When I was younger, I fell in the bathroom. The left side of my head collided with the base of the sink, and I was told by an incredible amount of people that, had I fallen a little further to the left, I would have collided with the sink and suffered severe brain damage.

This game makes me wish I did. Perhaps, if I had brain damage, I could enjoy it.

Anyone who sincerely believes DW9 to be the worst DW should be locked in a room with nothing but this game and a LeMat Revolver, loaded with a single round. It is horrible. Beyond horrible. This game is more devoid of redeeming traits than most war criminals.

I'd heard so many bad things about the Renbu system. For years, years I'd heard them. None of them prepared me for reality. What the fuck is this combat system? In lieu of a charge attack system (wherein you hit with light attacks and then press charge to do a heavy hitter), this game merely has entirely independent light and heavy strings. There are no transitory moves, not even any imitators of the old system. Simply these, a command grab, and jump attacks.

This is bad on its own, but the actual Renbu system is salting the wound. No, you can't use your entire combo strings immediately, no matter how high a level you are. You have to hit enemies to build up the Renbu Gauge, and upon rising in level you are granted extra combo strings. In practice, this turns the game into what most journalists think musou is; aimless, uninteresting button mashing until the stage ends and you are free from the gameplay for a moment. It's awful. It sucks. If you tweet 'there is no such thing as bad game design' there should be a legal requirement to play this game first.

The game's utterly atrocious camera doesn't help either, with the low FOV and forced perspective changes often obscuring where your target is. For some mind-boggling reason, the camera often tilts to the left or right at an angle, usually leaving the player character uncentered and making you blind to the enemies behind you who're hungry for your supple little bo- er, Renbu.

And no, before you ask, the gameplay isn't the only bad thing. Aesthetically, this game was made in a cauldron that was still crusty from brewing TES IV: Oblivion in it. Everything is... soupy, lathered in poorly distributed high contrast colours and the kind of bloom that made Oblivion a migraine-inducer on consoles. Character designs are a gaudy mix between feudal plate armor and the chinese armor endemic to the PS2 titles, with the idea of 'design coherence' being kicked into a river like Liu Shan. Designs range from 'competent' (Like Zhou Yu or Xiahou Dun) to looking like a horrible Xenoverse 2 OC with mods (I.e, everyone in Shu and Zhang Liao).

The maps suck too. I don't know whether the actual design or the geriatric movement speed is to blame, but they at once feel too large and claustrophobic, making navigating them a pain. If you modded DW8 to have the speed of DW3 I imagine this is what it'd feel like.

So it looks like shit, plays like shit, handles like shit and is designed like shit. Does this game have any redeeming aspects?

No.

It sucks. The End. Goodbye. I'm going back to my DW8 replay.

God.

Fuck.

Damn it.

Urgh.

My opinion on this game has oscillated ever since I played it at the start of Covid. I used to think it was amazing, you know? 170~ characters, tons of stages, a cool magic system with swappable powers, mythological heroes and some really cool new movesets. Whenever I recommended a WO title to someone, it was always 4.

But I dunno. Time hasn't been kind to this game. My musou marathon in 2021 already introduced me to games that were not only better, but shamelessly ripped off as part of this game's attempt to win people back after DW9. I skipped over it back then because it was right after WO3U and just... Jesus christ I did not want to try out another 170 characters right after clearing that game.

So, I ended up going back to it later. Muuuuuuuuch later, after I finally gave WO2 a genuine and sincere shot... So about two days ago.

And boy howdy doo has my opinion plummeted.

WO2 is not perfect. For all its good, it's still one of the first musous to make peons little more than set dressing and the morale mechanic a completion gauge. Yet, the entire time I speedran WO4U again, I found myself missing it.

Missing the weighty, impactful combat. Missing the unique R1 specials that had me genuinely pondering my team composition with characters I'd previously never given a shit about. Missing the simpler but more streamlined camp. Missing the cool little treasure guides. Missing objectives being optional but impactful as opposed to mandatory stops on the rollercoaster ride. Missing neither the SW or DW characters being particularly dormant. Missing the dub.

WO4U doesn't have any of these. It has weightless, floaty combat that somehow somehow feels worse than either SW4 or DW8 ever did. It has generic shared specials that are honestly pretty bad barring a few standouts. Missions are basically straightforward cut 'em up fests where you listened to canned and poorly acted dialogue play out before the next door opens or objective pops. SW4 characters stand out above the rest, able to dart around and slaughter peons without the need for treasures.

In exchange for all it lacks, you get... Uhm... I don't know. I used to love this game, and now I genuinely don't know why you'd play it. Athena, maybe? She's gorgeous, moe and has feet. Beside her, though? I dunno.

Just go play WO2. Or WO3U if you want to be a masochist. Or Warriors All Stars if the crossover characters appeal to you.

This game came out in 2016. Somehow, it is more faithful to the idea of the PS2 musous than all of its contemporaries.

I'm not gonna comment on the story or character, because Fate is still new to me and it'd be unfair. The cast are utilized really well in a basic narrative sense, and I like their personalities, but that's it.

No, what I'm gonna focus on is the gameplay.

On the surface, it really resembles musous from the last 4 years. It has breakneck pacing, 4 on-demand super skills, huge crowds of enemies and no clones but a smaller roster. Where it diverges, however, is in how all of this is utilized.

Have you ever done an open-book exam before? Most people unfamiliar with them assume that they'll be easy. How could they not be? You have all your notes and information!
Well, open book exams are supremely difficult. The 'mercy' you get from having all of your notes is all but required, as you're expected to know everything and the minimum pass mark tends to be extremely high. The only open book assessment I've ever sat demanded 90% correct answers for a C pass.

Fate/Extella Link is much the same. Yes, you are supremely powerful and fast. The game leverages this by bombarding you with tight objectives and competent enemy AI. Much like in the PS2 games, dallying around will result in objectives failing and the AI officers just trouncing your bases. It feels more like a sped up version of DW4 Empires with modern accruements than it does a 2016 musou spinoff.

But it's all the better for it, since it allows Marvelous to make their game stand out. Really, I wish I had more to say? The game doesn't last very long, having no desire to bog you down in an endlessly tedious postgame and the story isn't very long even if you're gorging yourself on companion events.

It's just good quick, clean fun.

Disclaimer: This review is copy-pasted from my Steam review and is being reuploaded here in light of the sequel being relesaed.

tl;dr If you can look past the visuals you get one of the best EDF titles, but it lacks the class depth of the mainlines and unlike the others it's a little too self-aware.

I vividly remember thinking this game would suck when it was revealed. "EDF but for kids" sounds like a recipe for disaster and it being headed up by the Iron Rain team (a game I'm not too fond of) made it seem like it was headed for the bargain bin.

Fortunately, Yuke's surprised me. WB is not only excellent, it might be my favourite EDF title.

The first thing you'll likely notice is how different the format is. Mainline EDF gives you 1-4 classes and has a whole mountain of gear, weaponry and vehicles for you to unlock. World Brothers gives you the EDF5 Ranger with a single weapon and tells you to go recruit more people, who each come with one weapon and maybe an accessory. They have recharging abilities like air strikes, tapioca tea and molotov cocktails, and Special moves that recharge upon killing things which have an equally large variety of effects. Rather than unlocking new weapons for a class, you level up that class so they can use other people's weapons (the level cap is 10, which lets you use anything).

It doesn't sound very EDF, does it? But it is. Delightfully so, in fact. If you're familiar with Warriors games, this is to mainline EDF what Warriors Orochi is to Dynasty Warriors. Different framework, but the EDF core of charging into swarms of giant aliens, robots and insects is still intact. The team swapping and build flexibility just give you far more options, and the denseness of the maps (to accommodate the Switch's weaker hardware) honestly makes some later missions MORE chaotic than the mainlines, especially from Hardest onwards. Much like Warriors Orochi, this is also a crossover title, so you get to fight a wide variety of enemies and your favourite class from the other games is guaranteed to be in. There's a bunch of returning maps too, including London, so if you're an abolitionist you can take down Parliament.

There's a lot of replayability too. Around 150 characters to acquire and six difficulties with the mission pack (launching Jun 10th), and that's not factoring in higher level versions of weapons and accessories (up to level 5 with the mission pack). The story is a bit short, only 60 missions (71 with the mission pack), but they're good missions and there's not much filler.

