Samvvel

Pros: - Non-linear plot with an impressively high level of variability - Excellent writing that puts Bethesdas, Obsidians and other CDProjekts to shame - Deep and interesting lore - The ability to roleplay anyone you want, not just who the game allows you to - Very little, if any handholding - You can actually complete the game without a single combat - Fairly moderate difficulty for such an old school RPG Cons: - Brevity (the ending felt especially abrupt) - Graphics. Looks better than, say, Wasteland 2, but some key points of interest are very easy to miss due to the overall blandness of environments - Several obscure quests that are very hard to complete without a walkthrough

A very solid sci-fi adventure. Not flawless, of course. Challenge at times feels inflated in a rather artificial manner. Apparently the guys we're working with are resourceful enough to launch a mission to the moon, yet too dumb to grab an oxygen tank that lasts for more than three minutes. Stealth, just like it always does in non-stealth games, absolutely ****. However, the game has a lot to make up for its downsides. For one, it is really nice to actually see a sci-fi space adventure that is not centered around killing aliens. Deliver Us The Moon also has a great cinematic feel to it, that really helps you to immerse into its atmosphere. The game is unfortunately pretty short. I do hope the sequel provides at least twice as much runtime, as well as less artificial challenge and tacked on mechanics.

Awful graphics, awful voiceover. Very first encounter has enemies that kill you in one shot (on normal difficulty). Unplayable garbage.

Could've been a great game, but the creators were so hell-bent on making this game old school they had completely abandoned any common sense. So you're telling me that someone is freeing those prisoners only to send them on missions almost butt-naked, with no medicaments, a five minute worth of oxygen and only a handful of ammo, yet that someone expects them to succeed? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. For a game that seems so keen on reviving the old school spirit of games like System Shock and Bioshock, it certainly doubles down on their negative aspects, yet offers little to no positives, which is the exact opposite of what a good spiritual successor is meant to do.

Why did they even bother releasing it on PC anyway? It is basically unplayable with a keyboard and a mouse. The keyboard layout is just all over the place, totally unfit for quick responses the entire combat system of this game is built on. Also plot-wise it does the most terrible and lazy thing of throwing everything at you within first 10 minutes. I'm not a big fan of Witcher 3, but at least there you were given time to sink in, get a grasp of what's going on and proceed at your own pace. Basically the worst case of an Assassin's Creed clone.

I admire the art design and the atmosphere, but the game design in this game is just pure ass. What's the point in giving the player so many abilities, only to immediately render him unable to use them? Almost every mission has some dumb limitation or condition. Oh, you wanna be stealthy and take your opponents from above? Well you can't, because we only made SOME of the buildings climbable, so you never know which one of them you can use to your advantage. Oh, you wanna take your time and plan ahead? Well, eff what you want - we're adding a stupid timer on this mission that makes absolutely no sense. I was collecting supplies for the rebels, two packages in total, and nobody rushed me, I could take a whole week to collect them if I wanted to. However, once you get a final package all of a sudden a timer appears, and you only have like two minutes to deliver the goods. Like, seriously, WTF? On the surface, game wants to look like a completely open-ended experience, yet in reality it acts like the most linear shooter possible. Super frustrated. I really wanted to like this game, 'cause I like the scenery, the graphics, the voiceover, but the gameplay is so freakin' jarring. Far Cry 4 is the equivalent of a friend handling you a big candy in a pretty wrapper and running off with a smirk, only for you to find out there's a rock inside instead of a candy.

Not sure why it came out on PC. This is clearly made for the console crowd. The controls are weird. Some of it feels intuitive, but some of it doesn't (like having to press three keys to complete very basic actions). The riddles are annoying as hell. And I don't like melee combat in this game one bit. Overall, the art design and the voice over work in this game are great, but the gameplay I personally find wildly unenjoyable.

