A good spin-off from the Persona series. Game mechanics are pretty much the same as in Personas, the only difference is that the protagonist uses Archetypes instead. Decent, though slightly repetitive game loop, but with a major con: the game is too long. It took me around 80 hours to reach the end and do everything, and just like with Persona 5 (which took me more than 100 hours) I felt exhausted with the world and the game itself. Make it 60h long, add some optional super-dungeons and post-game bosses, and it would be perfect. All in all, I'm waiting for the sequel.
Hoooooly moly, what an addicting game. It's one of those that you know you will fail over and over again, but then it pushes you constantly to become a better Hades player. And then, on top of that, when you reach what you think is the end, the game actually throws more at you! Incredible. Easily one of the better (best?) games of 2020. Why 9 and not a 10? Because there's a little too much RNG involved. When you clear a stage you will have several paths to choose (usually no more than 2, sometimes just one). Above every door you'll see what rewards await you in the next room, but you have no real impact on what kind of boons you will get throughout the whole run. This means you can get very lucky and receive all the best boons in one playthrough and considerably weaker boons in the next, which makes for a slightly frustrating gameplay sometimes.
An enjoyable game, but only to a point. Where that point is depends entirely on the player, because every player copes differently with the feeling of growing boredom which comes from repetitiveness. Essentially, you have to do the same things over and over again to grind resources, which will allow you to: a) make your characters stronger, b) continue the story as you can only progress the story after you acquire a certain Adventurer Level, c) enter additional dungeons. You can cut this time short by buying premium resources with real money. That being said, the game is not pay-to-win. It is 100% beatable with a free-to-play account, you just have to prepare yourself for a festival of grind. So if you're not into grinding and you don't want to spend your money on it, I would take a pass.
TL;DR: Aria Chronicle is essentially Darkest Dungeon Lite in an anime setting. Gather heroes, send them off to missions, level up, rinse and repeat. PROS: - Nice anime visuals - A wide variety of heroes and team combinations - A decent story - Nice audio CONS: - Though Aria Chronicle is sort of like a Darkest Dungeon clone, the level difficulty is much lower, which actually makes the game *less* fun. At times I actually felt my characters are a little overpowered, which made dungeon crawling tedious. - Max level of your characters is 10, but at level 8 you have all your skills unlocked. Also, 8 is more than enough to finish the game. And since there's a Hero Succession system (in which your veteran, who you can easily replace later on, retires and gives away half of his EXP to another character) you can reach the 8th level very fast. After your main character reaches level 8, it's very easy to acquire more level 8 characters and upgrade the whole village, way before you actually need any level 8 characters (I managed to acquire a full party of "eights" when the world tier was still level 6). You can play post-game content and fight in the arena with your powerful characters, and grind for no reason at all, but until then the game is too easy and thus boring, offering very little replayability. - Dungeons are very repetitive and do not offer the same depth as the Darkest Dugeon dungeons. Summary: though I enjoyed the game for a while, it wasn't meaty enough for me to finish it. It does not offer enough of a challenge, which makes crawling tedious. If Darkest Dungeon was too much for you, but you liked the premise of the game, this might be a great find.
Simply said: even with no DLCs Crusader Kings III plays like a finished product right from the start, which -- in terms of games developed by Paradox Interactive -- means that this might be the best grand strategy created by them to date.
While this visual novel has a good start to the story and a decent ending, everything in between is a jumbled mess. It seemed like the developers had something much greater in mind, but their expectations fell short. All-in-all the novel holds out on its own, but just barely. PROS: Nice visuals; good music; interesting interrogation mechanics; strong start and an interesting end. CONS: The middle of the story is a jumbled mess with some inconsistencies; the characters are mostly paper cut-outs with an unbelievable development arc; some translation issues.
I have just finished the last chapter. I came to Metacritic to see how many white-supremacists-at-heart have wrote a review or left a rating. And, boy, I was not surprised when it turned out: a lot. Life is Strange 2 follows the story of two brothers. The brothers are Latinos, mind you, and the face most of the struggles Latinos face in modern day America, from police violence, to racism, to the hard-nosed bigotry of the anti-immigrant immigrants of the US of A. So, ask yourself those questions: are the immigrants taking your jobs? Should Trump build a wall on the southern border? Should PoC use different toilets / water fountains / buses? If you answered "Yes" to any of the above, don't buy this game. You will soon be as resentful as may of those kids whining about the "in-you-face" politics in the game. If you don't mind the game which touches some delicate subjects, you will be in for a treat, because the story is beautifully crafted, with the right balance of happy and sad moments. It doesn't mean that it won't break your heart. Oh, it will, at least several times, but at least there's light at the end of the tunnel. As with the first two installments, the game offers great graphics, that goes along beautifully with nice music score. The thing I disliked the most was I could not obtain all the souvenirs (which are collectibles needed for the PS4 Trophies) in my playthrough. After you finish the game, you can go back and get them all, but in some instances it takes a lot of time (and I mean, like, watching a 5 minute boring sequence), since you cannot rewind the scenes you've already seen. That ****. So, if you don't think yourself a privileged white dude who thinks the whole world is out there to bereave you of your entitlement, it's well worth giving the new season a try. Many beautiful moments guaranteed.
