Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods

  

Game Review: Immortals - Fenyx Rising
Game Review: Immortals - Fenyx Rising Score: +12 /-5 Underrated open world game done right and nowadays available for a song. Pick it up from Ubisoft directly as they sometimes have discounts that can make it cheaper than buying through Steam or the Epic Games Store. The vibe is about fun that's a little offbeat, a little irreverent, and a creative yet respectful take on the Greek myths. A rare combination especially in the contemporary climate of often just butchering old IPs for radical novelty. +1 In terms of visuals, graphics performance, and storytelling cutscenes, it has aged very well and in fact superior to many games that have come since (especially performance/optimization). +1 A lot of builds are possible including potion-spamming so you can use your skills more (which cost Stamina). This can make the game feel too easy but you can adjust the difficulty, making it accessible for a wide range of players. -1 Dodging and blocking can be unreliable against certain enemies. Fortunately this is not strictly a soulslike (although it can be played like one) so there are other ways to clear encounters or even cheese them if necessary. -1 Enemies can be cheesed because they don't reset their health when they reset their positions. And especially as you can shoot an arrow an extraordinary distance and it will still reliably hit because of an early ability to guide arrow shot (even around corners).+1 Massive amount of redundant resources in optional POI content Even just a fraction of the game world is enough to unlock most of the skills and variations. Therefore you are free to ignore a lot of content and do it later as part of New Game Plus if you want to focus on the main story.Including the POIs, just the main game zones can span well over 100 hours. After unlocking all upgrades, upgrade currency is still valuable because you can use them to trade for more power creep bonuses. If you run out of POIs that you are willing to do, you can do Ubisoft Connect's weekly missions to get more currency (or collect cosmetics). This is in contrast to many other games that also have a wealth of "content" in POIs but ultimately you "must" do everything in order to get the final character development such as buffs from achievement titles based on strictly finishing all content, even the stuff you might really dislike such as harder platforming. And there is repeated content in the "live service" component so if you like the IP and just want to keep playing in the game world, you can instead of suddenly running out of things to do. It's quite grindy but has a range of difficulty over the week in tasks, and you definitely earn your purchases of cosmetics with the currency you earn.-1 There are very few monster variants and so many puzzles that the game can feel more like a puzzle solving game than an action RPG. Some of the puzzles are quite badly designed and irritating. -1 For example, some outright difficult platforming. -1 Some feel more random luck requiring an excessive amount of retrying. For example, you may have to golf a rock past fast moving pillars that can block the object. Fortunately, you don't have to do all of them since the same rewards are generally available in some other way or ultimately don't matter so much (e.g., Hermes's side quests involving difficult platforming).Some Vaults mandatory to complete Hermes's Heroic Tasks on the board at the base do not contain hard puzzles so there's a lot of puzzle content you can skip. Mostly those will be combat related.WARNING: The main quest to defeat Typhon does contain at least one medium-hard platforming puzzle although it might be possible to brute-force it with healing potions after each damaging section you fail to jump over properly. +1 Difficulty levels actually help you with some of the puzzles, e.g., puzzles with timers. +1 Power creep is incremental, not RNG based to artificially extend grind.You are grinding but also constantly seeing progress either in your stats or your collection of cosmetics.There is a lot of content you could potentially do (plus Ubisoft Connect live service tasks which are theoretically unlimited but paced out over days and weeks), so there's a lot of power creep possible. This could trivialize combat but at the same time there are enhanced difficulties to increase the challenge again. +1 There are many ways to get the same armor set and additional copies just give you cosmetic options so you generally do not need to succeed at specific challenges.+1 Live service done right -- keeps the game relevant yet without FOMO urgency.Through Ubisoft Connect tasks you can also get certain upgrade currencies without having to do any in-game puzzles at all.Alternatively you can earn currency with easy weekly and daily tasks to buy more cosmetics. +1 The open world allows you to do and find side quest things before the quest is started, and explicitly recognizes when you have done them already with contextual dialog. +1 The world is packed with not just things to gather but points of interest. In many contemporary games, these are just copy-pasted POIs such as catching bugs or extremely simple puzzles repeated around the map (e.g., Starfield, Nightingale). But in Fenyx, puzzle points of interest are often based on Greek myths including less recognizable ones, and explained with commentary from Prometheus and Zeus (all voiced). Further, they are all solved differently and can take some time to solve, so it feels like a genuine break from exploration and traversal. +1 Milestone events feel epic. With story-light exploration-heavy games, often the story feels short and the part where you "write your own story" by exploring the land feels weak. However, here there are certain milestone events you can earn such as defeating all four corrupted heroes and earning a heroic statue of yourself amid theirs, in an emotionally uplifting scene. This adds to the sense of accomplishment from "simply exploring" and doing optional things. +1 Humor mostly works although a few lines from Zeus do fall flat. The idea of the gameplay being a story told by narrators provides an interesting excuse to fill otherwise quiet exploration with dialog about frank takes on Greek myths, which made me actually pause to listen to. This is instead of what other games often do which is have an NPC talk at you through some kind of comlink and more often than not your protagonist doesn't respond. There is also a meta theme to the narration (e.g., Zeus as a father figure) so it's not just a straight lore dump with occasional reinterpretations of myths. +1 The story is actually interesting, Not as predictable compared to plots where the right path is straightforward and good or deliberately morally gray. Instead it draws on the Greek myths and lets the gods be their complicated bickering selves while still moving toward the initially straightforward ending of defeating the final villain Typhon. This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

How to Stop Ratting Without Killing PvP in Extraction Shooters
Section 1: Why Oppose Ratting? Extraction shooters are inherently dangerous. Ambushes, stealth, stalking, patient marksmanship, and choosing favorable engagements are all legitimate forms of PvP. A player who hunts other players, steals their gear, or waits for an advantageous moment to attack is still participating in the core risk-and-reward loop of an extraction shooter. This proposal is not opposed to that kind of PvP. "Ratting" is a broad term, and players use it to describe everything from cautious ambushes to prolonged camping. The problem this proposal is concerned with is more specific: static, low-participation ratting, where a player minimizes their involvement in the rest of the match and waits for other players to create a profitable opportunity. This can take several forms. A player might camp a known extraction point, sit at a chokepoint, wait near a valuable objective, or position themselves along a predictable route between an objective and extraction. The common element is not simply that the player is hiding. It is that the player can spend much of the match avoiding its risks and objectives while waiting for other players to generate the opportunity they want. In many extraction games, extraction points are effectively ungated: anyone can leave at any time, regardless of whether they completed a map objective, cleared an AI enclave, collected valuable items, or otherwise contributed to the match. This creates an opportunity for a player to ignore much of the game's intended gameplay and still potentially walk away with some of its best rewards. The distinction is important: Active or mobile PvP: A player moves through the map, hunts other players, chooses when and where to engage, takes risks, gathers information, and has to survive the consequences of those decisions. They may deliberately avoid PvE objectives, but they are still actively participating in the match. Static ratting: A player minimizes engagement with the map and its objectives, settles into a strategically advantageous position, and waits for other players to come to them or create the opportunity for an ambush. The player is relying on the game's predictable reward pipeline rather than actively participating in most of the match. The objection, therefore, is not that PvP players are stealing from other players. Stealing from other players is part of the extraction-shooter premise. The objection is to a strategy where the player can avoid most of the game's risks and activities, then attempt to convert the work of other players into a reward at a predictable point in the match. This creates three problems: Zero-contribution parasitism: The rat can allow other players to perform the work, accept the risks, and spend the resources required to progress the match, then attempt to take the rewards at the end of the process. Economic inversion: Standard game design generally rewards greater effort and risk with greater rewards. Static ratting can reverse that relationship: avoiding the game's major risks can become one of the most efficient ways to obtain high-value gear. Damage to the match ecosystem: If static ratting becomes a highly effective strategy, it can discourage players from engaging with objectives at all. Players who actually participate in the game's core loops may begin to feel that they are simply generating opportunities for players who are waiting for them. The goal of this proposal is therefore not to eliminate ratting, ambushes, stealth, or PvP. It is to make static, low-participation ratting an unreliable and inefficient strategy. A player who wants to hunt other players should still be able to do so. They can stalk another squad, ambush them at a POI, intercept them on a route, steal their Units, or attack them on the way to extraction. Those are all legitimate forms of PvP because the player is still moving through the match, making decisions, taking risks, and exposing themselves to counterattack. What should not be the dominant strategy is simply finding the endpoint of the reward pipeline, sitting there for most of the match, and waiting for everyone else to do the game for you. The design objective is to force the rat to participate in the match rather than allowing the rat to make the match participate for them. Extraction: Who Decides When It Happens? For this proposal, extraction is controlled by a third party called The Corporation. The Corporation provides extraction based on its own operational requirements and financial return on investment (ROI). This framing provides a simple justification for why extraction is not automatically available. The Corporation will not spend the resources necessary to extract players unless the match has generated enough value to justify doing so. Minimum Mission Objectives: The Quota Suppose an extraction match begins with 10 players. The Corporation establishes a minimum operational requirement: for example, 5 Units of quest items must be recovered across the surviving players. This minimum is the Quota. The Corporation will not commit to an extraction when the return on investment is too low. Once the Quota has been met, the total number of Units recovered determines the size of the eventual payout. The important part is that the Units are treated as a shared mission resource, rather than something that must be personally carried by every player who wants to extract. Dynamic Voting and Extraction Activation Players carrying Units can vote to activate extraction by using a Unit from their inventory. Each Unit can be used as a vote only once. If a Unit is destroyed, its associated vote is also lost. Once the number of active votes reaches or exceeds the Quota, extraction is initiated. For a five-Unit Quota, this means that five active votes are required to trigger extraction. Tying extraction activation directly to Unit possession addresses ratting at its foundation: No ungated exits: Players who ignore the map's objectives and acquire no Units have no voting power. They cannot initiate extraction on their own. No pre-camping: Extraction locations are not predetermined at the beginning of the match. They only appear after a successful vote, preventing players from simply running to a known extraction point at minute one and hiding there. Silent activation: Voting happens silently through the player interface. A map-wide extraction alert is not broadcast until the voting threshold has already been