Recent reviews by Sterling

At the start of the game, the player is taken to a massive open area that leads to the NPC hub, and it has some amazing presentation; the game has some breathtaking maximalism that the devs have been refining at least since Divine Cybermancy. However, this is almost entirely killed by how most of the game's environments seem to be caves with different biomes slapped on top of them: you got mushroom cave, ice cave, hell cave, cave this, cave that, and it feels so disappointing to go from absolutely massive architecture to... that.

The combat animations are weirdly clunky in a way that reminds me of Divine Cybermancy, except this is a game released in late 2025 and Divine Cybermancy is nowhere near that. Swinging some of the melee weapons around, it feels like I'm back to the game where I look more like I'm slapping enemies with a sword (and even that looks clunky), than actually slashing them.

The game itself looks great, because it's UE5 and it's mandatory that the performance matches the graphics (I haven't personally found the huge performance issues people talk about, aside from making too many enemies bleed on my screen and my framerate dropping in half). As much as I clown on the "everything is a cave" aspect, the caves do look good. There's also the aforementioned maximalism, which when it comes into play, is actually ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ phenomenal: they made these cinematic and jaw-dropping shots that made me say "I didn't know you could do that on a game", and it's clear they learned a lot since Divine Cybermancy.

The gearing system is pretty extensive, with different weapon types, elemental damage, passive effects, character stats, skill book thingies and I don't know what else. In the runs, you get the roguelike tidbits of picking random bonuses (and sometimes having the game just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ quadruple enemy health to kill your run) that get some pretty interesting results: attack waves, breaking shields and armor, telefragging an enemy, crowd control, different ranged attacks, ignoring shields at the cost of base damage... it's a nice selection for early access.

The lore of the game is there: you got the weirdly overdressed NPCs spouting a gibberish language that sort of makes sense, talking about cryptic world-ending stuff, you can play your character as the different factions that compose the big main faction of the game (though it seems to be entirely cosmetic), but so far I haven't found any infighting to really seal the deal and they can only do so much with the roguelike system. It's evocative of the old stuff in a mostly positive way, but leaving space for improvements.

Overall, I think I got a pretty nice deal for the price and want to see this game grow into something really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool.

Game is a blast until you start running out of one-time rewards and need to rely on the daily and weekly caps, which are miserable at best. They also use an energy resource to get rewards from co-op content, and it recharges fully in, I kid you not, 3 days. Imagine being forced to wait 3 days just to do 2 hours of the content you want to do? I can't recommend this to anyone remotely interested in RPG progressions until they remove or raise the caps to account for people that don't play half an hour a day.

Maybe people who are running games on GPUs that simply don't have a control panel (which offers scaling options and many other settings) will benefit from this, because I just have no idea what the positive reviews talk about when they mention "absolute magic" and "must have". This doesn't seem to run any better (or equal) than the inbuilt upscaling games are starting to come with, and even in the case of not having upscaling, Lossless Scaling will smear the absolute ♥♥♥♥ out of the interface because it doesn't know which part is the game and which part is the UI. Way too intensive for what it (doesn't) offers and a hard pass due to the amount of games already releasing with upscaling settings that actually don't tank your framerate.

The balance in the game is a mess at the moment:

• One class has wallhacks, a summon, and shapeshifts into a broken hitbox with the fastest movement speed

• Another class has a ranged nuke and a 50% damage resistance buff to rush players in melee

• The other one will just slow you down to a crawl so you get forced into a fight

• The other one can just lightly tap you with a paralyzing poison that keeps you out of the fight and allows the enemy to gang up on a single player of your team while the other has no option but to watch

• One is straight up useless because the support gets trumped by the other classes' convenient ability to kill enemies faster and give less time for them to dish out damage that needs to be healed or mitigated

• The ones that are decently balanced eat ♥♥♥♥ from the rest because they don't have anything broken to abuse

There's also the matter of gearing: you can be matched with players wildly out of your league that will just annihilate you with their obvious stat advantage, which turns into a reinforcement loop where you can't go to a place to farm good loot because you die in record time to the sweats who already farmed the good loot and have a fine-tuned build specifically made to screw you over. I had decent loot from several hours of farming the bad loot places to get acquainted with the game, and the moment I lost my gear I started doing half the damage I used to do, which means I also dealt half the damage I was doing to players and dying to a sweat makes me more likely to die to the next sweat until my wallet is drained of the gold I need to use to buy semi-decent gear. I understand one of the appeals of the loot is the danger of losing it, but when the danger of losing it comes with just being more likely to lose it again, there's something wrong about the way the game's working and it stops being fun to play because your ability to play well is tied to the gear you just lost and have to buy or loot again.

