Recent reviews by Duncaan43

very promising potential here I hope TVGS implements everything he's promising and hopefully more; in particular the art style and presentation begs for deeper more sophisticated and involved social systems and scenarios and more multiplayer mechanics. for what it is I suppose it's worth the $20 but it is a shallow pool of content as is.

Have you ever wanted someone to make a fighting game with gamebryo combat? no of course not me either. but torn banner did, and they somehow made it work by adding a ♥♥♥♥ ton of feedback mechanics that bethesda could never because their too busy modelling bobbles and fruit bowls.

i7-8750h/3080; game barely pushes 24fps with settings low as possible. I know this is a me problem but don't trust the 'minimum' requirements, if you have a i3-7100 you're not playing this game even at 30fps.

I'm not a big fan of survival games; I think the grind is a waste of time and I don't find simulating monotonies immersive. I am a big fan of arpgs though and enshrouded does somewhat scratch that itch. there is a decent ammount of mob variety and custom level design and platforming in this game that keeps the exploration fresh and engaging. there are forts, caverns, ruined towns and castles that are clearly not simple boring procedurally rendered environments. if you enjoyed playing fable or botw and can't find anything better that you haven't already played then you probably will have fun with enshrouded. I did play palworld and I think enshrouded is all around a better made game than palworld. all that being said I hit the level cap extraordinarily quickly, and there is a bit of extra exploration I could do, but being level capped so early has really sunk any enthusiasm I had to keep playing, I've probably burned through 70% of content available in early access in just a few weekends, it's early access though so. I will have to say the developer has done themselves a complete disservice not incorporating bodies of water and weather mechanics in this early access. this game would be getting so much more attention just from the cozy/immersion factor if they had done so.

I have a $3k asus laptop from 2020 and an RTX3080 and I cannot run this game. I mean it will run but even on the lowest settings and dlss maxed out I can't get a steady fps with no stutter. I'm not trying to single out this developer because the poor performance is consistent across all AAA and even most AA games made in the last year or so. I just find it disheartening that games over the last decade have become so much more CPU intensive than GPU intensive and I don't understand why that is or why it's necessary. either way I'm just going to have to wait it out until i get my christmas bonus and build a proper PC. just going to refund the game and withhold my judgement.

-lack of content (scant maps, limited playlists and game modes, content for customization is laughable)

-fickle servers/netcode (despite almost always being in a lobby at ~30ms I often enough end up in a match with rubberbanding and lag outs, sometimes the latency on picking up a weapon is so atrocious that I assume its garbage input detection and i end up chucking the weapon I want for the one I was trying to drop)

-melee hit detection is broken (this might just be because they have collision turned off for player models but you will get back smacks when you should get beatdowns and beatdowns when you should get back smacks.

-bloated coding (there is no way a game that looks like this should require so many resources to run)

-almost all customization is placed behind a paywall (it's truly atrocious and ridiculous to have a battle pass with such little content and there is such a negligible difference in armor pieces that it makes you wonder why even bother, helmets are really the only thing that stand out.)

-xp and challenges make no sense, especially considering how playlists are setup right now. (there is no quicker way to get players to uninstall your game than to frustrate them with trying to get in the right game mode and find the right weapon or circumstance for a challenge that has nothing to do with the objective of the game or whether or not your team loses. why are you losing while your team isn't playing the objective? well because they are too busy trying to progress and finish a challenge. man if only there was a mode were you could focus on challenges without teams and objectives on a big map maybe with lots of weapon drops... sounds like too much work to implement though.)

the game has potential but I doubt 343 has the wherewithal to capitalize on it. maybe I'll comeback and change or remove this review if they do.

edit: it's okay now, challenges and customization unlocks are still nonsense, and I'm not a big fan of how they prioritize playlists and manipulate the playerbase. other than that it's a pretty solid game now.