When I finished Nioh, I just felt numb at the end. Nioh has the foundation of Souslike games and starts pretty solid for the first few hours, but eventually turns into a slog of game mechanics that you have to constantly be aware of if you want to succeed.

The biggest difference between Nioh and other soulslike is that in order to becomes "gud" or successful in this game, you don't focus on your skills as a player as much as learning the inventory system with all of the buffs and benefits all of the randomly dropped loot provides. You also always stay underpowered as the monsters grow in level with you, which means they continue to one/two shot you even as you gain 10s of new levels.

It all comes down to spending hours upon hours staring at your inventory screen and trying to forge/reforge a perfect item (you'll usually need at least 5 though) and spending more hours reading/watching videos to copy what others have done. Without these perfect builds (based on TONS of obtuse mechanics) it becomes so frustrating to play this game. Not dark souls frustrating where you learn with every fail, more "so I have to go and grind for that perfect drop in some other level so I can reforge it for hours before I can proceed" frustrating. And since forging isn't even fun or interesting it makes Nioh a very obtuse game.

To make things more difficult/worse, wiki for this game is very limited and there have been multiple nerfs over the years to make many builds useless, so all of this becomes a frustrating rather than enjoyable experience.
And without a strong build that can survive a few hits or decimate opponents quick, you end up constantly underleveled and frustrated as even the basic monsters with usually one shot you in higher difficulty levels.

So even though the game starts as a soulslike and is quite enjoyable at first, once you reach the end of the first playthrough and start to replay some of the missions or do extra content, it just becomes plain tedious as you're forced to start looking up build guides and mix/match stats in your equipment, which in many cases may have already been nerfed.

I'd probably only recommend this to someone who REALLY likes theorycrafting and min/maxing their character in games and enjoys staring at inventory screen for days, rather than actually playing the game. If you want to just go through the game with random drops and don't want to worry about the numbers, there's only so far you'll get before becoming way too underpowered to proceed.

And to make things even more difficult, after every missions you're showered with 100s of pieces of equipment that's often useless but MAY contain that one bonus you want so going through most equipment becomes a must too...so yeah....ugh...just frustrating, can I just play the game instead?

I really wanted to get Nioh 2 before playing this, but now that I've read it's basically Nioh 1 but with more mechanics to worry about, no. I think I'll just skip

I honestly think this game would be SO MUCH BETTER if they did the following:
-reduce the number of mechanics players have to worry about
-add an actual difficulty setting for people that don't want to worry about min/maxing
-make loot more meaningful or at least make a good inventory system where we don't have to scroll through 100s of items per mission in what seems to be a console era inventory screen
-maybe stop the nerf updates? what's the point? it's not a PVP game
-provide some other way of fun for people wanting to go through the game that don't care for min/maxing

It's a fun concept wrapped in poor game mechanics and even worse UI

Edit: finished NG and DLC to see if I would be missing some more fun and well...the game does become different in a sense that you mostly focus on perfecting your build and honestly there's only one major build everyone goes for - damage reduction using heavy armor. So the game becomes a bit too repetitive after and considering that all you get is more difficulties and a 999 floor dungeon, but no additional missions or endings, I just don't see the point of playing past NG
It's ok overall, but the mechanics and the level design make it a bit less fun than other Soulslike and a lot more frustrating in the first playthrough

This is mostly a PSO2 original review, not the NGS, as NGS is still being worked on, I'll mention more about this near the end.

I'm a pretty big Phantasy Star fan and have played the series since the PSIV era on Sega, so I was really excited that not only was this out in North America but it was also more or less free.
I jumped into this originally about a year ago and have now experienced enough to be able to do a more or less honest review of what you may expect from this title.

First of all, a lot of negative reviews of this seem to be from players that got too used to freebies and handouts that were given away to a lot of North America players the first year in order to help them catch up with the Japanese servers, I'd honestly ignore most of them as they seem to suggest the game is dying, which is far from the truth.

Secondly, despite this being a free to play with a cash shop, you are absolutely not required to pay for anything ever and as a matter of fact, I never have. I wanted to, but decided to see how far I can take this on a free account and I basically got to play through everything, got to top levels, enjoyed all of the same content as other players and the only thing I'm missing out on is being able to sell on the player market. This is an issue if you want to make A LOT of money in the game, but it's not a requirement and there are much better ways to make money by selling items to vendors (e.g. grinders from high level gear that drops in many quests). I was never short on cash or never felt the need to sell anything right away. As a matter of fact the process of money management makes the game more fun for me,

Thirdly, the pay option and a lot of money would probably come into play if you want to participate in the "Fashion Star" endgame - basically looking good. I'm not big on fashion in games, so this was not a concern for me. You can still buy fashion items with in-game currency and still look good, just don't expect to have too many flashy costumes for free

Now let's talk about the actual game - it's fun. Really fun. At least for the first 100 hours or so. It's a very fast paced but also very tactical hack and slash, with some very unique/specific skills for every class and extremely diverse character customization options. I actually wanted an RPG with tons of attributes and items to modify and this really scratched that itch. Up until the final endgame, there are a lot of items to progress through, lots of ways to upgrade/update everything, lots of ways to grow your character by assigning skill points to main/secondary classes and in essence it's one of the most complex systems in any MMO today.
There is however a small issue in the endgame, due to theorycrafting, by now you're sort of expected to follow a very specific build and aim for a specific weapon set in order to be most efficient in the endgame content. This becomes particularly important in some of the most difficult quests where the entire purpose is to rush through the level as fast as possible by doing a lot of AOE damage. Now that's actually one of the reasons I sort of stopped playing as much.
I like the tactical approach and being able to survive battles against all odds, but in top geared content, it becomes too trivial and sort of boring. You can still do the same midgame content and the same challenge with other classes obviously, but once you reach level 100 and finish your gearing process, it sort of becomes too easy.

