ArminW

Basically, as of today, the game needs 3 entirely different reviews... Act 1: Wow. The Scope. The depth! The characters, all the possibilities. The fun and fair (yet challenging) combat. The incredible attention to detail. This is probably one of the greatest games ever made! Act 2: Whee, still a fantastic game, but the bugs and glitches start to annoy. And couldn't they have come up with *some* quality of life improvements in *3* years of Early Access? Fabulous characters, engaging story, still incredible depth, but quite a bit of tedium in between. Act 3: Crash, crash, crashedy-crash, crash-crash crashedy crash. The game falls apart in act 3, the story meanders and the memory leaks, glitches and constant CTDs almost kill the motivation to finish it. Well, maybe after the 2nd patch the game might actually become what most people basically *wish* it to be atm,

1 point, because one can see that there might be a great game hidden beneath the pathetic technical execution on the PC. Requires two (malfunctioning until patched) launchers to start, has a terrible optimization, crashes regularly (not even able to finish a poker game without CTD) and support via the epic games store deserves the straight "F" rating they received from the better business bureau in every possible way.

It's actually... quite OK. No more, no less. And I personally consider The Witcher 3 of of my favorite games ever and played Gwent in that almost obsessively... The story is, indeed, very good. As are the handpainted visuals and the music. Gameplay, however, was disappoining. They **** the original card game into something that fits all, puzzles and story battles and normal battles, and lost the basic idea behind it. The most important thing is: in a card game, I want to know the rules. In Thronebreaker, they are contantly changed, completely wanton, and the opponents never play by the same ones as you. Deckbuilding is oversimplified (No "theme" decks as in Witcher 3, just one in which you mix units for maximum cheese...). The results from battles have no meaning whatsoever for the story campaign (just "win" or "lose", it makes zero difference if you win by 1 point in the 3rd round or steamroll your opponent by 83:0 and 167:0). No difference for morale, losses or resources spent. Economy is meaningless, you just pick up resources like in a bad mobile game, buy every upgrade available and have tens of thousands of gold and building materials in the final chapter with nothing to spend it on. MANY descriptions of special rules for puzzle battles are vague, unhelpful and sometimes plain misleading. And, all things considered, the balance is quite bad. Most battles are trivially easy, once you found the cheese in your deck, some puzzles are completely obscure, and the final battle is the utter opposite: A complete and totally ridiculous bag of silly cheats for an opponent, who breaks EVERY rule of classic Gwent, replaces every destroyed units immediately from a 90-card deck, randomly boosts his troops and conveniently draws an extra card-card or a silly, all-immune 75 power boss whenever needed. Can actually be beaten, by simply replacing the deck with a special flavour of cheese, but is, to me, no fun at all. As I said, it's not bad, just...a bit disappoing compared to what i've come to expect from CDPR.

I backed this on Kickstarter for much more than I ever paid for a game before. I desperately wanted this game to happen and thus had absurdly high expectations. Now, after more than 60 hours into the game (within 5 days ant NOT quitting my day job yet...) I can sincerely say: PoE managed to surpass them all. So, I'm, giving a 10 for the first time, not because I want this game to be rated highly, but because I truly think that this game, and Obsidian for making it this way, deserve it. I can find nothing among it's short list of minor issues that would warrant to take down my score by even 1 point. The Art is gorgeous, and proof that well-painted. lovingly detailed backgrounds beat High-Res textures and technical gimmicks every time. It's simply fun to explore every single area, just to revel in all the detail. The writing is a class of it's own, with a major wall of text hitting me like in Planescape:Torment days, a ton of well-rounded and interesting characters far off the beaten cliches, a fantastic world and a story that made me cut hazardously short the third night of sleep in a row... Nothing is simple, nothing is black-and white, and no one is simply a fantasy troupe repeated the umptieth time. The choice feel like they really have weight, and my character, with abilities, background and reputation, has never mattered so much (except, perhaps, the aforementioned PS:T) And the RPG system that obsidian came up with is to date, hands down, the best compromise between pen&paper complexity and cRPG ease-of-use mechanics I've encountered. It offers endless choices, tactics and possibilities and makes for interesting, tough but fair battles. With *meaningful* difficulty settings (not just numbers raised on enemies) to boot. Really, for me, this game is close to perfection and I openly admit - this 46 year old fart has turned into an enthusiastic fanboy. 10. Thank you Obsidian.

