Goby

Hands down THE best hex-map 4X since Civilization V and it improves upon V and others in so many ways. And I've played a lot of them. Old World devs have put a lot of love into this one and it truly shows. Tons of replayability. Impressive game design and balancing of all the different systems which work together beautifully from start to end. Challenging and smart AI. Loads of QoL features like interactive reminders, the ability to disable individual soundtracks, nested tooltips and so on. The Orders system absolutely solves the problem with late game grind we know from older games and has you thinking about your priorities every step of the way. I could compliment every aspect of the game really. The devs even accept player feedback through an in-game form - a rare sight these days. Truly a must play for any fan of turn-based strategy. I'm addicted. Before you start, tell your friends you're going to be off the radar for a while.

Definitely addictive, putting ticks in a lot of boxes for what it set out to be. Procedurally generated worlds; an interstellar empire to build via multiple playthroughs; campaign modes that introduce you to the story and characteristics of the many factions in the game. Everything I don't complain about below is likely OK, or even great. TLDR: If you've been looking for a marriage of Hex Map 4X + XCOM, then Planetfall will be an entertaining and addictive experience for you. Its good, not excellent. You may feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of enemy variety. The learning curve can feel pretty bad and you will never truly 'learn' this game, but it gets better as you invest the time to familiarize yourself with all the factions and tech trees in the game. I was surprised to find that the combat in the game felt balanced, given how much variety there is in tactical combat and unit modding. I was initially attracted by the blend of two of my favorite worlds: Civ V-like 4X and XCOM-like tactical combat. Planetfall does a good job at both, but not as good as either of those two games individually. The 4X manages to feel too fast and too slow at the same time. It always became a chore after midgame. However your mileage may vary if you don't set your mind on world domination / conquest, which I expected to keep me invested in the process, but I may have been shooting myself in the foot going after this particular victory condition. While I was initially intrigued by all the unit modding options and branching empire research paths, I started to borderline hate it all after I purchased the DLCs, which introduce even more factions and units (and variables). The learning curve was already steep, but it exploded after including more factions. It literally got exhausting when there is an entirely new challenge around almost every corner - how does one properly prepare for... everything? The simplicity of Civilization V and our familiarity with real world history really helped in getting through the chore of learning the game and getting to the fun part, but in Planetfall I always found I had to read and learn more than I like, because no two fights are ever the same and if you're going to play at your best (which is usually the mindset in any strategy game), then unfortunately you may feel obliged to thoroughly inspect every single unit in every single fight before making your first move. I felt I have a certain capacity for going through this process over and over again, or perhaps domination mode simply doesn't work well for this game. Its likely more enjoyable if you got one of those big math brains. Or you've played this game for hundreds of hours and you already know what this or that mod, unit or effect does. What to expect, which enemies to focus, how to approach them etc. The fun only starts when you've properly familiarized yourself with the situation. Impossible to enjoy chess if you don't know the rules, right? Well expect to go through the learning process many many times here. The AI is fairly easy to dominate if you prepare well. Diplomacy in this game is unfinished garbage and the AI is often too forgiving. They show no mercy when the odds are already against you, but in evenly-matched fights I found it easily achievable to come out of it with all your units alive and ready for the next battle. Very often the AI doesn't seem to have good priorities when confronting you - they tend to move to unfavorable positions and seemingly make a point out not forcing you to lose some important unit you misplaced yourself. Auto-resolve could really use a deep learning engine (make it happen for the next Planetfall!) - While the outcome was impressively fair for the most part, I still had to manually take over in fights where you absolutely do not need to lose a single unit if you use one brain cell. And screw the vocal narration in the tech tree! I wish there was a way to turn that off. It is essentially a bunch of made up nonsense narrated by accents and quirky voices from every corner of Earth, there to distract when you're trying to read. They even vocalized the made up name of the made up dude who is supposed to be the author of the made up aphorism or quote being narrated... AAAGH!! At least in Civilization I learned some wisdom from actual wise men who lived.

