Recent reviews by Within

You can literally walk up to an NPC and ask him if he knows a guy called Nathaniel Higgers and he will give you an in-world/in-lore answer.

This is the last insane video game I have ever played.

Bloober if you are reading this you better give us a DLC with story or a sequel. This is not a request.

Without a doubt one of the worst endings I have seen in a video game. If the poor sales weren't bad enough, the ending would be the final nail in the coffin for what could have been an ok franchise.

The game wasn't too bad, just somewhat underwhelming, everything happens in the last hour of the game and the "real" ending is locked behind a DLC...

Played 50 hours or so of this as an insider and pretty much saw and did all there is to do and its not a lot. In its current state the game has virtually no content, the content that is there are just some line challenges which you complete to get currency to open "lootboxes" which give you some generic asset store customisation options, alternatively you can spend £20 for a garbage reaper costume. Not to mention this game had MTX during its CLOSED ALPHA, you can't make this s@#t up.

The physics and skating feel great and are a lot of fun, but so many tricks and things from even Skate 3 are missing and even though they are on the roadmap, after 5+ years of development this is more like a glorified demo. The map is tiny and looks like some metaverse @ss map, there are very few interesting lines to skate on this map and you will frequently just go about without anything to skate, there is no skate culture in this game. It sometimes feels like an AI designed this map or something, I hope the map gets expanded and changed in the future because its tiny.

This game can be a lot of fun but after you explore what little content there is to do, the game will degrade to a pick up, play 15 minutes per day and do dailies sort of game. I really want to be positive and have high hopes, but this is EA we are talking about and they will absolutely fk this game up the @ss. Being free to play and early access is the first red flag. I really, really hope I am wrong and that they turn this around and I am aware this is early access and that its free but after a 5 year wait and seeing the few months of insider updates, this is extremely disappointing. I will closely watch the updates and development of this game.

That being said, you should at least play it or try it for yourself and see if you like it since its free.

Jesus christ, I have seen people in the paralympics that run better than this game. These levels of performance are completely unacceptable. I got this for free with my GPU and still feel ripped off, game costs £60 so Randy can dress up like Susan Boyle. You pay £60 for a game that can barely hit 100fps on a 5090 at 1080p. It's a shame because this game actually seems good, too bad I will have to frame generate the rest of it with my imagination as the performance is so trash I have virtually no intention of playing it.

Do not buy until this is fixed.

Kill bandiit group.
Walk 15m.
Bandit group respawns behind you.
Kill bandit group or die trying.

The game.

Save yourself money and storage space and download GAMMA instead. It does everything this game does but x10 better and is FREE. I tried this on release and it was awful. I come back a year later to still a mostly awful, unfinished product with trailers releasing, teasing features that have been in the ORIGINAL trilogy for 20+ YEARS. I wouldn't even buy this in its current state on a 90% off sale.

This is a full priced game that runs on UE5 and is littered with trash performance, bugs and immersion killing bugs. It should have been marketed as early access, it runs on an engine quite literally deigned to cut down dev time and pump out slop. It will rarely look better than gamma even on the highest of settings. The visuals suffer from the same smeared garbage effect that most UE titles do.

This game will run like cheeks regardless of your hardware, sure I can use MFG x3 or 4 but thats shouldn't be required, the game takes a dump everytime you visit a populated area.

A life? Non existent. I mean it literally doesn't exist. Patch notes repeatedly cite improvements. To what exactly? The NPCs are no different and act no different than NPCS in a ubis h i t game. The moment you are seen flanking isnt an option as enemies just know exactly where you are.

Factions? Dead. Everyone looks the same. Enjoy walking and having 6 enemies spawn in front of you, then figuring out which faction they belong to and whether they are hostile or not. They all look and dress the same, you might as well replace every NPC in the game with Agent Smith from the matrix. See an army outpost? Yeah just shoot them, no repercussions for you at all since there is no faction rep system. Now look at the old games? Every single enemy faction can be told apart with ease.

No more immersive and funny PDA chatter or messages.
Looting is plain boring and uninteresting, you find the same 15 items scattered across the world.
Stashes all just contain the same items in different quantities.

The things this game can do quite well is ambience and from time to time it will actually look nice depending on the time of day. The native voice acting is also pretty good but that is where the positives end.

I would have happily waited another 10+ years for this to come out on a newer version of xRay. Instead you get this in-cohesive abomination. Either wait another 2 years for this to be fixed if it ever gets fixed or wait for mods to fix it in a decade.

Extremely disappointed.

Man if you look past the MTX and actually play this game the same way it was, you'll have a great time. I played the OG back in 2006-2009 and haven’t played it since returning in December of 2024.

This game is very different to OSRS, it has a lot of QOL over the former but at its core it's the same game, think of it this way.

OSRS = A snapshot, a time capsule of when the game was at its peak years ago.

Runescape/3 = Continuation and modernisation of that time capsule. Whether you love it or hate it, you'll have to decide for yourself.

