PowerGamer

A 2021 review for a 2013 game. I enjoyed this game for many hours, got to 53% completion, but gave up on it in frustration. The game has some major issues from a 2021 perspective. 1) No native widescreen support. You have to use someone's 3rd party patch. 2) The UI is very cumbersome. The UI is mind numbingly unintuitive from a 2021 perspective. 3) The controls are bad. It's hard to switch weapons, even knowing how to switch weapons to begin with. A lot of the controls make no sense. 4) The graphics are dated. To be expected for a 2013 game, but it's worth pointing out. If you are PC gamer and after playing AC Odyssey, I wouldn't go back further than AC Origins. Even though this one is rated as one of the best. Ubisoft still sells the game but they don't bother at least updating with a widescreen patch, etc. Wait till there is a remastered version of this game if it ever happens.

In summary: A soulless, woke, game that wants you to like communism. Instead of waiting at least a week for reviews I got this game since I got a new RTX 3080 card and wanted to see what the raycast effects looked like. Disappointed (when it came out last October) to find that the online play wouldn't be available for months. One of the great features of WD2. First odd thing I noticed is the character generation. You have to choose from one of several randomly generated choices. You skin color, sex, etc., and you can't reroll to get another random set. If you are not satisfied with the random choices you get, you go play through the intro mission again. Hello I'm random, are you random too? This is so strange and offsetting. Why do I want to play a game where I'm just some rando? In real life I can just go walk around a shopping mall and merge into the crowd if I want that. Then you can play as another rando operative, the pick more rando NPCs so you can play them. Who in the hell wants to play this? People want to play someone special, the hero, etc., they want to be a meaningful protagonist or antagonist. Why can't we just play Dalton (the interesting James Bond like guy in the intro)? This game is the sign of the times where some purple hair, weed smoking, androgynous, birkenstock wearing SJW designer(s) are let loose on Ubisoft whom must have fully embraced woke culture. Let's make a game with "unity", were we are all the same; man, woman, thing, short or tall, any melatonin (yet disproportionately dark) shade. Utopia is here! Weeee! Sure London looks pretty, but it's all soulless, lacks character, boring, and directionless. Better off playing WD2 again and hope they come to their senses and recover with a decent WD4.

The only thing you will "RAGE" about is one of the most stupid game design decisions ever made. There is NO intra-progress save. It's all huge checkpoint based. I can sort of understand this for a console game in the past where there there was not enough storage, but then that would be an excuse for anything like the Xbox since it's so much like a PC (with a HD to store saves on). The game is a contradiction. It pushes this fast paced gameplay with the music, fast moving and shoot enemies, and that you want to move in fast with quick moves to pick up the nanites. But then one mistake it's over, you die then you have to do the objective that you are on all over again. The checkpoints are literally the whole base! So you can't play it fast like they want you to because then you will just have to do the same 5 to 30 minutes you played, over and over again. I don't know who is left from the original crew at Id. This is totally lame. This is checkpoint game mechanic that might have been okay 20 years ago, but inexcusable now. It's just a very lazy decision, maybe a decision made because the game engine was broken or something. Is you want to play a real post apocalyptic car game play the underrated Mad Max 2015 game. It blows away this confused hot mess.

Got it free on Epic so I can't complain too much. I missed the whole P2W debacle when the game come out. Any how I played it maybe 40 hours, but the problem is there are too many hacks in the PVP games. Their pitiful anticheat can't keep up with it. You can always play the 4 PVE at least and you level super fast.