reached. Passive players therefore do not receive advance information about where active players are heading. Active-player agency: Players who have acquired Units control when the vote occurs. If they believe non-contributing players are camping nearby, they can withhold their votes and delay Extraction so that passive players are encouraged to acquire Units of their own. Extraction Resolution Once extraction arrives, possibly after a hostile area has to be secured, The Corporation requires two conditions to complete the extraction: The total number of Units carried by players inside the Landing Zone (LZ) must meet or exceed the Quota. All non-downed players currently carrying Units must be inside the LZ. The second condition prevents active players from being penalized for carrying the mission objectives. It also creates an interesting tactical decision when someone carrying a Unit is outside the extraction zone. The remaining players could: hold the LZ and defend it against AI enemies; push out to rescue the missing Unit carrier and preserve a larger payout; or eliminate the carrier, destroying their Unit, if the remaining Units are still sufficient to meet the Quota. Griefing Edge Case These mechanics cannot completely eliminate a determined griefer who intentionally refuses to enter the extraction zone and attempts to hold the match hostage. However, the remaining players still retain agency. They can abandon the match, denying everyone, including the griefer, a payout, and report the behavior through the game's reporting system. That may be preferable to introducing complicated algorithms intended to determine whether a player's behavior constitutes intentional griefing. Player reporting is imperfect, but trying to automatically infer intent can create its own set of problems. Carrying Units: Additional Friction Against Ratting How Units are carried provides additional design levers. These mechanics can make ratting less efficient without eliminating organic PvP. Importantly, PvP for gear or other advantages remains completely valid. These systems are intended specifically to discourage passive play that bypasses the game's core objectives. Option A: The Gear Tax Inventory Trade-Offs Under this model, Units occupy significant inventory space or use dedicated equipment slots. The mechanic: Carrying one Unit is normal, but each additional Unit replaces one piece of equipped gear. Impact on ratting: A rat can still attempt to steal other players' gear, but there is a practical limit to how much they can carry while remaining properly equipped for extraction. The rat has avoided much of the risk associated with acquiring Units, but now faces a different risk: reduced equipment while attempting to survive long enough to extract. Option B: Fragile Units Risk of Quota Deficit Under this model, Units can potentially be destroyed when their carrier is downed. The mechanic: At its simplest, each Unit could have a percentage chance of being destroyed when its carrier is downed. Impact on ratting: Rats can still engage in PvP for loot or attempt to reduce the number of survivors and increase their eventual share of the payout. However, they may now have to acquire enough Units themselves to ensure that the Quota can still be met. In other words, they have not actually avoided playing the game. Note on Individual Mandatory Units: On paper, requiring every player to carry a Fragile Unit seems like a silver bullet, but enforcing "participation" is deceptively complex. If participation is tied to killing a boss or looting an enclave, it either penalizes non-combat support roles (like medics or recon) or simply shifts ratting to objective arenas—where bandits let active teams do the work before ambushing them for the drop. A shared, pooled quota avoids these edge cases by measuring squad-level progression without mandating who or how the inventory is acquired. Mission Rewards The endgame of an extraction shooter is where PvP tension naturally peaks. How rewards are calculated and divided can strongly influence whether players cooperate, take calculated risks, or simply pursue reckless banditry. Equal Survivor Split: Code Efficiency and Support Viability Rather than attempting to calculate each player's individual contribution, the total match payout is divided equally among all surviving players who successfully extract. The payout is determined by the total value of Units recovered beyond the minimum Quota. [ Total Unit Value ] ÷ [ Surviving Extracting Players ] = [ Individual Payout ] This avoids the need for complicated and potentially bug-prone contribution tracking. Developers would not need to build systems capable of determining the value of every individual action, such as combat healing, suppressive fire, intelligence gathering, overwatch, or carrying additional cargo. If a player survives and extracts, they receive an equal share. Built-In Role Utility This also protects support-focused playstyles. A medic who spends the raid treating teammates, or a scout providing overwatch, receives the same reward as the frontline player or dedicated mule player carrying multiple Units. No special contribution-tracking system is required. Organic Endgame PvP Tension Equal division creates an interesting economic effect: the fewer players who survive, the larger each survivor's individual payout becomes. This creates a natural high-stakes decision at the extraction zone. The Greed Dilemma Players must decide whether to extract peacefully with the entire group or eliminate non-teammates to increase their personal share of the payout. This creates PvP tension without requiring the game to artificially declare one player the "winner" of the extraction encounter. Dealing with Freeloaders The shared extraction system also creates a potential problem: a player who contributed almost nothing to the match could simply arrive at the extraction zone and receive an equal share. Because that player has no Units, the players who actually completed the objectives have little reason to consider them indispensable. Ideally, players carrying Units would be clearly identifiable in some way. Even if the extraction zone contains NPC enemies intended to keep everyone active, some players could still perform the minimum necessary work and then hide in cover until extraction. There is no perfectly clean solution for players who want the game to automatically calculate merit-based rewards. The proposal deliberately favors a simple equal-payout system over complicated contribution telemetry. As a last resort, Unit carriers can refuse to extract, abandon the match, and cause the extraction to fail if the remaining players no longer meet the Quota. They can then report players who deliberately remained inactive (in other games this would be similar to joining group content and going AFK until the rest of the group completed the instance, then simply collect rewards). The Quota Check on Greed The Quota also places a natural limit on endgame greed. If a squad eliminates other players at the LZ but damages or fails to recover their Units, the total value available for extraction can fall. If it drops below the Quota, everyone is locked out of extraction. Players therefore have to balance the potential benefit of eliminating rivals against the risk of destroying the very resources required to complete the mission. Corporate Greed: Casualty Thresholds and POI Dynamics The mechanics above reduce ordinary ratting, but one particularly dangerous form can still remain: End-game hijacking. This occurs when active players perform essentially all of the work gathering Units, only to be ambushed and eliminated at the extraction point by another player or group that intends to claim the resulting payout. This could be especially problematic if large premade groups are able to queue into the same matches and they queue with the intention of this form of play. To limit this last-minute form of freeloading, developers could introduce a Casualty Threshold, or "Acceptable Losses." The Casualty Threshold acts as a systemic backstop against endgame hijacking. More importantly, it can influence player behavior throughout the entire match, not just at extraction. The Asset Recovery Override During the extraction phase, the game monitors total lobby casualties. If casualties cross a developer-defined threshold, such as more than 7 out of 10 total players being killed or downed, The Corporation switches from Standard Extraction to Asset Recovery Only. Under this system: Asset collection: The Corporation secures the physical Units present in the extraction zone. Contractor write-off: Player extraction is denied. Any surviving players are left stranded in the match. For narrative coherence, the extraction could simply fail to complete while The Corporation waits for the remaining players to be eliminated by NPC hostiles. The Corporation could just be greedy and not want to pay anyone; or have no reason to trust the small group of survivors after catastrophic mission casualties. How the Casualty Threshold Changes the Match Although the system is designed primarily to stop endgame hijacking, it would also discourage passive play much earlier in the match. Encouraging Early and Mid-Game POI Encounters If waiting until extraction to steal Units carries a significant risk of triggering the casualty threshold because too many active players died trying to secure Units, players have a stronger incentive to acquire Units themselves. This encourages extraction to be triggered while more of the lobby is still alive, concentrating player activity and potential PvP action around active quest objectives rather than empty extraction zones. Instead of everyone converging on the extraction point for the final ambush, firefights are more likely to occur at the places where Units are actually being earned. Managing Lobby Survival Squads hunting Units at points of interest must balance aggression against lobby survival. Wiping every team they encounter may seem advantageous, but if their own members are also being downed, excessive aggression can push the server toward the casualty threshold. Friendly Fire and Trigger Discipline High casualty counts create a collective cost. Reckless area-of-effect attacks, explosive spam, and careless friendly fire do not merely threaten individual teammates. They also move the entire lobby closer to the Asset Recovery threshold. This gives players an additional reason to exercise discipline during intense fights. Systemic Limitation: The Premade Group The Casualty Threshold has an important weakness in lobbies that mix solo players with large premade groups. A premade group could represent a significant portion of the server. If that group simply remains inactive while solo players eliminate one another at points of interest, the remaining deaths during a final ambush might not be enough to trigger the threshold. That could allow ratting to evolve from an individual strategy into a premade-group strategy. For this reason, the Casualty Threshold is not sufficient on its own. It is practically designed against a specific contingency (premade groups with the intention to rat). Combined with the Quota, Gear Tax, and Fragile Unit systems, however, it can serve as a final backstop. The overall goal is to preserve PvP as a tense and viable part of extraction gameplay without allowing endgame hijacking to become the dominant strategy. Putting the Mechanics Together None of these systems necessarily needs to be implemented simultaneously. The central mechanic is the Quota-based extraction system: players must contribute Units to make extraction possible, while the extraction point itself does not exist until the required votes have been cast. The other mechanics are additional tools that can be used to close specific loopholes: Quota: Prevents players with zero contribution from initiating extraction. Dynamic extraction locations: Prevents players from camping a known extraction point from the beginning of the match. Gear Tax: Makes carrying large numbers of Units a meaningful equipment trade-off. Fragile Units: Makes Units vulnerable to being lost and can force players to acquire additional Units. Equal Survivor Split: Keeps the reward system simple while preserving the value of support roles. Casualty Threshold: Acts as a backstop against large-scale endgame hijacking. Implementing every mechanic at once could potentially discourage PvP too much. But even a couple of these systems could be enough to make Ratting a poor strategy for success. The objective is not to make extraction shooters safer or less competitive. It is to make sure that playing the game remains more rewarding than waiting for someone else to play it for you. This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Marathon's Problem Wasn't Just Difficulty: Dissecting Marathon’s Post-Launch Statement
