giskard

Since Fraxis dumped down Civilization 5 for the kiddies, us long term civ fans have not had a lot to get excited about and I really was not expecting much from Fallen Enchantress either. But it turned out to be an excellent game. This game mixes a full blown RPG (I am not kidding) with Civilization style gaming in a fantasy world. Not only do you create your own leader character like you would in any serious RPG, but he levels up as you progress. You can hire heros too which also level up. Build cities which level up as they grow and gain extra features. And do all the building that you expect inside a city in a civ style game. For an RPG Fan + Strategy fan, it does not get any better than this. Its a mix that works really well and drews you in pretty quickly. The only real tactic you need to know early on is to build lots of cities. Not only is it rock solid stable game with out a single crash in 15 hours of playing. But the world is just so rich and deep it has lore running like rivers across the landscape. AI players all have their own background story and special abilities and if you choose to play one your self if you want. But I like to create me own character. As with all good RPGs, weapon types, units, spells are all different, so are the enchantments. You get a lot of strategic options from mixing units you can build with your leader and heroes. Sometimes you can get your butt kicked simply because you had no ranged units in your army, other times you will win because you have something the enemy has no defence against. The battles you will see in the videos look crap, it nearly put me off buying the game but to be honest, its a lot more fun and lot more tactical that the videos make it appear. So before puking at the sight of the battles understand, the game is a lot better than that and you can auto fight the battles and skip that if you like too. The part I like is exploring the map, seeing a village or a temple or a ruin or something else and sending a unit to that square and either getting a quest or a bad guy to fight or both. You just do not get that in Civilization games. The games background story goes something like this. The old world is invaded by titans and the battle to destroy them lays waste the world. When the Titans are finally destroyed most of the life on the planet is wiped out and for the next hundred years, ancient beings called Elementals start appearing and taking over the world. Mean while several kingdoms and empires start to emerge, kingdoms being life loving types and empires being merchants of death. Empires follow the old titan teachings, where as kingdoms fight against it. Several premade AIs exist for both Empire and Kingdoms and to win you can either beat them to pulp, allie with them or our research them I believe. The usual stuff. Each element (pardon the pun) adds a layer or lore to the game, once that lore gets about 12 layers thick, as happens in this game, you could almost drowned in the game lore if not for the fact the campaign walks you through it in a nice fun way. Though I should add, the campaign is NOT a sandbox game and plays differently from sandbox since most of the options are disabled in the campaign which focuses more on the story than the world conquering strategies. Everybody I know who brought this game, loves it so far. Its turned out to be a hidden gem ****.

Don't you hate first day of release 10 scores, I mean how can they ever be accurate. Anyway, this is a very good squad based tactical shooter, but that is all it is. All the other xcom features are gone or simplified to the point they no longer matter. The base is just 5 menus, the whole Ant Farm Idea is just eye candy, very pretty eye candy but you never have to use it and even if you do, only the main ops section does anything. They gave up aliens invading your base for a pretty backdrop. UFOs are rare, which is strange for a game about UFOs because shooting them down in large numbers was kind of the whole point of these games. There is only 1 Alien base in the entire game, aliens do not establish bases in areas you failed to defend, you just get this one base and this is part of the main plot anyway. EG part of the story and not at all random in anyway. Cover in battles is so messed up you can be hit through solid walls without the wall being damaged or have zero percent chance of hitting an alien that is stood right next to you. Despite this, the battles are still very good. Aliens do not move around, they spawn when triggered, either by the player walking through invisible triggers that makes them suddenly appear, or by dropping out of the sky like magic or by just popping in to existence in front of your very eyes. Not very convincing. Again, despite this, the battles are still very good. You can play game without any fighters are all, some of my fighters have never been used or only used once after over 20 hours of game play. Unlike the original game where you had a lot of UFOs to shoot down and needed those fighters, that is just not the case here. Most of the time your dealing with UFO landings, but you never see the UFO fly to the spot and land, it just happens. Terror attacks on cities, abductions and a host of other missions make up the core squad based game play, this is what makes the game worth an 8 score on its own. Worth buying just for this if you like Squad based combat. As for the title making it sound like a UFO Enemy Unknown game, that is just a way to sell a Squad based game to an audience that may not have brought it if it was called ET Invasion or something. It may look like an UFO game but its not, there is no RPG elements in this worth speaking off, no strategy worth talking about. Just Squad based tactics, 1 out of the 3 elements that made the original game a classic is all that is left. My advice to those considering buying is this, if your looking for a Warhammer 40k style table top battle system for the PC then this game rates an 8 out of 10 and you will love it. But if your buying this game because you want a modern UFO Enemy Unknown (UFO Defence in the USA), dont bother, your wasting your money. I am going to score this game based on its squad gameplay and give it an 8, if I was to score it based on what it should have been as a UFO clone, it would only have gotten a 4. So if you want UFO Enemy Unknown DO NOT BUY THIS GAME, but if you like squad combat and thats all you care about, you will love this.

