blubberguts

It's just not very good. What's fun about action rpg games ? Loot, exploring, leveling up and battles. The loot ****. Very bland, so half the fun is gone right there. No gems to insert either. The "dungeons" are pretty much just big rectangular areas. That's it. Not enough variety means that exploration is boring. Leveling up is not fun. I don't like most of the skills, the seem uninteresting and useless. The bosses seem to fight mostly the same, they just *look* different. It's not a terrible game, just VERY mediocre and forgettable. I was really excited to try **** never played it again after the first day. It's just too meh. And now I;ve uninstalled it... The only thing it does better than T1 and T2 is looks. It;s actually quite pretty. But fun wise, exploration wise, gem wise, leveling up, **** all inferior. How did they get it so wrong?

Game is tedious. I was bored within minutes. 1. Don't like the art style 2. Don't like the music 3. All the rooms look like each other and make utterly no sense as rooms. They look like random pieces that have been assembled into a "room"....because that's what they are. Procedural content generation. 4. No inventory. No armour or weapons. Some of the greatest fun of a rogue-like is building an ever better set of armour and weapons....well you won't be doing that here. Instead, you just get new abilities. Even older games like Grim Dawn or Diablo 2 are more fun than this, and graphically better too. Do yourself a favour and avoid....

I was really attracted to this game and wanted to play it back when it came out. I liked the look, I liked the system, it was so pretty, and I was hooked storywise from the start by the treachery of Tartuccio. But bugs. So many bugs. So I put it away and waited..until last a couple of weeks ago. By then the games was up to patch 1.16d. Surely by now I could enjoy this great game? No. At one stage, the "i" for inventory button stopped working and i was unable to see the inventory ..then all the other hotkeys stopped working too...loading an old save did not fix this. In the end I had to exit out of the game and restart before the keys would work again. Sometimes enemies become invincible - for example there will be a set of goblins on a map and you will kill most of them easily but the last one will be **** will hit and hit but nothing kills him and finally your entire party is wiped **** you reload from an old save, go back in and discover he's just an ordinary enemy this time and wiped out in seconds... There are items that give bonuses like "ac+1" - now i know these don't stack; for example if you have two items that give "ac+1" on one character then only one of the bonuses will be applied...(you can see this by inspecting the armour bonus; it will list in green all the bonuses that got applied and red all those that were not applied) But i got one item that was NEVER applied, no matter who I gave it to, and didn't even appear in the listing, red OR **** may as well have been a piece of fluff. (I guess it was a cosmetic item!) I got my entire party up to level four and was able to wipe out several sets of **** set included a warrior, a necromancer, an archer and a thief but I got them all..then entered the next map and was wiped out by a single "mature leopard" who was apparently invincible...I watched the combat log and noone in my entire party, even the magic users, got a single hit against him until he eventually wipe us all out... a single leopard!! If they ever get the bugs out, it could be a good **** will they? It's been six months and from what I've seen for myself and others it's still a buggy mess, even to the point of game breaking bugs.... I'm giving a seven, because it's so beautiful and when it works - when combat isn't bugged and hotkeys function and monsters aren't invincible and your party ai works - it's fun. I hope they do a better job next time - guys, whoever did your coding needs a kick in the ass. Fire them and keep whoever did the music, the graphics, the story writing and music and item design. Better luck next time deepsilver.

A wonderful, fun game that is also disappointing. The game has great visuals, sound, and controls. The worst thing about it is the combat system, which is moronic. It is the same thing over and over **** around the battlefield pressing x or y (fast attack or slow attack) OR.... jump into the air and press X or Y. Or press a different button to fire your ranged weapon. It's boring and no fun. It also means all those different weapons and armor you find are less fun too. It's a shame and feels like a missed opportunity...would have been so much fun to try the different weapons and abilities against the different monsters in a turn based game. Is it worth playing? Yes. Very much so; I give it an 8. It's still fun because of the visuals and sound. But it would have been a 10 with good turn based combat. As it is a lot of the variety of weapons and armors and spells is just completely wasted; you barely notice the differences in combat.

Great game. If you've ever played Ultima VII or Eschalon this game will scratch that itch. Yes, the graphics are a little old fashioned and the interface could use some **** it's fun and there's a large world to explore. It has elements from Harvest moon (you can plant and grow stuff) and cooking sims (you can learn or buy recipes) and a dungeon explorer game. The aspects of the game are well crafted too; the cooking / pets / growing crops aspects are interesting *and* actually useful in the game. Really having fun with it; would love to see a game like this but with actual modern graphics (I'm fine with an isometric viewpoint, I'd just like a 3d isometric world instead of 2d tiles.) Give it a shot; this is one of those games that the more you play, the more rewarding it gets....

