At this point I feel like the whole point of these games is just to exhaust people with eyerolling cliches of another type. Small town Stephen King America, tons of girl-aligned girls thinking about rekindling their romances, overbearing parents, Strange Metaphysical Happenings (TM), breathy voices complemented by the one with vocal fry, "relatable" ADHD/neuroses. "What's goblincore???" We get it, everyone was a generic spaceman for decades or had a well-endowed female sidekick. You can't just keep making games about Gals Being Pals forever and maintain your artistic integrity.
Backtracking, fetch quests, button-mashy compulsory combat sections, whack-a-mole bosses, bugs galore, sudden Chinese caricatures because Deus Ex I guess, uninteresting character progression, most characters only have one quest or serve one purpose ("I'm the angry redhead! Argh!"), level design is mostly hallways joined at right angles with identical rooms branching off, masquerade and humanity are laughably easy to uphold, "try a Malkavian playthrough!" but the Nosferatu experience is amazingly dull, a million small annoyances like the storm drain entrances to sewers always spawning you at the far end of a tunnel you have to crouch through, and so on. Steve Blum tries both a Romanian AND a Chinese accent and it turns out about as well as you'd expect. People get themselves really lathered up about this game but there is easily as much wrong with it as what it does somewhat well, which is early game dialogue trees and mission freedom. Other than that though, it's extremely generous to act like this is more than an actually bad game. It's mostly just a headache. And that's WITH the patches.
The other red reviews are definitely trolling (if you couldn't tell) but I assure you this remaster is mediocre at best. As usual, NDS couldn't help but take license with everything like they've ever designed a decent game in their lives, and as such the railgun damage was reduced by 1/3, enemy behaviors that were cut for quality reasons were re-introduced like that's a good thing, menus are tacked on like always, they just had to go and mess with nightmare-difficulty balance, and so on. The KEX engine renders everything as competently as the other source ports, which is to say there's no reason not to play the other source ports, and accessibility options may be helpful for a tiny minority of the tiny minority that are even going to play this. Four points for not being a total travesty at release like the Quake KEX port.
A competent CRPG from the post-quality age. I could write a list of glaring faults (example: no text or voice chat in multiplayer) so long that your eyes would glaze over. Other than that, the game narrowly skates by on the enjoyability of its mechanics. Not a 0/10, not a 10/10; it is truly insane to suggest either score.
Late, underdesigned, poorly balanced. Every aspect of the game shouts, "me, too!" from the art style that would be at home in Raft, the building system from the Forest and the story from a Disney movie, to the soundtrack which is nearly indistinguishable from Skyrim's at times. It makes very few interesting innovations for the genre, mostly in somewhat lightly-applied RPG mechanics that smack of Outer Worlds (set bonuses, perks, and so forth). Other than that it's pretty much the same, "make this item to go here to make this item to go here to make this item to go here" treadmill we've all played in the survival crafting genre for over a decade now. Notably, the game does not have a story by Chris Avellone about repairing a road or finding out that you were a tyrant in your past life so it doesn't have that going for it either. Obsidian, please go.
The bizarre army of shills that Nightdive have built up over the literal 9-year development of this game are doing a fantastic job of rating it just above the worst-rated of the popular immersive sims (Dark Messiah, Thief 4, etc.), and indeed everything came out much better than I thought it would 5 years ago when the game was already late and going on hiatus. Unfortunately, this will not be quite enough to make the game successful. The credits list at least 50 distinct people involved in the project, and even if they were only contracted for 1/3 of the time, that's easily $6,000,000 on the payroll alone, for which they'd have to make multiple hundreds of thousands of sales on Steam to turn a profit. It seems the game is headed for the, "kind of well-rated, but ultimately unsuccessful" niche of the original, thanks in no small part to its dated interface, graphics, extreme development time, boring soundtrack, floaty combat, various bugs and the studio's willingness to repeatedly alienate even non-hostile subsets of its supporters. POSITIVITY TIME: The art is very cool. The pixelated textures are an affectation in my opinion, and don't come at me with "OK zoomer" or whatever since I played the original, DOOM, Marathon et al. multiple years before the CEO of this studio did. But, pixels notwithstanding, the art in the game is among the best fan works of System Shock I've ever seen and is more than a match for the original game. The game design is improved in several (albeit obvious) ways. This was truly the whole point of the project in the first place: to go beyond compatibility porting and move into modernizing game mechanics. Yet it still retains a surprising amount of the original game's design - more than you might expect for a relatively inaccessible game like System Shock. For this I have to praise Nightdive's grit knowing that there would probably be bellyaching about manual saves, writing down CPU room codes, time limits, etc. and including that anyway. Lastly, polish. It's not perfect, but neither was the original game in this regard. The final product, dollar-for-dollar and adjusted for age, really does feel more professional than the original. Overall, this is a SIGNIFICANTLY flawed, EXTREMELY late debut-slash-swan-song from a somewhat witless developer that was probably wise to sell out and let someone else handle their PR. There are diamonds in the rough here, but let's not kid ourselves by saying this is an 8/10 game. If it is then you may as well quit playing video games now.
Flavor of the month game incoming: 6 million Youtube views in the past week, overwhelmingly positive reviews on storefronts, positive reviews coming in at an average of about 5-7 hours of gameplay (and there's maybe one genuine positive review on this page as I write this). Unfortunately due to the rather shallow mechanics, asinine rules regarding team balance, and open advertisement of "loot" and "epic outfits" at the top of the game's store pages everywhere, it's rather obvious that the game is another stale chip to serve up monetization on; a financial, if not mechanical, improvement over "Rocket Arena." Very few people will be playing this regularly by Christmas. Shout out to whoever downrated this review: in June 2021 this game had 1/10 the average player base that it had in May 2021 when it released. Gosh, who could have seen that coming? February 2023: Aaaaand what a surprise, the game is getting shut down before it's two years old. Cope.
A 2.5-year-late clone of Castle Crashers, a game that came out over 13 years ago and still has more players than this one anyway. Developers interrupted their tight schedule of making Polly Pocket games and horse grooming simulators to hammer another nail into the coffin of the Conan franchise, a semi-functional arcade game that supplants several decades of amazing art including the likes of Frazetta, Vallejo, Windsor-Smith, Buscema, and Nord with a blatant ripoff of Cyanide and Happiness. This could all be forgiven if the mechanics were particularly tight and the game worked for the most part but this is not the case. Consider this a "strange gesture with my nose," and God help you if you join "all the other [sic]" 300 some players of this game on PC this month before it flatlines like every other Conan game released under Funcom's watch except the ones about redoing your kitchen. April update: the game has lost 90% of its player base since I posted this on March 2. Who could have guessed? Could it possibly be because the whole game was conceived of as a joke and couldn't plausibly be a viable product? Mighty Kingdom are now in the awkward PR position of pretending they will fix the handful of highly visible bugs left in the game for about as many people that still play it, knowing that most of their rather paltry sales have already been made. What will happen next is that support will prematurely end for the game and it will be yet another discontinued Conan title sitting around festering on digital storefronts, played by about a classroom full of people. It didn't have to be this way, but it's rather unlikely that Funcom will be able or willing to make a decent Conan RPG before the property goes into public domain. How interesting that the Conan game that is played the most is the one where you can be most like Conan... Nah, that's probably just a coincidence. I'd say better luck next time but that seems unlikely given the decision-making at Funcom. May update: "Nah this review isn't accurate, game is brilliant," meanwhile Mighty Kingdom's financial statements reveal poor sales and stock buybacks, the game dropped to "mixed" on Steam and the last bug fix was 3 weeks ago and failed to fix the 1 bug it was meant to address. Bon voyage, MK, the whole thing went exactly as I thought it would almost 3 years ago. September update: average playership is down to 7.3 players at any given moment, not even enough to fill two lobbies.
