BernardTheBeast

It was good. It was worthy of maybe 7/10 in the past. But today it's been entirely taken over by a company that doesn't much care about the source material, and has converted the game into a Lootbox Simulator overflowing with microtransactions, lootbox keys, currency conversion, obsessive grinding (for in-game currencies), and pretty much everything else that is horrendously manipulative and exploitative. It's a nightmare to see a game where creativity was the core game mechanic, turned into this disgusting excuse for catering to people who can be manipulated to buy bytes and pixels for cash. Give it a try if you want, it has probably the best character creator of any 3D game developed, ever, and being able to select your own superpowers has its pleasures. But steel yourself in preparation for artificial barriers that will continue popping up, encouraging you to hand over more of your time and money than this game deserves. Do I recommend this game? I hate answering "No". I really do. This game was my life for years. The people, the community, they've stayed with me. But the game has fallen behind, dragged down by the weight of its new, corrupt, cash-grabbing nature. Such a heart-rending a shame.

I bought the Silver Edition so that no one could look at my review and think I didn't put in effort in trying to enjoy it. When the game started, I discovered that if I declined the Terms of Service, I could disable the Market and all Loot Box content (including the Silver Edition Lootboxes I paid an extra $20 for). Therefore no one can look at my opinion and think I'm biased just because of Microtransactions, because in my gameplay, they were entirely disabled. This game is equivalent to the very first Assassin's Creed, but with a Lord Of The Rings reskin, written and directed by a greedy fanboy. The content is functional but limited. The story is average, occasionally boosted by likable and even humorous orcs, yet at the same time often feels soulless. The gameplay is functional, but nothing truly unique when compared to other games of the recent past. The randomly generated orcs...both the best, and worst part of the game: they're creative in design, ability and behavior; yet they are the spawned outcome of a randomly generated number that the game decides without any regard for your action or playstyle, because they're based on the integrated Lootbox system, and are therefore not supposed to be unique—otherwise orcs from Lootboxes would be different from orcs found in gameplay, and render the microtransaction system less beneficial. This is the summation of my thoughts, based on the time I spent playing (again, with a Disabled Market/Microtransactions/Lootboxes). I loved Shadow Of Mordor, I had high hopes for Shadow Of War. Sadly, the horrific impact of Warner Brothers has left a stain on the game, if not the franchise, through it's continued mishandling of intellectual property: within which WB itself would be the enemy of mankind, were J.R.R. Tolkien himself to write an adaptation of this story, in addition to flagrant disregard for ethics; specifically towards what is becoming legally recognized as a form of gambling (Lootboxes), in addition to avoiding labor laws on other projects, not to mention the whole controversy surrounding the death of a Monolith Developer. Bottom line, what could have been an enjoyable experience has been twisted and warped, and is hardly the game I had been hoping for. It's got a overall Mostly Positive rating on Steam. I'm not one to judge the community; if people like it, great. If you yourself enjoy this game, then do have fun with it. But despite wanting to like it, I couldn't enjoy Shadow of War. Whatever heart was poured into this game, was utterly corrupted by greed, as demonstrated by one particular scene: Let me call to your attention a moment where one of the orcs you encounter who is important to the story. After joining the protagonist's side, he offers to share his knowledge with Talion regarding orcs and how they function. There's a cutscene that plays, in order to explain specifically, the Combat Arena: a "minigame" that is essentially nothing more than a mobile game: you select one of your orcs, and your orc duels an enemy orc. You have no influence over the outcome, essentially making it a 'game of chance' (I won't insult your intelligence by pointing out what that technically is). During this cutscene, the orc, who is written to be friendly and likable, speaks to you—not Talion, the character—but to you, the player, in a first-person cutscene, in which his dialogue is explicitly written to compel you to give this 'minigame' a try, with the outcome potentially coercing or forcing you to buy microtransaction orcs to get better results. With the potential present in which your orc will be killed, and the only options for regaining orcs being lengthy gameplay to recruit orcs, or the easier option of "buying orcs" via Lootboxes, I'd hope that anyone, even those without a comprehensive understanding of Gambling Mechanics, Advertisement, Marketing and Business principles, can recognize how this system is inherently designed to guide a player (who has already spent between $60 - $100), to invest more time or real-world money, in this situation. I won't get into the ethics of it, but I will point out that there was a time when games were built to be played and enjoyed first and foremost, not to be tools that, in a very real sense, scheme to manipulate gamers into emptying their wallets further.