I feel like "Through the Darkest of Times" deserves a review, because it touches some very difficult subjects, while treating them with proper gravity. First of all, as a Pole, I'm touched somebody made a game about the atrocities of WWII, and had shown them from a perspective of regular people. We command a group of German citizens who try to resist the cruel **** regime in any way they can. But, whatever they do, it's more about surviving than it is about fighting the actual tyranny. At the same time, the devs manage to avoid any historical blunders. There are no "Polish death camps". Instead, we can see clearly Auschwitz was created by Germans. On that note, the terms "****" and "Germans" are used interchangeably. We're not opposing some mythical, impersonal ****, but normal German citizens who got swayed by the terrible propaganda or forced into submission by the sheer terror of the NSDAP. People who were our friends and neighbors not that long ago. There's no Holocaust denial. No historical revisionism -- the Soviets who are liberating the lands east of the Oder do not bring just the freedom, but also death and destruction. On the other hand the gameplay itself is very shallow. You have a group of dissidents who can take all sorts of actions: collect money for the cause, gain supporters, paint **** slogans on walls, and sabotage the regime. And while it all seems great, in reality you don't have to do much to beat the game. In truth, you can limit yourself to collecting money and gaining supporters, and leave the dangerous missions to... someone else? There are 4 chapters, and each one is 20 turns long. Since the consecutive chapters are like 3-4 years apart, if you won't manage to do something in the previous chapter, all progress is lost. You were one turn away from blowing up a **** factory? Sorry, you can't, move on to the next chapter. This **** big time, because at the end of the game you feel like you've accomplished absolutely nothing. So, what's the point of trying? Gaining supporters and collecting money is easy, and also enough to get by. Is that what it's all about? If there's a war just try to find **** to give you money in return for unfulfilled promises? I don't think so. That aside, while the strategical aspect of the game is rather poor, the game is still worth playing. It is an excellent history lesson, one everyone should play to understand war is not something to be desired, and the world's warmongers are just evil people. Think about it next time your government starts sending boys and girls to yet another "justified" conflict.
The game's main problem is that it is absolutely unforgiving. If anything goes down (and it takes just one zombie to overtake your whole colony, mind you!), you can retire the mission and start again. And the missions take hours sometimes. One wrong move, and you're done. And that's on "normal" difficulty. I mean, there are lower difficulty levels, but for some reason Easy is very easy, while Normal is very hard. That's just bad balance. The game has a lot of potential, but it's badly executed. I don't want to spend time on game that's going to punish me for little mistakes or some hasty decision when I'm playing on Normal. Sorry, move over game.
TL;DR: The Outer Worlds reminds me more of a Borderlands/Bioshock mix, than a Fallout tribute. It's much more "shooty" and much less "ar-pee-gee" than you'd think. It's not great, but not terrible. PROS: - Fun gameplay - Humor (dialogues and writing) - Story's decent enough to keep the player entertained - Good and diverse companions with a character of their own CONS: - Outdated graphics: I mean it's the end of 2019, and the game looks much more like Fallout 3 than Red Dead Redemption 2. Let's face it, on the outside the game's dated right from the start. It's not a deal breaker, but all those generic faces and interiors get dull pretty quick. - Boring quests: most missions in The Outer Worlds are classic fetch-quests, and not of the good kind. Almost every mission seems to follow the same pattern: receive a quest, go somewhere to shoot things, come back withe quest item and/or knowledge. It gets old pretty damn quick, and if it wasn't for the fact that shooting stuff is actually quite entertaining, the game would be a drag. - Bad pacing: it's almost always the same; you come across a new area, you gather all the quests you can, then you solve them, and move on to another area. There is no grand scheme of things that would push you forward. It almost seems like a linear shooter with just a tinge of RPG, and that's a definite con. And it's all pretty slow. - Poor equipment and character options: this game will seem quite easy even for an average player. It doesn't matter what kind of character you create. The same goes for your equipment. You can use whichever armor and guns, it hardly matters. This ain't no Fallout. IMO, The Outer Worlds got published a few years too late. Had it been competing with Borderlands 2, for example, it would have been a close call, but in 2019 it's just a pretty shallow action-RPG that only aspires to be a Fallout successor. In truth, though, it's much more an impostor. Wait for a sale, because it's not a bad game, just not one you NEED to play at the earliest convenience.
The Red Strings Club is a beautifully made adventure experience in which you will try to bring down a scheme of a corporation that tries to alter the world "for the better" in its own wicked ways. At the core of the game are some philosophical question about happiness, sadness, freedom and choice, which are actually not that easy to answer as some might think. Word of advice, this will be a difficult game for the right-wingers to swallow as it promotes freedom, the right to choose own path and non-hetero normative behaviors that the small-minded hate so much. If you don't mind, this game is a small gem.
I simply adore the Kingdom Rush series from Ironhide Game Studio, which is why I had to play Iron Marines. I tried to play it on my phone at first, but the RTS mechanics simply did not translate well to a touch screen, and the controls were clunky at best. When the game finally arrived on PCs, I made another approach and spent several evening with the game only to come to the conclusion that Ironhide Game Studio should simply stick to the Tower Defense mechanics. The game is not bad, by any means. It's simply okay and nothing more. Visuals and sound are top-notch as always, but the gameplay is just meh. In each mission you control a hero and several squads of base units (soldiers, mechs or empyreals [or simply Protoss]), and you go about the map, doing stuff. In the meantime you have to defend and develop your bases. Seems great, but in my experience it's just not that fun. The worst thing is the grind. You have to replay levels to develop your heroes who always start on level 1 (lvl 10 being max). The thing is, you'll unlock some of the heroes only after you've beat a good part or even the whole game, but level replayability is rather poor. What's more, after I unlocked the first few heroes, it turned out that the two base heroes are simply the best, because they use ranged weapons. All the other heroes mostly use melee attacks, and are all that much more difficult to control. Another part of the grind is earning the research points which you spend on upgrading your units. This way they receive more powerful abilities and become stronger overall. This is important if you want to beat the campaign as the missions are getting exponentially harder. But, since grinding is not really fun, and the mission replayability is low, the games becomes dull and repetitive at some point. In all seriousness, I would much rather this game was a sci-fi tower defense (maybe with some light base-building) than what it is now. I think I will wait for the Kingdom Rush: Vengeance to hit the PCs.
