Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

Currently 24 hours into Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. I can lose hours upon hours playing this game. If I didn't have to save and quit every now and then, I'd probably spend even more time playing it. I haven't really tackled the first main quest yet, my first port of call was finding Mutt and the blacksmith followed by Bad Blood. Generally I'm not too fussed about performance but I'm really impressed with how this runs on my 4 year old gaming laptop, runs at a steady 60fps with mostly ultra settings. Just walking through the countryside is a joy, that is until you run into some bandits. The combat system takes a bit of getting used to but I have managed to win battles against 3 or 4 foes at once, it's about being patient and positioning yourself so you don't get encircled. The save system is a bit annoying, I guess you're meant to strategically use those schnapps to save but it's too easy to just save and quit and reload. It does break the immersion though.

I quite like the mini systems/games I've played so far in this. Dice, Alchemy and Blacksmithing. I'm not as keen on Sharpening the weapons, it's a bit too basic and tedious compared to the others. I've barely scratched the surface of this game but so far really impressed with the amount work, care and attention that's gone into it. It's comparable to Baldur's Gate 3, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 in terms of quest design and quality. Very ambitious game but they seem to have pulled it off.

It's keeping me from playing Avowed and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at the moment, good times

@Pizzamorg Thanks for the review! I've been curious about this, but ever since this game got washed up in the online culture war I never know if criticism and praise are being made in good faith or not.

tbh I really yearn for more RPGs in this 40-ish hour range. That's still a really solid, meaty gameplay experience.

@xeofate Did you play the original? With all the positive press about KCD2, I'm mulling over grabbing the original on sale.

Wanted to check in after 20ish hours of Monster Hunter Wilds, as this was enough time for my friend and I to make it to high rank proper. There is a lot to like here overall, but I can't help but feel rather mixed on the whole experience.

Firstly, I played on PC. My PC is a beast, but Wilds looks like a PS2 game and runs like one too. They released a high texture pack, which does improve things somewhat, but it also tanked my performance (unless I enabled DLSS AND frame generation together) and caused multiple crashes. Like I really don't think reviewers stressed enough just how bad of a place this in technically right now.

In addition to the game being in a pretty rough state, I genuinely kinda hated the story campaign. Story campaigns in multiplayer games are always kinda annoying, but it really felt like they went out of their way to make this as infuriating of a multiplayer experience as possible.

To explain - each fight is broken up by extensive cutscenes and extended on rails sequences, which each time bumps every party member to their own instance, forcing everyone to abandon the hunt when it starts proper, so they could all be reinvited back into the same instance and hunt the monster as a group. Like in a sense I guess this is better than World? But why are we still doing this in 2025? Just keep us all in the same instance throughout. Like didn't we already solve this like 30 years ago?

And maybe you could be more forgiving of this if the story was well written, or well acted, or well paced or even interesting in the slightest, but isn't any of these things, so it just serves as like a 15 hour roadblock for new players to bounce off of and play something else.

I will say the moment to moment combat is maybe the best in the entire series, but difficulty tuning feels completely off. In Low Rank, rather than using the same escalating curve of previous games to allow the player to organically engage with more and more of the games systems, setting them up for High Rank and above, Wilds is basically a cakewalk throughout except for a few monsters in the final stretch which have these stupid one shot moves, that the game doesn't tutorialise you on how to deal with until after you die to it.

I worry for new players as a result, as you're prolly gonna get dumped into High Rank after learning nothing cause you've just been facerolling monsters for the last 15 hours, never needing to think about your build or engaging with the monsters in a way that makes you learn anything about them. Maybe High Rank remains just as easy so it doesn't matter, but right now I cannot say and if it is as hard as previous games, then yeah, low rank sets players up so poorly for what is ahead, it is probably gonna be perceived as such a significant difficulty spike it is going to drive new players away.

So, yeah, after 20 hours I can say the core loop of kill a monster, make a new hat, kill a stronger monster is still fun. They really created some incredible new monsters for this game, and the core game feel has never felt better (even if the difficulty tuning is all over the place), but I thought the story was genuinely awful, and quite painful to get through because of the awful multiplayer implementation and how on rails it all was.

I'm now pretty grateful to have it behind me now, so my friends and I can hopefully bounce from hunt to hunt no longer needing to deal with all the ***** in between. A little more challenge to force us to engage with the game's various systems properly now is the final missing piece.

Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut

So, I've collected all the Steam achievements for Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut. It'd be a platinum if such a thing existed on Steam (the one thing, really, that PS has over everyone else in that regard). Took me about 27 hours and countless replays of the game. Don't regret it at all: this is very much a top five indie for me. One of the most consistently creative and engaging indies I've played in a while. Some spoilers, but I'll try not to reveal too much.

Like another favorite of mine, Gnosia, StP is a game that is structured around a looping narrative. You always awaken in the woods, and a witty, sarcastic narrator informs you that you must venture to a cabin in the woods and kill a princess who will otherwise go on to end the world. You're expected to take him at his word, and he will urge you, with unshakeable resolve, to ignore the pleading and reasoning of the princess and carry out your grim task with haste. Taking clear inspiration from The Stanley Parable, it quickly becomes clear that "The Narrator" has his own agenda, which doesn't necessarily prioritize your well-being. Part of the fun of the game is slowly puzzling out what is actually happening, and deciding who you're going to trust as the twisty contours of the larger story take shape.

As you venture through the game and talk to the Princess again and again, emergent storylines emerge, along with "voices" who function as a sort of party. You begin with the Hero, but quickly discover other voices who arise in response to your choices throughout the various storylines: the broken, the cheated, the cold, the contrarian, etc. etc., who all embody a certain personality trait. My personal favorite is the smitten, who speaks with a princely gradiosity and urges you toward gaining the love of the Princess regardless of how... crazy things get.