I did not expect to spend as much time on this game as I did... 60 HOURS! And I skipped a couple side quests, sorry... but I thought I was close to finishing the game after spending a little too much time in the first large city you come across. Oh boy was I wrong. Most of the game does not even take place on the continent of Europe, where you as the new leader of a viking clan are based. I was THIS close to uninstalling the game when I realized this was only the beginning. I'm not a fan of reading fiction, unless it is something very significant everybody and their mother recommends. Frankly I was caught off guard by all the reading you have to do in this game... When I first launched this game some four years after first hearing about it, I was expecting to be met with more action than I ended up getting, but honestly.. the reading-intensive gameplay grew on me and I kept going simply because I was curious about how the story was going to play out. All the important characters are essentially just a combination of static profile pictures on the UI and low-poly models in the field, but they grow on you through dialogue and storytelling. I'll leave my personal judgments regarding shortcomings in the story out of this, but I will say that the dialogue is exceptionally well written, clearly perfected to the word. Spoken dialogue, which is rare, is usually a little awkward with accents and the pacing... But in my opinion that's irrelevant - most of the time you're reading, so everyones' voices and character are up to your imagination. Basically - if you already enjoy reading, you'll probably go through this game in half the time I spent on it and read it like an animated book of sorts. Otherwise you may feel inclined to look elsewhere. I suggest you take a chance with it, like I did. Let me be very clear though: this is 100% an indie game and you can feel it in most aspects of the game. I am almost certain the guys behind it could do a lot more, given the resources. Combat on the hex map is innovative and entertaining, but there are some bugs, imbalances and situations in which something you'd expect to work, simply doesn't (read: "it can be unintuitive and unclear"). Stay away from the hardest difficulties in the beginning of the game unless you're looking for excuses to uninstall! I've seen many reviewers complain about surprise rounds, which is when the turn-base combat kicks off with the enemy getting the right to perform the first attack with all of their combatants. Yes, this sometimes make zero sense, but somebody's got to start the round off and sometimes that somebody is not going to be you. Deal with it. And if you can't, simply lower the difficulty and enjoy the story. I usually challenge myself with harder difficulties, but seeing the balancing issues in this game I deicided to go through it on normal difficulty and honestly, it got a bit too easy towards the end. However you can increase the difficulty at any point if you want. I was lazy. Overall I wouldn't thrash the game over any particular aspect of it - just don't expect perfection and you're good to go. I have more complaints and compliments, but I'm not getting paid to write this, so I will end it here. Peace.

Great storytelling and graphics are welcome, but they are much less impactful without a solid gameplay foundation. This game has many sections of fascinating storytelling, but they are usually followed by extremely hectic RTS segments which completely break the pacing and mood. In these RTS segments you have to manage armies and settlements at the same time, but your gameplay experiece is made as difficult as possible by way of ridiculous mechanics. The game feels like something of a throwback to Age of Empires 2 on harder difficulties. There is honestly no room for a breather in the RTS segments. Any strategy you practise is usually devised through trial-and-error. Normally failing and learning from your mistakes is a good thing, but not in this game. There is simply no way for you to know the right approach from the get-go and you will likely fail until you know what exactly you need to be focusing on to beat some particular segment. In these RTS segments, the game will constantly throw you off by alerting you of events like "being attacked" when there is just one enemy dude running into an army of your men or one of your outposts. In such cases you end up wasting precious seconds checking out the situtation, then wasting some more trying to figure out where exactly your camera is now, where your nearest soldiers are and where you need to go next to do whatever. Every aspect of the RTS gameplay feels very unorganized and barely controllable. It actually feels infuriating when you think you're doing all you possibly can and at the same time there are plenty more things the AI is doing while you f*ck around with those decoy units they send out to divert your attention all the time. Not to mention all your efforts with character development go to waste when you simply do not have time to micromanage their skills during combat. The game would receive an 8/10 if I had a better control and overview of what is happening during the RTS segments.

My biggest gripe with this game is that every time you think you won a battle like a champ, the game immediately throws another unfair battle at you without giving you a chance to recover from the previous one. This coupled with a poor economy that severely inhibits building your characters makes this game a waste of time. I spent 8 hours so anybody reading this and considering getting it can use that time more wisely elsewhere. You have been warned.

This game needs it's reviews reset - most of them are from way back. I play games on a daily basis and seen many different genres in it's various implementations, but this survival game here... It's simply above anything I've played. I keep coming back to it because it is the only source of genuine adrenaline rushes from any videogame I know and I couldn't recommend it more. One thing though, if you're playing in a small group (1-3 people), don't play in a vanilla server - progression is too slow for most people's tastes (might be appealing if you have enough time and the servers don't wipe on a weekly basis). Instead go for a 2x or 3x server, that way you'll get to see everything the game has to offer. This game is beautiful, both aesthetically and in implementation.

