Nightingale

This is an enjoyable game. I picked it up for it's Valheim like gameplay. This game was fun solo, and even more so with friends.

Now that the play with a only friends mode is in the game so my friends and I can play privately with out a rando who may or may not be a ♥♥♥♥ will bother us. i do like it more. the down sides are lack of voice acting and small fonts for text and the bad way conversations are designed are an anoyance. the world is standard sand box but pretty. the animations are stiff but work able. there are bugs with the interface where your mouse curser vanishes. the character creation needs work. i say this coming from baldurs gate three and skyrim. crafting can be an issue with bone a bone b rare bone a rare bone b. the affects other than straight up physical damage are standard. dogs bite and claw bad guys shoot and stab or slice, the standards. i found these tendrille in a cave that rather than capturing you or anything that would make me work for the crappy chest at the bottom of the cave. they point at you and suck your health while slowing you down when you walk throught them. so while i slam potion after potion to get the chest, i just left 6 potions less. Lastly as a black human i must say it is okay to have white people in your game. and not have them with sticks up thier asses while everyone else is normal. trust me my people are the most vicious even to our own. Over all i give this game a 3.75 out of 5 I would recomend now that i can have a private safe space for my friends and I and not be online with randos.

loving the direction thus far.

There are some bugs with movement: getting stuck inside cliff sides while using the grappling hooks, a glitch that causes you to not be able to use the grappling hooks as your character thinks it's in sprint even when jumping. Typically that glitch occurs while using the grappling hooks. Only fix I have found so far is to reset the client. Puts you right back where you were upon logout. Those little glitches aside, the game is very well done. Graphics are great, story is unique and exciting, character customization is very detailed. Progression is thorough and a lot of items in Progression can be picked up free if you discover them on your own. Some Progression recipes are story locked or guaranteed free once specific quests are completed. Crafting is a bit involved and intense. I can easily spend at least an hour trying to kit my character for the upcoming area. There is an Auto-fill for the mats used in crafting, but it may not use what you want to create the piece with the stats you need, so you would be better off clicking each mat slot individually to get exactly the material you want as each mat affects different stats for that gear piece. Customization (color/appearance) for gear is easy to do and costless unless you are doing a transmogrification. You can open a lot of recipes for "cards" that can be played in each area to provide buffs such as increased yields on specific gatherables or increased combat stats, but combat cards also have a de-buff (increased attack but decreased crit chance or such). Interaction with characters is interesting in that you can take the story in different directions depending on the answers you choose or actions you take, which then impacts your achievements. Potential for multiple play throughs to get all the achievements based on how you play through the story. The different maps aren't necessarily difficult to navigate, but also aren't very thorough in regard to queues on where to go. Lots of POI's though. There is a lot of reading between the lines (riddle-solving, almost) and exploration one has to do as most quests give a general idea, but often contain little real direction on how to get to the next step. I have had to look up a couple of quests to find information on where to go, and even then, there isn't much guidance through reddit or even walkthroughs aside from some videos on YouTube that I am too impatient to watch. I have learned to be careful navigating from POI to POI if I have specific quests going, so that I don't complete a POI before story needs me to be there. I found one glitch on a later game map that could have potentially required resetting the map for resources if I couldn't get it to load what I was looking for after completing that POI before I should have. Controller support is there, but sometimes glitchy if you want to go from controller to mouse while navigating menus or during NPC conversation interactions. If you start in controller, you can't always get the cursor to take over. Cursor gets "stuck" in the center of the screen, have to back out and start over using KB controls to gain control of the cursor. Taking a companion from the survivor NPC's you can recruit is nice and they can also be outfitted with gear, allowing extra storage for gathering from map to map, and aid in combat. However, they aren't always smooth in their movements, and can easily get in your way because of how they roam on base leading to you needing to back out of unnecessary conversations. You can only have one dedicated "respite" at a time, but you can have 10 teleport pads (Lodestones) per map. Can make travel a bit tricky depending on where you are trying to go or for getting back to bases. Building menu for housing is a bit complex but not impossible to do, and the reticle is very sensitive, small area of effect on how closely you need to look at what you are trying to move. Overall, I have enjoyed this game, despite the occasional need to reboot due to movement glitches and would absolutely recommend it to others.

very fun with a friend, but takes a min to get used to crafting and all the various mechanics

I love this game, I love the crafting, I love the enemies, if you want a well built survival/crafting RPG then Nightingale is your game!