Recent reviews by Neutral Effect

Short but gold. It's more of Blood West, with just enough interesting new mechanics to make it fresh again but not so much that the base formula is lost in the process. The new enemies are challenging and force you to be more aware through smart design, as opposed to just pumping numbers - for example, one of them hides in plain sight by sitting on treetops and tall cliffs. It's not difficult to spot them and the enemy itself is nowhere near as dangerous eg. a Skin Collector, but until you learn to look up and listen for their distinctive sounds, you'll keep getting ambushed by them - perhaps at the worst of times. New weapons are generally quite good, both in power and in design - the staves in particular allow you to shake up the experience quite a bit, one of them allowing you to send a creature berserk and turn on its own allies. And the final boss of this chapter has an awesome design, only rivalled by the boss of main game's chapter 3 - blowing both the blood tree and the cursed giant out of the water. It's even foreshadowed, if you care to read the various notes you'll find scattered throughout the world - THE BLACK SUN DEVOURS .

The expansion has two distinctive flaws though. First being the length, as it's roughly as long as any other chapter and I just wish I got to spend more time with its new weapons and enemies. Not that big of a deal, but by the time I got a hang on just what I could do with some of the weapons and how to deal with the most challenging enemies, it was over.
The second is the map, and that is much more serious. The base game had three main environments, one for each chapter - desert, bog and forest. I'm not sure whether I like desert or forest more as both of them have an amazing main theme of an open area bathed in moonlight, and enough variety to ensure it doesn't get monotonous. The bog, however, is the worst by far - while it technically has the same variety as the other environments thanks to emphasis on human settlements, the visual variety of the surroundings isn't all that significant - and that's made infinitely worse by the omnipresent fog obscuring every corner of the map. Whereas other chapters are bathed in moonlight, creating ample opportunity for shades and shadows to give it plenty of atmosphere, in the bog there's none of that. There's barely any shadows, silhouettes of enemies and buildings blend together and the texture work that gave some enemies (like the common Animated Dead) more identity that you'd expect from their basic designs has no chance to do so here - "thanks" to the bog's darkly fog.

• Creative and grotesque enemy designs (Vessel, Strix and Terror Eye to name just a few)
  
• Enemies pose a good challenge without becoming bullet sponges thanks to clever mechanics (Lemures, Tormentor, Vessel, Terror Eye and Wraith Wolf especially)
  
• Interesting unique weapons that avoid "+5% x/y/z" formula
  
• Terrific final boss with some nice foreshadowing
  
• The story of the expansion cleverly tied into that of the main game
  
• More NPCs to interact with and give the setting a sprinkling of flavour
  
• The Tears in Reality provide much needed environmental variety

• It's The Bog, Again. We may never escape The Bog.
  
• Somewhat short at just one standard-sized chapter
  
• Most artefacts and non-staff unique weapons are still boring "+10% chance to do something that doesn't matter" or "+5% that doesn't make a difference"
  
• Three poorly designed enemies: one from the base game (Skin Collector) and two new ones (Ravager, Abyss Walker)
  
• NPCs look bad, both due to the model and the stiff animations

As long as you're fine with the two major cons I mentioned - that being the length and The Bog, Again - the expansion is well worth your money. It's got decent amount of content with enough mechanical twists to keep it fresh and interesting. Enemy designs are more eldritch and grotesque than ever before, reaching a new height quality - and it might be worth getting the expansion just to see those.

Interesting combat, awesome characters. Just don't hire Mouse unless you want your ears bleeding.

If you removed 90% of every map, the game wouldn't simply retain all of its content - it would in fact become more enjoyable since you wouldn't have as much of the mindless walking which is omnipresent in this game.

The scenery is dull, the spells and weapons are boring, the enemies are not challenging and it's all accompanied by elevator music. There is no distinct visual style or satisfying gore to speak of, while animations are stiffer than stickmen demos I made in Pivot twenty years ago.
The game uses a system called "Lunacy" that influences the damage dealt by spells and relies (among other things) on the IRL phase of the moon - so as you can likely guess already it's completely irrelevant since magic-based builds deal so much damage already they don't care, while weapon-based builds deal so little spell damage and are so tanky that they also don't care. If you go for magic build you will use combat spells nonetheless, and if you go for non-magic build you still won't use them no matter what phase of the moon it is.

If you want to rebind your keys, the game will open the TEXT FILE where they are saved and you'll have to modify them by typing the code names associated with proper keys. No, they are not listed there and Mouse 4 is "<Mouse> /buttonForward". The menu is bound to [Tab], while your consumables are on [2] (yes, the digit) by default. Bringing up the menu doesn't pause the game world.

