After playing 3 hours and half I think I can write a review; I'm confident that the rest of the game will be more or less similar. This is not a game for action fans. There is no astounding gameplay, nor combat or puzzles. It's true: combat is repetitive, puzzles are quite boring. The action is just a pretext. It's all about narration and atmosphere, and in these two areas the game is perfect. There's a balance between psychological and magical that is respected in all the dialogues and in the whole narration. It's the story of a curse or the story of a schizophrenic girl? Or both? Or none of them? This ambiguity helps to search for a metaphorical reading, and the gameplay is all thought in that direction. All the actions you do, all the encounters and combats, have beneath them the power of a deeper meaning. So: don't ever think that this is a game for action lovers. It's not. But if you love deep (and quite disturbing) stories, told in a unusual way, this is a must play.
Grim Dawn is a good, dark ARPG that can entertains you for hours and hours and hours... The coolest thing? The classes ("masteries", sorry) and all the builds you can create from its bi-classes system and from the monstrous quantity of items, weapons and armors. The horrible thing? The time you have to dedicate to it. C'mon, I'm a grown man now and I simply DON'T HAVE 100 hours for leveling up each character I want to make. If you want to success at the hardest difficult you have to grind and loot A LOT, and that takes a lot of time (and, yes, after the 50th level, is quite... boring). And 99% of loot you will find is pure garbage. Wow. The rest: good atmosphere, interesting and balanced combat system, but plot non existent, and NPCs and music forgettable... I'm not a big fan of D3, and I liked GD more than it, but I still find Torchlight less pretentious and more suitable for a relaxed playstyle.
One of the most intriguing and original games I've played in the last 20 years. A thrilling noir that is not a thriller, an RPG where the fundamental characters are the parts of the psyche of the drunken lovely dumb ass protagonist (every new play you can choose different skills and see new different crazy dialogues...). A beautiful distopic background, similar to our world, but totally different, with deep references and philosophical themes. A game that all who loves witty and crazy dialogues definitely have to play. Not for everyone: it's not a "common" RPG, it has no combats nor action. So, why 4 stars? I'm italian and I've a B2-C1 level in english language. And it's not enough to understand every shade of the dialogues. It's a game based only on words and dialogues, so losing a part of them is losing a lot. And anyway, trying to understand everything can soon become tiring. Hoping there will be new localizations sooner or later in this gog version. And no, I'm not speaking of the automatic translations that you can find with mods. It needs professional translators to fully communicate every hidden shade and every subtile meaning that all languages have.
A very very very funny dating game. Some of the most satirical, strange and hilarious characters ever seen in games. It takes the stereotypes of american campuses (seen in a lot of teen dramas and other series) and reinvent them as monsters. The game can become a bit repetitive, but it takes only 30 minutes to finish it, and it's thought to be replayable a lot of times, so you can leave it downloaded on your desktop until you want to spend some hours with funny funny characters, jokes and humor. Or, you can play it with a friend to see some other scene that can't be viewed in solo. Alt-rights, incels, bigots, be careful downloading this... you must be very skilled to laugh at yourself to appreciate it. For some comments I've seen down there: the mechanic of the game - except for the lunch time where you choose between two characters - is based on your statistics' points. Each scene has a choice: your task is to understand to which of your statistics refers each of the two possible answers, and then choose the one that has the highest value in the related statistic. It's not so simple the first times... you have to enter in the game's mentality to understand what statistic is used in each situation.
Passing the terrible (non-existent) gameplay and the stereotyped characters, the basic graphic and so on, I still expected this game to have a touching story with a strong narration. It had all the seeds to be like that. Even if the narration pretext - the machine to enter one's memory - sounds too much strained, I thought it could open some interesting phylosophical considerations. Passing all these heavy issues, I played it until the end. There are some points in which the plot could go towards a moving (even if sterotyped) ending, and I hoped so; but no. The ending shows only the poor choices of the screenplay. The plot and the characters' coherence are so full of holes that resemble a swiss cheese. And the message this (wannabe) touching story passes is something like: ignore the reality, ignore the grief, indulge in your fantasies and memories. Wow. It has so many wrong things, from an ethical and psychological point of view that I have not enough space to write them here. It's like a childish trick to not take responsability for anything. No, I can't save this game for anything, except for (at max) 12 years old players.
