Migz

Summary: If your play style is to explore, listen to NPC conversations, find the hidden goodies everywhere, and stealth through levels, Burial at Sea is an excellent DLC for you. However, if your play style is to run and gun and charge through content, wait until you can get both Burial at Sea DLCs in a very cheap bundle. Also, buy the Season Pass instead of purchasing this separately. The only complaint about this DLC is its length. Depending on your play style, you can finish it in about an hour or upwards of six hours. For my 5.5 hour run on Hard, I rate this at 9.1. But, if I had run through it in an hour my first time, I would have rated it at 8.3. Details on review score--- Entertainment: 10 It was a lot of fun seeing Rapture in its prime. The combat was more challenging than in BSI's main campaign. Graphics: 9 Great detail. I'm not sure if this or BSI's main campaign has the best looking UE3 content, because they're both very good. Sound: 9 Although the ambient sounds were good, the music was what made this stand out. Design and Gameplay: 9 Combat was much more challenging than in Infinite's main campaign. Although you still have a sky-hook, it's not as over powered as it was in the campaign, because the enemies seem to be able to hit you while jumping now. Also, players can carry all of the weapons they pick up now instead of the two-weapon limit in the main campaign via the new Weapon Wheel. Game Length: 2-8 As I said above, if you explore and sneak, this content will take you a fairly long time. If you follow the arrow and charge through quickly, it'll be over in an hour or two.

If you like turn-based/4X games, you should give Fallen Enchantress a try, because it has a lot of promising pieces to it, but don't expect a great game, or you'll be disappointed. And, I recommend waiting till you can get it on sale. If you really like it after you buy it, you can give **** more money by buying the map packs. That said, great 4X games come along once in a long while (Total War: Shogun 2 is an excellent example, while in my opinion, Civilization V is not). Unfortunately, Fallen Enchantress is not one of them. **** does some fun things with this recent addition to the 4X/turn-based strategy/RPG genre (such as being set in a fantasy world with armies of wandering monsters and challenging quest areas), but it lacks in enough fundamental areas that I just wasn't excited while playing it. **COMPOSITE SCORE: 6.875/10** **ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 7/10** Fallen Enchantress has enough good pieces to interest a player in spending a couple hundred hours if you give it a chance. It has the standard explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate aspects of games like the Total War series and the Civilization series, but it actually allows you to join in combat between armies which Civ does not (Total War does). Being challenged by behemoth monsters early in the game if you expand too much is a fun twist as well. However, there are a number of weak aspects to the game too. Winning diplomatically seems far too easy to me. Unit movement is very short: two spaces without roads until you get horses... and that will take a long time for a full army. Army sizes feel miniscule at the beginning, and champions always feel underpowered. **GRAPHICS: 6/10** I will admit that I am probably spoiled by Shogun 2's setup, attention to detail, variety in armies, and graphics, so when I loaded up my first game in Fallen Enchantress, I was immediately disappointed by what I considered to be PS2-era character models and textures. The reason for this is that **** used the very same model for both the campaign map as well as close-up shots of characters and army units. Many other games will use models with varying numbers of polygons depending on how far out the "camera" is from the model, but they don't here, so we're stuck with the low resolution models and textures. Bleh. The strategic map was similar in detail to Civ V's, and the combat maps were about the same as well. Compared to Shogun 2's combat maps, Fallen Enchantress's lacked a lot of detail and options. I do like the dragon models though. **SOUND: 9/10** I had no problems with Fallen Enchantress's sound. What voice acting there was was quite reasonable, and the music was very good. **DESIGN AND GAMEPLAY: 6/10** I've already mentioned the standard 4X-setup. That works pretty well as long as you disable some options (such as allowing the game to go to the next turn without you telling it too... lost a lot of building/research turns till I found that option). And again, the wandering monsters and quest areas added a level of challenge I hadn't seen in other 4X/Turn-based strategy games (especially if you turn up the monster frequency... whew). I noticed an AI scripting problem though: if you change the number of opponents you have to below the recommended number for that map size, the AIs will often do nothing until you encounter them. That could be 30 turns... or 200 turns. Encountering an opponent when they have 1 city and you have 9 makes it kind of boring. Also, I feel like there's a huge flaw in the army creation system: when you start out, you can make army units with three men in them. By the end game, you can create army units with seven men in them. But, you can't convert a unit you made at the beginning, leveled up, and outfitted with new gear into a a 7-man unit. They're always stuck at the size you created them at. It makes no sense to me and is frustrating to deal with while playing. (Reason being, your early armies max out at 27 men. Late game armies max out at 63 men. So, why can't I just pay more resources to upgrade to 7 men????) Lastly, although there are a lot of combat spells available, I never used any, because frankly, an army with one champion buffing eight units of top-tier archers destroys anything, so why bother with wimpy spells? **GAME LENGTH: 8/10** Much to my surprise, Fallen Enchantress did have an actual campaign (they call it a scenario). I had originally thought it was just a Civ V style of game with only the conquest maps. The scenario's story is pretty good. Loss, tragedy, redemption, more tragedy... all good stuff. Unfortunately, it's only about six hours long. But, the regular maps can take a very, very, very long time. So, plenty of game length all around.