Arg, the ending almost makes me want to avoid saying anything negative about the game, but frankly it's FAR BELOW the quality standards set by the previous Mass Effect games. I'm not even going to complain about the faces or glitches, I'd have less of a problem with those if the rest of the package were delivered well. Unfortunately they flopped it. Bioware has seemingly become a victim to the recent trends in open-world gaming. Trends like artificially extending gameplay time by having the player engage in mind-numbing repetitive tasks and quests, poor design solutions for the process of resource collecting (which you require to unlock some bonuses or to experiment with new gear - not essential, but in order to research and develop all the gear offered you'd have to waste a huge amount of time better spent elsewhere) RESOURCE COLLECTING, RESEARCHING FOR GEAR It's a grind, because the best way to accumulate resources is to pick them up by hand. That means you are expected to stop for them and hold a button for two seconds or worse, deviate from your mission to engage in this distraction that should have never left the MMORPG genre. That design solution for collecting resources sounds bland on it's own, but unfortunately the slightly more interesting options like planetary scans yield significantly less resources for the time invested and even that process becomes dull due to lack of variation. QUESTS I sorely missed those side quests from the original games that felt like they were significant in one way or another. 9 out of 10 side quests in Andromeda feel like they have all life **** out of them and they consequently end up being a huge to-do list in which you'd rather not do anything because there's a 90% chance you're going to be disappointed again. Honestly the overall quality of the dialogue didn't leave a lasting bad taste in my memory, but a lot of the narratives felt rushed and incomplete. Oftentimes it's your generic MMORPG quest: talk to an NPC, go to a location, interact with an object or kill some enemies, collect your reward. Sometimes if you start to feel invested in a quest it just all of a sudden concludes and you'll feel like nothing even happened and everything you did was for nothing (you may be rewarded with some useless garbage for your troubles or perhaps to offer some solace for feeling unfulfilled). There's plotholes too, likely resulting from a tunnel-vision approach when writing. What a pity... If you have to try out Andromeda, avoid all task type quests. There are a lot of terrible ones in Allies & Relationships as well, but those are generally better, albeit still not as interesting to do as in the original games. SAM THE PATHFINDER'S AI I want to bring this thing out separately because I believe it to be the culprit that steals away a lot of the potential goodness this game could've been. Sure, it's immensely helpful in your pathfinder travels - it's a know-it-all AI that can solve pretty much any problem you throw at it: decipher alien languages, interact with alien objects on the go or even know what a random piece of alien tech is designed to do. I have a huge issue with this because it rips this game of SO MUCH potential for fascinating side quests and makes too much room for that fast paced shooting-oriented gameplay that was never at the heart of Mass Effect. SAM is always telling you where to go and what to do. I don't remember a time when I had to think about what I should be doing next or even feel mystified by anything, it's always just GO GO GO and if something gets in your way, KILL KILL KILL. OTHER ISSUES * Squad AI system is utterly useless. You're more likely to get yourself killed trying to give out orders to your squadmates, so just don't bother with it and let them stand in the middle of gunfire if that's what they choose to do. * Certain idiotic dialogue situations. I completely avoided Liam in my squad because of it. * Ambient dialogue (e.g. a squadmate talking to you or a radio chat via comms) is constantly cutting off, triggered by you moving into a different area. It really doesn't take much at all for it to happen. It doesn't even have to be so that a new line of dialogue could start. * There's two Asari character models in the game - one is Peebee, and then there's everybody else... How is this even possible!? * Planets feel very small with so many locations packed together. * Too much forced smalltalking, it's exhausting... * Coordination between crafting, development, store and loadout user interfaces inconvenient. THE GOOD * Impressive graphics * Main storyline interesting enough * Some interesting characters - I personally liked incorporating Peebee and Jaal or Drack in my standard squad loadout * Ambient dialogue and reactions (perhaps even progressions) in quests vary based on which crew members you brought on a mission. * Sound engineering * Well optimised Overall, Andromeda felt uninspired and rushed.