After 2 very thorough playthroughs and with 172 hours on record, I guess I must clearly recommend this game :-) It is a HUGE, wonderfully modernized but still refreshingly old-school rpg, with an incredible attention to detail, great humor, a decent story and an amazingly deep, turn-based tactical combat system that allows for countless approaches and combinations. It looks georgeous, is surprisingly bug-free for a project this size (and it's patched regularly and fast as well), and it runs well even on older systems. The crafting system is fun and intuitive, and some of the puzzles are very well done. For all the praise, however, I also have to mention the downsides. And there are definitely those: The balance, in general, could use an overhaul. The game has a pretty steep learning curve in the beginning, but once you know the system, the fights are actually very, very simple. Note that I say simple, not easy. The fights, especially boss fights, tend to be long, repetitive, tedious, and, yes, even boring. The enemies usually have a TON of hitpoints, unlimited special abilities and everyone and their mothers, - of the same level or a bit higher than the party - is pretty much immune to special abilities - and thus, most tactical choices. They do, however, do pretty pathetic amounts of damage while keeping your party stunned, crippled, knocked down, frozen and generally annoyed but alive. I would highly prefer shorter, more challenging battles against enemies that are actually affected by all the special arrows I can craft and all those abilities - foes that are much faster to kill or disable but a lot more likely to kill ME. The numbers/RPG mechanics are yet another problem. Larian follows the old JRPG-style of insane number exaggeration. You start with a weapon that does 10 damage and you'll end with some monstrous obscentiy that can easily exceed 1000 damage on a critical hit or with a special maneuver. Enemies hitpoints and resistances grow accordingly, and the interesting enemies are thus always within about 2 levels of yours. Higher enemies are pretty much untouchable, lower ones pathetically helpless. And, finally, many quests and puzzles are just too damn obscure. I commend Larian to go against the mainstream, and skip all the quest markers, map markers, signs above a quest giver's head etc. But sometimes they fall to the other extreme and there is simply no way to continue with a quest but to randomly walk evereywhere, try everything and finally check the internet, only to learn that you missed some random item 4 hours ago... ;-P More logic and sensible hints, please! But this is all just criticizing on a VERY high level, and it doesn't diminish the fun at all. And, hands down, you won't get a better deal for your money anywhere atm.

Sorry, in the current state I really can't recommend it. Honestly, I wanted to, I supported this on Kickstarter for a pretty high amount as I love the genre, however, the execution simply leaves too much to be desired. There is no such thing as a manual that even explains the most basic functions or displays. The tutorial is bad and doesn't help much either. All menus are confusing and *extremely* clunky. Total facepalms during the first few hours of gameplay: the bloody keys for rolling left and rolling right are interchanged and there is no way to reassign them; Missiles target acquisition either doesn't work or there's something about it that the tutorial or menus aren't telling me. Moving around the carrier is ship is a nice idea, but so poorly done (the controls, ouch, the controls!) and pointless (there's nothing interactive as far as I've seen) it looks like there's something planned and never implemented here. Mission design on some missions is extremely poor (waypoints keep pointing you through solid objects, pathfinding is extremely hard, waypoint triggers are like a built-in exploit) and unfair in some, when for instance a required, completely arbitrary waypoint, you need to reach, triggers enemies, that you are then too far away from to stop from destroying your mission goal in time. Just one example. Silly, pointless, frustrating. The space combat itself is not very fun, you can play entire missions without ever seeing an enemy ship, as the enemies basically become large enough to see at 100 meters distance. That might be realistic, but it kills all dogfight feeling when you shoot almost exclusively at the center of a targeting rectangle. Targeting itself is absolutely terrible and clunky (as are most controls), as there's no way to target the nearest enemy, the nearest friendly, the nearest mission objective or your nearest attacker - as has been pretty much standard in such games 15 years ago. No, here you have to click through 37 enemies, while an unseen missile turrets keeps pounding you... Joystick support is terrible, i found no way to reasonably use my Saitek X52, but that's just a minor thing as mouse control is totally superior anyway. makes targeting so easy, it sometimes feels like a cheat in fact. I'll shelve this for now and wait for a patch or three, and may give it another go then. As it's now, extremely disappointing.

