I'm now hooked on Jagged Alliance. This is one of those games that has the veterans up in arms both singing its praises and condemning it depending on historical context I simply don't have, and I'll leave that to them. What I got was a complex, interesting, challenging, and most importantly funny- tactical squad based strategy game. I loved it. It shows a lack of polish in a few places, but the bad is instantly washed away by all the good the game provides. I also applaud that the game's chief challenge on the 'standard' difficulty setting is the economical aspect of running a mercenary organisation. Taking fights I didn't want to simply to survive another month of paying mercenary rent was a fantastic. It reminds me of Battle Brothers in all the best ways. Complains are that while the length drags on it feels like it's a really long road to not get anywhere particularly exciting. There's a twist at the midway point which is very interesting and helped breathe some life into the story but your mission parameters from the intro are pretty much the totality of your mission in the fictional Grand Chien. It's fine, but I would have liked a little more substance to it. You end up playing Othello with the hostile forces almost from the get-go, trying to flip important landmarks to your favour and immediately losing them when you take a step outside. There's also a little bit of a problem in acquiring armaments and ammunition, there's no automated system for doing this so you can exploit a few local resources in a tedious time-consuming manner, or you can make due with what you have. And I'd really like some kind of way to purchase specific weapons and tools, especially ammo is inexplicably scarce when the enemy has full auto on at all times. I was unsurprised to learn that this kind of store-system was in earlier versions of the game so I can only hope it is either added in a future expansion pack, or as a mod. On the whole I had a great time in my 50 hours.
If you want an adventure game with tactical turn based hack and slash combat with semi randomised environments then this is the game for you. It does this quite terrifically, and every time I die I curse the game, hate it, and then feel compelled to go again 20 minutes later. There's tons of stuff to figure out and do, and plenty of variety so you can have plenty of options in how you approach problems. Downside is that fundamentally this game is about having your character bump into the other character, then heal up, and repeat; forever. It's good, very good, but I was sold on this being an 'evil overlord'-type game and I don't really feel it is. The story is interesting and presented in a very unintrusive and tasteful way, but despite picking your character at the start of the game this is just the "vessel" for the main character, "The Devourer", who has nothing to do with that character narratively speaking. So whether you are a human barbarian or a gnoll cultist is just stats - it has no bearing on the story or how others interact with you. Which is, to me, the biggest disappointment. There's also a very involved crafting system that is incredibly deep and sophisticated and also entirely vestigial; you'll pick up loot from victims constantly. On the whole it is very different from what I wanted, and what it was advertised as back when I first saw it however many moons ago. But what is there is great and the fact that they put effort into making it so character class and type has meaningful mechanical differences is delightful. I'd hope for a balance pass or two in its lifetime but at the time of writing I put 15 hours in and intend to put in at least twice that. Help I'm being bushwhacked by elves, send flails.
My favourite part was when we picked the option 'We wont go along with your evil plans' and the game refused to not let us go along with their evil plans. That was great. This happened because a character got knocked down by a non-lethal weapon, and that failed the questline because that counts as "dead". Overall, this is somehow even worse than Holy Detonation; but at least it is much shorter. So you'll waste less of your time. How a good game like Wasteland 3 can have such awful DLCs is beyond me. I say without any irony "Did someone playtest this before releasing it?"
The soundtrack is worth the little extra you'll pay over the base edition.
This game is wonderful. Fast paced, good looking, brimming with little details to discover, things to unlock, and inexplicably has some great voice acting. Finished it in 9 hours with a few restarts and was entertained throughout. Where the game is not great is that a considerable amount of those 9 hours are wave survival, and if you want to 100% the game the vast majority of it will be wave survival. There's also a few areas in the game where the environments could have been more detailed, as often you'll find doorways blocked by props and the room behind it is completely blank as if it weren't a room people used and lived in that is now inaccessible; it's an unpopulated video game room. I blame budget for this, and my proposed solution is to give Trepang Studios all the money they need to make more Trepang or whatever else they wish to make because this game was an amazing breath of fresh air and I want more. On a preferential level I wish the combat favoured milsim a little more, just because I feel jealous when the enemy characters can lean out from corners; but in the optional modifier (cheats) menu you can dang well unlock universal ADS if you want so on replays maybe I'll be less jealous. Thanks, Trepang, this was great. Looking forward to Trepang2½: The Smell of Fear.
I like the dungeon, but I'm currently in my fourth flute playing cutscene and I am losing my mind about how many times the game takes away control so that it may show you the bleeding obvious. God help me, I wish I had died in that holy detonation instead.
I really hated Elex 1, I hated every second of it. Ugly, buggy, unfun. So I bought Elex 2, on a 50% sale, as a joke. I expected to see garbage that I could laugh at with my friends. As it turns out I really liked Elex 2. It's not a "good" game in terms of quality, writing, gameplay, etc. But it's the first game since Gothic 2 that made me feel that spark of exploring a dangerous and magical world, and as far as I am concerned the best game they've made since Gothic 3, which I think it is the most similar to. And I think it's nostalgia speaking, and that this isn't a general audience's kinda game. But I have to say that while I am not entirely down with this kind of strange mix of cheese and immitating superior action games; if Elex 2 is the kind of game PB will keep making then I'm once again ready for the ride. I still wish they would make a smaller, more grounded, world. And I wish the main story made any coherent sense. And I wish the main character was more likeable. But I had fun. I finished the game. I'll remember it, and I'll probably replay it. I can't say that for any of the Risen games or the previous Elex. If you end up getting this game just be aware this is jank city and it's best to quit once you get bored, there is nothing worth seeing at the end of the game. But you might just feel what made the original Gothic special in there, just a hint of it. It felt good to me.
Took me many years to conclude on this game. It's a hard game to really evaluate. On one hand this is the world's finest first person medieval simulator. On the other hand it's not really much better than any other fantasy game with swords. But I keep coming back to it, and I keep thinking about it. And no matter how many issues I have with it, how many times it aggrevates me and infuriates me, I do think it's a fine game. It has issues, but you can get many hours of fun out of this and in the end the stuff that's good is damn good. No other game has made that excited to hunt, or required me to actually manually cook up a potion, or encouraged me to mind how often I bathe, or made me wonder if this jacket makes me look posh enough. If you end up playing this game you will inevitably be frustrated, but you'll enjoy yourself. Even beyond the literal interpretation; there's really nothing quite like this game. It's plain good.
