Greggor

Outstanding gameplay. This game has me addicted moreso than any previous installment in the series. The addition of the training and social aspect of the academy is a welcome breath of fresh air. I find the school atmosphere vaguely (just vaguely) reminiscent of the Persona series, but the strategy and mechanics are definitely going to feel familiar and interesting to fans of the older games. The story is captivating, and I can feel myself conflicted during certain parts and empathizing with the characters I've met as well. Overall, I've found so far that this installment is more accessible to casual gamers and yet has more than enough to sink your teeth into for hardcore gamers. I can't think of anyone I wouldn't recommend it to.

The spiritual successor to Bastion is all that I had hoped for and more. Transistor adds life to the ordinary gameplay mechanic of choosing a weapon. The story is captivating. The gameplay is inspired. The music is excellent. I'd recommend this game to everyone I know if they hadn't already played it.

The game is not so much "fun" as it is thought-provoking. Maybe the story is a bit cliche, but I think playing it was worth the experience nonetheless.

The game play is pretty good. I like the way that you interact with the enemies in this game; they don't immediately kill you, but first freak out your display. The plot is pretty captivating, but it really makes you work for bits and pieces of the backstory rather than just handing it to you. I only ran into one gamebreaking bug, when my character phased out of the gameplay area into empty space and I couldn't bring him back. Most of the puzzles and challenges are reasonable, but there are a couple that are asinine and that you don't really have any hope of getting without cheating or foreknowledge. I mean to say that I'm thinking of two specific parts of the game where you're going to be wandering aimlessly without knowing what to do. While the story of SOMA was interesting, it made me really uncomfortable in an existential sort of way. This isn't really the sort of philosophical quandary I expect to get when I'm playing a video game. I'm being serious when I say you should put this game down if you are troubled by thoughts about what happens after death and the future of the human race.

Mildly enjoyable game, but pales in comparison to its successor Zeus: Master of Olympus. Pharaoh suffers from a number of glaring technical flaws that make the game unreasonable to play. At the top of the list is the slow access to necessary structures. In the beginning of the game, you are forced to make do with a variety of problems that do not have a solution until you gain technology given in later levels. In the middle of the game, you are forced to contend with poor level design that makes building a city a chore rather than a challenging adventure. Towards the end of the game, apparently out of legitimate methods of upping the difficulty, the designers throw wave after wave of misfortune at you in an attempt to trip you up. A close second on the list of glaring technical flaws is the horrendous mechanic of direct worker access. In summary, patrolling units (such as firefighters and architects) have a limited effective range, which limits the possible size of a city block; yet the game FORCES you to include direct access to your city blocks from every single building that requires workers. If you don't do this, you get "WARNING: Poor Worker Access", and your businesses sporadically lose and regain workers, rendering them almost useless. The result is that you need to make a dozen smaller city blocks (all with their own goods and services) on a tiny map that can barely fit them, just to do what should have been accomplished with one or two normal-sized city blocks. There are a multitude of other issues that this game suffers from, and which are notably absent in Zeus: Master of Olympus. Issues such as the inability to effectively deal with crime, the lack of suitable rewards for appeasing gods and neighboring cities, and the monotonous gameplay that offers few interesting objectives these issues make the game relatively unplayable for those who have enjoyed other games of this genre. Look to Zeus: Master of Olympus, as well as other titles like Caesar 3 for an example of a Pharaoh-like done RIGHT.

I was really skeptical about this game until I played it. This was actually my first "old school RPG" as other people are referring to it. I really enjoyed it. The story was really interesting, the secrets and puzzles were challenging, and the combat was player skill based rather than solely chance-based. And FYI, to the **** who spent 90% of the game sleeping to regain HP, there are GIGANTIC GLOWING CRYSTALS that refill your HP and energy for you and recharge every 5 minutes.

There's just no beating around the bush. This is a really lousy game. At its fundamental roots, it's a roguelike game, but it's EXTREMELY dumbed down. Normally, I accept such modifications to the genre with arms wide open, since they make it more accessible to non-hardcore gamers. But this game just takes it to a whole 'nother level. Let's start from the top: You can choose one of three characters, which are the race/class combos of Human/"Saracen" (apparently a warrior type), Woodland Elf/Archer, or Human/Wizard. First of all, not sure why they even included races, since they're entirely irrelevant. Second of all, three class options, really? And they play almost exactly the same. You might expect that you get different spells as a wizard? NOPE! You just get a ranged attack, like the archer. You might expect the archer to be sneaky or capable of theft? NOPE! It's basically just a ranged warrior. There are no keyboard controls; you just click on tiles to move, click on enemies to use your one and only attack on them, and click on items to automatically use/equip them. You don't have an inventory. This is ridiculous to me, because the key to roguelike games is strategy and management of limited resources. You don't get ANY of that in this game. You get randomly generated items dropping from randomly generated chests and randomly generated monsters. What, you're surrounded my mobs and low on health? Wish you had a healing potion? TOO BAD, ****! TAKE IT! Wish you could reload after your grisly death? TOUGH LUCK, FOOL! You rolled the dice and lost; now start the f over. You start the game in a randomly generated dungeon with some starting equipment and enemies galore. Everything in this game is randomly generated. This all might possibly have been redeemable if it was even a little bit fun or even a little bit nice to look at it. It's neither. The gameplay is repetitive, shallow, and boring; there isn't even a storyline/plot. The game's art looks like it was designed by an autistic toddler; your character has MAYBe 15 pixels, total. It's not even funny. Stop laughing. It's boring and miserable, and frustrating. This game shouldn't cost $5. This game shouldn't be free. This game shouldn't exist. It's that bad. I'm not exaggerating. This is real. No jokes here. If you're bored, go flip a coin. It'll be more fun than this awful 3MB, $5 piece of garbage.