I backed this game on Kickstarter very early on, basically after having read the words "turn based strategy" and "vikings" and had very high hopes for the project. During the first hour of play I was thouroughly impressed with the artwork, the graphical style, the music and the combat system. It runs well, I encountered no major bugs, and the story starts very intense and engrossing. Now, after nearing the end of my first (and, most likely, only) playthrough I can sum up my personal experience with a single sentence: I learned to *thoroughly* hate this game. I'm terribly sorry, I desperately wanted to like this, but with every tedious, frustrating and boring hour of gameplay I had to concede, that just about *every* design choice made by Stoic seems to go diametrically against my personal preferences. Trying to cast an objective vote, i give it a 5, because there are undoubtedly many things good about the game, but the essence of what it's about - having fun, being motivated and enjoying the time spent playing - simply doesn't happen. TBS is the very definition of a railroaded game. More than that, it actually *feels* like more than half of the time I'm actually watching pointless, endlessly repeating nice backgrounds scrolling past, while nothing happens. Events are scarce, and when they happen, they kill my motivation and the RPG aspect. Because, frankly, I'm NOT making decisions. I'm playing a random guessing game, in most cases with absolutely *no* clue on what the consequences of the 4 "choose your answer" alternatives *might* even be. I hate playing a game where I don't even know the rules, and I hate winning every battle and then losing my heroes to random dialogue events. The world map is like a bad joke on my expense, as it serves absolutely *no* function in the game but as a "choose your flavour text" library. It feels like there's an entire aspect of the game simply never implemented here... Same goes for character development and resource management. Both are oversimplified, shallow and simply feel completely unfinished. Each character has one single item slot, and the items available are nothing special. Abilities are pretty much predetermined, and dividing 10 points you *might* receive during 5 ranks isn't that big a deal. There is one single resource for everything (renown) and one single sure way to acquire it (by killing enemies in combat). Sometimes you might draw a lucky card during the random dialogue guessing game and acquire some extra, but that's it. As the resource is used to buy supplies, items *and* for leveling up your heroes, it comes down to either have your caravan starve or run around with level 1 heroes, despite them having earned several promotions on the battlefield. That kills motivation on such an epic scale, and can't even begin to describe it. There are no side quest, no method to forage for food, trade, to gain extra renown or anything - remember, you are on one long, single track railway and never look left or right. You will *never* feel in control of *anything* in this game. For me, however, that is what gaming should be about. Even the combat system, one of the best parts otherwise, has several unnerving flaws that started bothering me in the long run: - You are forced to choose your team *and* the sequence in which they act *before* you know anything about the enemies you will face. Why is there even a deployment phase at the begin of combat if all you do there is arrange the predetermined team on the board? That placement will be void after one round of movement, a wrong party mix or suboptimal sequence will stay, however. - the way the two sides take turns is beyond silly. If you face a single, strong opponent, that one will act 6 times for every ONCE your heroes do something, as it's always the *sides* that take turns. - one stat for hitpoints AND combat effectiveness basically means, that the battles are decided in the first round. The side that starts taking hits is the side that will lose. Always. Without a way to regain strength, a single hit can de facto disable a hero. So, again, sorry Stoic for being so negative, but this game is so totally NOT my piece of cake. Terrific art, great lore, good music and a stable game do NOT equal fun, I'm afraid. Lots of bad design choices for me equal de-motivation, tedium, boredom and frustration. Others might love this game, I can't, I'm afraid.