Risen 1 had that cheesy feel about it but turned out to be a very good game, Risen 2 is an improvement over Risen 1 in most ways. The best way to describe it "Pirates of the Caribbean" in RPG format. Combat is the worst part of the game, it has that Assassins creed/Batman/Witcher 2 close your eyes and left click issue, not very good but that is the worst part of the game. The rest gets better and better with each new island you sail to (which is a kind of cut scene based fast travel affair). At many points you have to make a choice that affects the rest of the game, the first choice is to help the natives or the Inquisition, which opens or closes various options in the game. Adding reply value to the game in the process. Spears thrown at you can be dodged by simply moving out of the way despite what somebody said in their review. But the secondary weapon, a pistol which you can shoot whilst fencing can also be used against you when fighting pirates which makes some fights more interesting than others thanks to this second attack. The NPCs are all unique, there are many laughs to be had in this game. Jaffar the Gnome has to be my favorite followed by the Native Chani and then Patty. I played the game for about 35 hours in the first play through but missed some quests, so it is over the 30 hour mark easily. The Story is interesting with many good settings for quest locations. There is an issue with distant items popping in to existence at close range making it hard to ignore, but I suspect this is to allow the game to work right on the consoles which might otherwise struggle to run this game if full detail was visible at greater distance. The islands and towns look great and the native villages feel authentic. Very nicely done actually. You can run this game in 2048x1152 with max detail on a 5 year old PC without issues. But it might be better if we had an option to increase the level of detail at a distance on the PC version in order to reduce the pop in effect. Much of what i have read from the low scores on Metacritics seems to come from people who have not actually finished the game yet or gotten past the first 2 islands. The only real issues in this rock solid stable game that I could see is the combat which is horrible and the pop in effect. Other than that, the game is great, hard to put down once you get going. I hope to see Jaffar again in Risen 3, he was so funny. As was patty :) Most peoples biggest gripe is the game costs £40. I have a value for money test which I apply to games that is a games value can be measured by the hours spent playing it. My test is £1 per how. This game lasted me 34 hours so its true value is £34 not £40. But since I enjoyed it and am likely to play it again, it may go to 70 hours next time making £40 look pretty good value for money. A great game, heartily recommend it.

Poor console based controls on the PC Version, poor support of hardware forcing you to turn down the detail to play a game that should easily be able to run smoothly on max settings and a cut scene heavy game to tell a story with very poor sections of game play in between. This is more movie than game and the game play elements are really pretty poor over all. If you like movies, perhaps renting the movie version of this if they make one would be a better and cheaper than buying it full price as a game only to end up watching the best parts because the interactive gameplay parts really ****.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Skyrim is a massive world, far bigger than we expected. Larger than Morrowind and Oblivion combined I would say. Too many locations to name, some very deep hand crafted dungeons, some simple buildings. I have spent 60 hours doing quests back to back and there is no sign of me running out of quests any time soon. The graphics for the pc version are below PC standards and the controls are right out of a console and very annoying, leading to wrong selections, the controls are the worst part of this game to be honest but you can live with them if you sware at bethesda for leaving them on the PC version a lot. The faction quests for the companions and others tend to be short, people are finding these to be a disappointment once they play the game for a while. The Civil war quests are also short but the main quest is long and lots of fun. There are 26 hours worth of quests in the main quest if you walk everywhere. This is the best Elder Scrolls game to date by a long shot, it delivers features previous games only got via mods, making many of the old favourite mods obselete because the game supports those things as standard now. It would be perfect if not for the UI and graphics but since I do not believe in perfect scores, I would give it a 9 but the UI it self is so annoying I am going to give it an 8 instead. Anybody buying this game is going to love it because all those who got it so far, already do. I am not joking.... this is going to be classic...