That all said, the game does have a few issues. Despite the lower amount of weapon levels, some higher level variants are a downgrade. Some world brothers/sisters outright suck, and while you can build a team around them, you likely won't be so generous in higher difficulties. Unlike the mainlines, which are corny because they try to be serious, WB tries to be tongue-in-cheek and self-referential. YMMV, but the humour can get old. There are less maps than in other games, so there's a ton of repetition on that front. Some maps have really bad unit placement, which can make grabbing them a pain in the ass. The music gets repetitive FAST and I genuinely recommend disabling it. At the time of writing, the PC version has mouse smoothing that makes turning around a pain in the ass.

Despite these issues though, World Brothers is still my favourite EDF, and I've played all but one of them. The variety and fun on offer is amazing and I don't think we'll ever see anything like it again unless this game shifts millions. Buy it, play it, love it. And hey, if you hate it, you only need an hour to decide if this is for you or not.

Don't buy the season pass though, just get the mission pack. Unless you REALLY want to play as Sarge from EDF5 or whatever.

This game is such a painful monkey's paw. Really, it's like a textbook definition of the term.

On the plus side, this is Omega Force's creativity at their finest. Having curbed some mechanics from arena fighters, PW4 has some obscenely enjoyable and complex characters that're the best in their genre. Officer vs officer fights are a joy, and the sheer amount of momentum every character has stops traversal feeling slow. A universal dash mechanic only adds to this.

But... Man, there's a problem. This game would be an exceptional arena fighter, but it's not. It's a musou.

To me, musous are objective-centric games where there's tons of enemies between you and the goal. Even the more flashy musous like WO4 hold to this. PW4, though? The downside to the increased freedom of movement, character power and new mechanics is that... How do I put it?

When Musou boomers accuse the new games of being "grass cutting simulators", this game feels like a window to their worldview. It's a great beat 'em up, but it's a horrible musou. The player's power skyrockets so hard regardless of difficulty that you can, for many characters, simply mash normal attack with impunity to win.

It's not a bad game. It's very enjoyable on its own merits, but if I ever think "Golly, I want to play a musou!", this game rarely comes to mind. If I think "I want to destroy stuff!", it's at the top of the list.

This game is never going to be the best musou ever made, but it sure is my favourite Dynasty Warriors game alongside 9.

There isn't really a lot to say here, honestly.

Gameplay is satisfying (even moreso with a mod to remove animation lock), striking a nice balance between DW3's difficulty and DW5's breeziness. Helps some of the weaker movesets flourish where, in the previous game, they'd flounder. Replacing weapon drops with a level system helps with power progression and then some.

Compounding the excellent gameplay is both an incredible amount of fun game modes AND a newer approach to the story, shuffleing everything into a per-Kingdom story and allowing you to play anyone within said Kingdom to experience it - even created characters, a first and sadly last for the series.

Maps are truly excellent. My only gripe with them is that, after the vividness of DW2 and 3, they're a bit dim palette-wise. Other than, though? The variety of approaches, variable objectives and just general layout are fantastic. This isn't a game with wasted fights, and I was sad when I realized I'd ran out of new maps to encounter.

Soundtrack is stellar, though not quite as fantastic as DW9's. Still, I hold a lot of fondness for the crusty guitar and grungy riffs. You know a game is something else when even the game over theme is great.

Really, my only gripes with DW4 are moreso a product of its time than anything. The low render distance gets annoying in bigger fights, the overabundance of loading screens between modes is irritating, autolock is HORRIBLE for more motion-heavy movesets, and the low draw distance means lots of offscreen arrow hits.

Still, DW4 is fantastic. It has aged like wine.

Most folk with a lot of life experience will tell you that, when your gut says something, you should heed that biological advice. I’m one of those folk, and yet with Wild Hearts I found myself defying my own advice.

Prior to taking the plunge on this game, it threw up every red flag imaginable:

Published by EA, a company whose output errs on the miss side for me personally.
Developed by Omega Force, whose output I enjoy yet would not trust with anything other than a musou (after Bladestorm, anyway)
Poor launch rife with tech issues.
Relatively no impact; Wild Hearts was not spoken of by anyone after its release period passed.
Quiet subreddit, alarming for a 2023 release pushed by EA of all companies.
Total lack of a comprehensive wiki and not even Fextralife hopped on it.
Difficulty finding gameplay videos that aren’t either ‘newbie struggles with the first hour’ or ‘overtuned endgame build stomps enemies in 3-4 minutes’.

And more. So many more. There was not a single piece of reassuring evidence in Wild Hearts’ favour on the entire internet.

But I bought it anyway.

At heart, I am a Koei Tecmo shill. They are possibly the last company that I would say I have blind faith in. I hold some (or a lot of) love for the majority of their output, they hold as many of my favourite games/franchises as Capcom do, and of everything they’ve released in the last decade I’ve only really hated one title.

I also used to be a Capcom shill, for much the same reasons, but alas many of my favourite Capcom IPs succumbed to rot over time. Megaman fell to sequelitis, Resident Evil kowtowed to popular backlash and released two awful titles (7 and 8) back to back alongside two soulless remakes, Dead Rising was farmed out to a worse team who fundamentally misunderstood the series, Lost Planet tried to chase mainstream trends and forsook its identity, and Monster Hunter… God, Monster Hunter.

My relationship with Monster Hunter is akin to a marriage which has gone on too long, beyond the reconciliatory aid of counselling. I fell in love with the idea of Monster Hunter; of a game primarily comprised of boss fights and resource gathering. Where fights required preparation, map knowledge, familiarity with your weapon and knowledge of a monster’s behaviours.

It was a good idea, though… It didn’t really exist as I’d imagined it. Like all idealized daydreams, reality tends to be much more difficult to contest with. Much of what I’d wanted from Monster Hunter actually proved to be detrimental. The resource gathering simply slowed the experience down, often at the most annoying of times and sometimes even acting as a progress gate if I got unlucky. ‘Preparation’ soon became extraneous thanks to personal skill transferring between games, and I was eventually starved of fights that demanded I knuckle down and prepare accordingly. To say nothing of my loathing for nigh-mandatory pre-hunt rituals such as the Canteen, the entire sharpness mechanic, turf wars/monster invasions and the relative lack of skills making weapon-based decision making a relative nonfactor.

There are, of course, MH games that touch on things I want, but near the end of my time with the franchise I just wished they’d cut out all the shit and make it a series of straightforward boss fights.

Capcom then proceeded to do this with MH Rise, a game I rather distinctly hate on most counts. I came away from Sunbreak dejected and confused, unsure of what I really wanted from this genre. I’d been given what I allegedly wanted with Rise/Sunbreak, but it just wasn’t enough. MH just wasn’ enjoyable anymore.

Just under a year later, I spy Wild Hearts on sale for 40% off and decide to take a blind leap of faith.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” I ask myself.

I won’t spoil the whole answer, but I will tell you that I don’t think I need MH anymore.

Wild Hearts’ opening does not inspire faith, if I’m honest. It is a long slog through a mostly unremarkable environment with little in the way of combat, accentuated by cryptic dialogue which won’t make sense for 20~ hours and an unwinnable fight before you even get a tutorial. This I expect from most mediocre 6/10 AAA games, but not Koei Tecmo.

Fortunately it picks up almost immediately, and keeps going up and up. A brief mechanical tutorial gives way to a fight with a Ragetail - a large monster, no small fodder this time - and the absolutely game changing mechanic that is Karakuri, which really deserves its own section.

Every Monster Hunter clone has to contend with the question of:
“How do we separate ourselves from our influence?”
God Eater had transforming weapons and a decent emphasis on ranged, Soul Sacrifice let you… sacrifice souls, Toukiden had super abilities, and Dauntless was bad.

Wild Hearts’ answer is Karakuri.

Taking a leaf out of Fortnite’s book (trust me), WH saddles you with a resource named Karakuri Thread and offers you various buildable gadgets to summon during a hunt. There are ‘normal’ Karakuri such as boxes, springs, gliders and torches which are typically used as offensive/mobility tools. ‘Dragon’ Karakuri are semi-permanent map fixtures with a variety of functions. Some automatically harvest resources, some allow you to quickly traverse the map, some are merely cosmetic and some let you build fast travel points. I’ll talk about Dragon Karakuri later, because it’d be remiss of me to mention them without talking about maps and traversal.