I've bought this every time it was released but I only got around to replaying it recently, and I have to say... this is poopoo. There are a few interesting architectural features here or there but the majority of both episodes is just one-textured "Pitfall" hallways with one trap to jump through after another. When it comes to the fights, you either get locked in "elevator sections" or an egregious misunderstanding of the mechanics of the game, beginning with the second level where you fight a shambler that's perfectly locked in a cage so as to not hit you, and then minutes later fight a shambler in a totally bare cubic (one-texture, of course) room before even getting the SNG or thunderbolt. The expansion gets considerably weirder from there, with various enemies that generously could be called "super" versions of a handful of the existing enemies and various guns that could similarly generously be called super versions of the original weapons. The two new single player powerups are a belt that makes you jump higher and what is essentially a "partial" pentagram of protection. There are few standouts, including the hell spawn (a spawn that can clone itself, annoying but at least somewhat original). Frankly, while some valiant attempts were made here or there (shout out to the composer), this is overall a worse expansion compared to the first one in every way and hardly compares to the more popular (and free) Quake total conversion mods. I don't even like the Machinegames episodes but I think I'd still rather play them than this.
Garbage. Studio 369 is on pure damage-control mode, trying (and failing) to salvage this dump that Human Head took last year. It is obvious to anyone who's played the game that they are actually working on it, but, sorry, to no avail. There are only 64 people playing it during Thanksgiving week on Steam and the game remains horribly buggy and unoptimized, yet they are releasing DLC. Pure damage-control. Sorry about your financials, guys. What Feremuntrus said about how the gameplay looks is hilarious and accurate, as I still recall a glimmering anecdote from RUNE 1 when a guy's sole tactic was throwing 4-weaps (sigurd's axe, dwarf ws/hammer) and saying "owens." Still a problem 20 years later - except the difference is that it actually took time to pick up weapons in the first game. The game is not an evolution, just a pastiche of some other contemporary garbage - mostly Conan Exiles. Unsurprisingly, the rescue team went out of business and the game's support ended sometime the middle of 2021. That's a F-U-very-much to whoever downvoted this. This thing had disaster written all over it from the moment the first trailer released.
The greatest innovations of this iteration of Demon's Souls are mechanics from the decade prior to Demon's Souls. Jumping, horses, open worlds. Wow, why didn't we think of that before? Like pretty much every FROM game since around the DaS 2/BB era you can quickly use this game as a proverbial dipstick or smell test to see how susceptible someone is to media hype in video games. It's not a new franchise, it's not a bold new direction, it's just red guys hitting you from 10 feet away and luring you into enemies again. This is like calling Quake 2 fresh because you have an inventory like in Hexen. There's no reason anyone should care. EDIT: Ok, bad analogy, it's actually like if Quake came out every 2 years between 1996 and 2009, and each time it had that room in Gloom Keep where you grab the gold key and the shambler pops out, only this time in 2009 everyone's saying that the shambler's "art design" is incredible and it's probably the best game they've ever played.
As another said, this is Absolver but less several features. Sloclap never really finished Absolver for that matter. As such this is purely a rebranded product, basically the video game equivalent of an Arby's sandwich or Taco Bell taco. In that regard it's only impressive in that it's not totlly broken.
Hitbox/collision issues every few seconds, grossly unbalanced classes, AI that only activates on physical approach, shockingly repetitive enemies and environments. The game is virtually just walking down the same corridor for several minutes before fighting some combination of 5-10 of the same 4 enemy types over and over again. A noticeably inferior game to its namesake, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance - and I can't imagine anyone disagrees.
Yet another bizarrely-conceived make-work project from Mojang. The essence of Minecraft is that they will make a poor man's Diablo clone before they add sculpting or paint to a game called "Minecraft."
A competent, but massively overhyped title for PS5 fans to point to when it's brought up that half of PS5 exclusives are remasters or sequels that no one asked for. More normalization of padding and dodgy save systems that will annoy you on the inevitable crash. I doubt anyone who rated it a 10 will even be playing it this summer.
A game as impressive in its ability to ripoff the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as it is impressive in its laser-guided injection of gachapon and aggressive monetization tactics. Truly the future of gaming, in every bad way.
NCSOFT embarrasses themselves again with a moderately generic WoW clone that removes any improvements made to the formula this century and injects various 2014 team game cliches: Pixar-esque art (though more genuine than cringeworthy attempts by Gearbox, at least), the One Pet Class That Is a Roboticist, an obvious attempt at ripping off Pandora of Borderlands but with cat girls instead of shirt designs from Hot Topic, "dodge the danger zone" boss mechanics like it's a phone game, and an obvious imminent discontinuation of support. Meanwhile combat is slow, quests are boring, there's absolutely nothing that is new except nominally, and once again NCSOFT is providing the worst customer support in existence. Unsurprisingly the game went free-to-play within moments of its release, as will be the case for most MMOs from here on out, along with mechanics that increasingly resemble freemium phone games such as 20 different currencies from 20 different sources, AFK passive gameplay, data mining, daily DLC that requires more research than investments, over-emphasis on copying video games from the early 2000s, deceptive marketing that makes the product almost indistinguishable from a more successful competitor, utterly cluttered user interfaces, and, of course, a much higher price hidden behind exploitative marketing tactics. Thank you o NCSOFT for this blessing (turd) you have bestowed upon the MMORPG market. Now bring back City of Heroes or sell it already. REVISITING THE REVIEW IN 2020: support was indeed discontinued in 2018. Wow, who could have guessed? It's as though I'm more familiar with the workings of NCSOFT than the people who rated my review.
