Cataclysm is an expansion to Homeworld 1. It improves somewhat the engine of the game, and add a brand new campaign happening after the original game. It's not bad per se, but it lacks the great strengths of Homeworld (the immersion, the vastness of space, the ambiance) and is rather more pedestrian. Not very impressed with it in general.
I love SF, so I jumped at the occasion. But in the end, this game lacks meat. The gameplay is basic and, honestly, far too frustrating : fighting the controls is not really the best basis for a game. It'd be a nice game for 10 bucks, but for 40 it's definitely vastly overpriced.
This is the real deal, made by the original creators of Fallout. Managing to be both HUGE and deep, with countless places, great storyline (that you see changing the world as you progress) and Obsidian-quality dialogues, this is the very best Fallout and one of the greatest RPG of all times (I would rank only Planescape : Torment and The Witcher 3 above). It's an absolute no-brainer for anyone who like RPG.
This is the real deal, made by the original creators of Fallout. Managing to be both HUGE and deep, with countless places, great storyline (that you see changing the world as you progress) and Obsidian-quality dialogues, this is the very best Fallout and one of the greatest RPG of all times (I would rank only Planescape : Torment and The Witcher 3 above). It's an absolute no-brainer for anyone who like RPG.
A child of extreme, Civ3 sports both the best and the worst. Bringing the new revolutionaries concepts that would grow through the franchise (like culture, borders, global support of units and so on), Civ3 was truly a revoltion for the serie. At the same time, it suffered from dubious design choices and balancing. Still, at the crossroad between old-school and modern, it's a very great experience and well worth any price. Those wanting only the very best should look at Civ4, but still, Civ3 has an immersive quality and some magic that were unique to it. I would definitely recommend to play it.
Here we have the highest peak of a glorious serie. Civ4 is a lovingly crafted jewel, which benefitted from the deepest development phase in the serie history, and it showed clearly through the extremely elegant design and supremely tought-out mechanisms. Civilization IV reaches the equilibrium between complexity and accessibility, between depth and variety. Far, far better than those which followed it, and even better than those which preceded it, it's the definite, ultimate, best Civ game ever.
One thing that must be given to B&W is that it's not a ripp-off : for the price of an expansion, you get about the same content as a full-fledged AAA game. That's something highly commendable. That being said, if the expansion sets the bar for customer respect, it's sadly a rather stark let-down after Wild Hunt. As a separate game it would be pleasant, but as the final chapter of TW3 it's simply a disappointment. I understand that Toussaint is supposed to have a distinct tone, be somewhat of a satire of fairy tales, and to be much lighter and softer than the very grimdark setting of the main game. But they clearly overdid it, throwing all subtlety and good taste, and ending with an over-the-top colour theme (ultra-saturated with a horrible yellow filter), an excessively parodic tone (the main game is itself no stranger to humour and silliness, but manage to keep the balance ; B&W just makes a joke of the setting and feels downright farcical) and overall ends up with a change of tone which reach "jarring" levels. More crucially, the writing is simply of a much lower quality. Geralt is more or less neutered, losing most of its snark and being pretty passive and submissive. The moral dilemma and the strong emotions, which were a staple of TW3, are pretty much absent. The new supporting characters are okay, but the main opposing ones are just plain bad. Samely, the side quests are acceptable, but the MQ, which started nice, ends up in, frankly, fanfiction-level of quality. Overall, it doesn't feel like at all that the same team from Wild Hunt or Heart of Stone wrote this, but rather Bioware at its most mediocre. The new mechanisms are welcome, if you get a graphic mods which remove the horrid colour filter it's a pretty gorgeous locale, the size is humongous for an expansion, but on the whole it's just subpar compared to the main game, lacking subtlety and depth. Impressive as a work, disappointing as art.
Let's keep it simple : one of the very, very best RPG (and even video game in general), ever.
