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4/10 to balance out the hype. Just like the last big gaming releases backed by social media marketing, the release of Baldur's Gate 3 has again pointed to the roots of marketing hypes and public relations: Propaganda. People become devotees up in arms against anyone who stands in the way of its Gloriousness, its Holyness, its Singularity. "GOTY, GOTY, GOTY !!!", consumed and forgotten one after the other. It's sad to see how the name of Baldur's Gate is used for an entirely different game that is also a part of all this frenetic and agitated hollowness that is shaping the current gaming industry as well as groupthink mentality. In this context, the actual game and its content have become pretty much irrelevant. BG3 is a professional industry-product. But it has almost nothing in common with the original 2 games. So what's the difference between BG 3 and the original two games which stayed in the memories of a whole generation of gamers? - BG 1+2: A personal journey with mysterious locations, epic tales, and legendary treasures to uncover. You start as a nobody that slowly gets involved in grander schemes while growing in power until your party fights the very gods that tried to exploit you. Pacing is great. - BG 3: A sequence of beautiful but arbitrary set pieces with random junk loot scattered around. The story starts with a bombastic climax as your lvl 1 party is already breaking out **** flying prison made out of tentacles. - BG 1+2: At its time an innovative and very fun combat system, "real time with pause", that translated the D&D rules to the computer medium and kept the narrative flowing while still providing a lot of tactical maneuverability because you could pause the action at any time. - BG 3: Common and generally slow turn-based system adapted from Divinity Original Sin where archdemons wait in line like orderly citizens. - BG 1+2: Charming and endearing characters with a wide range of personalities. Jon Irenicus as an iconic villain. - BG 3: In essence and in contrast to the supposed "uniqueness", the companions of BG3 act very trendy. The style is hip, the substance is square. A nod to mainstream fiction which is full of edgy antiheroes. - BG 1 + 2: Witty and nuanced high fantasy, reflections on the human condition and the thirst for power. - BG 3: Complete checklist of aggravatingly shallow identity politics, that fails to reflect that fiction can be more than just superficial representation without becoming reactionary. A disservice to truely progressive politics because of the heavy-handed moralizing involved. - BG 1+2: A gift by crazily talented people that wanted to share their passion. - BG 3: A fancy and stylized product based on a famous brand, made by industry experts. - BG 1+2: Ran on an average computer, just as Divinity Original Sin 2 which provided the engine for BG3. - BG3: Time to upgrade! Overpriced graphic cards have long enough been waiting for such an opportunity. After all these years, Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't change direction by building on its predecessors strengths, it rather escalates a sad trend by trying to assimilate the identity and brand of good old games while omitting most of the original's defining content.

It's sad to see they actually and purposefully tried to copy Games of Thrones' style. Especially in the case of Final Fantasy... that's even more disheartening than FF16's story itself. So many big games and other works of fiction try to copy that style nowadays. Because of this, it very much isn't a bold shift. To me, a "guy from the Europe", Final Fantasy 1-10 were great in offering another point of view from another culture. Despite coming from the other side of the world, these stories hit close to home and inspired me to trust my friends and believe in kindness. I felt connected despite the cultural differences. "You're not alone", a central message of FF9. Final Fantasy games didn't intrigue me by trying to imitate western narratives about the disconnect and mistrust between people in an attempt to get larger market shares. Final Fantasy games were answers to the question of how to overcome mistrust. I don't get why so many think these grimdark stories are "mature" and "based more in reality". It's just as real and mature as pink fluffy unicorns, just the other way round. It's what 12-year boys hitting puberty might think of what "brutal grown-up stuff" is like. "Look at how tough I am, playing such a game." But even grown-up kids seem to buy into these stories full of mistrust, backstabbing, and needless violence. If these stories are deemed mainstream entertainment nowadays and (young) people start to believe that they imply "realism", oh boy, that's the real dark stuff of our societies taking the risk of going completely bonkers. I remember playing Doom when I was twelve. Man, I did feel badass. But it wasn't very mature. In contrast, Games of Thrones takes itself way more seriously and is carried by an edgy, cynical, almost neurotic interpretation of human society ruled by sociopaths that never really did grow up. You could argue that yes, that's social criticism, and yes, there are sociopaths running wild in contemporary politics. But that's not really entertaining. Just as the mentality that most other humans are evil, you "have to fight dirty" to "survive" and mistrust every other person, especially your nearest acquaintances, is neither an insightful nor a helpful moral of the story. It just builds upon another rather bleak ideology. Especially in the context of social criticism. I had hoped Square Enix would stay true to themselves instead of seeking similarity, reinventing themselves with a fresh and different take and a level of maturity on par with the old Final Fantasies - all way more mature, authentic, and profound than this installment.

