Small Update #2.5:
Managed to beat The Baron and yoink his huge golden poleaxe, but it's very unwieldy because your character is too small to use it correctly. Shoulda taken his full golden armor set, but I wanted to see if there was anything beyond this point. It doesn't seem like it since instead it loops you through the Lord rank with a shiny new piece of gear in your inventory.

==========
UPDATE #2:
==========
tl;dr: still needs some polish and the devs need to put a lot more work into the physics system, but this has the potential to be a game anyone can enjoy. Until then, my review will remain negative, but it's not as bad that the game deserves to be in "mostly negative". Mixed is a good spot for it at this point in time.

I've had some more time with the game and have made it to Veteran ranks after being able to buy/steal a full set of armor, so now my character isn't dying instantly to lightsabres in the lower tiers. It's still super annoying having your body parts fly off from simply touching the sharp parts of a weapon even if there's no force or pressure being applied, hence "lightsabres." It's happened so many times when you're in clinching distance of your opponent, and it's just unfair that it happens to you more than it does the enemy since the enemy loves ramming their bodies into you when you're already point-blank with them.

They have fixed the hand-locking issue it seems, so that's really appreciated. It was immediately noticeable that it was fixed, so I'm glad it wasn't me being crazy.
They also fixed the broken menu of getting kicked back to the character creation screen, thanks!

The Slums map should still be avoided because of performance issues, even with the new fix they implemented.

Your character being a pathetic pushover is still the most annoying thing about the game currently. Thankfully you can keep your distance when you get to around Militia rank since you start getting viable long weapons and a new shield they added in this release.

Something I have noticed is that it seems much harder to wallop someone with something like a two-handed hammer or mace than in the demo. Again, this might tie back into your character being a pushover, but I wanted to bring this up specifically. Even breaking someone's limbs doesn't seem viable anymore.

I've gotten used to the Zombies in the Abyss. I want to slightly change my opinion of them since my previous update: they are significantly easier to handle than the Abyss enemies/bosses in the beta/demo, but they are still unfair to players still in the lower ranks where they don't have access to decent weapons, but at least you can still find a long candlestick and even take it with you into the land of the living. Actually, and this is seriously super nice of the developers, but you can steal the goblets and chalices in the Abyss and sell them to the trader for a very sizable amount of money (bringing 4 chalices that sell for 65g apiece is very, very nice). So far, my only suggestion would be to nerf their "instant lethality" as soon as you get into clinching distance (the only distance that lower ranks can fight in without a candlestick) and nerf their movement if you manage to cut off their legs (they magically slide towards you faster than if they still had their legs attached).

========
UPDATE:
========
Nope, back into the oven you go!

Performance issues I can accept, but they've downgraded the combat system quite a bit.
With two-handed weapons, your arms and hands keep locking together when on the backswing, which is seriously punishing and will get you killed very easily through no fault of your own. This weird arm/hand-locking issue wasn't a thing for the most part in the demo (it's "kind of" there in the demo, but it's extremely apparent in this release, especially if you craft your own mace with a long shaft and has some weight on the grip).

The biggest issue that is by far the most egregious is that your character is a pathetic pushover. It feels like your character hasn't developed his core at all and can't plant his feet on the ground and can't be rock solid. Instead, you get flung around at the lightest things, and good luck if you take a hard shove because you'll be stunned on the ground for a good while. On the other hand, being able to push enemies over with good swings is about the same as the demo, maybe slightly worse. However, good luck trying to earn that opportunity, the moment you step into the enemy's danger zone, you're going to get eviscerated by love taps, whether it's because you got pushed over like a little kid or you knick the slightest edge of your opponent's weapon and slice entire chunks of your body off (yes, lightsabres are still a problem and in full force, which comes straight from the demo on some select few weapons).

The zombies in the Abyss are completely broken and kinda overpowered. They'll swing and miss, but it doesn't matter because they bite you instantly with very little chance of counterplay. They also don't behave like normal enemies because they have insane recovery and can't be bled to death, so a lot of weapons that aren't cutting or massive bludgeoning weapons aren't too effective. I wish these things weren't in Abyss Mode at all, or at the very least, make them something you fight once you're already properly geared, because starting with nothing (like in Beggar/Peasant tier) gives you next to no chances to survive unless your weapon is insane or you get lucky enough to find a 2-handed lamppost.

