The combat in this game is excellent. Story is OK.

Some basic optimisation work would be good, though, I don't understand why a cartoon game taxes my GPU more than Cyberpunk 2077.

I really wanted to like this game, because I love the setting. But it's just more typical AAA slop.

The graphics are (generally) good, and atmospherically the game is quite nice. But that's where the good stuff ends.

The game is unstable and crashes frequently. This is a problem reported by a lot of players, even people like me who easily meet the requirements. No fixes seem to be on the way.

The combat is just okay - it tries to do RPG-style combat but it just lacks the depth to do a good job, so it ends up being boring, especially on "boss" fights which are repetetive and just make up the difficulty by dealing more damage when they hit you. You manage your stamina, parry the yellow attacks, dodge the red ones, and maybe use some "special moves" that you unlocked. It works, that's all.

The quality of the voice acting is all over the place. Both of the available PC voice actors sound a bit... flat to me. One sounds American af but is at least putting a bit of effort in, the other sounds like a flat english guy. Neither sound nordic or viking at all. This would be fine, except that some NPCs do have really convincing accents, while others have the flat english/american accent, or an american doing what they think is a european-sounding accent. Some sound like they don't even want to be there at all, like the guy who voiced the king of Norway sounds like his mom just forced him to do a voice acting gig or something. There's no coherent oversight, no consistent level of quality or authenticity, it feels like a mishmash. Maybe you don't care about this, but I found it a bit jarring.

The game is also full of bewildering design decisions. Every time I feel that I am starting to get a bit immersed in the game, something happens that pulls me out of it and annoys me. For example:

- The pacing of the story varies wildly in speed, starting off extremely fast and then slowing to a crawl a few hours in. It's quite strange.
- Why did they put the first part of the level 350 DLC quest as a sidequest in the level 25 area with no prominent warning that you're going to get ruined? Do not go and sleep under the tree.
- Why are the nights brighter than noon in northern europe is irl? By far the brightest nights I've ever seen, it looks ridiculous.
- Why can I hear a bard playing the lute and singing on my longship, but there is *clearly* no lute in sight?
- Why does the game tell me off for being a naughty boy if I accidentally (or deliberately) kill a civilian NPC during a supposed viking raid? Want to pillage like a viking? Well, better make sure you pillage *peacefully* or you might *desynchronize*! I tried to reenact the scene from Vikings series 1 where they bust into the church and cause havoc, because I like Viking stuff and so of course I wanted to do that. NOT ALLOWED! Murdering all the guards and setting all the houses on fire is fine, though. Mostly Peaceful Pillaging it is.
- Want to go raid that town upriver that looks the same as all the others to get some extra supplies for your settlement? Tough, it's just across the magical level barrier, so it's 100 levels stronger than you are. Stay in your county, scrub.

I'm sure there was more, but you get the idea. All of this combined with the crashing and the random texture flickering glitches and piles of snow randomly warping into different shapes when I walk past it means that I just cannot get immersed into this game.

It feels like about half of the development team really wanted to make something cool and authentic, and the other half wanted to pump out the usual AAA slop as fast as possible, and the result is a fragmented mess with moments of brilliance, but to enjoy those moments, you must wade through ravines of frustrating unpleasantness.

One of the only larger developers still making games in the old way, with a finished product on launch and no day 1 extras for sale. They've done a great job and shown that it's still possible, no matter what nonsense greedy corporations and their enablers say.

Game spends hours building shaders after every patch they release. This process takes several hours and the game is basically unplayable until finished.

Absolutely stupid, this has not been necessary for any other game that I have played in my life. Why did you give a port of a AAA game to these developers?

Most fun I've had in a single player game since the Witcher 3. Optimisation isn't great atm but that's my only complaint.

This is quite simply a fun game. I haven't really encountered anything frustrating at all. Gameplay is great, soundtrack is good, graphics are good. If you don't know anything about Warhammer it doesn't matter either, it stands alone as a fun experience without knowing any of the lore behind it.

No 4K UI scaling. In 2021. Just trying to play it gives me a headache in 10 minutes.
Even Medieval 2's UI scales fine in 4k.