Like the previous game this one thinks "game balance" is a PR term and "quality of life" is a stat modifier. You might find an enjoyable RPG with Pathfinder flavour in this purchase, but you will not find a Pathfinder CRPG. If you thought Kingmaker needed some polish, this is not it.
The new class is inherently a risk\reward archetype where you gamble health for damage; but you aren't given a lot of damage for your risk. It does however add one of the best skills in the game at level 1 which is quite weird. The campaign is fun, but the price is too high and the content could use some more thought put into it.
It's quite short, it's quite fun, it's quite alright. There's a lot of build options, but also the game ends before any real synergies are built up. The classes are fun but lack a bit of punch to justify going deep into their trees so it is often better to just grab the first and second skills of several trees which makes all the characters feel a bit samey. A thoroughly okay game, but points deducted for this game that includes a lot of reading and has such a small font that you can not change. Your UI design needs work.
Royalty has a really weird place in terms of expansion packs where it adds a lot of new mechanics and toys that are legitimately great additions to the game, but they also severely affect the tone and balance of the game. I would recommend the DLC, it is pretty great. But I'd only recommend it after you've already played the game and enjoyed it, and want more.
One of my favourite games of all time.
Gameplay: Not quite polished Graphics: Pretty nice. Acting: B-tier. Story: There is one, barely. Music: Punchy and good. This is another painfully average shooter in the spirit of Doom (2016), and it is just that; average. That said the issues this game has come from budget, not design. Once again Streum lets out a game tinged with brilliance behind layers of grit and smudge that a bigger budget could have made rise to the front. As it stands I'd give it a charitable 4\5 but that is indeed charitable. You can do a lot worse than this game in terms of entertainment, but you can also do a lot better. On the plus side compared to Spacewing Deathwing this has great music, so presumably the next one will have improved another aspect? We can but hope.
I held off giving this game a score because it was just after release and all games have toothing issues these days. Give it 6 months to polish up some of the bugs, graphical issues, inconsistencies; you know; that whole song and dance. Then I realised that they were full steam ahead making paid DLC. There are 3 lords for the skirmish mode and the 4th to be added? Paid DLC, of course. Despicable. They're selling a shell for the price of a full game and then on top of that asking you to pay out for more. I didn't get my money's worth the first time I paid them! Maybe this will be a hit in 2023 when it's sold in an 'enhanced edition' or something, right now it's a waste of your money. Stay far away and instead spend your hard earned buck on a game that doesn't try to fleece you.
Sunless Skies is a sequel to Sunless Sea. In Skies you travel around fantasy-space in your flying locomotive seeing crazy and sometimes scary things. The setting is "whacky cosmic horror" with a big chunk of satire of the British empire and nationalism. This is a nice starting point. The game is divided into two parts, text adventures and free-roaming with your 'engine'; and this meshes pretty well. You solve problems using stats you level by getting XP either from interactions, or combat; which lets you accomplish more things. You set your own victory condition at the start of a new save so the game wont last any longer than you'd like it to. There is also a solid system for dying where you can either use permadeath to play as a succession line of captains, or make permadeath optional to get more control over it. The combat's diffficulty, and the free roaming economy aspect, is also tweakable starting a new game. So what's the problems? Failbetter Games sell themselves on their writing which range from whacky to mysterious to cooky to atmospheric, and they've got good writers - credit where credit is due. But the game delights in shoving mystery and obfuscation in your face without any answers or convenient ways to unravel them. You will be handed many questions and not a lot of answers, which when you notice will pull the writing from "great" to "filler". A mystery needs a resolution to be complete, and you will not have a lot of completed mysteries. When you do however they're great! Revealing the secret of Albion's sun with your not-Aunt and trying to see through an illusion by examining how much a donkey poops is all unnerving and funny as it should be. But these are exeptions to the average. The gameplay is also sinfully slow. You can spend an hour doing nothing but travel just to sort out menial busywork. This is a game that would benefit from being turn based. The combat is also simplistic and never escalates. It could have been great, but it isn't.
Playing on 1.05 it took me 70 hours to find a gamebreaking bug; a sidequest refused to progress due to a missing talk-prompt. 58 hours to find my first crash. Everything else was fine, no hiccups beyond minor graphical ones, so I'd say for technical performance this plays great. As for gameplay it's a weird, funky, mix of Deus Ex and the newer Fallouts. You get a lot of tools and toys to work with, and there's always something new to discover around the corner. The acting performances are great, characters are well-rounded; there's a lot of detail and nuance to the world. Basically every side quest has a full backstory whether it be driving a man to a doctor because his cybernetic genitals are on the fritz, or saving some young men from the claws of a particularly disturbed paedophile. As for exactly that, narrative, I'd give a content warning that this game deals with some very mature themes. Not in the sense of superficial moral quandries about murder, but more how to emotionally cope with rape. It's not particularly in-depth but there is definitely a lot of stuff here that can be emotionally taxing to deal with, and some of it is part of the main questline. It certainly adds stakes to a lot of interactions when you know how bad things can get, but I'd not recommend this game to anyone but adults. It pulls no punches. But this often works to the game's favour, as a lot of plot twists whether they end in difficult choices or the death of a character demand the player's attention and serious consideration. Something as simple as tacit approval can mean a character is dead or changed several hours of gameplay later. There's a clear cohesive logic to the choices and consequences the player makes, but they are very rarely drawing attention to themselves. Something you thought didn't matter inevitably will. In the end this is a game that destroys my bed-times, and never stops being fun. my favourite game of the year. Inventory management is garbage though.