TL:DR Persona 5 is probably one of the best jRPG's since Ni No Kuni and possibly the best game I played in a while (with the exception of Witcher 3, which is a masterpiece). This is the type **** that comes once, maybe twice in a console generation and a must have for any jRPG's lover. I won't give it a 10, but it's very damn near. 9.5/10 for sure. Pros: - Phenomenal music. This has got to be at the top of this list. The OST is simply amazing. It's one of those things that I'll remember for a long, long time. Just listen to the "Persona 5 OST - Price" on YouTube and feel the vibe. - Great story and memorable characters (mostly). I wouldn't call the writing superb, but when the game is as long as Persona 5 (100+ hours for one playthrough), the story has to be good to keep you entertained. The characters are mostly interesting with some minor exceptions. - Entertaining confidance system through which you strenghten the bonds with you fellow teammates and other characters that are important to the story. Every person has a backstory, which makes them even more interesting. - Great battle system. It looks a bit like Pokemon and plays a little like Pokemon, and... that's just fine! Gathering new Personas is both fun and challenging, especially if you're looking to get that final trophy for catching them all. - Around 100 hours of great content, although... Cons: - I feel like the game could have been a little shorter. I think 80 hours for one playthrough would have been just right. It would have been enough to explore the game in-depth, and at the same time the ending seems like a little bit of a drag. Go get it, guys!
An absolutely dreadful reboot to a venerable game series. The game looks and plays like it was made some 10 years ago. The camera is awful and so are the controls, even though I was using a gamepad. The story is incredibly bland and the only good thing about it is that it's short (around 4-5 hours of rather lazy gameplay). The inventory is broken on so many levels. And most of all the game is very poorly optimized for PC (at times it feels like a poor console port). Black Mirror reboot will most probably be a huge disappointment for all Black Mirror fans like myself. I strongly advise you to stay away for this one.
A really great expansion, which under normal circumstances would receive a 10/10, but the fact that I began playing Blood and Wine just after finishing Hearts of Stone refrains me from doing so. Unlike Blood and Wine (which offers an additional location - Touissant), Hearts of Stone is a very linear adventure with several quests which follow in succesion. The story and characters are great, gameplay is expanded, the quests are very well written (just wait for the wedding reception!). All in all it's a great addition to the main storyline, but the expansion itself lacks a little freedom. Still, a must-have for any Witcher 3 players.
An absolute masterpiece. This expansion deserves a solid 10/10 just because it's easily the greatest expansion pack ever made. It offers 30+ hours of a completely new gameplay, with new quests, a huge, new area to discover, a ton of new loot, new enemies and much more. The expansion seems like a full-fledged game in itself, and could very well be a standalone title. This is truly an epic conclusion to probably the greatest game made to date. I put more than 250 hours into playing Witcher 3 with all its expansions, and I didn't regret a single second. An incredible, incredible journey, which every player should experience for himself.
TL;DR After all the updates (update 1.10 to be exact), Mass Effect: Andromeda turned out to be a well-above average game, that doesn't quite live up to the Mass Effect standards, but holds its own as an "independent" title. First off, I didn't play ME:A just after the release, due to the negative reviews. Bugs, graphical glitches, stability problems - nobody wants that, obviously. But a couple of months back EA offered the players a 10 hour demo version. I downloaded it, played through a few sittings and, well, I became a Pathfinder. Even if the game was a dreadful PoS riddled with bugs right after it hit the shelves, in the long term it turned out to be a very decent action RPG, offering a lot of content. PROS: - Exploration! This part is outstanding. I love exploring games and here I really felt like I was exploring another galaxy. Devs really put their minds to it, creating strange, new worlds that seem almost life-like. - A lot of content. I clocked almost 70 hours with the game and that says a lot. There are some quest fillers, that just send you on pointless errands, but there are also several interesting side-quests that bring some quality to the quantity. - Vast world. Not only there is a lot to do, there's also a lot to see. There are five explorable planets, and four of them are really big. This makes exploring so much fun, because you never know what else you just might find. - Combat. Since you're gonna shoot aliens a lot, it would be nice if combat was smooth and fun. And it is. Lots of guns, lots of powers, lots of customization choices. I really enjoyed it. CONS: - Bugs. Even in ver. 1.10 there are still some irritating bugs. The game seems to have problems with loading assets on-the-fly, so sometimes you might get stuck, because something suddenly appeared next to you. Same goes with quests. Some of them are semi-broken and you have to search for a workaround. That's not cool. - Animation and models. Though devs worked on making animations a little more bearable, they are still pretty bad at times. Same goes for the game models and facial expressions. I saw all the SJW comments and I think it's BS. The reason behind ugly animations and models seems to be a little more straightforward - the game was simply rushed. When you look at companies like CD Projekt or Blizzard, you know they aim for quality. They always say, the game will be there, when it's there. But with EA - they're just money-grabbers, so no wonder ME:A feels unpolished. It was released probably 6-12 months early, which ****, since ME:A 2 is now on ice, because of the bad publicity ME:A received after the release. A shame, really. All in all, ME:A is an enjoyable piece. If you're looking for another groundbreaking ME title... well, you might just going to wait a tat longer, but if you're searching for a good sci-fi AAA title with no strings attached, then ME:A should deliver.
Tacoma is a "walking simulator" that, in my opinion, has the best exposition in recent video game history. You watch the story unfold through recovered holo-vids that you can freely rewind and look at all the aspects of the story from many different angles. Aside from that you can thoroughly explore the space station on which the story takes place to get even more flavours. The game is very short (around 3 hours worth of walking around), but it feels like reading a finely crafted short story. If you're into dystopian sci-fi, it is worth looking at. Very enjoyable.
Despite being a very good game, Battle Brothers has one major flaw - no goal. Yes, it's fun to develop your crew, gather loot and gain renown in the land, but it really feels futile when you realize that it is all for naught. I really dislike endless games, since they feel unfinished. It **** when you can't get a sense of closure. Many players asked for mod support and I really hope the devs will listen at some point, since the game still has a lot of unused potential.
