Control is a Remedy game to its core; like Alan Wake, playing this for the first time will let you wondering, and generally for every question answered, five more are nagging at the back of your head. Narrative is interesting and keeps on giving. Main character is likeable, and she actually acts and thinks like a human being for a change. Atmosphere is gripping, and the Oldest House is a wonder to explore. Remedy is famous for their level design, and here they nailed it once again, both artistically, and technologically. The game was basically a RTX show-off at release, so the visuals are understandably gorgeous. One grievance with the game I do have, and that's the grind. The game is pretty difficult, and to progress on anything higher than easy difficulty, you have to do side missions, find collectibles, recipes for upgrades, and upgrade your character. Normally, RPG elements in this kind of game are great, but here, all the side missions are procedurally generated, quite boring, and bring nothing to the game except the resources you need. Could have been done in a better way. As with all Remedy story-based shooters, you pick this up, play it, be amazed, and then quickly shelve it until next Remedy game arrives. Replayability is pretty poor, so, if you want to enjoy this, make sure you have a decent RTX card for it, and go. If this kind of games is what you like, you won't go wrong. I wish I could give 3.5* because of the grind, but overall, the game is leaning towards a solid 4, so here we go.
This DLC brings some great story to the game, but it gets hammered by extremely poor combat design. You will encounter one of three things in this DLC: complete trash fights that are over in 10 seconds, or HP sponge enemies who can't be CCd hitting everyone for massive damage, or absurdly annoying enemies that can freely interrupt you, teleport, and make themselves invisible. Reminder: there is NO way in the game to remove enemies' invisibility, other than LET yourself be attacked, not even AOE spells work for some godforsaken reason (we can't let ourselves copy DnD, now, can we, even if we are copying it in every other way imaginable). Note that all of this can be overcome, it's just not satisfying to do so, because it is unfair (enemies using mechanics you do not have access to and can't possibly have counter to). You will roll your eyes every time an infested monk with ton of concentration teleports into your party and starts whacking everyone for damage your min-maxed lvl 20 barbarian with 24 might can only dream about. You will roll your eyes every time a shimmerbeast will teleport around, make itself untargetable while interrupting your casters and you can't do anything about it because you, unlike enemies, do not have unlimited concentration or bazillion critters who can all interrupt. It's not about difficulty - it is beyond annoying. That sums up encounters in this DLC the best - annoying. It's like the guy who made combat in this DLC and the guy who made it for the base game did not even talk to each other. As a cherry on top, this DLC completely wipes out any semblance of economy in the rest of the game because you get like half a million gold down there - a side effect of enemies dropping superb gear all the time. So, three stars for the story, and -2 for the gameplay.
Don't get fooled by the store description, this game's not mature and it's definitely not Disciples. It's an emotional roller coaster with an edgy teen in the main role - our girl Avyanna is constantly shifting among cheery, dark, inappropriately horny, and crazily bloodthirsty attitudes, depending on which button you pressed on the "dialogue wheel" implemented with the intelligence and grace of Dragon Age II. The game is trying to be woke by having a "strong" female main character and ridiculing male characters, but since Avyanna is totally psychotic and absolutely unbelievable as a character, it falls flat on its face - to the point that it's actually funny how the game's own presentation of her neuterized any chance of spreading "the message", and the male characters are in reality the only sane ones in the entire game. You might be worried that unless you played the abortion called Disciples III to the very end (which I presume 99.99% of you didn't), the world will make zero sense. Well, don't worry because it will make no sense even if you did play that. The world building is non-existent and frankly, it doesn't have to exist in this kind of game. The story telling has the eloquence of a five year old and the game allegedly presents you with choices, but it ultimately amounts to nothing, as the only difference to anything whatsoever is what flavor text you will have in a few dialogues and which faction units you will be mainly using. Which brings us to the only saving grace of this game - the gameplay. The combat, creatures, abilities, are well designed, albeit generic, and if you are looking for a temporary kick from a Kings Bounty clone, this RPG/strategy hybrid will provide. All in all, if you want to play this, you have to approach it as a B-movie - it has clunky dialogue, writing so stupid to the point of being funny, and all is saved by TB combat galore (action scenes). If you can live with that, go ahead. It's a good parody of better games.
When you ask players who completed Pathfinder: WotR what they loved about the game, they will most likely tell you "the first 2 or 3 chapters when I was exploring the world and game mechanics". If you then ask them what they hated about the game, they will tell you: "the atrocious final chapter of the game". Why? Because of the overblown, badly designed, and tedious slogfests that owlcat calls combat encounters. Because of the absolutely horrible and tedious "puzzles" that take hours even *with* a walkthrough. Only a handful people are willing to suffer through that. So, what would be the best possible DLC you could provide to address those issues? Yep, that's right, even more slog fest with even more tedious combat and "puzzles", only this time you also do not get anything form it (you begin and end at the max level). Sounds fun, right? It's no wonder this is the worst pathfinder DLC ever made, and it shows in all reviews, both here and on Steam. Owlcat shot themselves in the foot for listening to the tiny minority of loud "fans" who masturbate over min-maxed builds. For the rest 99.9% of the playerbase, this DLC brings absolutely nothing worthwhile or even remotely fun.