It has been almost 5 months after release, and an update is in order. Got the game again for 10 bucks on steam, which is a WAY more fair price than the ridiculous 30 Euros for that release disaster I returned in anger... However, I have to strongly disagree with the decent-to-good ratings that have started to come in. I agree, version 1.32 is a quantum leap when compared to the fraudulent, apocalyptic trainwreck they released. But that just means it has improved to be a below-average game as compared to horrible, unfinished and dysfunctional theft. The game today is *still* a clunky, uninspired and cheap remake, full of bugs and glitches and very low on fun. Need examples? In the first 20 minutes, the 45 Dukats of starting equipment fail to happen due to a months-old simple and silly bug, in the first combat enemies get stuck in an endless loop *AGAIN* (and keep circling around and be unattackable in melee), I can't close the smith's repair interface because the button does nothing and I have to click 3 times after saving a game to close *every* open interface window. Graphics are improved but still very mediocre, NPCs now look "halfway OK" instead of "ridiculously awful", performance has improved from terrible to unimpressive... 5 more months and this might be playable. I highly doubt it will *ever* be enjoyable.

A word of advance warning: I might be slightly biased, as the value for money ratio for this game was ridiculously good. I got it as a gift for backing Divinity: Original Sin on Kickstarter, so... :-) For a free gimme, this game is excellent fun. And I can honestly say that, even though I'm not a big fan of RTS games. I'm an old fart, and I prefer my strategy games turn-based, not the hectical click-fests of today :-P The overall presentation, Story and campaign mission are hilarious and fun. The whole political intigue thing is wonderfully over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek. If not taken too seriously, it's really a blast. Moving units on the strategy map is great, with many options, lots of ways to skin a cat and clever enemies. I love that part of the game, and wish I could skip ALL of the battles by handing them to my generals :-) The RTS battles are too hectic for my taste, especially when trying to simultaneouly control the dragon. No way to get THIS to work, I'm afraid. While the computer enemy keeps building, issuing orders that make (sometimes) sense and moving troops in a sensible way, you are down aome veray basic ordes, while dodging missiles. Not my piece of cake. The Opponents' AI in these batlles is very bad however, counterbalanced by blatant cheating. Also, a way to have my own units use their special abilities (Shaman's protective cloak, Warlock's turn enemy to bugs, trooper's self-destruct etc.) on their own is sorely missed. Enemies constantly do that by the dozen, and I'm simply in no way as good at micromanaging 30 clicks a second like the AI. Not my favourite part of the game. Still, the battles can be fun, and in most cases a good strategy will win a battle. Lightnig fast mouseclicking wins more easily, though ;-) Still, all in all, it's a good, fun game that kept me entertained for quite some time. I give it a solid 7, with a bonus point for the good price...

This was the first "major" kickstarter campaign I funded that came to fruition, and the first one where I can honestly say "money well invested". For it's limited budget and short development time, the game delivers exactly what it intended to. Solid, old school roleplaying in a well-loved setting. It catches the atmosphere and the "feel" of the universe just perfectly IMO. The graphic style and looks are superb for me. The initial campaign is short, but very well done. It has a wonderful "detective noir" flair in the first act, many references for old shadowrun players and readers, and some pretty interesting battles, none of which feel like filler material just there to increase game time. The second act is a bit more linear, but still well written and with some very satisfying runs. The tactical turn-based combat is interesting, though not perfect yet, but it beats most modern RPG hackfests hands down. The interface is a bit too "tablet style" for my taste, as is the inventory system. The save game system is bad, no doubt about that. At least a "save on exit" option badly needs to be implemented, as some checkpoint are *very* far from each other. The campaign is pretty short (about 12 hours for a thorough playthrough), but I take quality over quantity any time. And I still get the Berlin campaign in October. :-) All in all, I'd rate it a 7, and add an extra point for the editor, that has already yielded a few short but interesting user made runs, and for the upcoming Berlin Campaign that I'm really looking forward for.

