Recent reviews by Beepus

Pretty middling. The map is about five times too big for the content offered, the combat runs out of ideas within a few hours, the enemy variations are few (although they are animated and textured very well), there are only about a dozen weapons in the base game (even with DLCs it's only about 20), and the few NPCs there are feel more robotic than the things you shoot the whole game. The amount of DLC is pretty ridiculous, too - a lot of them should have been free additions, especially in a game that desperately needs more variety to patch up its weaknesses.

I will say though that the atmosphere and sound design are fantastic. Creeping through a dense forest while hearing all sorts of bass-y horns, shrill beeps and thunderous footsteps from the robots never gets old, and puts me on edge even after a few dozen hours. The landscapes are also remarkably realized - they capture the look and feel of rural Scandinavia perfectly. If this was more focused and developed by a less greedy company, it could have been something great. Oh well.

I have played this since Alpha, and it is by far one of the best medieval games I have played (unfortunately there aren't too many to begin with). First off, a summary of features Mordhau has:

1) The gamemodes offered range from Frontline, a 64-player Team Based Objective mode similar to Chivalry's Team Objective or TF2's Control Point, to Horde, a wave-based coop arena akin to CoD Zombies, with armor and weapons strewn about the map that require points to buy, to Battle Royale (you can guess what is in this one).

2) Cosmetic customization is ridiculously in-depth, with dozens of armor pieces for each part of your character's body, leading to thousands of different combinations of interesting looking knights on the battlefield. However, only your Head, Torso, and Leg armor are the ones that have any bearing on protection and speed, meaning you can customize your shoulder, arm, waist, neck, hand, and feet without having to worry about an effect on your stats. You can also change your character's face, voice, voice pitch, hair, facial hair, etc. It's fricking amazing, I have spend at least 10 of my 165 hours just making freaks of nature and cosplays of dark souls NPCs.

3) However, this game wouldn't be any good if the main aspect tying all of these things together, the Combat, wasn't any good. I can say as a veteran of both Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Mount and Blade: Warband, that this combat system surpasses both by miles. Exploits such as reverse overheads (turning your character away from the enemy and performing and overhead in order to hit them with it extremely quickly), 360 spin attacks, and Z-stabs (dragging a stab in order to bypass a block, extremely hard to read) are all either completely removed or nerfed into the ground. This makes for a combat system where fights look like fights and not a dance audition.

Feints in Chivalry were pretty much a "Win the fight button", as the only way to combat them was to hard-read them, meaning you must make a split millisecond decision whether or not to block. This was very difficult, and only the most competitive of players with hundreds to thousands of hours would be able to do so. In Mordhau, however, there is another counter, called Chambers. Chambers work similar to Mount and Blade: Warband chambers, in that you must mirror your opponent's attack type and direction in order to successfully pull one off. This makes feint-spamming much easier to deal with, and raises the skill ceiling quite a bit.

In my opinion, this is the best multiplayer Medieval game at the moment. Definitely going to be pouring many more hours into this. 9.5/10

Just finished this last night, started NG+ a few hours ago. Overall very fun, fluid combat with some of the hardest bosses in the From Soft series, an an interesting world.

The Good -
1) An intuitive combat system that is somewhat souls-like but with much more emphasis on parrying and speed rather than abusing i-frames and sticking close to a bosses butt.

2) Less zones overall (compared to DS3/DS2), but they are GIGANTIC now, it will take a blind player around 3-4 hours to clear a zone now instead of 40 min.

3) Lots of skill trees, all with different combat styles/interesting weapons and upgrades to use.

4) Much easier traversal of terrain, you have wall jumps and a grappling hook (who doesn't like a grappling hook), so you can actually jump those 3 foot tall obstacles now.

6) World interconnectivity - you can walk from the end of the game to the beginning (except for 1 major flashback level and a few setpiece scenes), makes it feel like you are actually in a living world rather than "here's a video game level, have fun"

7) New game plus actually matters because there are so many skill trees, it's virtually impossible to complete them all by the end of the game, encouraging you to start a second playthough.

9) You can swim now! No more drowning in 6 ft of water.

Now for the Meh:

1) Stealth - its not boring, but less fun than regular combat. A lot of gank fights force you to use it a bit more than I would like, but once you get some of the later game abilities it becomes less of a hassle.

2) Reused mini-bosses are prevalent, without even giving them new models/skins. It feels a bit lazy but nothing horrible, and most are fun to fight anyway.

3) Grabbing ledges is a bit annoying, its hard to tell which ones you can and cant grab. Some you can grab that it feels like you shouldn't be able to, and some you can't when you probably should be able to.

4) If you die, you now lose 50% of ALL YOUR MONEY AND EXPERIENCE, and you do not get a chance to reclaim them. The counter to this is that you can come back to life after you die, but only 2 times (unless you find certain items), based on two circles - 1 circle you automatically get from resting at a bonfire, the other you get from killing enemies. For clarification - you do not lose your money and xp if you come back, only if you resurrect and die again, or if you choose to die for real instead of resurrecting. There is a counter to this called Unseen Aid, which has a chance of applying after you rest/teleport to an idol. However the MAXIMUM this % can be is 30%, and if you real die too many times, this % starts decreasing. Not really a fan of random chance like this, I wish there were items or skills that could increase this number.

Cons:

1) Terror - this is a status effect that builds up when attacked by certain enemies, and if it fills up you die. This isn't that bad by itself, but even if you block their swords you still get a terror build up, very annoying to deal with. The only way to alleviate this is to use disposable items, so if you run out, you can't fight that dude any more.