Cthulhu Saves the World is a lighthearted RPG with plenty of serious gameplay. I couldn't put it down until I beat the game! Honestly, the best $1 I've eve spent.

I am giving this game a 7 instead of a 10 because of the ending. We were promised 14 different endings, tailored to your character archetype, how you played the game, and the decisions you made. Instead, we got two different endings. You can win, or you can lose. This depends only on whether or not you have completed enough missions by the end of the game. If you win, you can very slightly alter the end-cinematic depending on the choice you make after the final battle. Your decision, however, has no impact on the story, and everything that you did in the game is basically invalidated by this frustrating conclusion. It's a highly disappointing end to the series, which is why so many people are upset about it. Now that the bad stuff's out of the way, let's move on to the good. The game was very fun. I beat it in three days, and I slept only a few hours each night because I simply couldn't put the game away. The story was extremely captivating, the combat was really visceral, and the dialogue was fascinating as always. This game does credit to its predecessors, which were also paragons of the shooter RPG subgenre. It's a real shame that they ended the series on such a terrible note, but that doesn't detract completely from the game's other virtues. It was fun, and I have no trouble recommending it to friends.

A fascinating RPG with depth and a creative story. It's not quite open-world, but it's not completely linear either. The combat takes a little getting used to, but you will be a master in no time. The different attack styles and weaknesses of enemies will keep you on your toes, and your playstyle and propensity for exploration will very much determine your success in the game as well as the difficulty. Do not be discouraged by the first boss fight; it's easily the most difficult fight in the game. For reference, I died against the first boss approximately 23-25 times, and I died less than 10 times for entire duration of the remainder of the game. I had a great time playing this, and I would recommend it to not only RPG fans, but anyone at all.

In short, this game is a masterpiece. It is an elegantly designed RPG with exactly those elements that make RPGs great: excellent storytelling, thought-provoking decisions, challenging (but not too difficult) combat that requires strategy, and an immersing game experience that draws you in and keeps you coming back for more. Avadon gives you power and waits to see if you will misuse it. It makes you question your morality at every turn. It plays on human emotions such as jealousy, kindness, and rage as masterfully as a storyteller, and it provides a fantastically rewarding experience if you let yourself become drawn in. I highly recommend this to any fan of RPGs or even anyone who thinks they could be interested in RPGs. This is a titan of the gaming world, and it deserves all the praise it gets.

I gave this game an honest try for approximately two hours of uninterrupted gameplay, and I must say that I remain unimpressed. The exploration is reminiscent of old-school roguelike games (like ADOM or Nethack), and the combat is reminiscent of old-school Zelda games, only with shooting. The story is slightly interesting, but not anywhere detailed enough to call it a major aspect of the game. So what you get, in the end, is a mediocre shooter-game with some RPG elements. Unfortunately, as modern games evolved to become more gamer-friendly, this one didn't seem to get the message. It's extremely punishing and unforgiving of mistakes. You die, whatever the circumstances, and you start over from scratch. No continues, no extra lives, nothing. You don't even restart the same level; you restart the game. Add that to the fact that the game is completely and entirely random and you get some levels that are painfully easy and some that are painfully difficult, and it's a complete matter of luck as to whether or not you can finish the game. I didn't have the patience to keep trying because the game didn't lure me in. It's sad. I really wanted to like this game, but I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone.

ME2 was a huge improvement over its predecessor. Not only did they remove many of the irritating tidbits that bogged players down in the level-up and equipment screens for hours, but they also improved gameplay drastically. The result is a well-made, fun game that easily makes the top of my list of games in 2010.

I'm sorry, but this game was NOT that good, even for its time. I ran into frequent glitches, and the game got seriously boring after only a few hours of playtime. Not one of the better PS2 titles.

The only redeeming quality of this game is its combat system, but even that system is flawed. Enemies tend to come at you in waves. So be aware that any time you think you're picking a fight with three bandits, their entire bandit army is waiting around the corner to punch you in the sack. This wouldn't be so bad except for the implications it has for aggro control. New enemies can't be aggroed until they spawn, so they are gong to immediately jump on your mage/healer/rogue/weakling and ignore your fighter until you scramble to save the lives of your squishy party members. That said, the combat is a bit more fun and manageable than its counterpart in DA:O. But the rest of the game has just gone downhill. Bioware really disappointed me with this title. The story is watered down and hard to accept. The breadth of its predecessor was sacrificed for "accessibility" to a wider audience. In fact, the whole game takes place in one (small) town. But besides that, other features I dislike are: Your companions don't get new armor, period. You can purchase "upgrades", but you can't put any loot on them. You don't get to choose a race anymore: you're human, and that's all there is to it. The game reuses the same areas for quest after quest after quest. Most of the loot you find (50-75%) is junk. Literally, it's junk. It goes in the junk tab of your inventory. And its only purpose is to be sold for a pittance to merchants. Really, Bioware? You couldn't just give us more cash in treasure chests? You had to add "broken chair" or "mangled darkspawn dagger" into the mix? Are you kidding? This whole game was a massive disappointment. I will never pre-order another Bioware or EA title again. No, you can earn your money from now on. You don't get to get away with crap like this anymore.