Marathon Senior Design Lead Kevin Yanes recently reflected on the game's launch with the following statement: "Launch didn't go the way we wanted to. We all built a game that we believed would resonate, but I think when you're so close to something, it's hard to see the bigger picture objectively. And so, we made a game that was overly difficult, I think, for a lot of folks. And um that constant loop of failure I don't think spoke to as many people as we hoped it would." At first glance, this reads like a candid post-mortem from a design team processing a tough release. However, analyzing how extraction games actually function reveals a fundamental misdiagnosis: attributing player retention drop-off to generic "difficulty" overlooks the structural incentive loops that govern the genre. "Difficulty" Is the Wrong Metric Entirely When leadership attributes a retention failure to a game being "overly difficult," it introduces a concept that misses how the genre actually functions. Extraction shooters don't succeed or fail based on mechanical difficulty or tuning sliders; they live or die by how they manage non-consensual friction and player incentives. Framing an unrewarding risk economy as a simple "difficulty issue" misinterprets the root cause of player churn. Furthermore, treating a "constant loop of failure" as an unexpected barrier ignores the foundational appeal of the genre. In extraction shooters, punishing failure isn't a design flaw—it is the central feature that creates tension and gives meaning to a successful run. Dedicated extraction players don't just tolerate loss; they are reconciled with it as the price of high-stakes gameplay. Expecting a brutal loss loop to suddenly appeal to a mass market reveals a fundamental mismatch in expectations, as if the design team expected a hardcore PvPvE ecosystem to yield the comfortable, high-retention progression of a casual power-fantasy shooter. Punishing Engagement, Rewarding 'Rats' Attributing retention drop-off to a developer-tuned "difficulty curve" fundamentally misunderstands how PvPvE ecosystems operate. Unlike pure PvE games, developers do not dictate the difficulty in an extraction shooter—the players do. In structured competitive games like MOBAs or arena shooters, player agency is sharply controlled through rigid rulesets, lanes, and matchmaking parameters. In an open PvPvE extraction environment, player behavior is unconstrained and highly emergent. While developers cannot dictate how players act, a decade of historical genre data allows them to predict it with total accuracy: open-PvP environments where loot can be stolen will always produce aggressive, opportunistic behavior. When high risk isn't managed through strict mechanical guardrails, it directly targets active players. High-skill players who actively push objectives, clear bosses, and make noise take on almost all the operational risk. Meanwhile, passive players ("rats") who minimally engage with map content and prepare ambushes at extraction chokepoints face virtually zero risk while securing high-tier payoffs. By framing this dynamic as "making a game that was overly difficult," design leadership treats an emergent player-agency problem as if it were a simple developer-side balance slider. The resulting "loop of failure" wasn't caused by miscalibrated enemy AI or weapon stats; it was caused by an inverted risk-to-reward ratio that rewarded low-risk ambush tactics and penalized players for actually engaging with the game. The Gap Between Genre Reality and Design Direction What makes this post-mortem framing so notable is that these dynamics are well-established across the genre. Games like Escape from Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, and The Cycle spent years laying out what keeps players engaged versus what drives them away. Shipping a major title while mistaking structural incentive flaws for a simple "difficulty curve" points to a significant gap between internal development assumptions and real-world player behavior. Conclusion: Strategic Miscalculation or Public Framing? Ultimately, this reflection highlights two primary possibilities: The PR Framing: The statement is sanitized damage control, framing a fundamental flaw in player incentive design as an artistic misstep about being "too hardcore." The Systems Blindspot: Design leadership genuinely overlooked how player incentive loops and low-risk ambush tactics dictate player retention in the genre. Neither explanation bodes well for product positioning. Player behavior in extraction games was decoded years ago; treating structural incentive failures as an unexpected difficulty curve suggests a disconnect from competitive market realities.Why did Bungie need to learn these particular lessons at launch? The Final Word: A Strategy Built on Illusion Zooming out from game design to studio strategy makes the situation even clearer. Pivoting major studio resources toward Marathon as a flagship live-service engine required one of the hardest maneuvers in gaming: poaching players from an established, highly niche genre. The extraction shooter audience is notoriously loyal, defined by hundreds of hours of institutional knowledge and sunk-cost investment in existing titles. To pull those players away—or to convert a core player base accustomed to cooperative power fantasies—required a generational breakthrough in gameplay innovation. Instead, shipping standard genre mechanics paired with an uncalibrated risk economy created an immediate strategic barrier. Expecting a niche, entrenched demographic to abandon their primary games for a derivative experience wasn't just ambitious—it was a product strategy disconnected from market reality.This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Ludonarrative Dissonance in Aniimo: Why Harmony Requires Better Mechanics
I genuinely found Aniimo's IP charming, and despite a slow-burning narrative, I stayed invested to see where it was headed. Unfortunately, the deeper I played, the more the game's worldbuilding began fighting directly with its gameplay and storytelling. Aniimo places huge emphasis on synergy with the land and framing its creatures as cherished companions. Yet, when you interact with them, the game repeatedly defaults to the laziest open-world quest loop imaginable: Go to X. Kill Y. Collect Z. What makes this particularly frustrating is that the game already possesses a far more compelling, lore-friendly alternative to standard combat: Twining. The Core Contradiction: Twining vs. Force With Twining, you transform into an Aniimo to communicate directly with wild creatures of the same family without spooking them. World characters use it, lore references it, and several quests require it. Which brings me to the main story quest involving Tuking—the "turnip disco boss." When the characters encounter this massive Aniimo, they merely suspect it might be guarding something useful. Given what the game has established about its world, the obvious solution is clear: The Lore Solution: Twine with a related Aniimo and talk to it. The Game's Solution: Take it down and steal whatever it's sitting on! This is the moment where immersion completely breaks. Instead of utilizing an established communication mechanic consistent with the worldview promoted by basically everyone in the game world, the game discards its own world rules to reach for a standard video game trope: put a boss fight in the way. The Creature Capture Loop Problem This contradiction isn't isolated to a single main quest—it runs through the entire capture loop: To capture an Aniimo, you throw an "Aniipod" (essentially a Poké Ball). If that fails, you beat it until it submits to the Aniipod. If you accidentally kill it or fail to catch it? No problem. There are no consequences for slaughtering wildlife. Once captured, it instantly becomes your devoted, loving companion. The violence involved in acquiring an Aniimo wouldn't feel as jarring if the game framed them as wild animals captured like dolphins for aquariums. But that isn't the fantasy Aniimo is selling: Aniimos are supposed to be friends. Humans are supposed to live in harmony with nature. The player is supposed to form a genuine connection with these creatures. Yet the mechanics insist on a much older RPG rule: Defeat monster. Get reward. Missed Potential: What Twining Could Have Been This issue goes deeper than simply being "too much like Pokémon." Pokémon established a specific gameplay language decades ago. But if you design a world around harmony, your mechanics must reconcile with that premise. Twining could have been the game's core identity. Instead of turning every encounter into a fight, Twining could have let players: Understand creature behavior and solve problems from their perspective. Negotiate access to disputed territories or rare resources. Discover why specific Aniimos are acting territorial or agitated. Since Aniimos are intelligent enough to farm, craft, speak human language, and discuss complex topics like why flower-Aniimos collect colors—why must they be forcibly kidnapped? Why wouldn't some seek out human settlements voluntarily, much like wild cats domesticated themselves around early human food stores? Declarative vs. Consequential Worldbuilding Great fantasy and science fiction worlds feel believable because their core premises have logical consequences. If you introduce magic, intelligent species, or transformation mechanics, readers naturally expect those elements to reshape society and behavior. The worlds follow their own rules. Aniimo’s worldbuilding is largely declarative rather than consequential. It tells us humans and Aniimos live in harmony, but fails to show mechanics that reflect that relationship: Need a quest obstacle? The Aniimo becomes a monster. Need a collectible? It becomes a resource node. Need a companion? Beat it unconscious, then claim it's your friend. Twining was right there. The game simply refused to build its world around the consequences of its own best idea. Instead of forging a new path, it was content to copy a proven formula and tweak it just enough to survive. This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Eternal Strands - Boss Guide
In this guide for Eternal Strands, we go through boss fight tips (work in progress). Guide philosophy: This guide focuses on the minimum you need to do to expose and harvest each boss's Strand, rather than listing every weak point. Breaking additional parts may make a fight easier, but can also create unnecessary work or even interfere with harvesting. General Notes With very few exceptions, stay on the boss. Bosses are generally less dangerous when you are clinging to them but sometimes they can end up killing themselves. Read specific entries below to know why. It's probable that on death, all points break and you get the remaining drops that would have come from breaking body parts anyway.So don't waste too much time hacking the boss hoping for drops.It's better this way since you don't have to figure out where drops fell while the boss was moving.For armor plating, the rule seems to be:Yellow: Can be destroyed or removed by destroying rivets.Green: Invulnerable, must be removed by some other means, usually the rivets holding it. Be careful about using fire or ice. According to in-game information, fire and ice can "temper" enemies to make them drop higher-tier materials, but they can also destroy lower-tier materials of certain types. It's not clear if destruction can happen to purple and gold tier materials that drop from bosses. Climbing is based on camera facing, not character facing. This can make climbing around a boss confusing because the camera angle tends to change often. For example, if a weak point is behind you, between your character and the camera, your character will simply reverse onto the weak point if you move backwards. This can be awkward if the weak point is something like a horn that will fall off, possibly taking you with it if you are clinging on to it. Instead, turn the camera around so that your character is now between the camera and the weak point. If you then move forward toward the weak point, your character will turn around to face it.Weaver's Grasp at rank 3 can rip off certain body parts such as the armor from some Arks without having to deal with rivets holding the armor in place.If an Ark is going to grab you:Try dropping from your climb immediately as a faster way to reposition. Only walking bosses grab so you don't have far to drop and they don't try to grab you if you are on the ground.You can also press jump to leap a short distance. Faster than regular climbing, although there's no guarantee of a glitch and you fling yourself off instead; that can happen in regular climbing.If you are grabbed by an Ark and crushed in its fist, it will drop you afterwards. But if you don't want to lose your position on the Ark, mash the Climb button to immediately cling to the hand before you drop too far. It won't crush you immediately again but you will probably take minor damage while at the hand. Ark of the Stricken Earth The minimum is to reveal the Strand is to expose the chest.You need to hit the rivets on both shoulder plates to drop those. This exposes the rivets beneath the shoulder plates that hold the front chest piece in place.If you have Weaver's Strand level 3, you can just rip off the front chest piece right away.You can also just break the shoulder armor without having to hit the rivets.Rivets anywhere else are not necessary unless you want to expose parts you can damage with the goal of killing it.If you can make it up to the back of the head, you can often briefly stop climbing and stand at the base of the neck between its shoulders to recover Stamina. To avoid accidentally clinging to the headpiece instead of the shoulder pads, you can break the headpiece to get it out of the way. Ashpeak Drake The minimum to expose the Strand is to break both horns and then let it fly. However, it will roll in flight to foil your Harvest, so break one wing to prevent that. If you break both wings, it cannot fly and the Strand won't be exposed.When it's not flailing, it's generally safe to stop climbing briefly and stand to recover Stamina, even while its flying. If it's in flight, Ice