Recent reviews by RJ casts Head Kick

Honestly I thought it was a decent little game, for sure had a lot of kinks to work out though. Game didn't seem finished. Would have thought it was in early access but I don't believe it was when I was playing. Can't support a game when even the devs don't lol. This game should have been on life support but instead it was left for dead.

I bought this game thinking it was a newer Total war game lmao. It is not.

Don't buy until they fix it. Crashes, runs like crap, and every other performance issue you can think of.

Up side: no screen tearing lol

Updated: The day after release they released a patch that significantly improved my experience, but it's still barely playable. I would doubt that most people would even consider it playable at all.

Updated again: Played the main story to completion with several crashes and on very very low settings at 20-50 frames per second. (Most of the game high 30s)

This game kinda sucks. I played the first games thoroughly, and enjoyed them thoroughly. On top of this game seeming weird and unfinished (cough cough 0.2 even though it's marketed as a finished product), the writing is so boring and unbearable that I could never recommend this game. Play the other two games. Please.

Elderborn is a great murder simulator. The combat is challenging and satisfying, but usually not so hard that it made me frustrated (Except on the hardest difficulty that can be pretty frustrating.). The visuals are kind of whatever, nothing particularly great, but nothing that bothered me either, and the variety of enemies, environments and murdertools is more than passable.

The combat is incredibly fun and satisfying, and you have lots of tools and abilities to work with. You have 10 (I think, I feel like I may be forgetting one, and no the power mace doesn't count) weapons that you collect throughout the short ~5 hour campaign and a couple of other special abilities that you can unlock through a skill tree, the most notable ones being deflect, where you reflect a projectile back at an enemy, and a charge move, which sends you flying in one direction and knocks down whatever you hit. You are often fighting several enemies at once, making you dodge all around the nice environments and your reflexes will be pushed quite hard.

Probably my number one issue in the game is the weapons balance. Most of them have uses and are viable but there is some that are just stupid and useless. The weapons are mainly divided into two categories, parry weapons and block weapons. Parry weapons have an alt-fire where if you time your button press just right, it will stagger the enemy and you can get a high-damage counter-attack, but you can't "hold" parry, you press RMB and a little uninterruptible animation plays and if an enemy attacks you at this time, you have successfully parried. With block weapons, you hold down block and block all incoming damage, except that of unblockable moves, which will stilll negate most, if not all damage but will break you guard and stagger you. Most attacks in the game, other than most enemies' basic attacks, especially after the first act, are unblockable, and there is very few moves in the game that are unparriable. This is perhaps my biggest issue with the game, once I got the first parry weapon, the ancient spear, I hardly used any block weapons the whole time, except for in very specific situations and to finish the associated challenges. The only real uses for weapons that can block seemed to me to be very situational, for example:
-Hammer is good at throwing around large groups of light enemies
-Skullcrush club is good for swiftly taking down weaker enemies as long as you aim for the head, and acts the same way as the hammer from what I can tell, making the hammer utterly useless once you get the club
-Janus Greatsword does bonus damage when your exp bar is full, which is actually very noticable and a good idea, but I feel like nobody is going to willingly avoid levelling up just to use a massive, slow, ugly, unattractive hunk of junk effectively.
-And the worst weapon in the whole game, the Old Blade (or whatever it's called). Now, this is the first weapon you have in the game, so it's understandibly terrible, but I still thought it was lame that it doesn't have a single redeeming quality that would make you want to return to it, it's ugly and can't parry.
Now onto the uses for the parry weapons:
-Ancient spear can parry and does more damage the farther away you are, incentivizing you to keep your distance and dance around enemies, and the game is rewarding you for it
-Golden spear can parry and gives you bonus exp
-Khopesh can parry, but kinda nothing special, basically just the starting sword except you can parry with it. Still one of my favorites though just because I like the look but I will admit it's kind of lame.
-Dual Sickles can parry and are armor piercing and swing super fast, good for stun-locking weaker enemies and
-Dual Katars can parry and if the sickles swing super fast, these things swing super duper fast. Also each consecutive attack deals more and more damage, making it a good choice for larger (healthier) targets
-Also I recently learned of a weapons that I apparently missed, the Golden Creaver, which brings me into another point, even though I happened to only miss one, it seems to be pretty darn easy to go right past some weapons, namely the Creaver, the Dual katars, and the Khopesh. i wouldn't blame anybody for missing any one of the weapons in this game because a couple of them are kinda hidden or out of the way. I thoroughly explored everywhere I went in this game and stilll somehow managed to miss a weapon.

Anyway, those are pretty much my thoughts. I wish the block weapons didn't suck and more weapons added will always be appreciated. Other than that, great game and I wish it was longer.

I just installed this thinking that I wold come out of it with a lot to say. Not how it worked out. This teaser is unoptimized to the point of near-unplayability. The default graphics settings when I loaded the game up had everything on Epic, the highest there is, but my resolution scaling was at 25. I pumped that bad boy up to 100 and started a new game. The 144 frames per second I was getting in the title screen was absolutely no clue to how the game would actually run. Everything is so damn glossy and shiny, and it is genuinely obnoxious to look at. I was getting less than 30fps the entire time, and messing with the video options didn't even seem to change anything at all, let alone increase my fps.