TL;DR: Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs seemed to be a decent pickup at first, but after a while it turned out that under a crunchy crust it's pretty half-baked. Regalia represents one of my favourite genres - the tactical RPGs. Maybe that is why I had very high hopes for this title. Unfortunately, the game didn't quite come through. Pros: + it is very pretty and voice acting is quite decent + the castle-building and relationship-developing parts are fun + there's some charm to the characters and their dialogues, there's some comedy, some witty remarks, it reminds me a little of Disgaea, which is great, but... Cons: - ...the story is so tedious I felt no drive whatsoever to find out what happens next. The premise is uninteresting and so is the development of the story. Frankly, the story seemed like just an excuse for grinding out gold, EXP and items. Unfortunately, that's the style of a low-level jRPGs. - combat pacing is dreadful. Everything is so slow. And I don't mean the movement of the characters (which you can change with one click), but the pacing overall. Each battle takes around 10-15 minutes to complete, and believe me - it's 5-10 minutes too long. Our heroes and their adversaries exchange never-ending blows, which makes combat a drag. This is important as fighting will take around 50% of game time. - the tactical side isn't particularly interesting either. Our heroes powers don't really give us a lot to go on, and very often it's just about which party can outlast the other (literally, healing - or rather armoring up - seems almost too important). There is very little room for improvisation. All in all Regalia is an ok game, but not much more. If you're a die hard fan of tactical RPGs, and you're looking for a pearl in the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics or Jeanne D'Arc from PSP, you might be disappointed. If you're just looking for any tactical game with a lighter side to it, you might just hit the paydirt.
Oh, man. Once again I've been hooked up on a nostalgia trip, and once again I've been disappointed. Thimbleweed Park is incredibly boring. Considering that Ron Gilbert, the designer of such smash hits lake the Manic Mansion and the Monkey Island games, was in on this project is a double disappointment. Where are the humorous dialogues from those previous games? Where is the story? Where are the characters? I mean, don't get me wrong, the game is not terrible, it's just not... good. It is like a low-budget indie game, even though the budget was not that low (come on, they made more that 600k on Kickstarter alone!). Truth be told I played better point-and-click adventures over the last few years, and their releases weren't blown out-of-proportion like Thimbleweed's. Once again I got myself hooked up on the nostalgia trip trick, and once again it failed me. Unfortunately.
TL;DR: Well below average for a Final Fantasy. It lacks the charm of FF IX, an engaging story of FF VII or memorable characters of FF X. Personally, I would rate it even below the lackluster FF XIII, which - obviously - is a bad sign. Pros: + Big and pretty open world, which you can explore quite freely + Good visuals, both in terms of textures and animations Cons: - Dreadful combat system. You basically hold one button (circle) to attack and another (square) to dodge. Many times I found myself just holding the circle and watching as my character blew away its opposition. There is no finesse in all that. I understand that this FF was supposed to be "for the fans and for the first-time players", but this... This is just dumbed-down to the point of absurdity. - Too many meaningless quests. Have you ever played Witcher 3? There's a ton of sidequests in Witcher 3. Some of them are fetch quests, sure, but ALL of them (and I mean ALL) are somehow memorable. Here, it's mostly, well... Bring me this, fetch me that. Booooring. - Riding the car. At first I was pretty excited to use the Regalia (that's the name of the car), but after a while driving it (or rather riding it) became a nightmare. Sometimes it takes five minutes for the car to reach its destination. Five minutes when you can do nothing but sightsee. Or make yourself a tea. Go to the toilet. Do something else. Anything. Otherwise you'll just waste your time. - No plot. Seriously. I was halfway through the game (maybe even a little further than that), and the number of exciting events equaled exactly zero. The game has no drive whatsoever. What, you mean that trying to regain the throne for an unlikable, spoiled brat is supposed to keep me in front of a TV for 40-50 hours. - Boring characters. That's pretty much self-explanatory. All in all this was a huge disappointment. I waited for this game since it was announced in... I dunno. 2006? Maybe back then it could be considered good. Ten years later it's average at best.
TL;DR, a decent game which I'm rating slightly higher than Pillars of Eternity. It manages to fix some of PoE flaws, while developing a bunch of its own. Just another average RPG, seemingly suggesting that the era of AAA isometric role-playing games is slowly coming to an end. Very minor spoilers ahead. Pros: + Story - some say it's rushed at the end (maybe a little), but I liked it. The lenght is ok (around 30-35 hours), but I'm guessing Obsidian left something for upcoming DLCs or possibly a next installment (depending on sales). + Main character development - I like the fact that you can get quite powerful, and it feels. In PoE you were a character of legend, yet everybody kicked your butt at every turn. Here, you can get powerful enough to smother every opposition, even though fight still seem challenging at times (difficulty level Hard and above). + Being bad - it is the centerpiece of this whole game. In other games being good or bad means that you have to act like a boy-scout or a complete ****. You never get to be truly malicious, unless you take high-school standards and consider bullying others an act of evil and not misguided duchebagery. In Tyranny being evil means what it should, like you're doing your job for a steel-fisted tyrant. That is good. + Spell-system - Very cool. You combine runes to create your own versions of spells. Playing as a mage, I really had fun with this. Cons: - Only 4 character party - Why?! Apart from the fact that there are only 6 NPC playable character in the game, I see no reason to make the party so small. BG had six, PoE had six, and here we have four. What's worse, neraly all characters are pretty bland. I remember Planescape: Torment had only 6 NPC characters, but they were so brilliantly written that it didn't matter in the least. - No freeroaming - That ticked me off. You can only get to new places by receiving a quest. You cannot just wander around the map, because... we, f*** you, that's why. Also, during one gameplay you won't be able to visit all the places at once. For example, I played with a mage and there was this Burning Library, a place where a lot of arcane knowledge is stored. I though, allright! I'm gonna leave that for dessert. Then the game cut me off, and I couldn't go to the Burning Library no more. I mean, WTF?! It's not like it burned down completely. Even the neding said it still burned. Damn. - Skill dihharea - There are just TOO. MANY. SKILLS. You have 5-6 skills from leveling up. 3-6 skills from your companions. 6-10 skills from fractions. Even more skills from your artifacts, and then there are, of course, spells. All in all you have a s**tload of skills, and you won't be using more than 20% of them (excluding spells, because those you craft yourself to you liking). - Boooooring item system - What is this - Diablo 3? You find so much useless junk I just can't believe it. The loot system is just slightly better than in PoE, but it is still pretty bad. And don't get me started on those artifacts. They are often worse than regular stuff. What the hell?! I remember finding a +2 sword in the first Baldur's Gate - genuine excitement. Here, after I find an artifact, I ask myself why do I even bother looking at its stats for the hundreth time. I originaly gave PoE a 7/10, and I thought about giving this game an 8, which would place it in the green zone, but even though it's slightly better than PoE I just can't force myself to do it. Seven it is. You might like it, you might not, but it's certainly worth a look.
