Recent reviews by ECE94FSR

With 97-98% positive reviews I was expecting more to be honest.
It has some decent exploration but its ultimately a management game at its core.
That being said the graphics and design is really nice and how you go about the game is up to you in a sense.
You can chose to do adventure mode or an easier variant where no Tar Slimes exist.
Those are hostile slimes when two combined slimes try to combine with a third different plort end up becoming mosters.
They quickly takeover but can be easily dealt with by shooting some water.
Lastly there is the so called "Rush Mode". Its basically playing a slightly altered world trying to get as much money within the time limit as possible. By doing quests you can gain some extra time.
This mode last typically bellow 2 hours and without quests less than an hour.
It somewhat goes against the base concept of carefully managing the farm and building up structure and carefully taking care of your slimes etc.
Unless you go for achievements this mode is completely optional.

If we ignore Rush Mode, the adventure mode is kind of relaxing.
Some puzzles and things might be a little too difficult for children and maybe some adults.
I didnt use any guides and know that I probably would have spent less than half the time I did if I would have known about certain things.
Enemy slimes and falling into the water is easily avoidable and the main difficulty is finding, progressing and using availble utilities. The game starts a little slow, but eventually you gain access to more plots of land to expand with more corals, gardens and other buildings. Then there is the lab which you can use to construct things to help with traveling or depositing resources, extracting and gaining materials to further create things.

]Being a rancher you are going to manage a farm with slimes, fruits, vegetables, chickens and try to gain money.
You gain plorts from feeding slimes or vacuuming it up with your Vaccpack which you trade at the market.
The market changes prices each day, so its good to save up and sell the plorts when they are at high or atleast mid value to make as much money as possible.

You go and adventure some and catch slimes, get some fruit etc.
Finding big "gordo" slimes you feed them to gain keys to progress further as areas are closed of by valves with keyholes.
Some of these slimes also provide a teleporter to some part of your ranch. Making portals of your own is a great way to get around but overall the map isnt that big.
There are day and night cycles which affect spawns etc. and when you aren't exploring you set up gardens and feed slimes or set up so they will be feed automatically. Later on you can use drones to pick up and transport various things.
It is somewhat limited though.
Threre are 3 special areas you can gain access to where you play mini-game like modes to gains some special things.

There are quests you can pick up to earn money and gain some resources which can be nice.
If you manage to "die" you get knocked out and keep the money but lose the rest you are carrying.
You wake up back at your home. You can also whenever you like sleep to force a new day and change market prices or from night to day.
Health bar, energy bar, 4 slots with a fifth for water later available is your inventory.
The amount you can carry per stack is also upgradeable, sadly not the amount of slots.
Health regenerates and so does the energy bar. Energy is used to sprint or hover like a jetpack.
All is upgradeable.
You can move quite high and do skips between far away places if you are careful, so it adds a bit to the freedom of exploration.
While it seem simple enough a few things arent that obvious and can require some thinking.

Its mostly fun and enjoyable but eventually gets a bit annoying with doing repetative tasks.
So while adventure and exploring is fun, don't expect it to be that much to do.
There is some story progression through mails in your home you can read and finding "H" reading about a persons left notes.

While I had higher expectations it was a good game overall.
I think sandbox people, creative persons and management focused people are those that would get the most out of the game. Children could enjoy parts of the game.
I got about 40 hours and expect that it would have been much lower if I would have used guides.
For me its about 100%:ing the game so the only real challenge was Rush Mode which was harder than expected.
i like the design, graphics and some of the gameplay. There is a lot of decorative options which doesnt appeal to me but might be interesting to others.
The problem I have with the game is that it just feels too limited with the amount of slimes, exploration and repetitiveness.
More slots would have been nice, but it might have ruined some of the concept of having to carefully chose what to bring.
I got it at the summer sale which was well worth the price.

//ECE//

JC 4 didn't look as bad as people claimed, though in comparison with JC 3 and how both games ran it became a problem.
I could set high settings and not have any problems with JC 3 while with JC 4 I had annoying stutters.
It oddly runs better on higher settings than lower. I started with "medium settings" and my first session was nice.
When I used "optimal settings" it scaled down the resolution bellow full HD and set everything to low etc.
The stutters appeared a lot more frequently so I decided to switch settings.
For fun I set to "very high" and maxed most things except for shadows. Stutters weren't as long but clearly appeared at times with many explosions. I wanted to further try and tweak it but the game refused to switch from very high and crashed when I tried. So Very High textures it is...

