Initially, I was ready to give this DLC 5\5. Henry joins with a mercenary band as overseer and general hired sword as a flimsy pretense to do some good ol' fashioned mercenary work. And it's great! There's a colourful cast of characters with a well-portrayed sense of cameraderie. They all have unique looks and personalities; they feel like a real band of sellswords. You go on little missions with them to protect the realm; do some investigating, some tracking, and some killing. And when the second mission leads into a hilltop charge at night, over a dozen enemy bandits with torches, swords clashing, sound effects; I was hooked. I wish this was the entire game! This is my kind of game! And then KC:D does what it does best and pulls the chair out from under you. Within a few seconds of combat I get the message that the mercenary captain is dead and that all subsequent quests in the DLC have failed. This is not a rousing mercenary story, this is a 2000s escort mission. And like that the magic is gone. I no longer feel like a mercenary, or Henry for that matter. I can no longer afford myself the luxury of walking alongside the other NPCs because I need to get in there and kill bandits before they have a chance of killing the precious captain. No longer a simulator, no longer a roleplaying game, it is firmly an arcade hack and slash game now. I remember doing the exact same thing in Bethesda games. And, sure; this is a game that prides itself on historical realism. It's not all 1:1 but it tries its best and I've always appreciated that. An engagement like this could quickly end with a leader kill and a rout. That should be an option. Maybe making the captain immortal would be too much; BUT; Warhorse Studios took the damn effort to make every OTHER part of the mercenary band essential NPCs who can't die, so why not the captain too? It's inconsistent, demands savescumming, and isn't very fun. It's sad, I liked it a lot until the gameplay happened.
I have always had mixed feelings on Kingdom Come: Deliverance, on one hand it's the best medieval open world game that captures the spirit of the period that has ever been made, so far. But on the other hand it has a lot of issues both in terms of writing, bugs, and balancing, amongst historical concerns. But this? It's a series of fetch quests that is used as an excuse to bring Henry into new, exciting, and unique situations. Murder, dice tournaments, ghosts, a Christian burial, and a fun spin on the old 'Romeo & Juliet at the balcony' gag that had me in full out laughter at least twice. There's also decent freedom in how you solve the quests and since they're fetch quests you can, if you for some reason dislike any one part of it, simply brute force them. Quite frankly there's very little to complain about. Good value for content, gave me some laughs, kept my interest, on the whole very pleased with this. Credit to whoever came up with writing 'Blame the French!' as a timed dialogue option.
Crashes frequently enough to be unfeasible to complete, but not so frequently that you couldn't if you had a gun to your head. Maybe it's good, I don't know.
The good here is that building a village is satisfying, it gives your thousands in cash some functional value, and that you can get some practical benefits of having another central hub that far noth in the map. You also get to play judge which is fun. The bad is that the settlement in no way big enough to be a trade hub and even by the time you can afford to get it you'll have figured out your traders in the south. You're also limited to what you build so you can't have everything, some buildings are mutually exclusive. You're also not allowed to customise where buildings go, there is no economy aspect beyond whether or not the town has access to X resource, and in the end it feels like you just create another dirt farming hovel in the middle of nowhere to accompany the already existing ten or so shitholes that dot the map. But my biggest issue here is that the DLC adds 3 incredibly strong horses, by far the best horses in the game. The stable upgrade sells them, which competes with the guardhouse. The guardhouse's purpose is to defend against bandits, bandits who seemingly do not exist and is no threat. Maybe a cut feature? But what really grinds my gears is that even when a DLC adds power crept items, you don't know the damn buildings are exclusive so about 10 hours after I build the guardhouse I realise I just locked myself out of getting a better horse; even using cheats and console commands. Why? Why Warhorse? Why? ... Why have you done this? Who does this? Who builds their game like this? Oh, and as a result of finishing this DLC's content I caused a known bug that causes Sir Divish to stop pathing anywhere for the rest of the game softlocking some other quests. Two stars because there's potential to this otherwise awful DLC. Potential no one will ever see.