Ember is a game that has a simplistic side to it. The story is simplistic. The leveling system is simplistic. The crafting is simplistic. Even the combat system is simplistic. Yet, at the very same time, the game is very absorbing, and has a real charm. The gameplay is a little rough around the edges. You can feel that this is a mobile port, which means a lot of clicking and drag'n'dropping which was probably much easier on iPad than it is with a mouse. This makes combat more than a little clanky and unintuitive. I suppose that on mobile devices it could have been a smash hit, but on PC it's "just" one of those RPGs that you'll play for 20+ hours and then move on to something more challenging. It is hard to define what makes this game so likable, but it has a "soul" that is difficult to come by these days in modern AAA games industry. Ember is surely well-worth its asking price
Not a game, not an experience, not really a walking simulator either. Hard to categorize this title, but one thing is for sure - it's awkward. There is some story, but Virginia won't allow you to follow it, because it will chaoticaly jump from scene to scene before you could even read half the text written on files. The characters are bland, and not only because they won't say a word, but because it's very hard to follow on who? where? what? why? The visuals are fine, but the world is as lifeless as it could be. You basically wander around empty spaces looking for a next spot to click (which is incredibly easy, considering that the mouse cursor changes after you hit a live spot). The only strong point is the score played by the Philharmonic Orchestra from Prague. That's why I'm giving this game a 3. Other than that, I'd tell you to stay away from this one. If you have to, watch it on youtube or something. It takes around two, two-and-a-half hours tops, and you'll be able to rewind the boring parts. For me it was a no-no.
Wow, I just can't get enough of this game. I mean, I know that it's almost the same as all the R&C games I played and loved on PS3. And I know it's a reboot, just some old-news-made-new, but it's still awesome in so many ways. The visuals are great. Audio is above average. Level design is top notch. Backtracking is fun. And last, but not least - the gameplay is pure destruction. There's one thing I really love about this game - it's the difficulty level. I'm playing on hard, and it feels like hard. I had to replay some fights, because the were... well, hard, but at no point did I feel cheated. I reached platinum with all three PS3 titles, and I'm sure I'm going to hit platinum again. Man, this game's good! Absolutely can't wait to go commando with the next installment. Hope it's gonna be here sooner rather than later.
This game would have been great, and could probably go on par with some of the most recent western RPG AA-games, if they just: - created a map for each area, because now it's just too easy to get lost among buildings that look pretty much the same (also, all the signs above the doors are in Chinese, so it's difficult to navigate) - prepare some kind of a journal or a log with quests or at least a place where the player could make notes; right now there is no such thing which makes following the main quest and sidequest a chore - translate the game in full; this is probably the funniest part, because at this point the game looks a bit like old pirated games where some parts of the text were missing or weren't translated. I've encountered more than a handful situations in which the text was in Chinese, and I had no idea, what the protagonist was talking about. Also, several times the translation didn't fit the window properly and the text was cut off in the middle. - deal with bugs, because at this moment there are too many, some of them game-breaking. If those issues were to be resolved, this game would be a pearl from the Far East. As is, it's just another below average title with many questionable design solutions, game-breaking bugs and overcomplicated plot.
This game is exactly why I stopped reading on-line reviews a while back. The only reason why I looked at Kotaku's review of this game is the fact that people here slammed them for being PC police. I read the review and it gave me instant cancer. The level of moronism in mainstream media is overwhelming. How people fail to understand that making a game that touches difficult subjects is pro-PC, and not the other way round, is beyond me. Especially that this game clearly states that some of the choices you might make are morally and legally wrong. Like the LGBT/Black/Pro-life supporters protests that you might be forced to quench - just before you make the choice to disperse the protest by force your deputy often states that people have the right to protest, and that their protest is proceeding peacefully. Only then you get to choose if you want to use force, and what's important - YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT. The game gives you a choice. After you decline to beat up the protestros you will get a call from the bastard-mayor, saying that they will make your life miserable, but if you're doing a good job managing your police officers and detectives, solving cases and keeping the crime in check, you are fine. Just like in real life. When you're at the very top, it's impossible to stay true to yourself and not step on someone's toes. FYI all you PC policemen - hate is a part of human nature, not talking about it won't make it disappear. Only cowards fail to meet the problem head-on, trying to sweep it under the rug. Oh, by the way "This is the Police" is a really cool police-themed micro-manager with an excellent visual novel-style story, nice voice acting and some fabulous jazz music. Highly recommended.