The consumables would've been more interesting if the inventory system didn't just allow the player to stack healing items and remove most of the choice involved in using them, such as being careful with your health because you are given a limited amount of them; instead, you can just have healing items by the dozen(s) if necessary and just keep bandaging yourself after fights or chug one of your 16 health potions during gaps, making fights less about health management and more about just not dying so you can heal back to full again.

I like the risk of extracting the loot, but my reward is just the "joy" of finding more ♥♥♥♥♥♥ people abusing broken mechanics to reset the progress I keep trying to rebuild so I can go back to fighting them on the same footing of gear stats, which I'll stress again is an awful way to balance a PvP game. The kills I did get felt barely earned because I looted the poor souls who ate my ♥♥♥♥ and found out their gear was always worse than mine and I just wrecked their progress.

The only definitive thing in this edition is my motion sickness from the insane head bob on everything, sluggish movement, and abysmal field of view. I don't control the character, I give them suggestions on what to do next and give them time to think about it.

The game is a mixed bag to deal with, so I'll boil it down to the classic three real quick.

Once you turn off AMD's LPM on the settings, the game goes from bright colour vomit to a much more pleasant colour palette and actually looks normal and quite good, but unfortunately that also makes the spirit mode thingy lose its own colours and look bland (I'll talk about that later). In general, the graphics get a thumbs up and the design for the items, armors and world in general got a pretty positive reception from me, so on that end the game delivers.

The skill tree shows a lot of depth in the combat, with many different button combinations and effects to look out for, such as unlocking the ability to hit enemy weak spots, dealing extra damage to ranged enemies with a shield bash, breakfall, chaining hits increasing your damage, the soulshatter mechanic incentivizing the player to mix light and heavy attacks, the weapon combos being done with a small amount of buttons, and the list goes on - by all accounts, the combat looks great.

I didn't see a microtransaction shop and I hope it wasn't because I played less than 2 hours, but usually games like to introduce them by then, so kudos for not doing that on a paid game - I know that took restraint.

The combat isn't great; in fact, it sucks. Now why would a combat that looks deep and inviting be actually awful? Well, the answer is very simple: animations and stagger (or a lack of the latter, better put).

A lot of my time in combat was spent doing the following: the enemy is not attacking, I initiate an attack, the enemy initiates an attack after my attack started, the enemy's attack finishes first and I cannot cancel out of my attack, so I take a cheap hit from something I couldn't have predicted unless I slowed my own combat with the already spongy enemies (because I made sure I was using items that gave me good damage, including the DLC ones, and I was playing on the "intended" experience of normal difficulty). Staggering an enemy is honest to God a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pain in the ass and I'm impressed by how bad that made hammers, when even a weak enemy would eat a hammer to the face and hit me in the middle of my attack. In fact, the lack of stagger combined with the lengthy animations that the enemies hit you in the middle of contributed to the only usable weapons I found being longswords and dual blades (ignoring greatswords, hammers, spears and I don't remember what else) - this sucks, this kills build diversity and I don't wanna play more for a possible "it gets good later bro just keep playing please"; it's fun when it works, it just doesn't like doing that.

IT'S ONLINE-ONLY WHY DO YOU PEOPLE KEEP DOING THIS ♥♥♥♥ OFF LET ME PLAY THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GAME IN PEACE

The loadout UI has item boxes to equip items, and when you click a slot for, say, a weapon, it takes a second or so of nothing and then loads in a separate window with your weapons instead of opening a weapon list on the side of the screen or something; given this is a game where I'm leveling and constantly changing gear, this quickly got annoying because it felt like each time I was changing an item I had to waste a small amount of time that amounted to a nuisance when I watched it 8 times in a row - not gamebreaking, but try using a light switch that needs you to blink your eyes twice before using it and you'll quickly get annoyed at the thought of having 7 more switches before leaving the house.