Mad Max, in some ways, is possibly a pioneering game in the open-world genre, but otherwise falls flat on it's ass. First of all, I have to commend the visual aspect of the game - it's by far the most appealing I've seen so far. Most satisfying hand-to-hand combat I've experienced in a game, great graphics and animations. Loved the vehicle motion and combat and customization options, the level design (the world is massive - lots of different areas to see), random events interrupting your business, such as storms and bandit patrols (although I wish some of them had stopped doing that after getting beat up so many times). While the game featured several fleshed out characters and well written scripts and dialogue,it looks like Avalanche Studios figured they don't need all that and decided to not utilize their writers' skills further than the bare minimum. This company doesn't seem to appreciate a solid, prevalent story in an open world game. There's a whole lot to do here, but there is a serious lack of that driving force that should keep you motivated to explore every nook and cranny of this amazing world. The main story in this game revolves entirely around Max wanting his stolen V8 engine back and he will cast aside all his emotions and any interest for some sidetracking (there is a SERIOUS lack of storied side missions) to make that happen. Consequently we now have this grumpy Max who yaps at everybody for no reason and is simply an obnoxious character. The world is absolutely massive, but there are unfortunately a limited number of activities: destroy stuff, beat up raiders, listen to some NPC's boring one paragraph intel, destroy convoys, fight patrol cars, race through the wasteland etc. That's what you're expected to engage in over and over, but besides yielding you more upgrades for your car doing all that doesn't have a point. Think about how that plays out: you spend hours upon hours doing chores to earn a new exhaust for your car... It's Just Cause all over again - a vast world with no draw. The only reason I figured a 7 instead of a 6 or 5 is because the little story it had showed potential and was executed well enough (not decently though - transitions in the story were not seamless and needed work), and the visual aesthetics were impressive. This was almost the perfect Mad Max game, but unfortunately it focused too much on the Hollywood definition of the "Mad" part and neglected the necessary attention to the other. Remember the first Mad Max movie? Strong story that makes you root for Max all the way through. This game simply doesn't capture that effect.

Picked this up at a great deal last summer, figured it would be a nice throwback to the CIV V days. I certainly wasn't wrong, much of the same experience I had in CIV V is present here, but there's a lot more added to this one. It's sophisticated - there's a lot of strategies to use and planning to consider when developing your empire. Approaches vary significantly depending on the faction you're playing, which adds plenty of replayability. Other good features: tons of different resources (many with booster effects that are so good they're worth going to war over), marketplace to sell or purchase heroes or resources (there's also mercenaries, but investing in those didn't ever seem to be beneficial), competitive battle AI, prioritizing in the tech tree development (in CIV V it was pretty much linear), storyline quests that can return significant benefits like powerful weapons for heroes or faction-wide benefits. And there's plenty more laudable features. There are some downsides though. First one was more troublesome when first starting the game - you have much less control in battles and in the beginning that can be an annoyance when you can't get things to go the way you wanted. Eventually you'll begin to understand the movements and see that the combat effectiveness trade-off for initiative (the characteristic that determines when an unit can make their move) is a neat strategy element. To point out a more serious issue I had, I'd prefer to describe how one my campaigns went down. I quit playing the game after a while and don't want to go back to it. Mainly because there's something going on with the campaign AI and it put me off the game for good. I played a campaign on the hardest difficulty (endless), 8 players, with only elimination victory enabled (conquer all enemy provinces). Now I remember **** about how hard the harder difficulties were when I first tried them last summer (called it "impossible and ****"), but it looks like there is a significant luck factor involved that determines whether your campaign goes well or not. Basically I got lucky this time and without sacrificing too much, at the beginning of the game I laid down 6 or 7 cities before my expansion options were closed by enemy factions. Spent a good 100 turns just building, researching etc. And all this time I was surprised that nobody had come to f*ck me up like they used to when I first played this difficulty. My military was terribly weak until I got bored and started pumping resources into armies. Soon enough I was ready to go and capture my first city. Didn't meet too much resistance, managed to take them by surprise and immediately settle a truce with them. And here's one problem: A lot of the times powerful factions get "exhausted" very fast. That means that they're much more willing to submit to your demands in diplomacy for truce. Therefore you can pretty much play according to your own rules. I then learned that the city I conquered was much more developed than any of mine were and since conquering it didn't have any serious repercussions, I figured it was time to quit the pacifistic gameplay and just invest in war. Bla bla bla, eventually you'll have figured out the main weakness of the AI - they're easily taken by surprise and you can capitalize on it without bearing serious repercussions. After a while my elimination campaign turned into a grind and I quit. Therefore I'd recommend keeping the other victory conditions enabled and (except score - that can end your dozen-hour campaign unexpectedly) let the game function as a whole - then the faction specializations can shine. The AI may not be balanced enough to deal with limited victory conditions.

