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It's booooring. I love walking around in Fallout 3/ New Vegas because there is always the chance you find a weapon that is useful for the whole game and you will always find stuff that is useful. Skyrim is not quite as good because it's far more randomized but still there is enough to to and a chance to find something unique and useful. In the Witcher 3.. you can get lucky and find a unique schematic for a cool weapon and if you are luckier you are actually carrying around the right nonsense (steel, dark steel, shiny silver.. there is a LOT of different stuff to carry around) to have it made by a smith and you may even be very lucky and it is exactly for your Level. You will still sell it three Levels later and use some random weapon you found for the new Level because it makes more damage. Potions are even more horrible. If you want to create a Potions that make hour toenails grow really fast so you can scratch the feet of your enemies for added damage if you are wearing no boots, this is the game for you! (I don't know if this particular potion is actually in the game but it might as well judging from the deceptions could bring myself to read) The story is not as interesting as all the 9+ people claim, perhaps they never had the fortune of reading a good fantasy novel, there aren't many I know. But it's not bad either. Why shouldn't this Geralt dude look for his long lost foster child that is being hunted by these extremely dangerous other dudes? And why shouldn't he solve all those problems everybody has while doing so? And mind you, nobody else can do **** in this game. The peasants are completely useless for anything (except killing Geralt two games ago.. yeah right!) and the soldiers always have a reason why they can't do something right now. And so our mighty hero has to kill every monster on the planet and save every cat ... and only gets to rest during the long and mostly boring cutscenes. Most of the game I didn't mention is not completely bad. The controls are wonky, but you can get used to them. It's just so sad the designers didn't play Skyrim or any Fallout game and thought.. "hey.. there are things here that are really fun.. and stupid in our game". And given they still sell the nvidia givaway versions for like 20 bucks on ebay.. just go buy it. It may help you waste your time until Fallout 4 comes. But DO NOT buy it for 50+ bucks or whatever the steam loonies sell it for and if you believe you have bought the RPG of the century and rate it 9+ you need to visit a doctor.

Alpha Centauri went above and beyond Civilization II by bringing new ideas and and engaging story to the table. Beyond Earth does not. It is Civ 5 on another planet with Barbarians switched out for aliens. New additions are the tech web and the quests. The quests are mostly stupid.. mostly stuff you would have done anyway and nothing really interesting. Same as civ 5 the game is crippled by penalties for having citys. What do I need an army for if the next city will make tech discovery even slower? But enough said, all the 0-6 reviews are basically saying the same. The game is a soulless mod for Civ 5, shallow, slow and boring. Next turn. Nothing happening.

Many games have tried to fill the fantasy 4X hole that Master of Magic left something like 20 years ago. Endless Legend tries it with good looks and lots of quests. Unfortunately they forgot to make it not boring. For example: You meet villages that you can "pacify" by destroying them and bulding them again, by giving them money and by solving quests. So far so good. Succesfully pacifying a village or group of villages then gives you a 5% increase on some more or less useless stat like 5% more initiative or whatever. WTF? So instead of marrying the village elders daughter or getting some cool artifact its playing spreadsheet again. Even if you find an artifact in some ruin you don't get it per se, you can build it yourself.. once you have the relevant technology and ressources. I could go on. Heroes gain xp, but the effect of new levels are pretty minor and not at all satisfying. What good is a Hero if every random schmo can beat him in combat? Good: - Good Looking 4x - Lots of quest including a main story - PVE to keep you interested until you meet the ai Bad: - Plays Sloow, especially the tactical combat. (That isn't tactical btw. ) - Excel gameplay, +2 per whatever here, +5% there - Bad city placement can cost you the game (Pocket calculator time) - Lots of fake 9/10 reviews, I can't trust a company that does that.

The game is a remake of Alpha Centauri in all but name. Unfortunately the only thing it does besser are the graphics. As for the rest it holds its ground on the first 100 turns but looses very fast afterwars. AI? -> Good at colonizing but completely **** at warfare Warfare -> Did they even test this? Technologies -> Playing the numbers game of +1, +2, +3 and so on techs with little innovation The Planet -> After a huge part in Alpha Centauri it only gets a minor role for the first 50 turns in Pandora But I also don't want to judge too harshly. Pandora is not a bad game. If they could patch the AI to actually fight wars instead of putting all units into the city closest to the border (seriously!) it could actually become quite good. But to match Alpha Centauri? Not by a long shot.