I've played the CIV games since they came out may decades ago. Got this most recent incarnation for free off of the Epic store. The game was pretty fun for a while on the first try, and stopped when I beat it once. Didn't feel like it was worth playing anymore. Kind of a let down. It needs some quality of life elements added to the UI. Why repeat some of the same dialog options over and over again when they didn't matter for instance. Such dialogs could have a "don't show me again" checkbox. The worst of it is the balance and progression between the various units. For instance jet planes are a nearly unstoppable defence. The mobile SAM units are almost worthless. The only way to combat them is to bring your own planes. And the balance in the progression is off. The game is likely to be over from a cultural victory way before you get to have fun towards the space age. Maybe this is just a problem with computer games in general, but the AI seems pretty much the same one from CIV3. I really like the battles and the tech upgrades so I wish they would focus more on them. Now you are just considered a "war monger" if you fight for more than several turns. Instead of suggesting a future tech, why not just one? There could be futuristic laser weapons, hover tanks, antimatter bombs, etc. Somewhere I feel there is a great CIV game waiting to happen, but mostly the game appears to have had a graphics upgrade but the gameplay has stagnated.

Low quality, soulless, garbage RGB. Maybe something that would have been just meh in 2005, certainly not anything special even by 2016 standards. At least I got it for fee from Epic games. Nothing like "Pillars of Eternity", save your time and money. Too many better RPGs to play.

One of the best games ever made thus far. Sure it has some problems at launch time, but I found nothing game breaking, and all the good outweighs the bad. In particular what is great about it is some of the story lines and the atmosphere. Really got me immersed at points and felt some sort of emotional attachment to the characters like I never had in other games. Sure to be critical it felt like probably CDPRS got overwhelmed at times. After all a game of this scope is a major undertaking. Like when Rockstar came out with GTA3 it was a big shift. Maybe some people (going by by the percent of negative reviews) expected GTA5 like perfection, and just overlooked the good of the game. Anyhow after many hours I finished all the side quests and the main story, now I'm back after the ending exploring every section the city bit by bit. Looking for hidden gear and mini quests I might have overlooked. And can't wait till they add the multiplayer component they are looking to push out in 2022 or so. It's the end of 2020 as I write this. You can just wait a month or two till they will probably have fixed a lot of the things people complain about, or just enjoy the ride now.

Constant random crashes for everyone that I know that tries to play the game. This is the only game I have that does this. And everyone is saying it crashing on Reddit, etc., too. Not only on the PC but on consoles as well. If they tried they could monitor where in their code it's crashes and fix it but apparently they don't even bother. Maybe it's a bug(s) that very hard to track down because they are in the middle of some random thread or something, but there is no excuse. This is just very bad and lazy game development. To add insult to injury they just pretend the crashes don't exist ("It works for me!"), and instead of fixing anything they just keep adding new features and asking for more money.

I got the steam version, played less than 2 hours just in time for a refund. The game is just terrible. Rushed, unfinished, looks like it wasn't even play tested. The UI is unintuitive and broke in some areas. The story mode missions are confusing, lacking directions/indicators, and I found the ship control and feedback to be unintuitive. I would have liked to try online mode but you have to link your Steam account to an EA one and the in-game UI for it is broke. Finally yea the game was made through woke colored glasses. First you will notice you have very few characters for selection. Most of the choices are only female and I don't think one of them was even fair skinned. Apparently in the woke world, you are only worthy if you're not male and your skin color is beyond specific melatonin levels. I would have settled for an alien race (as in out worldly) character selection, but apparently for the Silicon Valley, Critical Race Theory zealots, trying to mix an alien race into that ideology was too much and would have made their heads explode.

Was really fun for a while, that is until the skid cheat downloaders caught up to the game. The last time I tried to seriously play the game I tried both the team and solo version and out of 150 players a big percentage of them were cheats. Players were spamming "person radar" when they just landed. There is no way they could have had them because it right when the game started (not plunder mode, no load out). And they would constantly spam them. It's free to play but what is the point if the game has no anti-cheat? Plus the game crashes so much it's annoying. There is no point player this game if/until they add a anti-cheat to the game.

