Recent reviews by richiepap

So far so good. I"m really enjoying it. I don"t do well on every level, but what I really appreciate is that, so far, every time things have gone wrong it"s because I"ve messed up. I haven"t felt cheated by the game, which makes it much easier to give the level another go.

The game looks good and runs really well for me on a 5600x and 3060ti. It"s stable. It"s a slower paced game rather than a twitch shooter, which I really like. There are plenty of options for loadouts, which is nice to tinker with. And I"ve found AI team mates perform effectively for solo play. Also, the NPCs will not always be in the same place when you replay a level, which keeps things fresh, and is a great touch.

Forever Winter is a post-apocalyptic roguelite resource gathering extraction FPS. It is PVE and can be played co-op with friends or randoms, or single player with or without bots - bots must be paid for each time, and they can be destroyed.

Forever Winter is Early Access, and while it is certainly playable, I feel it needs more work. It feels poorly optimised as, on the face of it, I see no reason for it run as badly as it does for the game that it is. On no other game do I have to turn the settings and resolution down to a level that I have to for this one.

Although you can use a gamepad, it is not optimised for one, with some control functions unavailable. And sometimes the mouse cursor disappears when using a controller, making it impossible to use the UI elements which require a visible pointer.

The gun play is mediocre, with no real cover system. Enemies roam in groups, and turn on you with pinpoint accurate volleys of fire immediately when you attack them. You need to have your head on a swivel at all times, as enemies seemingly spawn in from anywhere - and if you"re seen, there"s a very good chance you"re dead. Enemies often congregate near the extraction point too, and it can be quite tricky to exit successfully.

Upon death you drop your inventory, and have to go and retrieve it before it decays. This means that you frequently don"t get to go out with a fixed loadout each time, but instead you revert to a few basic, standard, stock items. And although you can level up your skill with each gun through kills including these starter ones, I have yet to see much incentive to get in to a firefight yet.

One resource you need to collect is water. There is persistent water usage in your base, whether you are logged in to the game or not. If you run out of water your scavengers will die and you will lose your entire inventory. Although it isn"t majorly difficult to get water, it does become a concern, and will understandably put people off of the game - because who wants to feel like they can lose their progress just because they haven"t logged in for a while

There is character progression, and different character archetypes which you are largely free to switch between at any time. Your skill-ups are limited by a level cap, but this cap can be extended by prestiging your character. For example, I won"t be able to reach level 4 in first aid at prestige level 1, to do this I need to increase my prestige level. However, when you increase your prestige level all of your current skill-ups are lost, along with the earned xp, so you have to start them all over again.

So far I have found little encouragement to commit to things in this game. Much of it feels fragile and liable to be lost at any time - your life, your inventory, your loadout, your skills. So I end up just going out without any items I don"t want to face having a slog to get back if I need to, and just running to the extraction point dodging lethal enemies where possible and collecting anything I can. Which, as a gameplay loop, becomes stale quite quickly.

But, I do think this game could become much more than it is now, and I hope the devs have success with the start they have made.

I just found it dull. Too mindless. Too similar to Vermintide 2, but without the appealing aesthetics. And the chatter between characters just doesn"t compare, either. The nail in its coffin for me was the lack of solo play.

I like the game and will keep playing it, but I can"t recommend it. Here is why: It"s broken, and they can"t seem to fix it.

Yesterday my experience of the game was:

- game crashed
- completed successful mission
- completed successful mission
- network error ended game after it had started
- network error ended game after it had started
- game got stuck on loading screen as we were starting mission
- start mission and got kicked for using a certain weapon (arc thrower), presumably because that weapon had been crashing the game, and even though it has been supposedly patched people don"t like it being used
- gave up and closed the game

Another problem is that if for any reason you don"t complete a mission, you lose many of your rewards, so basically you go through 40 minutes of effort for nothing. Including if the group leader starts kicking people. The game has no voting system, so if they don"t like something you end up getting unceremoniously dumped out to the lobby, losing some of your rewards in the process and all the time that you put into the mission.

What makes this worse is that the friending system is broken. If you happen to team up with a decent group of randoms, you can"t become friends with other PC users in-game because the system that they have in place for that doesn"t work. And they don"t show up in the Steam "recently played with" section either, so you can"t add them after you"ve finished unless you remember all of their usernames.

It"s a shame because the game itself is a blast. But these issues really make it very hard to consistently enjoy it.

