Recent reviews by Dirkson

Released a massive update, which brought massive new interest into the game. Utterly failed to account for this upswell, then shuttered the studio days later. Absolutely silly behavior. Managed exactly as poorly as everything else Amazon touches.

Oh well yes, obviously.

Controller required.

It's... Not a PC game. At least not yet. No ability to set keybinds, mouse settings, mouse sensitivity... It just assumes your computer is the developer's computer. That's not how PC works, dev. You know this.

Can't rebind keys or invert the mouse. It's nearly impossible to play right now as a result.

There's a good game in there somewhere, one I want to play. But it's hiding under a LOT of poor decisions.

The weapons feel good. The characters can be fun, even if some of them are pretty oversaturated in the current culture.

Average engagement distance is rather high and characters are VERY mobile, which introduces a lot of randomness into fights. But I admit it IS fun to dance and maneuver my way out of danger. There's bonus damage for headshots, but the high engagement distance and mobility means you'd be a fool to aim at heads, so the headshots are just more randomness. And then I think there's randomness on the actual damage, too? Battle just has a lot more randomness to it than feels good.

The UI is an utter mess, like most modern "live service" games. If I wanted to read a comic book, I would go do that instead of playing a game, guys. Please stop flagging every little thing as "new". I was here before battlepasses, and by all that's holy I hope to see the end of the damn things before I die. Make a game I want to play; Charge a fair price for me to play it.

Some of the characters are incredibly poorly balanced. Spiderman's mobility is so high that none of the characters can effectively fight him - You just sort of live with a spiderman infestation in your back lines, and pray the spiderman isn't good. Fliers in general aren't squishy enough for how hard they are to hit.

Some of the ability interactions feel a bit arbitrary. Squirrel girl's blockade, for example, will stop a couple ults in their tracks... And utterly fail to do anything against some characters when they're using normal abilities. I guess I'm just supposed to memorize how all abilities interact with one another? High skill ceiling, at least!

The chat seems more toxic than average, and it feels like it's getting worse. But you still do sometimes run into nice people. Lots of weird censorship, which is really strange considering the amount of sexuality on display in the character designs. You can LOOK at oversexualized character designs, but not talk about them.

EOMM is cringe. I'm either getting my face pounded in, or utterly destroying some poor team. Neither is fun, neither is what I want.

But every now and again, when my shots are landing ok, when the map hasn't screwed my best character over, when I'm actually in a fair fight against a competent team? Yeah, that's beautiful.

They took a silly amount of time to add key rebinding, but the game itself is lovely. My only note is that I'd like more variety in climbs... But that's really just asking for more of what the game is already giving me, so that's hardly a criticism!

F key, specifically, is not rebindable.

The launcher worked once, then stopped working. Literally can't play the game. Good job Rockstar.

The "T" key is not currently re-bindable.

And the game's UI is as much of a mess as it ever was. Definitely designed console first, PC never. You're going to have to fumble around everywhere because Rockstar are terrified of using the mouse to control the UI in any way.

But hey, there are deer now. And apparently the graphics changed slightly? It didn't look very different to me.

This isn't just a 10/10 game, this isn't just a masterpiece - It may literally be the best game I've ever played.

I have a deep love of the forest. I can take you on a walk and identify every edible plant we see, explain how every aspect of the landscape has been molded by man and nature, and explain how seen and unseen water flows over the landscape. It's long been my dream to have SOME game do justice to the temperate forests I love so much.

This game does that. I could identify plants before ever seeing their name pop up in the UI. I can see how water flows, where it comes from, where it's going. Trails and tracks are visible. The edges of forest are lush and full, as they should be, with more sparse interiors below the canopy, but still have a defined and accurate understory.

This game sells its natural environment so well that, after walking around in its lush summer countryside for a few hours, I walked out the front door of my house without a coat on, fully expecting it to be a hot summer day. In February.

And that's just the natural environment. The built environment is every bit as detailed. Just walking around a village, I can see how timber becomes lumber, which becomes the everyday objects around me. I can see how a bench is put together. I can see why retaining walls were placed where they were. I can pull up google maps and walk down many of the roads in the game, and recognize the lay of the land.

Everything is beautifully, perfectly period-appropriate. Lime whitewash coats the buildings, wattle and daub construction is visible and identifiable, roofs are perfectly period. Stew is left cooking - Without refrigeration, keeping the stew hot was the perfect way to preserve it. Castles are WHITE in this game, which is entirely accurate - They too were painted with whitewash in the period, a fact that I'm not sure I've EVER seen another game get right.

The clothing and economy are fantastically accurate as well, showcasing period-accurate clothing and armor for both the lowborn and highborn of the era. Some of the dyes I see strike me as too expensive in the period to be as common as they are... But given how accurate the rest of the game is, I'm inclined to think I might just be wrong about the prevalence of bright blue dye in 15th century Bohemia.

Every detail has been so meticulously crafted that I've been learning things. When I see some feature of a building, place, or person that I don't understand, I've been googling it and learning about medieval times.

Every. Single. Line. is voice acted. From random peasants chatting about their day to story beats to overhearing bandits chat around a fireside. It's all brought to life, all grounded in reality, and sounds fantastic. When I help someone as part of a "quest", it FEELS like helping them. Not all of the quests come with great (or any!) rewards, and I find myself not caring, just happy to have "helped" some random passerby.

I have an amazing amount of freedom in how to do quests. With my slow pace and need to explore, I routinely find myself having visited locations before I'm officially instructed to by a quest. And you know what happens? When a quest-giver tells Henry to go to "The meadow with all the deer uphill from the stream to the left of the mill", Henry immediately responds with, "Oh, yeah, I've been there". And that's true of nearly anything you can think of - People, places, events. It really sells the idea that people are responding to the actual things I've done, not just what the developers expected me to have done.

In short? There is no more immersive game. Period.

The combat is engaging, challenging, and fun. I'd say it's among the best medieval combat I've ever experienced. The storyline actually grabs me and has me wanting to see what happens next. And the amount of content is just ridiculous - At the time of this writing, I'm 60 hours in and haven't seen half the game. I know I'm moving pretty slow, staring at every flower and whitewashed wall I come across, but still.

And the programming? I haven't seen a modern, large game with fewer launch-day bugs than this one. I get the occasional graphical glitch, the occasional weird pause before I can talk to someone, and the like. But nothing game or save breaking. In the 60 hours of gameplay I've had at the time of writing, I've had exactly one crash.

It may not sound like it from this review, but I am a grumpy, hard-to-please curmudgeon of a gamer. This game isn't without its flaws... But they're so minor relative to what this game has to offer that honestly they're not worth mentioning.

So yes, I think I can recommend this game. Go be Henry. Learn about 15th century Bohemia. Get involved in the plot's twists and turns. Steal food from a bandit's cookpot. Laugh in amazement when you're 50 hours in and only just NOW got to the big map.

And pray, PRAY that Warhorse never makes an online multiplayer game. I'd never go outside again.