The menus can get very buggy. I've had to where I win or lose in a match, but leaving back to the Tavern puts me back at character creation, causing my inventory to be a complete mess - sometimes I straight up lose items I spent a lot of gold on, sometimes not, there wasn't any consistency from what I saw. The only fix was restarting the game.

I hope they fix these serious issues soon especially with the negative reviews starting to pour in.

=================
Original review below:
=================
I have 100 hours in the demo.

I will see to it that I have 1,000 hours in this release.

There are some performance issues, but that is something that can be addressed, so I don't have too much criticism for it. Darktide was the same way and that game runs great now, so if the developers can accomplish the same thing, then all is well.

I'll be leaving a positive review for now because of my playtime in the demo, but will update my review accordingly as I explore this early access release more thoroughly.

I am currently waiting for the game to be more fleshed out before I hop back into playing this more, and the devs are seriously on top of it with trying to get new content out the door so that's highly appreciated, but the experience I did have with it was very favorable.

The game is relatively easy if you know how to play ARPGs, but there are definitely moments where you need to lock in during boss fights because one mistake is extremely costly (if it doesn't outright kill you on the spot), and it's not like PoE where you have a good amount of flasks to make up for those mistakes, but you do have ways to heal yourself in the game which I very highly recommend you grab during your playthroughs.

I think the only feedback I have to offer is some form of overworld mobility, whether it's adding in a mount or if the game could offer more mobility skills that have little-to-no cooldown when you're not in combat. Having to backtrack slowly to go explore small pockets you missed or branches off the main path that you were going to come back to later is never fun, even if there are waypoints scattered about. This was already a HUGE gripe with PoE2, and even when GGG added in sprinting, it wasn't anywhere near enough to satisfy the players with how huge the maps are there, and TQ2 is open-world, so the problem of "maps are way too big" from PoE2 applies to the entire game essentially (not a problem in itself, it's just that the ability to traverse what you've already explored is the primary complaint).

Another feedback that I'm not too entirely sure about myself is if there needs to be more synergy between the Masteries. I love melee combat, so Warfare was an obvious choice for me, and I wanted to augment some cold element into it - the thought process here was "get them slow or frozen, then wallop them with a huge hit", but when I tech into Storm/Cold, the majority of what that Mastery has to offer are spells that don't really fit the mold of what I wanted; it feels kinda weird to throw a cyclone at them, then jump in man-mode style and start beating on them, and also weave in ice novas, it just doesn't feel right somehow? I dunno, maybe I'm just weird, so I don't really think this part of the review should be weighed too heavily.

For the price, it's not that bad, but it needs a LOT of work if the developers want replayability. If Steam offered a Mixed review, then that's what I'd choose, but I'll sway towards positivity for this review.

After having finished a run which took about 7 hours, it definitely ended way earlier than I imagined it would. You only get so much time before the score attack mode completes, which is your only opportunity to try for the best score achievements for which I have no clue what score you need to get for that - I got the 2nd best achievement at just shy of 1.3M points. I could have squeezed out more score had I known for sure that it would count forge upgrades and weapon patterns since I had a ton of money leftover, but I had no clue the game would abruptly end like that even with the warning that you're in the final year.

Anyway, on to the review. The game is a mix of the game "Codebreaker" with some economic management elements. The weapon forging parts are entirely a guessing game, but as you craft that specific weapon pattern more, you learn more and more about it so you know where the sweet spots are, just like in Codebreaker. This is fine and all, but my biggest gripe and the one that seriously impacts my view of the game is the fact that the game does little to help you with memory. The only things that gets "saved" are the last configurations you inputted for the 3 phases of forging, and sometimes the inputs you have attempted previously -- for some reason, this isn't always consistent and the game doesn't tell you why, but you can absolutely accidentally use an input you have already given and not realize it. What I would like to see is the game providing you with loadouts, especially since you can put 6 different elements on the weapon pattern which changes where you need to put the sliders that are only "weighted" (the slider with the scale icon), and sometimes a faction will request item with an element that you know is considered awful for that weapon pattern, so if you craft with that in mind, then you will overwrite your last-known configuration even if it was a 10/10 mastercraft result.

