JustMy2

If anyone wants to make a game today, PLEASE USE AN EXISTING GAME ENGINE! They're incredibly advanced and super-optimized these days, and they are cheap to license! You even get access to the full code and can modify it as you see fit if you need to do something unusual. Game engines lets you stand on the shoulders of giants, and frees you from technical concerns so you can focus on developing your actual game! You'd have to be an idiot to not take advantage of that! Should you be stupid enough to decide to roll your own engine instead (and have less than 100 man-years of highly skilled programmer time to dedicate to the job!), you'll end up with a game that looks really dated and low-resolution, but that still runs like total cr*p on high-end PC's. Guess what Hello Games decided to do... that's right, they made a game engine! And of course it **** like there's no tomorrow... Flying over a planet you'll hardly even see what it's supposed to look like because of the ugliest pop-in of any game in history. That's how bad this game engine is - it just can't load terrain fast enough, and it can't smoothly blend in objects as they spawn into view either, it just pixelates them into existence instead, which looks *horrible*. Especially when this isn't happening "in the distance", but literally right in front of you. But the poor struggling engine also compromised the gameplay by forcing poor decisions. Your ship flies slowly and steers with the agility of a stoned cow. Both are obviously necessary sacrifices that were made because flying and turning with more agility would put even more strain on the already struggling terrain loading code. BTW, you can't even land your ship where you want manually, instead the game auto-lands it for you, with about as much success as a stoned cow trying to cr*p in a bucket. I've tried landing on a point of interest and ended up as much as 2 minutes walking away from it! But it's an RNG thing, sometimes the cow hits the bucket by pure chance. I even managed to land on a landing pad once! Strange the game didn't give me an Achievement for that, it certainly felt more like an achievement than walking 5000 steps (which the game considers achievement-worthy!). This review is already more than long enough, so I won't even go into details on why the game **** as a game. Read other negative reviews for that, there's plenty of them...

Everything the naysayers say is right: Flaw 1. The author tries to make the characters talk like "kids these days" and falls hilariously on his face. Flaw 2. The story breaks its own rules and the story and the time travel mechanics lacks internal logic. Flaw 3. Interacting with things is wobbly and unpredictable due to a strange "click and drag" mechanic. And so on and so forth. So, given all that, why do I rate it 8? That's pretty damn good, right? Because, I actually LIKED the game! It spoke to me emotionally on several occasions. And I thought the lead heroine was cute and likable. All characters are cliche as F, but it works somehow anyway. That's just me, some people will of course disagree violently on all points mentioned. Sure, it makes no sense logically, and it's a bit awkward when they feel the need to show how "progressive" they are by scoring some cheap LGBT brownie points in the end (totally out of the blue, and contrary to the character development so far, which is the gripe here, not the LGBT inclusion as such). But even that ending on a sour note couldn't take away the fact it was an enjoyable experience FOR ME and I'm glad I played it! I'd like to see more games like this in the future!

This game is at the same time grandiose in scale and vision, and the pinnacle of mediocrity in execution. It is truly one of a kind, and never shall anything quite like it be created ever again. To understand the peculiar way the stars aligned to make this game possible, let's recap the story of its creation: In the beginning was the legendary Bioware game Knights Of The Old Republic (2003). This game was a fantastic achievement at the time, and it remains an enjoyable game to this day (if you can look past the parts that are a bit dated for obvious reasons). Millions of fans wanted wanted more KOTOR, and another studio was tasked with creating a sequel. The sequel turned out good but not fantastic, and it clearly suffered from being forced out the door before it was ready. The dream of Bioware some day returning to give us a REAL sequel stayed alive in the hearts of fans for years. Then WoW happened, and game developers saw that this new MMO thing could rake in money like there was no tomorrow. Everyone wanted a piece of that action! Bioware was no exception, and they knew you have to bet big to win big, so they gambled some serious BIG MONEY on their first MMO. This was a project that couldn't afford to fail, so they did what people always do when failure isn't an option - they bet on what they perceive to be A Sure Thing (TM). People LOVE WoW, people LOVE Star Wars, and people LOVE Knights Of The Old Republic too! Put these three things together, supercharge with stratospheric production value, and boom, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?!! Quite a lot, as things turned out... The worst problem with SW:KOTOR, is that it feels forced as an MMO; it clearly has the soul of a single player game. The MMO aspects of the game simply aren't very impressive. And when judged as a single player game, it's unfortunately much worse than it could have been if it hadn't been forced into the MMO mold in the first place. It's a BIG game though, all that money spent sure bought a metric F-ton of lovingly crafted content. But it's all MEDIOCRE! The story is