Recent reviews by woozyy

10/10 i sobbed

I have 100% this game not once, not twice, not three times, four whole times. and every time they take my 100%, I am forced to buy the next DLC and play this game again. Please stop adding achievements. I'm tired.

A surprisingly charming point and click adventure about a mystery surrounding a paranoid alligator, in the Big Apple...or should I say, the Alligator Big Apple?

At least we're not in Alligator Jersey!

Although this port is marred with some pretty bad performance and crashing issues (especially when playing full-screen on a 1440p monitor), Henry Stickmin Collection is still a pretty fun romp through old internet culture and memes. Be prepared for some lighthearted millennial humor that somehow finds a way to be charming all these years later.

Also Charlie is the best character and if you think anything else you're wrong.

Minor bugs aside, this is one of the best Star Wars games ever made. Story, Game play, and even tiny character and world-building moments were some of the best I've seen. Definitely the best game since Force Unleashed.

Really make you FEEL like a Jedi.

A fun game about a perfectly honest small town preacher. No lovecraftian beings behind this game, no way!
Indoctrinate your followers and name them whatever you desire!
Special regards to my #1 follower, dung eater!

I played Dark Souls 2 directly after playing the first Dark Souls, which I view as a masterpiece. Please keep this perspective in mind while you read the rest of my review.


Dark Souls 2 is a tough nut to crack, and the opening cinematic alludes to this reality by telling you that you will die over, and over, and over again. While this is true, I believe this statement in and of itself is a reflection of the developers mindset while creating this game. They were focusing on infusing their game with Dark Souls original marketing tactic, which is that the game is extremely hard. This however, just isn't what the original Dark Souls was about. Dark Souls 1 had more of a "Punishing but fair" mentality, that lended you the strength to continue despite any hardships. This game, only seeks to pound any sense of hope or enjoyment out of you. A game for mental masochists, one might say.

I will break down the ways in which I believe this game is cruel in the following bullet points:


1. Gank mentality and combat

One of the top criticisms of Dark Souls 2 is that this game forces you to deal with sometimes hordes of enemies. While I don't think that this is inherently a bad thing, many games do this, I believe that this is a problem for a few different reasons that I will break down further:

- Enemies often have frame 1 or 2 startups for their attacks, not giving players enough time to dodge said attack, even if the player is not currently attacking
- Groups of enemies being used in some of the starting areas of the game give the player a feeling that they are not meant to be in that area at this time. More on this later

- Delay on input for the players. I don't know if this is a problem for everyone, but it is fairly common for players to have issues with input lag in the PC version of this game which obviously can be frustrating.

- A lack of iframes while rolling, until the user gets enough adaptability. The game appears to not want you to roll, as they make it very difficult to make rolling viable within the game. For context, Adaptability(ADP) determines the sub stat of Agility in the game. This is extremely important to gameplay, as Agility determines the iframes of the players roll. You read that right: The animation for rolling stays the same; Agility only affects the amount of iframes while rolling. Players can choose to spend their souls on ADP in order to raise the stat of Agility (32 ADP = 105 Agility, which can be comparable to the roll in Dark Souls 1.) You might be thinking that players could simply block attacks, however blocking also costs stamina, as does rolling. As a result, until the user reaches a certain level of ADP, rolling feels useless and appears to be broken. Not to mention the amount of souls that are wasted while trying to level ADP to level 32.

In short, the group fighting in this game feels like an extreme hindrance to the experience, and leaves players feeling more frustrated by the trash, than by the bosses.


2. Enemy Placement, Traps, Health and No Suicide Runs

- Enemies are placed in such a way that it can sometimes be extremely easy to accidentally pull more than one mob at a time. Additionally, there are often enemies placed in unreachable locations, shooting arrows and throwing bombs at the player. This wouldn't be much different from other games, except for the fact that projectiles have a chance to stagger the player, and are based on predictive assumption. What I mean by this, is that the AI attempts to predict where you will run to next. The result is projectiles that do not allow the player to dodge unless you are sprinting, rolling, or walking back and forth like a mad man. This can be very frustrating in encounters where you are already facing 2 other grounded enemies, and are forced to sustain the relentless abuse of an unreachable, completely accurate enemy.

- There are a few instances of traps that one shot the player, and are delivered without warning. I won't spoil where they are, however this happened enough times to where I felt the need to include it as a point. The original dark souls sometimes had traps that inconvenienced the player, but unless the player was at very low health, or next to a cliff, the odds of them dying are very slim. This games traps feel cheap, and are just another weapon in the arsenal of making you feel frustrated.

- A new mechanic in this game is the concept of Hollowing. This means that every time you die, you lose 5% of your HP bar, until 50% of it is gone. This can be restored with a common item know n as a Human Effigy, however it's more of a nuisance and doesn't really provide any value to the experience. It might have done better as a new game plus feature for hardcore fans.

- The lack of Suicide Runs, a concept common in Dark Souls 1, is one of the most frustrating parts about this game. What I mean is, there are times when you have explored every area, gotten every treasure, and just want to fight the boss again. In the original Dark Souls, the player could simply run past these lower mobs and enter the "mist" of the boss room door, making the player immune to attacks while moving into the boss room. This animation immunity was removed in Dark Souls 2. Not only that, but mobs very rarely de-aggro the player, even while the player is in a boss fight. This results in the player sometimes being attacked by the lower mobs that were chasing them as soon as the boss encounter ends, which could possibly kill the player if they are on low health at the end of the encounter. This results in situations where the player is forced to defeat every enemy in the way of the boss every time the player wants to attempt to defeat the boss. and that kind of monotony makes the experience extremely not enjoyable.



3. The Narrative

While the lore of this game is quite good, all this considered, the game does a pretty poor job of explaining to the player where to go, which is needed, as the word of Drangleic is not as interconnected as the original Dark Souls. A bit more guidance on where to go and what to do would have at least saved the overall experience of Dark Souls 2 for me. From the onset of the game, it was extremely unclear what the players motivations were beyond "breaking the curse of the undead", and collecting "4 souls of immense power" and as a result, figuring out which direction to head in first was a doozy. If you go to Heide's Tower, you are met with giant knights that you can do damage to, but who might one shot you in return. If you go to the forest of Giants, you are met with enemy hordes that pick you apart, or giant orcs, and armored knights that also have the potential of one shotting you if you only have half a health bar. As a result, the new player has no idea where they are meant to go first, as there is no easing into the mechanics of the experience. This can often lead people to quitting the game early, as they feel they don't know where to start. As the game progresses, a guide is more and more necessary even to find where bonfires, the checkpoints are, as the developers have seen it fit to hide most of them. If you miss a bonfire, and die, you might be having to complete a huge chunk of content all over again.

Overall, I felt as though the more I played Dark Souls 2, the more I fell into the cycle of almost enjoying it, then having any enjoyment ripped from me by a cheap gimmick, getting lost for hours, or just having to do the same content over and over just to fight a boss. I really don't recommend this game; It is inferior to the first game in almost every way.

Beautiful remaster. Picked this up after my XBOX 360 hardware failed, and gotta say it looks great.

As far as Dark Souls itself goes, I can't believe I didn't play it sooner. Definitely one of the best games I've ever played period. Without spoiling anything, You can expect:
- Amazing top tier combat
- A story that reveals just enough to keep you interested, but is ambiguous enough to keep you thinking about it after completion
- Characters that will make you question your own moral compass, and your choices in the game

I can't recommend this game enough. It will take a lot out of you, but I weirdly feel that by completing it I've grown as a person.