This game requires you to have an EA Origins account to play, if you previously registered a game with EA then you already have one of these accounts. Then you must download a 10gig install for the digital version, install Origins and a webbrowser plugin before you can even play the game. Then you have to wait for the updates, after downloading the files, the setting up of the game and its requirements took me 90 minutes last night the first time around, in what has to be described as a complete nightmare. By the end of it I was already extremely frustrated and annoyed with EA and this game. Not a good first impression. To get to this point I had to agree to no less than 3 different Eulas, one of which, the one for origins required me to give EA permission to collect data about me. No opt out option, if you want to play battlefield 3, you have to agree to this. Once everything was installed, I was presented with a webpage that is Battlefields main menu. That is right, Battlefield 3 has no standard in game menu. It is the ultimate in "you must have an internet connection to play" system, because without one, your not even going to get to the options screen to set things up. Even multiplayer games need the player to set up the game so it works best on their system and gives them a smooth frame rate. Unfortunately the best EAs auto system could do was Auto everything and set the screenmode to max, which is generally not good for a brand new shooter on my computer. Btw max res here is 2048 x 1152, that was the res it choose for my 3 year old Quadcore computer. I meat the requirements easily enough but I think you have to agree, that is a little extreme. Next I set up the server filter to give me a list of games that should have a good ping and tried to join one. 20 minutes later, I was still waiting for it to load the server. And that should have been a warning for me to give up and go and play Mount and Blade Warbands but I failed to take the hint and kept trying until 4 am by which time I gave up and went to bed. Just like the old gamespy system that added a few minutes to the join server process and often leads you to being disconnected because a server has filled up before you even get your game loaded, this has the same problem. Only this time its much much worse. The login process is basically downloading a list of players in the game. Only players join and quit so fast, it is out dated before you get a full list or even see the server. Once you get beyond the login and connecting messages, it starts to load the map, it is at this point you either see a black screen, or a loading map screen or a flashing white dot in the corner. If this works you can be connected in around 4 minutes. That was the time it took to let me join a server for the only 10 minute laggy game I managed to get in too since buying this game. I have literally only managed to play this for 10 minutes and then the map changed and I was disconnected and have not been able to join any more servers since then. The single player is joke, most of it a movie with parts where you have to hit space bar like crazy. Not the battlefield experience we buy the game for, thats for sure. The web interface plugin needed to join the game crashes out, Battlefield 3 crashes out, being able to join games at all seems to be a luxury reserved for the chosen ones, the lucky players that manage to play Battefield 3 without issue. After spending a total of 4 hours over 2 days to get in to the game, and only managing that one 10 minute game. I went searching the net for solutions and found this issue is pretty common. There are lots of people with this issue. The internet is literally full of reports of people who paid £40 for a game that does not let them join any servers. And none of the solutions posted actually work. Now I hate giving 10 scores or 0 scores but **** does not work at all, then a zero score is all I can give it. So a zero score is what this is getting. If you buy this game, you may find it is a cause of frustration and anger more than fun, never has a system been such a nightmare to setup and install, so invasion in what it demands from YOU, and never has a game that needed all that been so unforgiving buggy and unplayable. Take my advice, do not throw £40 away, do not wait for the bugs to fixed, just write this one off as a bad job and cheer Ubi for their excellent online copy protection system that everybody hates because compared to this, that is pure joy!