Another gripe that I have with the game are the guild upgrades. A lot of them are useless purchases, especially since the stock market for personal crafting supplies doesn't unlock until around the time you get Forge Level 2, but there are like 15 guild upgrades (each with 3 tiers of upgrade I think?) that pertain to the stock market stuff that have an exorbitant and increasing cost that don't do anything that helps you - it doesn't affect market prices or increase how many materials you get passively from faction bonuses, all these upgrades do is affect your storage capacity of them. What good do all these upgrades do me when I hardly ever use the automation line because those upgrades are just as outrageous in gold/guild point cost when I need to make sure I don't go bankrupt also? Sure, the automation line is nice for supplementary income, but the main focus is in the forging and completing contracts.

That brings me to my next points: selling to the guild as well as the weapon storage (the slots above selling to the guild) and its associated upgrades is a completely useless system. They have practically zero value to you as the player: anything you craft is crafted for a purpose, and early on in the game, you have no reason to sell to the guild nor hold onto any stock, especially when random market sways are... random! The fact that there are upgrades to increase your completed weapon storage capacity that cost an arm and a leg and require Forge Level 2 and 3... just why? Why would you sell to the guild at a guaranteed net loss when you can just sell it to literally any faction for a guaranteed net gain? They feel like dead systems in the game that were forgotten but left in.

In the future, I would like to see some upgrades that have meaningful gameplay effects, something the player feels good about when they buy them. The only upgrades that I found were the most impactful were the production speed upgrades (crafting faster helps me prototype new weapon patterns that a contract wants), the batch production upgrades (for contract fulfillment), and upgrade that automatically acquires sales money (this shouldn't even be a thing, all it does is remove unnecessary clicks). To go back to my first gripe, why not provide upgrades that help the player estimate how much each slider could potentially affect the forging meter? One of the biggest issues I had was understanding why red would overtake purple despite me applying "4 red - 1 purple - 3 purple" -- this should be an equilibrium, but it's not. In fact, if you try this logic for Forge Level 1 weapons, it works out just fine, but for Forge Level 2 and 3 weapons, this stops working once you start approaching the extremes of either purple or red on one of the sliders. This is not intuitive at all, so being able to purchase upgrades to assist with this gives something the player to work towards rather than simply having "money go up, good factions stay alive" on your mind all the time. I could think of 20 more upgrades that would be far more interesting and also engaging then what the game currently has.

Then there's the clicker stuff strewn about on your island - the thing that Hearthstone popularized for clicking on stuff, but this game rewards you with 1 coin apiece which is very nice for surviving the earlygame. Why not some upgrades for those, like only needing to hold LMB instead of needing me to use an autoclicker or wearing down my mouse's switches? Instead, the game takes those away as you buy guild upgrades - an upgrade should never detrimentally affect the player, especially if the player is not notified that it would do so. Why not make it so that the forge upgrades gives you better clicker opportunities, or change it up a little, like needing to drag open a cauldron door to let the molten metal pour out into the mold? Give me something for exploring the game world, throw me a bone.

Something I want to throw in here: I really have no clue what the player can do when it comes to faction-faction relationships. If there are two factions that I want to get rid of, the only thing that I know to do is to pray that a faction that I like has tensions with them and that tension state progresses into a war, then I feed the side I want with weapons or feed the side I don't want with tainted weapons (from elixirs). However, I don't know if there is even a method given to the player that allows them to sway the opinion of one faction and what they think about another. I don't know how to break tensions between two factions that I like - the game hints that it's possible, but doesn't explain a potential mechanism for doing so. I really feel like this system could be fleshed out a little bit more and provide the player with more/better feedback for their actions as well as give the player more agency to engage with the faction system. Maybe allow the player to bribe the faction, or lobby against another faction, or pay a faction to send spies to economically harm another faction's resource(s) to raise/lower the prices.

All-in-all, I know I had a lot of complaining in this review - like I said earlier, I wish I could leave it as a "Mixed" review, but I'll leave it as positive because at least the game was interesting enough for me to play it to completion, and all I spent was $10. I've experienced far worse at far worse prices and time investment. Plus, all of the complaints I ranted about are easy to implement, but it's up to the developers if they want to implement them.