Good story, characters, level design, dialogue (though people tend to speak too fast - hard to follow). The overall gameplay mechanics are decent, but the game occasionally manifests itself as a console port. The main problem is with the E key, which serves too many functions and there's no way to distribute them across different buttons. Your E key interacts with objects like doors, light switches or bodies. It's also for initiating a kill animation and picking up weapons. Now imagine a situation where you want to do one thing with this key, but coincidentally there are several animations that can be triggered. I want to go for a kill, but... NO. FISHER CLOSES A **** DOOR IN MY TARGETS FACE AND GETS HIMSELF SHOT IN THE PROCESS. In another instance I got myself into a gunfight and wanted to pick up a weapon while I was behind cover. Coincidentally there was an effing body right next to the weapon. What happens? Fisher is locked into the slow animation for picking up bodies, stands up from cover doing so, AND GETS **** SHOT. In "realism" mode this "realistic" scenario gets you killed in two shots and you have to do everything all over again. The number of times I had to re-do a level because the game facked me over is uncountable. That impacts the rating. Otherwise it's a classic Splinter Cell experience.

I got this game way after the ordeals experienced by many at release. I have to mention that when I compare the two versions (the initial release and Emperor Edition) side by side, the improvements are definitely noticeable. My problem, though, is the fact that after three years since release some very obvious mistakes are still in the game. Some of them can be fixed or improved with mods, but in the end they are still gamebreaking. First off: The campaign victory conditions are utterly ridiculous and will take ages to achieve (100-200 hours to finish one campaign, depending on your resolve). Sooner rather than later you will find that the game has slowed down to a grind, whatever faction you play. The Steam global achievements for this game tell me that not a lot of people finish their campaigns on harder difficulties - and the reason is not because it's too difficult to handle. In previous games there were short and long campaign modes, but this one has neither - it has just one and it should be labelled "eternal mode". Therefore playing several campaigns to experience the different factions is pretty much out of the question. Autoresolving is overpowered. I understand that the developers want to limit the time spent on campaign battles by having us choose to skip some where the outcome is fairly certain. This system is TOO EASY to abuse. THE MORE MEN YOU USE TO OUTNUMBER AN ENEMY, THE LESS CASUALTIES YOU SUSTAIN. And that's another gamebreaker, because once your empire is large enough, it's easy to outnumber the enemy in battles, especially if you're using Radious mod to overcome the other problems with the game (thankfully, Radious can be implemented in parts and you don't have to install the campaign mod that does this). Two changes in the code would've fixed this easy: 1 - attacking walled settlements or villages with high defensive ratings should cause you more casualties; 2 - replenishing your armies in recently conquered territories should be drastically lowered. At the current state you can just blitzkrieg your way through enemy regions once you have a few armies to spare for an offensive. The only mechanic stopping you is local unrest, most of which decays the next turn. Autoresolving is why you probably won't finish the game. At one point the battles requiring your presence will be bygones and you are tempted to just autoresolve all the way through - not the Total War I know. Marketing. Unfortunately SEGA has gone down the route of several other corporations in the video game industry. Now you don't even get the complete game upon purchase. Guess what, most of the interesting factions you'll have to buy separately. I should mention that the factions are already in the game, but you'll have to dish out more $ just to be allowed to play them. In fact, the whole DLC collection costs more than the game itself, while adding very little content, or content that should be in the main game. Not enough unit variation. Uncle Radious will help you out here, just download his unit packs in the Workshop. Lack of settlement models. Considering the fact that the game is expecting millions of players to finish the campaigns, they should have added way more settlement types in the game. I've been playing barbarian factions and I've been through all of the barbarian territories - every single one of them chooses between four or five different models. FOUR OR FIVE models for more than 40 barbarian regions? Excuse me for **** but learning strategies by heart and replaying them in different scenarios at different locations is not how I've come to love TW. 4TPY mod is a must. Without this your generals and agents are highly unlikely to become specialized in anything and will die of old age very fast - agents in particular are absolutely essential and in higher difficulties in vanilla they will stress you out very, very bad. They don't add a challenging aspect to the game, they are just a bigtime annoyance that have the power to stop entire armies turn after turn and wither away all your men. If you don't have skilled agents, good luck doing... anything! There are more bad features, but there are features to credit as well. Despite some bugs like javelinmen not throwing their spears when they should, battles are a lot of fun with the Blood & Gore installed. It's proper madness in every aspect. Ballistas projecting massive rocks through enemy ranks, knocking them back in either direction; Arrows and thrown spears pierce the enemy in a very visual way - lots of gore; the individual fights between men in combat are detailed and visual. When you got the time to observe how it all goes down on ground level, it's one of the better features in this game. Campaign map looks aesthetic, so do the interactions between characters. Although for some reason they often move Sonic-style fast and you can't slow that down. The new province system is great - much less micromanagement and way more comprehensive