At its core, Wild Hearts’ approach to MH gameplay is “less is more”. Weapon movesets are significantly less complex and their button assignment always boils down to ‘quick poke attacks’, ‘damage dealer’ and ‘special function’. While the different weapons feel unique, even the more braindead Monster Hunter weapons have a beefier movelist. This may make some of you scoff, but in truth the regular Karakuri exist to serve as a set of special moves.

When you first go through WH’s tutorial, it kindly points out that you can do a special plunging attack when vaulting from a crate Karakuri. What it does not tell you is that nearly every subsequent normal Karakuri has a special attack associated with it, each with their own function from weapon to weapon. The end result is a smaller core moveset, but a much larger conditional moveset. It helps to patch up weaknesses certain weapons might have against certain monsters - especially with slower weapons that lack gap closers.

Sure, the core movesets are enough to win fights, but choosing which normal Karakuri to bring really adds an extra layer to fight prep. Especially when one factors in Fusion Karakuri - combinations of multiple Karakuri that merge into something new. Sure a glider and stake may be more useful than a torch, but in forsaking the torch one also loses out on the incredible utility of on-demand flashbang grenades and actual cannons.

That said, there are only 6 normal Karakuri, so the system is not bogged down with overcomplexity or too many options. Regardless of what you take, you will always have some extra offensive options and will always have a bevy of utility Fusion Karakuri. While there are likely going to be a few ‘Fuck, I wish I brought [Karakuri]’ moments, not once did I ever feel stuck because I brought a certain combination.

As for the actual monsters… I don’t look too kindly on most other MH clones’ rosters, primarily because they lack visual cohesiveness and tend to just be ‘what looks cool?’ as opposed to ‘what looks cool and fits the world?’ This isn’t inherently bad but when your progenitor game manages about 20 visually striking + fitting designs per entry, it's a bit disappointing.
Wild Hearts’ angle on this front is ‘standard animals, but if they were elemental demigods’. It stays consistent until the credits roll (barring one major exception) and well into the post-release additions. While Monster Hunter favours a biological explanation for its monsters, in Wild Hearts the Kemono often used just straight up elemental magic and the fights are exceptional for it.

Actually the fights are exceptional all around. On top of being visual spectacles, Wild Hearts takes off the kid gloves relatively early and tends to avoid jobber monsters. Even Ragetail, the starting boss which is quite literally just an angry rat, has a handful of moves meant to catch careless players off guard (like that FUCKING double tailspin). Nioh might’ve been Team Ninja as opposed to Omega Force, but the general premise of ‘shit gets hard early, better use all your tools’ is still here. Later fights escalate from ‘elemental spirits’ to ‘actual divine beings’ and with it, the spectacle and difficulty increase. Wild Hearts never felt like it plateau’d on that front, there were no sudden dips or spikes in difficulty. It was smooth sailing till the end, baby.

…Most of the time. Towards the end of the game, the Golden Tempest (Byakko) appears as a mandatory fight and it’s… Not great. Monster Hunter players will probably be familiar with Barioth, a hyper aggressive and irritating monster that becomes trivial once you break its parts - assuming you live long enough. Golden Tempest is that game’s equivalent, being absurdly fast and capable of comboing in ways that no other basegame monster is able to. Add on ludicrous range from its house-sized tail and it was a nightmare to fight. It has the negligible honour of being the only monster I switched to a ranged weapon for.

Combat only makes up 2/3rds of the game, though. Like Monster Hunter before it, non-combat stuff is a whole beast unto itself. At first, it might not seem that way given how many Monster Hunter staples have been executed entirely: Consumables are gone almost completely (more on that later), resources are simply either crafting materials or ingredients, sharpness as a mechanic does not exist and thus neither do whetstones, there is no Canteen, traps/deployables/etc are Fusion Karakuri and thus both innate & infinite, ranged weapons do not require ammo whatsoever and even crafting has been reduced to simply weapon/armor crafting.

Instead, Wild Hearts introduces some curveballs to keep things fresh.

In place of an automated canteen, there is a manual one. Across your hunts/exploration, you will run into ingredients - fish, vegetables, grain, etc - and can eat them raw for benefits (at least until your food gauge hits 100). These are your consumables.
However… Several Dragon Karakuri aid in food preparation via drying/fermenting/pickling/smoking ingredients. Taking a leaf out of BOTW’s book, albeit more complicated, the creation of fulfilling and buff-heavy food is a process of refinement.
Throw fish on a drying rack, toss vegetables in the fermenting cask for vinegar, pickle them both in a jar and then smoke them to bring out the flavour (and enhance the buffs).
At first it can be kind of monotonous, but later Dragon Karakuri automates the acquisition process. Combined with the later game allowing you to place more Dragon Karakuri overall, simply having more racks/jars/casks removes much of the tedium. It helps that food processes no matter where you are, and thus can safely be left while you go out hunting.

As for the other major component to pre-fight prep… The thing about Dragon Karakuri is that they can be placed pretty much anywhere on the map. You may think ‘surely there are some limits’ and I did too but… No. Aside from minor proximity exclusions to prevent overlap, you can drop fast travel points or ziplines anywhere. While one does have to upgrade Dragon Pits with resources to get more Karakuri capacity, this ultimately adds to the experience. Starting off, your only options are to travel on foot, climb walls using crate Karakuri (which have a height cap), or wasting valuable wood energy on a zipline that might not even be much of a time saver.

Later, you not only have ideal routes plotted out, but built. Even normal Karakuri stick around - unless destroyed by Kemono - which allows for even brief spring hops over broken bridges. Like something borrowed from a Factory/Automation game, by the end of your time with Wild Hearts you’ll most likely have sculpted the map to suit your needs and preferences, and formed a relationship with it through said sculpting.

Ultimately, though, it does cut a lot and those craving the more intimate prep of Monster Hunter will find themselves wanting. Like World and Rise, this game is focused more on getting you into the hunt immediately.

Which is to your benefit, because weapons are a serious investment in this game. As opposed to a standard videogame ‘tech tree’ where you ascend branches but always go up, Wild Hearts allows your weapon tree to move down, sideways, diagonally and even upwards. Unlike Monster Hunter, weapons are blessed with skills which can be inherited when you make a move along the tree. The end result is that the most powerful of weapon builds require a full Mario Kart course rotation around the tree to acquire the ideal skills. And, of course, lots of builds mean lots of materials needed. It is a small blessing that even the G-Rank equivalent monsters do not succumb to HP bloat.

Armor is less of an investment, but not by much. In place of jamming armor orbs in for more defence, Wild Hearts’ upgrades manifest as ‘path’ upgrades. Choosing to spec into either Human or Kemono alignments, you can sink extra parts into a piece of armor to change the appearance, raise the defense and of course unlock certain path perks - which replace set bonuses outright. It’s not quite as in depth as weapons, but it is a nice added layer that helps set construction have a bit more thought in it.

Helping both of these is the absolute stellar visual design. Yes, it is another Koei Tecmo game set in Sengoku Japan, but they’ve taken the mythological influences to heart and created a treasure trove of designs that’re unique blends of samurai/ninja/onmyoji outfits and monster parts. Gone are sets which are overdesigned, too, so mix sets are much easier to assemble.

It’s not all sunshine and roses though, even if this is my new favourite hunting game.

Wild Hearts has a story, and while it’s not a bad story, it does have an awful habit of getting in the way. It never becomes as handholdy and intrusive as MH World’s, but it does often take up an uncomfortable amount of screenspace right after a particularly grand hunt. That you lose the ability to free hunt in a region if there’s a story quest to be started there only compounds how irritating it can be, and the post-game ‘main story’ objective simply being “hunt freely” betrays a certain degree of self-awareness.

And the hub… man. Even with fast travel points, it still feels akin to a Sengoku version of MH World’s Astera. Being a portside city, the center of Minato is taken up by a large expanse of water. Not to mention it’s built into a cliffside, so it is annoyingly vertical - so vertical that ziplines need to be daisy chained to allow swift access to higher areas without taking the stairs… Except there’s some difficulty in finding a spot for them, as the distance between walkable terrain and a suitable zipline location is often too long for a zipline to reach.

