Recent reviews by Vauden

I would say 6.5-7/10
Some people would say this is game of the year. Others rage about it being terrible because it's unplayable for them for some reason. I'm here to tell you it's.. middling. It's okay, but it doesn't make me want to no life it for even a short period of time. I've only played 10 hours but I've experienced 4/6 planets so far and unlocked every weapon and I think unlocked access to all upgrade mechanics so I'd say I have a pretty good feel on how it is. Overall I'd say they doubled down on the first one but just made the maps a lot bigger and added more collectibles. Maybe I'll give it a better rating down the line.
Combat is fluid. I love that dual wielding doesn't take force power anymore. However, I do find myself using force powers a lot less.
The enemy variety is nice. You have b1, b2, magmaguard, bx, around 5 or 6 variety of stormtroopers, and quite a few monsters. Legendary bosses such as the Rancor and Frog seem harder than the main storyline enemies. Once again, the frog (Spawn of Oggdo) was the bane of my existence. (I still defeated it in my defense, just took me awhile with learning the pattern with Charged Shot)
Customization is an improvement. Yay for more than just a poncho. Don't get too excited. Most of them are still pretty similar. Especially the shirts.
The cutscenes are spot on. They definitely spent more work on them this game.
The first segment on Coruscant is amazing. I don't want to spoil this part too bad for you. If the whole game was like this first segment I would give it a 8 or 9.

Boss enemies feel unrewarding to kill. In other games, you fight an legendary enemy and you get rewarded with amazing equipment. 90% of this game you fight an legendary enemy or tough encounter and get rewarded with cosmetics...
In fact, that's what most of the game is. 90% of chests in game contain cosmetics. 90% of the inventory of the special item vendors contain cosmetics. So the completionist in me wants to unlock it all, but you're not happy about it because it doesn't make you stronger. It's not just about your character as they've also added cosmetics to your canteen for you to collect. The most excited you'll get is unlocking another healing stim.
Which leads me to my next point. The map is... needlessly too big. Sometimes bigger is not always better. In games like The Witcher and Elden Ring it works, because you can summon them wherever and you can use a mount most of the time. Here you can't summon it and you'd abandoned it anyways searching a cave or a cliff never to be seen again.
Which leads me to my next issue which is locked areas everywhere you go. Not only is the map way too huge, but you'd have walk all over it a 2nd or 3rd time to fully explore it. Some people would like it, but I'd rather have fun fully exploring an area once instead of having to revisit it and I'm guessing to only unlock a couple additional cosmetics.
My final major issue with the game is the story's focus. As I mentioned above, the first segment on Coruscant is amazing. You're fighting the Empire, you get some motivation, the Ninth sister is back and there's inquisitors, the works. Then it switches to reminiscent mode and you're trying to find a home. The shift from Empire to what feels like side content is... disconcerting. Don't get me wrong, I love fighting these Confederate remnants, but there's no explanation from what I've seen why the Empire is suddenly more interested in Koboh and Jedha. You don't really face a lot of them except for a short section and they no longer have a main antagonist from their faction like the 2nd sister or Darth Vader. In this aspect, it falls behind Fallen Order. Maybe it gets better later on.

Elden Rings 8/10 and probably one of the best video games I’ve played in the last two years. This is coming from a person whose never beaten a souls type game. Only two major gripes and an opinion that is good and bad. First, Co-operative play sucks. FromSoftware Co-op has always sucked. It’d be nice to be able to explore such a big and beautiful world with a friend without problems. Instead you have to trudge along on your feet, repeatedly craft an item if you die to rejoin, the scaling increases difficulty so much more, and you have to redo everything on your own save after helping friend.
Secondly, questing and tracking which bosses you’ve killed. There’s a lot of side quests and puzzles. The world is huge and I want a tracker to be able to make sure I’m not missing out on any amazing content.
Lastly, the bosses are either super easy or super difficult. It’s good, because it allows new players into the series and if you’re struggling on a boss you can always find other content to do to power up to defeat him later. Bad, because it’s rare I have to do an encounter more than once or twice. Maybe Crucible Knight was the only one that I couldn’t just power through and had to get better.
Anywho, that’s my review. I do suggest getting it if you want a great solo experience, but if you want co-op souls adventure, Nioh 2s experience is 10x better.

Gameplay is fun. The story is quirky. However, this game is pretty buggy as all new releases are nowadays.
50% of the time I enter the game with no HUD. Easy fix is just to go back to main menu then re-log in. that's dealable.
For an hour or so I couldn't authenticate to servers for no rhyme or reason. After 2 files verification, it finally fixed itself.
But the game breaking bug for me is the game crashing whenever I try to turn in EVA's quest after you have freed her from the sex dungeon guy or otherwise known as "The Bad Day" quest. Doesn't matter what quest reward I choose, solo or with friends. So Probably won't be playing this till they fix that bug.

