Pathfinder: Kingmaker, a first computer CRPG from the Pathfinder setting, is a welcomed injection of D&D goodness that has been eluding PC fans since NWN2 and its addons. The game starts strong and has very addictive gameplay. All archetypes you have been longing for are here - strong but stupid barbarians, dwarven clerics, evil sorcerers, naive bards, and so on. Kingmaker is a classic D&D RPG game in every sense of the word. If you've been waiting for a "new" Baldur's Gate, your wait is over. Everything that made old PC D&D games is here, and more - now you have a kingdom to manage, which is a nice addition. So why only 3 stars, you ask? Well, there are two main reasons why. First of all, the game seems hell-bent on wasting your time. Insanely long loading times everywhere you go - maps are tiny or small-ish, certainly not huge dungeons, so why does loading take so long on a system with 6core CPU and a SSD? The game is not a technical marvel by any means, so I just don't understand why it loads... sooo... slowly. As if that wasn't enough, there is an unskippable animation every time you start the game up. There is no way I know of for you to exit your kingdom capitol quickly (you have to go through several locations and loading screens to go adventuring), your characters' movement speeds are insanely slow, and so on... Half my playtime is comprised of boring back-tracking, waiting for my chars to slowly trek across a map, waiting for loading to finish, getting out of capitol, etc... The second problem is that difficulty is all over the place. What this means in practice is that you will be plowing through encounters 90% of the time and then, for the remaining 10%, you will get your ass kicked no matter what you do. There is no in-between. It's either wreck them or get wrecked. My suggestion to the developers: optimize loading, give player option to leave capitol instantly and to speed up animations, tweak difficulty. Then it will be a 5-star game.
Shadow Warrior 2 is not a complete disaster but it's NOT a sequel to Shadow Warrior (2013). Core gameplay of linear, fast-paced shooter has been gutted and replaced with a Diablo-esque FPS ARPG game, where you spend time constantly fiddling around with the metagame, raising skills and upgrading weapons with never-ending stream of uninspired, generic loot, and grinding for money and equipment. The mix is flavoured with boring side missions taking place in procedurally generated levels that are empty save for occasional group of bullet-spongy enemies with a mini-boss. Devs burned the bridge between them and the original Shadow Warrior fans. Whether it was to appeal to "broader audience" or to just create something different I don't know. Just keep in mind that this is not the Shadow Warrior you've been looking for, unless you loved Diablo and/or Borderlands, in that case this is a game for you.
This game is very different from the previous two installments. If you haven't played those, buy them and play them because otherwise this game won't make any sense and you'll get only a fraction of the enjoyment out of it. As other reviewers already stated, Trails 3rd is an epilogue to Trails in the Sky duology. And it is a very dark epilogue indeed. The setting is radically different and instead of recycling the Kingdom of Liberl for the third time, Falcom opted to present a fantastical, eerie realm. This realm is inhabited with new enemy types, giving Trails 3rd a welcomed breath of fresh air, even though the entire game is essentially one gigantic dungeon. Another aspect of Trails 3rd that is different from the previous games is its approach to main storyline. Instead of lengthy cutscenes evolving a stereotypical good-vs-evil story you get a much darker, more mature storyline that is chopped up into fewer and smaller pieces. There are still lengthy cutscenes presented as flashbacks, but you don't have to watch them if you don't want to. You will spend much more time fighting in this game than in FC or SC. Combat is the focus of 3rd's gameplay and is better and more challenging than ever. However, it's not that 3rd became an "action JRPG" with bland storyline. It's more like that both combat and story are polished to perfection. You will experience many epic battles, powerful moments, and plot twists in the 3rd. If you liked FC and SC, then this is, in my opinion, the ultimate ending and a must-play.
No matter how hard I tried as a veteran of KB: Legend and KB: Armored Princess to love Dark Side, I can recommend this only to the most die-hard fans. The game has quite a refreshing storyline with all that dark army building, Shelter (sort of castle-building first time in KB series), tons of funny one-liners, complicated quests never seen before in a KB game (for example, working with your spy to get inside a castle), new unique units, tons of addictive combat... I loved first four or five areas of KB: Dark Side. But after first few islands it all gets extremely repetitive. You soon realize that quests almost always get overly complicated and long, you don't get any guidance what-so-ever besides the original dialogs with quest givers that is NOT recorded in your journal so if you happened to not pay enough attention you will be searching Google for answers - too many times... Battles are very punishing in the beginning but get laughably easy once you are powerful enough (I am level 59 vampire now and haven't had a challening battle since 40 or so). And on top of all this, KB: Dark Side is absolutely humongous. Seeing as repetitivness is the common trait amongst all KB games I don't understand why the developers insist on pushing these to such lengths. Dark Side is twice the length of KB: AP, at least. When I realize that I am going to spend another 20+ hours going through more and more areas, finding bits and pieces of information on how to beat it on Google (seeing as the quest log is useless) I slowly begin to cringe. This is why I cannot give the game more than 3 stars. I really tried to love it, and I did, for a time, but then boredom and endless grind kicked in. First 10-20 hours are amazing. The rest is a boring mess with occassional brilliant idea thrown into it.
When this was released all those years ago, I remember that my disappointment was immesurable. A game that hyped itself to be the BG2 successor, only to fall flat on its face in nearly every metric imaginable. Now, years later, I am replaying this with White March I and II, and while I'm not exactly having a blast, after some updates, it's serviceable. Everything in this game is predictable, as if done according to some template to check all the boxes. You have a predictable, boring villain, pretty meh but acceptable story, cliche characters out of which the only one who really stands out is Durance, and honestly quite baffling design choices. Gameplay system that tries too hard not to be D&D only to look like an exact copy regardless. Kill XP that is tied to the bestiary, and once you have bestiary full for that particular enemy, you stop getting XP for it, which is honestly a "galaxy brain" design choice - if you have to gimp player's XP progress in order to not overlevel him, then it's obvious that you have too many trash fights in your game and you should cut some of them out! If you can get past some of that, then the game isn't really bad, it's an isometric party RPG, with good build variety, adequate length (maybe too long...), and some good parts here and there. It isn't the top of the pack, and it has its problems - problems which PoE2 solved almost entirely - but if you have an itch to play a cRPG you haven't tried before, or just want a character to export to PoE2, you can play this, and it will serve a decent enough job. But don't expect another Baldur's Gate, and of course brace yourself for the constant loading screens, which are just bearable on a modern CPU and SSD (they certainly were the immersion killer back in the day when this got out). If you want it, then get it on a sale with both White March expansions.