Tl;dr While the cinematics and impactful action show exceptional craftsmanship, they barely conceal what Diablo 4 is at its core: A grimdark demon cookie clicker that revolves around user retention and mindless busywork. Monetisation isn't the only problem of D4 but still a central one. When a 69$ game (at minimum) features in-app-purchases at 99$, that you can buy an unlimited number of times, and an upcoming battle pass, it's not just about "cosmetics". It's about its consequences for game design, about the fear of missing out, about game mechanics that try to nudge you towards paying that 99$ regularely. It's about gameplay that turns into a chore you endure because of sunk cost fallacy. And yes, that's exactly how D4 quickly starts to feel. Setting and atmosphere: D4 is "dark" and "gritty" again. Well yes, the writers can now comfortly tread the well-trodden paths in the wake of Game of Thrones, Witcher 3, and their many copycats. But there is one very essential difference in comparison to the first two Diablo games: D4 takes itself way, way too seriously. By doing that, regrettably, D4 entirely misses and contradicts the tone of the original Diablo games, as the reviewer of The Guardian benevolently put it. D1 and D2 had a "dark" setting but they were also over-the-top and hilarious. They relied on their simple setting. Just like Doom or "Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.". Yes, a big evil hidden somehwere below the church of a once tranquil village were more than enough to build up tension and an eery atmosphere. D1 and D2 didn't need tragic family dramas or discussion about overcoming human nature. The only thing that really is horrible in D4 is its attempt to add "deep quality HBO content" to a simple formula, resulting in an extremely shallow and heavily misinformed kitchen psychology. Even Genshin Impact had a more profound side story about humanity emancipating from gods and demons. Considering lore, D4's main antagonist Lilith (and Inarius) were hinting at an elegant solution to the games' central conflict with a nod to the ambivalent myths the lore has been inspired by. But not in the days of live service games where conflicts must go on forever. D1 was a dive into a crypt of ever increasing madness, D2 was an adventurous trek, hunting the "dark wanderer" which caused mayhem wherever he went, always just a step ahead, with interesting locations that build up on each other. D4's battles are fought on a big, grey, largely indistinctive "open world" battlefield and in dungeons populated with arbitrary packs of demons and monsters. Multiplayer: Also gone are the days of casually joining a game called "Act 1 Andariel" or "Act 3 Quest 2" with your friend, easily grouping up with up to 8 players. I remember D2 games as exactly that: Fun parties most of the times, like randomly joining a party of 6 barbarians all shouting war cries, whirling and jumping around. Just join a game, say "Hi!" and write "TP plz", and off you go - fun times. I never played alone even with the option to play offline. Now you have to look for other groups and players doing the same quests, join a clan, ask around, invite them, etc. It's possible but needlessly complicated and it's no wonder then that even many streamers play this game alone or just with their buddy.