I was looking forward to the PC version of this game. It ended up being disappointing in some ways. Over all pretty fun, epic in scope story driven game. Still I expected a GTA5 quality in both gameplay, graphics, etc., and it's just not there in this game. Pros: 1) Unique Wild West theme. Probably the #1 Western game series of all time. 2) High media quality. Great graphics, great audio, etc. 3) Long, detailed story driven. Cons: 1) Crashes a lot. The immersion of the game is broken since you have to constantly manually save. Can't count how many times I had to do a 30min plus mission over again because the game crashed in the middle. And it isn't just me, other family members on different PCs have the same problem. 2) The loading performance is bad. Maybe it's just a symptom of having a complex detailed world, but the game takes way to long to load on a high end PC with an M2 drive unlike most other games I play. 3) The pace of the game is way to slow for me. I like that it is story driven but a lot of it just moves too slow. The game often kicks into movie mode where basically the game takes over and you are watching a movie. Some of these movies are very slow and drawn out. A lot of time it's just a video of you riding a horse and you can't individually skip these parts. I get they are trying to set a mood, but mine turns to boredom. Instead of a skip button, maybe a speed up option would be nicer, like a 1.25, 1.5, 2x speed would have been great. 4) Has an unusual, perhaps console based, save system where you can only save when you are out of a mission. Some of these missions can be very long so you either have to play it all through to the end, or restart it when you reenter the game. On top of that when you restore a save it puts you in some random spot and under a different context. Like if you save in front of a random encounter and then load the game the encounter is not there. It's as if the game developer is trying to punish players..

Quite simply if the bugs don't kill you than the script kiddie hack buyers will. Game crashes a lot, has lame bugs like having to reset your weapons every round, etc., and still not fixed a week later. Then apparently bored of the game, the hacks started showing up in full force a week after launch. You watch the kill cam and they obviously see where you are, do constant head shots and have 15 kills and 0 deaths. And how is it a level 4 mastered the game with out even leveling yet. But I'm sure if you look tomorrow they'll be easily level 50 at their hack rates. Where is the anti-cheat? Finally the solo mission is nothing special. Pretty boring. Adds nothing new. I should have known to wait awhile for reviews first..

Luckily I didn't play much for it since it was a Humble Budnel sale. Sure it's got real pretty graphics. Maybe some of the best ever seen in an RTS. But the worst of it's problem is the forced narrative. You can't play it like you want to. Most if not all of the levels I played were a race against a very short clock. Where is the "strategy" in "real time strategy" (RTS)? And other real stupid things that shows time and time again that if you put graphics over gameplay (or story) it's going to ****..

By far the worst of the entire Telltale TWD series. Shallow characters, and boring dialog. It first it was pretty interesting but it seemed obvious to me they (the writer(s)) tried to stretch already weak story to far. I uninstalled when I hit the 5th chapter out of shear boredom..

Fun for a while. It's an obvious clone of PlayerUnknown's BattleGround but with WOW like cutesy art style instead. One problem is the balance. There isn't much. You are way to squishy. Even with full armor you damage way to easy. And then the real killer of this game is the hackers. 9 out of 10 games have multiple cheats. People can see you through walls and one shot you with any weapon (shotgun, anything, no scope). Real bummer in this day and age anti-hacking measures are mostly an afterthought. Programmers/hackers share info and make hacks for FPS games like this with-in days, and it is only going to get worse until developers start taking security seriously and do robust server-side detection and automatic banning et al.

Doom by name only, I'm old enough to remember the original Doom. It was phenomenal for it's time. This mess hardly compares at all. Obviously none of the talent behind the original had anything to do with this version. The original Doom was not about achievements or DLCs, the game play enough was what made it fun. It was also mostly a closed kind of tunnel'ish game where you didn't know what was going to be around the next corner. This version is more about large often outdoors areas. Then there is the multi-player. That is if you can find someone else to play with. Here about a year later from release and the the server(s) are pretty much dead. Also in the original Doom there was no concept of level. Here you are everyone's **** until you play up in levels because the level 50 people will stomp you. In the original you could just jump right in on an equal footing and it was your skill that made the difference. It's too bad John Ramero and John Carmack have long since left Id where they could have made a proper remake.. I'm glad I bought at the bargain bin price..