Don't look at Elite Dangerous as a game. It isn't. Elite Dangerous is a piece of software that wants to be Flight Simulator, Trains Simulator, a space combat simulator, and an MMO, all in one. Does it succeed? In my opinion, no. Here's the good stuff you can look forward to: ► A space game where you can choose to play Solo, with a Private Group (friends only), or Open (open online multiplayer with instanced maps holding a set number of players at a time). Options! ► A space game where you can choose between the space-game trifecta of Combatant/Trader/Explorer or incorporate all three into your play style. Options! ► A space game where you can customize the loadout of your spaceship with equipment ranging from a dozen different types of weapons, armors, internal components for offense, defense, bounty hunting, passenger carrying, cargo hauling, planet exploring, etcetera. Options! ► A space game where you can fly across a huge, seemingly limitless galaxy, where every dot on your Galaxy Map (and there's millions of them) represents a sector of space you can travel to and explore, possibly for the very first time that anyone has ever gone there...! Options! ► A space game with fairly solid graphics, a cool premise, a good simulato-yet-action-focused-yet-exploration-capable feel to it. Especially if you have a good flight control system/joystick, TrackIR, or VR, you'll probably want to buy this just to take advantage of your hardware. Here's the bad stuff you can look forward to: • Grinding. If you want ranks, money, or to simply explore, prepare to spend months grinding. To get satisfaction from traveling and doing what you want to do, it's going to require money and ranks, so you'll have to grind. This is where MMO syndrome comes in: the infamous "Engineers" system requires you to find components found RNG about the universe, which can take a long time. These Engineering goals are essential in making your ship perform with lower risk of dying due to unfair AI or players who have an Engineered ship and want you dead for some reason. • AI with no personality that mostly sends text messages to you (very little voice dialogue/radio chatter) and cheats in combat, their level of cheating determined by their difficulty (AI are immune to certain weapons, techniques and strategies, have accuracy/damage that is disconnected to their ship's actual loadout). The lowest ranked AI will fly stupidly in box patterns without fighting back, while the highest ranked AI will pull J-turns, flank you, shoot you perfectly with 360 degree turreted weapons, and take out your subsystems with flawless accuracy. Cheap. • No purpose or overall objective other than what you make for yourself. While there are more interesting missions other than "Kill/Trade/Explore", you might never experience them because you're too busy grinding to get a ship actually capable of doing those complex missions. Limited depth & bugs: • You can't land on planets unless you buy Horizons DLC; however, they're all slight variations of either a crater-marked orange moon, or a large, rugged and mountainous orange moon anyway • Using Multi-Crew, you can jump into the passenger seat of another player's spaceship! But you'll experience lag issues, sudden disconnects, game-crashing errors, and a whole bunch of other bugs. You also can't walk around the ship, or wave to your friend, or anything other than giving the pilot player an extra pip to their power distribution and maybe taking over one of their fighters or turrets. • You can land on space stations! But there's only about 6 different looking interiors in the game you'll see most often on average • You can buy any ship you want, but customizing the ship's appearance is real-money microtransaction based: $10 from the third-party Frontier store, and only applies to that specific class of ship. This game's out-of-game store is horrendously expensive, and feels like it's one step short of introducing lootboxes and XP boosters due to the excessive grind. I honestly like this game. But I literally don't have the time to play this game enough to gain enough money/ranks to do anything fun. I can't do combat/explore/trade for fear of my ship being destroyed and having to spend another 10 hours grinding for money. I can't participate in events because I haven't spent the 1,000 hours grinding to get an Engineered ship capable of not being destroyed. Everything I want to do relies upon grinding to get there, and the grinding itself gets very boring, very quickly. The satisfaction from playing with my X52 Joystick, TrackIR, or VR, is worth only an hour or two at most, because afterwards the game goes from 'game' to 'chore' to 'second job'. Do I recommend this game? Well, after doing the math, I have to say: "No, unless there's an incredible sale". This game is worth $30 at most, and that's counting cosmetic microtransactions.