For a review of the story, see the many other reviews. Considering gameplay: Messy balancing and tedious, undercooked gameplay parts ruin potential fun. Many other games, even indie games, either have good balancing or clever options to adjust difficulty, not so Fire Emblem : Engage, regrettably. "Normal" and "Hard" difficulty quickly evolve into "send arbitrary unit forward and let it 1-hit-KO any enemy" snoozefests. To raise difficulty, you have to restart the game completely. The highest difficulty, "Maddening", provides challenge but completely messes with the game's balance and gameplay systems: - Your units gain experience slower. In effect, the characters you start with trail behind pretty quickly while progressing through the story. Every single new character that regularly joins your party is stronger right out of the box. Thus, you're pushed to constantly replace older characters with new characters, eliminating choice and any attachment you had to these characters. - The base game offers no relevant options to let older characters catch up (disregarding inconvenient and overcomplicated cheesing strategies) - But wait, there's a DLC that comes with a skill that let's your characters gain 20% more experience! The drawback: I had to completely restart the game again to profit from this skill's effect. - So I restarted the game again with the DLC and let my units gain 20% more experience. Difficulty again: Maddening. And yes, this time my older units stayed relevant. Regrettably, by chapter 10-11, supposedly difficult missions, my party was again completely dominating, smashing enemies the story wanted me to escape from, eliminating any challenge and immersion again... - So yes, I could think about what limitations I could set for myself to have a balanced game, and restart the game a third time... but honestly, I find daily chores to be more fun than this. - In summary, this game seems more like a very fiddly sandbox you need to extend (buy DLC) and tune very carefully to not ruin any fun. Even then, the toolbox feels way too clunky. - Most of the combat is limited to simple unit movement with simple "rock-paper-scissor" tactics. Varied tactics like "Gambits" in "Fire Emblem: Three Houses" have been dumbed down and only play a minor role later in the game. Interface problems, contributing to a lot of fiddling and confusion: - For example, if you want to change a characters' skills you need to access its inventory first... Yet, you can't equip a ring via the inventory. For that, you must access a different interface via the main menu... - Yet again, not all options to interact with rings can be found in this one menu. For some options, you must visit the "Ring Chamber", adding more loading times. - In the "Ring Chamber", you can inherit skills from a ring. Yet sometimes, you need more training with that ring. For that, you must visit the "Arena", adding more loading times. - To get to the next mission you have to leave the hub and load the world map (more loading times). From the world map, you can access the next mission (more loading times). Undercooked yet relevant hub activities which get tedious way faster than the hub activities of "Fire Emblem: Three Houses": - While in the hub (the "Somniel"), you can interact with the game's mascot to get bonus materials. You can feed it (loading times) or pet it (loading times). To access either menu, you leave the previous pet or feeding menu (more loading times) while you wait for long, unskippable animations to finish... - There's a couple of tedious and undercooked mini games you can play in the hub to get relevant materials after each mission. These mini games (like pressing "A" to do push ups) overstay their welcome the first time you're playing them. But to get materials the games nudges you into wasting your time again and again with these mini games, since it takes a good amount of time doing each of them. - The interaction with characters, especially the Emblem heroes, can be likened to talking with theme park mascots.

Great potential The good: - exceptional art design, vfx, and animation - one of the best user interfaces I have seen in a long while - diverse combat units, the game has enormous potential for great tactical gameplay - loads of content The bad: - extremely repetitive and grindy in the early stages of the game: it takes way too long to unlock new units. - progression and pacing are completely off: you are a legendary hero before unlocking tier 2 units. - convoluted lore, story tumbles through grimdark territory. - level design constantly breaks tension and immersion: overworld maps look great but seem empty, most encounters are skippable because of your army being too strong while story encounters feel random and often feature even weaker enemies. - resource management feels superflous within the campaign (would probably better fit into a skirmish mode) - small combat maps limit tactical gameplay - tactical gameplay isn't really required because you can steamroll 98% of the encounters in the story campaign. In my opinion, a director's cut would be great with a streamlined campaign, quicker access to new units, interesting combat encounters, and a story with more focus. Alternatively, a skirmish mode, like in HOMM, would do wonders. With some tweaks this game could be really good.