I don't think there is a single thing I would qualify as a strength of this game. All the things that ain't a flaw are either passable. mediocre or alright at best.

Sitting in a bush without making any noise for ten minutes straight is way too often the optimal strategy.

I got my rusty knife. That Wendigo doesn't know it's already dead, but I'm about to inform it...

Assail.

What, did you think they fixed it?
No such thing. They buffed it.

It doesn't matter whether it's balanced at Damnation because you're gonna spend 60+ hours in Heresy and lower. And sure enough, Assail will be there, making the experience as boring as possible.

In case you haven't played the game yet and don't know what Assail is - it's one of the weapons in the game. It has infinite ammunition and shoots homing, piercing projectiles. If you have a person with this weapon on your team, he will murder mostly everything on the map before you have a chance to see it, and thus make the game very boring.
It's even worse though because you can have more than one person with that weapon on the team. So it boils down to either you playing anything that isn't Assail and game being an unfun slog - at which point you should just drop it - or using Assail yourself, which will get boring quickly once the novelty of it runs out.

The worst thing is, FatShark knew the weapon is broken because there's been a lot of community backlash when they introduced it, for the reasons I listed above - and yet, in the next patch they BUFFED IT. So it's unlikely to get better anytime soon.

If you're a faithful servant of the Emperor, avoid Darktide like heresy. It's a place where only the witch prospers, and should be cleansed.

The game is as linear as it gets, but that's exactly why it withstood the trial of age. With satisfying gunplay, engaging story and such an interesting way of telling it, something had to be given up - and I'd say they chose right. I don't think it could have worked with more open and slow-paced gameplay. I was especially pleasantly surprised at the incorporation of "quick time events" here - while those are commonplace in Gunslinger, they have been well thought-out to the point where they are actually enjoyable. Moreover, most of the time they simply allow you an opportunity to gain some kind of advantage - instead of being an instant loss should you fail one.

If I had to list some downisdes, then graphics and minor inconveniences would go here. Graphics ain't bad, but they ain't good either - they are serviceable, although you can definitely feel the touch of early 2010s here between high color saturation and overall bloomy brightness of the environment. Sometimes after slow-mo my crosshair would be stuck for a couple of seconds making it impossible to aim - but that was rare, and didn't seem to be completely random.
While boss battles weren't very enjoyable for me, I don't think they are bad - just merely not my kind of thing.

Overall I expected a janky, boring and failed attempt at a western-styled tactical shooter. That is not the case, as the game is very enjoyable, mostly owing to coherent vision of a fast-paced arcade shooter and satisfying gunplay. Of note is also the game's length: main campaign is long enough to supply you with a few evenings worth of fun on it's own, but it doesn't fall into the trap of overstaying it's welcome and dragging out to the point you're tired and just want to finish it. It took me about five hours to get through it in it's entirety at Hard difficulty, but there's plenty of replayability should you find yourself liking the wild west shootouts of Gunslinger - finishing the story unlocks new difficulty, which is a good opportunity to get through the game with a different weapon and talent setup. And if that's not for you there are alternative game modes to try out.

I'd expect the game to be priced roughly at 20 EUR; instead, you can get it for less than 5 EUR - absolutely worth the price.

Battle Wizard and Briar Javelin have been finally fixed!

This is beyond "good". It's outstanding.

I would call the game "Genuine AAA Cinematic Experience", and these triple A's one the front are truly deserved. Everything in the game clicks - combat, graphics, plot, characters, soundtrack, soundscape, even the UI. And probably a whole lot of other things I should have mentioned that have been screwed up by recent "AAA" games, where the budget is only thing classifying them into the category since their quality is just bad.

Notably though, the game has very good character writing and voice cast, along with excellent cinematics. I myself despise both Marvel and DC for how bland and inconsequential they are - and even though I'm biased against it, I did enjoy the game thoroughly. There are truly no weak links here.

No game is perfect though, and two areas I wish were done better are PC optimization and ending (not finale, but rather the ending sequence itself along with some of the character's lines), even though I disliked the latter mostly for an insignificant thing - minor spoiler warning Nikki's new hairstyle, which I believe doesn't fit her.

Overall if you like this setting style (Epic Space Opera) along with this game type (Linear Cinematic Experience), I cannot recommend it enough. It's worth the money even for full price (70$), but you can get it much cheaper right now.