Honodi

So after much hype and fanfare the game released, and it is probably the worst game I've seen from Mihoyo (Hoyoverse) yet. Even the now 10-year old Gun Girl Z (shut down now) looked and felt less cheap and generic than this.

Let's start with the not so bad, the combat is ok-ish, it's not truly bad but doesn't feel great either. The Characters are well-developed, and and the story is well written. But that is pretty much where the good ends unless you want to nitpick at little scenes like when General Chop cooks a meal , the cut scene is truly enjoyable. And the Bangboos are cute.

But that is where any enjoyment ends, the gameplay-style is a mix of visual novel and small area limited combat. To me it does not feel good, but that might be personal preference.

The UI is terrible, it looks like Game boy Color rejected it in the 90s but someone very stubborn really wanted to re-use it. Everything looks overcoloured , overly "pop-art" and overall like 15 different Graffiti fought for dominance in menus , character screens, and pretty much everywhere. Its just not nice to look at. Why we have tiny writing in some menus , giant "mobile" optimized selection prompts in the middle of the screen overlaying everything in other scenes, i don't understand the choices , nothing feels like it has a coherent theme and it doesn't make sense.

Everything in the game felt the way you imagine a cheap generic mobile gatcha would feel like if all clichés were true. I have no idea what went wrong with Mihoyo and this game , Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and even Honkai Impact 3rd all manage to not feel like generic cheap rushed mobile shovelware, this game fails to feel like anything but that.

While it is of course a live service game that will receive updates, i don't see how the fundamental feeling of "cheap mobile garbage" can at any point be overcome by this game. I uninstalled it and i don't intend to give it another try.

There is so much to say about this title.

And nothing is good.

Let's start with the clipping, yes this is so bad you will yearn for a Bethesda game on launch, and the worst, sometimes after you clipped through terrain, you are stuck behind / under it.

The world is in standard ubisoft fashion, oversized and empty feeling. I would have much prefered half the map size with about 100 times more open world interactions, as it is the world feels sad and dead. A procedural generated landscape with nothing to do in it.

The Story , well it is there , but so gear level gated it makes no fun to play through it and it is incredible bland and has pretty much neither memorable moments nor memorable characters, everything feels predictable and somewhat boring.

Why you would gear level lock progression in a single player game - and in typical ubisoft fashion enemies of 1 level higher than you feel like they are five times your strength - so you are forced to grind the gear stuff for hours to level it up and be able to progress in the main story. If only there was a way around that - ah, yes the in game store where you can spend your real money on things that help you level up your gear faster , and would anyone actually be surprised if a few months after game launch they will (once again) sell you time savers directly ? - One might actually think the whole grind system in the ubisoft titles is just, so they can sell the "boosters". And of course one would be right. This is a 14-hour story game that has been stretched to at least 40 by grindy progression locks. That might be ok in a MMO or a Gatcha game , it really feels exceptionally bad in your RPG single player game.

Overall it is a forgettable standard ubisoft game that feels like a mix between Far Cry: Primal, The Division and Far Cry 6.

Unlike The Division and Far Cry 6 however, the story is bland , boring and unremarkable in every way, which makes playing this feel less fun than any of those games.

I wouldn't even advise anyone to buy this when it is half price in a few months, let alone for the full launch price, it is just not worth it.

I was actually looking forward to this show, the description read nice, and that is where i should have left it , reading the nice description, because this is so terrible, that you will have to look really hard to find anything positive about this production at all, and you will probably come up empty-handed. Let's start with the casting which seemed still the least bad thing about this, but its by no means great, the main cast is decent at best, the "family casting is, as per today normal, nonsensical and there is no change in hell people who should be closely related on the show actually could be closely related genetically. Either way, expecting anything better is a lost cause these days on that aspect. On other aspect however this Show demonstrates a complete lack of any realism, be it big swollen face bruises that seem to heal within 9 hours (maybe the writers watched the Johnny Depp trial and believed Elaines miracle "Anika" cream actually existed... who knows) just to name one of the many , many , ohh so many things this show desperately fails at (i remember a time when TV productions had on set "experts" for things to correct stupid mistakes like these, but i guess thats a thing of the past if you look at the amount of illogical crap that turns up in so many new productions. - They could maybe at least have an unpaid intern look over the finished cut and point out the most obvious garbage.. But i guess by that time its cheaper to just send it out to the viewer than to fix the mistakes). And Human decision making.. Yes, to the surprise of probably no one this is once again something not only this show but many (it makes you somewhat wonder where they keep finding these "writers") completely fail at. Be it the Cop who after witnessing a fight where someone is killed and immediately goes to "hey lets bury the body" instead of calling it in as self defense.. Which it clearly was and would have easily hold up as. Be it the nurse who seems completely oblivious to new bruises on his significant other (i mean he is written anyways as if he has half a brain so .. Maybe we could let that one slide) and the main character.. oh yeah.. so many decisions that make you go "why would she ever do this in this situation ? - and the only possible answer is because the writers needed the show to go in that direction and had no idea how to get there in a way that made sense. Overall, the show is not fun to watch, even if you can tune out the nonsensical elements (and this show has so many .. sooo many more than any other show I've seen and its by no means a rare thing in today's productions) and try to enjoy the "story" .. Its just not told very well and there is nothing to enjoy. I can only advise everyone to actually watch at least the first 2 and the last 2 episodes of this, it can serve as an example for awful production and writing. I really expected more and i am somewhat dissapointed by this level of awful. I know, shame on me for expecting anything of modern productions, i should know by now.