The first few hours were pretty good and I could enjoy it.
Grappling, Wingsuit etc. was comfortable to use.
I got a bit worried after one of the earlier missions when I had to drive an ATV and flew around from enemy bikes and little rocks etc.
Luckily this was the only mission this happened and it never felt like a problem again.
Menus were somewhat overwhelming at first, but when you get a sense of what all represents and the limitations of the map it quickly becomes natural. With that said I even after completing the game had issues with supply drops, grapple menus etc. from clicking the wrong button. I used a Xbox One controller, so this might not be a PC issue and might even be a personal thing.
The map is big and the chaos is usually crazy, but becomes a bit less so after taking over regions.
With this I mean jetfighters, helicopters, tanks etc. being present and shooting all over the place.
The chaos system is no longer increasing in level, so while it does increase and "level up" it doesnt appear more or harder enemies like past games or the star system of GTA for instance.
A lot have complained about another major change; the way you take over enemy bases.
You have to interact, escort, defend etc. and destruction is at best present in some of these missions.
The "ar scan" feature you can use to highlight mission objectives etc. it has its uses but doesn't seem to work properly at times.
Modding the grapple is much easier in this game and you can do some amazing stuff with it and to further unlock more things you can just progress with side or main missions from each corresponding letter.
Garland is "G and Javi "J", simple and easy and they all provide unlocks to their category.
G gives more mods to "booster" and Javi to "retractor" for example.
Most of the stunts are very generic and more of a grind than a challenge. Wingsuit is always just 3 rings and is very easy compared to JC 3. Only one gave me any real issues.
It didn't take an hour but 10 min so a big difference. Most are first tries however.

While I'm sure the critique is warranted when JC 4 launched, I don't think all the negativity expressed now is just.
It's not a bad game at all, I'm critical though that some things havent been fixed.
I have grappled through a wall and the grapple doesnt work for me properly at times.
Not sure if it has to do with the stuttering since it happens without any lag.
So to give an example I want to tether a chopper, instead of doing what "holding" is supposed to do I ended up grappling towards it which isn't good at all.
At other times I do the first tether and the second one can't be attached and instead decides to do something else.
It also happens that the grapple becomes "delayed". I try to tether a chopper and it doesn't do the second tether at the normal rate.
I get hit and fall. When I get up I will now grapple. This isnt happening at all times but it became enough of a problem that I no longer rushed in as much and tethered enemies, choppers and tanks etc.
This is bad as its the funniest weapon to use.

If I would only do the "main" side missions, story and dlcs it would have been enjoyable all the way through.
I got lucky that I never did that many "mini missions" as I got way more points than needed for upgrades and they never served a purpose.
Mostly it was boring objectives so it felt very nice to know that you didn't need to do them.
However the stunt, speed and wingsuit challenges are all needed for achievements and 100% completion.
The mistake is that they are too many maybe 4-500 if we combine them and mostly generic.
A thing which I strongly disliked about JC 2 was finding all locations.
There are a lot in JC 4 and on the map some of the smaller settlements and villages don't count and with a vast map its very rough to find all of them.
I spent a few hours comparing a map to my map to get them all. They really should have implemented a better way to find them.

When "liberating" regions you have to take out a military facilty and gain unlocks depending on what is manufactured there overall and can be seen from the map.
I don't think the new way to interact and do certain things is as bad as some claim. It could be really annoying to find all the destructibles in JC 2, but in JC 3 it felt pretty well balanced.
The big issue is that destruction on objects isn't really giving you a sense of progress. It adds up and unlocks more pilots etc. but you don't get extras for making chainreactions etc. which is a flaw in my opinion.
They more serve as a creative way to do cool things or take out enemies.
Chaos doesnt as mentioned increase enemy difficulty so the game isn't that hard.
Though you can get killed a lot from unlucky hits or a jetfighter flying into your chopper.
The checkpoint system is very generous which is nice.
Vehicles and weapons are plenty and the DLCs further improve on this.
The story is alright and I watched all cutscenes, they are step down in quality graphically.

The modding of the grapple is probably the best change, while the way how chaos works and all the excess "stunt stuff" is the worst.
For the DLCs I would say that "Los Demonios" is very straightforward destruction and a bit odd so I can understand the negative reviews and you die a lot.