As I write this the user score sits at 7.0. I think this is pretty much on the money. The game is extremely flawed technically, with bugs being a virtual certainty. I sometimes go a stretch of about an hour without a bug, but no longer than that. Often it's only minutes or seconds between. The game itself is more or less a first person mod for the Witcher 3 with vastly more powerful "magic" and multiple vehicles to drive. The story is pretty middle-of-the-road-ish for the genre, kinda weaksauce if you were weaned on anything above Ghost in the Shell, Deus Ex or Snow Crash though. As far as I can tell it's pretty much just a re-invention of the Witcher 3 but without the warm fuzzy apologetics that the audience have built up around CDPR. I'm having a lot of fun, but yowza. RIP console users. Game length: about 60 hours.
If you didn't realize that this franchise was for game journalists and not you with the first installment then I don't know what to say. You had to learn sometime I guess. I have known TLoU was boring and preachy for about 7 years now, how about you?
You're about to see lots of reviews that say that this game "was good, until they added (yet another) Denuvo)." Let me assure you that the game was not good to begin with. Every complaint that people have about the actual game itself is actually an expansion of what was wrong with the predecessor, DOOM (2016). Examples include: - story doesn't make sense - reliance on glory kills, not level knowledge, to stay equipped - level design is basically just linear with arenas beaded along on it - menus upon menus upon menus in a franchise that started with a game where you only had to access the menu 3 times in the entire playtime - cooldowns everywhere like a WoW-era MMO - rainbows all over the place - terrible modding experience In many ways, DOOM Eternal is the ultimate showcase of how PC FPS games have changed over the decades: in the 90s, you had a basic gameplay premise and often had source within 4 or 5 years, and these games are still modded to this day. In the 2000s, expanded budgets meant everyone trying to add in pet features that didn't work. Now, in the 2010s and now 2020s, you are forced by multiple kernel-level applications to play the game exactly as manufactured, modding is disallowed entirely, and the game will be dead in a couple of years. The true irony of the title is that the original DOOM will outlast this one that came out 27 years later.
Total equity of $2 billion, several of the highest-rated games of all time and they still manage to release a buggy port. I'm sure it's all the pirates' fault.
What a decade it's been for young, white female sidekicks named Ellie. January 2011: Ellie Langford (Dead Space 2) March 2013: Eli(zabeth) (Bioshock: Infinite) June 2013: Ellie (The Last of Us) October 2019: Ellie (the Outer Worlds) Incredible writing! I've never seen a story about mercenaries taking on amoral corporations in space before. Meanwhile, Epic Games Store, lol. Yet another severely overrated Obsidian game for people to gush over and pretend to like.
The latest drawn-from-a-hat game Funcom has made in attempt to cross two niche demographics. Sometime last decade they gained the video game rights to the Conan IP and since have made a MMO that melts your graphics card (currently played by a classroom full of people), an ARK clone with dwindling playership and bugs that have persisted for years, and this "They Are Billions" clone. In disbelief that a pulp franchise about a muscular barbarian that explores tombs and steals from the rich in an inherently amoral society might not be adaptable to a tower-defence-style game, Funcom has recently put the game on sale, making a bully profit of perhaps 1,000 or 2,000 USD in the process. It's unknown why they decided to release the game in its original buggy state, much less why they conceived of it in the first place, other than to perhaps report a loss to the Norwegian government. Next up in this series is a Conan game by the developers of Shopkins, blatantly ripping off the art style of Cyanide & Happiness in a top-down dungeon crawler reminiscent of Gauntlet. For some reason they've delayed the game by 6 months, imagining feverishly that the 3 extra people this will attract to the game will be worth payrolling an Australian studio for another half year, while using Conan Unconquered as an excuse to scale back development on a single-player Conan RPG (i.e. the only use of Conan that actually makes sense). After this game, called Conan Chop Chop, fails, Funcom will re-assess their Conan line and decide that they will not be doing a Conan single-player game after all, especially since playership for Conan Exiles will have dropped yet further to the 6,000-7,000 range at that point, with a player exodus due to people not finding inherent entertainment value in Minecraft blocks and Dark Souls armors being added to the game when there still aren't mounts, sorcery, interesting combat, or bodies that stay in place instead of disappearing into the aether. This is basically the death knell for Petroglyph, a company that was not selected by the ravages of time for greatness, as their ripoff of Dune 2 (during the Westwood days) was never quite as successful as Blizzard's ripoff of Dune 2. Similarly, their ripoff of They Are Billions is not doing terribly well either. My recommendation is that if you want to infect your computer with spyware, download this game on a free weekend, get bored, and never think of it again. Otherwise, don't bother thinking of it in the first place.
Pros: - Relatively unique building mechanic feels more immersive than the deluge of voxel games - There are several avenues for survival to where you don't have to do anything too contrived to survive - though as usual it is apparent that the developers are not survival experts - Many basic tasks are made more immersive than the usual fare, like chopping down trees or spearing fish - The game strongly encourages risky exploration - Not much tutorial is needed - Coop! Cons: - Bugs galore - structures disappearing, enemies running in circles, climbing spikes like they're nothing, the ability to fall a mile on a turtle shell and not die, a multiplayer exploit to dupe items that has existed for over 3 years, enemies spawning inside your walls, pots used for drinking water exploding when a fire goes out... - The lighting model, in its efforts to produce something cinematic, means your character is more blind than an ordinary healthy human - Dedicated servers are supported, but just barely, and by a horrendously barebones application that will have you scratching your head for a few minutes - Story strains credulity - The world is small and only gets smaller - The game was clearly given the 1.0 as a stop-loss so that the developers could quietly abdicate and any new feature takes months or years to be balanced and fixed, if it is ever working Overall, it's fairly dignified for a Unity indie early access survival crafting game (what a genre, eh) but most of the trappings are still there, just not as noticeably. On the splash page here you'll see a review from 2014 saying that it's acceptable for it to have bugs because it's an alpha. Well, it's 4 years later, we're several RCs past, the game is "out," and still buggy. Buy it on sale.
The trailer is live-action with no game footage, the game has been in alpha since October 2013 (over 5 years at this point), and the last major update was a year and a half ago. It bills itself as zombie survival but zombies are perhaps the least threatening thing in the game. It bills itself as survival in general but the actual means of survival are contrived, unintuitive and nonsensical, for example requiring you to possess glass bottles or tin cans to hydrate yourself properly, or needing a cast iron pot to cook food. It bills itself as multiplayer but the community is peopled with loners that you will only rarely see on public servers. The game claims to be many things but will never be good at any of them. Read the 5 most helpful reviews. They are all negative. As of the end of 2018, they all also happen to be true, even the ones from 2015. The developers like to brag about their 5+ million copies sold. That's $100 million, of which the developers saw at least 25%, or $25 million. The company has 14 employees. That means over the past 5 years, the Fun Pimps were paid an average of $356,000 per year to license Unity - a free engine - fill it with prefab assets, basically kick the can making a poor man's Minecraft, and they still insult their customers. I almost want you to see just how ridiculous this is for yourself, but that would require you buying the game and supporting them and you should not do that. They are all millionaires.