At first I really liked the game. A lot of variety in character choices, etc. At lot of fun at first but frankly the game just gets monotonous. The game doesn't scale well, and you will hit the level cap before the end of the 2nd act (out of three). The whole thing get monotonous. It's the same thing over and over, and over again. I would play the game for a while and fall asleep. I feel now it was a mistake to get the expansion. If it were not for the expansion I probably would have made it to the 3rd act. For some reason most game developers, who's ever in charge, seem to think well if I don't put 100+ hours of play in a game people will complain that it's too short. It's as if every new movie had to be six hours long. Most people couldn't sit through it and with this game like most it's just too drawn out. I even used Cheat Engine hacks to supercharge my characters to roll through the battles thinking I would make it through the 3rd to finish the game. To boring, couldn't do it even then. The game is fun for a while, but take my advise and don't bother getting the expansion unless you finished the game and really want to add many hours of the same thing..

Just give it a chance. At first I saw the game, within an hour or two I felt like it was Fallout 3 but with some clumsy crafting system. Then after a few hours more, I thought that and then I'm some kind of junk collector. But after a while, maybe after a day I really fell in love with the game. The main thing, the game is just huge. There is really a lot of places to explore, interesting stories and side quests. Then the finally made the weapons and armor systems much more interesting (a problem I've had with all Bethesda RPGs). There is so much content, I've been skipping the main quest line and doing the side quests for many days now. So much to the game I think I might have to do a 2nd play through or spend the next few months playing and exploring everything. Ignore the bad reviews, like everyone else I know that actually plays the game they really like it. Even the crafting system that I thought was clumsy at first (leaves a lot of room for improvement) I got a handle on it after a while. Just give it a chance, you'll see, you won't be disappointed.

First of all I liked the game at first. I'd say it's worth the ~$60 price for entertainment, but I give it a NEGATIVE review because of how EA badly handles the game. First the game could be better. It feels pretty shallow and overly simplified. For instance if you compare it to the Battlefield series, those games had a lot more going for them. More interesting weapons, vehicles, parts of the environment could be destroyed, and mainly better games that allowed some meaningful strategy, tactics, etc. It's getting harder and harder to find games, people must be bored with it already (less then two months after opening). Why I give it a negative because EA still refuses to do any sort of realistic anti-cheat control. Currently after playing for one or two hours I run into at least two to three obvious cheats. Losers that can see through walls and other obstructions, using ainbots, etc. Recently cheaters coded a new exploit where they can shoot super burst shots that will kill your AT-ST in a single shot. For EA/DICE security is an afterthought. If EA really wants to catch and curtail the cheating they would have a full time anti-cheat team of their own instead of some off the shelf easily beat 3rd party system. They could do real time server monitoring, and have a serious client side effort that could catch cheaters within an hour or two. ALL of EA/DICE games have the same problem, but they choose to ignore it and pretend it doesn't happen instead. I skipped most EA/DICE games since BC2, now I'm sorry I gave them another chance and I'm burned again. Don't waste your time.

Low quality, but free MMO. I tried the steam version of this game. Right away I could see it was very low quality, very low production value game. Despite using the Big World engine (same one that "World of Tanks" uses) graphically the game looks like some cheap effort made ten years ago. This game was way too low a budget to hold my interest very long. Very low polygon and texture quality despite having the game set at "very high" graphics setting. The animations are limited and the controls are bad leaving a poor sense of immersion in the game; rather felt very disconnected from it. Parts of it are still in Russian, etc. It feels like a **** stepson from the "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." game series as there are several similarities. You are called a "stalker" in the game, a lot of metro train tunnel loading screens, also developed in Slavic country (appears to be Russian or Ukrainian). But that's where the comparison ends, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are much higher quality then this thing. It is free after all through for the downloading from Steam. Probably most people that will install it, try it for five minutes, realize it was a mistake then immediately uninstall, but I imagine some die-hard somewhat masochistic MORPG fans might stick with it for a while..

