PutCashIn

Having been pleasantly surprised with the console port of Dark Souls 2, I am amazed at the incredible lack of foresight and early game decisions made for Dark Souls 3. There is a boss character in the TUTORIAL area, almost making Deprived characters impossible to play, especially on PC, with the as ever present in a Dark Souls game amazingly bad camera aiming and lack of any meaningful block and parry. In Dark Souls 2 you could start deprived, find a dagger, make your way to the Hub, level up, invest in your character and actually do some ROLE PLAYING GAME gaming. In Dark Souls 3, you are essentially forced into one of the Character builds given at the start of the game. Zero emotional investment, utterly immersion breaking. It is horrible, all the bugs and frame rate issues aside, who in their right mind removes the 'blank' character class from a RPG with a supposedly classless levelling system. By placing a boss, in the TUTORIAL area. Whomever was a play tester for this game needs to be black listed for gross incompetency.

Another game with much potential ruined by a severe case of consolitis - Despite playing on a PC there is NO SAVE OPTION - instead, you are re spawned at a safe house with an experience hit. Quake 2 had a save option. 20 years later, an apparently AAA game can't think to implement such an option. Also, I got killed by getting hit THROUGH A WALL. TWICE. Yet another game where the Art Department vastly out resourced the Design Department. There are better Zombie games on the PC.

I really like this game, even on PC - it takes a lot of getting used to, the controls aren't even ported into on screen hints correctly, however the menu controls are. As long as you aren't playing PVP, if playing PC, leave the main attacks as double click left and right mouse buttons for two handed. Your best bet is going flame Long Sword (check online to find it), then lightening Claymore to +10 and win buttons. I have tried shift + mouse button for alt attack, honestly, double click just seems easier. You will never be as good as a cheating useless console hand set player [****, come play me with a KB], don't worry, not even a PS 4 can really send an email to your mum - even if you wanted it to. This game is gold, just really a really **** port.

This game seems to have a lot of potential. Pity: No quest locator, which wouldn't be so bad if you could *climb over barrels or minor obstacles* - which you cannot. So everywhere you turn you are hitting walls of barrels, bales and timber that my 3 year old could climb, yet you cannot. I encountered an invisible wall in the first 2 minutes of escaping from the tavern - told to escape the town, tried to jump into the jungle, bam, invisible wall. The penultimate weird thing is, in the keyboard mapping menu, there are TWO entries for most of the skills, like 'heal' and 'fear' are both bound to 4. Typically, pressing 4 does nothing at all. The most amazingly bad thing is, both the characters pointing *and* the map rotate on the mini map, so you never know where you are going. Basically the exact opposite of what a compass should be. Disappointing, as the game looks like it could be really good, like a modern version of Sea Dogs. Pity it was, like most poor games, apparently play tested by the people who made it, thus unable to spot or critique themselves correctly. A modern version of Pirates! this is not.

This game starts out well, but quickly descends into the same issue all the Risen and Gothic games have so far had - almost zero interesting characters (except maybe Bones in this games case), almost zero incentive to continue any mission other than the ignorance of sunk costs ('I paid for this game so I should spend more of my time playing it' - when economically, if you don't like it, do something else), essentially a well crafted world that completely alienates the player from any sense of feeling or immersion. Combat tries to be Witcher-like but comes off Witcher-lite, move sets are limited and dodging/rolling is haphazard at best. I stopped playing after the 10th time falling off an edge due to the weird amount of momentum your character has, in fact, most movement feels a lot like your character is 3 times a heavy as any other model in the game. Essentially, Gothic 1 was great *at the time* - every game by this company since has had this weird 'stuck in 2002' feel to it, So much so the fan base for this company even admit to being 'cult'. Risen 3 is no comparison to The Witcher 3.

Well, unfortunately this is as bad as others have made it out to be. Battled with a lagging interface to finally get full screen and resolution set correctly. No tutorial. Asked to select crew, given list, why would I do anything other than chose the best for each category? Made it to first planet, went into orbit. Went to deploy 'mining probe thing' - informed this would cost 75. SEVENTY FIVE WHATS? Units, people, include units, like you were taught in first year university. Stopped playing in case it was 75 years off my life, or seventy five more dollars for a game that HAS NO TUTORIAL. Avoid.

Played Dungeon Lords - Steam Edition. I haven't played the earlier versions but I continuously got stuck on objects and enemies, the Athletics skill had no effect, despite the manual saying it should. For a game that tries to be movement based, the game play is pretty poor, kind of 'bump' fighting. Essentially, still a hunk of crap. Poor people who played the earlier versions if this game actually used to be worse.

A rather Bible-esque version of Serious Sam, except where Serious Sam has decent weapons, this game has one over powered short range shotgun, then some ridiculous stake launcher, along with another op short range infinite ammo starter game weapon. Beyond that I wouldn't know as I gave up at World 1 Level Five - The Boss was untouchable with the Shotgun as it has such a short range and the Stake gun runs out of ammo, forcing you to enter the center of the map to gain more, whence you are insta killed by some silly tornado ability. Interestingly, it appears you do more ammo shooting the boss in the arse rather than Staking it in the head. Believe me, I can literally do some levels of Quake 2 either walking backwards or with my eyes shut, this is no 'spiritual sequel' to Q2, it is Serious Sam with a Seriously bad weapon load-out. Just Bad.

I am very much on the fence with regards to this game - some ideas are brilliant, once you get the hang of the characters abilities and upgrading the town the seemingly impossible game really does open up - however, there is one design decision which has left me unable to play this game with enjoyment. When your characters reach level 3 (and again at level 5) they are unable to entre level one (three) dungeons any more, this combined with the fact that the available dungeons are primarily based on the level of your rostered characters, leaves you an often untenable position where your level 1&2 characters are unable to complete the 'harder' types of level one dungeons, whereas your newly leveled 3 characters are not yet ready for the difficulty spike of level 3 dungeons. It is a bizarre decision, I guess it is designed to prevent 'farming' - which is odd ad that is essentially the core gameplay - finding and collecting items for use in your town. I simply cannot fathom this decision to split the character roster up based on level, why wouldn't the new character want to tag along with a more experienced character? But the characters can *learn* from experts within the town itself? Just ... bizarre. I would suggest even people who like rouge-likes to seriously consider before purchasing, this is a somewhat odd take on the theme, developing into games that either spiral into disaster or become repetitively easy. There really is no 'mid game' because of the level splitting in the roster.

I would not recommend this game, there are plenty of more unique turn based squad games that have exactly the same features - Fixed screen 'towns/hq/campsite/npc interaction' +research/roster control with a turn based squad combat game alongside. Many competing games are cheaper and add something new, this is a rehash with some terrible controls and very average gameplay. Weird tactical decisions - no tactical map, yet you fly an alien HQ spaceship that routinely scans entire sections of continents, one grenade per character until research unlock of a *wow* second slot, grenades and med packs take up the same slot, 69% accuracy on basic assault troops when you are 2 meters (!) away from an enemy. Essentially, it seems most of the development was spent on cut scenes and very little on any idea of balanced gameplay features. It is almost as if it proved to difficult to balance anything so they development just cut most interesting ideas and lumped everything into one badly managed soldier profile.