A lot of wasted potential. It has the look **** RPG adventure, but behind the curtain it's still your standard mobile gacha game. These two types of games contradict each other: - "Pay to win" is a misleading term. You can't really "win" in a gacha game. "Gacha" is about collecting rare heroes and exclusive items. But without spending literally thousands of dollars, your collection won't contain many desirable collectibles. The whole game is about trying to sell you lottery tickets for seemingly exclusive virtual items. As in all gacha games, gameplay and immersion are shallow and soulless when you've seen through the inital eye candy. - Combat has potential but doesn't evolve. After 2 hours you will perform the same fancy looking moves over and over again. Gameplay feels the same at lvl 1 as at lvl 60. Likewise, you will fight the same enemies at lvl 1 as at lvl 60, just with higher stats. - It tries to mimic an "epic adventure", but there's nothing to discover. All the good stuff is in loot boxes and will never be found elsewhere. There's literally thousands of treasure chests, all containing the same common items, with zero chance to get anything worthwile. - After the inital hours with lots of eye candy, progress grinds to a halt (at rank 23-25), content is gated behind huge amounts of grind and/or paying money to make the grind more bearable. - The "endgame" revolves around farming small amounts of premium currency and materials. Materials will unlock the full potential of your heroes. Premium currency lets you buy another lottery ticket. Sooner rather than later, gameplay becomes a tedious job you go through just to get another lottery ticket or to make your heroes slightly stronger. - There 's no real challenge, you will steamroll 98% of the content. The only challenge comes in form of time trials, in which you won't be able to defeat some monsters within the time limit, since your team's damage output isn't high enough. How to overcome the problem? You guessed it: grind for months on end and/or pay for lootboxes. - Immersion is constantly broken. Before you meet characters in the story, you might get them in loot boxes. So you might run around with the "Anemo God" Venti, a very rare character, while you try to locate him in a quest. It's a bit like "Back to the Future", but twisted. Genshin Impact, like all other gacha games, is about "pay for a chance to get a super rare hero", "pay to progress", "pay to not waste your time". It isn't even "pay to have fun", since gameplay is shallow and whatever you might pay, it will never be enough, there will always be some bottleneck or some new exclusive hero that outperforms whatever heroes you might have collected until then.

"#1 Best Switch Game of 2020". Catch 10.000 fish in a minigame that requires 2 A-button presses, catch 10.000 bugs in a minigame that requires 1 A-button press, chop 10.000 wood, mine 10.000 ore, dig for 10.000 fossils, and pop 10.000 balloons/lootboxes for rare pieces of furniture. Click through the same repeating speech bubbles when interacting with your NPC villagers. Later in Animal Crossing: New Horizons you can also edit the layout of your 3D-level, piece by piece. One of the "best games of 2020" is a cumbersome 3D-level-editor in which you have to do busy work to gather randomly appearing 3D models of furniture, dress up your character, and outfit an empty museum which probably no one but yourself will visit. This whole "game" is like outfitting an empty museum which will never be visited by many interested visitors. That's about it, that is the extent of interaction this game provides - for the "multiplayer" part see almost every other review. The only feature that made me play this game 5 minutes a day for several days is the "skinner box", i.e. the variable rewards, i.e. the chance that maybe a rare piece of furniture appears in one of the balloons/lootboxes or in one of the ingame stores. But after you've placed your rare piece of furniture and after you've equipped your new fancy hat, there's just nothing much to do but grinding and looking at good looking 3D items.

