xephnid

Like all other games from Amanita Design, this was a blind buy for me. All of their games are amazing. So why am I rating this one an Eight rather than a Ten? Well, this is unfortunately one of those games that should come with a warning label. For people like myself who suffer from amusia, this is an unnecessarily difficult game to play. It seems the game devs cannot conceive of people like myself existing. I can't even blame them. The condition is rare. But, yeah, we do exist. A warning label would have been appreciated. This review attempts to fix that. So if you too suffer from amusia, buy one of their other games instead!

I haven't finished the game yet because, well, the puzzles are hard. But I do like what I've managed to complete so far. The characters and the little story bits are charming. The music is very nice - although it can get a bit repetitive if you're stuck on the same puzzle for too long. That's probably unavoidable though. The visuals are nice. And the puzzles are challenging. How difficult you'll find this game probably depends on how good you are at spatial thinking.

This is the best DLC, I've ever played. Ever. It's also the one DLC that deviates most from the base game. Mooncrash changes things up so much that the game switches genres. The latter is what makes this DLC a bit difficult to recommend. If you enjoyed the base game, there's no 100% guarantee you will enjoy Mooncrash. And vice versa. The base game discouraged rushing and rewarded careful exploration. This DLC reverses that. You're always on a timer and you might want to not read every email (at least not right away), not explore every nook and cranny (at least not right away) and not fight every enemy (at least not with every protagonist). But don't worry about dying either! Death is a minor setback. The simulation will simply start over. Mooncrash is a roguelite i.e. every bit of progress you make carries over to your next run. The simulation has more than one protagonist too. You will - eventually - play all of them consecutively. They're all more specialized than the protagonist from the base game. None of them will become good at everything but they all have theirs specific strengths and more importantly: They complement each other. Mooncrash feels like the next evolution of the immersive sim genre and I do hope there's a lot more where this came from!

I wanted to like this game, I really did, and I did rate it an 8 despite how much it annoyed me. XCOM 2 contains a whole lot of improvements over the first one. Even more if you also buy War of the Chosen... The maps are more varied. The enemies are more varied. The gameplay has improved quite a bit. Everything looks better. And more... There is a lot to like. But - and this is a big one - Firaxis have learned nothing whatsoever about interface design between the two games. Nothing. I have no hope that they ever will. Every thirty seconds there is some inane voice-over to tell you perfectly obvious stuff. And to make absolutely positively sure you pay attention to that hideous mix of bad exposition and superfluous tutorial, the game locks the interface, takes camera control away from you and forces you to look at that one thing you don't care about. And because that's not annoying enough, that **** is on repeat. You will hear it again and again and again while screaming "Give me control of the frickin game, dammit!". Sure, some of the exposition and the tutorialising is useful at least halfway through your first playthrough. About mid-game however, it'll start to grate. By the end you will rage and scream "Shut up! Shut up!" while the game noises at you. Some people think this game has replay value. I disagree. You will never want to hear from "Central" again. Never. This can be slightly mitigated by installing certain mods, but only slightly. I really wanted to like this game. I kinda did. Kinda. I don't regret buying it and its expansion. And, no, I will not buy future Firaxis games. This is it.

Having never played the ancient games Commandos or Desperado (I probably got the names wrong) this genre is completely new to me. I'd describe it as a squad-based tactical top-down stealth game. If there is such a thing as a perfect example of this genre - that I've never heard of before - I'm pretty sure this is it. The game looks great. It's got lots of atmosphere. Sound and music are very nice too. But most importantly: The gameplay is extremely solid. And it's difficult. It's a really challenging game. It's the Dark Souls of this genre, I've never heard of before. Or so imagine. And I just can't stop playing it.

The concept is amazing. The graphics are amazing and so is the music. This would be an amazing game were it not for the sloppy controls. If you've seen gameplay footage and consider a buy, wait for the developer to rework the controls. If the developer doesn't invest more time, you shouldn't invest in the game. It's infuriating and frustrating to stumble upon a game that could have been great but doesn't live up to its potential. This game is a nice example what happens when a single person tries to make a big game. Yes, it's a very coherent mix and all the elements click, but he clearly didn't test enough. Maybe all the critique and bug reports will help him fix the game. We'll see. I'd love to increase my rating :(

Too many cutscenes. Too many scripted events. Too much backtracking. Too much frantically-tap-E-1-million-times-or-die-instantly-nonsense. Too much press-this-button-to-advance-the-story-bs. Too much waiting in front of doors. Too many things that got in the way of gameplay. Not enough gameplay. And speaking of gameplay: No, spawning enemies between the player's toes, under his armpits and in various bodily orifices doesn't make the game scary. And no, it doesn't make the game challenging either - just annoying - very very annoying. It's almost as if the game designers purposefully chose to learn all the wrong lessons from DS1 and DS2. Shame, because the art design is great, the gameplay is perfectly polished and the crafting system had potential. Oh, and I probably should mention that this game has one of the worst save systems, I have ever encountered.

What none of the other reviews will tell you: This is a masocore game! Sure, it starts out easy enough but soon you'll encounter more and more increasingly drastic difficulty spikes. The game contains about one to two hours of gameplay and about ten to twenty hours of retrying and cursing. If you're into that sort of thing, well... here you go, but if not, stay clear! You've been warned.

If you're looking for a perfect blend of tower defense game and action RPG than this is it! Not only are there lots of traps and lots of monsters to funnel through them, you also get combat skills to supplement your traps. You can find or craft gear for your character and you can level up both your character's skills and the traps. The game could do with more maps and more game modes, but I've rated it 10 regardless because it's such a rare beast and I do hope it will set a trend. It seems like it will take you somewhere around 40 hours to complete all 13 maps at the highest difficulty with a three star rating. The game does come with a full map/wave editor however, so there's a chance it will keep you busy longer than that.

Pros: The graphics are even nicer than in the original. Morphing adds some interesting tactical variation. Cutscenes and tutorials are less annoying because they're skippable now. Cons: Enemies spawn ridiculously close to you. And when they're dead, they respawn even closer. As a consequence the pace is frantic pretty much all the time. When you hear one of your units asking for help and you're not standing next to it, you may savely assume it's dead before you get there. And so you will find yourself restarting at the checkpoint again and again. And that's on normal difficulty. Higher difficulties are not manageable without meta-gaming: You will have to memorize when and where the enemies spawn.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This DLC does everything wrong that Fallout 3 does right. More often than not there's only a single path to take and when there's choice you'll find doors locked behind you to make sure you cannot explore the other option. Sometimes you cannot leave the room until you've figured out which button to push. And so on. This DLC constantly bosses you around and tells you how exactly to play it. Make 100% sure you save before you start the DLC so you can opt out of this crap. I didn't and now I have to bite the bullet and finish it to return to the real game.