Recent reviews by Krindi

Super fun space mining game that's surprisingly deep, really scratches the itch for being able to incredibly fine-tune your ship and the ship's systems to eke out desired performance. Game developers are highly responsive on discord and will answer questions, regularly poll for desired feature enhancements, explain game systems, etc.

100% worth the price.

NOTE - I would ONLY recommend this game if you bring your own group of 3 players and will never plan on playing with pubbies. If you're not bringing a pre-made team of your own, then do NOT buy this game.

Why? Complete and utter lack of co-op tools in a co-op game:

MATCHMAKING
Is basically non-existent. No lobby browser, no settings for what you're looking for. Just gotta queue in to a specific map and hope you've made it into the one minute window when 2 other people are also looking for a mission on that same map. It's the worst matchmaking I've ever seen in a game that has matches.

Also, you can't join your friends mid-mission. You can ONLY join a team prior to mission start.

AI BOTS
The AI for bots is complete garbage. They can barely deal with a single, bottom-tier alien on their own; on casual difficulty. They don't use your gear that you've leveled up and they don't use your perk layout. Utter trash.

COMMUNICATION
Neither VoIP nor the ability to type to your team exists in this game. LIke, seriously? It's 2021.


Now, all that being said, if you're playing with a pre-made and you've got enough buddies with the game to always have a full group, never having to rely on attempting to matchmake or on the garbage AI bots, then this game is super fun. The above total /failures by Cold Iron Studios are the only things holding this game back from being amazing.

Things that would make the game vastly better:
- tracking of what missions you've completed on what difficulty
- add a lobby browser...
- ...with filtering for different missions, difficulties, etc
- quick play to just find an existing group without having to guess what mission they might be playing
- ability to join games in progress, with a penalty to the exp and credits that would received based on how many holdout scenes you weren't 100% present for
- ability to type to your team
- in-game VoIP
- AI loadouts that use both the gear that you have equipped on that class AND use the perk grid, along with the ability to prioritize what class Alpha and Beta will be
- UI could use a couple of passes to polish things up better as well

Valheim is going to be this generation's Minecraft and will be played for thousands and thousands of hours to build beautiful worlds. In addition, it's a beautiful world, with great music, and a good mix of crafting, upkeep, combat, progression, and role-playing.

Come play Sim-Viking-Terraria-Minecraft-Fallout, it's a great game.

Excellent co-op with asymmetrical classes that complement each other in a variety of environments. No half-baked PVP garbage to water down the co-op experience. Dev team continues to add high-quality content to the game, and this is literally the only Early Access game I've ever seen that even met - much less exceeded - my expectations.

DRG has an excellent community. While the game is better if you bring some friends along for the ride, it's plenty worthwhile if you're just getting into it by yourself - just hit up the Discord server.

Rock and Stone!

Playing on the free weekend, exclusively multiplayer with my normal team of 4 for co-op games.

The inability to revive downed teammates in any fashion other than completing the level absolutely sucks and is a terrible disincentive towards me ever being interested in purchasing the game or being willing to recommend it to anybody. 40 minutes into a run and I insta-died from full health somehow, another guy died shortly thereafter. This mission was going poorly, so it took another 21 minutes for the other 2 players to finish the mission.

21 minutes is enough time that I could have run a whole zone in almost any other co-op game that we play. But instead, my options are to sit there in a completely unenjoyable fashion browsing reddit or something else equally NOT-PLAYING-THE-GAME while waiting to see if my teammates finish the round, or alt F4 or go do something else. Obviously, after being 40 minutes into the run they aren't super enthusiastic about just suiciding out so that the other 2 of us can PLAY-THE-GAME again.

Can't even consider recommending.


edit: for those replying "you suck, it's a rogue-like", the moment the add multiplayer and co-op on as keywords, it's not a rogue-like game anymore.

The actual gameplay is pretty decent and enjoyable, with good-enough graphical quality. My main problem with the game and why I reluctantly down-voted it is the constant freezing and/or crashing when attempting to fiddle with the game settings.

Almost every time anything was changed, the game hangs. And it's not an instant restart so it's tedious and boring trying to find the magic combination of steps to let you finalize adjusting something without crashing.

For example, instead of playing on my 1440p monitor I ran the game out to my couch on my 1080p big screen tv. Lowering the resolution to 1920x1080 didn't actually do that, it ended up at something stupid like 1033 x 736. Adjusting to fullscreen and 1920x1080 resulted in crashing. In order to actually make the change, the third time I sat through the tedious load process, I discovered that if I went to fullscreen first, then went up in resolution, the game wouldn't crash.

But first I had to turn off the dx12 rendering engine. With dx12 on, the game crashed any time I tried to make it fullscreen.

Scenarios like this happen any time I fiddle with the settings to try to fine-tune the appearance of the game. It either crashes, or hard-freezes and requires a restart. Usually wiping out the changes I was going to make. It seems like the best thing to do is change each option one at a time and then see if it took it, then change another option.

I might accept something like this from a shoestring budget indie game, but from a AAA franchise this is totally unacceptable.

In a refreshing change from other games that purport to be 'difficult', and then feel like the 'easy' or 'normal' difficulty some of us older gamers grew up playing, Vermintide is actually difficult - sometimes unfairly so. And that's a good thing, in my opinion. The accomplishment of completion is more meaningful when there's an actual penalty (lost time, and poor rewards) for failure. None of this "get a trophy for showing up" stuff, you have to actually play well in order to obtain your rewards.

This game has THE best first-person melee combat of any game I've ever played; it's set in a universe that makes me nostalgic about childhood, and it the in-game character diaglogue's as they interact with each other are fantastic.

The mechanics of the game, being very much based on the Left For Dead franchise, absolutely punish you for failure to play as a team. Sadly, many people still can't seem to understand that "play as a team" does NOT mean "run off on my own ahead of the party so that I can get the highest score on the meaningless leaderboards at the end of the match and I hate you jerks for not rescuing me after I got grabbed".

That being said, the vast majority of people I've played with - and I almost exclusively play in pickup groups - have been good people to game with.

Word of warning, if you are the type to be overly concerned with your loot reward then this may not be the game for you. If you spent 20-40 minutes on a run that was enjoyable and a great experience, but getting sub-par loot through the random loot award at the end will completely ruin what was a great experience just moments before, then yeah, this may not be your cup of tea.

However, if you just like killing an endless horde of rats, gaming with a good group of people, and spending time in a very well done universe, then Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide is for you.

edit: 5 months later, I still play this game almost every day. The recent Quests and Contracts free DLC is very rewarding for casual gameplay of an hour or two here and there, and the substantially improved loot tables from patch 1.4.3 greatly improve the quality of loot that is obtained.