It's been years this I've found a wargame I really liked - in fact the last time I did it was Battle Isle on the Amiga. (25 years ago.) OOB is fun. There's a great variety of units; the controls are well thought out (A rarity for some reason in a TBW) and it's a pleasure to play. Instead of struggling with some arcane control system you can just concentrate on strategy. And there's a heap of depth here. Units can gain experience. Things done/not done in certain scenarios can carry over to later ones in the campaign. For example, in one campaign I won but did not finish destroying an enemy warship. The game informed me that the carrier will now spawn in the next scenario because it wasn't dead - so there are consequences for choices made, each scenario of a campaign is not played in vacuo. I really liked this. Victory objectives are achieved by capturing cities or destroying units earn you points with which you can buy more units. You can repair damaged units with fresh troops (lowering their experience) or seasoned ones, keeping their exp but costing you more replacement points. It reminds me a lot of Panzer General 2, only with better controls and graphics. I've never played any of the OOB games before yet in minutes I was able to get into it quickly, rather than slogging through a manual for hours. The tutorials are good; I've already completed the first three and only stopped to get on here and give a review. This is the most fun I've had with a wargame more more than 20 years - accessible, yet deep. On another note There's a review here by YoungBlood52 whinging about how Panzer General 2's graphics were better than this so I went and googled PG2. Very pastel graphics, much more so than this game, very limited colour palette. He doesn't seem to remember what PG2 *really* looked like. No wonder he can't find a game "like Panzer General 2". Because even PG2 wasn't as good as what he remembers. Nostalgia is deceptive. If you like turn based wargames, give this one a try.

What a missed opportunity this is. Dragon quest on a pc - an opportunity for greatness. Gone would be all the limitations imposed by consoles; you could have a large, open free-roaming game world for Dragon Questing in. But that isn't what we got. This is Dynasty Warriors with a Dragon Quest skin. There is no open world at all - instead you go through endless repeated battles in largish areas. Want to explore them? Too bad, you're too busy fighting off monsters. Well, at least we can kill the monsters and then explore? Nope, the game takes you back to the intermission area instantly when you kill the last monster. So the best you can do is run around fending off monsters while trying to explore. And that's all there is to the game. Fight a battle with hundreds of monsters, kill them all, then back to the intermission screen. Which also contains the shops, and chapel. No exploring and looking for new shops with new weapons in this game - you always go back to the same shop; new weapons just appear depending on what battle stage you just completed. It gets old very quickly. I'm only level 9 and it already feels repetitive. A lot of the fun of getting new swords and armour is gone too - because of constant heals from food drops from monsters during battles, there's no real edge or strategy here. All the different strike types are wasted, too - the best strategy just seems to be running around and whacking everything as fast as you can. The "dodge" button is almost useless, unless perhaps it's in the boss battles (For example dodging a tail swipe from the green dragon.) Art - some problems here. As usual DQ's art is very attractive. I liked the character models a lot - the colours are vibrant and the models match the old 2d sprites very closely. Someone did a top notch job. Unfortunately, whoever did the environments dropped the ball. Whereas the characters are bright and cartoony, the textures and environments are "realistic" and a bit dull - it's a style mismatch. In particular the foliage and the textures on the walls and other parts of the environment seem out of place - what is a dingy, dirty and cracked brick wall doing in this bright colourful cartoon world? It's a mixture of styles that makes the game a bit less attractive than it should have been. The environmental modeling too doesn't seem up to par with the character modeling, which is excellent. Perhaps they were done by different teams. But you'd think the art director would have been on the ball and told them to switch styles. If you've played DQ before you're going to be disappointed and it's probably not even going to feel like a DQ game; more like Dynasty warriors with the DQ characters dropped in it. What score to give it? Hard ****'s not the worst port I've ever seen; it doesn't seem to crash a lot. The DQ characters are the best thing about it and as usual are fun. But on the other hand it's a great missed opportunity for an open DQ world and a lot of the RPG fun and goodness is gone.... Seven. Could have been great, but some poor design choices mucked it up. Here's hoping they give us a REAL DQ on the pc next time. Sigh.

Brilliant. It's as if they took Fallen Enchantress and fixed everything that was wrong with it. The UI makes MUCH more sense, it's intuitive now. Crafting is fun. The doomsday clock adds excitement to lengthy campaign games. The map looks better now. No bugs or crashes after hours of play. Finally the tactical maps are much more fun. They look better and play better. I'm recommending this one to my friends. If you like fantasy strategy games, do yourself a favour and try this one. I notice there's a few very negative reviews out there - it might be that some people are still "punishing" **** for the buggy mess they released last time. It's been known to happen before. Keep an open mind, and try this for yourself. It's currently my favorite strategy game.