mediocre, the gameplay is mediocre, the visuals are mediocre. This can't really be blamed on lack of trying, the game oozes of love and care! It's clear everyone involved gave it their very best! But they had too many checkboxes to tick, and the game is an Overconstrained Design as a result. They were tasked with creating something that was fully WoW *and* fully Star Wars *and* fully Knights Of The Old Republic, all at the same time. They were given the resources to pull it off, but were then clearly hampered with a risk averse leadership that wished to play it safe. The result was a mess. And a surprisingly dull gaming experience. Players went into it expecting to have their minds blown, got disappointed, and quit. The scores of servers Bioware started out with were emptying out fast, and many players who wanted to play after all got stuck in ghost towns. But Bioware refused to admit defeat, and took way too long to merge servers. When they finally did, it was more or less too late, the remaining population was low. Certainly far lower than they had hoped for at first. Heads rolled, the team that created the game was replaced because "it takes a different skill set to run an MMO from creating one", as Bioware diplomatically put it. The new team set out to convert it to the free-to-play model to pull in more players. But they didn't want to lose the few subscribers they had, so they came up with a convoluted 3-tier hybrid pay model where you can play most of the game for free, but are **** to subscribe and nickled-and-dimed for ridiculous little things like having to pay to hide your helmet (!). All that said, the game isn't BAD, it's just not all that good either. And it needed it be AWESOME to live up to expectations from players and investors alike. It has been polished and improved a lot over the years, and at this point it is without a doubt the finest free-to-play single-player "MMO" experience out there! If you want to waste some time grinding mobs mindlessly and being rewarded with snips of a little light heroic story, then this is your game! All for free! I haven't actually paid a single cent for this game, but I have played three characters to level 50, and have three more at level 15 waiting to go when I have some time to waste. Tier 1 free-to-play players actually only get 2 character slots, but I preordered the game and ended up being registered as a former paying customer, which elevates me to tier 2. This in spite of the fact I canceled my preorder in disappointment after trying the early access... Sometimes you only want to play a dumb bog-standard mob-grinding MMO to give your brain a break for an hour or two. This is just the game for it. It beats anything in the "market" for games you care enough to play once in a while, but not enough to actually pay for. Which must be considered a colossal failure.

The first two episodes left me so underwhelmed I almost didn't care about playing this game anymore, so it actually took me three moths after the release of chapter 3 to even try it out. A lot can be said about the shortcomings of the first two, but I'll sum it up in a single sentence: I never got invested in the story or the characters, and the surrounding gameplay was excruciatingly tedious. So when I finally decided to check out part three, my expectations were low. The first scene was mildly entertaining, but still plenty tedious to play through (I'll avoid spoilers here, in case someone actually wants to play through this snorefest ****). But then the game dropped me into a conversation between two characters where one of them came to the conclusion the other was gay (after a very forced and obvious setup dialogue), and -surely enough!- went on to give the usual cringe-worthy declaration of tolerance to prove she's not a homophobe. This kind of **** keeps happening in Dreamfall Chapters, and it keeps pissing me off. Not that I give a damn about homosexuals doing their thing; to each his own, live and let live and all that jazz. I just don't want this stupid political correctness mania infesting my games! It's just so *wrong* for a fantasy character in a magical wonderland to speak as if she is afraid to upset the sensitivities of the easily butthurt Western PC-culture on Earth anno 2015 (the only place in space and time where people constantly have to pay lip service to tolerance and inclusiveness of an entire laundry-list of protected out-groups to avoid being socially ostracized). After suffering through this painful conversation to its bitter end, I was dropped in a dark back alley as Kian Alvane, the badass warrior who never actually does anything. My task (should I choose to accept it) was to go to someplace and presumably talk to someone or something, it didn't really say. I dutifully walked a couple of meters forward, then I stopped and asked myself: Why am I even here? Why am I supposed to go to that place? Why am I even supposed to care about anything or anyone in this game? The full weight of how totally emotionally not invested I was in this game hit me like a freight train. I couldn't find the enthusiasm to move another step forward, so I shut down the game right then and there. I don't intend to try again later, and I don't intend to download the last two episodes. I really don't give a F about what happens next. It's all just so incredibly BLAND! This game will forever remain in my memory as the game where deciding to buy a sausage or not passes as An Important Choice, having Severe Consequences. (Mild Spoiler of those consequences: an obnoxious character whose guts you probably hate says he got a tummy ache if you give him the sausage. Hard to feel sorry about that. And not even that satisfying.)