I am a huge fan of the original so Deus Ex Human Revolution had to meet some pretty high expectations to get a good review from me. Deus Ex HR does remain true to the Deus Ex formula and is not another Invisible War farce. The kind of game play here has been seen more recently in the Mass Effect games ironicaly borrowed heavily from the original Deus Ex 1. So we have 2 series of games driving each other forward it seems. Deus Ex 1 introduced us to missions that could be completed more than one way and upgrades that decided which way we did them. Unfortunately the original Deus Ex 1 got a little lost half way through the game and stopped supporting that, becoming a plain old shooter in the end with half hearted steps and the multi choice mission design. Which made the early game the favourite part of the original for most hard core fans. Deus Ex HR does not make that mistake, you have choices all the way through the game and best of all Deus Ex HR does a far better job of it than the original Deus Ex 1 did. So the gameplay is best described as Deus Ex 1 Statue of Liberty level on some very strong drugs. Every single level jn HR blows that original Deus Ex level away on game play terms and in terms of choices. The tools used to active this are simple, multiple paths to every destination exist, passwords can often be found on computers for security systems. So all you really need to do is decide if you want to be stealthy or gun ho and configure your character accordingly. Believe me you can take good 70% of the upgrades by the end of the game, so there is lots of room for experimentation here. Perhaps a little too much room actually. The difficulty levels are easy normal and hard though they use different words to describe them. I found Normal gets you killed just enough to make you think about each level. Thus turning HR in to an RPG rather than a shooter. If you play on easy, you find it becomes more of a shooter than an Deus Ex game and if you play on hard, which is called "Give me Deus Ex" difficulty, I fully expect you to be completely reliant on your upgrades to succeed. So the balance is great, though the bosses are more annoying cop outs than a real end of level story update that should have taken place. A sign of a problem that this game has actually. Unfortunately HR lacks a strong story line and its characters are too shallow to care about. You will not care about saving the main quest character the game is about. You will not care which NPCs around you die. This game is more action that story and you jump around from one place to the next so fast that the little details that made the first game special and where important to game in some ways are lost in translation in HR. HR is a far shallower game than the original Deus Ex as a result. And at about 25 hours long for the main story and side quests on the first play through, it is a short game than Deus Ex 1 too. Going by my £1 per hour rule to gage value for money, if you only play this game once, you will be ripped off by £5 if you buy it at full price. If you can make it to 30 hours it will be good value for money but given all those details I spoke about are missing, I am having a hard time working out where those extra 5 hours will come from. Still if do not care about such things than fine but you should because without a firm expected guide to game length you end up paying £30 for games that struggle to make the 10 hour make like Batman and Bioshock 1. So HR gets the game play right but fails on the story line and characters, basically it is swings and around about is. It is a good Deus Ex game, it delivers the gameplay we expect in spades and even sets new standards for future Deus Ex games. So it beats the original in some very important areas and falls short in other important areas. Which means its a great sequel because there are clearly ways this game can be improved in the net one and its not going to be hard to achieve next time now the formula is right for the game play again. PS avoid Deus Ex the invisible war, it is a farce from the start and has little or no relation to any other Deus Ex game. If you like Mass Effect, Vampire - The Masquerade Bloodlines, knights of the old republic or Deus Ex 1, then you will like Deus Ex HR too. This is a genre has a lot of fans when the formula is right and it is almost right here.

There is no doubt that for the first couple of hours this game does look like Tropico 3, but once the game gets going you start to see a whole new level to the game that just blows away Tropico 3. Though do miss certain radio DJs, the new features more than make up for it. For example the new disasters are features you will definitely want to leave turned on, they are just so cool. The fire station is not just eye candy, you actually need it, especially when the volcano erupts. Its never as bad as it sounds but looks pretty awesome in the game. The new features appear to work well and are best described as a nice think layer of coolness that lays over Tropico 3, taking Tropico 4 to a whole new level. I always thought Tropico 3 lacked the buildings to make it an island holiday resort, well there are lots to choose from now. I also thought the islands where a little small in Tropico 3, they are huge now. There is so much more to Tropico 4 than many here have made out, it is pretty clear to me that the reviews claiming it looks like Tropico 3 are from people who have not played it for more than 2 hours. When I get the chance I'll make a Youtube video of the game and prove my point to you all. In the mean time, this is worth getting even if you own Tropico 3 and Absolute power, trust me, its cool :)

The controls for this game are horrible, clearly designed with a console in mind with auto aim and all that sort thing, I turned them off but its still no where near good enough for a PC game. There is no precision hits like you expect from a PC game and that lets the game down in end and drops the score below 9. Other than that, this game is great, it has so many quests that even after 30 hours, I have still not done them all. The voice acting is good, the quests are good, the individual stories are good, the game has its own sense of humour and not every NPC you speak too will play fair with you. Just like real life. It has some of the best looking cities, dungeons and caves I have seen too. If you can put up with the console style controls, I recommend this game.