Wall on its body can encourage it to land. At mid-range, consider using Ice Wall on its mouth to at least slow it down from using its fire breath on you. Alternatively, run toward it, especially if you see its throat glow, which indicates that it's about to use its breath weapon.When you hear it breathe, immediately dodge. But keep running in case it's the sustained breath. Generally you can stay just out of the sustained breath weapon if you keep running. At close range, jump straight onto the head if you can instead of trying to flank it first. If you are on its head, it can't use its breath weapon on you. You're in position to break both horns and head for one wing. You might as well hack the smaller spines on the neck because they can make climbing take longer. If it uses its fire breath on the ground to try to burn you when you're on its back, use Ice Wall close to you to cool down the area. Ark of the Living Flame All gems must be shattered: both calves, chest, left hand gauntlet, and staff. The exposed red gem on the staff is probably the trickiest to reach because the boss switches it from one hand to the other periodically.Instead, use Ensnaring Blast on the staff. It's easy to place the trap on the staff and then detonate it, destroying the gem. When its veins glow red, it's about to ignite that section in fire to burn you off. You can either keep moving or use Ice Wall on the area near you to mitigate the effect. Brennig Glasstail Required weakpoints: Nose Horn, Chin Spike, Mane on the head, Spikes on front knees, Scale on Tail.Charge in especially if it's facing you and climb onto the head so it can't use its ice breath on you and you are in position to attack its nose horn right away.To burn the Mane, use the fire arrow ability from your Flame Bow (from Dredger's Mire, in the Warden's Roost).If you try it with Drake's Breath, which seems like it should work better, pulse it instead of using a sustained burn.The mane doesn't actually have a hit box and attacks go right through it. Often when the head is broken, the mane should burn up as well. It needs to be Stunned to expose the Strand.Dismount and run around near the head until it rears up to headbutt. Dodge roll into it to avoid most attacks.Because it doesn't have its Nose Horn, when it rears up to head butt, it will stun itself (and sometimes break its Chin Spike, if you haven't already broken it). Highland Iceclaw When you encounter it and can see the health bar, you will notice that its Strand is already revealed when it is airborne. So you just need to get onto the boss and Harvest it. Break only one wing so it can't roll in the air and foil your Harvesting attempt.If it is still close to the ground when you try to Harvest, it will drop down to the ground in a slam and foil your attempt. Break the legs to avoid this or wait till it can't do this (high in the air, too long to drop before you finish Harvesting). If you get shaken off, look for cover and keep moving until it lands. Using Ice Wall on it can encourage it to land, presumably because of the added weight. Rehnland Sledgewyrm If there's good non-destructible cover, this boss is quite safe to stay at range from and you can therefore try sniping the scales.At range it's main attack is to pick up some stones and fling them at you, but it generally holds them in the air for a while before it throws and you can try dodging if you are in the open.Most of its powers are close-range, to blast you away or hit the area with a kinetic explosion (for a lot of damage).Once you have Weaver's Grasp strong enough to just pull the scales off, it's probably safer to stay at range and take cover when necessary, and climb on only to pull off the last hard-to-target scales. Depends on how much cover you can get in the area.The minimum to expose the Strand is to break the scales off the tip of the tail.However, it will keep shaking you off whenever you try to harvest unless you break off all the scales/frills.If you are on the boss when it has items ready to throw at you, there are two things you can do (other than just try to survive):Start Harvesting and it will abort to throw you off instead.Climb under its belly for cover.If the boss is low on health, you might want to leave and run for cover so the boss doesn't hit itself and kill itself. Ark of the Winter TideThis Ark isn't holding anything in hand so it aggressively tries to grab you for a crush.Smash all ice pieces to expose the Strand. It will be on the Right Elbow so try to save that for last in order not to have to climb there.Once all ice pieces are destroyed, it will regenerate them shortly, hiding the Strand again. Ark of the ForgeHigh Fire Resistance is good here because there will be fire everywhere and on the boss as well.The shoulder plate has to be removed to access the Strand and properly reveal it, but you don't need to do this first.You need to wait until the boss does a special hammer attack.The boss will heat up all its armor and ignite.Shortly after, it will roar and slam the ground three times in a semicircle, not directed at you specifically.To fairly safely wait for this boss sequence, cling to the hammer handle.The boss will not grab you there.You are generally away from any flaming parts.The boss frequently tries to shake you off, so in between Cling prompts try to stop climbing briefly to recover your Stamina.When the boss starts slamming is hammer, you will probably be knocked off and take a lot of damage if you are still on the hammer. To avoid this, you can drop off when the boss starts roaring and get to a safe distance and anticipate where the hammer will finally land and be stuck on the ground.If you prefer to just stay on the ground, the boss can fairly easily be kited by getting behind it whenever it attacks, such as by running or dodging between its feet.When the three-slam sequence is done, the hammer is on the ground and soon extends glowing knobs on the sides of the hammer head. Break those and the Strand should reveal on the shoulder.A bow might be better than trying to jump on the hammer to use melee. This lets you avoid fire around the hammer and also you don't have to climb around wasting time.If you take too long the exposed parts will retract and you have to wait for the next opportunity. Ark of the NovaThe boss can also shoot beams that create a mine that detonates (but has no suction). These can go through any cover.It cannot use this while you are clinging to it.If it loses sight of you, it typically tries to shoot your last known location until it runs out of shots (three?)These beams are followed by using its Scopes (the flying turrets above the boss).When there's a coloured halo over your head, it means the boss is going to shoot at you from a Scope.If you are on the boss when it shoots its Scopes, you can crawl underneath to its chest and be shielded from some of the damage.The boss can kill itself trying to shoot you when you are on it, or taking splash damage from each shot.It appears each Scope can fire three times and it will keep shooting once it starts firing. It also doesn't seem to care much about trying to get line of sight to you as long as it can shoot you with its tail beam (which ignores barriers).Sometimes after firing its Scopes it will take a long flight. If you are on the ground, it can go very far away. No need to chase it as it will come back as long as you still see the Health Bar and are "in combat" with it.According to the instruction from the Codex you need to remove all armor pieces and then wait for six Scopes to spawn and it needs to be in the air.Yellow armor pieces can be hacked off.Green armor pieces need to be removed by breaking off the rivets. If there are no rivets (e.g., on the wings) they are invulnerable.Mane does not need to be removed to break the rivets that hold the neck plates. The rivets are on either side of the neck.If you hide under the back plates for cover, the turrets shooting at you can damage them for you.Once you have taken off all pieces, if it has six Scopes the Strand should reveal.The boss starts with three when you first arrive on the map and doesn't add more until you engage it.When it is on the ground and spins its headpiece, it is summoning another Scope.If it has less than six, dismount and look for cover to just wait out the boss. It appears you must be "in combat" (see the health bar) with the boss for it to add Scopes.It can take a couple of minutes before the boss adds a Scope. When it has five and starts to spin its headpiece for the last one, quickly rush to mount it so you'll be in position between its wings to Harvest as soon as the Strand is revealed.The Strand might not reveal immediately after the sixth Scope is added.Since you need to wait for the boss to have all six Scopes, if it starts shooting at you while you are on it, you can consider dropping off and going for cover and coming back later to finish breaking off armor parts.You can harvest more than three Strands but it is not clear what their purpose is.Surgeborn HeraldFirst Story EncounterAscending Strike from the Kinetic Two-Hander or the Stargazer Two-Hander can be used to get you out of the vacuum from the mines that it throws. It can also launch you high so you can hopefully grab hold of the boss but this is harder than it sounds.When it shifts its sword to its other hand it's about to cast a spell. The kinetic bombs are planted on the ground but the Frost and Fire Mines are flung at you and have a suction effect. It's best to use Kinetic Strand to catch and fling the Mines back to do more damage easily than you can at range.Oria says to freeze its body but the lowest sections cannot be frozen and the upper parts (chest to around where the thigh should be) don't stay frozen long.The easiest way is Frost Mine that will detonate right away. Ice Wall crumbles too quickly and cannot remain to sustain the cold.I found that I still couldn't reach high enough with a jump and just took tangle damage from the lower body. Ascending Strike can get you high enough to try to grab and start climbing but it's pretty chancy.The lower section cannot be targeted at all (your Ice Wall reticle shows you cannot even fire your Ice Wall at it or through it).The Frost Bow does not inflict any freeze at all with its tracking bolts so you still need to use Ice Wall or Frost Mine.Once the body is frozen, those sections can be damaged. Molten Barrage can be easily pasted to its body without much aiming.Does not seem like you cannot harvest the Strand here (?) because of the cutscene triggering at around 50% health that requires it to be alive.Second Story EncounterIf Surgeborn adds come at you, use Weaver's Grasp to just fling them at the boss. If they get in the way of boss attacks, they can be harmed.Get to the sides where there are elevated platforms and take cover behind one of the indestructible pillars.They block the dangerous sword thrusts.If the boss puts a Kinetic Bomb at your location it won't be able to smash you with the sword when you are flung up.When possible attack the boss with Frost Mine to make its body parts vulnerable then your bow or Molten Barrage.You could use Kinetic Stream to try to grab the boss and hack off parts but generally this is quite tricky.Repeat FightsWhile fighting the boss, if you don't want to climb onto it (which isn't necessary, apparently), try to find something tall and indestructible to block its sword swings and any mines you can't intercept with Weaver's Grasp.Reduce boss health to zero. Boss won't die but Strand will be revealed.Frost Mine and arrows on the grey frozen parts seems to work well.Gum up the free hand so it can't grab. It doesn't appear that you need to paste it to anything, just put Ice Wall on the hand.Use Kinetic Stream to quickly get to the boss's face and Harvest.It explodes after you Harvest it so try drop as soon as you finish getting the Strand and/or have a Vitality Potion ready. This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Game Review - Eternal Strands