It's a fine game and the intense dedication of the developers is obvious. Most of what it accomplishes, however, is at the cost of designing an entertainment product as a "game," though. The game incentivizes keeping a main horse and even has an icon for it, but regularly teleports you away from the horse so that you have to backtrack. The game boasts an open world but you have practically no choice in the outcome of the missions. There are rewards for collecting perfect animal pelts but the availability of the pelts is random to the point where it is no longer skill-based to find an animal with a perfect pelt. The graphics are truly incredible but they regularly slow to sub-projector-framerates, even in battle. Is this a game or an interactive movie? The player may pass most of the game believing that they're still in the tutorial. In the end, the time is passed but we are not better humans and haven't seen anything new or more refined, just old and perhaps even un-fun mechanics done more professionally.
GOOD: - The mixture of Mount & Blade and Dark Souls combat styles (sans magic or real ranged weaponry or horses nonetheless) is fairly successful, although imperfect in places. - The maps that do exist - of which there are relatively few - are very detailed and play well - Artwork is generally pretty good and animations provide very appropriate tells to where a HUD is not necessary BAD: - Single player campaign is short and either pathetically easy (90% of the time) or annoying (when bosses show up). The story is so generic there might as well have not even been one, and no one's behavior makes any sense. - The vast majority of characters are masked because the developers were too lazy to animate the faces or just have static faces. - There are 12 classes but essentially 2 play styles: attack people quickly around their attacks, or smash them with a huge long-distance attack that they're not expecting. This has a number of ill effects on the gameplay: a. Teamplay basically just consists of ganking in a fashion similar to any other team action game you've played. This is especially the case since there is stagger so the victim cannot fight back, and you generally have to be locked on (unlike Mount & Blade or Dark Souls) to actually be effective. The targeting system is awful. b. Duelling consists of timing your special abilities properly like a MOBA instead of a careful fencing match like M&B. c. None of your progress really means anything other than aesthetics. - There might as well be no music in the game. The most memorable tunes will be the menu music (that you'll hear many times after being disconnected) which has no melody or the lobby music which is basically a drum march. - Graphics are not bad, but they're nothing terribly impressive. Most of the processing power seems to go into creating detailed surroundings. The characters might be out of an Army of Two sequel. - Netcode is totally awful, as if you need to be told this by now. All matches are peer-to-peer and if more than one person leaves the game (don't worry, server capacity is 8 - lol) then everyone gets kicked. Some people get kicked from the majority of their matches before they complete. For me, it's about 40%. Yes, my router is set up properly, and yes, I have more than 100 Mbps down and 30 up. - Combat is interesting but doesn't particularly make sense. Most people hack with their weapons, like that's going to significantly affect a fully plated opponent. There are very few thrusting attacks unless you're a polearm class. You cannot interrupt giant telegraphic attacks with a shove, but a tiny graze with a knife will do. You cannot fall more than 2 stories before DYING, although you can be clubbed in the head 3 times by a kanabo, something historically used to destroy metal armor and paralyze horses, without being permanently wounded. Arrows are insanely powerful, mainly because they are relegated to feats with long recharge times, like that makes sense. You can sprint forever but as soon as you swing your weapon about 4 times you are out of breath and almost defenseless. Essentially, everyone is forced to behave like they're fighting in a video game. - There is a massive amount of downtime. It's not at GTA Online levels, but it has taken me upwards of 7 or 8 minutes regularly to begin playing a game mode that I want to. This is especially problematic when the game gives you Destiny-esque daily orders to complete as your only real means to gaining currency or experience. Loading maps, loading the lobby, matchmaking, waiting for players to ready up, watching unskippable cutscenes and faction war briefings - it's all unavoidable, all unskippable. The only way you can really get around it is to make a custom match that won't count toward your progress. You HAVE to sit there for virtually half the time doing nothing. - Cynically, to circumvent this, a number of players will just sit at the back of the map while their teammates carry them through because they will, nonetheless, get progress toward the "complete x number of ... matches" orders. Today I even played with a guy whose PSN name included Farmer. Unlike better games from 20 years ago, there are no means to flag or kick these people.
THE GOOD: - Graphics are pretty impressive for a static-hardware machine; especially compared side-by-side with For Honor, another recent release on the same system, pretty much any metric except for on-screen actors is superior in Horizon. - Quests come fairly organically and there isn't much "rummaging around," other than in your inventory, which would otherwise interfere with the pace of the game. - The various tribal civilizations are unique and interesting to see and learn about. THE BAD: - Pretty much every gameplay mechanic has been done at least as well in the past 3-4 years. One migraine-inducing design is that Aloy needs a different satchel for every single item type, and you must craft progressively larger satchels out of irrelevant materials in order to avoid inventory management annoyance. This was done the same way, but slightly less annoyingly, in Far Cry 3-4. - The RPG elements feel tacked on, since, like Far Cry 3-4, they mostly consist of contextual actions you will use a handful of times throughout the game. Perhaps the most noticeable upgrades are the economical ones that will allow you to salvage more resources - and therefore engage in inventory management more often. None of the dialogue choices have any eventual consequence, there is one ending to the game, everyone's character eventually looks the same, and your character's background is entirely handed to you. There is no roleplaying save a pastiche of some "RPGs" from the past few years: dialogue wheels, leveling and experience, quests, etc. - If you're outside, the game pretty much boils down to using the extremely easy stealth system to one-hit enemies with your spear that never breaks, or using some traps to where you can nearly one-hit larger enemies. All of these things are accessible regardless of what abilities you choose (the beckoning call, probably the most useful ability in the entire tree, is available instantly). Basically Witcher 3 mixed with Far Cry 3-4 but worse than either. - The story is very predictable. Just combine Enslaved: Odyssey to the West with a handful of Bioware cliches and you've about had it. The characters are extremely generic, perhaps appropriate for a Nickelodeon cartoon. The main character is obviously inspired by Ygritte from Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones but played like a generic Jennifer Hale Commander Shepard. - The lack of risks taken is palpable, with game mechanics borrowed from Assassin's Creed (climbing longnecks = belltowers; focus = eagle vision, etc.), Far Cry 2-4 (collecting crafting materials for increasing carrying capacity and items, clearing out bandit camps, hunting animals for materials you shouldn't need, stealth executions from plain sight of the exact same variety: from cover, from below, from above, heavy execution, throwing rocks to asininely backstab 3 enemies in a row without them noticing somehow), Witcher 1-3 (setting traps to lure larger enemies into to make up for your inherently pathetically bad damage), and Mass Effect 1-3 (6-option dialogue wheels that ultimately don't affect anything). Basically imagine a successful open-world franchise in the past decade and its features are probably the core mechanics of this game. Here is the list of game mechanics in this game that I have never seen before in a triple-A title: None - The music is totally forgettable. I can't even remember a single tune. There are games like Mario or Hotline Miami where you can hear the music from across the room years later and know what that was. This is not one of those games. CONCLUSION: While the game is solid from a technical and - mostly - artistic standpoint, it is being massively overrated by critics. I'm not even a Zelda fan and I can tell the rationale for this game was to give PS4 owners some kind of kitsch Zelda open world game. It does not live up to that expectation. We have just about reached the limit of where character progression mechanics alone will carry the player retention, and now we just need a few games to take some risks to decide what cookie cutter mechanics will be used in the next decade. This is not one of those games, either.