Starts out pretty fun, but gets old pretty fast. For one thing it's hard to differentiate the visuals, to pick the characters out from the background, the way they shade everything in a dark high contrast way. They could have done something to make the NPCs stand out from the background. The game play, from the visuals and reaction/feedback, makes me feel distanced from the game. Then there are the cut scenes. Kind of neat at first but then you see the guy is like the Forest Gump of the Western world. He/you just happen to know all the famous outlaws and cross paths with them all. Goes from a sort of tolerating humor to being overrun and sanctimonious. I don't want a game telling me so and so outlaw was really a nice person and is just understood and so on. The designer(s) of this game took them self a little to seriously. At least if I could only skip these dialogs, but many you can't. I would rather had more action and less silliness.

Horrible solo play. Starts out where the AI is no challenge at all then suddenly cheats like hell. It's obvious the enemy AI can see the whole map and iterates through all your units to pick the weakest target. Would have okay if the enemy had scouts, but they devs didn't even bother to take it to a decent level. Lazy, bad, minimal AI design and game play.

In a nutshell: A hardly playable, glitchy,stalling/lagging, bad animation, mess of an online FPS. I really wanted to like this game but after about 9 hours over a few sessions of trying I gave up. A lot of people are still drinking the kool-aid, but given a few more hours they should wake up. The game must not be optimized at all, and, or they made very poor choices for core engine structure when they put this thing together. The biggest problem is the glitchy/out-of-syncness that you experience in this game, regardless of your ping or graphics settings, etc. It is as if the game only has a few preset canned animations that are forced into what ever action you are doing. An example that you'll endure repeat over again is when your fighting head to head with someone. You might see four frames of animation at best. Someone will shoot and someone will die with out much of an indication why. No muzzle flash, nothing.. Then other times you are fighting on the edges of a tench and you are shot at while your enemy is pointing up in the air. Any sense of being there, of immersion, is lost most of the time. And then the balance and a lot of the game design choices are horrible. Apparently when you level up you gain an almost god-like edge. You'll see people with mid to high levels all the time with ridiculous kill to death ratios of 50/1 etc. And then a sniper hits you half way across the map for no apparent reason. Okay if you have some ridiculous mechanics like this in the game then at least separate the battles into ranges/classes or automatically adjust somehow. Reminds of the idiom: "bring a knife to a gunfight" Although what I could have been seeing were aimbots or some other hacks, which again would be even more sadder meaning no anti-cheat system. Then there are four (as I recall before I uninstalled) base classes/roles that are uninspiring and pretty pointless. One example is the default "commander" class. You start with a pistol and binoculars. First off all this pretty much relegates you to be a trench fighter only, and then you can't do anything really meaningful with the binoculars. You can direct your squad to attack, which is unrewarded and everyone ignores anyhow, or you can direct a mortar attack that does nothing and all so ignored. At least the idea of a WW1 style trench battle is unique. And that's all you do, fight in a handful of tench maps over and over. This game feels like a poor alpha state concept game. Maybe in a year or so (if there is still anyone around in it) it might be okay..

Fun until it gets old. I really loved this game for a while. Reminded me a bit of the simple fun I had playing the Ultima games back in the 80's. It's got the usual things that you like from RPGs. The character creation, the battle with monsters, the loot, the leveling, etc. Again for a while but then after so many hours, you will see a lot of it is the same; in particular you spend the majority of the time in battles. So repetitive my shoulder actually started to ache from the same repetitive moments, and I'd literally get sleepy doing the same things over again. Although this goes a lot for other RPGs of this style (like the final fantasy style et al). Then at first you see a lot of the world is the same and rather bland. It lacks direction. There is a story behind it, but it feels like it's a lot of aimless wandering, again over a lot of scenery that got bland. Finally the classes are not hashed out as good as they probably could be. Some are over powered, some are basically useless. You would expect that a typical balanced party setup like: A tank, cleric, thief, and Mage, then one extra like a Bard for the buffs or CC, would work great. But it turns out the way the game balance works you'ed be better off with more tanks, or otherwise high HP and defense guys. I though a thief was needed to have a lock picking, disarming expert, but it turns out I could have had the main "explorer" character learn those skills and a thief archer was almost useless in battle. The mechanics are that AOE CC (area of effect, crowd control) characters are some of the best, as the simple fact that whom ever has the most to attack gets the most hits in. If you can lock the enemy up the less damage you will take, and killing them faster en mass will save you a lot of the tedium. You are best to read some kind of guide before you start, rather then using your intuition from previous RPG experiences. Overall worth the price since you will get a lot of RPG enjoyment out of it, but I doubt you will make it to the end..