Game Review: Eternal Strands by Yellow Brick Games Score: +4/-18 The core of the game is good, but almost every system falls short of being consistently satisfying and instead tends toward tedious or unreliable. Even the storytelling takes shortcuts, using hand-drawn concept-art-style panels in place of fully produced scenes. The core loop of exploration, combat, and bringing home loot becomes increasingly frustrating because of so many unnecessary time sinks that were not sufficiently enjoyable (time sinks that are enjoyable are completely acceptable).+1 The graphics look good and have a distinctive style somewhere between realism and the more exaggerated, cartoony look of something like World of Warcraft. The environments and giant bosses can look quite impressive. However, optimization feels weaker than I would expect considering the stylized graphics and relatively small open-world zones. +1 The material and crafting system is genuinely interesting. Different materials contribute different types of stats, and different pieces of equipment require different mixes of materials. This gives gathering some purpose because the material you use actually matters instead of everything simply becoming generic crafting currency. Lossless recycling helps enormously because experimenting with equipment does not permanently consume valuable materials. Nightingale tried something similar with materials and gear components, but its version became overly complicated while also encouraging fairly obvious damage metas. In Eternal Strands, there is more reason to trade raw damage for environmental protection because heat and cold hazards can be extremely irritating if you are not prepared for them. +1 The story might not be the greatest, but the quests are actually very good. RPG quests generally boil down to some combination of fetch quests and kill quests, and Eternal Strands is no different. What Eternal Strands does better is present more interesting quests in more interesting ways, often combining intrigue with your emotional investment in the characters. For example, if you have paid attention to Oria talking about her lineage, then when the opportunity arises to find out who her father is, both you and Oria can feel invested in the investigation. Fetching information from different game zones then feels like a necessary part of the investigation rather than an excuse to send the player somewhere to retrieve an object. Lazier writing would simply put a boss at the quest target and have the player fight them. That is common in RPGs, and it often makes the quest feel like an inconsequential excuse to trigger a mini-boss fight. -0 There is also contextual ambient conversation between NPCs in the camp based on events that have already transpired.However, these conversations can sometimes be distant from the player and difficult to hear, or otherwise easy to miss.Or two characters far apart are conversing and depending on where you stand one or both will be faint and very hard to hear.The non-default Accessibility setting that shows all subtitles can make some of this easier to notice, but once a conversation has been missed, it is missed.-0 A lot of the side quests, which technically good, basically amount to daytime soap opera between NPCs. Which leaves the main quest which is actually quite meh and predicable. +1 Some world systems genuinely change the way you approach the map. Weather can affect what preparation you need, how your skills affect the world, and what creatures you can encounter. This means the same map can sometimes have to be handled differently. Unfortunately, the creatures themselves are often much less affected by the weather than the player. For example, dangerous conditions such as Flash Freeze or Miasma can be extremely hazardous to the player while many creatures continue behaving normally. Some appropriate creatures may appear during certain weather conditions, but even fire-based creatures such as Spitfires can be unaffected by cold weather that does more damage to the player than their own ice powers do. In practice, this can mean simply making one set of gear with adequate cold resistance because Flash Freeze is the most irritating condition. Juggling multiple sets is presumably intended to encourage more resource gathering, but bosses are randomized without weather restrictions, so you can encounter a fire boss during cold weather anyway. A lot of gear therefore ends up feeling less useful than the system initially suggests. -1 Combat looks like modern responsive action combat, but often does not actually feel responsive enough for the mechanics it asks you to use. Combat is generally fine against a single enemy. Once there are two or more enemies, their very high mobility makes encounters much harder to control and disproportionately dangerous. Melee enemies can have very fast and sometimes extremely long-distance gap closers, so trying to disengage and find a more favorable position can be surprisingly difficult even if you simply run. Ranged enemies tend to move extremely quickly as well. They try to flank and find line of sight while also being able to run away when approached. Their accuracy is extremely high even at very long range. A single ranged enemy can often be lured closer by hiding behind terrain. With multiple enemies, you are trying to corner one while the others flank and shoot you. This makes terrain extremely important, but the open-world areas are often wide open, especially from the perspective of ranged enemies. What begins as exciting action combat can quickly turn into tedious pursuit and crowd management. -1 Regular fights are not fun. The Spitfire is a good example of an encounter that becomes extremely irritating when there are several enemies. These flying insect enemies often appear in pairs or groups. Their firebombs have long range, high accuracy, and leave lingering patches of fire on the ground. They attack quickly, are highly mobile, and can fly faster than you can run. A single Spitfire is manageable. You can break line of sight and wait for it to come closer, then use Ice Wall to exploit its vulnerability to frost and either let the ice kill it or attack it while it is frozen. With several Spitfires, however, they can bombard you from different directions while you are trying to deal with one of them. The tutorial recommends using a bow, but Spitfires do not take much arrow damage on Normal difficulty. Charging a bow shot for more damage leaves you exposed to their firebombs, and any hit interrupts the charge. Rapidly firing arrows at a moving target is unreliable and consumes stamina quickly. Once your stamina is depleted, you have to stop and recover while the Spitfires continue attacking. Your arrows have effectively medium range because they arc and there is no aim correction. Despite the circular reticle, shots must be extremely precise. Meanwhile, enemies can apparently calculate projectile trajectories accurately at long range. The result is another encounter where the counter exists, but becomes much more difficult to use when the game simply adds another highly mobile enemy. -1 Archery is barely usable. On Normal Difficulty some enemies take no damage at all from normal arrow shots, no matter how strong your bow.The circular reticle is misleading. There is no aim correction, so the circle does not give much useful information about where the arrow will actually land. You must be extremely precise. One pixel off and the arrow can fly past the target. Tab targeting for the bow can miss surprisingly often even against a completely unaware and immobile target. I have repeatedly seen this happen against Arbalest Arks, although it is not clear why. -1 Blocking also feels questionable. It is not always clear whether attacks can be cancelled into a block, which makes blocking much harder to use reactively. Perfect blocks require reading an attack and timing the block properly, but that becomes much less practical when several enemies are circling you or shooting from outside your view. Holding block can work, but feels pointless against multiple enemies because it is directional and enemies move very quickly to flank. The usefulness of perfect blocking against giant bosses is also dubious. As a result, trying to engage with the more skill-based defensive mechanic can feel like a disadvantage rather than something the game rewards. -1 Skills can be fun in theory but become clumsy and irritating once enemies get close. Enemies moving sideways even at a moderate pace can simply avoid many targeted skills. Tab targeting helps you land skills and spells against a single target, but becomes a liability once several enemies start circling you and you are simultaneously trying to reposition, change targets, or see what is happening. The game encourages Ice Wall as crowd control, but actually aiming it at a moving enemy at mid or close range can be surprisingly difficult unless that enemy is already running directly toward you. This seems to be due to a combination of casting delay and being unable to cast directly in front of you. Once Ice Wall is placed, it becomes a hazard to you as well. If auto-climb is enabled, approaching an enemy trapped in the ice can cause you to climb onto your own wall and start taking freezing damage. Another example is Drake's Breath. It is basically a magical flamethrower, which sounds like it should be extremely useful both in combat and while exploring frozen areas. Unfortunately, magically frozen ground can neutralize the fire so quickly that it does not create a useful warm area. If you keep using it long enough, you can briefly set the ground on fire instead and start burning yourself before the ice returns. In combat it can set enemies on fire, but it can also leave the ground burning afterward so you take damage trying to collect their loot. The elemental reaction between fire and ice is interesting but hardly revolutionary. Prey, for example, already used environmental fire and the Gloo Gun in ways that overlap with the fire and Ice Wall interactions here. You can use Ice Wall to extinguish the fire, but then you have frozen the ground and can take cold damage while trying to collect the same loot. -1 Elemental Counters: Some of the game's stated elemental counters are actually worse than ignoring the advice and using cheese tactics. The tutorial entry for the common Acala enemy says: "Their thick fur makes them resistant to frost, but ignites easily to flame." That strongly suggests fire should be the preferred solution. In practice, Ice Wall can still be much safer. Freeze the Acala, accept a little damage from your own ice, and kill it while it cannot retaliate. Drake's Breath requires letting it get much closer, takes a while to actually ignite the fur, and leaves you vulnerable to being hit several times while trying to apply the supposedly correct elemental counter. Those enemy hits can cost multiples more health than standing near your own Ice Wall. The Glacial Slider is an even clearer example. Its tutorial entry says: "Coated in a thick shell of frost magic, they are nigh-invulnerable until it is removed. Flame magic to the rescue." Except Drake's Breath seems to take forever to remove the protection, if it removes it reliably at all. The Glacial Slider can simply walk sideways out of the relatively short-range fire attack. It has no useful hit reaction while you are channeling, so it can attack you and interrupt Drake's Breath. Its attack also creates a ground AOE which breaks your spell channel, slows you, and inflicts cold damage, making it even harder to maintain the supposedly intended attack. It can be easier to find high ground and repeatedly use your very first magic ability, Weaver's Grasp, to fling the enemy around until it dies. Or simply rush it with your two-handed sword. -1 Weaver's Grasp can become a cheese tactic in many 1v1 encounters. Enemies are briefly stunned after landing, so you can sometimes grab them again before they recover and repeat the process. This works best when there is only one enemy because trying to fling one enemy into another, even if it is not moving, is surprisingly difficult when throws can miss despite the reticle being over the target. You can tab-target the enemy, but then you have to change your targeting again to grab something to throw at it. Alternatively, you can throw them into a chasm and accept that you will not get any of the material drops from defeating them. Having your first magic ability remain one of the easiest ways to defeat troublesome enemies undermines the fun of discovering new magic powers. The game keeps giving you interesting new toys while its combat balance can encourage you to keep using the first one. The "best build" guides on YouTube naturally encourage using Weaver's Grasp because the tiresome combat can be shortcut by throwing enemies into a chasm. Yes, it works, but it does so by avoiding combat that simply is not very fun or rewarding. In another game, a "death ray" like this would be ridiculous. Here, it can feel like much-needed relief. -1 Boss fights are too often about fighting the controls rather than the boss. Trying to reposition while clinging to a boss can be surprisingly tedious, even after you figure out that movement is based on the camera rather than your character. If the boss suddenly causes the camera direction to change, the same key you have been holding to move can suddenly send you in a different direction. Climbing can also stick you to the wrong body part when you are close to the boss. Some bosses, such as Ark of the Forge, have a long and uneventful phase that you need to wait through before the required weak point appears. It is not particularly dangerous, but it is boring because it lasts so long. The newer Ark of the Nova is even worse.The final boss type is so tedious to even grab onto that being able to just ignore the correct mechanics feels like something they let the player do because it was too late to redo the whole boss model and adjust a fight that has too many irritating elements. The very first Ark of the Stricken Earth demonstrates the repositioning problem. Its wide headpiece is almost always very close to the location on the shoulder where you need to be to hit the weak spot. You can easily stick to the wrong nearby body part and then spend too much time fighting the climbing controls just to get back into position. The challenge becomes less about defeating the boss and more about persuading your character to stand where you want. The open-world boss encounters can create additional problems. If the Ashpeak Drake is in Glintwood Hollow, for example, by the time you tediously chase it down after spotting it in the sky, it can be on a high plateau. When you ride it to harvest its Strand, you can be flown higher than the world exploration limit and automatically repositioned off the drake and onto the ground. -1 On all maps, after dealing with the boss you typically have to figure out where the boss was roaming while you were hacking off body parts and where the precious high-tier materials fell.These can end up