Wow, I can't believe I backed this... Honestly, I really like to support Indie game makers, and I hate to bash a small (8 people in Croatia IIRC) team that was trying their best, but if their best is on such an epic level of ineptitude, really, what can I do..? One piece of honest advice to those developers and others: Folks, if you try to make your own game, for heavens sake, PLAY a few of the similar ones that came out the last 10 years or so, and LEARN a thing or two. Try to avoid the mistakes and try to keep what has already worked a dozen times before. Really, this games' user interface is BAD on such an incredible scale, you need to wonder what year we have. A quicksave button? what for! Closing menues by the ESC key? Would only make the game less awkward! Useful controls like basic attacks on left and spells/abilities on right mouse button? Nah, Diablo did that 15 years ago, boooring. Providing any useful info on inventory items, like, what potions actually DO? Too easy. And would distract from the epic failure that the entire inventory system is. Explaing how things (rune stones, crafting, spellcasting, ANYTHING) actually work? Nah. Control of movement and camera that make sense? Now, lets be creative here... Truth be told, this game feels and plays like a VERY early alpha version, or as if no computer RPG whatsoever came out in the last 15 years. Lets skip things like the non-existant immersion factor (like, being able to steal everything from right under everyone's nose), the bad voice acting and terrible balance, endless grinding and catastrophically useless manual and come right to the point: avoid spending money on this one, until at least 5 patches have come out and some reviews confirm that they actually fixed a thing or two. UPDATE: The first patch adds some basic functionaltiy like a quicksave and autosave option and instead introduces a gamebreaking bug right at the beginning (getting unrecoverably stuck in a conversation). Taking the score down 2 notches for total ineptitude...

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Well, I'm not going to review Baldur's Gate here. The game is a timeless classic, one of my all-time favourites and about as good as roleplaying for the PC ever was. Nothing about that has changed. So I AM going to review the "enhancements", the things that they charged me 20 additional bucks for. The technical part of the enhancement is a bit of a letdown actually. Almost everything good is simply a continuation of fan made mods that have been there, done that, years before. Everyone who (like me) has played BG 1 in the BG 2 engine by BGtutu, downloaded the Weidu mods or numerous fan fixes will not really notice anything groundbreakingly new. The zoom-in option is nice, at least one step above the already availbale high-res mods. Nothing really special here. None of my personal pet peeves and actual technical shortcomings have been addressed, though. The pathfinding AI is still abysmally bad (Firewine dungeon is still the same old unnerving headless chicken dance, when all that would be required is to change the scripts to allow player characters to pass through each other). The pRNG (pseudo random number generator) is still broken - things with a probability of 1/20 keep happening 3 times in a row (probability of 1 in 8000) way too often to be random whenever the pRNG gets stuck on a bad seed. All in all, underwhelming on the technical aspects. What about the additional content? Well, I would rate that way higher, if the two new NPCs I'm currently running with were not built either on full purpose to annoy the player or with such an amount of ineptitude it hurts. Neera the wild mage is a character, completely unable to do her only job. At level 1, with 4 hitpoints, she better NOT cast any spells (her only use), as there's a 1 in 20 chance for a mishap that might (and very often WILL) kill her outright. Countless reload saved games later you recruit Rasaad the monk, who, as a front line melee fighter (the only thing a monk is really there for...) also has way too bad stats and few hit points for his intended role. Combined with the inability to protect himself from critical hits (aka wear a helmet) he just keeps dying time and again so FAST, not even auto-pause and a ton of potions will help. Really, the constant accidents and reloads are so frustrating and annoying, I almost overlooked their admittedly excellent voice work and decent background stories... All in all, it's ok, but for an ease-of-use package that basically saves me 3 hours of downloading mods , installation and tweaking when wanting to Play BG on my new computer, the price is a bit steep.