It's basically a bunch of games combined (many of which are derivative of GTA), but worse: Saints Row and APB: Less visual and statistical customization, radio is less manageable Trackmania: More arduous stunt tracks, slower gameplay, slower loading and reloading Payday: Heists are less variable, rarer, and less skill-based Sleeping Dogs: Melee is worse in every way Various first person shooters: Weird physics and collision, no progression, more repetitive than APB Just imagine if Wii Sports had a sluggish, sprawling open world between each minigame and that's basically what this is like.
A very generic, unsophisticated click-ARPG that is leagues behind most modern offerings in the genre. The game is heavily bloated with currencies and shops that are meaningless unless you were introduced to them as they came and in general it plays like Marvel: Ultimate Alliance but worse and 10 years later.
Lucius DeBeers is wearing a Kingdom Hearts outfit, there's a half-black female sidekick named Alyx, Morgan Everett is voiced by Dennis Haysbert to complete the analogy to Splinter Cell, approximately a million times as many people have augs in 2029 compared to 2055, you can just buy aug upgrade points if you'd like to do that for some bizarre reason instead of just editing your save, Adam Jensen has now been in more games than JC Denton even though I didn't care about him to begin with, triangles everywhere, Illuminati (or change? Like delta??) confirmed. Rated 5 to reflect what the game makes me feel (nothing).
Despite being more or less a post-Minecraft version of Spore, the union of Spore and Minecraft has far more content and features than No Man's Sky does. Even Spore by itself has much more to do in space alone, and Will Wright got laughed out of the industry for it. Minecraft, meanwhile, actually does have multiplayer down to dedicated servers and we're going on the sixth (or so) year of free updates, while Sean Murray has already mentioned paid DLC for No Man's Sky. Both of these games were completed at least a year before development on No Man's Sky even began. While the game has a very attractive visual style, gameplay ages quickly and dies sooner than the most banal 90s first-person shooter. To reward your efforts, the ending is an unironic next-decade version of Spore's, with a little bit more Arthur C. Clarke and a little less Douglas Adams. This is not even getting into the massive technical problems that the launch is currently having, even on the most common hardware (hangups on 970s with modern drivers surely could have been foreseen even by an indie developer). The game deserves no more than a 2/10 and you should pay no more than 2/10 of the launch price for it.
The single player is essentially Brutal Doom but worse, and the multiplayer is Halo. I did not finish the single player campaign - I'm around the Cyberdemon, I guess. I will probably never finish the single player campaign because I am so bored of it. At least they got the game out.
An underwhelming, overhyped, overrated game. It is Team Fortress without Capture the Flag and 20 years later. It is Tribes without vehicles or substantial verticality and 18 years later. It is Battleborn or Destiny without single player. It is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory without originality or campaigns and 13 years later. It is Brink without freerunning or interesting unlocks and 5 years later. See that new character trailer for Ana? It's the medic from Killing Floor, but 7 years later. It is all these things but less, and yet it is rated equally or higher than any of them. The art assets are stunning, fluid, and surprisingly consistent in their styling. The game runs practically without a hitch. And yet it is dull, uninspiring, unoriginal, and hardly fun. Weapon reloads break up action for no reason. Respawn times break up action for no reason. Every game mode is a variation of capture and hold with minimal variation in the back end. Character classes are almost exclusively lifted from prior team shooters. Off the top off my head (straight from memory, no checking): Tracer is the scout from TF Widowmaker is the sniper from TF Hanzo might as well be the same Pharah is the soldier from TF or a soldier with a spinfusor from Tribes Junkrat is the demoman from TF Mercy is the medic from TF 2 Zarya is the heavy weapons guy from TF and TF 2 Torbjorn is the engineer from TF Reaper is the spy from TF (2 specifically) McCree's special honor is having the spy's pistol Roadhog is the smoker from Left 4 Dead Every support character's powers are lifted verbatim from City of Heroes - Lucio is a sound defender, Symmetra is an energy/force field defender, Mercy is an empath or the medic as mentioned, and Zenyatta is roughly a dark defender Winston is essentially the tank from Left 4 Dead but with a gun Soldier 76 is Visor from Quake 3 Arena D. Va is the mech from Gloom Reinhardt is also a tank from Left 4 Dead, but with defense powers of the assault from Global Agenda Bastion is also more or less the HWGuy from TF in his application Ana is the medic from Killing Floor Mei is an ice controller from City of Heroes Who else is left? Genji, who is Grey Fox but worse. The designs are pretty good-looking and again, stylistically consistent which is rarely achieved. But we've seen all of this before, or at least I thought we had. Escort game mode is ripped straight from TF 2, which ripped it from Wolfenstein: ET (Gold Rush for example). Assault is as old as objective-based maps from Unreal Tournament (1999) or Counter-Strike but without objectives. Hybrid is a half-hearted attempt at solving that problem. Control dates all the way back to "Canal Zone" in TF, but its application was heartily used in practically every game since from all of the Battlefields to Global Agenda. Most female characters have identical faces; literally half the skins are palette swaps. Many unique features of previous team shooters were left on the floor for no apparent reason: single player campaigns, objective-based missions, elimination, free-for-all modes, CTF and Threewave - more than 2 teams at once for that matter, power-ups, escort-the-VIP, vehicles, story-based multiplayer campaigns, dedicated server listings, co-op modes, fortifications beyond just turrets and mines, freerunning, loadout customization, pets, modding... Again, all straight from memory. Overwatch is an utterly banal, unoriginal game that is light on content. It does nothing new at all: in fact, even the UI work is mostly borrowed conceptually from decades-old games like Halo 2. It uses no new or groundbreaking rendering methods. It does not make any developments in networking or technology period. We are made to believe that this game that could have come out 15-20 years ago, if not for poly count, deserves "universal acclaim." Think harder, and welcome to post-Diablo-2 Blizzard.