"Danger Rising" is a good setup for JC 5 and brings back classic JC 3 having to take over big ships/subs by destroying stuff.
Hover Board is cool, but its also the worst part of the dlc having to use it for objectives and somewhat frustrating time trials with my "grapple problems".

"Dare Devils of Destruction" is a big "hit or miss", on one hand its like a game of its own although not that long, on the other hand a lot is focused on destruction which is typical JC.
It was enjoyable and a little frustrating. My biggest problem is that reversing with vehicles is ridiculously slow and you can be screwed over by RNG on some stages with enemies locking you down.

Overall it was a surprisingly fun experience and it almost took exactly the same time to 100% as JC 3.
While worse than JC 3 I would give it 8/10 if it would have worked as intended, but with the issues I had its 7/10.
I would recommend the "Complete Edition" at ~15-20€ or lower.
Not as bad as they say, but different in a lot of ways compared to JC 3.

//ECE//

I would probably rate this game 4/10 maybe 5/10 if I would play splitscreen with friends a lot and find it enjoyable.

For single player the campaign does give a sense om making progress and could take some time to do if you play every stage at hard difficulty. Otherwise your looking at about 90min+ to finish with all gold medals.
As an achievement hunter this game has some challenge to it, not the best kind but atleast it feels good to finish.
Playing the same map 20 times in a row is kind of stupid as an achievement. Everytime you leave you will hvae to reselect map and difficulty. This makes the achievement of winning against 5 hard level NPCS on "Speed Racer" (idk 100% the name) 5 times in a row annoying apart from the RNG.
The speed run achievement "Ultra Fast Food" is a good challenge, the only thing is that it suffers from the same problem as the other challenging one; its RNG.
No matter how well you play you could lose 10 times in a row due to not getting enough boost power ups.

Overall the game has apart from racing some interestign gameplay so called "minigames".
You go bowling with your car try to land as close to a hole as possible and play a retro version of Rocket League to name a few.
It is relatively easy to handle the cars, but a bit frustrating on some of the minigames.
It has its moments, but overall the gameplay feels dull and not very enjoyable to me.
It might be worth to pick up at a good sale but there are a lot of better cheap games.
While I do recommend it, it is more a neutral score on my part.

//ECE//

To avoid needing to read all off the essay long review, this needs to be said:
Redout is definately not for everyone.
Game warns about epilepsy at start, affecting few who have never experienced it before.
I who seldom, or more like never get motion sick. felt the game affecting me in the stomach.
In a light way like on a roller coaster, so positive but hinting at people easily getting motion sick, to think twice about getting the game. It would be helpful to actually get some sensitive people in that area to give an opinion as I am an opposite, just a thought.
To be clear this was not using VR, which I havent tried but definately should.

Game is very fast and requires fast reaction or repeatedly playing to gain muscle memory.
So for people who dont like games where you cant clearly see where you are going and have a clear minimap, or cant stand bumping around like a pinball a lot of times, you might dislike this a lot.
While it is very much about racing, in many modes you can use passive and active power ups.
Unlike mario kart for instance, you have them on at start and they are personal, so no pick ups.
This means that a bot might use emp while you use a magnetic stabilizer to more easily manage curves.
Game feels very rewarding and learnable and has easy settings if "normal" is too hard.
However this only effects bots and the modes where they are present.

The game is typically a hyper speed racer with tracks many times too fast too react and needing to memories.
Unique and very interesting mechanic is that you have to use both controller sticks like if you were steering an airplane. Left stick is general steering while the right one is for strafing. Basically when you enter a loop you have to push the right stick backwards and tilt properly with slopes and curves.
To quote someone giving advice about the game "You dont use the brake button, then you are playing the game wrong".
You are in many instances better of bouncing at a wall in a curve and some rare times you want to strafe in opposite direction to the way you normally do.
This is very hard to get right, many times you let go of the right stick or react wrong or to slowly.
It becomes particulary hard when needing to strafe and use the boost button at the same time.
Very interesting way to drive and still fascinates me when thinking back on the game.