Evercrash 2.

Gameplay is great, but I"m crashing to desktop multiple times a session. This wouldn"t be so bad if some missions, such as base clearing, saved your progress as you went. But they save after you"ve completed all the objectives, so if the game crashes before you finish, you have to go through the whole process from the beginning.

You also lose all of the loot you earned from that mission so far. Got a nice blueprint? Tough. Like that component? Gone. New colour to customise your ship with? Maybe you"ll find it again someday.

The really annoying thing is that the game runs like butter. Until it just doesn"t.

**Edit** After trying many things to fix the problem, I have now gone several hours without crashing after changing my RAM.

When I upgraded I left the old sticks in leaving me with unmatched pairs, which hadn"t been a problem until now. But taking the old RAM out seems to have solved the issue, so I"m changing my review to a positive one because this game is great.

Look at how they massacred my boy.

I"m really glad I got to play it back when it was good.

I am giving this game a negative review based solely on the fact that, having my PC connected to a television, the in-game text is far too small for me to be able to read it. For many games this is not an issue, as both the UI and the text will scale appropriately; however, some games do not seem to be able to do this, Legends of Eisenwald being one. As such, it is unplayable for me.

I would love for someone to tell me that I am missing something obvious, or that there is a workaround, because I haven"t found anything and I would really like to play the game. There is a checkbox option for large UI in the menus, but it doesn"t fix the text. If anybody has any ideas, please do let me know.

I"d go along with many of the other reviews. It isn"t the worst game I"ve played, but it"s far from the best. I feel like it could potentially become good eventually, but it"s not right now.

20+ hours in and I just don"t anticipate experiencing anything particularly novel, interesting, intriguing, or exciting to come from playing any further, while the gameplay loop that is established is kind of flat. Where is the hook?

If you want to spend an hour or so every now and then loading the game up and taking over some rackets, it"s ok for that, but the combat is pretty shallow and does get repetitive quickly.

Other than that, it"s a case of accruing money to then click a few buttons to upgrade your rackets, and clicking different buttons to change the type of alcohol being produced to meet the needs of the customers. There is some limited interaction with rivals, but it never feels intense or meaningful. I certainly don"t feel like a gangster caught up in a rich and vibrant yet gritty and brutal world.

I bought it in the hope that I would find it interesting and enjoyable in a way that other reviewers didn"t, but that hasn"t happened, and I don"t feel confident that it will.

I had to uninstall it because I don"t have much self control and I need more than 5 hours sleep a night.

If I were writing this review having never played the first game, then certainly I would make it a positive one. It really can be great fun to play.

However, I played the hell out of the first M&B, and unless I"m missing some fantastic stuff at end-game which I haven"t reached yet, I can"t honestly recommend this game based on my personal experiences. I"m not sure what we"ve been waiting this long for, as nothing is standing out to me as being wildly different. I see some nice touches, the sieges are more interesting, and graphically it"s prettier - but it just feels like a substantial update for the first M&B rather than a standalone game.

One thing that is severely limiting my game time is not being able scale the size of the UI text. My PC is connected to a (large) TV in the living room and I find myself straining my eyes to read the descriptions of skills and the latest trade rumours etc.

Overall there is fun to be had playing Bannerlord, and it can be a real time sink, but I can"t help feeling a bit underwhelmed. Bottom line is I certainly wouldn"t recommend paying full price for it if you"ve played the first game.

*Update 12/01/2023*

The game is still disappointing. I"m getting random crashes, often when fighting in tournaments where it is particularly irritating to lose that progress.

Speaking of tournaments, you are frequently split into groups where your teammates are wholly useless. They get wiped out QUICKLY, leaving you with a 1 on 2, 3, or even 4 situation and it is practically impossible to win on realistic damage.

But perhaps worse is the fact that you can"t group your troops as you could in Warband. Instead, you are given a deployment screen which automatically assigns your troops into groups, often mixes them up, and makes it very difficult if not impossible to organise them easily.

For example, all of my companions are horse archers like me. But they get allocated to infantry instead of with the group of horse archers that I captain. Why? Who knows.

I subsequently have to create a new group of horse archers in the deployment screen, which automatically selects my companions and puts them into it. I then reduce the size of that group to zero, which automatically overflows them into my group of horse archers. It"s such a needless faff.

And the game never remembers that I want my party to be organised like this. So I have to do that. Every. Single. Time. that I go into battle. It"s truly inane.