It can't be denied that this game has many flaws. The graphics are dated (they still set the mood very well and succeed in bringing the world to live, though), the camera is a complete disaster, the gameplay is VERY generic and the combat not very varied (partly due to, dictated by the setting, the fact that you almost exclusively fight humans that use no magic...) And still, of all the games that I played recently (and those include Mass Effect 3 and Diablo 3) this one, despite the worst reviews, I enjoyed the most. By far. Because, simply put, this one didn't care a a bit about the bells and whistles, but it cared about telling a fantastic story. It really cared about the setting, the mood and the lore of the world. It made you immerse into the tale and get to enjoy playing as Alaster and Mors, despite all their vices and failures. And in the end. that's what really counts. No multiplayer, no auction house, but a great story that I can't wait to see unfold. In that, GOT succeeds. Still could live with a better camera, less clunky interface or shinier graphics, though :-)

A pretty OK game that could have been great, with a little more attention to detail, a LOT more polish and a less appaling business model. The pirate setting was the thing that sold it to me, and some of it is actually executed pretty well. The Piranha-typical gritty and sarcastic dialogue fits really well here. But like a lot about the game, it's a ton of wasted potential. I have a measly 4 crewmen on my ship? Not a single ship-to-ship battle? *shrug* The combat system, out of the box, is AGAIN a major failure with no way to dodge the attacks of animals and simple, stupid left-clicking till they drop the way to go. How they could botch this up in their 5th attempt yet another time really beats the hell out of me. Many quests have a very unfinished feel and a completely unsatisfying and underdeveloped way to resolve them. Immersion suffers a lot from the hilariously silly way conflict, crime and combat is handled with villagers. Get caught stealing, simply beat the stuffing out of them (you can't actually kill them, even if you try) and 5 minutes later all is forgotten and back to normal. Folks, people who are shot in the face with a flintlock pistol in a dark and gritty setting should have the good manners to stay down. Replay value is VERY low, you only make one significant choice in the game and the results are, apart from the choice between using muskets or voodoo from that moment on, mostly cosmetic. Graphics, usually a thing I hardly care about, are actually so much below standards that is DOES disturb me, and the fact that after playing it through ONCE I fond more than 600 unwanted save games on my HD is just such a double facepalm... really, don't know what to say... Well, and trying to sell me DLC that is in fact - apart from the voiceovers - *completely* on the disc should actually bring down the rating another notch or two... Ii has it's fun moments, and with the first patch, can certainly be played and enjoyed once, but it could have been so much more.

I can usually find a redeaming feature in just about anything and never cast straight zeroes (and very rarely straight 10s), but if value returned for money paid is exactly zero, what can I say? Being unable to use the product I bought because of a feature I did not want, IS a straight zero. Another company brought down by greed, incompetence and unacceptable business practises. Why was it possible to play Starcraft in offline mode once I logged in, and why isn't it in D3? If I'm FORCED to be online all of the time, there is NO excuse for not enough servers in use or the software not working. I refuse to be cheated and patronized by companies that take my money and THEN treat me like a criminal. No more games with forced online mode in single player for me. Period.

The game itself is mostly a 9, with great, emotional moments, good fights, some RPG moments from part 1 brought back and overall only a few minor flaws (boring fetch quests, confusing useless journal, and one insufferable enemy with script immunity). But the ending is such an monumental, epic fail, that I actually have to rate that a -1. Yes, it DOES have to be negative, because, honestly, it not only spoils ME3, it manages to somehow spoil the entire series. It is way to short, badly written, shamelessly stolen from Deus Ex, makes NO sense whatsoever, it negates EVERYTHING you have done over 3 games, ignores al your choices and basically offers the same lame end sequence video with 3 different colored explosions. Unbelievably bad, and even worse if this is just a ploy to sell some kind of "epilogue DLC" later. So, the average between a 9 and a -1 is what I have to rate this.