Something very funny is going on here. This is my second review of the game. The first was negative - and has been deleted. Other users have reported the same thing. This game is just not very good. The puzzles are awful - in one you explored a room step by step, never knowing when you were going to fall through an "invisible" hole. Once you did, the hole was marked on the map, and you had to climb back upstairs and go through the room again trying a new step in a different direction - until the entire floor is explored. Sound fun? It isn't. Graphics are mediocre, combat is one one worst systems I have ever seen (You stand in a box and "bullets" fly at you and you dodge them. That's it.) and the sound is also so so. So why is it getting so many high reviews? I don't know. It's almost like someone is performing a viral marketing experiment. The system seems to be being gamed. Negative reviews are being deleted. I wonder how long this one will stay up? Giving the game a zero. It just isn't any fun at all. I was bored within minutes.

A beautiful game with great music and sound effects. The problem is, there's just too much luck. This is like playing a slot machine. I played my heart out for 8 turns and got nowhere. Then I picked up a lucky card that grants you 1 prestige per turn for 3 **** 4 turns later I won the game. It's a shame, because there's so much to like. The idea is unique (to me, anyway) playing different characters is fun, the sound is great, the game is enjoyable to look at. But the thing about strategy games is...they have to be about using your mind to win, and this isn't. There's no doubt strategising helps *a little*, but it's overwhelmed by luck. If they could make the game less dependent on luck, I'd be willing to give it 9 or 9.5 (The game area itself is very small too in terms of hexes and quickly feels cramped, you see everything in a few turns.) I found this game very fun to play at first, but quickly lost interest. They need a bigger game board, a longer game and more things on the board (currently bare terrain, a settlement, or a stone **** much variety.) If they can make a few changes, they'd have a real winner on their hands. As it is, it just isn't a strategy game. Giving it and eight anyway because it's fun for a while.

A good game. Could have been a great game, but it's just too random; there is too much luck involved. Your strategising does help; but the most important thing in the game is chance. I've played for turn after turn and gotten nowhere (0 prestige ) and then suddenly gotten a card that allows me to gain 1 prestige per turn for the next three turns: After three turns I was prestige leader and was able to make the king choose to award me a 4th spirit crystal and I won. Armello is verging upon greatness. Music is top notch; visuals are some of the best I have ever seen. The whole game screams quality and care. They really put effort into it and I congratulate them. Unfortunately the thing about strategy gamers **** want to think to win. Armello is more like a slot machine; whoever is the luckiest wins. My interest is already waning...when I've won, it's because I got a lucky break so it's hard to take pride in it; when I lost it's usually because I was unlucky so it's infuriating. There's no denying there is SOME strategy in the game; however it is far outweighed by luck. When I can play for 8 turns and gain zero prestige; only to get 3 prestige in the next three turns because I got a lucky **** am I supposed to feel skillful? Was I skillful in getting a lucky card? Perhaps a patch could fix this, but I doubt it. I think there needs to be an Armello Two and athey need to make some serious adjustments to the game. I'm giving it 8 anyway because it has been fun to play for a while , it's beautiful and sounds beautiful and is a high quality product. But I doubt if anyone will be playing it for more than a week. Better luck next time guys please make the game less reliant on luck and more on skill and you've got a 10 on your hands.

I had seen screenshots and was looking forward to this game, but it was a disappointment. The start is good, city looks pretty, and your boat lands. You lay your brother down and start off to explore the city...what ? I can't jump? I can climb like goat but can't jump? Feels weird. So you explore the city....which consists of finding boxy buildings with bits of moss you can climb, and "bumping" into them. The game takes over and puts you on the wall. Hmmmm... you cannot fall. Also, there is only one path to climb each building. No enemies either. And my brother just lies there. All I can do is boat around and climb a preset path. Excitement is rapidly fading. This isn't a sandbox game it's just a game full of big boxes. There are three kinds of rewards: Climb the building completely and get rewarded with a look through the telescope to the next kind of building. Also, each building may have a box of health for your brother. It also may have little books on pedestals - if you get one it tells a "story" by showing you a single, brightly coloured heavily stylised image of something, and some grunts in an unknown native language. So what's the story? I don't know; the language is unintelligible and the pictures are so highly stylised I couldn't understand what they meant. So. No enemies. No way to die. Only one thing to do - explore. No-one to talk to. (Even your brother just lies there). No rewards except books I can't understand and health kits for my brother that don't do anything - you just "collect" them. Only one path up the buildings, apart from a secret area where a book or health kit might be. This game is pretty and that's it. It's kind of fake; what looks like a big city teeming with life turns out to be full of empty buildings (most of which you cannot climb) and nothing else. Oh man it was boring. Deleted and uninstalled. Let it submerge back into the depths from which it emerged. It's a terge.

