i love shadowheart so much i wish lesbians were real

Hands down the one of the best shooters I've ever played, if not THE best. I don't know how to articulate that this game is incredible and you need to play it. Just buy it and go. Nothing will prepare you properly.

TLDR it's an open world Dark Souls. If you like these games you'll like this one, and if you're new then this is a somewhat decent starting off point.

After 100 hours I finally finished this and have some thoughts. I consider myself a pretty big fan of these Fromsoft games so I'd like to think I have some idea of what I'm talking about, but I'm also pretty bad at these games. Most of what I'll talk about applies to PvE, as I did very little PvP throughout my first playthrough, though some of these things can apply to both. As of writing the game is in version 1.02.3, so keep that in mind when I get into some of my gripes.

Elden Ring feels like a big culmination of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. Mechanics from each game make appearances, the biggest to me being DS2 powerstancing is back, and of course, you can actually jump like a real video game character. The open world feels incredible and it's fun to get sidetracked for hours exploring new areas. It also lends itself well to the difficulty these games have a reputation for. Stuck in an area? Go explore. Get stronger, find a cool new weapon, and come back later. I don't really have much to say that plenty of other people haven't said already. The game is fun and the world is really impressive. That being said, I do have complaints about this game as a person whose played these games quite a bit.

As of right now, the combat feels...off in some ways. Jump attacks change up your tactics a bit, with jump R2s basically replacing grounded R2s if you can land them. There's no reason to use a grounded R2 if you can land the jump R2. It'll do more damage, more structure damage, and usually stagger enemies. On the other hand, enemy stagger vs. player stagger feels whack. Regular enemies stagger VERY little, even being able to raise a shield in between quick hits with fast weapon types. Meanwhile, hitstun on your character is egregious. Getting sniped with magic near a group of enemies is a death sentence. In previous games, poise and hyperarmor mitigated this, but poise values feel ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Max poise is higher than DS3, and there's effectively two systems: Standing poise, akin to DS1, and active poise, akin to DS3. The issue is there's virtually no hyperarmor with swings. It REALLY shows with big weapons when you constantly get interrupted before you can get something out.

Similarly, large weapons feel punishing to use. Combat is fast in Elden, it feels very much like DS3, if you've played a decent amount of that. A few certain weapons have already shown to be dominating throughout the game, Moonveil Katana and Sword of Night and Flame being standout, overtuned weapons that take very little effort to get early. Elden also has some very clear busted playstyles. Magic, as usual, is incredibly strong, nearly trivializing some fights with decent setups. Bleed and frost are also surprisingly powerful. For reference, I was on a STR/DEX quality build for about 60 hours before going for an ARC Bleed double katana build and the difference was night and flame day. I do not know how I would've done one endgame fight in particular with a slow, heavy weapon (If you know who I mean, you know what I mean). I should say that I will never tell people they didn't properly play the game because they used magic, or summoned friends, that's stupid and this isn't 2012. However it'd be wrong of me not to talk about my issues and not mention the very clear winners and losers of character builds. As it stands, weapons with split damage and ARC scaling (so a weapon that deals physical damage and fire damage, and scales off the ARC stat) currently don't work right. There's also a build going around that flat out kills you because of a bug with a spell and weapon effects. Some weapon arts (or ashes of war as they're called now) do silly amounts of damage with no investment, and some spells are so hilariously worthless to cast that they shouldn't even be in the game. If you played DS3 at launch, think CCS and Dark Sword as the early meta. Obviously the game is still in its infancy and From will most likely apply patches and fixes eventually, but I'm reviewing this as it is now. As it is now, there's unintentionally (I pray it's unintentional) shifting of focus towards some playstyles. Don't use a big weapon, and learn how to cast magic, and you win!

With all of this in mind, some of these fights feel straight-up unfair. Not in the "I have no health because I didn't level it and I die in one hit!" unfair, the genuine, "Wow, how did they expect us to get through this without using [Item] here?" That endgame fight I mentioned in the section above? I tested some damage numbers. At 2600 HP, the first attack in the second phase hit me for 2400 total. If the initial hit connects, the follow-up is unavoidable, and hits for around 2400. Since softcaps in this game are so much higher, I had 60 Vigor, a few talismans that increased HP, and popped a consumable to hit 2600 and still barely survived it. While the first hit is avoidable, the timing window feels off, and it isn't great to miss a dodge by a tiny bit and have to redo the first phase because of it (This doesn't even mention the wombo combo this boss has too that will almost certainly kill you from full if it connects because of how fast it is, and the boss throws it out at random). Another thing the developers did was give a lot of enemies and bosses AoEs on their attacks, or follow-ups, or both. It took me 90 hours to realize you're supposed to jump over some of these to dodge them, or they're unavoidable if you get hit, or if you roll to dodge. I'm not going to whine and throw a fit that "wuh game hard!" but I do feel that a lot of this feels really bad. I can't imagine how new players must feel doing some of these fights. It feels like after the "second main boss" (in quotes, because this could be the last one you do. Open world and all) the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gets cranked on these fights. Of course, being Fromsoft, there's gimick fights too, They're pretty bad, but not overly offensive. It's more unfortunate than annoying, in my opinion.

There's a few smaller nitpicks I have, and I don't want to mention the optimization issues. My rig is starting to show its age, this is the first new game to come out that I've had to actively work to make run well. I get crashes too, but it's not frequent enough to change my opinion of the game.

Despite my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and complaining I still love Elden Ring. If you're considering it, get it, you'll find a way to enjoy it. You can probably power through it in 60-70 hours if you don't explore much, and can easily double my playtime if you comb over every single area you can find. Hopefully some of the early, janky bugs and mechanics get fixed later on.