Gameplay is very, very lacking... AC3 is technically a movie with intermittent "gameplay" that is really just there to force you to put your popcorn away for a minute before you get to experience the next cutscene. If you're looking to experience a game per se, just forget about this one. If you're interested in what's happening in the AC storyline, just look up the "Assassin's Creed III movie", which is essentially all the cutscenes edited together. Guess how long it is... IT CUTS REALLY CLOSE TO FIVE F'N HOURS!!

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Enemy Unknown was a brilliant game and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. That one I played all the way on classic and without ironman, so for EW I figured I was ready for ironman. Well, frankly, it takes about 3 playthroughs to be "ready" per se. Wanna know why that is? Because EW surprises you with random **** that is guaranteed to be fatal for your campaign. Let me explain how my classic ironman campaign suffered a sudden death. It all started with a terror mission in the police station map (the one consisting of a large open two story building with a pillared facade, a one-story side room and an alley to the right). Now I've had difficulties with this map before, seeing elite mutons, chryssalids, floaters and all kinds of crazy coming out of that building, but this round was rather special. There was nothing but chryssalids. Just 18 civilians and an estimate of 16 chryssalids. I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined such a scenario, so consider me shocked when I saw three chryssalids storming out of the side room and taking about 5 steps from the door, ready to land insane crits on 3 of my guys next turn. One already got pierced at the door the moment I ended my first turn (which also makes me wonder: this was the first time an enemy that was not triggered on my turn was able to attack me - the chryssalid who killed that unit was triggered by vision provided by the three chryssalids who barged out of the side room at the end of my first turn and enabling sight into the room that contained two more). As if the events in front of the side room were not bad enough, I had three-four more chryssalids jump down the walls and running out of the front side of the building. I barely managed to kill all 6 or 7 chryssalids that appeared on my screen there - only thanks to the heavy firepower from two of my colonel heavies. Guess what happens next turn. That's right, about 6 more chryssalids deicide to ignore the civvies in the building and just dash outside and in front of my units. Couple of turns after that I lose one corporal and another colonels who had been with me since the beginning. I'm forced to dash to the evac and abandon another colonel, Zhang, who ended up being surrounded by 3 zombies because I needed his rockets to blow away the hordes of chryssalids coming at me every single turn. Fun mission, but I deicided to get over it and push on. Next mission I get one of those advent evac missions. As usual, I'm very careful with my positioning, but with missions like these they matter jack **** Not only am I told these exalt troops are genetically enhanced (which is "great" news after just losing two colonels), their snipers can move and shoot at the same turn, despite otherwise playing on the same field as the xcom troops. But that's not the issue, the issue is the sheer number of those **** coming at you. Not only does the game drop about 10 of them at the same time, they are also dropped in BEHIND YOU. That leaves you with two options: you somehow blast those flankers or you risk getting wrecked by multiple overwatches trying to find better cover (in my case going to the only other cover revealed three more exalts camping out at an alley...). Basically exalt had every single position covered and death ensued. But what I loved ABOVE ALL about that evac mission was the intel given to me by Central. BRADFORD YOU BASTARD. I **** you not: twice did he have the occasion to tell me "That should be the last of their reinforcements." BRADFORD U ALREADY SAID THAT AND I JUST FINISHED DEALING WITH THOSE PREVIOUS REINFORCEMENTS!!! The result of that mission was total wipeout and 7 xcom operatives dead - couldn't even evac because the evac zone was on the opposite end of the area I was supposed to defend. And the evac area was also out in the open. It didn't get any better from there - the game is so good at mercilessly punishing you for failing. After that failed evac mission I am approaching the end of the month. As I'm researching the advanced interceptors I am once again surprised with three consecutive large or very large UFOs, which I all have to ignore because frankly there isn't much you can do with those figher jets, even with items. Month ends, I lose two funding nations. Ironically the month started with 666 currency with a monthly 666 income. In total I now have over 800 currency. Two days later I get sabotaged by exalt, who take FRICKING HALF OF MY MONEY. I'm now left with just 400, which is not going to get me through the next month considering the number of recent setbacks. I'm not even going to mention all the bugs I never saw in EU. I suggest you don't try this in ironman the first or second playthrough. In my case it's the surprises that ruin the game entirely. It's only very late into the game that you can get some intel on what you're going up against, and even that is only in ufo crash missions. Otherwise you're going in fingers crossed