This is a huge bait-and-switch in that this is just Call of Duty with everything bad about BF2042 smeared all over it. They lied to the players in their promotions leading up to this game, promising to "bring it back to their roots". Apparently, that means paying more attention to all the new finnicky systems like mounting which is useless in 70% of cases because it locks you down like a sitting duck but also keeps your character's body exposed in such a dumb way that real life military forces would laugh at how stupid you look.

Every match is so up-and-down. You either get matches where you pop off really well and dominate the enemy with clean tactics that overwhelm them, and then you get matches where every teammate has the combined IQ of a brick wall or the top 5 enemy team members play omega sweaty like they're applying to FaZe or Cloud9. You either get matches where hit-reg is clean and accuracy/bloom feels surgical, and then you get matches where the enemy's body fills your entire reticle and you somehow still miss. It's COD:MW(2016) all over again where the game flips a coin to decide whether you have a fun match or an infuriating match.

Suppression is also a big fat joke, it may as well not even exist.

Aimpunch in contexts that make sense is nonexistent. Snipers will continue to fire with 100% precision and 0 punishment despite taking 3 bullets from 10.5mm or .277in bullets and being bombarded with cover fire (again, suppression is absolutely useless). Absolutely no effect, so uhh, get headshotted I guess.

There are still gamebreaking bugs in the game that have existed since the beta phases. There's the "dead alive" glitch (yes, I stole this name from Halo 2 speedruns because they are very similar) where you are permanently in the "down-but-not-out" state but are unable to be revived or end your life, meaning you can no longer respawn unless you rejoin the match. There's the "stuck scoreboard" glitch where you are permanently locked in the scoreboard and cannot close it unless you rejoin the match. There's the "gadget weapon" glitch where your character is stuck trying to use a deployed gadget like the UAV despite you having your primary/secondary weapon equipped, but at least this is fixable by re-entering the gadget and exiting it.

The mortar is still the worst equipment in the game, and they even pushed out an update that touched the mortar (nerfing it, actually, with no longer being able to quickly reload it by putting a supply box next to you as you're firing), yet did NOTHING to improve it by any means. If you are using the mortar, you are actively acting as a waste of a player slot for your team.

Don't even get me started on the map design. They are the biggest joke of the game and the sole reason why you should NOT pick up this game if you were considering it. They are too small and designed by Monty Python - gameplay balance was not at the forefront of their mind when they were designing them, it's like their number one concern was "style over function." There are multiple hotspots where the defending side gets absolutely no cover and the offense can essentially cosplay as the Astra Militarum in WH40k and decimate the enemy team with nonstop, oppressive firepower. There are multiple hotspots where tanks are pretty much free to do whatever they want and live forever as long as they have proper infantry support which is, again, a complete coin toss decided by matchmaking because you will get teammates who are dumb as dirt and never defend their tanks or use tanks in the dumbest possible way and waste them. There are also maps that are designed where aircraft use the SAME TWO ROUTES because all they have to do is conduct a pass over the map for some cheap kills, pop flares regardless if they are being locked onto or not, and snake away behind conveniently placed environment to completely avoid AA by infantry and tanks.

I just want video games to be good again in the year 2026.

Finally done with the battlepass grind for the BF6 cosmetics...

I mean, it's not a completely horrible game. I had more fun on BF2042 than I did with Battlefield 5 and their abhorrent vehicle spam-fest and unlimited sniper nests. At least this entry in the series gives you *some* options to deal with annoyances, albeit they aren't the greatest solutions, especially when they rely on having teammates with half a brain like using my favorite tool, the tracer darts, but it's something at least.

Still, most matches are a sweatfest, just like any other shooter game post-2015ish, but a majority of matches only had a handful of sweat squads while the other 20~25 players are your typical "controller Fortnite Timmy" players, so that's something at least.

Lastly, the removal of the suppression mechanic is simply a completely terrible design decision.

Is it worth full price? God, no. Was I an idiot and didn't read the reviews before buying the completely worthless Elite Edition? Yes I am.