Horizon is a 4x space stragety game in the spirit of the genre grandmaster Master of Orion II. It has all the usual ingridients - weird aliens, a customizable player race, different types of planets to explore and tactical space combat. It even has some unique ideas. Your scientists, for example, just improve on known ideas an only occasionally get some groundbreaking new ideas. While this removes some micro management because the improvements of your laser guns are automatically retrofitted on your ships it is also extremely unsatisfying. So your brand new Spaceship with its mighty 5 times imroves laser cannons got eaten by some schmo with "particle cannons". How did he get them? How will I get them? Nobody knows. The in game help is mostly useless as is the manual. This also makes the ship customization largely pointless, at least in what I would call the first half of the game. I didn't manage to play further, because the game is booring. And not the "lets look what happens" boring of paradox grand strategy, but the "oh I have enough money to build the third technology building on my fifteens colony" kind of booring. There where games 15 years ago that let us cycle through units without orders, but in horizon one has to go to the turn information screen, to click on the message "unit awaiting orders" to move the screen in the general vicinity of the star system in which the unit floats about, where one has to find the actual unit and give it an order. Every F*** turn, while nothing really important happens and your next technological breakthrough may be a hundred turns away. I don't even want to think about how to manage a large empire. So lets finish this review: ++ Moo2 clone without too many experiments + looks good + special events and "quests" + spaceships and aliens - Bad game flow -- Booring - Lots of click intensive colony micromanagement - Decisions have very little impact I give the developers credit in the fact that the game is in good technical shape with good looks and little to no bugs. But it still feels rushed with less features than even the first Master of Orion. If you like Excel style space strategy you will already own Galactic Civilizations II and if you don't your itch for a good space 4x game will not be satisfied by Horizon.

In Game Dev Tycoon your object is to develop console and computer games over the course of several centuries. You start out alone in a garage and slowly progress to larger offices and teams. One of the first things to notice in the game is the simplistic UI. You get some information on all your released games. But you can't sort by Genre or by Sequels or get some chart graphics or whatever, so after you released ten games or so it becomes difficult to even keep track of things. Also there is barely a sense of accomplishment. Like a hall of fame for instance? Nope, dne. You get some newspaper like popups if you release a great game or sell a new record number of copies and you also get achievments if you are into that.. but how about a simple star on the wall or something? But I digress. Developing games in you garage starts out entertaining enough. You get some sliders (sliders? seriously?) to determine the importance of different game elements, you can select different genre/setting combinations, develop new game engines and in doing all this stumble you way to successful games, your first million and a new office. Unfortunately the game quickly falls apart afterwards. The main reason for this is that the game is completely one dimensional. The way to being successful is not to be creative but to go on the internet an research how you need to put your sliders for the genre of your game. While doing this you will also find out that the features in your game don't really matter, only that there are features which together with the sliders lead to some internal game score. And you will find out that the game review score, that basically determines sales is not calculated absolute but relative to your currently best game. I have to repeat this: your games are reviewed by comparing its "game points" to the "game points" of the best game you released so far. This seems like a decent way to prevent the game from becoming too easy over time but it's also completely braindead and leads to the winning strategy of: "start with bad games and only improve them about 10% each game". Releasing a very good game can actually ruin you. I released a perfect 10 game from my garage and made about 4Mio, a very good number in the beginning of the game. So I hired some new developers and made my next game: and it tanked. And the next: it also tanked. Only with some crazy bank deals I managed to keep afloat long enough so that some training and upcropping new features got my "game points" high enough so that I could score 7/8 games again and make money. I learned my lesson and deleted Game Dev Tycoon. It's not fun to play, it's not intuitive, there is no creativity required, scratch that, allowed and you might as well play Excel than pay even 5$ for this game.