2) This was very rare for me, but caused me to die a few times, and I've heard other people complain about it too: during certain boss fights, the game froze but allowed my enemies to keep attacking. My specs are well above the recommended, and this bug still occurred even after lowering my settings. Hopefully this gets patched soon.


9/10

This game is fun, but it needs a lot more work. My rig is well above the minimum specs (i5-6600k, gtx 1070, 16 gb mem), and even on the lowest settings I have constant stutter between 25 and 70 FPS. This is all included with an astounding amount of bugs, including the following: invisible weapon models, necessary audio (footsteps, gunshots, etc) not playing, teleporting and rubberbanding players/bots, and brightness being lowered for no discernible reason.

Besides the performance issues though, it simply needs more content. There are only 6 maps with 4 modes each: Skirmish and Firefight are basically the same, except in Firefight you respawn only after an objective capture, while in Skirmish you have a limited number of waves. Push is basically Battlefield's Conquest mode with more emphasis on infantry combat, although there are vehicles. Checkpoint is a Coop mode that pits 8 players against a large amount of bots, and is my personal favorite. After around 15 hours in-game, I feel like I've seen and experienced everything the game has to offer. For a multiplayer-only shooter, that amount of playtime is pretty low.

The first Insurgency was no masterpiece, but it ran better, had much less latency/performance issues/bugs, more content, and mod support. Hopefully that will describe Sandstorm in a year or two, but right now it's a hot mess (albeit an entertaining one).

3/29/19 Edit: Some of these problems, such as the audio issues, the invisible weapon models, and major stuttering, have been fixed, but overall performance is still pretty iffy and there has been no major content added in a while. I'd still say wait for a sale or until these issues are cleared up.

I was soooo hyped for this, I 100%'d the main game before I found out there was a DLC. The reviews didn't look great, but I figured that they were due to the super hard dark souls speedrun mode. TL;DR: It turns out, while the original is packed with fun and invigorating exploration, platforming, and characters, this DLC is chock-full of frustrating navigation, reuse of existing personalities without adding good new ones, and annoying mechanics.

The expansive open levels of the main game are ditched in favor of a claustrophobic and maze-like (although aesthetically pleasing) cruise ship that you are somehow supposed to complete TIMED MISSIONS on. It doesn't help that the amount of time given to you is reminiscent of The Simpsons Hit and Run, where even the most seasoned veteran can fail if they make a single mistake. There is no fun to be had in the platforming here, only irritation.

A new fun mechanic is the ability to pick up objects while also being able to double jump, slide, and use hat abilities. The fun part is when if you pick up more than one object at a time, the game drags you in whatever direction the objects are leaning (i.e. if the stack is leaning left, it drags left). This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the timed missions, which require you to NEVER make a mistake and force you to carry as many things as you can.

Regarding the characters, there are pretty much only two new additions: the Seal staff and the Walrus Captain. The seals are fairly enjoyable and pretty cute, but they speak in baby-talk, a major pet peeve of mine. The Captain is a bit more interesting, but there isn't much to him, he's a cliched serious manager with incompetent underlings type. What really bugs me is the recycling of pretty much every single character from the base game. There aren't enough new characters (besides Fish Dude, I forgot about him. He speaks in a frat bro voice and is interesting to look at, good job with him) to make the setting feel like its own world imo.

Another issue is the length. While I haven't played the Death Wish mode, because I'm not a masochist, the Artic Cruise only take around 2 hours to complete, and that's if you explore every single nook and cranny as I did. If you are mainly buying this for the new world, as I was, $5 might be a little too expensive for that amount of gameplay. I'd grab it on sale if you absolutely must, otherwise stick with mods for the base game, you'll be happier that way.

I have literally no nostalgic connection to 3D platformers. I've never played Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64, Conker's Bad Fur Day, or whatever other games that Rare made back in the Stone Age. I came into A Hat in Time with no expectations, and I was blown away. I think I was... "having fun"? It's been so long since I've had that feeling that it's hard to describe, but holy heck it was awesome. Except for the lady out of a horror movie that stalks your character through an abandoned creaky mansion and eats you alive, that part was scarier than a scary game.

10/10 without child-eating monstrosity

This game is great, but as countless others have said, there are a lot of bugs that hamper the gameplay and some that make quests undoable. There's also a metric ♥♥♥♥ ton of graphical glitches, from textures not loading to extremely close-up pop-in on foliage and NPCs, and this is with the draw distance on all things maxed out. The combat is pretty fun in one on one situations, but in large battles, it looks ridiculous with enemies doing 180 degree snaps every few seconds to lock on to you and then a friendly NPC. I have enjoyed my time in the game so far, but I'll be leaving it for a while and coming back once they've ironed it out. I would say wait for a year or two until this game goes on sale, by then it will be worth it.

Compared to the first Life is Strange, Before the Storm surpasses the cringy, forced dialogue of the original's first few episodes that put so many people off of an otherwise amazing character-driven story. Although Chloe's voice actor has changed, she does an fantastic job picking up what Ashly Burch left, and I might actually like her more.

If you enjoyed the first game, you shouldn't even question buying this, just do it.

Love it, all the best aspects of Project Reality (barring helicopters and jets), while upgrading to a new engine and getting rid of boring/gameplay-hindering mechanics. If you are a fan of Project Reality, you will be a fan of this.

Took 4 hours to do the tutorial
9.7/10