And oh my LORD the main character is the most obnoxious player character I have ever seen in any video game ever. he is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying, he narrates everything. He isn't funny, he isn't charming, he is the epitome of "trying too hard to be a funny, carefree badass edgelord." I'm fine with the roguish, edgy wisecrack but this guy reminds me more of someone who got bullied his entire life and spent his free time practicing his wisecracks and quips so he could use them if he ever turned out to be a video game protagonist. There was one part of the opening cutscene where I swear to god all he said was the word "right" five times in a row, with less than 4 seconds in between each of them. And everything is SO DRAWN OUT! It takes this man ten minutes and two essays to do the most trivial of tasks, which a regular person could do with a time limit of five seconds with time left over to let out a grunt!

I could barely play this game enough to get past the tutorial because it ran so horribly, despite my more than capable machine. Maybe the engine just doesn't agree with AMD for whatever reason. I would like to try this game out again when the full release happens, but I will never put up with that protagonist, especially with UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENES! Jesus christ, I've never disliked a character from any form of media that I had only known for about fifteen minutes. Please, THQ Nordic, kick that protagonist off of a cliff and do something better. Silent character, Voiced character, whatever... Just not him. Please not him.

AND MAKE YOUR ♥♥♥♥ LESS GLOSSY!

I have been playing Dishonored 1 since the 360 days and have hundreds of hours across the series and I even own the books.

The gameplay of Dishonored isn't super complex. You have a wide array of gadgets and supernatural powers to traverse the open, although linear, levels. How you approach is up to you. Sprint in, gun out, hacking everyone up and leaving only a trail of corpses, or the exact opposite, leaving zero trace at all.

Combat: The combat of Dishonored, at a glance, is very simple. Enemy swings, you press the block button right before the enemy hits you, and then you get an instant-kill-counter-attack. However, add the powers and gadgets you have at your disposal? And now you have an amazing variety of ways to cleverly dispatch your enemies. You can throw objects such as bottles and glasses at enemies, place mines on throwables, effectively making an improvised grenade, use actual grenades, use your silent crossbow, use your silent crossbow's less silent bolts, such as incendiary and stinging bolts. The possibilities are endless. You can look up youtube videos by creators such as StealthgamerBR and look at the amazingly creative things he can do within this game world.

Stealth: Once again, very simple. Sneak around and choke people out from behind or slit their throats if you are more of a sadist. But start using the powers, and you are a force to be reckoned with. You can use shadow walk to basically briefly turn into a demon, stalking up on people and draining the consciousness from them (or tearing them in half), or you can use domino to link guards' fate up and clear a whole room with one sleep dart, or stun mine, or chokeout, or whatever environmental things you can do in your current situation.

Powers: The powers are truly unique. They aren't things you see a lot of the time in video games. Not done well at least. You have blink, which is just a straight up short-range-teleport. Far reach, which is you shooting a tentacle out of your arm to pull you to a certain location, OR pull people to you, so you can cut them up or punch their lights out. There's also the passive trait 'reflexes' which lets you block bullets and other projectiles, and if you upgrade it the right way, even have said projectiles reflect off your sword, killing the nearest enemy. The way you can combine the powers and gadgets, ALONG WITH the core gameplay elements is astounding how entertaining it is.

Side note (level design): The way Arkane designs their levels is incredible. I'm not a developer and I can't put my finger on it really, but the verticality is something they always get right, you can just walk around, you can jump, climb, and parkour your way all through the levels. Arkane's slogan (if you can call it that) is "Play your way." You can do whatever you want, however you want. It's amazing! There's so many ways to tackle each mission it's insane!

What makes a good sequel? Well Dishonored 2 never changed the formula much. All it did is expand upon the systems the first game already had (And did great with.) The power system in the first game was like this: "Spend this amount of runes to get this power, and this amount of runes to upgrade it to level 2" And that was it. Now there is whole mini-skill trees. Before, there was only one shop that you could visit regularly; Piero's workshop. And that was fine. But now you can find a black market shop in most of the levels, giving you the chance to load up on supplies mid-mission, after seeing what you need. And every one of those shops can be robbed. But the way you rob each one is different. For one, you have to sneak into the shop owners house to find a combination to a code lock to get into the back of the shop. For another, you find out about (or stumble upon) 2 bandits trying to explode their way into a shop, where a wall is weak. To rob this one you must take care of the bandits, get a whale oil tank (the source of power in the game world, which is highly explodable) and blast through the weak wall and rob the store. The latter has harsher consequences though, because the explosion will kill the shopkeeper inside, damaging your playthrough if you are trying to not kill anyone, or trying to kill as few people as possible.

Verdict: This game is endlessly entertaining and I still come back to it every once in a while to replay it a few times, after dozens of playthroughs of both this, and it's predecessor.

P.S. I recently re-installed this game and had many performance issues that I never had in the past, despite being on the same machine. I was aware of the awful performance at the original launch of the game but when writing my review had forgotten to mention it. This is still a phenomenal game, just beware of the performance bugs that evidently still exist...