HereticAlpha

Don't pay for mods. Don't give Valve, or Bethesda, money for content they did not create. The entire notion of this system is shameful, disgusting, and insulting to the community that helped bring their mediocre franchise up to a legendary series.

At first I thought Fable 3 would turn out to be a mediocre action/adventure/RPG, but oh was I wrong. It seems like Peter Molyneaux started with an actual Action/RPG game, and slowly divided more of the content into less interesting places. What you've got left with is a pitiful attempt at a Sims game, a pitiful attempt at an action game, a pitiful attempt at character customization, and a pitiful attempt at being a comedic game. The interface is just a mess, and all broken up by zones that don't even have the decency of giving you a minimap. No, you get to access your little "world map" which has the user friendliness of the stuxnet virus. The pathfiding to your dog (i.e. the helper who allows you to access dig sites) is miserable, and either won't recognize when you're following him, or simply won't be able to remain on the path he was leading you on. Everything feels scattered and separated, but nothing moreso than the game as a whole. Fable 3 is a game that wanted to branch out in every direction and fell short in every direction. What you get is this simplified, poor-quality product that wants to be a game, but it couldn't tell you what genre it wants to be. 1/10, only because I like the dog when he chases his tail.

Craft the World utilized a very simple, but profound concept: keep all of the materials relevant. It's refreshing to see a game where even raw materials like dirt, sand and water have a plentiful presence in the later game segments. That being said, Craft the World suffers from THE most crippled AI I've ever seen in a finished product. You cannot tell which Dwarf to dig, which one to chop wood, and so forth. It was commonplace for my dwarves to mine a block of dirt, only to walk away empty-handed, making a long walk back to the shelter, leaving the SINGLE PIECE OF DIRT for another Dwarf to walk out to, pick up, and walk back. The combat is worse. Want to target a tiny tree beetle? You can kill them in 2 strikes, but that won't stop your entire base from dropping their hauling and crafting to run in and try to lend a hand. Finally, the pathfinding is a joke. Dwarves will stand around and deliberately move into the spaces I'm trying to fill with dirt, or they will fall from the simplest of steps. My own brood have been complaining that they can't reach items that haven't existed on the map for weeks. Alternatively, you can control a single dwarf, which is often the most efficient means of mining/building, but the functionality becomes limited very quickly. Craft the World had the potential to be something like Dwarf Fortress meets Terraria, but ended up a confusing and frustrating disagreement between the two paradigms.

SW:KotOR II is a wonderful example of how to take a great concept, show it to the player, let them bask in it for a few minutes and then crush it. Throughout the story, there is the underlying theme of "right and wrong are just perceptions", yet everything you do is so polarized between right & wrong that it's impossible to really drive that theme home. Each of the characters in your arsenal have SOME moral grey area and inner demons that they all must confront in some form, but it's poorly undercut by that light side/dark side conflict that demands the spotlight and just serves to make the characters more bland and just as polarized. KotOR had the luxury of being able to throw an INCREDIBLE twist at the player toward the end, but without that, KotOR II builds up a great atmosphere, great tension and then just... stopped it all. The ending can't even be considered a "Deus ex Machina" because there was no real conclusion, there's just "this is the good guy's ending" and "this is the bad guy's ending".

After "Towns" and its catastrophic failure to release meaningful content, I came to Gnomoria with skepticism at every corner. I've been with Gnomoria for the better part of a year, and the developers, Robotronic Games, have released update after update that not only improved the game's functionality, but added content that allowed the player to exhibit more control, but only if they WANTED to utilize those options of control. The bottom line is that Gnomoria is a city-builder game that is approachable for casual gamers without lacking the depth that would interest the most gamers with a strong interest in the genre.