I've got a problem with Stellaris. Because the game is good. But it is also an unpolished product. You could even call it unfinished. Bare bones that still need a lot more on their frame. The situation is similar to Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV - both of those games are 2-4 years old and only just recently CK2 has become what I think Paradox wanted it to be from the begining. EU4 is the same, only I don't think they published all the DLCs quite yet. Stellaris might be another great game in PI portfolio, but not before there's a ton of updates and expansion packs. Right now there is a lot to work on - the diplomacy **** (my biggest mistake was to start the game as a peaceful race of scientists, and not because the other races conquered me, but because after a while I couldn't expand more without resorting to violence, which was prohibited by my people), the military part is limited to say the least (you can build your own ships, but why bother when you have the auto-upgrade option that gives you good results), and there is no real goal to achieve, other that "conquer the whole galaxy, unless you're a peaceful race in which case you can't". I will wait for the game to develop further because as of now it's just a below average product that will make you "WOW!" for several sitting, after which you will quickly notice that deep down it offers very little. At least for now.
Do not get disenchanted by the game's poor User Score. Kathy Rain is a really good point'n'click adventure game with good writing, interesting characters and strong voice acting. It is a vivid example of the fact that adventure games don't need stellar graphics and can thrive on story and atmosphere alone. One thing I was afraid of when I started playing is that the main character seemed like a product of a Mary Sue syndrome. She is a strong, college girl, a biker, a smart mouth and, of course, pretty. But the creator is a dude, so the theory doesn't stick. At least the character is consequential in her actions throughout the game. I wrote earlier that the game doesn't have stellar graphics and I stand by it. It doesn't change the fact, though, that Kathy Rain boasts some of the best pixel art in the last several years. Same goes for the sound. Voice acting is quite good and seems very well implemented for an indie game. All in all Kathy Rain is a recommendable title. Surely not the best adventure game ever, but definitely one of the few pearls in the last half-a-decade. With a low asking price it's a treat for any adventure gamer out there.
Not as good as some of the other Wadjet Eye games, but still worth the $15 asking price, especially that there is a real draught in the point-n-click adventures niche. Though the game may have been a little too easy and the story overall was lacking, the premises and setting were interesting enough to keep me entertained for 8 hours of gameplay. Pretty recommendable.
Okay, I am forced to change my opinion about this game. Soon after the release I picked it up and wass hugely disappoined. I gave the game a lowly 4/10 and pointed out that the game was full of bugs and poorly optimized. Just last week I saw that Satellite Reign received a series of updates that fixed some of the problems that annoyed me from the begining and I decided to give it another try. And even though the game is still flawed in many ways, it has been fixed enough to be playable and enjoyable. At this time, if you're looking for a cyberpunk treat, you might want to give this one a try. It is still full of questionable solutions when it comes to gameplay and story, but at least it is enough of a decent game to try it out.
I present to you a game about... opening doors! And I kid you not. Layers of Fear is a pretty good horror game that revolves around the story of a failed painter that seemingly descends into madness. The storyline is quite decent, though a little too cut-and-dried at times. Problem with the story is that it's stretched out to 5-6 hours of gameplay when in fact it should be 3 hours tops. The artistic side is very good, but that is something to be expected from Polish developers. The visuals are solid if not very good and audio quality is enough to maintain the atmosphere. No complaints here. The main problem of this game is that it's not really scary. Instead of building the tension, it relies on cheap jumpscares. You just go from door to door (you'll probably be sick of opening door for quite some time after you finish this title) and breeze through the rooms. Sometimes there'll be something to be found, sometimes there'll be a scripted event to watch, but most of the time you'll just be looking for the next door that will lead you to the next room where something might happen and make you jump. All in all, a recommendable game with decent story, palpable atmosphere and good visuals. If you don't mind some cheap scares then it's a game you might find interesting.
Easily one of the best rouge-like indie RPGs out there. I've been with this game since the Early Access and I clocked in many, many hours, watching tha game expand. Just after the final version was released I started the game from scratch (even though I had a game saved well after mid-game from early access) and I still can't seem to get away from the screen sometimes. I really can't understand the complaints about high RNG influence and the statements that luck is way more important than skill. Darkest Dungeon is ALL about skill. It's about creating the best possible combinations of characters and their skills, maximizing their chance of survival in hostile environments. And the game reminds you about it on the opening screen every single time you launch it. Yes, the gameplay feels harsh at times and there might be some frustration going, but at no point does the Darkest Dungeon feel unfair. Your characters will miss sometimes, but so will the enemies! Your heroes will bleed, get sick or even die sometimes, but it doesn't feel like it's because of bad luck. It's because the game is hard with no possibility of switching the difficulty to easy or casual. This is not a game for everyone, just like Demon's Souls or Bloodborne wasn't. Throughout my adventures I lost 3-4 heroes and every time it was because I didn't play it safe enough, when even the game reminds you many times: "Remember that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer". Yeah, learn the hard way. So if you're not one to run away in face of adversity or one of those people that would like the game to play itself with constant success and you wish for a bit of a challenge then pick up this game immediately. I guarantee that you won't regret it.
This game was way too over-hyped. All based on the fact that on screens (and in real life) it looks very pretty. But on contrary to what we're looking in a one-night-stand, it's the inside that counts. And the inside of this game is shallow and uninteresting, just like the one-night-standee might turn out to be. Some 10/10's want to us to think that there's something more behind this whole walking around the island and solving hundreds of maze puzzles. Nope. There are no little story pieces, just some random quotes from famous thinkers, like Albert Einstein. It doesn't give us any background, they're just quotes. Then there are the puzzles. At first I thought: "Oh, a maze puzzle, cool." Then I was: "Oh, that was a clever one. I feel smarter by solving this one." But after the 100th puzzle I was thinking: "is that all there is? I'm going to solve hundreds of puzzles to get several ray guns shoot that big thing on the top of the mountain?" Well, I looked it up and it turns out it's exactly that. Apparently you wander the island for hours and hours, solving one maze puzzle after another until you reach the end (which I didn't manage to accomplish, mind you) that makes all the puzzle solving completely futile. Neat. Why not buy a paper Sudoku booklet for like $.99 then, instead of spending $40 on a game which very principle is exactly the same - to get you thinking real hard. I won't go any lower than 4, because the game looks pretty. We had a one-night-stand together, but in all seriousness, I don't want to see it ever again.