A solid roguelite with a great deal of customisation for difficulty and playstyle. It does show itself as low-budget in quite a few places, most obviously the re-using of Gwent assets that may or may not be appropriate. But the flip to that is that there's a staggering amount of individual card choices and abilities in the game, and many of the ones that are new for this game are inventive and interesting; or simply funny. The spell that rerolls a card already played is fun, and the treasure that turns your entire deck into cards that play themselves adds a dimension to card selection and interaction that completely alters how you play one run from another. The downsides are, mostly, just related to the game being structurally simple. You and the AI take turns putting down cards that have a value and an interaction, whoever has the highest at the end wins. There's a lot of variety within the cards interacting but ultimately it's about getting a number to be higher and the AI frequently blasting away any engines or combos you're setting up can make it a bit one-dimensional. The AI is also, while quite alright, not perfect. Occassionally it will make obvious sub-optimal choices, or downright target itself, which is not at all satisfying to play against. I would rather play on easy-mode against a superior machine than play on hard-mode versus a janky one, you don't really get the option of the former. But, aside from that, it's fun to lay down cards, get combos going, and find cheeky ways to beat the game. Duplicate powerful cards, flood the board with effects, buff a fragile card into a big beefy boy that suddenly multiplies it value many-fold as a result. If you've played Gwent, or Thronebreaker, nothing here will blow your mind but it's varied enough that it's fresh. For someone like me who ended up quitting Gwent due to advertisements and samey design, this game is most of what I enjoyed with the worst bits trimmed off. At 10 Euro it's a steal
While this DLC is large and definitely of interest to people who want more advanced tank-building, I found it way too fiddly and intrusive. I love all the animals, but in the end building separate utility areas for the freshwater species is more effort than just filling the saltwater section with more fish. A lot of the freshwater species are also very space inefficient. In the end I always play with this on because I like some of the things in it too much, but I rarely engage with the freshwater species. The simple fact of the matter is that a lot of the species will start plopping eggs and babies at you, which could be a great way to create living eco systems and\or a source of income, but the lack of automation meands a lot of tedious micromanagement that, quite frankly, becomes too much to handle in a large aquarium. I don't think this DLC is bad, it has a lot of content and can be of interest to people who like taking things slow and messing with each variable. But in the end I feel it needed something more to justify the extra effort.
This DLC really rewards players for thinking about their aquarium layout, and elevates the game considerably. The tools added can help make the aquarium run much smoother than it otherwise would with some creative uses here and there.
The game has a steady progression and the management of tanks is surprisingly in-depth. Making sure all your little aquatic critters are placed in such a way that they get the environment they like and the tank-mates they like ends up being a puzzle with oddly shaped blocks, and figuring out which go together well rewards those that can pay attention. Meanwhile you are trying to make some buck so you can keep expanding, and while simply having fish is enough to get through the game you can do a lot better with some strategic use of merchandise and consumables. The only significant negative I'd give this game in terms of gameplay is that it really lacks an endgame. Once you've unlocked all the toys there's not really a reason to use them beyond your own personal enjoyment. You still can, but I would have liked a gameplay reason. Overall, it's pretty alright.
(Copied from base-game review as this is just a package deal and functionally the same product.) The art is beautiful, the music makes the atmosphere, the presentation is overall nothing short of wonderful. It is one of the few times I've really felt that me, as a player, have become immersed in the story. However the gameplay itself is a fairly simple adventure game with the context of your actions largely stripped away. Rub thing on thing. Did it work? No? Try different thing. Work? Okay, try thing in the new thing. This in of itself is not a problem, not every game needs to be mechanically deep, this certainly doesn't need to be to be enjoyable. My biggest problem is that the game board lacks basic organisational tools like card spawning in a user-defined place for organisation. That and that you have to move the mouse more than in a first person shooter, I had to stop because my wrist was hurting too much at times. The board is a mess and you have no tools to counter-act it, unlockable or otherwise. But the absolute killer is that the game is filled with routine grind that never ends. It is not deep, it does not change, it is not interesting or rewarding; the same few actions simply allow you to continue playing the game. Grinding the same action repeatedly should not be a game mechanic past the introduction; it directly contradicts the exploration element. This game has little substance past the dressing and flowery dialogue. A good plate-spinning game should reward you for your performance, not reset you to square one because one out of your 28 plates fell.
As stated this is not a sequel to Aragami, it is in fact a completely different genre of game. This is an action game with stealth elements, not a stealth game. If that bothers you then you will be bothered, if it doesn't you wont be. Simple enough. What isn't so simple is that the game takes inspiration from several contemporary action-stealth games and copies them poorly. This is the sort of game one could make a huge annoying list of issues that are baffling or poor decisions, but there's plenty of Steam reviews that do that already. I'll keep it sweet and short: - The story is borderline non-existent yet takes up a significant part of the game, it does not make sense. - The gameplay is clunky but functional, you can have fun with this game if you can look past a few small issues. - It's quite buggy and not very well made. - It's padded to the extreme and offers little to no challenge to an average player. If it's on sale and you got 1 or 2 friends you can get a few hours of fun out of this, otherwise you can spend your money better elsewhere. It is not a game worth finishing, however.