Dishonored is a steampunkish hybrid of RPG-elements using Melee/FPS/magic combat-styles set in an Industrial-age imperial city being ravaged by a rat plague. It also has a Bioshock vibe to it. If none of that sounds like potential fun for a game, Dishonored is not for you. For the rest of us though, this game is a really good time and well worth the sale price of $30 I paid for it during Steam's post- thanksgiving sale. Although I thought the emotional attachment was a little thin from a player perspective, the main character's motivation was quite clear, so his actions during the game made sense to me. My only significant problem with Dishonored was that it crashed on me 7 or so times during my first playthrough. **COMPOSITE SCORE: 8.875/10** **ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 9/10** Arkane Studios gives the player the opportunity to complete the mission objectives in a true role-playing manner. If you believe Corvo wouldn't want to kill a couple of hundred city guards in order to meet his goals, you don't have to do that. Or, if you think he's so angry that he'd destroy anyone in his way, you can do that too. This gives opportunities for varied playthroughs. I recommend going stealth your 1st time, because it's more challenging than rampaging through the city. Save that for the 2nd. **GRAPHICS: 9/10** Although Dishonored is a console port, Arkane did a good job at making it feel good for PC gamers. I would have liked more people in the cities and larger areas, but the people who were there looked pretty good, and the settings were fun and looked good as well. I did not like all the fog, but I think that was an artistic choice rather than hardware. Being only DX9 limited how good water looks, but it's still decent. **SOUND: 9/10** The sound was solid although not ground breaking. The music was fun though. ...drunken whalers. haha **DESIGN AND GAMEPLAY: 8/10** Like I said before, you have options on how you want to play. I don't want to get into what your options are too much, cuz that might spoil things, but you can either move around and kill things really fast, or you can go super slow and sneaky, or you can be somewhere in-between. It's pretty cool. There are definitely easier ways to complete the missions than others. And, the side missions are just that. If you skip them, they don't really affect the game's difficulty... just the ending. I did not like how picky the achievement for Clean Hands is. If someone finds a person you knocked out, that counts against the achievement. I also didn't like how sometimes mobs will completely miss seeing you in broad daylight but other times see you in shadows from about the same distance. Lots of daytime missions. Makes it tough to be a magic ninja with all that light. **GAME LENGTH: 10/10** Playing the stealth path, it took me ~28 hours my first playthrough. With the different options to use, Dishonored offers a lot of replayability. People who complain about the game being too short (7 hours) are skipping most of the exploring and side-quests. It would be like doing only Skyrim's main line and finishing in 10 hours... why do it?? Have fun!

If you enjoyed the first game, you'll definitely enjoy the second. If you have fun with tower defense games which incorporate FPS elements, you'll enjoy this too. Although I still have four maps to play, I have spent over 20 hours so far with the game, so I feel confident giving my assessment. This game launched at $15 for a single copy or $25 for two. Or, if you got it during the Steam sale, $12.50/$22.50. That's really inexpensive for this quality of game. I definitely recommend picking it up at these prices f you're into this game genre. **Composite Score: 9.125/10** **Entertainment Value: 10/10** Solid excitement mixed with charming humor. I really enjoyed playing solo. Co-operative play really depends on who you're playing with and dealing with network/tech issues. My partner had some microphone and XBOX controller issues, so we had to deal with tech problems at the start. But, after we got those sorted, we had a good time roasting, slicing, and crushing waves of orcs. **Graphics: 9/10** The Vision engine still delivers as good of a product as it did in OMD!. On my SLI GTX 570 setup, I get solid graphics performance and appearance. Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are both great. No artifacting at all. Only reason this doesn't get a 10 is that the traps often don't mesh perfectly with the surroundings. And, coins sometimes get lost behind walls. **Sound: 9/10** Solid sound like the first game. Music is lively and entertaining. The surround system works. The orcs still tell silly lines, and now that dwarves have been added, they enhance the humor too. I give this game a 9 instead of the standard 8, because the dialog and music enhance the experience better than most other low-budget games of this style. **Design and Gameplay: 9/10** Gameplay has been tweaked since OMD!. There are more weapons, trinkets, and a new female character, the sorceress. There are new monsters. There are other ways to play such as ENDLESS and Co-op. Also, the way players can upgrade traps and items is distinctly different from the first game.... somewhat more like an RPG than before. Otherwise though, it's still build traps and use your character's powers to defeat the waves of mosters before they exit the map. **Game Length: 9/10** Given the game's low price and its incorporated multiplayer mode, don't think too harshly about it taking me less than three hours to complete the first half of the campaign on War Mage (normal) difficulty. I'm not done with the second half yet, but I've spent a couple of hours doing and redoing the next few maps. Also, I've spent many more hours playing through ENDLESS maps, going for high-scores, and playing through the classic maps using the new trap upgrades and weapons. Therefore, I'm quite happy with the game's length.