It was fun.. but.. felt too short. I beat it in around 12 hours and that's with me dying over and over on a couple of the bosses, exploring, and taking awhile on some of the environment puzzles. Ugh, especially that water level. Anyways, I only got $5 an hour entertainment value out of this game. I'd recommend playing it, but it's not a must have. Wait for it to go on sale :)
P.S. People are comparing this to a darksouls difficulty type of game. I will say it is, IF you play it on Apocalyptic difficulty. No shame in playing in a lower difficulty if you can't handle it.

It's pretty fun. Anytime you get mass amount of muskets firing at each other is always a good time. The army sizes can be pretty intense, but it takes forever to build up to anything huge if you start from scratch. It took me 2 hours to get to a point where i could start pumping out units like crazy.
PROS
ARMY CAP?- There is none as far as i could tell. Granted, I only went to 900s, but that took me two hours to get to. It's awesome.
CAPTURE MECHANIC- So. You can capture buildings and units. And you don't even need a monk to convert it or prevent conversion. Just run over to it.
RESEARCH- This game has tons of research in it. Mainly in the Academy and for each unit to improve.

CONS
ARMY MANAGEMENT- is kind of poor Your officers and drummers (key to putting your units in squad) like to stand in the front, die a lot so it's always a pain to reform that squad. Then, trying to form up an army out of multiple squads is more of a hassle. A lot of the time I had units overlapping each other.
Not to mention the workers. By the end of a match I had it felt like a chore to see which mines I had open and getting the peasants over there. I couldn't click on idle peasants and automatically assign them to fill up the empty mines, which would've been nice when you have 250ish workers.
UNITS- Cannons are unbalanced. You can't form up huge squads due to 1 cannon=20 guys in one hit. Or just get a bunch of melee cavalry and just charge in and kill them all since they'll never hit moving targets.
VARIETY- And there's no real difference between factions so far that I've seen out of the 3 factions I've seen. The buildings look different from each other, and units are called by different names (Peasants/serfs), I haven't seen unique units, unique bonuses, or unique buildings. Some buildings felt lacking while others felt more complete.
INFORMATION- Next topic is scoreboard. So you get a little tab on bottom right saying you're score based on buildings, units, etc. But there's no real end summary or graph like there's one in Age of Empires or SC2.
SUMMARY-
Overall it's a fun game, even though it feels incomplete at parts. If you like age of empires 2, you'll like this. I'd get just the regular version if I were you. Although, this review was based off of around 2-3 hours of gameplay, so I haven't nitpicked it. Thanks for reading! (:

This post is here to rant mainly about the problems. However, there's fun executions, abilities are interesting and fluid, graphics are great, and gameplay in general is fun. I just don't want people buying the game to expect hard boss fights, and give reasons to why I at least think the story is "bad." If I went back in time, I would buy this game again.

There are a couple things that I'm irritated about. For one, the story. Now I'm not saying this just because everybody else is saying it. It's because, by the end of the game, I felt unsatisfied from it. There wasn't any moments where it made me surprised or sad or anything. It was like watching a filler episode. Sure, I learned some new things in the LOTR lore, but nothing awe inspiring. It also left me with a lot of questions? Why choose Talion as the new host? Why let him escape? Why did Saurmon choose Celebrimbor for the task? Can you give more backstory in game about the first Great War?
You don't really get to know who Talion is. It might've been me missing some load in conversations or not reading some of the lore, but I think it's essential for the main character's personality to be displayed in game. I didn't get why his wife's father sent him to the Black Gate? What crime did he commit in the past? Why does he feel sympathy for the outcasts? Is it only because his turncoat fellow ranger joined them? Why is he attracted to one of the females in game or is he just protective of her? How does she remind him of his old wife? Whatever ends up to Tolvin and the others he encounters?
In total, the game doesn't tell you enough. I feel like it was trying too hard to set up a sequel that it censored all the information to make the story feel good.
The boss fights were horrid. I'm not talking about the unimportant warchiefs or captains, but the actual evil guys that you swear revenge upon. They're as easy as a couple mindless button clicks. I read their lores, and they sounded kind of badass and mysterious, but beating them in a matter of seconds without having to revert to a checkpoint is kinda depressing.

Very fun game (: If you like strategy, but also like to get into the midst of things in battle, I definitely recommend this! (: