amontillado

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

First things first: this game doesn't hold your hand. Secondly, it's immersive as hell. You come into a **** world, at first, seemingly being ripped apart by a singular faction, the usual baddies that you have to chop, shoot, peck, flame, and just all around wreck their stuff. But midway through, you find another faction is at it too, wanting to add their portion of misery. Now, you can pay attention to the clues, because you aren't outright told what all is happening, you get it in portions. This is good storytelling, no exposition buffet, dumped on your lap. So while you're getting a good helping of plot, you battle enemies. Standard stuff you may think. Least I did at first, grew up on D2 LOD and dabbled in Torchlight 2, so it seemed straightforward. But then, then you go to pick your class (which starts at level 5, not straight away - the people know thing or two about easing you into the gameplay) and you have several different classes to pick from, and if you got the DLC, you get a second class to choose from starting at level 10, to make a third class. Then it hits you, oh man, it isn't going to be as simple as click-until-it-dies. No, no you have to think about how you want to flavor click-until-it-dies. Now as you're pondering these choices, you see these levels and all this loot dropping, cause you figure the game is really generous and this seems to be pretty rich and wonderfully done level design for a rogue-like, but it isn't a roguelike. No, people took time and effort to design the levels, from the look to how you the player should experience it. And goddamn did they hit it out of the park! Not only did the good people doing god's work at Crate Entertainment know a thing or two about level design, but they knew how you were probably feeling as you're progressing. Usually you get tossed into the deep end, a whole bunch of crap thrown at you at once, but then the level opens up, breathes a little, before you wade into the next bunch of hell. And oh man, hell is where we are. From the journal snippets, to letters, to orders, you get a sense of what this world was like when hell-broke-loose. You get a sense and it logically makes sense, how people reacted to seeing their world fall apart. And you think, oh man this is great, but I guess I can skip it. And sure, you can, but one of the things that's helpful is that when you ever wonder about what should be motivating you as you move along in this world, what keeps your character wanting to wade into the mess again, these letters, journals, detailing how everyday people, how their world has been interrupted by a bunch of **** who's only reason, it seems, to invade in the first place is that they were bored of their realm of existence and have no qualms ripping humanity a new one. But not today! So, as you progress, adding spells and skills to fireoff in a middle of a fight, navigating twisting, richly textured environments that pay you big time for exploring, the loot, the loot! The loot becomes an element of a fight, so much drops that you have to pick it up just so you can see some more baddies to fight. And oh man, the diversity and the richness of the enemies, my god, there has to be like 70 - 90 different enemies! No recycling of behaviours, with different factions having different units that have unique styles that you have to learn and adapt to. And each fight takes on its own tempo, some you can breeze, others become a frantic, to the knife's edge. Each fight progresses and builds, so by the time you are coming to the end, the fights are bigger, more intense, and everything, everything you have been learning, adapting is building up to these end fights. And then it htis you. This has been well-designed. This game was made with care, attention, with detail, with love. The game designers and everyone at Crate Entertainment loved what they were making and keep adding to. And they understand what they made. These people are magnificent. Do yourself a favor, if you like ARPGs or hell, just want a good, rich game with intricate gameplay and a good story, this is it. Buy it, play it, love it.

This is a wonderful follow up to "Until Dawn" that goes a different route instead of replicating the sickening creepiness of "Until Dawn." Instead of sickening horror, the horror is not just the monster appearance but also how the monsters came to be, "Man of Medan" takes its cues from "Tales of the Crypt" and "The Shining." This is more of a fun creep fest than intense disturbance. In fact, during gameplay, thinking of "Outlast 2" which tried to replicate the intense horror of "Outlast 1" but misstep with having an open air environment, which took away the claustrophobic horror from the first one. The smart move here has been to recognize that once the novelty wears off, you can't replicate what made an initial entry spark - you need to build on the previous one. "Man of Medan" takes the core gameplay of the first and adds to it, by introducing us to the grander, episodic world. How intense can you replicate a known horror? Part of horror is the unknown ,that the mystery itself is horrifying, and so, if drama is ruled out, well the flipside of drama is comedy. Where we may have initially wanted to murder each of the main characters in "Until Dawn" straight away, "Man of Medan" presents characters you root for - maybe with the exception of Conrad, he's jackass, but can grow on you. Instead of an facile open air environment, being trapped on a mountain and the monsters induce claustrophobia, the story situates itself in a physically claustrophobic environment. And since we have a playful narrator and the intro has set the tone of "Tales of the Crypt," you feel as if you're peering in on a haunted house - seeing the set up for a good scare and waiting, just waiting, for the scare to drop, to see the characters jump back as their minds play tricks on them. So, if you're looking for intense, disturbing horror - this will not be your cup of tea. If you're looking for a good time, a spookfest, and feeling like you get to be in on the joke as you watch a character walk into a "Uh - oh, oh no" moment, then this is your cup of tea. Lots of fun, good spooks, but most importantly, a good time!

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

If you are a fan of the Total War series, this is an adequate entry, but it isn't a strong one. The interface can be confusing, at first, and many of the simplified battle mechanics are more complex - so you need to take some time to learn it. This feature, in particular, is frustrating when you're very first campaign mission begins with a battle and there is little intuition from the interface; especially frustrating if you're a veteran of the series and feel like an idiot for not understanding. Yet, much of the commentary about the frustration of the battle mechanics, campaign, etc. boils down to a problem of the developer's goals and gamer audience needs'. From the gamer's POV, we want a streamlined, intuitive system so we can jump right into the game and explore it. We want the immersion of the experience without being jolted out of it by bugs or gameplay failures. From the developer's standpoint, the feeling is that they wanted to bring home the realism of battle in that time, shooting for historical accuracy as much as possible. What got sacrificed in a spirit of authenticity was streamlined gameplay. It does bring home how rain affected battles when you the general have to navigate through the fog of war, essentially. It brought home how spread these empires were and how much time, concentration, and energy went into establishing a global network in a time when information moved slower. And it does bring home the frustration of navigating troops and ships prior to the telegraph and much later, radio-based communication. So what we have is a game that from an historical standpoint, fairly accurate. From the gamer standpoint, very obnoxious. Puzzling, do we reject or accept it, but we cannot do either as it won on one perspective but lost another. If you play this, choose which way you want to approach it, for if you approach it as just a game then you will be disappointed. If you approach it as a simulation of an historical period, you will find some enjoyment, but it does test your resolve and patience. And that, is probably why it does not score as high as it could have.

Overall: a good game but certain core mechanics stop it from being a great game. It is repetitive and in the late game it can become monotonous fending off an easy alien attack while waiting for a research project to get done. At times glitchy, the pacing is affected in both tactical and combat situations when short cut scenes play everytime your character misses or scores a critical hit. It's good for when you're in between games or want to do a casual tactical game. Otherwise, it doesn't present enough challenge, variety, or smooth gameplay flow to make it a strong, day in, day out game.