I kind of hesitated whether I should give this one a 6 or a 7. Ultimately I decided to go with the higher score, based purely on the fact that the game actually got me stuck in front of the screen for the past couple evenings, though in reality it should have been a 6,5. Into the Void is a space exploring turn-based strategy game. You're given a small fleet (and I really mean small, since you're limited to a maximum of six ships) and you wander around some random galaxy scavenging resources and fighting your battles. There's even some backstory to it, but it's so uninteresting that I followed it only to get the general idea. The gist of this game is to grind out enough resources during each mission to research new stuff and expand your fleet. Since there are a lot of ways to arm your fleet, it actually is quite fun. The main problem is gameplay. At some point of the campaign you will probably build a fleet that will mop the galaxy's floor with any enemy your ships come across, even at higher difficulty levels. This is when the game gets boring. Yes, the enemy ships are tougher and have more firepower with each consecutive mission, but it rarely makes any difference, if you also retrofit your fleet on regular basis (which you do, obviously). Thus in every mission you'll have around 8-10 encounters that take 2-3 minutes of your time, even though it's painfully obvious the enemy doesn't stand a chance, before you get to this one meaningful battle at the end of the mission that tests your fleet a little more comprehensively. There's barely any sense of danger, which - in short - ****. Despite of its shortcomings Into the Void is still a nice little game to spend some time with and cheap enough to simply give it a try.
Hard West is average in almost every aspect. The visuals are neither bad, nor are they stellar. Music and sound overall is ok, but nothing more, really. The gameplay is fine, but it becomes rather 'meh' before too long. In fact it's so average that I thought about writing a longer review, but lost the will to do so mid-way. Kind of what happened when I was playing the game.
Pretty fun game with one big con - most of the time it feels like we're doing chores for no sensible purpose. The problem lies at its very foundation and the fact that the player is left with very little to no info on what to do and why. At the very end of an incredibly scant tutorial you are left with three words "Explore,build, expand". So you do explore, build and expand to the point where no wave of monsters can destroy your fortifications. Soon you discover a demon portal, but your archers are too weak and too few to destroy it so you look for something to help you in the woods. There you are ambushed by a horde of demons, because apparently you didn't notice it's getting dark. You die. Again. You have to start from scratch. Another three to five hours of your life wasted and you're not really any closer to solving, how to beat the game. That's when I decided that enough is enough and removed the game from my hard drive. Don't get me wrong, the game itself is fun, but with no clear purpose to aim for it gets boring after several tries. If you got a lot of free time on your hands, have fun. I know I had some for a time.
I must say I actually enjoyed this one. The previous installment, Dragonfall, was okay in terms of the story, but it felt a little too repetitive at times when it came to actual shadowrunning. In Hong Kong the story is a little less complicated, but the runs feel more polished and diverse. Also, guys at Harebrained Schemes completely revamped the matrix which feels much more like... matrix right now. At last my decker had an opportunity to operate as a true hacker and not some dude wandering through empty halls filled with digital monsters. Some technical aspects of the game have also been polished, which all-in-all makes this probably the best Shadowrun game to date.
Absolutely the greatest game made to date. Hands down. Period. That's all there is and everything you need to know is enclosed within the first sentence.
I picked the game up just yesterday and, boy, it's like I've been **** into a black hole. Dead in Bermuda is another fine example of the fact that indie games are indeed going in the right direction. You get a small game from a small publisher that can easily compete for your time (and money) with many triple-A titles that are just a waste of $$$. Highly recommended if you got some time to waste. EDIT: After finishing the game I lowered the score to 7 out of 10. All because of the fact that the game suffers from a mid-game crisis during which the game gets a little tedious. You're basically all set for the end-game (no one goes hungry or sick anymore), but you have to gradually discover the rest of the island (and it takes some time), while micro-managing your group. After several days it gets pretty boring. There is no real sense of danger anymore, but it doesn't matter, because there is no way to rush things up. Nevertheless, it is still an entertaining game (at least up to a point) and I stil recommend it.
This game barely made it to the "yellow zone". Ok, maybe it's not THAT bad, but it's not good either. The story seems interesting enough, the atmosphere is ok for a horror story, and the black and white depiction of the game world adds to the overall quality. But then comes the technical side of the game. The camera angles are terrible. Most of the time you have no idea what you're doing. Then there are the controls. On PC with each camera angle change the controls slightly change. One direction becomes antother. Left becomes up or down or sometimes even right, and before you know it, you run into a wall, instead of going clean through the door. Not cool when you have to run away from a ghost. Secondly you operare mostly in the darkness or near darkness with nothing but light from matches to rely on. That's ok, it adds to the atmosphere. What's not ok is when you have, several times during the game, go through a complete darkness with no light source whatsoever. Apart from a spot of light it's pitch black. Your character is black and there is no way to discern him from the background. Thus you get lost, a lot. I had to replay one stupid scene, not a difficult one!, 10 times, because I had no idea where my character was and got completely lost in the darknes. 10 secs in the dark and you're going coo-coo. Load. Repeat. Aaaaaaaargh! I managed to get through 3 out of 6 chapters, around 6 hours of game time in total. Wasn't able to finish. Game with potential, but really unpolished.