This is a true sandbox MMO, you can go and do anything you want, there's simply no right or wrong. Want to do farming and raise dragons? No problem. Want to focus on combat and bossing? Also no problem. Want to do skilling purely? Also no problem, there's like 20 skills you can level, each one will have its use at one point or another.

There's no forced PVP in Wildy and various areas like there used to be, you also don't lose all your items when you die, you just reclaim them from Death at a small cost.

Quests are also done really well, what might feel like a slog can actually drag you into something goofy such as fighting a guy that “cant be beaten by any man” so naturally you change your gender to a woman and smack him up. Quests generally serve as means of progress and opening the game systems up for you, a ton of really important stuff and gear, passives, upgrades are locked behind quests, which are in turn locked behind skill requirements, so it creates a natural progression as you play A particularly excellent quest series involves you renovating a fort which will then take part in a battle and serve as a really great skilling hub that will have money making potential.

Community stood the test of time, in the same way stand users are naturally attracted to one another in Jojo so is Runescape and absolute fkn weirdos. That being said, the community is friendly and helpful ,if you ask a question in one of the popular places like Fort or Grand Exchange, you will more than likely receive more than help such as items or even money to help out in whatever it is.

The population numbers are also fairly healthy. Don’t look at steam charts because the majority of the players are on the standalone Jagex Launcher. There are approximately 30k daily players so the game is not dying and there is an active players base for most activities in the game, this of course highly depends on the world you are in.

Free to Play is free and you get access to maybe 15-25% of the actual content in the game, consider F2P a trial. If you enjoy the game you will eventually want to expand into a membership as most of the useful skills and content are locked behind members. You can make money that pays for membership but it will be extremely tedious and time consuming. Most people tend to go into membership, do high level PVM, merching, trading and then paying for membership that way. I met countless players that had enough wealth to have multiple years worth of membership. That being said, it is possible however it requires a time investment, patience and it isn’t easy.

PvM is excellent as is bossing. You will quite often die a lot, even with best in slot gear, equipment and various other things. Even with max stats, you cannot face roll your way through bosses, sure there are ways and setups to make bosses easier, you are still required to have a brain and learn the mechanics. I have seen countless people swipe for the best gear in the game only to get pathetically wiped at some of the easiest bosses in the game. This is a fairly complicated game at the end of the day and you will have to put time in and learn. Bosses such as Zuk can be particularly devastating to new players but with practice become a cake walk that still requires a good amount of focus and attention. Don’t expect amazing drops right away though, gear and decent loot drops in this game are really rare, you can expect to kill a boss upwards of 200+ times and still not receive any gear 1/200 being generous lol. That’s just how it is, but nothing beats the satisfaction and right of flexing you get for getting all the drops on a boss and a respective title. You attain the rite of flexing in that regard and you’ll also be making fat stacks of money. Certain pieces of gear can go for 500m+.

Skilling is fun but that depends who you ask. A lot of skills are not active, so you can easily AFK them and only click on your screen every couple of minutes, this means you can comfortably watch YouTube or a friends discord stream on the side whilst the game plays itself. There are many ways to make skilling more fun or active such as items or quest upgrades that make certain actions faster etc. A lot of skills also complement each other, whereas others such as Dungeoneering are a redundant, repulsive time waste that serves no purpose and should be reworked.

Overall performance in this game is awful and Jagex should focus on optimising this game next, it doesn’t look amazing but it can, which leads me to another issue. The graphics are super inconsistent. You can have an area like fort that looks fantastic. Meanwhile God Wars 1 looks like its stuck in a time capsule from 2010. Stuttering and frame drops in almost every area as you traverse the world, thankfully it does not impact important bossing encounters as they are in enclosed areas but it's extremely jarring to see as you run through the world.

In general it looks like Jagex is actively trying to listen to its community and is implementing stuff, however decade old bugs still plague the game so it's a bit of a mixed bag. The recent MTX changes and experiments definitely look better than trying to charge people more for membership which is already fairly expensive but worth it over aids like Netflix in my opinion.

Overall the game is good especially if you are thinking of playing it. It's extremely time consuming if you want to do everything so do keep that in mind. The content that is already there is good but locked behind membership.The game is riddled with MTX but it can simply be ignored for the most part because even if you swipe to get best gear, you will still need a functional brain to use it. The main hindrance at least in my eyes will be the MTX, performance and lack of art direction in certain areas, because the game is so massive I am guessing it's difficult to be consistent. There is a metric ton of stuff to do in this game that will likely keep you busy for thousands of hours.

Just disappointing that this is all we got after almost 5 years of early access.

Cooked remaster. I'm not even surprised it was free.

The game just looks blurry, upscaled visuals are great but its like there is a sphere 300m around my character, everything inside that sphere is fine, anything slightly outside of it is like having catarcts.

A bunch of objects relating to Russia were removed from this game,

Original versions of the game?

Delisted...

Welcome to gaming in 2025.

Concocted a batch of weed that made my character go bald and turned him black.