Some things in life get an undeserved high score on metacritic just because they have a small clique of zealous supporters, while people with a more balanced opinion don't even review it, since the thing in question just isn't important enough to merit their attention. Dreamfall Chapters is such a thing - it's a fanboy magnet. I may have enjoyed the predecessor games a lot, and I may have helped crowd funding Dreamfall Chapters hoping for an enjoyable continuation to the franchise. But I was let down. More than anything else, Chapters is a snorefest. It does take a long time to play, but that time is mostly spent running around endlessly in the same few dull environments. Sorry, I meant *walking* around, because the developer seems afraid we might hurt ourselves if we were allowed to move from point A to point B without watching our steps carefully. You can shift to a very leisurely jogging speed most of the time, but even this is denied in certain places. The environments are graphically pretty though. Sure the game is pretty in a two-generations-behind-the-curve kind of way, but that's not so bad. What's bad, is that there is so very little to *interact* with. There is practically nothing more than the bare minimum clickable content here. Even when you're solving puzzles, you sometimes just can't find ANYTHING nearby that even responds to your touch! Yes, the hardest part of the "puzzle solving" is walking around all over the map scanning the environment with your mouse cursor until you find an item that actually acknowledges its own existence in the game world and lets you interact with it. Grab that item, and you half solved the puzzle already. All that remains, is finding a spot where the item will do something. More walking around, and more random mouse exploration. A *good* puzzle solving game has entertaining and quirky puzzles that makes you use your creativity, and rewards you with a satisfying "of course, why didn't I think of that!" feeling when you finally figure it out. A good game also makes sure to keep you well entertained with quirky humor while you're futzing about trying to solve the puzzles. Dreamfall Chapters is not that kind of game - it is stiff and dull and unimaginative. If you want a *fun and enjoyable* puzzle solving adventure game, go play The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 or something. I just said Chapters is "unimaginative", and for a fantasy adventure game that's about the worst possible sin to commit. And yet it is true. Most of it is trivial, banal, and focused on just the kind of boring everyday minutia you play fantasy adventure games to get away from for a while. Where is the sense of *adventure*? Where is the sense of moving to another world that works by different rules? Even in the supposedly magical world of Arcadia, the "fantasy" is just a thin veneer for a carbon copy of our everyday world. It's a world of magic, but no-one seems to ever *use* magic. And it is steeped in the exact same ideological mold as our world today, in the most uninteresting way. Do you really want to travel to a magical land, only to be preached to about the evils of racism and prejudice? Isn't that experience available to you pretty much 24/7 in the real world just by turning on the TV or opening a random page of a newspaper? Isn't it kind of boring and lame to drag boring and lame crap like that into a fantasy setting? The game is *preachy*. It has a clear social justice warrior agenda, and never misses an opportunity to tell you what's The Right Way To Think. Just in case you didn't know, *pedophilia is bad*. This game makes sure to tell you, because it just can't leave depressing real-world issues like this alone and tell a compelling story about something fresh and inspiring. As a fantasy game should. Sorry, that's not "Arcadia". That's the modern PC-infested world anno 2015, where you can't swing a cat without hitting something that nags about how swinging a cat is animal cruelty, and somehow at the same time a blatant expression of White Male Privilege. And that's why you must play as a young **** who figures out being a **** is bad in this game. Sure, this is "fantasy", so they changed the name a little - "****" became "Azadi". But it's still the same thing. You're a ****, and your task is to realize that **** are bad and you must make amends. That's the story. If you already figured out for yourself being a **** is bad, then this game leaves a sour taste. Preachiness is annoying even when you need to hear it, and it's even more annoying when you don't, so it's really not the way to go when you wish to spread your favorite religion. The first religion that figures this out will dominate the world! :-D My last pet peave is that the game yells *THIS WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!!* in your face when you do stuff, and then it shouts *THIS WAS A CONSEQUENCE!!!* when something happens. Face. Palm.