Further compounding this is the game’s numerous sidequests, which are often handed out by NPCs in the most annoying of places. This is obviously a temporary issue that goes away once you run out of sidequests, but there are a decent amount and turning them in quickly becomes tedious. Especially given their middling rewards. I was frankly relieved to be able to dismantle most of my ziplines and retain only the direct line to the player house.

Speaking of dodgy things, actually, I feel a need to bring up this game’s myriad technical issues. I normally steer clear of them, as oftentimes they can be patched out (either officially or by fans) or they’re so minor that they have no tangible effect on the experience but… I don't know. Wild Hearts has a lot of them.

Collision is either buggy or nonexistent on a lot of terrain that should be walkable, and on the flip side there are several gaping holes in the Fort map that can be traversed as usual.

What the game considers ‘acceptable’ for Karakuri placement sometimes gets muddled, and this is especially prevalent with ziplines which will often throw up a big red “Nuh uh” circle on what should be a fine location for one.

This game’s implementation of adaptive exposure (a technique used to replicate how humans get blinded by bright light and then adjust, plus how they adjust to darkness) is really really buggy. Manytimes did I exit a cave only for the screen to be entirely white for a few seconds - long enough for Amaterasu to kill me. The same goes for chromatic aberration.

And hundreds of other minor bugs. This is a wonderful game, but it is not well put together even four months and several patches after release.

Lastly… This isn’t something I’d usually bring up, and it’s sort of nullified due to how much mobility the player has, but…

The hitboxes are just straight up dogshit. Way too many Kemono have forward-lunging attacks with tank sized hitboxes, often hitting BEHIND them (which makes dodgerolls dangerous) or straight above. This is especially prominent with the Lavaback line, bipedal gorillas whose hitbox size can be measured in square miles, which only gets worse with enrage. Again, you can often iframe through these with springs or go over them with gliders, but it gets really annoying when some weapons beg for Lavaback materials and I fear a less experienced player will get massacred by them.

All in all though, if Monster Hunter is the peak of the hunting genre then Wild Hearts is the zenith. Karakuri alone are a game changer, to say nothing of all the omissions that make the overall experience much more enjoyable. This is, by far and away with no contest, my favourite hunting game and then some.
As of writing, the game isn’t done yet and is currently releasing the G-Rank equivalent expansion for free patch-by-patch, so I hope that by the game’s end of service it’s even better.

It’s a little scary to consider, but did you know that most people who’re dying can tell when it’s coming?

Sometimes it manifests as an implacable sense of doom. For others, it’s a crushing sense of anxiety. In some cases it’s even a sense of calm, and in patients who’re suffering from memory decay there’s usually a moment of clarity before infinite blackness.

I bring this up because I see a lot of parallels between the various recorded reactions to an imminent death and the motivation behind a lot of games that killed or seriously hurt their developer. In place of anxiety or dread however, the prevailing emotion is predominantly overconfidence. A belief that ‘this will be the one’, the game that catapults the developer into (or back into) the spotlight.

I’ve played a lot of those games in the last couple years, not on purpose of course.

What strikes me the most about Nuts & Bolts is that it’s verifiably a game that hurt the developer, bombed and killed the franchise… but there’s no overconfidence on display here. Rather, there’s a crushing sense of resignation. This is not a game made by overconfident, out of touch blowhards who doubled down on a horrible idea and wrote that confidence into their game (like Saints Row 2022).

Before I continue, there’s a myth I have to dispel about this game.

It’s commonly accepted that Nuts & Bolts ditched the old gameplay formula due to Rare being pressured by Microsoft, their new parent company. The story goes that Rare pitched a remake of the first game to Microsoft who dismissed it as ‘unappealing’ and pressured them to make something more marketable. After some brainstorming, they came up with Nuts & Bolts.
It’s not easy to see why people latched onto this: Miicrosoft bought them out a few years prior and this was the first Banjo game released after the purchase. When the game critically bombed, Microsoft reshuffled the company and sent them to the Kinect mines. It’s a story that’s played out 100 times prior to Nuts & Bolts and 1000 times after.

Except it’s a complete falsehood.

Rare wanted to make a Banjo-Kazooie remake after being freed from Viva Pinata and Grabbed by the Ghoulies, but they realized that the audience would’ve either seen it as a rehash or dismissed it due to the then-fading popularity of platformers. Remember, even at the time of release there were a number of critics who viewed the first game as unoriginal, Tooie as well.
Iterating on a concept that began as “Banjo vs. Gruntilda in an event”, Rare added vehicles. From there, one of the co-creators suggested they add a Lego-esque building system. The team were so confident in their decisions that they essentially got as many hands on deck as possible. It may be tempting to assume this was done by a B-team or whatever, but no; pretty much everyone involved with Banjo in the past was working on this game, and despite what some of them have said in recent years, at the time they were in love with what they made.

And almost everyone hated it. The rest is history; Banjo fans felt betrayed, the game sold so poorly that its first month sales were only 10% of Fable 2’s, Rare get sent to the mines until Sea of Thieves, the entire BK IP was just sent to the grave until Smash, blah blah blah.

This might seem like a strange foreword for a review but 1) it’s really important for me to bring this up early rather than later and 2) it’s my demented backloggd introspective on a game I have a complicated relationship with and I get to choose the subject matter.

If you’ve read my Saints Row 2022 review, I noted that despite the crippling backlash that game received, the developers stuck to their guns and the overconfidence is rife in much of the dialogue.

Here, in Nuts & Bolts, that’s decidedly not the case. I don’t actually know if the dialogue was written before the official reveal, but there are a number of lines that boil down to ‘We’re not getting another game. This is going to go poorly, everyone is going to hate it, fuck’. This game was announced in May 2008 and came out in November 2008, it had no chance and this dialogue feels like an admission of it. I so direly wish the writer wasn’t somewhat reclusive, for I’d LOVE to ask them if these lines came before or after the reveal.

This is only some of the dialogue, though.

If you’re just reading this review out of curiosity and have no interest in playing the game here’s a brief summary: Banjo and Kazooie retired, but the Lord of Games found this boring and wanted a competition, so they restored the duo to physical fitness and gave Gruntilda a drone body. Unfortunately they hated the platformer gameplay of the last two games and decided to send the three off to a jumbo-land called Showdown Town to… show down. With vehicles.

Truthfully, understanding the ‘story’ context to Nuts & Bolts isn’t required to read this review, or even enjoy it. Same applies to the actual game. It’s just a little accent for what I’m going to say next.

Much of the dialogue in this game is returning characters admitting how strange their circumstances are but trucking on anyway. While the gameplay is divisive, the writing is unquestionably Rare at their zenith. It’s not entirely to my taste, but it’s undeniably Rare: Exceptionally English, laden with innuendo/double entendre/wordplay, irreverent and completely devoid of a fourth wall.

But what’s really striking about the dialogue is the meta context behind it, again I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. Yet when characters lament that their next game probably won’t manifest before immediately digging deep into the BK for faithful references or callbacks, it makes me wonder. To me, at least, this was clearly a game written with self awareness - intentional or not.

On top of the dialogue relating to the circumstances of the game itself, there’s also a sizeable amount of lines lamenting the state of the industry. It is fantastically easy to write all of this off as ‘boomer whinging’, but it’s worth considering Rare’s circumstances. Here was a developer mostly known for making children’s games with a bit of naughty humor finding themselves in an industry that suddenly became ashamed of the childish. It wanted more adult, gorey, serious things and if they weren’t getting serious games then they had to ‘adult’ silly. Remember, this game was unveiled alongside Gears of War 2 and Fable 2, essentially both extremes of the spectrum given form. This only got worse with time, I truly don’t believe this game would’ve succeeded at any point of the 360/PS3 gen.

With this in mind, every line of dialogue in Nuts & Bolts paints a very clear picture of a team who realized too late that they were walking into a hell of their own making only to shrug and try their best to continue the series anyway, despite the inevitable.

And… God, them trying to continue the series is really where all the issues stem from, isn’t it?

To switch over to the gameplay track for a while, I really like playing Nuts & Bolts. My game preferences are vast, there’s a lot I can enjoy, but I have a real love for games that give me a bunch of tools and say ‘YOU make the solution, nerd’. It’s why I sank about 150~ hours into Tears of the Kingdom, and why I keep buying immersive sims even though they’ll never be as good as Prey 2017.