in inaccessible areas because of chasms and hazard zones within the explorable area. For flying bosses especially, this is very irritating because they can fly great distances during the fight. You were probably not paying attention to exactly where they were going because the camera angle while climbing does not make it easy to track the surrounding environment.A flying boss can literally fall entirely into a chasm when you defeat it with the "Harvest Strand" maneuver, take you with it, and of course any loot it drops is down there in the inaccessible area. -1 The Brennig Glasstail demonstrates how poorly communicated some of the boss-part mechanics can be. The game tells you to burn the Glasstail's mane off, but the mane itself cannot actually be targeted. Shots pass straight through it. Instead, the apparent mechanic is that you damage the head until it "breaks," at which point the mane is removed. Blue cracks appearing on the head seem to indicate this process. This is different from other giant bosses where a particular body part can be targeted and cleanly broken away. It is also unclear whether the head-break state specifically requires fire damage or simply enough damage to the head. Players have apparently been using the Flame Bow, while Drake's Breath does not make the intended solution particularly obvious. That is especially confusing because Drake's Breath seems more effective than a fire arrow for actually setting zones on fire. It is also a sustained flamethrower rather than a brief fire shot. The player therefore has to reverse-engineer the particular mechanic the game expects rather than simply following the instruction to burn off the mane. This is particularly frustrating because targeting and dismantling specific body parts is supposed to be one of the game's signature systems and the only way to get skill upgrades. If a game wants you to climb around giant monsters and surgically attack particular pieces of anatomy, the climbing controls and hit detection need to be unusually good. Here they often are not. -1 Harder difficulty can feel like it is throttling progression rather than rewarding skill. The monsters drop materials you actually want to keep, so defeating them should be an important part of gathering and progression. However, most monsters drop low-grade materials you might never use, and there are a lot of them scattered across the maps. In later maps, enemies can start dropping higher-grade materials, which makes accumulating resources feel more meaningful, but your inventory is constantly too limited and you eventually have to throw away increasingly valuable resource tiers. There is no good reason for this to work like a live-service extraction game where limited inventory exists to force you to decide what to bring home. Each exploration phase is unlimited anyway, since you can keep jumping to different zones until you return to base. An intermediate solution could have been automatically unloading your loot whenever you reach a Fast Travel point. Instead, the limited inventory mostly makes deep exploration increasingly unrewarding and discourages engaging with resources such as treasure chests. When the combat mechanics are already tedious, making enemies harder does not necessarily create a more satisfying skill challenge. It can simply make collecting those materials slower and more expensive in time and healing resources. This is especially noticeable when encounters involve several highly mobile enemies because the player has relatively poor tools for preventing themselves from being surrounded. -1 After an encounter, the next part of exploration can become searching for replacement Vitality Tonics. You can only carry a limited number of healing potions. They are not desperately uncommon, but you may have to trek back through the environment trying to remember where you previously left one behind. An irritating fight that was unavoidable but also pointless because the enemies did not drop anything you wanted to keep can therefore be followed by an equally uninteresting recovery phase where you retrace your route just to restore the resources consumed by the encounter. An easy fix would have been to allow the player to collect the potions but only replenish the belt's quick-use slots outside of combat. Fortunately, there is "Story Mode" difficulty to save you from having to find a cheat just to save time and get on with the game. Or you can use the exploit of jumping into a chasm and being automatically repositioned because you went out of bounds, with your health fully restored. -1 Exploration is either lacklustre or irritating. Initially there are an excess of breakable crates, but mostly they give junk and your inventory is limited anyway. So even the excitement of finding treasure is diminished by the sharply limited inventory. Once that wears thin, the remaining major points of interest are lore objects, if you are interested in them. On the other hand, the game may be pushing you to fight bosses repeatedly and collect only their gold and purple resources because those are ultimately the ones that provide the best-in-slot materials and everything else becomes junk. But that still is not a good reason to limit what the player can collect. It simply creates irritation without a clear benefit. Later on there are an excess of higher-tier materials from fighting enemies and your inventory starts limiting exploration because you may be forced to drop useful resources to make room. Most resources eventually become obsolete because there are better ones. Remembering which materials are actually useful can be a chore, especially since you do not see their stats until you are at the blacksmith composing gear. Chests are sprinkled about, but often feel like a more reliable way of finding slightly better junk, usually green-grade material. Some chests are better but do not respawn regularly, or never respawn at all. An in-game way to mark locations would have helped considerably with finding useful chests again, at least for the early to mid game. Some of the materials you really want are difficult to farm except from giant bosses, and even that can be somewhat random because not all bosses are available in the world and some zones have irritating weather conditions. There may be several materials that look like possible "best in slot" choices, but you ultimately want to use only a handful. Once you figure out which ones they are, farming them can be tedious. That would at least be a more enjoyable grind if combat were more enjoyable to repeat. Meanwhile, simply moving around the map means encountering unrewarding but time- and potentially resource-consuming fights around every corner. Near the end of the game, you can trade junk materials for the best materials available.I suspect this is meant to solve two problems at once: all those lower-tier materials that have become obsolete finally have a use, and players have a way to obtain high-tier materials without repeatedly grinding the same bosses. Those are both reasonable ideas.The problem is that the trading system can bypass too much of the game rather than complementing it.  Once it is unlocked, you can visit an easy area, collect whatever happens to be lying around, and just go shopping for the materials you actually want. That is certainly more convenient than farming bosses, but it also makes the boss-material loop feel like something to escape rather than something worth repeating.The system also appears to make the earlier inventory limitation sensible since you can't immediately convert all your junk into the best materials. But nothing stops you from collecting junk now to trade for boss drops.A better solution would have been to make the activities being bypassed more enjoyable and rewarding to repeat.The trading system also fixes some of the economy's friction, but arriving so late means you have already spent most of the game dealing with that friction, while its ability to bypass boss farming makes the underlying endgame loop feel even less worthwhile.This feels like a band-aid for an endgame economy problem, perhaps intended to deal with obsolete materials and reduce the grind for best-in-slot resources. As a safety valve, it works. But it also lets players bypass so much of the intended material and boss loop that it raises the more fundamental question of why those activities weren't made more enjoyable to repeat in the first place. -1 Lore and exploration rewards are often placed in ways that feel artificial. You can explore for lore entries ("Codex Entries"), but quite a number are in highly implausible locations, such as letters and missives sitting on top of domed roofs.-0 You also need basically a minor spoiler to tell you that some lores only appear during certain quests and are impossible to acquire otherwise; because the counter on the map just shows how many are missing.Fortunately, at the very, very, end of the game when you've completed all quests, you get a quest to find the remaining Codex Entries and you can now use the extremely primitive quest tracker that just points you in the correct direction, straight through impenetrable barriers. It is bad enough that games nowadays sprinkle treasure chests throughout improbable corners of the map as incentives to explore. Lore objects should at least be in lore-probable locations. This excludes the Easter-egg "gold bricks" containing developer names, which are presumably intentionally placed in hard-to-find locations and do not pretend to be part of the world's lore. -1 The game actively discourages you from exploring its world. The more extensively you explore, the more loot you have to leave behind, and eventually you have to drop higher tiers of loot because you simply do not have enough inventory space. You can of course return to camp to dump the inventory, but you cannot simply "resume exploring" because all the tedious trash mobs respawn every time you return to camp. Finding new areas unlocks new bosses, and bosses can provide new skills. You are therefore passively encouraged to rush through areas looking for the transition to the next zone. That creates an odd incentive structure where exploring the world can immediately introduce encounters you may not yet be equipped or upgraded to handle comfortably. Similarly, camp upgrades are tied to the main story, so deviating too long from the main story holds you back from things such as increased inventory space. Instead of exploration naturally feeding back into progression, the player can feel encouraged to find bosses and advance the main story first and come back later. This severely devalues side quests. -1 Climbing is terrible. Mostly it works, but sometimes it behaves unpredictably, such as suddenly letting go when at other times you can climb under overhangs like Spider-Man. Starting a climb at a ledge to climb down may fail to work or cause you to let go. Jumping while climbing either gets you higher, mostly, or sometimes bounces you off. This would be merely annoying during normal exploration, but the same climbing system is also central to the giant-boss fights. -1 The presentation sometimes looks like development shortcuts rather than deliberate stylistic choices. Despite having attractive 3D environments and character models, some story sequences switch to almost hand-drawn illustrated panels. These may be intentionally stylized, but they can look like concept-art panels or storyboards used in place of fully produced cutscenes. Regular dialogue also uses 2D visual-novel-style character portraits rather than the existing 3D character models. The contrast is jarring because the game has already established a fairly attractive 3D visual style, so switching to static illustrated panels can make those scenes feel unfinished or budget-driven. -1 The game does not always remember minor settings that should simply stay remembered. Compass preferences are not saved. I have also seen difficulty settings revert. This sounds minor, but precisely because these are minor settings, the game should simply remember them when you set them. Eternal Strands has some genuinely interesting systems. The problem is that many of those systems sound more entertaining than the actual implementation. This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Eternal Strands LS-0019-IS-PQR2147943860 Error: Launch Directly from Windows Explorer
This is a workaround if you get Error Code LS-0019-IS-PQR2147943860 from the Epic Games Store when trying to launch Eternal Strands.WARNINGYou will NOT unlock any achievements on the Epic Games Store.Workaround: Launch the game directly from Windows Explorer. Navigate to the folder where Eternal Strands is installed and double-click EternalStrands.exe. Or for convenience, go there and make a shortcut to put on your Desktop or wherever you like. Why not use Epic's suggested workaround? Epic's troubleshooting page for this error suggests adding -SkipBuildPatchPrereq to the Epic Games Launcher. I didn't want to use this immediately because it changes the behaviour of the EGS launcher and could potentially affect other games launched through it. Instead, I investigated the prerequisite installation. Both the demo and the full game contained UEPrereqSetup_x64.exe. Windows reported that the Unreal Engine prerequisites were already installed, and the demo launched normally. I even uninstalled the UE4 prerequisite package and found that the demo still launched normally. However, the full game continued to produce the same LS-0019-IS-PQR2147943860 error when launched through EGS. Then I tried launching the game executable directly from Windows Explorer. It launched normally. So in my case, the game itself was working. The problem appeared to be with the Epic Games Store's prerequisite check/launch process rather than with Eternal Strands or its installation. If you are experiencing the same error, launching EternalStrands.exe directly may be a simpler workaround than changing the Epic Games Launcher configuration. This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Beyond the Culture War: What 'DEI' Objections in Game Reboots Are Actually Obscuring