Rating The Witcher 3 seems quite difficult. I have the utmost respect for all the work that went into this game. It contains a moderate amount of great ideas and fun content that seems personal and passionate, which is a true gift to gamers nowadays considering the excel-sheet game-design of current "AAA"-titles. But those fun pieces are overshadowed by design decisions that throw them into a melange that, at least in my opinion, is pretty much drab and humdrum. The sum is less than it's parts. In the end, I couldn't get myself to finish the game despite trying several times. The Good: - Astonishing level-art, great models and textures (Novigrad is frickin' massive) - Witty episodes in-between (returning a goat; herding pigs; rock trolls; some dialogues) - Quest design being tied to story elements; solving mysteries. The Disputed - Story: Overall, its tone, atmosphere, and mentality seemed more in accordance with (the popular) "Games of Thrones" than with the spirit of its own subject. My guess is: that's the reason why this game is so popular: so "dark", so "grown up". Therefore the game's story is a grimdark succession of tragedy after tragedy. Tragedy no matter what. Why? Because of drama. Want to save children? Then other children will die. Want to be diplomatic? Can't be, everyone's corrupt. Want to survive? Kill or be killed. It's this monotonous "human nature is **** " and all around edginess ("you gotta be a dirtbag yourself") that's now copied by every major player in the media industry, be it television, films or games... smells like teen spirit. Yes, there also was one such tragic quest-line in the Witcher 2, a game I really liked, but that's the difference: If you repeat this concept again and again and make it your one trick pony, it gets artificial and melodramatic. Besides, while the concept of neutrality was a really interesting topic in the books and also the first 2 games, in the third game Geralt's options to act neutral seemed reduced to Geralt behaving like a stone-cold mercenary, a calculating entrepeneur, regrettably. The Witcher novels, as far as I remember, manage a nuanced balance of "dark" and "light" content. At it's core they also convey a lot of gritty humour, sober human warmth and friendship, exciting (i.e. NOT depressing) adventures and tales, and a lot of eroticism (there even was a testimonial from Playboy magazine on the back of the first book). In Comparison, humour, adventure, friendship, and eroticism became a minor aspect of the Witcher 3, whereas the grimdark gore and edginess went into overdrive. Alas, it's also the reason I couldn't really get into the story, I'm no fan of GoT and its grimdark dramatically dramatic drama. The Bad - Stuff to do all over the place: What to do with the (literal) hundreds of "points of interests", and how to react to the (literal) tens of thousands lootable herbs all over the place? When and what to gather? Gather them at all? Is it worthwhile? I'd say: No. You thought Zelda BotW's krog seeds were a completionists nightmare, well, you haven't seen this. - How to get to all these places? The game is designed in a way that the only efficient method to get to places is looking at the mini-map and following the dotted line leading you to your next spot or quest. While the scenery you walk or ride through is nice, it's just that: scenery, empty scenery. I wonder how much time players have spend looking at that dotted line on the mini-map. I wish there was an eye-tracking study about this. - There's so many "NPCs". But except story NPCs and merchants, you can't interact with any of them, which seems kinda odd. There's whole villages with no NPCs to talk to, just "models" walking around. The term "NPC" is misleading in this case, it's more like "bots" or just part of the non-interactive scenery, like trees. - Loot. Generic, random loot everywhere. Besides the witcher gear quests, there's no "artifacts" or truly special items to discover. - All of this adds up to: Aside from the story quests there's no real discoveries to be made, no feeling of adventure, no real incentive to explore the open world. And while I do not know the look and location of many villages in this game or the nooks and crannies of Novigrad, I remember the layout of the mini map quite well. - Combat and moving around the world. There are a lot of other reviews that already cover this topic in all its particulars. Summary / tl;dr: If you're a fan of GoT-style stories, don't mind spectating Geralt's dot as it travels around the minimap to your next story dialogue, and fancy your combat to be rolling and pirouetting, than there's some fun to be had with The Witcher 3 and some beautiful sceneries to be seen.

Let me say I'm really fond of Bastion and the developers' design philosohpy - the team really seems to mean it, i.e. it's not just marketing. So please keep on making games, Supergiant Games! "Transistor" though, alas, feels like a mixed bag. The game's composition of visuals and audio is great (you can see that in the trailers), but for me the narrative and gameplay, while having potential, don't add up to something larger. Transistor's gameplay focuses heavily on combat, other aspects (e.g. a hub/haven where you can rest and do some challenges) fall short, granting you access to them only sporadically at rest houses along the road of battles. The combat itself gives you many skills and combinations thereof to play with, the option to pause the action and plan your moves is awesome, but tactically the encounters don't really inspire you to use all the combinations, since default attacks are just as good to prevail most of the time against the few mobs Transistor throws at you. Instead you're kinda forced to switch and use different skill-combinations because that unlocks bits of the story... yes, just like that, yes, sounds strange... it makes sense story-wise but doesn't feel fun: makes trying out different combinations a tedious work like crossing off a check list to get all them story bits. Although those story bits then only come in form of written text, i.e. entrys in an encyclopedia.. Speaking of the story, you really need those bits because occurrences of "true" story feel rare and are convoluted. While this has worked for me before (hello, Planescape Torment) Transistor's story is so incoherent (especially in the beginning) that for me it failed to build up enough mystery and wonder to get me involved. I.e. often it felt like running along beautiful drawn levels with just as beautiful music, doing kinda casual battles, now and then encountering a boss that should mean something to you, but somehow doesn't, and on you go... These aspects of the game ultimately made me want to finish it fast instead of taking my time to take it in.