I believe there may be a good game hidden somewhere inside, but it's hidden by all the BS: 30 FPS, in theory should be enough for the human eye, but in practice it is not, especially if you have a normal "work & game" PC setup and are sitting close to the monitor. It's Headache time gents. Next comes the tutorial. An unskippable tutorial with unskippable cutscenes that tell me things a five yeat old could have figured out by himself. Except for the Keyboard controls, of course, "Page up"?? Are you f**ing kidding me? Btw. in the tutorial videos it is constantly referred to as "the button". I don't know if I should call that cheap or annoying. Probably both. Anyway, back to the game. Car handling feels good, except for the fact that the tires where apparently stolen off of a Prius or something. If I wanted crazy drifing I would play Dirt or something. So lets head to the garage and install better tires. Oh I can't, i can only buy a "handling" upgrade. Seriously? This may sound nitpickingish, but why for heavens sake can't I buy new tires or a new engine? I could do that in Street Rod I, 25 years ago! But apparently the guys at EA want do destroy the immersion as much as possible. To drive the point home they also included EMP weapons and more such nonsene as well as ridiculous amounts of nitrio. One thing they chose to give more realism is car strength. So the police can get you really quickly, especially with the help of all the crazy toys. I guess this makes sense, given the multiplayer nature of the game, but being a single player fan myself I find it rather annoying. Well I guess I'll leave it here: Rivals is not a bad game, but it does nothing new and some things rather badly so I don't see a reason you should pay full price for it. Wait a bit or just stick with any NFS game you already enjoy.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

It looks like a fun game. The graphics are OK. Racing is a bit simple. For example the game seems to use the same approach some of the nfs games used to have in slowing drivers in front of you down and speeding the one behind you up. It tends to take the fun out of racing if you are out in front an an enemy zips by half a lap before the finish and there is absolutely no way you can prevent it. The same goes for the combat and powerup parts. Nitro and weapon powerup are all surrounded by nicely visible red circles but you only get to see what you actually get two or three car length before. They also respawn differently so what you actually get is mostly random which I find pretty annoying. But nothing about this is truly bad, what keeps it from being a decent game atm are strange breaks the game takes every minute or so. So the game does nothing for a few second and then probalby crashes you into the next corner unless you are lucky. And that was in single player, i have serious doubt that this game can provide smooth multiplayer games. Bottom line, wait for a patch or two and check the reviews here again.

The **** review is pretty accurate. It's a nice game with lots of stupid that just spoil the fun. I like the serious wargaming aspect, but for a developer who has already spent several years on the subject there are just too many stupid things. Like Artillery, that destroyes everything. Supply trucks you are sending around ALL THE BLOODY TIME. Infantry that is really good in cities and useless in forrests. City battles that are plagued by completely random line of sight rules. Well whole battles that are plagued by completely random sight rules. The list goes on. If you helicopter is flying high he can spot an enemy unit and you artillery can aim properly. Once the helicopter drops down he instantly forgets where the enemy unit was. So if you didn't zoom in on the enemy unit the moment it was visible you have no idea where exaclty to point you artillery. An infantry.. what great fun. You have mobile and mechanized infantry. The first one just has vehicles, the second one has firiring vehicles. But thats beside the point. What your infantry is good at is defending cities. You drive into a city block, your infantry takes position inside the buildings and your vehicles.. they get a bullseye painted on them. I can not explain it any way else they don' get hidden, they are not positioned behind buildings, they are just standing there, visible for everybody and waiting to be destroyed by the first random enemy that comes along. Well, I think this should do. If you have fun playing rts games, good micromanaging skills and never fought in the real military you may have fun. If you are looking for a serious war simulation or a forgiving rts game, look somewhere else. I will give it a six. I should give it a zero to level out all those 8-10 reviews, but the game doesn't deserve it.

After the last Call of Juarez game was a failed reach for the stars somebody went back to the roots. A simple and fun arcade shooter. A rather strange decision was to tack on a leveling system and skills. While it sounds like fun it lead to a limited number of enemies to prevent you from getting unlimited XP and in turn an at times rather dull story mode. Which is also pretty short and has some strange quirks like giving you default weapons at the start of each level instead of your favorites. In essence, if you haven't played 'Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood start there. If you liked it and absolutely need new stuff try Gunslinger but don't expect it to be better. Still it's not a bad game. I'll give it a 7.