Once I got over the strange graphics in the very first room, I was able to get into the environment and artistry id created in Rage. If you like post-apocalyptic mayhem w/ great artwork, I definitely recommend picking this up for $20 or less. Composite score of 7.375/10. **Entertainment value: 7/10** "Surprisingly, I'm having fun playing it."-what I told my brother after 10 hours into the single-player campaign. The artwork and exterior environments were the primary draw for me once I was actually playing this game. Nearly every surface and texture is unique, and all of the models are so detailed. It was really nice to see. The story is nothing ground-breaking: civilization is destroyed, and we play a person from the past thrust into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. It's still decently pulled together though, and I didn't feel any more forced to complete this storyline than I did playing through Fallout 3's main line. Although the vehicle combat and side games got old, the personal combat was pretty decent. I'll elaborate more in Design and Gameplay below. **Graphics: 7/10** Rage seemed more designed for the current generation of gaming consoles and smart phones than it did for PCs. Although PCs can run Rage, the game does not take advantage of SLI/Crossfire. It does, however, support anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF). By default, Rage's graphics look mediocre. (Not as bad as at launch, but still not excellent). However, after some tweaking (see Nvidia's tweak guide @ ****), I got the game to look amazing in outside environments. The artistry really shows through now. Character textures also really look great. Interior images are a different story though, because most interior building textures look washed out and grainy. Due to the way Rage's graphics engine works, expect texture pop-ins (surfaces go from super blurry to detailed) along the edge of your screen as you turn your camera. EVERY time you turn your camera. I'd be lying if I said I got used to it. Also, because of the tweaks I used to make the game look great (I still got well over 60 fps with a single Geforce 570), my zone loads were very long. Expect to wait a minute after every zone load for textures to finish loading... it's unplayably laggy if you don't wait. These problems occur, because every structure/surface in the game was uniquely created and painted. Unlike most games, Rage doesn't use a few hundred textures over and over in tiles; each surface was individually done. Those textures account for nearly 20GB of data. So, loads are slow **Sound: 8/10** I didn't score a 10 here, because there was nothing ground-breaking. However, I noticed no negative sound artifacts or errors. The sounds all felt organic to the environment. **Design and Gameplay: 7/10** Rage is a semi-open-world post-apocalyptic shooter full of stereotypical mutants and bandits. Pretty standard fare. But, who doesn't like eating their favorite food for the 100th time? Same thing here. id made Rage's enemies fairly aggressive, so you end up with a lot of mobs charging into melee range with you after jumping off random debris. So, surviving was a little more challenging than in the current cover-based shooters. Rage has a few mini-games which have nothing to do with the story. I really don't like those. But, if you want to play a pokemon style card game while playing a post-apocalyptic shooter, Rage has one ready for you. It also has a lot of car racing which is actually pretty fun until you have to do the relay races. There's too much roll-of-the-dice involved for my liking in the relay races. The quest giving and tracking system was clumsy. I'm pretty sure I missed some side quests, because I never knew the quest givers wanted help. Exclamation points above people's heads is totally artificial, but having the option to turn them on would have been nice. Every time you leave a settlement or city and enter the wasteland, you're either driving as fast as you can to get away from someone chasing you, or you're fighting them. That environment makes it really difficult to explore the wasteland, and it's really easy to miss things. For instance, there are supposedly a lot of sewer entrances for players to enter, but I only found one, and it was pretty obvious. Although I did not participate in the multiplayer side of Rage, I know there's no regular PvP element... only car races/combat. **Game Length 9/10** I believe a $60 game incorporating a multiplayer side should provide at least 20 hours of single-player content. The single-player campaign took me 19.5 hours to complete on Hard, but I only played races and skipped the other mini-games. Since this game technically has a multiplayer component, I should really give this a 10, but since that component is so weak, a 9 is the best I can do.

