Reviews - Blood_Wraith

Good stuff. DRM free Half-Life 1 and mods

I've never cared so much for a mostly optional escort in my entire life.

Even the future is lousy with vaccines, but it's not lousy with AR3s.

It's more Opposing Force, and then some.

Yeah, it's pretty rad I guess.

The real Blood 2.

Unreal Engine: This can't be good for me, but I feel great.

Score: 7/10

Arx End Of Sun is about 8-12 hours long.

I can't see why everyone else before me rated this a 10/10. Even a 8/10 might be a bit generous, it's way too dumbed down from Fatalis, and has too many bugs and other problems. Here are the good & bad cliffnotes for EoS:

+ Melee combat is more fun, snappy, and far less sluggish

+ Enemy health bars

+ Enemies are generally fun to fight, and the end boss is neat.

- Spells can't be precast (although an offensive spell is permanently equipped until another one is cast) and you can't even have a rune preview in the upper right screen like in the first game.

- Spell casting system is worse than in Fatalis, requires your gestures to be EVEN MORE SPECIFIC. If your mouse moves one nanometer north east while trying to move up, it registers it as north east, or a diagnal movement. I don't know about you guys, but I don't have laser precision hand movement.

- The game lacks a lot of spells, there isn't even a heal spell, where your health won't replenish slowly over time without a regen ring.

- Can we get rid of the stamina bar please? I was constantly out of stamina, and "sprinting" isn't that much faster than walking.

- No automap, although there are some Thief 1 style static maps, but they aren't very helpful. I spent some hours wandering around where to go next cause some of the levels were so huge and there wasn't an automap to help me.

- A glitch happened in the goblin portal area, I got stuck in the water and couldn't get out, then I quickloaded and I started walking back, and a black wall was in my way (the level LOD failed, the half of the map I came from was forever unloaded), had to load an earlier save to escape, because I didn't want to use my last Control Object scroll to activate the portal (I didn't have the runes needed to cast control object, an didn't know when I would get it, and didn't know if there were more portals after this.)

- Load times are ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS! There is no excuse for the game to take this long to load a map, especially if the map is super small, like the tavern, or the captain's room. I'm on an SSD, and it's like the game isn't even trying to load as fast as it could. It seems most of the game's content is in one .pk4 file, that's most likely part of the problem. I'm not sure how IdTech4's file system is structured, but maybe splitting the content into more .pk4 files might help load times, even Valve's vpks were seen doing this in recent years.

- Game doesn't run exceptionally well, even with antialiasing off (if you put AA on, you get VERY low framerate in some places). Probably because this is running off what seems to be older Doom 3/IdTech4 engine, which doesn't have proper multicore support (I think), that and/or EoS just isn't very optimized.

- Quick save and quick load aren't even bound, you can't even bind them in the menu. You have to edit ArxEOS_Config and put this in it:

bind "F5" "savegame quick"
bind "F9" "loadgame quick"

Also, a quicksave text or icon upon quicksave would be nice, as the only way to know it actually quicksaved is splitsecond lag.

- Stats have no description, ethereal link doesn't even enable mana regen, health and mana do NOT regen slowly over time unless you wear health and mana regen rings, don't worry there is plenty of those, and some stats are either underpowered, or seem to do nothing.

- Armor is incredibly dumbed down, there is no equippable armor, but it's treated like FPS armor (Like Doom 3), where you somehow stack multiple breastplates and helmets on you to increase your armor bar. There is also armor regen rings, much more efficient then buying pieces
consumable armor.

- Can't drop quest items. This is fine, until you get a duplicate quest item you don't need (like troll idol) and can never drop it or turn it in.

- Can't bind weapons/items, can't organize inventory, torchs don't stack, and you can't put them out, they're basically disposable one use flashlights (Like in Turok 2).

- Cooking food is an awkward and cruel joke, first of all, you can't even drag items out of your inventory, there is just a drop button that
sends items flying a few feet. Most fireplaces have stubborn collision, and the food ends up flying either past it, or doing a physics dance on the campfire, and bouncing off. Also food items cook literally one at a time, even if there are multiple items on there, this makes no sense, and wastes time. Food also takes WAY longer to took than it did in Fatalis.

- The location of the Dwarven Power Cell is a BIT obscure. (Central mine w/ portal, use telekinesis, look up for a lift, jump-grab it)

- Fire sword's fire graphic effect glitches out if you drop it.

- Lack of a proper ending cutscene (Time for a holiday)

- Other negatives I forgot to mention, or didn't come across.

This is decent for a beta despite all the problems, could use improvement overall, quality of life changes, improve those load times,
more spells, etc.