The gameplay is quite funny, it can entertain you for hours and hours; there are tons of weapons and spells to empower and try, and the length is quite fair. Drop rating of items and spells is acceptable and balanced. That is enough for me to give 3 stars. But... Plot somewhat inexistent: the same old heated slop with no twists, no surprises, no interesting characters. Few moment really challenging; the rest is spamming a handful of useful spells and weapons attacks (did someone really found weapons' techniques somehow useful?!? I never used them...). Most of time will pass farming and grinding: no strategy, no tactics, no technique. Repetitive, at most. The graphic rendering of characters is somewhat detached from the ambient, giving to the gameplay a sort of unwanted grotesque-kitsch effect. This is my personal taste, but surely it kills the atmosphere. Monsters and characters design: already seen in hundred of anime and animeish games. An unworthy copy of the classic Castlevania. Can give some fun, but there are better and better games of this genre out there...
Never played with HOMM 3 so I can't understand all the comparisons down there So, I speak only for this sort of mix D&D+Warhammer (Dungeon army is embarassing from this point of view). I start with a consideration: I find the turn based system more intriguing since it forces you to develop strategic and tactical thinking in place of the more technic skills that require real time (in Warcraft and similars, winning or losing is entirely up to the quickness of acting, more similar to an action than a strategic game). So this is a huge pro for me. To the game: the Campaign can be a little boring; the story isn't anything new. Multiplayer vs AI is quite challenging on hard difficulty (yeah, the AI cheats a lot... but knowing that you can take some countermeasures), easy and normal are for starters (1-2 plays is enough), heroic is too much frustrating (resources are too low...), only for hardcore players. All races have their characteristics and their tactics and is very funny to try every aspect and every use of the hero skills. Multiplayer vs humans: don't know, couldn't find anyone... Maybe the community is dead? Duel mode is a little pleasant adding that helps you to elaborate tactics with a pre-formed army. The new race is a little unbalanced but quite funny (the funniest for me remains Sylvans and Dungeon). Some mechanics are clunky and frustrating, based entirely on luck... for example the random encounters of creatures on map, spells in towns, magic artifacts, and the heroes' skills tree (in 30+ plays with Inferno I've NEVER been able to obtain the ultimate Gating skill, even knowing exactly which other skills were needed). But for these inconvenients there are tons of mods and a great map editor so the players can try to balance the problems and create his own maps and campaigns. So, a good game - not a masterpiece of course - that can offer you nothing more and nothing less that a lot of hours of fun.
I edited this review 'cause I found the way to elude both the freezing and the bugs issues. For the bugs: search with google d3d8.dll, download the file and attach it in the game folder For freezing: opening with windows 95 compatibility or setting mono-core in the Windows Task Manager during gameplay So, now I can freely say that this is the best of the four games (still, blood omen 2 doesn't exist... don't try to convince me of the contrary), regarding the focus on the story. The saga finds his most profound sense in the eternal, circular struggle of a son searching for vengeance against his father, and finding instead the truth behind his view and each of his actions. Unlike the other games of the saga, here we don't have secret locations, or optional powerups and collectibles. Everything is set for the story. You can also flee from most of the combats... but in the final rush I find myself WANTING to combat even if was unnecessary: emotions and symbolic meanings that accompany you throughout the game are enough to enjoy it, and all the usual action gaming elements (including bosses) are knowingly sacrificed to not disturb the deep immersion that this story is capable to give. Definitely one of the best games of all times for who loves epic and deep stories.
I admit it: my 5 stars are not completely fair. The game is not always polished, some bugs, some clunky mechanics (especially in combat), give the impression of a rough, unfinished game. The shortness (in two/three hours you can finish it at 100%) may be a problem too. But the script and the story are so well written, the philosophical dilemmas come up in such a natural way that only at the end you realize what the game is about. It's a symbolic experience; and this for me is invaluable in a game. And that's why it deserves 5 stars. Adding to this: the puzzles are well made; they're intuitive: you never have the impression that you can go further in the game only entering in the devs' head (this is a problem of a lot of games... one for all: Samorost). And you can count on some slice of dark humor to solve some of them. It's not a masterpiece; but who loves games with a deep, philosophical - and also disturbing - story will surely love it.
The title says everything. It's a drug: once you begin to play, you would try and try and try and try again, and try another time, and another, and another, and so on. Good characters, each one with a very charateristic deck (don't know if he's OP... but Defect surely has the most powerful cards), simple mechanics and enjoyable gameplaying, graphics and music. The bad thing: as such as most of this kind of games, you need a great quantity of luck to get through the dungeons. Luck for cards, luck for relics, luck for which boss or elite you will enconter. Every time you die, every replay, you find yourself hoping to find the cards and the relics that you need, And it's properly this mechanism - a flaw - that makes this game so addicting: it's a struggle against the chances. In the endless mode, the luck problem is well diluted and here you can enjoy yourself a lot more: on the third round, you can easily have a perfect deck and all the useful relics. In the "arcade" mode... well, you arrive to the heart boss making do with the poor cards and relics you found and hoping they're enough. Probably they aren't.