The best Saints Row game. I wish this had gotten a remaster alongside The Third, I think this is WAY better. That being said, this port is assshit. Crashes all the damn time, buggy as hell, glitches galore, it's a mess. There's fanmade mods to fight this, but I've heard the dude working on it finally stopped. It's a shame this game got no support from Volition.

If you want to replay this on Steam, download "Gentlemen of the Row." 1.92 is the latest (and final) version, and it's basically life support. It makes the game somewhat more stable and fixes a lot of stuff. There's options for adding new and previous cut or cheat-only stuff, but the bugfixes are enough. Shame the dude stopped working on it, I think it became too much.

As much as I love this I really can't recommend it to anyone in it's present state. Maybe by some miracle Volition will do something with it, but the outlook is bleak.

Quick edit: Literally right after this review I heard that the devs found the source code and might be working to either fix or rerelease this? If that's true, that'd be ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome. They said they were going to try to fix up the bugs and glitches, make things run through Steamworks instead of Gamespy (which I don't think even exists anymore), and include the two previous console-exclusive DLC packs. A tweet from April 2020 said it was being worked on by a VERY small team, so it'll probably be a long time, but either way. Keep your hopes up, I'd love to see a playable version come to Steam. If it does, I'll re-do this review and actually be able to recommend it, provided the new version is good.

DS3 is the final game in the ever famous Soulsborne series, which consists of 5 games. Of those 5, this one is my second favorite. The list goes Bloodborne>>>DS3>DS1/DS2 (They're tied)>DeS (I've played very little DeS, mostly because it's an exclusive to 2 consoles I don't own, but what I did play felt pretty bad)

These games are known for being hard and a lot of people will tell you to "git gud" when you ask for help. Firstly, don't listen to those people, most of the community is actually quite kind and welcoming to new players. Secondly, these games are only hard when you don't understand them, which could probably be said for many games and series, but Soulsborne is usually placed on another level.

I'm not here to write a comprehensive history on these games and how to play them, overpaid games "journalists" get paid for that. Instead, I'm gonna tell you why this is my favorite of the Souls part of Soulsborne.

The main reason is DS3's combat is a diet version of Bloodborne's. Obviously I'm biased since Bloodborne is my favorite of these games, but I think it works towards the game's favor. DS3 is much faster-paced than 1 or 2. You can roll forever, heal in an instant, but you also have next to 0 poise most of the time. Unlike 1, you don't have poise when you're not moving. Instead, it's calculated with your actual poise stat and what attack you're currently doing. Basically, if you're swinging a big ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ axe at a dude in a cloak with a dagger, you're probably gonna feel a tickle as you cleave him in half. DS3 also got rid of 2's powerstance mechanic (which sucks, cause powerstancing was rad. 2 had a lot of cool mechanics) with the weapon art system. Every weapon type has one or two shared WAs, with some exceptions having their own unique WAs. I like these. It makes combat more interesting. Along with the huge variety of weapons and tools at your disposal, 3 feels super open to options. I still think 2 has more build variety, but 3's systems are more straightfoward and easy-to-grasp with no more than a quick rundown, and it allows for more experimentation, in my opinion. 3's PVP also feels good. I don't want to say whether I like 2 or 3's more because I haven't done a lot of PVP in 2, but they're different experiences. 3 is also still active, you can usually find either people to help/be helped by, or people to fight. There's definitely a "meta" level for PVP (120-135 or so) with it's own weapon tiers, but regardless if you're adhering to them or not, the PVP feels good. Bad connections can kill it fast though, and 3 also has gank squads and ragequitters everywhere. Not to mention hackers. Do yourself a favor if you intend to play online and download "Blue Sentinels" from Nexusmods. It's tracks known hackers and has options to kick and block them. Do that, and back up your saves, and you'll be fine.

Dark Souls, the series, is cool to me because each game found new ways to iterate on itself to make the games feel fresh, and stand out from one another. In my opinion, 3 is a great end to the series. I think some people will always prefer one of the other games to 3 for various reasons, but 3 will always be the one that keeps me coming back. Untill they port Bloodborne to PC and give it 60FPS. I am ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ begging you Jesus Christ put this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game on Steam so help me God-

Oh and people who BM are bad at the game, regardless of how often they stomp people in PVP with their 3 other friends. Sorry, I don't make the rules. BM stands for (B)ad (M)gamer.

Seriously, don't be a ♥♥♥♥

The legend never dies

Theres 2 parts to this game to really review, that being the game and the remaster of it

The game: Its ♥♥♥♥♥♥ Dark Souls you know what this is. Theres nothing to say besides its really good and a lot of people think its hard. Wt ring u got bithc?

The remaster: Its...something. The game looks prettier, runs better, doesnt chug as bad (though I personally get frame drops sometimes). They added DS3's password matchmaking which makes playing with friends easier, they changed how some multiplayer covenants work so they actually work (looking at you, Gravelords), they added a bonfire next to the deep-fried skeleton blacksmith. Its little things. That being said, I think this is kinda lazy. Its twice as expensive as DS1 was (unless Im misremembering the price) for very little added. You HAVE to buy this version, steam doesnt have the original DS1 listed anymore. If you OWN the original DS1 but not this, its only $20, but thats still $40 if you didnt get DS1 on sale. Its definitely divisive. Overall, its not really terrible, just low-effort. Prettier graphics and a more stable engine are enough for me to buy it. Plus I actually see people playing it without a mod to find people, so hey, thats a plus.


Quick edit: FROMSOFT announced the end of the discount program on Sept. 30th. I have no idea why they're doing this, so if you own DS1: PtD and care about this at all get it on discount before it's gone. Seriously, what the hell FROM?