Overall, considering that this is absolutely free to play and has a decade of content, I'd definitely recommend this to anyone big on hack and slash and specifically fans of Monster Hunter like games - tons and tons of bosses to fight, a lot of epic battles, really fun.

Now what about the newly released NGS? Well it's a completely different beast and it's still a work in progress (probably max 50 hours of content in it at the moment) but it's definitely an interesting change to the series and I'm excited to see where it goes in the next few years.

Everything in NGS is different from any of the previous games in the series and the game itself feels very refreshing and kind of fun. There are currently (as of late 2021) two major regions with a good selection of quests and things to explore, but it's still being actively worked on, so it's probably not even remotely close to being finished yet.

All of the annoyances from the previous games have been removed and overall everything in NGS is smooth and convenient. It's flashier, faster, has more drops and the drops are auto picked up and it has modern design and look.

tl;dr super fun hack and slash with complex RPG elements and it's basically two free games in one. Just get it...as long as you have 100gb of free space

Incredible end to the Tomb Raider series and probably one of the best adventure/puzzle/action game I've played in a while.
Perfect in every way with only some minor issues but nothing worthy of mentioning
I bought this with DLCs on sale and it was worth it.

I played this originally over a decade ago on my college fund pentium machine that could barely run this. Some of the graphics were too much for the PC to handle back then so after completing a few quests, I decided to put this away for some time.
Years passed and I only recently realized I had a GOTY edition in my Steam connection and a new Ryzen APU laptop that seemed to be able to run the game without any dedicated graphics card.
Needless to say, this is exactly the excuse I needed to jump back into the world of Elder Scrolls and it definitely didn't disappoint.

This is probably the best The Elder Scrolls game to date (I'm sorry Morrowind) and despite slightly dated graphics, is more than capable to look good with mods.
It has some of the most sophisticated NPC AI in any game to date (each NPC has his or her own schedule and actual life) and some of the most complex and fun quests I've ever played through in any RPG.

On top of that, GOTY gets you access to additional content and a lot of other quests that are just brilliant making this one of the best collections I have in my library

I spent nearly 90 hours on this and am not even close to the finish yet. So much to do, see and explore!
Best of all, it was dirt cheap, when on sale.

If you haven't played through this and like games like Witcher series/Skyrim/Dragon Age do yourself a favor and play though Oblivion till the end.
Also make sure to install some of the mods as it makes the game more engaging

One of the best out there

eew

This is a bizarre game and I'm not sure if this is good or bad. The game feels like an odd dream world of an imaginative child, but also seems to make very little sense even as you progress and from what I've read from people who finished it, makes little sense at the end too. I generally like games to make at least some sense.
It's an interesting concept and definitely would be something I recommend had it been a bit more polished, but as it stands, it's just a bit too difficult to play it due to the clunkiness of controls, especially in battles and because there are still some bugs here and there.
In short, as an RPG, it doesn't have enough elements to give it that hook, as an adventure game, it's very difficult to understand what's going on, so usually I would just stroll around aimlessly, as an action game, the battles are not that fun.
Nevertheless, the art and design as well as the overall gameplay experience is still worth experiencing and has some of the more unique elements I've seen.

I didn't really enjoy it as much as the last Doom and this reincarnation felt a bit too contrived in its mechanics. You are always required to melee attack the enemies to refill your health and ammo and overall some of the level design and enemies feel like a downgrade from Doom 2016.
On top of that, there is a weird tiny lag in mouse controls that no matter what I did I couldn't get rid of. After moving the mouse, the character only reacts after maybe 50 or so miliseconds, but for seasoned FPS players this is very noticeable and difficult to deal with.
It's still a true Doom game and still offers good fast paced action and a lot of gore, but something about it was off and the action FPS with lots of bullets and insane weaponry has been replaced by a more of a methodical and slow paced advance where you are more worried about managing your resources (at least I was) than the mindless shooting that Doom is famous for.
I guess to each his own, but this wasn't my cup of tea and I felt a bit underwhelmed at the end.

This was an interesting 9-10 hour experience.
It's probably the most atmospheric cyberpunk game I've played and honestly is worth the price I paid for it, yet the gameplay itself and the overall experience was very lacking because this does feel like a game that was just not fully realized.
It feels like this was supposed to be a much deeper, more engaging experience but because of maybe time constraints or possibly lack of experience, devs decided to just turn this into a fetch quest simulator (akin to Death Stranding).
It's really worth trying though and worth supporting the devs for creating such an atmospheric city, but this feels more disappointing at the end than anything - hopefully the modding community will come in and turn this into something more engaging and longer than it currently is.
Still recommended though