This review is intended for people who have not been introduced to the game mechanics, so it may sound vague. There are a number of problems with Pokemon GO, which is otherwise a decent game at its core: - Having a moderate-to-game-crashing bug at least once per 30 minutes is a virtual certainty, even in areas with good data coverage. It will often happen right as you are catching a Pokemon, or right as you come upon one, regardless of your operating system. Sometimes it will be because the servers are overloaded; sometimes it will be because the game itself is unstable. - Pokemon are rare, much rarer than in any other Pokemon game to date. I find that I have to walk about 0.25 to 0.5 km on average to find a Pokemon to catch. This is opposed to the original game, where you had to walk about 5 meters into grass to be instantly assailed by Pokemon repeatedly. Pokemon density is based off of data gathered from an earlier application called Ingress that mapped where people used their phones most. - Due to this obstacle, players have overlooked the point of the entire game and started driving around in their Mercedes to get from location to location or downloading the APK off of GitHub so that they can fool their Android emulator into positioning them anywhere on the map they wish without moving. This sort of tactic is against the ToS but so far no mentions of anti-hack have been made. The game is quickly becoming a wasteland of carbon emissions and broken, gentrified gameplay with high barriers of entry for children and the less advantaged. - Progression is rather slow, and for some reason the quality of the Pokemon you encounter depends on your time playing. This means that the game supports early adopters. If you didn't start on July 6 then it's quickly approaching the point to where you might as well not even play at all, since there's no cap to the Pokemon quality that I'm aware of and you will never catch up. The only hope is that leveling up becomes so logarithmically hindered that everyone will be able to reach the same approximate level within a few days and no one will make it much further. - There are premium (paid) items that increase the speed of this progression, once again giving an advantage to wealthier users. - Battles are nothing like the other games other than selecting the right Pokemon types; they are more passive in a way that again favors those who are statistically superior (i.e. those who have shelled out more money, had the luxury of spending more time on the game, got lucky, etc.) The takeaway message here is that personal skill is practically irrelevant to battling. - There is very little explanation of game mechanics and none of the above will be particularly obvious to you unless you're familiar with video games and have already invested several hours into the game. So in conclusion the game greatly favors urban-or-suburban-dwelling, well-to-do users with a great deal of free time and/or money, who started playing early in July. Having a car and living in an area with light traffic helps also. Living in a place with temperate weather where you can actually use your phone outdoors or walk around for several minutes without absorbing unhealthy amounts of radiation helps. Basically unless you are rich, have a car, are already in good shape, live in a suburban area with low population density and lots of public meeting places like parks, are between the 40 degree and 50 degree latitude lines, and started playing last week, you might want to rethink bothering with this thing unless you're fine with working way too hard to catch a bunch of Rattatas and Pidgeys for a week. It's unfortunate because this is the most original and interesting Pokemon game since the original. The "game-ification" of getting out and walking or running around - assuming you aren't polluting the atmosphere by using your SUV or sports car to catch digital vagaries - is extremely effective and I've jogged 12 km in the last day alone just for this game. I would like to say these issues are going to improve but this is a Nintendo subsidiary we're talking about here; these guys aren't exactly known for finely-tuned gameplay unless you spend a lot of time in college dorm lounges.
All you need to know about Viking Conquest is these five things: 1. It has only 3 professional reviews. 2. Even after the Reforged re-release, people still complain about bugs. 3. Every "perfect 10" review mentions a fault in the game. 4. Its overzealous fans will mock someone for suggesting horned helmets because they are anachronistic, even though there's literally magic in the scenario (e.g. the immortal berserkers in the Morrigan quest line and "elf" helmets) and your soldiers all shout audibly in modern English whether they are Anglo, Frisian, Danish, whatever. 5. There are more interesting free mods with comparable amounts of content: AD 1257, Nova Aetas, Gekokujo, and Prophecy of Pendor, off the top of my head. Given a 2 instead of a 0 because some effort seems to have actually been put into mixing up the M&B formula a bit in the form of "strategic views," naval ship command, children, an actual entire (though horribly buggy) story mode, and making spears functional in the most obvious way possible.
Summary: an overall enjoyable, influential and interesting game pockmarked by poor design decisions, flawed development and philosophical contradictions. What I liked (* indicates a caveat - see following section): + Minecraft clearly popularized survival crafting games, for better or worse. Interacting with the environment and using it to your advantage by "mining" it and then "crafting" with it is the essence of the game and it is a relatively fresh concept. + There is a decent amount of content*(1). + The game clearly lends itself to co-operative multiplay, which I enjoy. Players have had some success with PvP due to novel situations you can get into with the mechanics, though I find it rather unsophisticated overall. + Minecraft will get you to think both creatively and geometrically. Mining and farming are matters of tiling, a classic category of math problems, based on a few facts you will learn contingently in-game. This encourages problem-solving skills not normally required in video games. Meanwhile, building aesthetic structures allows the player to express themselves in-game instead of following a railroad path so familiar to many modern games. + Item progression is relatively exciting and satisfying*(2). + Technically speaking, Minecraft is interesting for a number of reasons. It wasn't anywhere near the first game to use voxels in graphics and gameplay so extensively, but it popularized their use. Voxels are a kind of "atomic" graphical structure that constructs larger shapes out of smaller particles, not unlike LEGOs. Until Minecraft, they were mostly used outside of gaming for things like molecule imaging. Minecraft used fairly remarkable terrain generation algorithms to procedurally generate fresh worlds made out of voxels for each playthrough. + There is so much to do*(3), and the player can set their own pace. The game can be played in short bursts or in massive marathons and it lends itself to being rather addictive. What I didn't like: - *(1): There is a lot of content, but the way in which it is accessed is poorly conceived. Due to the terrain generation, most new content that comes in the form of new block types or new items needs to be reached by approaching the frontiers of what has already been discovered; for middle-to-old-aged worlds this can be several kilometers away from the starting point for a mere chance at visiting the new content. For instance, I easily have over 1000 hours in the game, and the "mushroom island" biome type was added to the world 4 1/2 years ago. I still have never encountered it. This flaw in the terrain generation algorithm forms the basis of several tedious game struggles later on, like finding a Nether fortress or village (necessary to acquire Eyes of Ender, items used to locate the final boss and "End" biome), finding biomes that were introduced years ago to experience all the content, or even finding content that is new to biomes that you've already experienced. - *(2): In the beginning of the game, there's a clear material progression as you advance through wood->stone->iron->diamond tools and armor. After this point, though, all progression comes in the form of using a rather contrived enchantment system that is frankly an inconvenience. Since this enchantment system requires wheat, sugar cane, cows, and trees you're somewhat limited to where you want to put your "base" unless you feel like traveling a great distance to visit your cows or want to try leading them across great expanses (the pathing AI is not that great). Even then, once you have gone through the bother of acquiring the 46 leather, 90 wood planks, 135 sugar cane, 4 obsidian, and 2 diamond necessary to max out enchantment (yes I know this off the top of my head), it becomes increasingly expensive to repair your super-items. - *(3): Most tasks in the game are about resource collection of some kind. There is combat and exploration but it is very lackluster. Once you've seen an example of something you've really seen it all. The rest of the game is about gathering resources, and this can be tedious. A few years ago one of the developers actually intentionally made crops slower to mature, not because he thought the game was too easy but just to make everything more tedious. Mining can take minutes upon hours of your time doing repetitive tasks to get modest gains, even when you meticulously plan it in a statistically favorable way and perfect all your equipment. - Many ancient bugs, like poor achievement detection and Nether portal calculation, persist to this day. - Numerous promises have been left on the floor: a modding API, more weapons than a sword or bow, a living villager economy, off the top of my head. - Devs are less imaginative than modders and have been spending the better part of 5 years inserting inferior versions of mods as patches. - The recent combat update adds more hackneyed decisions, hamstringing the player in pointless ways.