What's happening in the commentary here is the same **** that happens on Yelp. Competition has hired a bunch of people to write a negative review and upvote other negative reviews. I've played the game for hours now and I'm very much enjoying the effort put into it. The only complaint I agree with is with the poor sound design regarding guns and cars, but pretty much every other argument in the negative reviews here is just driven by hate for Ubisoft or whatever dumb reason, such as **** about the graphics, which by the way I never thought to be bad. I think it's pretty obvious - giving a rating of 0 while complaining about just one or two aspects about the game, which may not even be true, is childish.

All things considered, Two Worlds II is a huge improvement upon Two Worlds, but despite featuring significant upgrades, they fall short on several aspects, minor and big. The bad AI/crowd behaviour is poor. For example when you're in a city and stop to observe the crowd that is walking around you on the street, you will immediately disconnect from the atmosphere when you realize that everybody around you is programmed to walk a rigid, short path. At the end of their route they do this sudden 180 degree turn and will often do that as you're walking behind them, so what happens is that they simply turn around and walk straight into your face, increasing your notoriety if you bumped into them while going too fast... You can witness similar behaviour with hostiles aswell. The stealth system doesn't work very well. You are provided with a wide variety of daggers to use in stealth kills, but in reality you won't even want to attempt a stealth kill. Most of the time you don't need to pick out individual opponents, since you will become strong early on and even on the hardest difficulty foes will, at one point, be unchallenging, even bosses. AI is also a problem, as sneaking up on foes is usually possible only when the developers have specifically set up a situation like that, which doesn't seem to be that often. And the traps... Not only do you have to play through half the game before you can begin to use traps, once you get the bloody skillbook to do so, you will quickly discover that setting traps is REEAALLY tedious and terribly ineffective. All bombs and traps have an incredibly tiny trigger radius, it's the same problem Two Worlds had. You can only use them properly in narrow areas/corridors, but even then you only want to use them to witness a "cool" bang or flash, accompanied by a generic explosion that sounds like a sample from an arcade game... Traps are useless and they will more often get you killed as you're trying to set them up. If TWII featured an invisibility system to get access to the best places for a trap, perhaps that would help. Otherwise the only way you can set up good traps (that still, as any trap, do insignificant damage) is via the Oculus, an item you use to visually survey the area and remotely set the trap that is built into an oculus. But even those are a hassle to work with, as they move slow and don't do enough damage. TWII also has some shortcomings with lore. To this day I don't know who those dog-men called Varn are. I met them in the first game, and in this game they are camped all over the first island, but not a single npc or book or any other source of information in the game seems to give a damn about their presence 'nor give any hints as to who those creatures, where they came from and why they are there, being hostile towards any man that comes near them... Dungeons, don't do them. They are very uneventful. I went through a number of dungeons in hopes of eventually witnessing something interesting, but it's the same thing everywhere: You go in, kill a bunch of monsters, get some petty loot at the end and then you have to walk all the way back to exit. Should I have felt like I accomplished something? For me it was a grind and i quit going to dungeons outside quests after a certain point. Maybe next time they should have each dungeon feature an artifact that you can collect and sell to a museum for some quick money and then be able to see everything you've collected. Add some fruits to the labour please. other faults: three-way dialogues don't work, execution animations are all off, too many difficult locks - eventually you won't even care about picking them, since money is not an issue. The fact that money is not an issue is also a contributor to other mood-killers: side-quests often feel boring and pointless, since the rewards you already have in abundance and the quests themselves aren't particularly eventful. Also the main story picks up way too late. On the second island there is very little main story development. Most of it is pushed into the third and fourth, latter is only partly explorable, mind you. Big disappointment for me once i realized that. The good A lot of criticism went into the bad, so I'll have to be compact about the good. Very well written dialogues and significantly better voice acting. Some of the more important quests(particularly on the large island) are very fascinating and engaging. Melee combat is a lot of fun. I mostly used spears/halberds that feature some of the best animations I've seen in any combat system and are very effective vs single foes and groups. The magic system is also very versatile as you can literally create your own spells, but the animations and waiting times on spellcasting put me off. Alchemy system is thorough, although you rarely feel the need to make and consume potions

