Recent reviews by Dapper Raptor

Slept on this game for way too long after picking it up on a sale... Finally got around to trying it out and absolutely wish I had played it earlier. Ended up going through and replaying it multiple times to get all the achievements and such. Looking forward to jumping into the sequel now.

Picked this up impulsively on a sale after hearing it mentioned in a video or two... didn't play it for months. Just consumed it entirely in one sitting and I just want more. This had me super engaged the entire play through and I can easily recommend this to anyone who likes a good mystery. Hope to see a sequel or something similar come out in the future.

Addictive af and incredibly fun :)

Only a few hours in and some of that time has been spent tweaking and even trying to mod out an effect... But figured I'd post my thoughts.

The game itself is, so far, very good. I am very happy with the few hours I've played in terms of gameplay mechanics and so on. HOWEVER... I'd recommend waiting for a couple of patches. Right now performance is very rough, and very inconsistent.

If you like the Stalker games, or Metro series, then you'll have a good time here... but you really are going to enjoy it a lot more in a month or two once they've done some optimisation passes (hopefully)

EDIT: Just going to insert this here... your mileage with t his game will vary wildly. There are so many annoying bugs that can happen and it can vary from a small thing that just messes with the game a big (like shopkeepers getting out of sync with your world - so you just have to guess when they will be open and disregard their opening hours) to much more annoying things like entire cases bugging out because a character gets stuck in a combat stance in the middle of a stairway and just knocks out dozens of npcs who walk into their path, making it much harder to work out what is going on, to more game breaking things like getting stuck behind a counter that has been procedurally generated in such a way that you can jump over behind it, but not get back out.

I've restarted worlds ten or so times now and never managed to get tot he point of retiring because either something little bugs out and I decide to try again to see if I can work around, or things are going great and then a biiiig bug happens. I want to love this game, but if you are someone who isn't super tolerant of jank/bugs... maybe give it a miss. Gonna leave the rest of my review as it was and still hit thumbs up because I think its a great idea... but yeah - approach with that in mind.

Tldr; overall I think if you like what you see in the screenshots and trailer/s, you're probably gonna have a good time with this one.

Longer thoughts...

I've put about 12 hours into the game now after having bought it early in its early access life but deliberately waiting until 1.0 came out, and I am glad I waited. With such an ambitious concept as this, and from a small team, it is very impressive to see all the things that came together, but sadly the end result does fall a little short of the greatness I think it could have had.

What do I mean by that? Well... the game is far from bad - as the tldr said - if you think you're gonna like it you probably will. But I feel like some more time in the oven could have made what is a solid game into something truly remarkable.

Lets take, for example - the procedurally generated cities. They are really impressive - pulling something like that off without a giant budget to invest into R&D is really, really cool. But there's just enough hiccups in them to stand out. Sometimes you'll open a door to be blocked, entirely, by a random vent system. Sometimes you'll enter a room that seems like it should be important (like a security room) and its just empty. Sometimes you just get stuck on random objects and have to reload a save. Its not super common, but in the 12 hours I've played its happened about once an hour - which is enough that it stands out and dampens the effect of "wow these cities are so cool!" just enough to be annoying.

Another example is the character building, or rather lack there of. You always have the same few interactions available to you with NPCs in the world, and so far I haven't seen that change in any way. Either a NPC will talk to you, or they won't and you just have to throw money at them until they do - or find another way to get your info. There's no real differentiating one character to the next, there's no real growth in any of the characters, etc. Which is fine - it DOES work - but again, it does wear away at the experience over time. Your own character also doesn't really develop - you get some upgrade and such, but there's no sense of "I am this guy/gal in this world" at all.

There's probably a dozen or so things like the above mentioned things. None of them are issues enough to ruin the experience or make it not fun, but they just bring it from being amazing to "just good". I think that's why there are a lot of reviews and comments since the game hit 1.0 of people sharing frustrations - I imagine if you played this during the early access period, and fairly had the understanding that some or all of these things would be ironed out or expanded upon, the 1.0 release would indeed be disappointing in a fair way.

As it stands, I'm going to recommend this game - because I'm having a decent enough time with it, and as I said in the tldr - I do think you will likely have a good time if it looks like something you'd enjoy. I wish it had been given a little more time and polish - and its very possible the devs may do that over time - but I still expect I'll play at least another 12 hours of the game so realistically I can't complain too much. Its an enjoyable experiment that falls short of being a truly remarkable standout game - but its not "bad" by any measure.