This game is very good. Addictive even with some nice features and an entertaining gameplay. So why the low score? Because this is very clearly an unfinished product. Many options are flat out unavailable and you only get a "coming soon" screen when you tap on them. Also, after you finish the game, Star Command gives you a hint that this first journey was just the beginning of your adventures, but in thruth it's also the last. After all there's no more new content, you can only replay the main story, which is very short and a little lacking. There are unfinished sub-plots, unused skill slots that were never implemented, and much, much more. I has some very high expectations toward this game, but in the end I was disappointed. The game's good, but it could've been great if they just put more content into it.
A suprisingly decent game. After reading opinions that this game is a bit like XCOM I really wanted to play it, and after I did I found out that... well... it wasn't XCOM at all. Even so, all those people who moan that the game not as intricate as XCOM are just plain whiners. This game is much more simplistic in its nature than XCOM and thanks to this it works fairly well. If it tried to be any more complicated it probably wouldn't stand a chance in comparison to the latest UFO series installment. Combat is much simpler than in XCOM. There is no cover, no flanking rules, and there are essentially only three hero classes (althought by mixing those you can get sevral sub-classes), which is actually ok in terms of gameplay. The bloodlines system is an interesting thing and as soon as you figure it out, you should have a lot of fun just searching for those perfect combinations. All in all this is a fun and even a little addictive 10-hour time waster that shouldn't be treated any other way. Even though Double Fine is still in the suspect zone for me for the way how they use crowdfunding operations I will give them half a credit for this game, hoping that it's a step in a good direction.
Poor man's Joe Dever's Lone Wolf. That about sums it up. And it actually is. Sorcery! is based on Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson, and it really doesn't live up to the expectations. The story itself is pretty dull, and there is almost no backstory. The character is a nobody (no name, no story, no nothing). Sometimes he says that he's a great warrior chosen to fulfil an important quest, but throughout the game he/she struggles to beat anyone. Maybe it's because of the awful fighting system. During a fight you have to choose how much stamina you want to put into an attack. And your computer opponent will counter that. Problem is that he always has the upper hand. AI obviously it always knows the value of your attack before he acts. You choose to defend (0 stamina), he also defends or hits you with the lightest of attacks to damage you. You try to analyze, look through the strategy the opponent is using, you restart the fight, and try to attack with light attack. What does the AI do? No, it does not defend. No, it does not attack you with a light attack it did before. Instead it attacks you with a hit that's 0.1 stronger than yours therefore damages your character. Seriously?! It would much rather like to see RNG here, but with the game being so bland I don't really care that much.
What a great game. I've been playing adventure games for more than two decades and I think I only had this much fun when I was playing Monkey Island seires (to which there are sevral references in BoUT2). Great script, great puzzles (challenging, yet sensible), great characters with good voice acting, and finally great dialogues with tons and tons of well placed pop-culture references and humour. The only drawback was the technical side. Sevral game breaking bugs almost did it for me. Fortunately an update was able to fix the game. Apart from that? Can't wait for the third installment. What a great game that will be.
I must say this is a pretty decent attempt to make something more of Joe Dever's original Lone Wolf series. For starters, it feels pretty much the same as the paragraphed books that some of us used to get excited about. We've got a pretty shoddy story, the hero - of whom we cannot really tell if he's a real badass, because of his immense Kai powers, or a total wuss, considering that he keeps sneaking most of the time, sometimes afraid even to stand up to a bunch of Giaks, creatures similar to goblins - and lots of lots of text. So, yeah, pretty much the same as the original. But all of this is fun somehow, just as the original, even though it feels a little cheesy (but, hey, the original games were designed in the 80s, there was a lot of cheese back then). There were two things I didn't like about the gameplay though - both of them concern combat. First of all it relies too much on our quickness. Sometimes we've got a perfect plan created in our mind, but we're just to slow with clicking. Yeah, I know this is a smartphone/tablet port, and most of those games rely on quick fingers, but for me it had too much of an arcade feeling to it. Secondly, the game is mostly about fighting. Yeah, you have to read a wall of text every now and then, but many (and I really mean many) times it's: "Hey, you just reached a point in your adventure where we put in some epic battles, so the monsters ambush you for no good reason, even though you just evaded them using your mighty camouflage skill". So, yeah, there's a ton of fighting. Also, be prepared to die quite often. Especially during random encounters that you should win without even breaking sweat. It's all about quick fingers and luck. And even though it seems that I should give this game a lower score, I'm giving it an 8. Because all in all this is a very good game. It took me 17 hours to finish the chapters and I had fun all the way (sans maybe those sevral frustrating moments when I had to replay some boss battles over and over again). So if you're a Lone Wolf fan - don't hestitate. Otherwise it's a 50/50. You'll either like it or not.
Another good start to the Telltale Game series (the other one was Borderlands). I'm not really that much into Game of Thrones, but this game got me going almost straight from the bat, up the unexpected finale. Story itself is nowhere near as enticing as the original, but it's well written enough to keep just the right amount of tension. Also, comparing it to different Telltale games lately, I had a feeling that my choices were of more consequences than in, say, TWD2. The biggest flaw? Once again it's more of an interactive experience with choices, than a game. You don't really collect any things, and you don't solve any puzzles. You just watch the show, and react to it. Not something I'd expect from a "game", even though I quite enjoyed this one.
I must say this in an excellent start to the new series. Well written story, memorable characters with good voice acting, and quite a lot of unforced humor. After the downer that was The Walking Dead Season 2, Telltale rebounded nicely. Although it really poses a question whether the publisher didn't spread it's resources too thin (especialy since they were working on TWD, Wolf Among Us, this game and also the upcoming Game of Thrones at almost the same time). The biggest flaw? I woldn't exactly call TftB a game. Tales from Monkey Island was a game. Both seasons of Sam&Max were games. This is more of an interactive experience with a series of casual QTEs, that let's you make some choices which turn out to have very limited consequences. If you get past that, you should have a really terrific time though.
