Ceridwen8

Once again, I'm reminded *not* to trust Critic Reviews. (GG fails in every way, except the ridiculous inaccuracy of 'professional' reviewers.) I loved Origins - I liked *some* parts of 2. (not a lot - the combat was ridiculously simple & I'm a very casual gamer. I did not like the 'Hawke' idea, because it felt like playing someone else's story/character, but the actual character of Hawke was agreeable enough, if weirdly passive & lacking in any heroism/heroic journey.) Inquisition may get better, but I doubt very much I'll play long enough to find out. First, I hate the combat. I really despise it. It's awkward, slow, unsatisfying and feels badly conceived. (mage was best - I tried all but 2h warrior) Character creation is ok - the hair is horrible, however. (hair matters!) However, while the combat would put me off, it's the story that really shocked me. Unlike the brilliant start of Origins, & the at least initially involving story of 2, I do not care in any way about Inquisition. It makes little sense - in the space of a few minutes (if that) you are moved from 'everyone hates you' to 'exalted one!' For no good reason, other than some people saw a glowing woman and decided she's Andraste. They'd seen her before, too, but you vaguely touching green stuff changed their mind. For some reason. It has to get better, but I don't feel compelled to find out. My character is bland. Almost nothing. Whether elf or Qunari - just - eh. (and their voices are all the same between races, so - eh. That's ok, but certainly isn't impressive..) You get drawn into the 'Inquisition' - again, for some reason, with no real input of your own. Truly, most off-putting is your first companion, Cassandra. I absolutely loathed her - and I say this as a feminist type myself. She seems to be yelling at you constantly, she's abusive, she's sneering, she's obnoxious. I've heard people say you have to read the comments, & the only response to that is, "No." If I wanted to spend hours with an angry companion, I could - I don't know - hang out in the subway! Or DMV. The name, too, remains questionable. Joining & recruiting into something called 'The Inquisition' could be comic, but doesn't exactly inspire confidence. If I can't scream, "NOBODY EXPECTS...!" then it doesn't work. Neither does Cassandra's incessant 'Most Holy' comments. She comes off as an angry fanatic, & I don't care if her back story involves sad puppies. It's obnoxious, & reason to avoid. Maybe the action is better on consoles - but I don't enjoy console games. Either way, the characters & story really lack whatever it takes to gain interest & keep it, & get me, at least, to play again.

If this is the 'game of the year,' it must have been a really weak year. I know this has received great reviews, is supposedly 'authentic to Tolkien,' and reputes to be challenging & involving. I haven't found it worthy of those high reviews. In theory, if there are no major bugs or technical problems, a game deserves, say, a 7 of 10. And if it were titled 'Medieval-ish guy in Bad Guy Land,' I'd probably go with 7. But this sells itself on Tolkien, so the best I can do is 6. If you're not a Tolkien purist, some of my complaints won't matter. So I'll start with game play. I found it difficult at first, until I realized I was substantially over-thinking it. Once I accepted that this is left button, right button, pick a finish, then it dwindled into the 'painfully easy' game play that I should like, being casual, but don't, because it's boring. There was NO fight I couldn't escape if necessary. (Apparently, orcs have very short attention spans.) It's a style I don't care for, but maybe it works, as it seems to be a copy of Arkham Asylum, with something like AC movement. Personally, I don't like the movement at all. I don't feel connected to it - you climb sheer walls easily, but can't climb a simple rock pile. There's no balancing involved - your guy just stays automatically in place. Holding down the shift key to stealth, constantly, got painful after awhile. Targeting was strange - I very often kill the wrong person. But it rarely matters. Climb up, wait, then hop down again. Orcs don't remember well, either. Oh, & don't fight near a wall, or you'll lose sight of your attackers. (more annoying than dangerous) In any game, LOTR related or not, I expect some story. This has to be the most generic, tedious, 'I don't care what happens' story I've come across in a long time. It feels completely unrelated to Tolkien's world, except for tossing in 'facts & figures,' and some Tolkien words/names. I cannot imagine calling this game 'innovative,' as I've seen in other reviews. It just screams cut & paste to me, with nothing new. Maybe the orcs vying for power? But I found that completely uninteresting. Worse, your elf-ghost Celebrimbor (I'd call this a spoiler, except it was in the trailers) seems set on you using the weapons of the enemy against him. When I got to that part, I'd essentially lost interest entirely, especiaily when I MCed orcs, & gave them blue eyes. The dwarf was generic-annoying, too. The women, cliched. The comic relief orc wasn't funny. There is no exploration, no world to investigate. No loot, no chests, no surprises. No choices at all, no character development. The fan-fic named Talion is stunningly dull and screams, again, "Generic Video Game Hero,' to the point that he's essentially on a revenge quest. I would have preferred to play as the elf, though he came closer to a Warcraft elf than anything Tolkien. In other LOTR-related games, there's some story, some exploration. (that's the best part of LOTRO, at least - you feel like you're in a scaled-down Middle Earth - aka, it takes a few minutes to ride from Bree to Weathertop, as opposed to weeks.) But in this - nothing. Warcraft is closer in spirit, & this one lacks Warcraft's whimsy. If you're not going to be remotely true to Tolkien, then make up your own game! Elder Scrolls has their own world, as do Warcraft, Guild Wars, Dragon Age... Granted, they take a lot from Tolkien, but that's true of all fantasy, including Star Wars. But this is based on Middle Earth, & other than tossing in Tolkien words, I'm not feeling it. Yet I've read tons of reviews insisting that it's 'so accurate!' This takes place just after Gollum is leaving Mordor, I guess, yet a lot of Mordor is green & growing (with Lorien flowers...) and for some reason, Gollum recognizes Celebrimbor as a ring maker... No clue why that relates to the One Ring, but apparently to Warner Bros Gollum, it does. I don't remember him coveting Gandalf's ring, after all. Anyway - I deeply dislike this game. Not like ESO, which was an utter failure in pretty much every way, but in its laziness, & in its ability to rack up great reviews for nothing. Either there are a lot of 'interested parties' posting, or the gaming world really needs to get higher standards.

