JimmyJams

A fun little game that feels a tad dated. The game mechanics are more or less solid, the take on the RPG genre is fresh, and the game is deceptively challenging. The graphics are sort of charming, sort of awful. The storyline and characters are godawful, but it seems to be a sideshow anyway; easily ignored. I'd say the game belongs in the $10-15 range, $20 is pushing it, but ultimately worth sinking a few days into.

Summary: +Incredible graphics, great sound design, decent voice acting, well thought out dialog, interesting and authentic quests, historically accurate setting, realistic environments -The game isn't fun. Lock-on combat is boring, stat-based, dizzying, and broken in multi-combatant scenerios. Combat boils down to constant parry-trading and spamming attacks. Combos are pointless. Archery is an unpredictable and useless mess. Too much walking and not enough to do; underwhelming gameplay loops. Incredible graphics, probably the best I've ever seen in an open world game Witcher III included. Great sound design, everything from birds chirping from above, wind blowing through the trees, player brushing against bushes, clanking of swords, jingle of chain armor, town ambience, and so on is all very convincing. Decent voice acting and well thought out dialog, quests are interesting and authentic. Environmental detail and historical accuracy, check. The main gameplay loops though... they're just boring. It all comes together in this mundane goopy soup of mediocracy. The lockon combat is tedious, dizzing, and not fun. Multi-combantant combat is outright broken. Combat outcomes are pretty much stat based. The only skill component of combat is this reaction time test called "parrying". Combos are irrelevant because any enemy your level will parry a good 50% of your attacks and the shortest combos are 3 consequtive non-parried hits. Anyone below your level will die to non-comboed attacks easily. Archery is a cluster of randomness. You get pretty much 1-2 arrows off before combat starts and landing them is a magic trick. Restricted save system just makes the game less fun. Outside of combat you are doing a crap-ton of walking around and nothing. There's a lot to see in the world, just nothing to do. This is a case of putting realism over gameplay and fun which is the reason anyone plays a video game. If you want a cool art gallery game, play this game, otherwise avoid.

I mean it's not much of a "game" more like a series of dice rolls that usually don't work out for you. As someone who plays jRPG games a lot, this game pretty much emphasizes what I hate the most about them: RNG. The game wants you to lose, it wants your characters to die and you to lose any progress you've made. There's no decisions or skill you can use to overcome the RNG because it's RNG. When I first played the game on Darkest (ie normal) difficulty and I'd literally lost 5 heros on level 1 missions. Missions that are literally the first ones you encounter and are the easiest ones available. The same frustration persists at higher levels even after you get a handle on the game. You get this sense that you can't win the game no matter what you do because of the constant debuffs your heros take at random due to traps you can't see, moves you can't avoid or defend against, dice rolls that have mobs dodging half your attacks, critting your heros to near death, etc. The game just wastes your time and leaves you empty handed.

Good game, something everyone with the slightest interest in story driven RPGs should play. Nice graphics, great writing and voice acting (side quests included), fly honies with fat asses, and all round challenging and engaging combat/rpg mechanics. Protip, igni and quen. Igni so you never have to bum a lighter to light your blunt and quen for eternal life amen.

A visual story told through the eyes of the last remaining member of a family cursed with early deaths. The best part of the game was the graphics as it ran smooth with essentially no tweaking to the original settings. Environments were detailed and helped paint the story with color. The game takes you through each family member's room and tells, briefly, their story. Outside of that I can't really say there's much more to this story game. There was no gameplay to speak of; no puzzle elements, navigation, or problem solving of any kind. Just press forward to advance through the house. The story, the main aspect, was... kinda boring. There were about 3-4 family members whose deaths still remained a complete mystery and you're left guessing at how they died. Most of them died in pretty mundane ways too; no one died doing anything heoric, strange, or interesting. Each family member lived pretty mundane lives that most anyone could have lived. Nothing wacky or stimulating. I mean, yeah, their family is a bit DIY-ish and ambitious (painter, house builder, artist, child actor, etc), but no one achieved any greatness or did anything significant other than dieing clumsily. Each family member's story is told very briefly from either their eyes or some artistic recreation, which was cool, but again, brief. Their stories didn't link up too significantly and you didn't get too much of a picture of their full life with the family who clearly is very close with one another. There was one part of the story where I became genuinely interested in what was going to happen next (the one concerning Edie and the old house), and then, bam, that story ends, ok on to the next... The end was a bit touching, the rest was a snoozefest.