As for other mechanics you have health and power ups.
Dying on most stages means a respawn while others means you lose/die.
I you dont hit corners etc. your vehicle will start to heal any damages after some time sporadically.
Health becomes more important later when you face harder tracks and bounce on walls purposely.
You also have jumps where you can go outside the map for instant death/respawn as an addition to places without border guard.
This isnt too hard to learn the basics of, you mostly want to tip the vehicle nose down and land asap by strafing think of it like an airplane landing not going to far missing the landing track except with waay to high speed. The hardest part is exit direction, as you are doomed if you point too much in the wrong direction.
Another thing to know is that you will drive in pipes and even outside them sometimes upside down giving a lot to learn and handle correctly with strafing and controls in general.
Some environments of tracks affect how you drive which also becomes another mechanic to get the feel of.
Examples are driving under water and with low gravity.

The Graphics of the game are stunning especially for only being 5GB~.
Tracks look amazing and the environments are beautiful and some very futuristic.
Vehicles look very similar to the Star Wars racers in Episode I, some atleast.
Music isnt too bad either and very good on some tracks.
Game runs very well and makes you feel like you drive very fast, great immersion.

The mechanics and aesthetics are very much the best parts of Redout and sets it apart from other racing games.
I have almost exclusively played the Career Mode.
The gamemodes are (Might miss some):
Pure Race: No power ups
Race:
Time Trial:
Speed: Similar to Time Trial, staying above target speed reduce lap time, possible to negative values.
Endurance Race: Many laps race awarding points for hitting boosters and staying at higher position.
Arena Race:(unsure about the name) You die you are out.
Instant Gib: You take much more dmg.
Survival:(again unsure on the name) reach check points adding time and avoid obstacles.

The Devs have made a lot of good decisions here.
Ach. are well balanced and try hard completionist have plenty of challenge to fully master the game outside of the ach.
You can chose widely between different mission so it isnt fully linear and needed to play modes you dont like or struggle with.
They are divided by 4 tiers which corresponds to how good the vehicles are, becoming faster etc. as you move up the tiers. You cant use a higher tier or lower tier vehicle on stages and have to select the matching tier to be able to play.
You get exp. and cant buy higher level ships till you have reached a high enough "pilot level" becoming higher for each tier. To enter the final campaign map you have be high enough level rather than having beaten stages.
They further have chosen to put the increasingly harder stages at higher tiers which is great.
Each time you can buy a next tier vehicle you gain access to a lot of new stages to chose from in any order you want. They naturally reward you more money and probably logically more exp at higher tier.
But you could if you want go to the garage and chose a tier 1 vehicle and grind tier 1 till you beat the game for instance. So if you move to lets say tier 3 and most maps are to hard you can grind any of the lower tier stages for progression.
To be fair though, even if this adapts so that people struggeling can progress more easily, the final event is no pushover if you truly intend to get to the ending of the game.

There are a few vehicles to chose from and you can recolour them etc. for some customization.
These are the same in each tier with changed looks and improved stats.
All handle differently and suit different playstyles, some are tanky others fragile or fast acceleration vs speed vs boost power etc.
You might change as you move up tiers as some are better suited at different tiers and how you play there with those maps.
Further all vehicles in all tier have upgrades i four categories that should be made asap.

Another thing are the power ups.
You dont have any at first and you can have one active and one passive at the same time.
All of these when bought have several stages to buy to improve them and max them out.
Not all are useful, but is to a degree a matter of preference.

As for ach. you need to get gold on 45 stages spread over all categories and 1 platinum.
So dont worry if you have stages you dont want to play and dislike you can skip them and still have plenty to chose from. Though the final unlockable event is required to beat for 100% and can as mentioned earlier be challenging.

With its great mechanics, aesthetics, immersion, ridiculous speed and amount of content to beat it has become one of my favorite racing games. With promising VR not even tried, I would say it is worth it even at the full price.
Hard part is to recommend it to a broad audience so most should probably get it heavily discounted, sadly.
I personally recommend it and find it to be one of the most unique and cool looking games out there.
To fully complete it (platinum and gold on all maps) and master it would take a lot of time I reckon, but must feel very rewarding. I 100% the achievement and felt that was enough for me, good choice devs to not force all platinum or gold.
Review cut from 11k+...

//ECE//

I am an achievementhunter and had just finished up Redout: Enhanced Version and was looking forward to Grip.
My intitial reaction wasnt too good and I thought this would end up in a negative review.
However it had some really good things that I search for in a game.

