Thaltom

An exceptional first person RPG with a little more serious tone than The Outer Worlds 1. It really is TOW1 but better. More side quests, more reactivity from your skills and background choice, combat has been polished.

Excellent remaster. Honestly, this is the bar against other remasters should be measured. The voiceacting, the graphic upgrades, tiny small but necessary tweaks to balance. All great.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

SimCity has a handful of innovation; such as, upgradeable buildings, roads providing power/water to buildings, and the ability to trade resources and services with other cities. Visually, it is a clean looking, well built game. Unfortunately, the much hated always-on DRM and forced multiplayer aspect keep any of the innovations from being noticed. Network outages, problems with saving progress and difficulty connecting to the game's servers continue even as I post this: 6 days after launch. After every one of the server issues are fixed I feel SimCity warrants a 5 out of 10.

White Knight Chronicles (and WKC II) as a story falls rather flat on it's face. WKC's story is so bad takes a three point hit its score because of it. It's a very cliche "Save the princess!" love story with the youthful hero chasing after the princess and time after time the bad guy pulls her away at the last moment. Not a big fan of that. However; in terms of game play I actually enjoyed this game a lot. The AI used for the companions is smart about attacking and using magic. The enemies are reused quite often but are difficult enough while not being too hard. You get to design your Avatar player's appearance right from the get-go. There is a well thought out system for crafting new armor and weapons called Binding and even a mini-game where you design a town (called your Georama).

This expansion has turned out to be the same old iteration of reskinned bosses and monsters, a loot treadmill devoid of community and a massive award to the "Give it to me now!" crowd of gamers. The plot and story weakly hold together at the best of time. The various talent and attribute systems have been watered down to the point of complete homogeneity. The only reason this expansion earns a 4 out of 10 is it's continued unique art styles and the two new races (worgen and goblin) that stick to game lore.

Single player game play will consist of skirmishes. You will be leading one of three possible races: TEC, Advent, or Vasari; all with their own well fleshed-out bonuses and tech trees. These tech trees are separated into Combat, Civilian, Defense, and Diplomacy if you have all three expansions; or Combat and Civilian if you have none. Your armada will include ships to fulfill every niche of combat. For anyone who looks for a game's ability to involve strategy and timing: this is your game. I'm not usually one to comment on visuals in a game but SoaSE has them in spades. Space feels massive and beautiful, like it should feel. There is a silly implemented achievement system designed to test your abilities (e.g. beating four or more Hard AIs at once and for winning a map without researching ANYTHING in the combat tree). Really I can't say enough good stuff about this game. Will be a permanent fixture in my gaming library.

It's rare to find a game that captures good game play, storytelling, and usability. Mass Effect is this game. Using a third person perspective you will run and gun yourself through Bioware's story as Commander Shepard, make either Paragon or Renegade choices, complete the game and then LOVE doing it again, but this time as an Infiltrator or other class. Favorite NPCs have been Joker and Wrex as their writing is amazing.

Star Wars: The Old Republic's biggest features are it's class stories, companion, and alignment systems. A special runner-up prize will go to it's crew skills, but I'll get to that later. Bioware's claim to fame as always been it's writing and story. Characters and stories really seem to flow together and I frequently found myself doing quests because I wanted to keep the Imperials at bay, NOT to get to level 20; as a veteran MMO player this astounded me. Your companions are much more than pets. Though they do help in combat, they are also mini-chapters of the story themselves with priorities and personalities. Of course you cannot have a Star Wars game without the mention of the Light and Dark sides of the Force. Your character will travel down these paths frequently becoming either a bastion of good or an unholy terror on the universe. Whatever gripes I have with this game are very minor. In fact, my biggest concern has been the UI customization and that it being implemented in the next content patch.