And boy do things get crazy. While it's a bit unconventional, its listing as a horror game is well-deserved, and you'll need a strong stomach for some of the grisly material you'll see throughout the game. It mixes elements of body horror, psychological horror, and cosmic horror to great effect. Despite all this, the game still has a consistently fantastic sense of humor, and you'll find yourself cringing and laughing in almost equal amounts. So I guess tack on 'horror comedy' to the mix of elements in this game as well.

A given run of the game consists of five or six sets of loops, which will differ depending upon your choices in the first loop each time. Depending on which loop you enter, you'll see a different form of the Princess, which varies incredibly wildly. Every iteration of this character is fascinating, though, and plays with horror genre conventions in interesting and intelligent ways. One of the newly added routes to this edition of the game does one of the most interesting things I've ever seen in a video game by essentially transporting you into the body of the Princess and allowing you to see what your interactions with her look like from her end, and it's... incredibly disturbing.

Like a lot of my favorite adventure games, StP experiments heavily with the boundaries of interactive storytelling, making this another game that really couldn't explore its story or themes as well in any other format. I absolutely love when video games take advantage of the unique strengths of this medium, and this is a modern classic in that respect. Making this even more enjoyable is a sketchy, iconoclastic art-style and one of the stronger soundtracks I've heard in an independent production. It's also fully voice acted, which is an achievement given just how much dialogue is in this game.

If I had to criticize this game for one thing, it's that a lot of the choices needed to unlock certain CGs are a tad arcane, and the game doesn't give you clear enough hints. This is only applicable to completionists, though. I would also argue that certain routes, including my favorite one in the game are incredibly easy to miss. Actually, unlock conditions for similar routes can be easy to mix up. Thankfully, the game has tons of save slots that allow you to save at the start of specific routes so you can go back later and try different options, along with a text skip option to speed through dialogue you've already seen in previous playthroughs.

All-in-all, though? FANTASTIC experience. Certainly my favorite of 2025 to date, even if it's a somewhat older title. It'll be a while, I think, before another game clicks with me quite as well as this did.

@Ralizah Sorry missed your reply there, I haven't played the original yet but if it's anything like the 2nd one then it'll be a must play. I think it's on sale now on steam for 10 euro.

In follow up to my Wilds impressions, I've now spent around 30 hours (ish) in Wilds High Rank.

I have beaten I believe every monster in the game at least once, and beaten the variants of the strongest monsters at least once, too.

And yeah my worries were in the end wrong I think, but maybe not in the way I expected.

This is because High Rank kind of remains a bit of a faceroll, overall. There are really only three monsters I would say in High Rank that feel like the level of difficulty you would experience in previous games, and even then, it is less so the monster itself, and usually just some kind of overtuned specific move you just need to avoid, and then otherwise the fight is still pretty easy.

As a result, after around 50ish hours, I feel kinda done with Wilds, to be honest. Now, I was never one of those who plays thousands of hours of a Monster Hunter title, so that context is important, and people are already bragging online they have put close to 150 hours into this (which means they must have spent almost every waking moment playing the game since release!) but for me, the pull just isn't there.

Don't misunderstand, there is some seriously refined game feel here, and there are excellent monsters in this one, but the roster is thin, the systems are thin, I feel like I am in the shallow end of a pool, the water only comes up to my knees, but I'm desperately trying to force it over my shoulders.

I was hoping with the SPOILERS ahead, introduction of Tempered and Frenzied monsters it would at least give me something aspirational to drive myself forwards. But they also don't offer any meaningful additional challenge outside of very specific monsters and scenarios. And you might be thinking... who cares? Pizza, aren't you are always crying about how hard games are?! Firstly, I would say that is a little rude, but you aren't really wrong. However, this lack of challenge kind of breaks the entire Monster Hunter loop for me.

Like they have hold onto the grindy, honestly kind of tedious, material grind to craft new weapons and armour. In past games, the payoff to completing these extensive grinds was self evident. You overcame the strongest monster you could, with the best gear you could, to upgrade your gear so you could go back to a monster that used to bully you and absolutely mollywhop them. It was a satisfying staircase of difficulty you slowly climbed, to give your grind a purpose. This is just completely missing here, because you can beat the highest tier Tempered monsters with a completely incoherent build, full of random decorations and not a single armour sphere used.

This leaves you asking then like... sowhat then even is the Monster Hunter Wilds loop? And the answer is, I don't really know. There is no need to chase for more power, when you have all the power you need. The roster isn't big enough to have a truly varied play session from one to the other of different hunting experiences. So I guess you just beat every monster once and you are just done?

The other thing I used to like doing in a Monster Hunter game when the content started to run dry, is switch weapons, as it kinda of resets your whole progression loop, and some weapons can create completely fresh experiences in Hunts, as you engage with monsters sometimes surprisingly differently from weapon to weapon. However, this is another thing I just don't really love in Wilds.

Wilds "gimmick" is less the focus mode in practice, and instead more of its switch to new "perfect" moves. Perfect guarding. Perfect dodging. Perfect rhythm. Perfect parrying. Whatever. Now, I suck at these kinds of things, so weapons I once loved like the Lance, I just find really frustrating to use now, because you need to be absolutely perfect with your mechanics, or you cannot access the weapons strongest moves. And you could argue that who cares if the game is so easy, and you would be right, but it feels bad to know you aren't using the full capabilities of your weapon.

So yeah, I dunno, really. The enjoyment of hunting monsters with a buddy or two still remains a unique joy to the Monster Hunter series. The moment to moment gameplay is still some of the best we've seen in the series. But I can't help but just feel a little whelmed by the whole experience, being honest with you and now I'm seemingly just sorta done with the game for now, I can't help but feel quite unsatisfied and a little empty about it all.