It's the best game ever since the one that was released last week, until the next one that comes out next week. Netcode, controls, animation skeletons, bosses, AI opponents (somehow actually worse than Scholar), pretty much every item and spell and miracle, the nun-filled choir, you've seen it all before and I suspect you will be seeing it again. One notable difference is the addition of focus points i.e. mana, a concept done to death in video games and which is yet another stat that the bosses have an endless supply of in a vain attempt to pad out the game's difficulty. You will run past enemies like never before; in the beginning there is an AI opponent that is harder than the boss that comes 3 minutes before him and which will have twice your hitpoints and do twice your damage while naked. As usual the bosses require you to summon or have incredible equipment or else be murdered when they accidentally slap you with their testicles, the former of which means you have to reverse hollowing (called "embered" colloquially, or "enkindled" due to new sparking shader that circumvents needing to produce a hollow-version-model of yourself) and thus engage in multiplay. Sadly, as has been the case since Dark Souls 1, the netcode is a horrible joke and it can take well over an hour to connect to a 10 minute co-op session, if you are so lucky; meanwhile you can be invaded by people that don't know what they're doing and will confusedly lag stab you until they fall off a cliff. An utterly mediocre entry in a mostly overrated series hallmarked by its imitation of NES Dragon's Lair difficulty - training you to repeat patterns over and over forever, retreading the same content about 10 times longer than you would need to otherwise. Because it has gathered a following, your more suggestible friends will probably act like it's some seminal work of video game design even though each one is basically Demon's Souls but worse (perhaps progressively so), which in turn was basically Severance: Blade of Darkness, Die by the Sword, or Rune but with more interesting multiplayer and more gameplay padding. If you've never played video games before or have been chided for being ignorant, gullible, or uncultured then go ahead and give it a go - the whirlwind of Carrollesque imagery, Zen-like narrative and game design, and feeling of having accomplished the task of memorizing every enemy's attack patterns is sure to impress. Otherwise, save your money.
They re-used the world map, animation skeletons, menu, most of the core gameplay elements, and graphical engine of the past 2 installments, and removed co-op or any multiplayer, vehicles of various kinds, and weapon variety, and then charged $60 for it. There are an average of 2-3 layers of DRM with any given purchase of the game, some of which may render the game unplayable and this was the case for several thousand customers at least. If this sounds appealing to you then just add a '1' in front of my score. If my review is voted down, it's because of mindless sycophants that can't handle the truth. Nothing I have said in this review is a fabrication.
It's like Dark Souls, but set in Die andere Seite by Alfred Kubin, the parry mechanics make no logical sense even from a game design standpoint, there's practically no blocking anymore, and the entire thing takes place in some mixture of the Undead Burg and Anor Londo. Everyone is talking about blood, which is to say souls, insight, which is to say humanity, and beasts, which is to say hollows, all the time. This is the unspoken fourth game in the Souls series, and it would be an exaggeration to say that the series has ever learned any lessons from its past. The combat is more or less identical to Souls games of the past, with a few caveats. Turtling is no longer an option so everyone is rolling everywhere all the time, especially since there is an expendable (i.e. less renewable than stamina) resource used to parry. The armor is all essentially worthless and doesn't contribute significantly to poise or resists, much like in Dark Souls 2. There is dual wielding, but your offhand weapon actually has less functionality than a shield, so this is a step backward resulting in "timing battles" of either roll-slashing or standing slightly out of every single character's swing radius, moving forward 1 millimeter, and then attacking, rinse wash repeat, or else actually using the parry system which revolves around trial-and-error exploration of every attack animation in the game, because it is only at a certain point that a bullet to the face will actually stun someone, and that point is when they are 1 inch from hitting you. "Just like real life." Other than this the combat is straight out of last decade, playing something like God of War but where you can only take a hit or two before being presented with a 45 second load screen and then retreading your steps like every Souls game. The setting is lauded by fans as being deep and unique but in fact is just Dark Souls in an, "oops we dabbled with magic now ancient gods are dreaming a hell world for us" setting, not unlike various other popular titles like Dragon Age or Grim Dawn, both of which had releases numerous years before this game even began development. The fans will call the setting "Lovecraftian" as a buzz word, even though the concept of elder and forgotten gods feeding off of human existence predates Lovecraft (for example People of the Pit, published 1918), and they probably haven't read any Lovecraft to begin with. I guess it's supposed to be a favorable change to the more traditional sword-and-sorcery appearance of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, but this is at least the 10th game I've played chronologically that is set in a Steampunk Victorian-esque setting (most of the Castlevania series, Final Fantasy 6, Thief series, Amnesia, Dishonored, Grim Dawn, off the top of my head) and the 6th game featuring Lovecraftian monsters (Alone in the Dark, Quake, Eternal Darkness, Call of Cthulhu, Grim Dawn), so it's not exactly the path least tread for me. Even Pathways Into Darkness by Bungie features a "dreaming god" aspect without resorting to story elements reminiscent of all of the developer's other games. Not impressed. Multiplayer is no surprise, and operates almost precisely as it always has in these games. Fans will talk about how PvP isn't played up as much in this game, even though it's practically the same thing as always, just with fewer griefers coming in and ruining your game for you. In my opinion this is something of an improvement, though I still prefer hitch-free co-op and not performing arcane rituals inside and outside of the game to have any semblance of multiplayer. I have awarded this game 5 points to represent the utter banality and mediocrity I perceive; the re-use almost verbatim of all gameplay mechanics from the Souls series to date, the extensive art assets without inventing anything, and various technical annoyances - wildly varying framerates, connectivity problems, long load times - endemic to the series that have not and probably never will be resolved.
It's not that unreasonable to say it's a Titan Quest reskin, but if you take the time to acquaint yourself with the whole game you should see that there are plenty of improvements. Better loot tooltips, better loot filters, P2P servers instead of Gamespy (you aren't going to be MLGing this game anyway), more build options, less filler, everything is streamlined for player convenience compared to TQ. There is absolutely no pay-to-win or paying for anything except the game for that matter, and there will be no "auction house" wherein people get twinked to oblivion with $10,000. The game was made by about 10-15 people and in my opinion it represents the terminal state of the path that Diablo 2 was on in terms of being a straightforward, mouse-based raiding, number-crunching character builder. I suspect this will be the end of this style of game with all future ARPGs taking the route of PoE/Diablo 3 (freemium or pay-to-win) or rollfests like Dark Souls and its clones. If Diablo 2 is one of your favorites, then it doesn't get much better than this except in production values. Some valid points of negative reviews I'll acknowledge: - Some animations are pretty naff, like the 2H attack animations, which look like you're swinging a cardboard tube - Much of this has been done before, but the point of the game is refinement of those mechanics - It will seem AWFULLY FAMILIAR if you have played Titan Quest before, but it is leagues ahead of Diablo 2 - This is a mouse-heavy game, don't expect any fancy pants maneuvers, this is a real throwback to the clicky era The essence of Grim Dawn is basically perfecting the core gameplay of Diablo 2, as was attempted in TQ, and in my opinion it's made at least equivalent progress in that regard. I can't value the game for you (it's $25 presently) but I can recommend that you play it.