It was refreshing to experience a game that focused on the story. Visuals and music are also nice conceptually but the music's repetitiveness gets really annoying along the way. Beyond that, regrettably, there isn't much to Shadowrun Returns to complement its story. Regardless how much more content will be released after now, that won't change the really boring, at its core unchallenging, slow-paced gameplay. Open world or linear? Doesn't matter, I wouldn't have explored because it would have taken so long to navigate the characters there, to wait for the slow UI, to wait for the slow animations (spells being even slower), and fighting casual battles, slowly advancing your characters from one cover to the next cover. It feels like they just unpersonally copied the gameplay-design of the newest X-COM-game but obviously failed to clone it because of the lack of more resources. It should be a lesson that this indie-game (at least from my perspective) failed right where the designers tried to copy the style of the mainstream-industry: copying X-COM, and trying to adapt Shadowrun Retruns to the "so-succesfull" casual mobile platforms, creating an interface and gameplay that screams "tablet-game"!

For my taste, Heart of the Swarm's gameplay has been focused way too much on e-sports. It's not "playing" a game anymore but learning modes of behavior to win. Even within the singleplayer campaign, 99% of the missions seem to be about getting used to the way the race of the zerg is supposed to be played in multiplayer-mode: Gameplay is frantic, almost every mission has some kind of timelimit and you're supposed to be clicking everywhere on the map at once. Building a base with nice defences? None here, that's "not the way the zerg are played". In Starcraft 2, the campaign was the only fun part of the game for me, because it wasn't always frantic and hectic... Since there are no good RTS-alternatives right now, it's a shame that SC2:HotS is so monotonously action-oriented. The GUI and menus of the game strengthen these aspects: You access the campaign/story of HotS via a generic button within an e-sports-oriented interface.

Another game that makes me feel increasingly alienated from this industry. There's been put a lot of talent, work and energy into this game, including marketing that promotes Dishonored to be about solving things in a creative way. All this is kinda sad, since ultimately, Dishonored plays just like another blockbuster which you'll forget about before tomorrow. Because: 1.) Stealth-gameplay is you waiting for enemies to look away, nothing more, because light isn't regarded, for example, i.e. enemies see you just as well/badly in broad daylight as within total darkness. Also, you only have really few options to be stealthy besides the "Blink"-skill, especially if you want to do it non-lethally (options: sleeping darts and choking... that's it, 2 options, there isn't even a blackjack). 2.) Action: Trying out the various gadgets and skills to lethally engage enemies seems nice, but just as with stealth, there isn't much tactics involved - it's repeating the same process over and over again, the skills just make it look differently. 3.) Personally, the seemingly unnecessary, overdrawn brutality you are invited to perform or is performed visually and story-wise just turns me off.. I never had any problems with the gore of the Dooms and Quakes and what not, 'cause they were silly games. But games like this, somehow, for my taste, are just... no, thank you... Feels like today's games are trying hard to impress little boys who want to be "really bad-as*", if you allow me that snappy remark.

I can't relate to where this genre is evolving, be it Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2... Summary of my experience with this game in 3-player-coop (~12 hours) on veteran difficulty: Most of the time, mindlessly clicking the left mouse button works just as well if not better than spamming the screen with overlapping, unrecognizable fireworks. Don't know if my eyes get old or what, but with only 3 characters simultaneously using their skills, I wasn't able to comprehend what was going on on the screen anymore: Total chaos and seemingly random flashing with colors that looked way too similar to me. Hats off to those who can make out where the monsters are they try to click (if theyre not HUGE) or what sparks of the fireworks are damaging them or you or are just for show. After ~3 hours we settled to 1 of us using skills, while the other 2 just used left clicks. And even then it was straining to the eyes if you wanted to follow what was going on. Thus we were rushing through the levels, on the edge between shallow instant gratification and wondering about why we waste our time with this. Torchlight 2, just like Diablo 3, feels like its trying to feed "target groups" instead of being something that the devs really tried to be personal and fun.

In summary: Gets repetitive really quick and feels like a "production-pipelined", risk-free, standerdised game. Yes, you might think the problem of being repetitive is inherent in "Hack 'n Slay" Action RPG, but I think there're some who make this feel personal and rewarding and some who make it a redundancy. For me, regrettably, D3 falls into the latter category. Technically they included many things to prevent this: So much skills and runes and skill combinations, but it doesn't add up to something larger. Encounters are almost always the same (monsters coming in from the front of you) and you beat 'em down, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, repeating the same buttons presses. I don't remember any outstanding encounter. And although there's a lot of different artwork and randomization, the levels through the different acts seemed to be really similar to me. Feels like a checklist of locations you run through, locations that don't really depend on each other. Besides a few dialogues, there were no real authentic things for me, no little scenarios that make you smile or smirk, nothing personal.