This is where my experience starts and where I first dislike the game.
I lack control and handling as I bounce around and especially feel helpless in the air.
To get any air control you have to let go off the throttle and then move around with the stick on the control.
This gets pretty tricky when you drive at high speed and the car points towards the ground after a jump as you dont want to lose speed and the vehicles (especially airblades) tend to dive with the nose quickly.
Also it often is too late to save yourself when you are flying around aimlessly.
Even moreif you exit upside down.
Did I ever master air control and fully reap all the benifits of mastering Grip?
NO.

First in the campaign I focused on avoiding wacky roads with boosters and try to keep driving realtively straight. I chose to go with an Airblade from the Titan class.
I for sure developed and the progressing system made it easy to stay at it and feel yourself getting better.
The only thing that bothered me was that the final rival races of each tier was dead easy and not close to the challenge of the races to get there.
At first tier a 7th place is enough to get to next set of events.
As you beat each tier this requirement becomes higher and at the final tier it hasnt just become a lot harder but you need to get 1st.
Fortunately the total score of the events of each set is what counts and in this game you dont have one racer always 100% scoring first or even top places neccessarily.

This is a very good design choice and at around tier 7/11 I started to feel the challenge.
At tier 9 it felt like I hit a brick of walls.
I replayed the tracks till I got them learned and you can just restart in the middle of the race if you like and afterwards as long as you dont move to the next event. It might be smart to keep tabs to know for sure what position you need to win.

The campaign for me was the best thing about Grip and felt well executed.
Sadly the ach. percentage for beating the campaign is very low.
These are the typical events which you also can do in quickplay etc.

Arena fights where you try to deal as much dmg/kills as possible in arena like battlefields.
They were too easy and never gave any sort of challenge at all.
Speed demon, a race but with only speed boost power ups felt rewarding and taught you the maps well enough eventually.
Normal races are the typical "normal game mode" with power ups, not all available at all stages of the campaign but normally so. Various types of offensive abilities, 1 boost and 1 defensive ability.
Reminds a bit of mario kart with the blue rockets homing in on the first place and the catchup power up a from of "star power up".
Cool thing is that if you hold the button down instead of tapping when having 2 power ups you upgrade the selected ability to a more powerful version that can make the power ups much more lethal or useful.
Elimination is the last event type and works as a race but after passing I think the first lap a timer starts at 20 or 30 sec ( cant remember exactly). This type of race is very punishing. You can go from first place to last in a matter of seconds getting hit by 1 power up and then by passing vehicles.

The race and elimination mode reminds me very much about mario kart.
If you get to far away from the top position you cant catch up and with rubberbanding this becomes really painful.
Just like in mario kart you can get hit multiple times in a row and just have to restart. It is RNG heavy but you still need to drive well to get through those events at the later part of the campaign.
I have had many times where I lose 1st or second position at the very last turn of the entire race after a lethal power up hits me and have to restart to avoid ending up last.

The structure and progressive ramp up in difficulty, feeling the benefits of your skills growing and providing a very "perfect" level of difficulty is what makes this game worth to get.
Then the unfairness of RNG sometimes losing without being able to do anything keeps you engaged rather than frustrating, again like mario kart at the highest difficulties.
Really recommend the campaign and to keep at it if you want to get a good feel of the game.

Parkour but with cars? No, already there in the name it gets it wrong since the airblades basically are hovercraft and the vehicles using jetengines since they can gain speed in the air according to the loadingscreen.
But yeah, parkour but with vehicles is a good description of what carkour is.

You have a bunch of levels ranging from easy, normal and hard to nightmare difficulty.
Typically the maps are on shorter obstacle courses with a pink glowing "checkpoint" you need to reach with your vehicles. But 2 maps have a lot of these needed to be collected to win, some have 2 collectables.
They vary in length but are typically pretty straight forward.
Some require you to get how the physics of the game works to be able to understand how you need to do to win.

All in all the difficulty wasnt too hard but they were definatively challenging, the nightmare ones surely took around an hour each to beat.
It is decent game mode with a lot of potential I would say.
The biggest and to be honest atrocious failure about the mode is the camera.
If you would be able to look around or actually zoom out to get a sense of distance and how you are about to land etc. would improve this mode greatly. Another thing would be to disable the respawn button.
Hitting respawn in one of the 2 big stages is just horrible.
Imagine spendign half an hour trying to get 40+ collectables and hitting respawn.
The other solution would be to simply respawn the player without resetting the collectables.
Seriously this is a huge overlook.