Nuts & Bolts is an entire game of that, and I mostly love it. In lieu of areas with ‘collectathons’ as the game calls them, each area is divided up into acts and within each act there are missions. These aren’t what I would call ‘missions’, they’re problems to solve. Like in academia, but fun and you can cheat.
If a character demands you cook an egg, you can simply just deploy a flamethrower as opposed to the ‘intended’ solution of grabbing it and painstakingly dipping it in lava… on the other side of the map. When the game puts you in a race, you can always just mount a few guns on your vehicle and stomp the competition into blocks and paste. Have to defeat enemies? Just attach a sticky ball to them and throw them into the ocean. Even something as simple as ‘Get an object to a point’ gives you a ton of options with no ‘wrong’ way to approach them.

What really accentuates the gameplay are the levels. There aren’t any ‘samey’ levels and each map has its own gimmicks that’re leveraged incredibly well in missions. Parts that I thought were simply set dressing would end up providing, say, scuba diving or tightrope walking or trench racing. There are a lot of surprises and the missions keep up the variety well into the endgame. I’d frequently beeline from my plotted course to go unlock a new map whenever L.O.G dispensed an unlock orb for them, and every time I replay this game I get sad when the map unlocks end.

One mission in particular stands out to me: You’re tasked with bringing coconuts over to a hopper in order to accumulate points. The ‘correct’ approach is to do just that, but… all storage parts are too small to accommodate enough, you’re on a timer, and sticky balls will only pick up 1-3 before getting full.
You can just grab the hopper and bring it to the coconuts, clear the mission with impunity. When I first discovered it I was so in awe of the solution that all I could do was laugh, and thankfully it’s not the only mission with this kind of skip.

The enjoyment isn’t limited to missions either. Showdown Town, the hub, is divided into segments and most of them are inaccessible at the start of the game. As you repeatedly whomp Gruntilda in boss battles, more items are bolted onto the cart you use to traverse the hub and thus more areas are unlocked. With more areas come more items to use in building for missions. It’s a very satisfying loop that, whenever I replay, usually sucks me in wholesale.

Praise must also be offered to the game’s length and pacing: While you are allowed to tackle things in a relatively freeform order after the first few areas, unlocks are tied to Jiggy count and thus progression is uniform even if the means to do it aren’t. More Jiggies means more items and areas, so there’s not really a way to waste time in this game. New stuff comes in at a fairly acceptable pace, though there is a bit of a gap between Banjoland and the Terrarium (the penultimate and final normal areas respectively) where little is ‘happening’ so to speak. It’s fortunately not very long, and soon after the player starts unlocking Super parts which allow for some truly compact, empowered builds.

I’d also feel bad if I got this deep into the review and didn’t mention the presentation. This game came out in 2008 just as gaming was starting to become brown and beige, but it’s vivid in every aspect. Character designs are rife with colour, maps have beautiful palettes that change with each act, and even all of the vehicle parts you can pick up are vibrant. Grant Kirkhope has spoken at length about how much trouble he had with this game’s soundtrack, but the end result was truly fantastic and even 15 years later I still find myself humming the Showdown Town theme.

Lastly, the building itself is intuitive and satisfying. Eschewing more complicated physics systems in favour of arcadey ones means that you can get away with some truly abominable builds, and there’s plenty of room for more expressive and out-there ones. It’s not a difficult system and one hardly needs to understand weight distribution to get a plane off the ground, but understanding airflow and placing propellers correctly will make it go faster. That sort of thing.

If you’re unfamiliar with the game but familiar with its reception, you may be wondering why it’s so divisive. You may even be thinking ‘Mira this sounds great, what’s the deal with it?’ or something to that effect. Unfortunately, this isn’t something I can feign ignorance on. Despite my praise of it, I am keenly aware of why it gets the reception it does.

A very common criticism levelled at N&B’s gameplay is that it’s ‘repetitive’, and this is perhaps one of the most fascinating criticism I’ve ever heard because… In a sense, it’s Schrodinger’s Criticism. It’s simultaneously true and false.

On one hand, it’s true because while the game does offer you a robust building system with lots of parts and thus lots of options, you’re often placed in situations where the convenient cheaty solution ends up being very similar across missions. In most cases, you can get by just fine using either a plane with lots of power behind it (as you’ll go so fast that you won’t need to weigh yourself down with fuel) or a helicopter with a sticky ball and egg gun attached (for carrying and fighting, as helicopters offer so much manoeuvrability compared to anything else that it’s kind of alarming, they just lack in speed).
Land-based vehicles and boats just don’t offer as much versatility. The feeling of repetition comes from these endlessly similar ‘ideal solutions’ as a result; you are at once completely free and utterly pigeonholed.

On the other hand, though, it’s somewhat false. Almost every mission has an intended solution and it very blatantly nudges you in the direction using both the pre-mission cutscene and the description. You’re often told to create, for example, ‘a fast amphibious vehicle with combat functionality’ or ‘a flying vehicle that can attack or defend’, to name two examples.
While the game was designed with variety in mind, it will often tell you the construction required to properly clear a level. This is not a game where you have to play ‘guess the solution’, it’s on display in most levels.

Except… It’s actually significantly harder to go along with what the game tells you to do. This isn’t an exaggeration: You will have an infinitely worse time doing what you’re told for various reasons.

For starters, the opponent AI in races cheats. Surprisingly, not in the traditional way. There’s no rubberbanding. Instead they merely ignore the game’s physics, often making impossible turns and decelerating faster than should be possible. On rough terrain, they’re not beholden to speed or handling penalties. It’s particularly noticeable in the water and one icy mission later in the game, as they completely ignore how the environment should affect their handling and turn corners normally. As a result, it’s just… It’s so much easier to build a flying vehicle and bypass the AI.

Other mission types aren’t exempt from this. While the physics are decent, oftentimes the vehicles you’re expected to make will suffer on terrain that’s unavoidably in between you and your objective. This really rears its ugly head on any mission where you’re suggested to make a ground transport and go over hills or dangerous terrain. Or worse, when the recommended path leads you through mobs that are nonthreatening individually but can quickly mob and destroy your vehicle’s vital parts. By the time you have the parts/armor to just ignore them, the game is almost over.

Or you could just build a flying vehicle.

Lastly… Look, I don’t want to be too outwardly mean because I know a lot of passion went into this project, but a lot of the intended solutions just plain suck.
You want me to partake in a trench race using a ground vehicle? In a game that hates driving on inclines and has awful collision with other races? Haha, no. Plane.
Run the gauntlet through a near-literal minefield while protecting cargo? Haha no, helicopter with ball.
Ascend a coiling staircase using a vehicle with only sails? Haha no, glider.

In every single case, there is no reason to bother engaging with the mechanics. It will only produce a frustrating, tedious and asinine experience that at times feels actively spiteful. Especially in the boss battles, my strategy for which has now evolved to ‘pepper Gruntilda with torpedoes until she quits’. They’re just awfully designed, both from the perspective of an end user and a design perspective. I hope it’s not uncontroversial to say that your missions should incentivize… actually playing them, rather than cheesing them.
And yet, cheesing them is such a monkey’s paw, because it leads to the aforementioned feeling of repetition. When you’re approaching every mission from the air with mostly the same vehicles, the game gets utterly banal. So much so that the Showdown Town segments become inherently enjoyable just by virtue of not being straightforward plane/chopper rides. It’s REALLY not helped by the Terrarium being extremely vertical, all but demanding you approach everything this way.

But honestly? This isn’t even the worst part of the gameplay for me. No, the worst part is the L.O.G’s Choice missions. In lieu of freeform customization, these missions give you a preset vehicle and give you a task.

They suck. Just… God, they’re awful. They showcase everything wrong with this game with a spotlight, underglow and even the addition of sign language and screen readers so you absolutely understand just how bad a lot of the core is when it’s not approached a certain way. If you’re going for a more tangible form of completion rather than 100% (i.e, clear all levels), they’re not optional either. Some acts are almost entirely composed of them.

There’s a reason why, up above, I said I only mostly love the game.

To cap it off, we need to return to the topic of the intended audience.