If you're new to the RPG genre, I recommend playing through heavyweights like Oblivion, Skyrim, Gothic 3, Divinity: Original Sin prior to playing Two Worlds. But if you're like me and have already played those and enjoyed every last bit of it, but still crave for more, then hell, you probably want to give Two Worlds a try. My ratings(scale:10): Combat and gameplay mechanics: 7 Story: 8 Dialogue: 6 Sound: 5 Graphics: 9 Animations: 6 Character modeling: 6 Voice acting: 5 World design: 7 Quality to content: 8 For me TW started out a bit slow and I was often disengaged and didn't feel like continuing. Initially it doesn't succeed in catching your interest. I had a plan to play the first game before playing Two Worlds II and I must say: "Don't be deterred by the average rating". TW has more entertainment value than you'd believe. The reason I don't recommend this to new players is because it is unpolished. The combat is mechanically lacking, but regardless, I found tons of enjoyment in it. First time I started playing I chose to play on hard difficulty and went for the mage class. Not sure if I can recommend that. Nearly uninstalled never to play again because of that. Could be that further on as you acquire stronger spells it gets better. Fortunately the melee is fine from get-go. It doesn't feature swashbuckling per se, but it provides you with a number of approaches to any situation. For example there is a wide variety of different traps, each more applicable to certain foes and situations than others. You also have the option to sneak. Very useful and sometimes essential if you, for example, need to get up close to a more vulnerable target that would otherwise one shot you from a distance. There are plenty of tactics you can utilize if you think creatively. I haven't finished the game yet, but the story is very compelling. It's generally not cliche and often surprises you. I haven't felt much character development going on, and I guess the dialogue scripts are at blame. They're mostly there just to give you information, but don't advance any character very well. The voice acting could be better. Often it seems like the actors voicing their characters are reading their lines for the first time, since their voices don't convey the emotions expected, 'nor do they seem to be affected by what the other counterpart just said. But at other times the voice acting and dialogue are great. I just wish that the characters were modeled better. The same faces and voices are seen and heard everywhere. Even two key figures, Ultar Karga and Ebrat Skelden, both from opposing factions have the same voice actor. What the hell?? Animations are... interesting, but mostly poor. I shouldn't expect much from a game as old as this, but certain things could've been done better. I'm mostly disturbed by the constant laggy movements of combat animations. It is well motioned, but they don't flow too well. Perhaps the only time the animation is smooth during combat is the moment a fresh kill flies a short distance from a forceful blow and drops dead on the ground. Regardless of this, I found melee combat satisfying and inviting. I'm guessing archery and combat magic aren't very viable, since they failed hard early on and I haven't given them a second chance. The quality to content describes the relationship between how much content there is in the game and how enjoyable it is. Based on the time I've played so far I'd say it's a solid 8. The game is massive and features varied content. I haven't experienced repetitiveness (At first constantly travelling to a merchant to sell your loot was a pain, but that problem is mended with the ingenius teleportation stone that can be earned via a sidequest). But THE LOOT! If you are a loot **** like me then TW is your wet dream. One other thing that bugs me is that there's no way to change your chosen difficulty setting mid-game. If you choose to play the game on medium difficulty (there are 3: easy, med, hard), the beginning of the game feels just right. Everything is well balanced. Unfortunately once your gear improves medium becomes a bit too easy since there is rarely any need for all those tactics I mentioned earlier. You can just go in guns blazing and everybody around you will drop like flies. Some hard-hitting foes will always smack you dead with one hit though. I would love to swap over to hard difficulty to see if I actually need all those potions and traps I've been carrying around. You could start from the beginning, but there isn't really much replay value to help you get to where you were. Running out of characters here now. There are still so many aspects I would love to discuss, but my verdict is: If you're into RPGs, you really should at least try this one, even if you feel prejudiced toward it.