As someone who's been playing computer games since pong, about 40 years of gaming... I have to tell you that this is currently the best RPG ever made. A big claim, but D:OS deserves it. Wonderful graphics, fascinating and deep fighting system, turn based so you can *think* about your moves rather than just reacting, beautiful scenery and monsters, ENORMOUS world, heaps of varied and interesting loot, great plot with twists and turns that surprise you, this game does everything right. Currently standing at 9.0 for the user score, I have to tell you that isn't fair. They deserve a 10 for this. Of all the previous greats - Planescape, Planetside, Baldur's Gate, Oblivion, SkyRim - this is the best. It should become the new yardstick for RPG's, eg: "This game is good, but it's no Original Sin.." To repeat: This game currently stands rated at 9.0 and it's underrated. It's a 10. You must try it, if you like RPG's and like deep games you will love it.

This is NOT a "Sacred" game. This is NOT Sacred 3, even though it's called that. What it is, is a bland imitation of Diablo, or Torchlight, or Van Helsing, or Titan Quest. It is not open world, it's totally linear - just fighting through corridors the whole way. Calling this Sacred borders on fraud. It's ok, but you've seen it all before; endless brain dead fighting against never ending hordes of enemies. Some of it is downright stupid, as if designed by an idiot: For example, some enemies have "shields"; they are invulnerable unless you break their shield. To fight them, you press a key - and their shields instantly break (Literally; It happens with one keypress) and then you can kill them. Why the hell would anyone carry a shield into battle then? What kind of idiot would think this makes a fun, interesting or challenging fighting system? Note to Deep Silver: Fire whoever designed the fighting system. Keep whoever did the graphics. Fire whoever pushed for the closed world system - instead of an interesting game where I choose what to do, we got a piece of **** that tells me where to go and what to do. In it's own right, as an action VERY lite RPG clone, it's a niceish-looking meh-playing 5 or 6 out of 10. But as "Sacred 3" this is a 2.

At lot of fun ..at first. Especially against the computer players. Then you reach PVP and it's pay to win. I remember I had cards that cost 2 mana and did 1 damage .. others had cards that cost 1 mana and did 3 damage. No matter what you do, unless you pay, you aren't going to win. It's a shame. Graphically, I really like the game, it has loads of style. The cards look good, the colours are clear and bright, the animations are great. The voices and sounds are good too. As you'd expect, coming from the creators of WOW, it's a work of quality. I really enjoyed playing ..until I got to PVP. I have a suggestion for Blizzard. TWO sets of leagues. One league for "skill" players only. There are no cards or advantages you can buy, the winner is determined by sheer skill (And luck in the draw, of course, but that averages out the more games you play.) This will draw in a huge number of people and generate buzz. The other league for players who bought cards. Both sets of gamers could be happy! If you do this, I will go back to playing again. Until then, no more for me. 7/10 for this. Would have been 9 or 10, except for the pay-to-win. Apart from that, it's an excellent game. I recommend people try it anyway; until you get to pvp, it's the best card battle game I ever played.

Just not very good. I've already uninstalled it. 1. Everything is linear. Forget exploring; mostly you're just following where the game wants you to go. You don't play this game; it plays you. 2. The colours are poor. Seems like someone thought a film-noir-esque palette of drab, washed-out shades would make it seem serious and dramatic; instead it just looks monotonous, lifeless and cheerless. 3. The camera does weird things. Click on an item and the camera zooms in close to watch your hands pick it up. This is a serious pain in the arse and after a while made me feel sick as it shook and lurched about.. 4. It doesn't feel like a thief game - in fact, it looks and feels like Dishonoured. Dishonoured is a great game, but I wanted a "Thief" game. 5. Graphics, apart from the colour palette are not too bad. But in places there are laughable errors. Right at the beginning I opened a window onto a bay .... and saw the water moving around. Only someone had screwed up the scale; instead of advancing and receding by say a metre or so, the water moved entire boat lengths in a second, so fast that any boats in the bay and the bridge itself would have been shaken to bits in moments. How could someone not notice this? It's right there as soon as you open the window almost at the very start? 6. The writing is kind of blah. How about they start hiring real writers? If you've got a multi-million dollar franchise please spend a couple of hundred K on a real writer. The script as it is seems about the same level as fan fiction. Next time please get someone who writes real books. 7. The game suffers from consolitis. A lot of the decisions (Linearity, small draw distances, no real exploring) are obviously constraints placed upon the designers by their decision to make it compatible with consoles. But that means they cannot use the PC's strengths: the large drive space and greater memory. So you get a "consolised" game: A game cut into small easily digestible chunks for consoles. 8. The game is dumbed-down. A lot easier than earlier "Thief" games. That's fine if you like that sort of thing, and some people will. Casual gamers might like it. But if you're looking for a game that will challenge you or make you think, better look elsewhere. To summarize: Meh. I'd rather play Thief 1, 2 or 3.