Beyond the Culture War: What 'DEI' Objections in Game Reboots Are Actually Obscuring Whenever a long-dormant gaming franchise returns to the public eye, discussions surrounding cast diversity, character design, and demographic changes inevitably flare up online. In contemporary forum discourse, these debates are almost immediately funneled into familiar political binaries. Critics are branded as reactive, while defenders frame every design choice as an unassailable moral victory. But when we reduce these conversations purely to ideological warfare, we miss a far more nuanced and fascinating critique sitting right underneath: a breakdown in implicit worldbuilding and cognitive shortcuts. The recent conversations surrounding the upcoming Fable reboot offer a textbook study in this phenomenon. The friction experienced by returning fans isn't necessarily rooted in an objection to inclusion. Rather, it stems from how developers leverage real-world cultural shorthand—and what happens to player immersion when one specific variable in that shorthand is radically altered without updating the surrounding lore. The Power—and Risk—of Implicit Worldbuilding Worldbuilding in interactive fiction is an exercise in economy. Game designers cannot explain every grain of sand, economic policy, or historical migration pattern in an opening monologue. To solve this, developers rely heavily on implicit worldbuilding—using familiar, real-world cultural cues as cognitive shortcuts so the player's brain can automatically fill in the unstated rules of the universe. When a game sets its story in a land called Albion, populates it with rolling green hills and thatched-roof cottages, and gives its characters thick Dorset, Yorkshire, or Cockney accents, it is making a deliberate design promise. It is signaling to the player: "This world is anchored in traditional British folklore, fairy tales, and regional eccentricity." Because humans process media through pattern recognition, the player's mind instantly constructs a mental baseline based on those real-world cues. We expect the world to operate under the internal logic of the source aesthetic unless the game explicitly informs us otherwise. When the Baseline Shifts Without Warning The core conflict in modern reboots occurs when developers shift from a localized historical aesthetic to a modern, cosmopolitan demographic baseline without establishing the internal logic that brought it about. If a game relies on 80% of traditional regional shortcuts to build its atmosphere—the architecture, the humor, the folklore, the accents—but abruptly introduces a hyper-diverse, globalized population mix in a small, isolated rural village, a subtle cognitive dissonance takes place. The player isn't reacting to skin color in a vacuum; they are reacting to a conflicting set of worldbuilding signals: Signal A: "This is a quaint, isolated English countryside village straight out of 19th-century folklore." Signal B: "This is a 21st-century global metropolis." Without an in-universe framework explaining how these two realities coexist, the world stops feeling like a lived-in, cohesive space and starts feeling like a modern set piece wearing a historical costume. The immersion breaks because the rules of the shortcut have been altered without establishing new ones. The Port City Principle: Worldbuilding over Cosmetic Swaps Addressing this friction doesn't require removing diversity—it requires better narrative design. The difference between lazy integration and compelling worldbuilding comes down to whether demographic variety is treated as an active element of the lore or merely a cosmetic skin pass. Consider how a developer could handle demographic variety through intentional environmental storytelling: Case Study: The "Trading Hub" Mechanics If a developer concentrates a dense, multi-ethnic population in a sprawling coastal port city—like Bowerstone Harbor—the worldbuilding immediately snaps into place: Natural Lore: A bustling maritime hub naturally attracts merchants, sailors, scholars, and refugees from across the globe. The diversity explains itself instantly through the environment. Sense of Scale: Leaving a cosmopolitan port city and traveling into remote, homogenous inland hamlets creates visual contrast, making the world feel sprawling, varied, and geographically authentic. Cultural Depth: Rather than giving every character the exact same localized regional accent and attire regardless of background, distinct regional origins allow for unique clothing styles, dialects, and traditions, enriching the world's overall depth. When diversity is grounded in trade routes, migration histories, and distinct regional identities, it expands the map and elevates the lore. When it is procedurally sprinkled across rural farmsteads without context, it signals to the player that the developers chose corporate checklist convenience over thoughtful narrative design. The Reboot Paradox: New Audiences vs. Legacy Marketing There is, of course, a counter-argument: Fable is a long-dormant franchise. With well over a decade since its last mainline entry, a massive portion of today’s gaming audience has no prior experience with Albion. For a completely new player, a modern, cosmopolitan demographic mix creates zero friction—they have no baseline comparison, and to them, it simply looks like a standard contemporary open-world RPG. If the goal is to introduce the franchise to a fresh, modern audience, updating the world's visual baseline makes logical sense. But this exposes the central paradox of modern reboot marketing: you cannot heavily trade on legacy nostalgia while simultaneously discarding the specific cultural baseline that created it. When promotional campaigns sell a project on the promise of reviving a beloved classic, they actively invite returning players to measure the new title against the original source material. By leaning into nostalgia-driven branding while rewriting the setting's established "British fairytale" aesthetic, developers place themselves in an awkward middle ground—invoking the legacy to generate hype, but altering the execution in a way that feels to returning fans like a lack of respect for the source material. By moving past superficial forum arguments and focusing on the mechanics of worldbuilding, we can advocate for what actually matters: richer lore, cohesive environments, and narrative design that respects both the intelligence of new players and the history of the worlds being revived. This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Beacon Pines: When a Clever Story Mechanic Slows the Story Down
I recently tried Beacon Pines, which I had picked up for free from the Epic Games Store some time ago. I did not get very far, so this is not meant to be a full review. These are more my initial impressions of one of the game's central mechanics, because I found it interesting in theory but oddly frustrating in practice. Beacon Pines uses collectible words called "Charms" at certain story "Turning Points". At these moments, you choose a charm to complete part of the narration or dialogue, and that word changes how events proceed. It is a clever idea, and I can see two things the system is trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, both also created some friction for me. Charms Give Exploration a Purpose, but They Also Slow the Story Down One obvious purpose of the charm system is to make exploration more meaningful. In a narrative game, wandering around town looking at everything and talking to every character can easily feel like filler. By hiding charms in conversations and locations, Beacon Pines gives you a reason to explore. A seemingly unimportant conversation might reward you with a Charm word that later unlocks a different branch of the story at a Turning Point. One immediate problem is that you do not necessarily know whether you have found everything useful. Early on, the story gives you an interesting objective involving investigating a creepy warehouse. That sounded like the point where things might start moving and get interesting. But after reaching a Turning Point even before getting to the warehouse, I only had one charm available for that conversation. At that point I had a choice. I could continue with the Charm I already had, or I could wander back through several locations, talk to a dozen people, and hope that somewhere I might uncover another useful word to give me another option. However the game gives you no obvious indication that such a word is even available yet (or if you have found everything there is to find). That made the exploration feel strangely uncertain yet important. I was no longer exploring because I was curious about the town and genuinely wanted to investigate it or get to the know the inhabitants. I was exploring because there might be a progression token hidden in somebody's conversation. That generates a very different feeling when "exploring".It could have been better if I already wanted to explore the town and talk to the people, but I didn't. The first few I spoke with weren't particularly interesting nor did they compel me to talk to more. For me, that hurt the pacing badly. The story had finally given me an objective I wanted to pursue, but the Charm system encouraged me to stop and perform another sweep of the area first. So the mechanic seems to solve one problem while creating another. It gives the world more mechanical relevance, but it can also make the player feel obligated to comb through that world before moving on with the story. Finding a Charm Later and Using It Earlier Feels Odd The second thing I found unusual is how Charms interact with the game's rewind system. I do not actually mind rewinding a story to see a different outcome. In many ways, I prefer it. In other branching narrative games, seeing alternate outcomes may require replaying large sections of the game, carefully repeating the same sequence of choices and then changing one decision somewhere near the end. That can turn narrative experimentation into another kind of grind. Beacon Pines avoids that by letting you jump back to previous Turning Points and try another Charm/word. That part makes sense to me. It is basically a much more convenient version of reloading an earlier save. What feels stranger is that you can apparently find a new Charm after a Turning Point, then rewind and use that newly discovered word in the earlier scene. That is mechanically interesting, but narratively peculiar. There is a difference between saying, "I saw what happened after making this choice, so I want to go back and try the other one," and saying, "I found a new word later in the story, so now I can go back in time and make a choice that was not available to me before." At that point, the Charms stop feeling like choices the character possesses and start feeling more like puzzle pieces collected by the player. The chronology of the story and the chronology of your progression become disconnected. You are not merely changing a decision. You are retroactively inserting knowledge into an earlier point in the narrative. A Story That Starts to Feel Like a Puzzle I suspect this is completely intentional. Beacon Pines seems to treat its story less like a straight narrative with occasional choices and more like a branching puzzle box that gradually opens as you acquire the right words. That is an interesting idea. But it also changes the feeling of progression. It clearly adds replay value since you can keep scrounging for Charms and then construct the event progression you finally want. Which might still be fine except the pacing is slowed and now it's an increasingly larger bet whether the game is worth your time when you are sinking time into looking around for Charms instead of experiencing a hopefully good story.The story already didn't hook me early and exploring the warehouse was the one thing I was looking forward to and then I'm hit with this mechanic. Maybe as I get older I'm looking for a clearer assurance that my time is going to be respected.As an initial impression, I found the Charm/Turning Point system more interesting to think about than enjoyable to use. It is a clever mechanic that gives exploration a purpose and makes branching stories easier to revisit, while at the same time making exploration feel potentially obligatory and turning the narrative into something you solve backwards as well as forwards. That may be exactly what some players enjoy about it. For me, it made an already slow opening feel even slower.If you've played the game and liked the system, leave your thoughts about it in the comments! This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Game Review - Lou's Lagoon