A word to summarize my experience with this game? "Meh". Concept sounds interesting, Prison Architect from the prisoner's point of view more than the Architect's, but man does it get boring fast. Having just finished the 3rd level, I feel like each level prior was the same. Follow routine, build stats (int + strength), loot cells, do job, repeat until abot day 6-8 when you make your breakout attempt, and you're done. It's not much of a simulation either, other prisoners are just there to sell you items and give out random simple quests. Each day feels a bit grindy and each breakout attempt is pretty much the same with the harder levels being more narrow in what you can do. You can only break out at night and the guard routines are more or less a crapshoot. There's nothing more annoying than having to replay an entire day because some guard that was never there before suddenly decides to explore some remote corner of the map that you were tunneling out of. Everyone moves at lightspeed which is semi-bothersome and the game mechanics don't have much depth or complexity. It also weirdly withholds crafting recipies from you as if part of the fun of the game was just randomly guessing combinations of items until you make something of some unknown function and value. Basically you're forced to wiki everything which is a design flaw. Unless your idea of fun is running around for 20 game days collecting important recipes which are given out at complete random and in a random order. You might get something useful you might not, more likely not. When you get down to the experience, it's not bad and it's not good. Wouldn't really recommend it.

For a game released in 2009, this is great. I had no real knowledge of the game going into it, so I was very suprised when it went from open world to an inovative RTS + third person mixup partway through. A fresh take on the RTS genre coupled with a solid overworld to explore makes for some varied and engaging gameplay. Add on top of that some solid humor brought to you by Jack Black and some other comedic voice actors engaged in a decent storyline and you have yourself a pretty solid experience. It's even got multiplayer which actually might be the biggest aspefct of the game. The main negatives are the somewhat wonky vehicle controls and pretty mundane sidequests. If it were just an open world game it'd be hard to recommend, but there's so much more to it than that.

Arcady open world game that gets old fast. The grapple + wingsuit movement system is wonky and not as smooth as it could be. No adjustable difficultly making this game super easy. The stupid capture system makes me tediously hunt down every destructable object in an area and destroy it to capture a base. Multiply that tedium by 30-40 for each base in the game and you have yourself some seriously laborious work to do. Every base is the same with the only variance being the size. It's got the Far Cry 3 effect going pretty strong. Anyway I played it this long only to see if it got better. Didn't. Boring.

Played it a bunch in alpha a few years ago. Game is released and still has most of the old bugs I ran into all those years ago, some of which I even personally reported on the forums. Very laggy after a few minutes of gameplay. AI is still unresponsive and slow. What a pathetic "grab the cash and run" attempt this turned out to be. If the universe was fair, these people would be sued and the customers would get their money back. That's the risk you take buying alpha games I guess.

Solid concept, fun game to play with friends as the name would imply. Simple yet hard to master. No glaring issues and once new maps are added, it'll have a lot more longevity.

What even is this game? It's a somehow laggier, worse looking, bot-ridden, **** version of CS 1.6 that no one asked for.

It's not terrible, it's just kinda plain and easy. This game is a somehow simpler version of Recettear with the dungeon elements reduced to a simplistic somehow less skill based version of tetris... I have to give it to the devs for managing to distill already very simple games to their very base most elements which seem to be clicking and navigating menus. Mostly clicking though. Mindless clicking. There's a little bit of shop design strategy and min-maxing going on, but far too little to really call it a core gameplay loop.

The game is impossible to enjoy as a new player with the massive influx of smurf accounts from higher level players. Only a small fraction of the heroes are actually viable (the game has 130+ heroes, ofc it's not balanced). Overall it's just not fun, it's frustrating and does not lend itself to new players. I shouldn't have to spend 8 hours on youtube to play a video game lol.

Interesting stories and cases, decent looking open world, great facial and character animations. However, the core gameplay mechanic is a simple guessing game. It's truly impossible in many places to correctly get the right answer. Often times an accusation + evidence combo that makes perfect sense is not valid and evidence that makes nearly no sense is the correct choice. Google "The Fallen Idol" for a prime example of this. If you mess up, that's it, done, you don't get to replay that scene and you are likely going to botch the case or miss out on big parts of it. (There are exploits to let you replay things, but no "official" way) The learning curve is non-existent; you have to deduce and see things specifically how the dev/writer imagined as there is only 1 answer to every question. I very much want to give this game a higher rating but the core gameplay mechanic is low-effort guessing game. So much wasted potential.