First of thank you devs for changing the achievement to drive 10000 laps to "only" 1000.
Overall the game is a nice and well balanced game to 100% though it is on the harder side of the spectrum and the campaign and carkour might be too hard for a lot of people just like 1000 laps is a pretty big grind that might not appeal to most.

I dont know much about the community or how good a to player is.
I think that arena mode only really is enjoyable with real players.
Multiplayer and just racing on the maps from quick play I havent really done much.
There are some "cheat modes" like hyper mode etc. that can be fun and challenging to use but wont count towards progress/stats.
The ai at Lethal difficulty in quick play are no pushovers, so if you are looking for additional challenge there you will find it.

I really recommend Grip as a challenging well balanced game to 100% for achievement hunters.
The mechanic of jumping and switching to drive upside down or on the sides is an interesting and new perspective for racing enthusiasts. Combine this with power ups and you got a pretty unique and interesting game. Again reminds me a bit of mario kart in some aspects.
I got it as part of the Nitrobundle at 5€~ which this game alone is worth.
Game is probably worth the full price aswell, but get it at a sale if unsure.

//ECE//

Prediction Error in most engagements, latency, random input lag, stutters, players with massive advantage stomping lobbies barely getting hit at all and being matched against players who get more kills in a season then I do in 3K+ hours.
Cheaters, the servers are trash and now they want me to buy the battle pass with real money exclusively and to top that twice per season...
LOL :D

With a massive cheating problem the first half of the 1st season it was pretty much unwinnable.
After upgrading their anti-cheat it became much more enjoyable as you could win a few games.
Sadly with that rough start and to slow content additions (if any at first), a lot of players left the game.
It is the main problem with a game like Fall Guys, it gets old playing the same maps constantly.
Season 2 had mediocre content, but Season 3 is by far the best season so far seen to content.

Fall Guys also suffers a lot from haters and labeling.
The game is not Dead by any means and it people still spam and try to massively downplay the game, a lto havent even tried it...
As goes with the labeling it isnt a casual game at all.
Play with your little children and they will most likely fail to qualify from the first round and a lot of players statistically havent even won a full episode once.
While skill is needed, it is very RNG dependant.
To make it even worse there is a clear adv/disadvantage between players.
Players are not affected by collision, grabbing and phisics equally.
This explains why so few have less than 20 wins.
The game greatly rewards skilled players, especially those with advantage.
Notice that golden person that is ungrabbable, that can walk into you moving you a long while if you do it you wont move them an inch. Do you fall more often and take much longer to get up?
Just watch a top player stream and compare your game, I can say mine isnt the same as theirs...

So to summerize some things the game has a good community, lots of haters and heavily rewards the top 1% of the game, it is probably fun for most people for a while, but many wont last even 5-10 hours.
Since they have episode varriations now I mostly play when good structured ones appear like the recent Hex-a-gone only one so I dont get bored.

Ignoring bad phisics, adv/dis etc. the game suffers from some other problems aswell.
For instance some people have a lot of disconnects and team games suffer from balancing when te teams are uneven. If your side is losing you dont get punished at all from leaving early and solidifying a loss for the team, 3 team games many teams end by simply having 2 teams gang up against one team which the game has no mechanics to balance against.
Lastly, for some reason they have an achievement for winning 5 episodes in a row.
Devs WTF, are you serious?
Disconnects break the streak aswell and early people used exploit to get it by leaving if they werent sure they would win to keep the streak...

In conclusion the game is fun, for a while but grows old rather quicky.
It doesnt take that long to finish the season pass and has been easier with each season.
Better players with not too much disadv get waaay more rewarded than other player with much higher playtimes and can usuallly buy everything constantly in the shop (cosmetics).

I recommend Fall Guys since it provides a good amount of fun and suits a lot of different people.
I hope they further balance the game between bad and good players, it doesnt really make much sense pitting the best against the worst in a battle royal and denying many players the ability to get a single win.
The biggest issue of being vastly unfair between players hopefully will get smaller as they keep optimizing and polishing the game.