Put a heap of time into this game on Epic and, honestly, its so incredibly well made and compelling as a game that it was a no-brainer to pick it up on steam as well to support the developer. Its incredibly satisfying, provides a good challenge, gives the player a huge amount of agency over how they want to play and progress, and is just all round a good time. Absolutely loving all the updates and can't wait to see what else gets added!

After playing the early access version on Epic for a few hundred hours, I forced myself to not play anymore after Update 3 and waited for 1.0... and that was a great idea! I'm having a blast. Satisfactory remains one of the best games in this style of game and the attention to detail, particularly in regards to the UX, is amazing. There's so many different ways to build and there's literally hundreds of tiny little tweaks and touches that the devs have put in to make your experience better... and that's all on top of a well designed, thoughtfully paced and rewarding building, automation and exploration game. One of the easiest recommendations if you have even a passing interest in the game.

Cool idea, great artstyle... but on launch you can't rebind keys and the performance is much worse than it was in the demo a while back... I'd wait for some patches and then see what people are saying - for now I've refunded the game. Hope to pick it up and change this to a thumbs up at a later date.

There's a lot of potential here, with a nice starting point already playable in early access. There's some rough edges, but that's always going to be expected in early access. The developer has already been open to taking feedback and has implemented changes when given said feedback, so if you are okay with buying in to an in-development project (as you should be if you are even considering early access titles), Blood of the Elves seems like it has a great future ahead of it.

Combat feels really nice, as does traversing around the world. There's really not that many games that cash in on the whole vampire thing with stuff like turning into a bat and so on - so its cool to see that here. The opening segment sets the tone for a high fantasy experience up in a floating city, and then before long you are down on the ground fighting all manner of baddies from orcs to giant spiders. Really interested to watch this one progress and see where it goes with time!

Just played through the game in a single sitting. While I am going to mark this as a recommend, I do think the price should probably be a bit lower (I got it on a sale myself) for what is on offer here. Its less about the length of the game - as personally I don't think the length of a game is a good way to judge value, and more about the fact that the game has quite a few misteps IMO. That said, I did have a fun time overall and would welcome a followup title that explored the world/lore more so still recommending it.

I do think the game could be improved in a number of ways though, so going to list them here in no particular order.
- The world map lets you place a waypoint but you can't remove it... For a game that focuses so much on crafting atmosphere, its a HUGE oversight (IMO) that you cannot remove the giant on-screen widget showing you where the waypoint is. Just let us remove the waypoint in the map by clicking on a placed waypoint.
- Forced stealth sections are fine to me... but I just wish I could crouch. Crouching doesn't even have to do anything mechanically, but not being able to crouch behind cover in a stealth section just feels bad after years of being conditioned to crouch. It would help these sections feel a bit more tense IMO.
- Cultists are annoying... the best way I found to deal with them, if I did get caught, was to run around so that they were all chasing me then kite them back to my train and just kill them. Having no way to counter them if they DO spot you, coupled with the fact that they run about the same speed as you and chase you for a VERY long time just makes them feel bad. I like difficult enemies and so on, but it just feels like you have to perfect the stealth everytime the first time, or too bad.
- Charles randomly turning up was great the first couple of times... but after that it got a bit annoying. Most of the time he would turn up at incredibly frustrating points - like when I was stealthing through areas with cultists and such. Meaning that my best option was to just run away and hide in a building or let him or the cultists kill me to get it over with. Similarly, the best way to deal with Charles, if you aren't in your train moving, is to just wait until he's there, jump inside a building, and wait him out - which is very boring. Sometimes he would leave after 10-20 seconds, other times it would take minutes. He even glitched into the building and killed me once lol. A few little checks to ensure that he isn't going to turn up at particularly frustrating moments would go a long way IMO. Likewise - the fact that he DIDN'T come attack when did things that were very loud or whatever (like blowing up dynamite or turning on a lighthouse) feels like a missed opportunity to me.
- Dying feels like a bit of a missed opportunity for stakes. I only died a handful of times and each time I did I lost single digit amounts of scrap... I had completely upgraded my train in less than 80 minutes of playtime, so losing 1-3 pieces of scrap for dying really didn't matter. In general the game has a bit of an economy problem - its way too easy to get scrap.

As I said - I still enjoyed the game. I just feel like the price of entry is a bit high when there are quite a few issues and annoyances hurting the overall experience. I absolutely adore the atmosphere in the game, and the music (while barely playing) was wonderful. Obviously Charles' design is sick as well. Again - I'd LOVE to see the developer revisit the idea and expand on the lore, polish it up, etc. in a future title!