Whilst this game seems to be voted down for not being the Sims 3, which is perhaps unfair on Maxis who made their name making Sim Earth, Sim Ant and Simcity long before the Sims ever appeared. I am afraid I must agree with the low user scores given to this game. The camera is locked in various views denying a free roaming style we all expected, that means you have 1 view of all buildings, and that makes decorating them a little half arsed yet that is clearly supposed to be a major part of the game experience....shame the view kills it dead. Then you have fact that the entire game is basically 1 giant goffa quest that starts with the mysterious question, how I am supposed to do that, and from there you go and do it. There is little or no point to the game outside of those goffa quests other than selecting a building to add to your kingdom which in turn adds an NPC which then adds more quests. It really is one long series of boring quests that often make no sense at all in the context of the quest line you have chosen to play. So despite being a long term maxis fan, I cannot recommend this game to other maxis fans. Unless your under 13, in which case this may be fun for you.

This game has good voice acting and an interesting story but in the gameplay department where it really feels like a bad console game ported to the PC. IF you like to run and jump off things, if you like to run, sneak, walk or any combination of those things, if you like to choose the direction your facing and choose the target your hitting, if like to hit enemies stood on the step above you or below you or do any of the things you expect to be standard affairs in any RPG, then your in for a massive disappointment here because the Witcher 2 is a carefully controlled game that chooses those things for you. One like cut scenes with gameplay breaks using its dodgy AI. This game will not even run unless you turn your desktop resolution down to below 1920x1080 and set the game to the same resolution as your desktop. The register game window that offers a free troll quest, does not even accept keyboard input, so you cannot actually register the game and from what the official website says, they seem to be having serious issues with the servers that handle that. Overall, not a good game, its almost entirely eye candy and cut scenes getting all the positive scores, the game play it self is badly letting the side down.

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon is a little like a simple Total War game without the Battles, you just have a campaign map that has a very RUSE like, zoom in and out feel about it which is actually better than the total war campaign map in my opinion. It is actually very good, well balanced and challenging game. Definitely worth the price of a full price game, but you should be able to pick it up at half that price on steam these days. This is a game I consider to be a hidden gem from the indi world so if your a strategy fan, put this one on your to buy list next time your bored. I think you will have a pleasant surprise.

I got this game shortly after it was released and quickly realised this was not a Civilization game at all. The game play of this game consists mostly of next next next with the AI handling most things for you. All the challenges and fun of the series has been stripped away and replaced by want feels like a console version of Civilization. Also dipsite the patches, the slow down and lack around the 15th century is still so bad, I doubt I will be able to finish it. So far I have lacked the will power to try. Civilization 1 and Civilization 4 remain my 2 favourites, just so you know where I am coming from and what I liked about the Civ series. Fans of the old Civ games seem to have a universal hate for Civilization 5, where as new fans that have never seen it have no idea whats missing and so like it.

Dungeons is one of those games nobody expects to be any good but ends up being surprisingly good. Unfortunately, with it looking a lot like Dungeon Keeper, a lot of people are buying it thinking it is a clone of dungeon keeper and have been disappointed. Hence some of the low review scores. Fact is Dungeons is its own unique game which does pay homage to the older DK series but is a vastly different experience. It that will probably appeal more to Dungeon Designers and Theme/Tycoon game fans more than RTSG fans. The biggest shock for most is that in Dungeons you want the heroes to come in to your Dungeons and lay out a welcome mat for them. Then leading them around your dungeon until they get nice and fat on soul energy that rises when they have fun before you finally move in and kill them to harvest that soul energy and recover their gold. So you see, it has a unique feel about it.

Fallout New Vegas is one of the best Role Play Games available for scifi fans that I have seen in a long time. Deus Ex 1 being ranked as one of the other classics I enjoy. Fallout NVs game play is that of an RPG rather than a shoot as was the case with Fallout 3. So its a little different to play. But when you figure that out and stop charging in to the wasteland guns blazing, things settle down and become fun. Unfortunately the game has save game issues that lead to saves becoming useless sometime after level 15, usually before level 30. Turning off auto save, quick save and any other save and sticking to manual saves seem to help but after 200 hours of play, I have never made it to level 30 without my save corrupting. So good game, work buying but bugs are killing it.