Just to recap, N&B came out as a children’s game in a market that was rapidly beginning to demand ‘adult’ games, and debuted on a console that had a mostly teenage/adult install base. The prior games were platformers that launched on the N64, ostensibly a more ‘childish’ console.

Several of the staff who worked on this game have said that while it was a misstep, they do view it as an earnest continuation of the series rather than a weird spinoff. This isn’t a bad idea in theory, but… Let’s go back to the dialogue.

Among the sombre acceptance of the game’s fate, puns, dirty jokes, and usual BK writing is a somewhat shocking amount of digs at the old games. While L.O.G’s insults are expected given his character, a lot of other characters poke fun at and seem to outright scorn the previous games. Rare are no strangers to self-deprecating humor but here it feels more like deliberate spite. As if it’s claiming to be a love letter to the old games while kicking them whenever possible. You may view hardcore BK fans who disown the game as irrational and overzealous, but why should they feel any different? The game certainly disowned them.

I honestly do like N&B despite all of its issues, it’s why I’ve been replaying it every few years since release. I even think it has a lot of the BK spirit despite the shift to vehicles, but I can’t in good faith call it a good-willed continuation of N&B. There’s too much regret, spite and weirdness going on in the nitty gritty that make it feel like it came from the myth; as though it were forced out by Microsoft.

But no.

In the same way that you have to consciously choose to engage with this game’s frustrating bits as a way to get the ‘intended experience’, Rare chose this.

Perhaps the Kinect mines weren’t punishment, but penance?

Do you know what a crane is? Not the bird, the machine. They're operated via ropes, chains and/or pulleys, and at their core they’re actually composed of several smaller machines working in tandem.. Most of the time they're used for carrying heavy loads, and they can get pretty tall. Naturally, the saying 'the bigger they are, the harder they fall' applies. You can reinforce them with pneumatic stabilizers, supports, counterweights and all that jazz, needing more and more as it gets taller. Unfortunately the reinforcement you can offer is limited, meanwhile the loads and height are theoretically infinite. Eventually, it'll fall over, or something will break.

In many ways, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (WOTR from here on in) is a crane, and the load is Owlcat's lofty ambitions. Even as I'm writing this, I'm not sure whether the game succeeds in hoisting them high or not.

There's a lot to this game. Even if we just spoke about the story in a vacuum, there are an incredible amount of plot threads - major and minor - running through and parallel to the main story that I can't really summarise them in a snappy tl;dr. Factoring in story-altering Mythic Paths, side quests, companion story arcs and all the mechanics? We'd be here for a while. At the time of this review my hour count is around 100~. That's not repeated playthroughs, it's just one, and I am well aware I missed a lot of content.

The first thing you see upon clicking "New Game" and selecting a difficulty is an infinitely complex character creator. This is both an omen of what's to come, and a filter. It seems simple at first, merely asking you for a portrait and race... Then there's everything else. Merely selecting something as simple as "Paladin" brings up a million options: What's your domain? Deity? Pick some feats. What's your character's background? Are they a normal member of their race or something else? Distribute some stat points, now some skill points. These aren't complaints, the complexity is great. There's a good vessel here for roleplaying and once you're familiar with the system the creation process is super intuitive.

There... are two problems with both of those - the roleplaying and the complexity - that we'll get to later. You may also notice that I specified "once you're familiar", and that's when the game's first real downside comes in: This game is not newcomer friendly.
While the game mercifully offers respecs for a fair price, the system is far from intuitive. For starters, levelling up does not immediately level up your chosen class. No, you have to pick the class again to level it up. This seems simple, right? And it is!
The problem begins to rear its head when multiclassing comes into play, and the game begins bringing up concepts such as Caster Level.
See, unlike in many other RPGs with classes/jobs/vocations/what have you, multi-classing is remarkably easy. Merely pick another class on level up, right?
When you read the phrase ‘caster level’, your assumption may be that it refers to ‘level of the caster’. I did too, and I’ve spoken to many people who made the same mistake. No, ‘caster level’ specifically refers to the level of the class from which a spell is derived.
Once you understand this, it’s clear as day. Until then… You may be tempted to put 1-3 levels into Sorcerer while playing as a Paladin to get some extra damage spells. You can do this, nothing is stopping you, but those spells will eternally be weak if they scale with caster level. Compounding this is the exceptionally low level cap: Only 20 levels are available to you, and they’re easily wasted while dicking around.
Again, the complexity on display is not a bad thing, and respecs are cheap - especially with how much loot you get. It’s just part of a larger issue with this game and onboarding, but we can talk about that when I cover gameplay.
As for the questing, I’ll say this: There are many games on Steam tagged as ‘choices matter’. Some of them in jest, some of them sincerely. Having played many of them, and many other games on other platforms/storefronts that purport to have ‘meaningful choices’:

Wrath of the Righteous is perhaps one of the only games I can think of where a lot of your choices have tangible, meaningful impacts on the story. Not just the main story, but side stories too. Even as late as the finale, things were popping up in response to dialogue choices I’d picked 40-50 hours prior.
This is not the modern RPG style of ‘choices matter’ either. You are not free to say and do whatever until the designated MAKE CHOICE prompts appear. Most things you do will come back to haunt you - for better or worse - later on. These appear early in the game and just keep going. An overarching theme of the game is that while your control over your own destiny is debatable, the consequences of your decisions are yours alone. Hell, NPCs even comment on your deity if it’s applicable.
Perhaps most impressively is that many of these choices are not binary, and oftentimes the player is given the choice to bail on something. Indeed, my pursuit of Lichdom in the main story was met with apprehension and a not-insignificant number of my allies begged me to stop as I cast off my humanity and defiled the dead. The option to bail was always there, yet I chose not to take it anyway. When the option was no longer there, and I felt horrified by the scorn thrust upon me or the consequences of my inhumanity, all I could think was…

I chose this.

The plot’s general outline is the same for everyone: The Worldwound has been dumping out demons for a century and you have to solve the issue. What really sets WOTR apart from other games and especially other RPGs is how much control you have over defining your character’s motives. Are they doing this as a bare-fanged power grab? Are they a zealot? Will they take extreme measures and cast off their humanity to win? How many ‘By any means necessary’ declarations do they have in them? Or are they forced into it?

The decision is in your hands. This is not The Witcher or FFXIV or your favourite story where the protagonist’s motivations are handed to you on a platter with no choice for a different serving.

Accentuating the story is the Mythic Path system; having received a mysterious but malleable grand power from an unknown source, you’re granted the choice to shape it how you will. These have an impact both on your character as a mechanical entity, but also the story. The power afforded to you and the shape it takes can act as a key, and like in real life not all keys fit all locks.
I played a Lich, so I can’t comment on the others, but I thoroughly enjoyed the personal story I witnessed. Playing as a Neutral Evil character, I decided to forsake my humanity and anything else in pursuit of closing the Worldwound. At first it was simply following the course of pragmatism, but eventually that wasn’t enough. Curious research gave way to new goals and with those came opportunities to command the dead.
But this is not Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the opposition are not idle. As they became more dangerous, I was met with no choice but to rise and meet the challenge. My allies whispered in my ear and begged me to reconsider, imploring me to stop what I was doing and hold onto my humanity.
I did not heed their advice.

The final act of the game was not triumphant. Iomedae’s glorious crusade had become a march of the dead, and many of my Good aligned allies deserted. The titular righteousness had deserted, and there were more corpses in my army than mortals by the time the credits rolled. Indeed, even party members deserted me for this. Many of whom I cared a great deal for, and enjoyed the company of.

By the end of the game, my allies were amoral fools, soulless pragmatists, and the eternal silence of death hanging over my base. This was both my punishment and my reward. I said up above that I was met with no choice, but the game was not going to give me the luxury of holding onto that particular delusion; my choices led me there. I, at every point, had the chance to stop.

WOTR’s strength in writing, however, comes from the characters more than the overall plot. Surprisingly for a game with a plot on such a grand scale, it is primarily driven by the machinations of its cast. This game reaches into topics I didn’t expect from an AA game and handles them with surprising nuance. Indeed, the characters themselves are multifaceted and people I’d dismissed as ‘boring’ or ‘one-dimensional’ turned out to be… well, not. Motivations and beliefs are laid out quite clearly, either upfront or through breadcrumbs, and by the end of the game only one party member (Nenio) struck me as shallow or one-dimensional.