Just horrible. Where to begin?, well first of all it looks like a game of the 90's. Maybe back in the 90's it might have been an okay racing game when there was nothing better. It looks like some horrible half-baked console port. If you can configure your controls, it's hard to figure out because of the weird labeling. As far as I can tell there is no steering/rear breaks, there is a lot of model and graphics glitches, in at least one case the opponent driver model is missing (looks like a phantom driving a convertible) , the control response is bad, it looks you are supposed to able to change your rims but it's broke, the same tune loops over - and over, and over, and did I mention the graphics look circa 1990? The word "tires" is misspelled as "Tyres". You shouldn't play this game even if it were free..

Boring, Boring, I was looking forward to trying this game. Hell, I'm one of the original Fallout 1 programmers. I knew Brian Fargo of course because he was the president of the company, and probably knew some of the people that worked on this game; including many that elevated their participation with Fallout but in fact had little to do with it. Doesn't change my opinion of the game however.. I put so many hours into the game. Fun at times, but frankly the majority of the time it's just slow, dull and boring. Furthermore it was hard to progress as it was hard to tell where anything important was at. The wacky map setup didn't help it either. The map always faces relative North, but then you can spin the camera around so you can be facing any direction. It's too bad this wasn't shown with some kind of circle, and, or cone shape et al. I had to switch between rotating the view camera around to into into orientation with the map to figure out where I was on it. Kind of cool to go back to an old style, but then **** is not good it's not going to help, just making things worse. A 1990's style, done worse. It sat on my hard drive for months now, it was time to uninstall it knowing I wasn't coming back. P.S. It looks like their are shills making +10 reviews. Look at some of them. This is the one and only game they made a review for. Go figure..

My review is for the last patched official version. Not the "Xenonauts Community Edition". This game was real fun for a while. It's obviously a variation of the original "X-COM" game which I did play back in the day. Although to me this game is better then last years official X-COM remake, I didn't like that one. If you like strategy and build games you will probably like this game and it will be worth game time. It was real fun for a while until I hit a point in the game after several hours of play. I restarted several times, but still in the one longest game I played I hit a difficultly level that made it hard, or otherwise just too tedious to continue playing. I'd say even the original X-COM was blast to play for a while..until doing the same types of battles over and over again got to tedious and then it was time to stop. Besides the tedium of slowly stepping out the battles, the game just doesn't scale very well. It's leveling - skilling - upgrading - growing up is hammered out as it probably could be. You will see if you made mistakes in upgrading where you are running out of money and, or, you didn't capture key technology in time then you will be behind and unable to fight the latest UFO craft (the level based on the date?), etc. An engrossing blast for a while until you hit the wall of tedium and difficulty..

Okay absolutely stunning visuals. By far the best outdoor visuals I've ever seen in a game. Looks a bit like ID's "id Tech 5" engine. They probably do some of the same stuff streaming textures and what not. Here there is a lot more realistic flora, water, atmospheric effects et al too. Also I don't think I've ever seen a game where you could look so far off in the horizon. It made for a pretty immersive experience. But then after that the game falls flat for me. It's more like a graphics demo without much content. The idea of running around in a pretty yet mostly barren landscape is not very appealing to me. It does tells you somewhat insultingly at the begging that it "won't hold your hand"; understood but that still doesn't cut for me. I searched for and found a walk-though online so I could get an idea what to look for in some kind of sequence and still looked boring. This graphics engine will be great for perhaps an RPG or somethinge, but my few hours wandering around was enough for me..