PoE 2 is definitely a huge improvement over its bland predecessor, with interesting mechanics, role play improvements, and good dialogue. It is being let down by a badly mastered Unity engine, though. The Good: + Improvements to the often nonsensical PoE1 system with better designed abilities and multi-classing. + Pretty tightly designed world - you are free to explore, but it's not an open world where you could get lost. + The game is has proper pacing and length (no 250+ hour time sink but not short either). + Dialogues are voiced now, and writing is organic, and not simply a huge lore dump. Also, kickstarter NPCs are gone for good. + Achievements mean something (you get points through them which can be spent to improve your main character when playing again). The Bad: - Lots of story NPCs are quite unlikeable, and accepting their "personalities" require very specific tastes. Thankfully, you can use sidekicks (companions without quests but with banter). - You cannot re-roll your class, which is a huge oversight (you *can* re-roll your current class at any time but you cannot change it). - Poor optimization (nights and storms will often tank fps). - Loading screen simulator to an insane degree (you go to a tiny location - loading screen - you go upstairs to another tiny location - loading screen - now you must go back - loading screen...). I can say without an exxageration that 30% of my playtime are loading screens, and I am sitting on a Samsung Pro SSD with i7-12700. It is disruptive and absolutely unacceptable in 2018, let alone 2022 - developers, please learn how to use overlays in Unity to avoid incessant loading screens. Nobody has less than 16 GB RAM in this day and age, so you don't have to be afraid to use it. Even Pathfinder devs use it.
I am giving this game 3* because how awesome the developers' attitude is, and because it was quite fun for the first 5 hours or so. But it gets boring quickly, and would easily be 2 stars, if I had to remain objective. To explain what I mean, I will have to spoil this game, so be warned. SPOILERS BEGIN HERE Lots of people praise the story, so let's begin there. Initially, this presents itself as a classic fantasy cliche, but soon, you will find out that in the ancient times, people had trains, planes, and space rockets. A race of omnipotent beings from another universe, who devour all matter and energy and are powerful enough to extract energy from supermassive black holes by going below their event horizon (yes, really...), opened up a small wormhole, scattered some energy crystals on the planet's surface, hoping that people would absorb them and use their power to perform magic, which widens the wormhole, eventually enabling the aliens to come into this universe and devour it. All of this is dumped onto the player in the first 20% of the game, and it only goes more ridiculous from there. A different story for the sake of being different, a fantasy/sci-fi merge that was completely unneeded, is how I would describe ToT's storytelling. Add to that the obligatory "plot twist" that you can see from miles away. So, what saves this, you might ask? Is it the exploration? Is it the combat? Sadly, neither. Exploration is on rails most of the time, it includes obligatory back-tracking, and combat starts strong but becomes a boring chore quickly. You see, there is no tactics in ToT besides the "keep tanks at front" classic. Every fight is simply a gear & level check. Either you are strong enough to win, or you aren't, and that's it. On top of this, ToT also suffers from being overly long. Developers of this game craved to create a different experience, something unusual, but in the process of making that, they forgot that they actually need to craft a good game.
Designed to "wow" you in the first half of the game, and I suspect that is the reason for so many positive reviews and general success of the game. And the first 100 or so hours are truly great and the game deserves all the praise for that. Well made mythic paths, tons of options for character building, gripping story, mostly bug-free. But once you start looking through this facade and you get into the second half of the game, it's like a punch in the face. Balancing, writing, pacing, everything falls apart. Boring side quests that are in there for no other reason than to make the game incessantly longer, with one especially tedious, designed to make us gamers remember why we hate puzzles in cRPGs and that, for some reason, devs insist on putting them in. Mostly unsatisfactory and uninteresting endings to companion quests, bar some positive exceptions. Crusade mode, so well executed in the earlier acts, falls apart too, and becomes a joke. Reaching max level in 3/4 of the game, taking away the main reason to fully run all the quests. Random optional bosses with higher stats than literal deities (not that it helps them in any way). And bugs, so many bugs in the last two acts of the game, even 4 months after release. It's so bad that I would almost call this game a "Jekyll and Hyde" of gaming industry. The first half of the game is so good that I do not want to trash Pathfinder: WotR, hence the 3 stars, but at the same time if you are looking for that cRPG gem of the decade this really isn't it. The later parts kill it, and all my future playthroughs (if there are any) will end in Act IV. Kingmaker was/is the better executed and better game out of the two overall, I would say.