The ultimate example of contrast between a great and enlightened developer and an avaricious, oblivious producer. For years City of Heroes pushed free updates of quality and maintained more than a modest amount of subscriptions. Unlike contemporaries, the game was much easier to pick up due to more intuitive gearing and much, MUCH faster gameplay than had ever been seen by the likes of Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, or Anarchy Online. The character customization was also orders of magnitude more complex than anything seen before. It was truly an evolution of the genre, and there was genuine artistic effort put into it. Then one day some suits that had never played the game in their lives (or any game perhaps) closed out the development studio for reasons that could be described as lunacy at best and malice at worst, unemploying tens or hundreds of people, rendering this product I spent over $100 on unplayable, and displacing a community of thousands of fans who will probably never play another MMORPG again, much less a soulless WoW-ripoff grindfest like an NCSoft title. Do not buy NCSOFT.
A cringeworthy outing, full of spammy combat, coming from the design school of "inconvenience = challenge," full of random number generation and therefore repetition and camping even more extreme than the training of the characters, unbalanced character classes, poor customization, and always-online DRM. Its main virtues are that the graphics decently emulate the latter DBZ style, and you can design your own Dragon Ball character - as muddled up with late-DBZ dogma, retconning and annoying advertising for the new installments in the franchises as it is. You can have a "Majin" (as in Majin Buu) character but not an artificial human or animal-person, as though there's some precedent for a majority of the former but not the latter. Overall a very cynical and uninspired show.
I would recommend this game if you're interested in a novel RPG or historic experience and have patience, but otherwise not. PROS: - Rather unique game design - Relatively unique combat system - High amount of unscripted but emergent content - no FMVs, no story save for what the simulation provides, which is 95% **** with hundreds of hours of gameplay - Decent amount of character customization and variation - Music will get stuck in your head - Sex actually matters and is treated with some gravitas instead of pretending it's more progressive to suggest men and women are the same and are treated the same - perhaps the first game to make me feel good about demolishing a smug chauvinist man (I'm male) - Optional hardcore difficulty settings - Your choices matter in shaping the world - If you don't like something about the native game mode, there has probably been a free mod released by the community fixing it effectively like it's the 90s again - Dozens of free awesome total conversion mods, including one of Sengoku Japan called Gekokujo (my personal favorite), a War of the Fifth Coalition one, a Middle Earth one, a Crusades one, and a future-of-native-scenario one, plus the paid expansions by the developers which are also great CONS: - Graphics look straight out of 2000 with DirectX features sprinkled on top; mediocre graphical art assets do this no favors - Occasionally frustrating game mechanics like the randomness of tournaments, the obviously team-based "melee" with enemies dropping out of the sky instead of all starting simultaneously, being unable to besiege a castle without first declaring war via an enemy noble, some castle sieges have excruciatingly slow siege tower pushes, many Khergit units are simultaneously useless and yet impossible to kill or capture, and so on - Some bugs that will befuddle you, but probably not crash the game, like your units being immobilized in the air after standing on a siege tower - "It's all there in the manual," would take hundreds of hours to learn if you don't Wiki the game, though it is possible - Questionable design choices like AIs that can block perfectly with their weapons, which just so happen to be indestructible unlike their shields, or the kick which is almost useless in the singleplayer campaign - 9 save slots per module, very strange for a game that is otherwise so strongly PC-centric - Some skills are actually useless even though there's no indication: throwing weapons are basically terrible in every way except that they can be used with a shield so power throw is folly, iron flesh does very little to help you (though the description may clue you in to this), the bonus from trade is rather small (the description does not clue you in to this), prisoner management is basically pointless after one or two points, and tactics requires an insane investment for almost no reward - Occasional lapses in pacing can make the game appear overall boring to newcomers If you ever said that the combat in Skyrim is boring, if you ever thought knights or mamelukes or Mongol warriors were awesome, if you liked Dynasty Warriors or Dark Souls but wanted something less Japanese, if you played AoE 2 and wanted it to be a strategy/action RPG instead of a RTS, if you liked Total War but wanted more engaging combat, or if you're one of these SCA or HEMA types, I'd be rather surprised if you haven't played this game already because it's likely up your alley. If you're not big into indie games, need a game that reliably requires only a small investment of learning or time, or don't have the hand-eye coordination, reflexes, or grit to at least order a dozen troops around a battlefield in real time if not partake in somewhat realistically timed medieval combat, then you might want to skip this one. Also, if you're new to games and you start out with this it's going to make you cynical for the rest of your life because you're going to see just how banal and derivative most games are, so beware of that also. Personally, I bought the game on a whim in the 23rd or 24th year of playing video games in my life, and I was rather pleased.
Single player uses the storyline from Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008), but the characters are basically nonexistent. Multiplayer uses the gameplay from Crysis (2007) and Titanfall (2014). Zombie portion is based on Zombie Panic! (2004) or Killing Floor (2007), I guess, which in turn were based on CS Zombies. Netcode still based on id Tech 3 (i.e. Quake 3 Arena - 1999). Marketing based on every CoD release since Modern Warfare. Now you know everything about the game. Given a 1/10 instead of a 0/10 because some artists and coders theoretically put some effort into generating the assets and UI for the game respectively.
Single player uses the storyline from Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008), but the characters are basically nonexistent. Multiplayer uses the gameplay from Crysis (2007) and Titanfall (2014). Zombie portion is based on Zombie Panic! (2004) or Killing Floor (2007), I guess, which in turn were based on CS Zombies. Netcode still based on id Tech 3 (i.e. Quake 3 Arena - 1999). Marketing based on every CoD release since Modern Warfare. Now you know everything about the game. Given a 1/10 instead of a 0/10 because some artists and coders theoretically put some effort into generating the assets and UI for the game respectively.
A pretty well-designed and conceived game in most regards. There aren't many ways to improve on it, other than including the defusal manual in the game itself. Since the game partially relies on Steam support for voice communication this would be a good idea - though Skype/Hangouts/phone users would see no difference. There's also a clear advantage to having more experts supporting the defuser up to a certain point because people can specialize and reduce their page flipping time, but the game makes no comment about this, nor any adjustment in difficulty based on number of participants. For the most part, though, this is a highly accessible, engaging game that most anyone who's interested in a thrill could enjoy.