I don't get it with these "old school" games. I "played" this game for about ten minutes and gave up on it to to the weird movement and camera setup. You can only move in prescribed steps and directions in some sort of maze like way. It's so bad that moving around in this game made me nauseated. The reason people used to make games this way was because of limited resources, and, or, lack of 3D rendering facilities (the old games had pre-rendered perspective walls, etc). So why would anyone want to play the old way that gives you a headache? If this is a walk down nostalgia lane, then maybe some old ways are better of buried and forgotten.

Fun for a while. The atmosphere is good, initially capturing the spirit of the 1979 classic movie. But the game became a chore of trying to avoid the Alien-some times making to the next objective and saving, then more then often getting killed, only having to repeat to try again. One of those points where it feels more like a job/chore then something fun to do..

Loved it. First of all was blown away from how detailed the game looked due to the "id Tech 5" engine. Many variations of weapons, seemingly endless MOBs to fight, etc. Overall a fun and beautiful game to play!

This game was over hyped as the next greatest thing in MMOs months before release. But in actuality it didn't take long to see it was a polished turd. It's yet another rehashed Asian style MORPG. First you have to install something called "Glyph", their own version of Valve's "Steam". As if we yet another of these floating around on our hard drives I couldn't even log-in because over all the servers had a queue of at minimal 400 players and numbers were dropping ever so slowly. I had to get up early in the morning anyhow and then I was able to log-in to one of the least populated servers. I was really turned off by the character generation. Of all the many choices you can make, you can't get away from making your character look like some fey Asian variant. I got nothing against Asian's but I just don't like being forced to play a MORPG where my character has to look like one. I'd like the flexibility to make my character look like any race known or otherwise. Then in game it's not very impressive at all. Like I've seen it all before. Overly saturated colors, bland scenery, giant invasive nameplates, no shadowing, cheap look and feel, etc. It looks like the same bland Asian MORPGs I played ten years ago, except now the download was 9GB instead of 1GB so they can add Speedtree grass and trees, and some shaders to the otherwise same dull environment. Also all the NPCs look unimaginatively Asian where I feel like I'm playing in an Asian version of Disneyland, also right on the get go the game complete with so much Gold seller spam you barely read any chat at all. The best thing about it that it uninstalls well.

I make my reviews as an independent thinker, that being said I don't see why this game is rated so high. To me as in the old tale the Emperor is truly naked here. Furthermore I've been playing RPGs and more since 1981 starting on an Apple2+ with Ultima, etc., and I've even worked (as a programmer) on an RPG of what people consider one of the top ten of all time..which might mean nothing other then to say I've played a lot of RPGs and have considered design in some detail. I had to read some guides and other views to see why people really like this game. My problems with it should be obvious. Apparently you have to really work at this game to understand it enough to even start. The whole experience seems very unpolished, unbalanced, and very unintuitive in a lot of places. Mind you I didn't play the original one, maybe it's a prerequisite. My first experience: I create a character, then I see okay I start with actually two characters. There is very little explanation or little telling you the significance of each. Now in game it's kind of fun. I do my first battle, etc., then I wander into a place where monsters are level 3 and they quickly wipe out my party. I reason, humm, okay I guess I need to get level 3 or higher to be on even ground. Then I reach level 3 go back and maybe I can beat them this time, and then hit another level 3 group but this time the boss dude has some kind of AOE that wipes out my whole party in one shot? WTF is going on here? And then there are quests with little indication where to go next to solve them. Yea all those classics (like the one I worked on) were fun, but the reason they just didn't have any of the advancements we have today are: A) They weren't invented/thought/tried yet. B) Were just not technically feasible yet. C) The costs/dev time was prohibiting. "Tough-S" is not the solution. There is a reason why more modern games have those helpful features, because they can. Proper gradient (in skills, advancement, etc.), arrows that show the way, etc., IMHO make things more fun. No one says you have to do everything for the player, but then doing little to nothing for them either? And sure they are a lot more work and resources for a developer to do. This game only made more sense to me as I read guides and or walk-throughs for it, okay I get that now. To me having to do all that sort of cases to make it a "game", it becomes more of a "job".. even from the get-go. Furthermore the skills and their interactions with MOBs are out of balance; the game lacks polish. Beta is not an excuse to release something before it's ready, and this game feels more like a barely playable alpha to me. In the end the game was fun for the several hours I played, don't mean to sound entitled at all, but because the game's imbalances,bugs, and incompleteness made me move on to other games..