Game Review: Lou's Lagoon by Tiny RoarScore: +1/-7A relatively expensive lesson that a good demo is still not representative of the full game. And after all the bug reports I put in on their Discord, I felt like I should be the one being paid.Main story and most side quests complete in under 30 hours and no impulse whatsoever to finish the final few side quests.+1 Generally cozy mechanics and even the platforming is easy.I played the demo, got this vibe, and thought this was going to be a great game. That's the only reason I bought it at launch. The other issues showed up once I started seriously playing the full game.There's the bones of a decent cozy game but how those underlying mechanics ended up used was just one disappointment after another the further I played.This is really the only upside to this game but even it doesn't last very long because...-1 Storage space is too limited making exploration irritating.Even though you can limit your crafting for quests, you still need money and that comes from gathering, crafting, and selling the result.Mid-game however you can use the Drone to collect resources, process them, and sell. Then you are just waiting on long crafting queues to get the grindy amount of currency needed to afford the upgrades.They are getting piles of feedback on this so it may change in a future update.+0 Main story is just okay.Some interesting twists, however, those twists are often more like unexpected funky tasks than the more substantial missions you might find in a "serious" setting.Quite short, and ultimately wasn't strong enough to carry the game.If you beeline the main story, you'll probably find no reason to keep playing. Which I feel is contrary to the cozy game expectation of spending time in the game world and enjoying the game loop.Not worth the price at even the 10% launch discount despite being a mostly bug free game (which to be honest is quite rare these days, especially from smaller studios) that isn't going for the "Early Access" excuse.-1 Side quests, NPCs, and the world are not engaging. Either in the story they told, the task required, or the interaction with the NPC.I didn't feel any satisfaction doing them and I only did them because I needed the currency for tech tree unlocks.So once the main story was done, I really didn't feel any inclination to engage with the game world anymore or complete the final side quests, find treasure chests, etcetera.The setting doesn't take itself too seriously. You can either see this as creative and funky, or as a random mishmash with weak worldbuilding where they just came up with a bunch of concepts to make each set of islands feel different and decided to put them together. Personally, I found it increasingly difficult to feel invested in the world.-1 NPC dialog was probably meant to be funny but the humour just didn't land or fell flat, and that got tiresome fast.-1 Building is unexpectedly clumsy.The system is functional if all you need to do is place a few crafting machines to complete quests, but don't expect to build yourself a really nice house or elaborate estate.There is snap to object but trying to align the first floor and second floors was unexpectedly really hard.-1 Tech tree unlocks are too scarce.The amount of currency for tech tree unlocks felt really tight and there are a number of things you can unlock but seem to do nothing for any quest so you can end up "wasting" them and hampering your progress on other quests that require you to craft something that in turn requires unlocking materials on the tech tree.Some unlocks also felt pointless and a waste of currency, such as the ones for foodstuffs.There were only two side quests I can remember that used them and only around half that tech tree. If you unlocked the rest it might have been pointless and worse, limited your ability to unlock other things for other quests.-1 You can't build a particularly large estate.This is generally one of the few things left after quests are done -- furnishing and fashion.The plot of land you're given is quite small, and the crafting machines take up a fair amount of that space. You could presumably build on the plot of land designated for Hefti's house, but that area is small too.And without any incentive to do this, the game really loses engagement. There is no longer any reason to craft anything except for quests. There is no reason to collect schematics for furnishings.-1 Some deliberately grindy mechanics:Some simple furnishings are randomly found through treasure chests or flying into chests floating in the sky.I suppose they needed to make flying in your plane relevant somehow after implementing Fast Travel. And without Fast Travel between islands, it would be extremely tedious as your manufacturing stations are only at your home base.To hang up a painting on a wall requires some serious upgrading to your "Builder" tool. Why?When you upgrade your Fishing Rod, suddenly catching fish becomes more of a chore. It can feel like you can get everything else except what you need which was back at the basic fish you could get with your basic rod.For example, after I upgraded my Fishing Rod I still needed Bronze Scales from fish but I literally couldn't get any after over a dozen tries and in the end just used the Drone to auto collect for a small fee. I don't feel that should be why I (had to) use the Drone.At launch it has some bugs, at least one of which is major:You cannot properly use ladders.Approaching a ladder doesn't work, and jumping onto one, (which you must do with climbable vines) just leaves you stuck in a climbing pose without being able to move.This blocks Main Story Quest progress.An awkward workaround can work: Jump at the ladder from a distance and hope you catch it high enough and you can climb up. I used this workaround on Bouldaria to complete quests required for the main story.Inventory can shrink when the game thinks you have more slots filled than are actually filled.I recommend waiting for some major updates addressing these before picking up the game.This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Dragonsword: Awakening - How to get Reina's "I'll Stand In The Sky" achievement
Reina's achievement "I'll Stand In The Sky" is described as "Attack an airborne monster for 30 seconds as Reina". It definitely sounds like you and the target need to be in the air for 30 seconds of attacking but this is extremely hard to do since even if you can manage this, a Break on the target generally means they will fall and possibly die from the fall.What I found was:Reina did NOT need to be constantly hitting anything for 30 seconds. She just needs to be in combat and stay airborne for 30 seconds.Based on some player reports, the target also doesn't need to be airborne (but it's harder to keep Reina airborne if she starts with a target low on the ground).Here's how I did it easily and what I observed:Unlock Reina's Master Skill for Air DashTarget: Sudden Mission boss Aela, the Wings of Collapse.It may not be absolutely necessary to attack an airborne target but this location and the nature of the boss to stay airborne can help with Reina staying airborne.Go up the slopes because that boss likes to stay in the air and is actually quite hard to drop onto the ground as it recovers Break very quickly.Attack the boss when it gets close.Stay airborne for 30 seconds.The high slopes help you get up and give you a lot of distance to fall slowly.Do not try to keep attacking Aela.Use normal attack - normal attack - Air Dash - normal attack to keep airborne.The third attack in your normal attack combo/chain is a plunge, so don't do that.The normal attack following an Air Dash is not counted toward your regular normal attack combo.To recover height, use one of your skills when the boss is above you. That will zoom you up to the boss because skills try to move you to connect to the target.It can be helpful to equip gear with defensive main stats like Max HP Up or Defense Up.So the achievement looks like it will trigger if you remain in combat with an enemy and you both survive for 30+ seconds and the enemy stays airborne (not the ailment, just in the air).CAVEAT: These are just my observations on my attempt where the achievement triggered. I'm not entirely sure on what the actual factors are.Good luck!This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Dragonsword: Awakening - How to get Lute's Sword Grab Achievement "The One Who Roots Out the Source of Harm"
The easiest way I found to do this was in Trait Dungeons. Keep Lute geared but choose an easy one where:The enemies can knock you around but only for very little damage.Because you need them to swarm you into a high density mob all around you.You can't kill them with your Skill.Because if it's dead, it won't have the Stun Ailment and you can't proc your Sword Grab.Once they are swarmed around you, dodge in place until you aren't being staggered by attacks and can lash out with your Skill that inflicts Stun.Then Sword Grab and hope you smash into enough enemies. Remember that you can turn your camera/facing when you Sword Grab.Good luck!This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Dragonsword: Awakening - How to get "Status Ailment Master" achievement
The higher level you are, the harder the achievement "Status Ailment Master" can be to get for the simple reason that even without gear or Karma, many creatures die before you can land five active ailments as status ailments cause enemies to take more damage. Bosses seem to be the obvious choice but they can be dangerous to fool around and you can lose time and status accumulation if you have to deal with their mechanics. Also, Hunt Bosses have status resistances.But thanks to a post on Steam I got it done fairly easily.Team: Kalien for Fire/Stun, Roxy for Bleed/Stun, Johnny for Poison/Airborne.Enemy: Logmol. This is the ogre summoned by the Sudden Mission boss Braheim. It has lots of health and if you actually kill it, just wait a bit and Braheim can summon another.Procedure:KalienUse both skills (Fox Parade, Fox Chase) then Signal Skill Finale to start Stun.All her attacks inflict Burn if there's not enough.RoxyUse both skills (Crimson Spiral, Bloody Shower)Her Dash Attack also inflicts Bleed if there's not enough.JohnnyUse both skills (Venom Dash, Phantom Slash)His Awakening level 1 allows him to hold up to two charges of Phantom Slash.His Dash attack also inflicts Poison if there's not enough.The trickiest part here is probably the Airborne and Stun as you can top up any other status with on-demand attacks from the characters.Good luck!This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Dragonsword Awakening - View Distance and finding Area Quests and Chests
Currently, View Distance is not consistent or reliable when it comes to Chests and Area Quests in Dragonsword:  Awakening.In this video you can see that there is actually a chest on the ledge across the river but despite View Distance set to High, it won't load until you are closer.Once it is loaded in, you can be further than you originally were and can still see the chest, so obviously all along it was within the View Distance setting. Other than this issue which can make finding chests confusing, some chests are simply tricky and this Map App can really help. You can upload your savegame and it will mark as "discovered" all the chests and puzzles and quests you have already done. Then you can look through the map to find what you missed.Currently the Map App has a couple of what seem to be mistakes or which simply can't be located:purple "Hero Chest" at Blue Plateaugold "Chest" at the Estuary of StillnessThis article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.

Dragonsword: Awakening - Exploring Underwater with near-Infinite Stamina
Ascending / Looking AroundWhen you are mounted on your Familiar, your personal Stamina (the character's Stamina) recovers.When your Familiar is in Swimming mode, but is NOT MOVING, they consume NO STAMINA.This means you can swim with your personal Stamina, then mount your Familiar and NOT MOVE to recover your Stamina, then dismount your Familiar and swim again. You can basically do this indefinitely.However you CANNOT DIVE without a Familiar. When you are not on your Familiar, you slowly ascend. You can swim around but you constantly ascend a bit at a time. To ascend faster, you can swim into a surface. A useful place for this is Ruins Beneath the Waves, a special dungeon where the Level 40 boss drops only mining resources. You cannot Fast Travel to it but you can apparently farm it infinitely.The shipwreck nearby has some chests. Use the trick mentioned to explore it, and when your Familiar is low on Stamina, enter the dungeon to recover Familiar Stamina, then Quit the dungeon to exit and explore more.There is a second dungeon with the same level, layout, and drops. Thanks to this video for revealing it. DivingIn Dragonsword: Awakening, you can find a secret skin basically at the bottom of the Trench of Secrets and nearby there is a hidden boss that drops a lot of materials you can normally mine.The depth is extreme and you must use a Familiar in order to dive -- if you try to swim, your character slowly ascends no matter what.Two foods really help:Egg RenewIngredients: 1-3 EggsMethod: SlicingRestores Familiar StaminaAssorted SashimiIngredients: Meat + Fish + GrainMethod: SlicingFamiliar Gliding/Swimming Stamina consumption reducedWe acquired the Skin and defeated the Boss with around 5 of each (but depends on the star rating of what you make) but to have a less scary time and flexibility to look around, bring more Egg Renew so you can collect Chests and Books (in bubbles). This article originally appeared on "Video Game Reviews, Walkthroughs, Cheats, and Mods". If you are reading this elsewhere, it has been taken without permission.