//ECE//

I wont bother doing a fully structured review but will share some things.
The game seems cartered to a very niche group of people being very dfferent from any racing game I have played.
The good is that the game has some options to reduce the authentacy.
For instance Instead of having to do four 12 lap races at the start of the championship you can reduce to 25 % at options (did not know this at first...) and the maximum amount of laps will be 2-4 depending on the map.
Serously who plays this with full settings, roughly 30 min per race and there is four per weekend.

The Handling you get used too but is very off-putting at first.
And sometimes you start to spin for no reason and you always end up faced the wrong way whatever you do when this happens.
Unlike what others say the ai isnt too easy but rather stupid.
If you manage to get first during the race you easily win as long as you dont make any mistakes.
If you dont overtake them quickly within the first lap or 2 depending on the map you have lost.
The bots accelerate faster than you and have a greater maxspeed even after getting full season contract and upgrading all parts to max.

Then there is the penalty system...
It only affects you and not the bots which means they can cut corners, hit border markers and ram you without penalty.
Imagine starting behind an opponent and they just brake and you instantly get a 5 sec penalty.
Or you get shoved at the corner by the ai so you get forced to cut the corner for 10 sec penalty and then hit two markers.
Hit three markers and get a whopping 30 sec penalty or penalty lap. Each new hit on makrer will add another 30 sec.
Some races its tight at the start and the ai can get stuck meaning that when you start behind you get locked and 1-4th place will get a 20 something lead forcing you to basically end up as 5th place.
Luckily you can restart in the middle of the race as many times as you like otherwise it would be much more difficult.
The normal structure of a weekend race at the career is Practis, qualify, qualify for super pole and then 2 races. This is repeated twice meaning that if you skip qualifying "by selecting retire" you get an automatic 12th place start and only have to do 4 races which roughly 35 minutes.
in the ETR or what it is called consists of a totalt of 32 races on 8 maps.
I played on easy with beginner diff ai, but it seems the professional ai is pretty much as stupid and broken.

Luckily with the 25 % reduction and the ability to skip races aswell by retiring you can reduce the amount of races you need to play to win and greatly reduce the time required to win the championship.

I have not tried other modes and after getting pretty good at the game dont really enjoy it but have 100% it.
Luckily it has been much worse in the past before patches so it isnt broken atleast.

It took me 4 tries to beat the game. (to exit the gungeon)

The biggest issue is the difficulty to keep track of your character and avoid enemy fire with lots of things going on at the same time on the later levels. This was not as hard on EtG. The patterns are more complex visually but should be easier when you get used to it due to the longer dodge rolls.
On the other hand having weapons randomly swapped and gunplay feeling easier balances this a lot in my opinion.
Feels good to be rewarded with better guns when you play well with the combo system.

Its not like EtG, but it has been pretty good so far.
I am not to big on arcade but this I find engaging.
I dont know yet how much time the game will keep me interested after completion, but I doubt its anywhere close to EtG.

I would say its worth it on a sale and probably at full price awell.
Might do my longer review when I have 100% it.

//ECE//

I had just finished up GemCraft Chasing Shadows after 90 hours of intense gameplay.
It was a very enjoyable experience going for the 100% with just a few bumps on the way.
When looking at the sequel GC:FW I was a bit worried.
It had some bad reviews and complaints about difficulty and grinding so I was afraid I would dislike it based on my experience with GC:S. However it also had complaints about updates making it too easy and ruining any challenge.
So, I decided since I needed my fix after the previous game that I would go for it and buy it.

Note: Most of the guide will compare GC:FW to GC:S.

I started the game at the "normal difficulty" (hardest)
The first impression is naturally that it feels different to GC:S in a lot of ways, the UI is a good hint.
The first levels feel more difficult than in GC:S and some are quite close calls.
The enrage system is different, you no longer gem-bomb to enrage. You put the gem in the "enrage gem socket" on top of the waves that are on the left like usual.
Gem level like before influences how much the change will be. I found myself using it less since it seemed easier to guage the impact with the previous system. However I never got that familiar with it so I guess that its a better system when you get comfortable with it.
It also seems far more important in this game to gain exp. as a "required mechanism".
There are less gems (6) but 2 additional stuctures apart from towers and traps compared to GC:S.
The new ones are "Lanterns" and "Pylons", both are nice additions and see some good usage in the game.