I really loved the first one. It was really great, kind out of no where to me, pleasantly surprised. On first impressions #2 it looked a lot the same. Even the starting level as I recall was about the same. Some stuff new, and some new stuff they probably shouldn't have attempted.. There are little one liners here and there, references to "Lord of the Rings", etc., the horrible voice acting and, or, the flippant way they were delivered was very cheesy. For that manner, one of the main characters is horribly voice acted too. He sounded like that one teenage schoolmate you probably had too that could make this constant guttural burp like voice. The bottom line, PLEASE have you voice acting professionally done and directed, and, or, have very little of it. Even with great professional graphics and what not with such horrible amateurish voice acting it makes the whole game feel cheap and shallow. There is one big **** problem that made me give up and uninstall it this time around after several hours of trying. And that is the user interface/control interface that has to do with battles (which is really what the game is about after all). The percentage of the time I could not direct where I wanted my attacks/skills to go. I would right click in a direction, or most certainly get the cursor right on my target, but the dumb game would be fooled and think I wanted to move instead! I would click to attack but instead I run right into the **** great. Same problems with other skills like I'd try to put down a flame wall (that I bound on right click). A good percentage of the time the game would mess up and no wall was put down, and with no sort of feedback why it didn't. It became unbearably frustrating. The game was getting hard at points where I couldn't but help thinking that "humm.. maybe I'd have a chance if the game would just let me control my damn character!" For any game really, the #1 thing is..playing it. You got to get that right. The player has to be able to expressively control their character. All the graphics fluff (and horribly voice acted one liners) should come AFTER the game play control is solid! My advice if you really want to play this game is choose a skill build that has the least directionality to it, instead go for general AOE's that go down with a press/click or ones that are centered on your character et al. They had a hit with the first Van Helsing game, now hopefully next time around they will mature as a game company and put enough focus more on actual game play and interface mechanics the next time around..

First of all I love the so called "tower defense" games so I checked this game out. It starts out pretty fun, and it has nice pretty graphics except for the unskippable take off and landing sequences. It seems like it should be a really fun game but the problem is the gameplay is not ironed out enough. The major flaw is a basic game play thing having to do with understanding and rewarding the player. If there is no point to it, if I feel I'm not being rewarded for my increased skill, energy, and, or understanding then it's just not fun. A very obvious example: One would assume that if you only get a 3 star completion for a level you should be able to repeat the level well enough until you can beat it full stars. This is a common mechanism that you would naturally expect but apparently the game doesn't work this way. This is what makes angry birds fun for example. You want to win the level perfectly and you get rewarded for it. First it doesn't indicate to you why you didn't get a full star rating to begin with. Then if you repeat the level it doesn't tell you anything else. Even when I knew I played the level better I wasn't rewarded for it. Not a better star rating, just some credits maybe. Now I'd take these credits and buy upgrades. But then from how the game scales it automatically increases the difficulty (it scales) according to the upgrades you have. So here one is trying to figure out how do I play this better, and, or, at the very least think with your new powerful upgrade you will kick some major-A in the level you can't. Trying to best a level becomes a exercise of futility as you always stay one step short of it, and wrapped in mystery anyhow because you don't know what makes you better (other say doing well enough to pass one). With this one mechanic sorted out it would have made me stick to the game longer then a few hours. Also while it was kind of cute and silly, the game dialog wasn't really compelling to me. Either poorly written, and, or, it didn't make sense to me in the focus/direction as a game. Play **** will be fun, but missing the potential to be the addicting game you thought you might come back to.