1) I like WarCraft. 2) I want to like WarCraft III Reforged. 3) I don't like Blizzard-Activision and other greedy, amoral corporate money-worshiping organizations. Why my 0/10 score? Because Activision-Blizzard needs to be sent a message and be held accountable for the downward trend they and other "AAA" publishers have embarked on this past decade. That said, here are my honest first impressions of the game: • HD Character models are great! • Cutscenes virtually unchanged • Dialogue has been edited in places (some more noticeable than others) • Dialogue glitches/repeats in cutscenes • Menu/UI Glitches • Stuttering after prolonged play • Less new content than advertised • WorldEdit EULA states you give Blizzard literally all your rights, including "moral rights" When I saw they were remaking WarCraft III, I thought "cool", and forgot about it until I bought the game 6 hours before it was unlocked. I was torn: buy WarCraft III for the third time (originally bought WC3, then Collector's Edition afterwards) at $30, or Deluxe ("Spoils of War") to get the Thrall model for online games...then I thought, "$10 just to use Thrall in multiplayer matches?" and bought the cheaper version. I had avoided all advertising/conversations on WC3: Reforged. As I was downloading the game, I saw walking animations being used by character models in one of the animated ads. It was then, I realized "Oh, they've actually added in more than just higher resolution models/textures!" The game starts. I select Play Offline. The menu loads, it looks cool. I go into options and start tweaking; suddenly the menu vanishes and I'm back at the main menu in Online mode. This happens every time. Once, I was quick enough to start loading the campaign—half way through loading, it booted me back to the main menu, with no mouse cursor. Original WC3 had hotkeys for all menu options; Reforged doesn't. Had to Alt-F4. The Campaign: They pulled a George Lucas, subtly editing certain lines of dialogue: Grunt: "The Warchief the human mentioned...maybe they're referring to—HELLSCREAM?" Thrall: "I don't know, but if they have captured—HELLSCREAM, I'll make them regret it." Pretty noticeable. The new models look great, but most of the cutscenes are shot-for-shot remakes, unlike what the advertising showed (I watched videos after playing, for comparison). I ran into bugs; characters repeating their lines of dialogue as the cutscene changed scenes or gameplay resumed (looking at you, Undead Arthas). The Menu bugs are rather severe; several occasions, I'd unpause the game, but the game is still darkened and paused, so I'd have to re-open the pause menu and close it again, to get the game working once more. After running the game for about 1.5 hours, a stutter issue started happening: selecting/ordering units would cause the game to freeze for a fraction of a second; very noticeable, and only resolved by restarting the game. It's my hope that the glitches can be fixed with patches. It's a lingering disappointment for all the game's visual upgrades, the core of the game itself seems either untouched or slightly fractured. I genuinely appreciate the opportunity to play a nostalgic classic with a more modern look, and I thank the developers that basically created a modding overhaul to do so... But there was less here than was advertised, and that falls on the shoulders of the Publisher and their Marketing Campaign, and that's where the 0/10 is really directed. The game itself, as a remaster, I'd give 6/10: a nostalgic game, with an HD upgrade, a strange choice of little edits here and there, but overall mostly functional. But it's a game that comes from Blizzard-Activision, a company with an operating income of two billion dollars (as of 2018). If their leadership had true, genuine passion and love for their games, WarCraft III: Reforged could have been a masterwork, revitalizing and reintroducing a classic to a new generation. It partly succeeded, but it could **** not, should have, been better than what it was advertised to be. And that kind of dishonesty in advertising deserves 0/10 rating. It's a rating to show how little they as a company are to be trusted by gamers. Activision-Blizzard doesn't deserve your money. Be careful about how, when, and on what you choose to give your money to them.