The graphic options and basically every other setting don't actually have any description of what the setting does, and as such I had to look up things like AMD's CAS and LPM to even know which part of the game they were truly affecting, since it's much easier to know how to measure it if you already know the right place to look (which is sharpening and lighting). I did say I'd get to the spirit world thingy later and here it is: the game has a Witcher medallion mode where it glows objects of interest around the map (because exploration is bad) and just looks awful with or without LPM, meaning if you want to efficiently explore the map you actually will forgo the normal pretty graphics and start looking at either the LPM fairy world or the non-LPM "Playstation 3 military shooter tint", which gets on the nerves fast when you're missing out on good graphics for the sake of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ loot.

The game's controls were clearly made for a controller, as evidenced by weird button combinations like Q+C, where they clearly didn't know what to put somewhere to make the hand do natural movements. It's not that a keyboard isn't an inherently flawed tool to play games, but we do have a lot of buttons that can be used to make Q+C not a combination that exists.

I commend the designers for the maps, characters and weapons; the rest can get ♥♥♥♥♥♥, specially the ♥♥♥♥ who decided to make it online-only - that one gets a chair to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ face, the ♥♥♥♥.

Don't buy this, you'll hate the bad parts and the good ones will only make the pain bigger because of what it could've been.

Not like the game can be bought anymore, but Jesus ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Christ, the AI is so slow doing curves and it's so easy to hit them by trying to do a faster turn that you know you can do. On the other hand, there's also the physics being one of the most uncooperative and awful experiences I've had with racing games and many times the car outright refuses to turn more than a couple degrees, or the drifting just slides the car like a bar of soap straight into a wall anyway, as if the tires were incapable of a modicum of grip. It tries to be Gran Turismo and Need for Speed at the same time and fails at both.

It's been months since I last booted the game and it had some really jarring issues with crashing when loading missions, so I installed it again because I beefed up my computer and now run the game locked at a smooth 60... nothing changed - thanks Rockstar.

And then I went back in to try the mission again, because surely it was just a one-time thing... then the game decided to get stuck on an infinite loading screen - thanks Rockstar.

And then I went to do a bounty hunter mission, because surely the solution is to not enter a loading screen at all... and then I crashed after finishing it - thanks Rockstar.

The bugs make Ubisoft look like the kings of playtesting: I had to restart the game three separate just to progress in the tutorial quest because I guess I was doing things faster than the NPC's dialogue or some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and then my first encounter with another player is screwed because the place I decided to hide in got me stuck in geometry and I had to lose all my loot exiting back to the hub because I simply could not get myself unstuck. If the first thing you do in a game doesn't work, I won't bother with the rest, specially when the rest also didn't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work; polish your game before charging the completely obscene premium currency prices you're charging, because to pay for that I'd expect the game to be some gourmet ♥♥♥♥.

The map design seems to adhere to the core principle of "how much can we twist the paths nonsensically" and navigation is done a lot of the time reopening the map for the billionth time because this is one of those games where the map designers went "ah, it's fine, they can open the map if they get lost" instead of making a map where the player could just not get lost by intuitive design. There's also the metroidvania garbage where the game's like "hey, come back here later after you learn this basic move", to which I politely reply "thanks but no thanks, I wanna move forward in the game, not backwards". Also remember the cool monk Jedi with robes from the movies and plate armor from shows like Clone Wars and games like SWTOR? Yeah, this one wears a poncho and the only option I found was to not use the poncho and wear the base outfit of "I work in a scrapyard". If I can't stand navigating the game and the character doesn't even have one good outfit to pick from because they're all "poncho, but in a different colour".

This game takes inspiration from the Souls series, then goes out and undoes many of what the series has done right, because I guess they wanted to be different or something. I gave this an honest try, but to me it's torture for people who care about what makes Souls games good to play, and it's also a shame because I enjoy the characters and the story, which are buried between the labyrinthian maps that get progressively worse on the mind and the eye.