For starters, the game looks just awful. The textures hail from around 2007, and so are the absolutely horrendous faces, completely bereft of any sign of emotion. I understand this isn't a big budget game, but why not opt for a classic 2D quest in the style of the first game or, I don't know, maybe a visual novel of sorts? You can't make a Marvel movie if you only got 10 bucks. But, believe it or not, this isn't the game's biggest problem. What is is its complete and utter unintuitiveness. A lot of the times completely irrelevant items and characters appear as active, while the important points of interest and story-relevant NPCs are not. The map is totally useless. What's the point in a map with no marks? The writing feels immature at best. As if a teenage person watched a whole lotta sci-fi and fantasy and decided to make his own mish-mash of everything mixed with everything. Almost none of the characters interact in a naturalistic manner, the screenplay just reeks of a bad fanfic material. I can't believe this was written by the same people who wrote the original games. Can't say either of those was a masterclass in screenplay art, but the overall quality of text was significantly better. All in all, the game feels very lackluster and cheaply made, and I fail to find anything even remotely likable in it. P.S. Oh, yes, one more thing. The game runs like garbage despite my setup exceeding system requirements by a mile. That, combined with a fact the game looks ugly as hell, makes for one hell of an impression.

The game certainly has a nice atmosphere to it. The music is rather nice, the environments are very comforting. Even the very basic graphics kinda create its own unique vibe. But the gameplay is a real slog to get through. The protagonist is extremely slow, you have to constantly press shift button which is very annoying and tiresome. Being able to pick up and carry around only one single item is a ridiculously lazy way of padding out the game's length. For christ's sake, why won't our protagonist fetch a bloody bag? Artificial mechanics like these are the real mood killers for me. I know it's a game and there are always certain conventions you have to just accept in games, but that's a bit much in my opinion. All in all, yet another example of a cool but poorly executed concept, as it's often the case with these walking simulators.

The dialog, the characters and the lore are good, as was the tradition in Bioware back in the day. But I just couldn't stand the relentless grinding you have to endure during almost all quests. Unusual missions involving persuading someone or conducting an investigation of sorts are very few and far between, most of the assignments you get is just room after room after room of tedious enemy grind. At best you'll get some kind of notes during the mission, but most of the time you won't. The plot and the dialog are for the most part decent, but the staggering overabundance of combat pretty much turns this game into one big slog. Almost none of the enemies require any kind of particular tactics, so it's just kill it all to death by any means you possess. Which is just boring. You could retain the same number of enemies, but make them weaker and/or make each type require a specific approach. But no, why bother if we can just copypaste hundreds of the samish boring opponents. There are smaller problems too. The codex here is a mess, You gotta read every note and every piece of lore you receive the moment you find it, otherwise you'd be treated to a (not so) great time browsing through this poorly executed codex, where it'll take you up to a minute to find some minor piece of trivia that'll take 15 seconds to read. The bugs are pretty much still there, after all these years. I've encountered ar least a dozen crushes during my first twenty hours of playthrough, and Denerim is plain unplayable unless you lower your graphic settings to medium, or you'll just experience crushes every time you enter a building. Speaking of the graphics... The game looks average at best. Some of the textures are so blurry it actually hurt my eyes. The first Witcher game came out two years prior and still looked better than DA:O. Fallout 3 came out a year earlier and looked just as good, if not better. Overall, the game was a big disappointment for me. I'm a big fan of Bioware, KOTOR, Mass Effect 1-3 and Neverwinter Nights are all among my all time favorites. But Dragon Age: Origins, as hard as tried, I just cannot enjoy.

If there's one redeeming quality about this game it's the gorgeously recreated Chicago. If you wanna just make a virtual trip to the city, it's probably your best chance. But the gameplay itself is just awful. Ubisoft took the worst aspects of GTA/Saints Row and turned them up to 11. Best believe that each and every activity in the game are there to annoy you. The only ones I at least mildly enjoyed were the optional CTOS system hacks. All of the rest either has a stupid-ass timer to artifically inflate the difficulty, or has a million other small things that will prohibit you in one way or another from even remotely enjoying the game. As far as GTA clones go, I'd much rather play Total Overdose or Just Cause 1 than touch this crap again.

Great atmosphere, fine visuals, decent voice over, good music. But these damn puzzles... Omg, the hacking puzzle is probably the worst thing I've ever experienced in a video game. The pipes linking in Bioshock 1 seems like a pure bliss after this. And don't even mention Human Revolution. Why couldn't they just make a linear story based on exploration or, I don't know, bring in some sort of melee combat or shooting mechanics. I mean, anything would be better than these half-assed puzzles!