Since the game has been updated, V-levels or in this game "Trial levels" are pretty much the same with no change that I can recall.
The other big change is endurance mode. You no longer get to continue the level. Instead you can chose endurance mode once you have beaten a level.
Intitally you only have like 40 or so waves in endurance, but everytime you beat it the number of waves goes up. This is a global change so all new endurance mode levels you enter will have the same level.
This means you can beat one level in endurance mode and increase the amount of waves for all levels when doing endurance mode.
While it is a big change it is not necessarily a bad one and it means that you can get free exp. easily like before, but since its separated from the normal stage it becomes more flexible in my opinion.

After a few stages I took a break and read some more on the Steam discussions.
I then realised that the higher difficulty mostly would result in a much slower early game and worse shadow core drops.
So I decided, without getting stuck that I rather would play it on the newer "Chilling" (easy) difficulty.
Basically it means double shadow core drop and 3 free buildings which is huge early on.
I pushed through a lot of levels before getting stuck and could to a certain degree agree on it being "too easy".
It had saved me from grinding and I had only done a single endurance through all levels.
I felt that I had made a misstake as I noticed I had barely any skils or traits.

As I said something did not feel right being so far in the game and lacking a lot of stuff.
It turns out "Wizard Stashes" which are basically revamped Tome Chambers that contain skills and traits.
They also give talisman fragments and shadow cores.
The game also has some cool new enemies and structures that cannot wait to take you by surprise but I will leave that to be discovered for yourself.

The next interesting thing that has been changed is the talisman.
You will have to collect talisman fragments (puzzle fragments) and match them together to build a 5 by 5 puzzle.
To make it harder you have to collect the shapes and sacrificce them to your catalouge to be able to change shape to them if they have the same category.
You only have access to 5 of the 25 slots of the puzzle and will have to spend a lot of shadow cores to unlock them.
Interesting to know here is that there is another aspect "runes". There can be 5 different rune shapes, if you have 3 of the different kind of shape vertically you get a minor buff to the mana you get from sending waves early.
However if you have 3 matching rune shapes horizontally you get a percentage base buff to your starting mana which is huge.

Beating the game in either difficulty should not be that hard but will take some time (Will do "normal diff" soon.)
However if you plan on getting all achievements, you will have to look up how to mana farm as getting to WL 1000, beating 360 waves on endurance and getting certain gem grades will most likely be impossible.
I feel like GC:S suffered from this too when you have to reach a certain mana pool level. You will not figure it out on your own, especially in GC:FW if you are new to the series.
Guides while harder to follow exist on GC:FW, but for GC:S it is way easier in my opinion. I was W-level 190:ish when I had done most of GC:S and could not figure out how to get the mana pool level higher.
One short video and I gained hundereds of levels and ended up being W-level 1200+ after just a few hours and runs.
I did not get to that point at this game as it took me well over W-level 500 till I got any significant jumps. I still never bothered to figure out exactly how to do exp-farming.
But I got about 100 levels on my final exp. farm run and ended my GC:FW run on W-level 1100+.
All in all it took me 113 hours to beat the game with all achievements and I spent over 25 hours farming for the last achievement (missing fragment shape).

In the end I am not a part of the small player base who aim to get higher W-level which is the "real" late game for GC:FW.
I got all the achievements and had a lot of fun, but felt more frustrated than with GC:S.
It will be nice to try the game again and see how useful my experiece is when doing "normal mode" again.
Looking forward to Wizard mode aswell, so hopefully it will be out soon.

I would give GC:FW 8/10 and GC:S 9/10 (for comparison).
GC:FW is a very good game and with the changes that has been made I do feel like most of the criticism is either trolls or players not giving the game a chance (or hardcore fans of the series).
It feels well balanced and offers a good variety of challenge.
The downside is that the game fails to explain things that are vital to 100% the game (mana farm etc.), needs more grinding, does not explain runes.
There is also the usual lag, which i feel is even worse in this game than in GC:S.
Did I mention farming for 25 hours to get the last puzzle shape...

The game has 636 achievements, takes around 100 hours to 100% but can offer far more playtime.
It is still being updated and has recieved a lot of improvements since launch.
I recommend it att full price given time and enjoyment it provides. (I got the bundle though).
I would say that buying GC:S first is probably a good idea as it is a bit easier and a little more fun.
Dont do them back to back though like me, atleast not in a few weeks, or you might start seeing things from the game.


//ECE//