I started playing this and could not stop. I only paused to write this review and then I'm getting right back into it again. This game is retro done right - no weird art styles to make the game "look" retro, instead they took an old game system and rejuvenated it . The entire game is turn based - in dungeons and overworld. And every step has to be thought about. The fights are brutally hard, even on adventurer level. If you don't think about every choice, you're going to die. The loot is interesting. The battles are fun. The enemies are varied. The overworld has a lot of interesting stuff - exploration pays off, that square of land a few steps away may contain some loose dirt that needs to be dug in, or a hidden shrine to some god tucked away on the side that will give you valuable benefits you may *need* to get past the next fight. Fights are tough but fair. Magic is interesting. Character/racial choices have a huge effect on gameplay - for example some characters may only be able to get to "novice" on swordplay, whereas someone else may be able to become a grand master. (There are four levels: Novice, expert, master, grandmaster, for every skill.) If you particularly want a grandmaster healer, you better pick the right race AND occupation. There are a few minor blemishes - movements keys are set up so that WASD, rather than being what most people are probably used to, is Forward/Left/Backward/Right. But as the keys are reconfigurable you can fix this in seconds. Also on the overworld map trees spin in place each time you take a step. Minor stuff indeed. What you need to know is, this game is FUN. Not because it's retro, but because it's tough but fair and thought is rewarded. It's as if chess and D&D had a beautiful baby. If you like RPG's or if you like strategy, TRY THIS GAME. I can't wait to see what the devs do next. I congratulate them for a wonderful first outing and I'm really hoping they do an M&M XI.

I got this for the kids, and began playing to assist them. From then on I played for me! I can't believe just how much they put into this. When I got to Rivendell I was awed. It's breathtaking. For me this is the peak of Traveler's Tales Lego series. Beautiful to look at, fun to play, awesome music, great modeling, lots of secrets and **** you like LOTR you MUST get this game. Even if you don't, it's a great game in it's own right. PS I am playing with an Xbox 350 controller (USB version) on the PC, I think that may be the best way to experience it... well done Traveler's Tales.

**** got it right this time. THIS is the game that Elemental should have been. It's not without flaws - the interface is still a bit unintuitive, and sometimes doesn't respond to clicks. There seems to be no way to scroll the battlefield - not WASD or cursor keys; instead you zoom out, point your cursor somewhere else, and zoom back in. Cumbersome. Why didn't the testers pick this up? But the core game is finally there. Battles are fun. The world is interesting to explore. The story is ok. Lots of equipment with strategy changing stats. The cities look great and so do the units. Battle animations are nice and it's fun just to see the different monsters, they look good and move well. I'm having fun. I disagree with Guinevere, it DOES have that one-more-turn feeling. It's 11pm and I have to work tomorrow but as this review is now finished I'm off to start a new game .... :-) Well done ****! And Kudos to Brad Wardell for giving it free to "Elemental" buyers.

Disappointing. Loved the original Kings Bounty and the sequels, it was what Heroes of Might and Magic should have been. All about strategy, not overwhelming someone with greater numbers.. But this is so so. The 'Rune" selection seems to add nothing to strategy, it's just an extra button to click, making fights more annoying and long winded. The Viking units seem weird. Their abilities don't seem to mesh well together. To cap it off, with the original games, you never knew what mix of units and artifacts you would get at start and throughout the islands. This meant that you had to change your strategy depending on your available units. Every game felt fresh, even though you'd already completed it. (I still play it from time to time.) But with this, you always start off with the same units. Finally, this is the fourth iteration of the series with the same graphical engine. It's a good engine and still looks ok, but it needs an update. In summary this just looks like a quick, not very well developed cash-in. Note: If you've never played KB before, it IS worth buying. If you've played the other three (or five, if you're old enough to remember the ps2 and Amiga versions!!) this will seem tired.