Some things in life get an undeserved high score on metacritic just because they have a small clique of zealous supporters, while people with a more balanced opinion don't even review it, since the thing in question just isn't important enough to merit their attention. Dreamfall Chapters is such a thing - it's a fanboy magnet. I may have enjoyed the predecessor games a lot, and I may have helped crowd funding Dreamfall Chapters hoping for an enjoyable continuation to the franchise. But I was let down. More than anything else, Chapters is a snorefest. It does take a long time to play, but that time is mostly spent running around endlessly in the same few dull environments. Sorry, I meant *walking* around, because the developer seems afraid we might hurt ourselves if we were allowed to move from point A to point B without watching our steps carefully. You can shift to a very leisurely jogging speed most of the time, but even this is denied in certain places. The environments are graphically pretty though. Sure the game is pretty in a two-generations-behind-the-curve kind of way, but that's not so bad. What's bad, is that there is so very little to *interact* with. There is practically nothing more than the bare minimum clickable content here. Even when you're solving puzzles, you sometimes just can't find ANYTHING nearby that even responds to your touch! Yes, the hardest part of the "puzzle solving" is walking around all over the map scanning the environment with your mouse cursor until you find an item that actually acknowledges its own existence in the game world and lets you interact with it. Grab that item, and you half solved the puzzle already. All that remains, is finding a spot where the item will do something. More walking around, and more random mouse exploration. A *good* puzzle solving game has entertaining and quirky puzzles that makes you use your creativity, and rewards you with a satisfying "of course, why didn't I think of that!" feeling when you finally figure it out. A good game also makes sure to keep you well entertained with quirky humor while you're futzing about trying to solve the puzzles. Dreamfall Chapters is not that kind of game - it is stiff and dull and unimaginative. If you want a *fun and enjoyable* puzzle solving adventure game, go play The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 or something. I just said Chapters is "unimaginative", and for a fantasy adventure game that's about the worst possible sin to commit. And yet it is true. Most of it is trivial, banal, and focused on just the kind of boring everyday minutia you play fantasy adventure games to get away from for a while. Where is the sense of *adventure*? Where is the sense of moving to another world that works by different rules? Even in the supposedly magical world of Arcadia, the "fantasy" is just a thin veneer for a carbon copy of our everyday world. It's a world of magic, but no-one seems to ever *use* magic. And it is steeped in the exact same ideological mold as our world today, in the most uninteresting way. Do you really want to travel to a magical land, only to be preached to about the evils of racism and prejudice? Isn't that experience available to you pretty much 24/7 in the real world just by turning on the TV or opening a random page of a newspaper? Isn't it kind of boring and lame to drag boring and lame crap like that into a fantasy setting? The game is *preachy*. It has a clear social justice warrior agenda, and never misses an opportunity to tell you what's The Right Way To Think. Just in case you didn't know, *pedophilia is bad*. This game makes sure to tell you, because it just can't leave depressing real-world issues like this alone and tell a compelling story about something fresh and inspiring. As a fantasy game should. Sorry, that's not "Arcadia". That's the modern PC-infested world anno 2015, where you can't swing a cat without hitting something that nags about how swinging a cat is animal cruelty, and somehow at the same time a blatant expression of White Male Privilege. And that's why you must play as a young **** who figures out being a **** is bad in this game. Sure, this is "fantasy", so they changed the name a little - "****" became "Azadi". But it's still the same thing. You're a ****, and your task is to realize that **** are bad and you must make amends. That's the story. If you already figured out for yourself being a **** is bad, then this game leaves a sour taste. Preachiness is annoying even when you need to hear it, and it's even more annoying when you don't, so it's really not the way to go when you wish to spread your favorite religion. The first religion that figures this out will dominate the world! :-D My last pet peave is that the game yells *THIS WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!!* in your face when you do stuff, and then it shouts *THIS WAS A CONSEQUENCE!!!* when something happens. Face. Palm.