Having played around 12 hours, although the first couple were promising much, I've put the game down: The story, the main quests, while in small parts entertaining (e.g. House of Ballads quest line), just feels like dry dialogues prompted by keywords, no real heartfelt interaction. Almost all of the mysteriously named threats and villains (e.g. "Maybe it was The Willow, stories of which were read to scare children since decades...") turn out to be your standard character models with nothing interesting to say. The side quests, making the greatest part of the game, are just "terrible trivia", urging you to run / fast travel all over the world map again and again, with no really convincing motive: Just collecting letters and books and punching small mobs in really many similar caves: for HOURS and HOURS without any end. Which leads us to the gameplay: While running around you actually don't face so many enemies, often just small mobs. That means it doesn't really feel like an action game, more like a "running-around" game. The combat seems to regrettably follow the motto "make the first 5 minutes fun and then repeat the gameplay". Because repeat it does. Over and over again. Even with switching your "destinies", i.e. playstyles between rogue, wizard and fighter (you can watch all of their moves from the beginning), it somehow stays the same without much evolution: It's almost always the same SMALL MOBS you encounter and easily cut down with the same combos. Better designed encounters, scenarios, and grouping of enemies REALLY could have helped the game to be WAY MORE fun in combat, delivering something unexpected at least. Especially because something like this missing, just "planting 5 mobs here and there", the game feels like it was done without any love for detail or any real affection from the developers. And yes, also the loot can almost always be *expected*: Mostly random junk. Even the few nice looking unique items I got (3 to 4 pieces) while playing just drowned in the mountains of frustrating garbage loot. "Oh, there's a hidden entrance with a chest that's locked very hard...." And what's inside? Nothing! A gem and a health potion. Time and time again. Frustrating. And even the unique items follow the same stats-design you get to know in the first hour (+x%damage to lightning/fire/ice), nothing unexpected except the looks, making the gameplay even more repetitive. In summary I'd say KoA:R, although almost aiming for the right spots, felt like a production-pipeline game in the end. I left the (in my humbled opinion) very repetitive game with the feeling that it just stole some precious hours without giving anything back. The professional reviews seem to hype more than being reasonable.

I've played 10 hours now in co-op with a friend and start to question myself where this time has gone. Terraria is one more gaming phenomenon that I fail to understand, except how much I search and try to find the worth. I don't have anything against old school DOS graphics, laid back games, original 2D-side-scrollers - I do quite like the fighting in Terraria (would it have been placed in a better context and be a bit more diversified - someone mentioned there are only a dozen mobs in the entire game). I rreally like games that were created with some dedication, that try to deliver a good experience in any way possible. And I do respect the work of coding and everything that the developers put inside it and hoped they had fun with it, had they only worshipped the players' time a bit more. Terraria really reminds me of a section out of The Phantom' Tollbooth's novel: The Terrible Trivium, a demon in the Mountains of Ignorance who wastes time with useless jobs. By giving the protagonist a pair of tweezers with which he has to shift a whole pile of sand. That's Terraria. It won't get you anywhere important, just waste your time digging and digging and digging literally thousands of tiny little blocks to get a +X defence armor and a +X attack sword in the end with which you bash at the dozen rarely appearing mobs.

That's the World Wide Web: Even for the things you really really, authentically like, there's always opinions about it who don't. ALWAYS. It's a bit sad, **** what? These are just my 2 cents, and I want to make them simple: A.) Thank you world that games like The Witcher 2 still are being made. B.) The Witcher 2 is new and it is different, but If you for some unexplainable reason liked games like Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, The Longest Journey, Outcast, Silver (yes, they are related in some special way).... felt their magic, felt that if you cared about them, your time wasn't wasted, you GOT something out of these games besides shallow entertainment: Then you may like The Witcher 2. If on the other hand you somehow, deep down, couldn't understand what good there really was about the "rationally" awesome games of the last decade: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Crysis, even Neverwinter Nights.... if you somehow were disappointed by them... you may like The Witcher 2, too.