Ok, given the ridiculously high 'critic review' score, I *have* to review this one. I dutifully played this with my son - and it's painfully bad. I cannot imagine who anyone could give it more than 5, if they were in a generous mood. First, you have a weirdly limited set of cards (which you can buy with real money, basically - that's nothing new, but let's not say Blizzard is above micro-transactions anymore, please) You have the potential for class strategy, which is undercut by the limited nature of the game mechanics. It's a lesser Magic/ Yu-Gi-Oh, without the strategy & fun. I guess it's there to be simple & mindless, and it's dependent on PvP. You can't play against friends (for progress - you can for - no good reason) It's just annoying to see critics lauding something that *really* doesn't deserve it.

I haven't played a lot of Point & Click games, but this one was really enjoyable. It's not a long game, but it has enough parody of other games you've probably played, that it's refreshing & amusing. I *loved* Wilbur - he's a wonderful little guy, & I actually wish he'd been the lead for the whole game. The other 2 are ok - they have their moments, but they're vastly inferior to his utter charm. The one thing I'd like in this game is the ability to pick the lead you want.

I played this through beta & briefly, into live. I don't have a lot to add to the criticism, except to say I found no reason to actually play this mmo. If it's aimed at PvP mainly, I wasn't aware of that when I bought the game, & I had read enough to believe the ES world & story would be paramount. It isn't. The play style itself is awkward & irritating, the races basically interchangeable & for some reason, it's too easy to put your, say, High Elf among the Bretons. I'm not sure who they're catering to, but it isn't people who loved Skyrim. We already have mmos that cater to PvP, to raids - and I found *nothing* in ESO that offers something new, improved or unique. It's a step back in many ways - shared nodes, cooperative play, character personal story. After trying this, I cycled back through the old mmos I'd played, & depending on your taste, each one offers something unavailable in ESO.