Duke Nukem Forever's (DNF) single-player campaign was a lot of fun because of the colorful and interesting environments and Duke's crass, over-the-top, sex humor. Composite score of 6.375/10 (turn off Depth of Field, and I upgrade to 7.375/10). [This review contains information pertaining to the DLC "The Doctor Who Cloned Me" as well. In general, it felt much more polished and consistent within itself. If you do buy the game, I highly recommend this DLC. You can skip the multiplayer DLC though.] **Entertainment value: 7/10** I went into DNF thinking it was a shooter satire or self-parody rather than a serious attempt at a modern shooter, and that worked really well. Is that what 3D Realms planned back in 1998 when they began this project? I'm not sure, but it's how it feels now. Duke's rude humor and the silly environments carry the game. The humor is very, very adult. Lots of sexual jokes and imagery. It's definitely not a game you'd want your mother to watch you playing. Also, some of the jokes are from the 1990s (Bill Clinton) while others are more contemporary (Leroy Jenkins). So, it's a strange mixture, but as a 35 yr-old, I laughed a lot while I played. The combat, however, was often pretty easy to complete on the Hard Difficulty. If you want serious, cutting-edge combat requiring advanced tactics, this is not the game for you. (More on that in Design and Gameplay below) **Graphics: 4/10** using in-game options only (8/10 if you turn off Depth of Field). Under Video Settings, the post-processing option turns on tone mapping, bloom, ambient occlusion, and depth of field (DoF). DoF is a blurring effect which is supposed to blur areas of the screen which should be out of focus such as objects deep in the background. However, Depth of Field is broken in DNF. When you have post-processing on, virtually everything is out of focus. It makes playing the game unbearable. But, if you turn post-processing off, you lose the other three effects which all make the game look nice. Thankfully, the 3rd party software, Flawless WS v1.0.12, can turn DoF off and leave the other effects on. This makes the game look like it should... really good. There's no advanced anti-aliasing (AA) methods (such as MSAA) within the game, so you're left with either no AA or two lesser AA methods (FSAA or FXAA). I used FXAA (Nvidia's shader AA method), and it was decent, but I definitely wished I could have MSAA x8 many times. In DNF specifically, the graphics seemed to be a jumble of textures and styles from 1998-2010. Sometimes, they didn't feel coherent. Some elements looked excellent (tentacles using bump-mapping). Most looked good. Nothing looked bad. I really think if early players and reviewers had been able to play on PC without DoF on, the graphics comments would have been much more positive. In the "Doctor" DLC, the graphical appearance is coherent, and I think it looks nearly excellent. It's as though the developers took the best graphics style of the base game and followed that level of work throughout the DLC. **Sound: 8/10** I didn't score a 10 here, because there was nothing ground-breaking. But, the game had very solid sound and music. I played using analog connections to my 5.1 speaker set, so I can't talk about the digital out sound the game can use. My experience was very positive. I noticed no bad sound artifacts or cut-outs. The surround worked as expected. The sounds of items and vehicles felt like they matched the objects they were supposed to emanate from. The music used a lot of the themes from the older games. **Design and Gameplay: 7/10** DNF felt like a jumble of disparate ideas forced into a story with the ultimate goal being finally getting the game out of the door rather than creating a solid story. While in development from 1998 to 2010, the developers had many great ideas for gags and events for the single-player campaign and often made playable versions of these events. I believe when the game finally got the green light, the latest developers created a story and mushed together versions of the best gags into the campaign. This made many elements feel like they didn't fit well... they were fun individually but are not organic to each other. The "Doctor" DLC felt very coherent, and it seemed like it was written first and built after. The play design is from the circle-strafe era of shooters, so no firing from cover like in current shooters. There were many mini-games and puzzles which had nothing to do with the story, but they added some fun flavor. The games included pinball, air hockey, pool, video poker, and video slots. **Game Length 7/10** I believe a $60 game incorporating a multiplayer side should provide at least 20 hours of single-player content. For DNF, expect about a 14 hr campaign if you do all of the mini-games. Maybe 12 hours without. The "Doctor" DLC took me about 4 hrs to complete. Fairly solid.