Perhaps this game’s biggest strength is that it avoids a pitfall many other party-based games stumble into and never climb out of: There is no ‘The [Trait] Guy’. I’ve been playing RPGs - CRPGs in particular - since I had my own computer, and even the best of them have a party that can be boiled down to “the pragmatic one”, “the just one”, “the wildcard”, etc etc. Whenever those characters broke from their established ‘role’ it was always an out of character moment meant to show the gravity of the situation.

There’s none of that here. Characters you usually agree with will oftentimes make a statement or suggestion you find abominable, and sometimes the party members you think are assholes will be right. This is only compounded by interactions between party members, wherein the dynamics and ideals clash in a way that feels natural. I am being deliberately vague so as to avoid spoilers, but around act 3 the game truly took me off guard by having me go “Ah shit, [party member I hate] is actually dead on the money” a few times.

This luxury is not exclusive to the party, with many of the main and supporting cast being just as fleshed out. If a character has a portrait, they’re guaranteed to bring nuances and surprises to the table, but even many of the ‘faceless’ NPCs are nothing to scoff at. While the game does have its one-note characters, it’s rare for the more substantial storylines to feature tropey characters and the vast majority of the game’s story is spent dealing with characters who are a realistic composition of beliefs, traumas, ideals and neuroses.

Except Nenio. Fuck Nenio. Worst CRPG character.

We need to talk about Nenio. Not her as a character, but what she represents.

Do you remember my question about cranes? Well, I asked it to get you thinking about the process of lifting weights, and how you just cannot lift certain things without the mechanism - or you - starting to buckle. It’s a basic application of the laws of physics

Yeah, well, WOTR is a crane and it’s trying to lift Owlcat’s ambitions. For as much as I just gushed over the game, it’s definitely straining to hold them aloft. This game aspires to be and do so much that it was impossible for it to pull it all off cleanly.

One thing WOTR glaringly aspires to be is funny. It’s why I mentioned Nenio; she’s emblematic of the issue, often torpedoing serious scenes with annoying quips and dragging other (better) characters into her irritating one-note gimmick. That she’s a genuinely unpleasant person without any justification does not help.

Unfortunately, Nenio is not the only part of this problem. I’m not a particularly big fan of stories trying to be funny in the middle of a setpiece with heavy gravitas and a serious tone - it’s why later Final Fantasy XIV content irked me - and this game does it a lot. Not quite as often as FFXIV or, god forbid, Marvel movies, but there were more than a few eye-rollers. It’s particularly grating to be in the middle of a fairly grim, serious dungeon only for that one whimsical song to start playing and inform me that I’m going to bear witness to some utterly banal attempts at humor.
Perhaps the worst part is that WOTR is a funny game, but it’s often in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments and it rarely occurs when the game is trying. Interactions between party members have more intentional and accidental humor than most of the designed Funny Scenes.

…You know, to be entirely honest for a moment: I’ve been writing this review for two days. It’s the 4th of June right now and I finished it near about the 1st. In all this time, I’ve been putting off talking about the gameplay. As a general rule worth keeping in mind; I don’t like being unceasingly negative to things that don’t deserve it. It’s easier for me to rag endlessly on Warframe or Daemon x Machina or Daemonhunters or MASS Builder or just… any game that’s very quantifiably bad through and through. But for works clearly made with passion, love and an earnest ambition to be amazing, I struggle.

And… so does WOTR, once you look past the writing.

‘Adaptation’ is a word described by the Cambridge Dictionary as meaning:

the process of changing to suit different conditions:

In the context of videogames, adaptation often means taking a plot or mechanic from another medium. Tabletop games, as massive mechanical behemoths that have a few hundred interlocking systems regardless of rulebook, are often subject to this to avoid players being overwhelmed or turned off by the complexity. When Shadowrun was adapted to videogame format with the Shadowrun Returns trilogy, much was excised and cut down for the sake of a better videogame experience. When Warhammer 40k made its close-to-tabletop debut with Gladius, naturally much was trimmed down or streamlined both to prevent these issues appearing and to keep the game from being ‘outdated’ as newer editions come out.

With this is in mind, I would not say WOTR has ‘adapted’ the Pathfinder systems. Rather, it has adopted them nearly wholesale and merely provided a GUI for many actions. This, in a vacuum, is not a bad thing. There is a critical lack of CRPGs that’re willing to hit you with complex systems, often going for more palatable one so as to prevent the onboarding process alienating people.

No, the problem comes from how the system interacts with the more videogame-y numbers.

Let’s take combat spellcasting for example. In XCOM or Shadowrun or Divinity Original Sin, you merely click it and the game resolves the calculation.

Here? We have dice rolls, the staple of any tabletop.

There are a few dice rolls…

There are a lot of dice rolls.

When casting a spell, first you must roll to make a concentration check and then roll for the spell to succeed, which is two rolls to begin with. Then you must roll to actually hit, which is a roll calculated against a target’s armor class and spell resistance - so two more separate rolls, with the latter being affected by the caster’s spell penetration. From there, targets will make a fortitude and/or will save to resist further effects. Any of these can fail in sequence, and every single roll is affected by some other stat.

The overreliance of Dice Rolls is, in itself, not bad. The actual problem is how many additional bonuses are heaped on, owing to the fact that this is a videogame which can deal with far bigger numbers than a D20 can. “Characters make saving rolls'' wouldn't be an issue if enemies did not regularly appear with AC stats of around 50~ or higher and had access to feats and traits that give them bonuses to saving throws.

Perhaps in an admission of their own stat bloat, the devs quietly sneak you armor and shields with sizeable AC ratings early on. I wish I could say ‘these are just boons, you don’t really need them’ but the game spikes hard and fast. It is perhaps an unstated rule of videogames that any scenario where a token force defends against a swarm be populated by trash mobs, but WOTR offers you no such mercy and makes sure to dump a horde on you every now and then - with one such encounter taking place about 6 hours in.

In other RPGs (beside looters), minmaxing is seen as a self-imposed diversion and rarely considered mandatory for the main path. The focus is, after all, on playing a role. In WOTR, it’s considered standard, at least on Normal and above. This isn’t a game where you can safely dick around, pick some traits that seem fun, and experiment in the course of a playthrough. No, you have to commit or else you’ll eventually wall against an enemy with an AC/deflect value you simply cannot surpass.
In other RPGs, some options are simply “not-good” relative to the overall difficulty. In WOTR, some options are just outright bad and it can take a few hours of playtime to realise something’s off. Branching off of this, while the aforementioned class system does let you multiclass with ease, it is in fact a horrible idea to ‘try out’ other classes without knowing what you’re doing. XP is at a premium in this game and there’s only 20 levels, with a lot of classes having very powerful 20th level abilities.

Let’s say you’re a Sorcerer, and you decide that being squishy in melee is dull and that you want a level in Fighter to get a weapon feat. Valid on paper, and maybe even on the tabletop, but consider: The game expects you to be getting stronger on an upward level most of the time. In taking a level in Fighter, your caster level is not raising and you’re not getting any new spells. While you do have access to the weapon you chose, you have no additional weapon feats to augment it and having spent a few levels in Sorcerer means you’re likely missing out on that sweet Basic Attack Bonus and the bonus damage from Strength - a dump stat for Sorcerers.
The cruellest part of this system is that sometimes, multi-classing only a few levels into something is a valid choice. Referred to as ‘dipping’, many build guides will point you towards picking up 1-3 levels in something like Mutagen Warrior for the sake of a hefty buff. But, as with most of this game, it can only be known ahead of time.

This further extends to your party members. ‘Canon’ party members (i.e, provided by the story and not made via the mercenary system) are best left on autolevel, as trying to experiment with them will only continue the cycle of hurting. It is unfortunately a bad idea to build for a versatile party, with it often being a safer choice to simply make everyone a monoclass specialist and then rotate them out as needed.
The sole exception are party members who come with multiple classes; most notably Regill, who (as per the Hellknight lore) starts with levels in Fighter Armiger and Hellknight and a proficiency in the gnome hooked hammer. Refuse to respec them at your peril.