I've played through RoS on my wizard, and though I rated D3 quite low, this *is* an improvement. (I'd like to do 6.5, but to be generous, I'll go with 7) First, the removal of the real money auction house was great - that was a painful, awful, insulting, greedy, disastrous system, & the #1 reason I quit D3, & remember it without affection. (I had reached - whatever the final level was, & completely lost interest, since it was P2W in the extreme.) On the other hand, the inability to trade with friends & party members now is disappointing, and a *sane* auction house system might be welcome, albeit possibly too open to exploitation. On the basis of auction house removal alone, I have to give it a substantially higher score. The story/area is a little better than D3. Not a lot. A little. I played the wizard most, but also got a crusader to max, & found it strangely ill-suited to the game design. (WHY make it slower? What's the point? - I realize that's been removed, but when I was leveling mine, it was a real pain.) By the time the crusader class had been buffed up, I was too sick of her to bother. I liked the voice actors for both male & female - that was a plus. I found the nerfs/buffs a little - annoying. I was disappointed, again, that the classes most suited to moving, to kiting, such as wizard & DH, seem to be rewarded for standing still & shooting. I find that boring, and too dependent on gear. I'm sick of gear being #1 in Blizzard games, as well as an almost mandatory cookie cutter build. (I see that critics seem to love their games, but I'm not feeling it. "Simple & utterly gear dependent is just not working for me, & I'm a pretty casual gamer.) Rifts - a good idea, intensely boring to repeat. WAY too long, & your reward/boss comes too soon, in that there's not a lot of reason to continue with them, though legendaries are supposed to drop more often in Rifts. (I averaged maybe one worthless legendary an hour.) There should have been a major boss per level, or make Rifts shorter. I got more legendaries from blasting urns & crates than from bosses, which is a big problem for me. A boss *should* give more than an urn, but you are not rewarded for tackling harder fights. Just - from playing a lot, & that's a reason not to open D3. Enchanting was a nice touch, if it worked reasonably well. I realize they changed the option that allowed for, "Would you like vitality for your vitality, or perhaps... vitality?" But several times, I got lovely rare items that had terrible stats.(that couldn't be altered by enchanting) Obviously, you're supposed to play this game for a lot more hours than I'm willing to endure. I'm not helped enough by going up in Torment (I was generally comfortable at 3 & 4 on the wizard, and had a few *mixed* set pieces, with the rest legendary.) (I was about 250 Paragon Level - I ran it more than I should have, though I saw players saying you had to have 'at least' 300 hours to expect set gear. That's crazy, & no thanks.) I was deeply annoyed, also, that the set pieces aim you at one build. I despise the 'changed look' effects - Archon, the Akarat's champion thing on the crusader - and I had no intention of building that way just because a set told me I had to. Not at all flexible enough! Gems were stupidly expensive to make, remove (that has been lowered a bit) and generally not something rewarding. It's an attempt to make you play eternally, & I don't find them exciting enough to do that. (I had max level gems on my wizard - there's no way I'd bother with that on another character) That brings me to Kadala - whose idea was it to make a snarky NPC who insults you as she gives you lousy, utterly useless gear? She gives you about what you'd get from 2 bosses. Just - no. My score is probably higher than I'm feeling about D3:RoS now, but it is a jump up from plain D3, & unlike most games now, allows me to play with friends. (I wasn't interested in public games) I'm sick of mmos, & single player rpgs have a very limited play time. So that's - something.

I've gotten my wizard well into Inferno. (Despite being female myself, I picked the male wizard because the woman's voice was incredibly grating. Hers was the only voice acting that I actively loathed.) When asked about the game overall, I'd say, "eh, ok." The story is painfully short, and your character makes virtually no difference, and has no choices to make. At this point, I expect games to offer me some choices, even in a survival game. On the other hand, I found my character likable and sometimes witty. (I felt stuck with the templar companion - and he's intensely irritating. The Scoundrel grew on me, but was useless by Inferno, & the Enchantress was like nails on a chalkboard. Pink nails.) Blizzard asks you to replay the same story over and over and over - which I assume everyone knows & expected, but it got VERY old for me. As for game play & challenge, Hell was the most fun - it was fine solo. (I also played with friends & family - never the public games.) Inferno is hard, as everyone says, but mainly, annoying. Mobs have random spells - wasps buzz around bubbled & linked & spitting flames (if they did this in real life, I'd be off the planet.) I felt very limited trying to balance health & damage - it just wasn't fun, & didn't feel like using the character to the fullest - at the very time you WANT to be using all your abilities. Auction House - I hate that you have to buy gear, can't earn it other than gathering gold. Worst of all - recently they made General Chat mandatory. Before I can type "/leave general," I'm hit with gold spam. (I assume they're selling the items stolen off hacked accounts?) Every time you log in, you get hit with this, and have to leave chat (this gives plenty of time for gold sellers to spam you.) If **** changes this, good, but too late. Even so, after round 3, the auction house was still more interesting than the game. By the end, I felt the first round should have been optional. Nightmare felt utterly pointless and should have been either the first round, or nothing. Hell was the best - inferno is just a pain. The strategy seemed to be - "Well, I can't kite here - have to reload." I didn't mind the old fashioned styling, really - it felt like being back in an old Ultima. The armor dyes were pretty lousy, though. In conclusion - I don't hate the game - I surely don't love it. I might fiddle around on my wizard if I'm bored, but nothing could inspire me to run another character through. For one thing, the classes aren't all that different - even between ranged & melee. For another - I couldn't face cycling through that story again. Most of all, I don't want to be focused solely on buying-selling gear, and that seems to be the utter core of the game. And real money? Ha! I don't THINK so! In all, it held my attention for about a week.