Rob Baldwin

A slog... this game is slow on every aspect of it... leveling slow, damage slow. fights slow. nothing about this game is fast. Everything in this game is designed to slow you down. With zero end game content. Once you beat the story at around level 50, your 50 levels of grinding. Every bit of the games novelty wears off quickly and becomes a road block to quickly leveling. Everything in the game levels with you so you never have a place to farm if you fall behind on gear (see below) your just going to have to try and slog through it till you find some gear. Over hyped and under delivered half baked game. "Play your way" not you have meta builds and past the 70's your stuck with meta builds. No chat, no looking for groups. Its supposed to be a solo game but some odd reason its online only. Have to use discord to find groups if you wish to group. Spells are absolutely underwhelming. Choice is hidden behind a confusing paragon system of boards with special nodes here and there. Every board has a glyph socket and glyphs are leveled through nightmare dungeons opened using sigils which have 1 buff and 3 to 5 debuffs. Making them from ridiculously easy to borderline unbeatable. Gear is so random and locked to your level... once past 50 every piece that drops is your level (no farming for an alt) and the 4 stats on it are random and you can only roll off 1 stat... at a ridiculous price. The uniques are laughable, there really is a handful that people want. Zero trading in game so you have to have it drop for you. The big ones everyone wants (harliquin crest and grandfather) have only seen 2 to 5 drops world wide in the 3 weeks since launch. You can upgrade yellows to legendries by affixing a legendary effect on it but this only adds to the confusion as now you have tons of yellows and legendries your looking through to see if they are an upgrade or not. (again it slows you down) we were promised a diamond and got a lump of coal and told that seasons will fix things. 10 years they took to develop the game and its still not right.

Graphics 10/10 Combat 7/10 Interface 3/10 Controls 5/10 Amazing world ruined by a clunky interface that does everything but display pertinent information, combined with horrible control. Your either over stepping and falling off everything or not able to track airborn foes because to aim with a bow your zoomed in. They removed quest objectives showing on the compass and your now forced to try and find them on the edges of your screen. In fights anything not melee range or just over is not displayed on your hud, so you sit and spin trying to find where arrows are coming from or where that last machine that is still agroed but is behind a patch of tall grass. The difficulty is ramped up however some puzzles have a clueless feel (cauldron tau for example). Lastly collectables right at the start need items not aqquired till way later in the game. Some like to get everything done in one area then move on to the next, and its not possible at first. A lot more side quests (yay) however unlike zero dawn that feel they add to the story, these feel to detract. Your on a mission with (SPOILER SOMEWHAT) a very small timeline which will save all of earths population, so lets throw a side quest to save 1 person, or retrieve a family heirloom. Yeah those make sense. Zero dawn story felt that it lends itself to exploring and side quests, some of which made the main plot more enjoyable. Here side quests just feel extra. Overall awesome game with amazing story twists, just wish the controls were improved and the hud was more informative.