So we have stat bloat, restrictive class building, endless dice rolls that can make combat feel miserable and sharp/sudden difficulty spikes. Surely there can’t be more?

Sigh… Alright, let’s talk about weapons and feats for a second. At the start of the game, you’ll be given the option to pick a feat. Among these is Weapon Proficiency, and clicking it unfurls a MASSIVE list of weapon types. Everything from simple shit like spears and longswords to exotic weapons like curved elven blades, the estoc, and many more.

If you’ve played other CRPGs that let you pick a weapon archetype, you might think that speccing into one in character creation will simply give you one of those weapons, right?

Wrong, unfortunately. You get proficiency in that weapon type but are otherwise stuck with the pre-generated loot. Which, to your potential dismay, will likely not conclude any of the more exotic weapon types. If you spec into Longswords or Bows or Spears or anything common you’ll reap instant results, but good luck if you picked an Elven Curved Blade feat.

I bring this up because it really exemplifies WOTR’s habit of letting you make explicitly wrong gameplay choices that actively hamper the experience. These options aren’t inherently bad, and certainly serve metagaming/repeat players, but for a first timer they’re blatant traps.
Traps… traps… traps… Alright let’s talk about character select forcing.

Almost every major level has traps in them. Traps are disarmed by characters with high Trickery, and like every other stat in this game, the requirements to safely disarm them skyrocket over time. Unless you yourself have Trickery as a class skill, you will inevitably be forced into bringing a character who does have it. You might think this is common sense, and it is!

But you only have 6 party member slots. Including yourself, that’s 5. Add in a trap disarmer, that’s 4. Ah, but you absolutely need a dedicated healer as well. We’re down to 3… God, you need a tank as well, so that’s 2 left. You will inevitably need a caster as well to deal with enemies who are nigh unbeatable in melee, so you have one free slot left-

Wait, do I have ranged attacks? Ah shit.

Early in the game you’re given Seelah, a Paladin who will in most paths stay with you. She can tank a lot of damage, hits respectably, and carries a number of useful buffs and debuffs if you keep her as a Paladin. You get Camellia soon after, and she’s a ‘dodge tank’ who can be useful but will otherwise melt to a well placed hit. But hey, at least she sticks around!
A short while later, you’re given Lann or Wenduag. Strong physical ranged attackers who can burst down anything. After them, you’ll likely run into Woljif who is both a rogue and someone with high trickery. A few random events later and Nenio (regrettably) appears as a dedicated offensive caster. Blah blah blah, Daeran and Ember appear as your healers.

I tell you this because to me it is the game admitting that you shouldn’t really bother on a varied or interesting party and instead opt for a rigidly defined one. You can try to get by without the archetypes I listed above, but good luck doing that. There are only so many potions, scrolls and lockpicks in the game world, yet spells and trickery are functionally infinite.

Everything I listed above is a contributing factor to the game’s worst part: Combat length. My god, fights are long.

This isn’t so bad in the early game, where the more methodical pacing of Act 1 leads to fewer fights overall. Trash fights are quick, and more substantial ones are long but not annoyingly so. Unfortunately this goes out the window with Act 1’s final area, which features a gauntlet of fights against decently strong enemies and each fight lasts a while. To the point where it was surprising to find the final fight only took a few minutes, but in this sole instance there is a good plot reason.

As it happens, Act 1’s finale was an omen for the future. WOTR has an incredible amount of combat, and as early as Act 2 even trash fights begin to take a lot of time. Due to stat bloat, a surge in enemy counts, and the introduction of enemies with resistances that often nullify a certain party member, they can DRAG. Unlike say, Shadowrun: Hong Kong (to use one example), the number of fights per area is rarely if ever in the singledigits. Main story levels have a nasty habit of throwing you into a fight and then placing another one about a hallway away… Like six or seven times. By Act 3 I was already sick of fighting, having done too many fights that took an age even when they were against ‘trash’ enemies (who still had high AC and access to debilitating spells). This game isn't short, my first run took about 105 hours and that's with missing a lot.

So, after deciding that I simply hated one aspect of the entire game, I lowered the difficulty and switched to auto mode. It just stopped being fun past a certain point, and I was reassured that Acts 4 and 5 are much worse on that front. This game is merciful in that regard, you can turn off or dial down things that irritate you.

Except resting, a mechanic which I grew to hate so much that I nearly got into modding just to remove it.

As you adventure through WOTR’s world, you accumulate fatigue and become… well, Fatigued. Continue further and you become Exhausted. Both debuffs inflict major stat penalties, and annoyingly they accrue uncomfortably fast. You can rest for free to cleanse them, but doing so builds up Abyssal corruption which… debuffs you significantly, and then kills you. Thus demanding a rest at a safe zone.

Your mileage may vary, but I just can’t stand this system. On such a huge world map, it feels as though it serves little purpose than to arbitrarily restrict exploration. It only gets worse in Acts 3 and 5 - which see a significant expansion to the explorable space on the map - and it felt like I was becoming exhausted every few steps. This sadly isn’t something you can just power through, either; Exhausted debuffs most major stats by -6. Combine that with stat bloat and it’ll just turn your entire party into invalids.

Lastly on the gameplay side, there’s the Crusade mode. Some would described it as a poor man’s Heroes Of Might And Magic, and they’d be right. I understand the developer’s intent, they clearly wanted you as a crusader to actually partake in the crusade, but the execution is just awful. While it supplements lots of other systems (including the fantastic writing, which it provides more of), the actual gameplay of Crusades is a boring numbers-game version of chess where you have little meaningful choice beyond “Spam archers and a tanky melee unit, have your General dump spells on the enemy”. This does not get better in Act 5.

It’s rather telling that while the use of mods to skip certain elements (like rest) is contentious, the most common response to “I don’t like Crusades” is “Get a mod to skip the fights”. There is an option to automate it in the base game, but this locks you out of research projects, several powerful items and even the resolution to some character arcs. It’s a bad option, don’t pick it.

Much of my vitriol for Crusades comes from how interwoven they are with the rest of the game. There is some exceptional writing in the Council events but to get them requires Crusade progress. Want to explore the map? Your Crusaders have to clear the way first. Want to progress the story? Yup, Crusades. Because of the aforementioned issues with the built-in Crusade auto-mode, and the sheer amount of the map gated off by Demons, this truly is a mechanic you cannot safely avoid engaging with safely without mods.

It’s a shame, too, because the actual Crusade in the story leads to some of its best bits. Even with a demigod at the helm, you’re not immune to logistics, morale and politics. How you navigate those minefields can influence the outcome of character arcs and even the ending, to say nothing of how enjoyable the council discussions on each issue are. They even react to your mythic path, like the Lich path featuring events involving necromancers, vampires and followers of Urgathoa. I just wish they were attached to an actually enjoyable system.

This review begins with an analogy about cranes, and the reason my mind homed in on that particular comparison is because cranes are the sum of their parts. One part being out of line or faulty can (literally) bring everything else crashing down. WOTR is an incredibly ambitious game, probably the most ambitious CRPG ever made and released, but… I don’t actually know if it can support its own ambitions.

Again, the writing and characterization (not Nenio) are fucking phenomenal, and mythic paths are obscenely cool. The voice acting is solid (except Nenio) and the game does an excellent job at making you feel like part of a well-realized world. It is perhaps one of the most painstakingly accurate depictions of a tabletop system outside of actual tabletop sims like Talisman or Tabletop Simulator, and…

I just hate actually playing it, you know? The combat is good in theory, but it’s a huge drag and it felt like my punishment for chasing the story. The writing itself started to feel like a reward for suffering.

“Congrats on suffering through like 9 Shadow Volaries and cultists who have a ton of crit-heavy weapons, here’s a great rumination on whether power as an entity can be inherently good or evil.”

Ultimately, I still recommend WOTR. Mods and difficulty settings can alleviate most of your grievances, and the writing is worth whatever unavoidable grievances you may have. Hell, you might even like the things I hate! I’ll probably replay it in the future because my curiosity about the other mythic paths outweighs my aversion to the gameplay. I wish I could’ve praised the story and writing more, but there’s a lot to spoil on both the quest and character fronts.

WOTR is a bright shining star of CRPGs and it’ll be hard to top it in the future, but like every bright light… that sure is a dark shadow over there, huh- No wait, it’s just Nenio.