Style 10/10 - If you can live with B&W graphics, it is very stylish. Soundtrack 11/10 - The music is exceptional, and also used very effectively. Surgeon Final Phase. Gameplay good/10 - Coming from XCOM the style of gameplay is familiar but shallow. Story cool/10 Now the bad. Rougelites, games where you reset to the start when you lose but gain meta-progession, are grinding games by definition. You win by unlocking things, not by getting good. This does not mesh well with a strategy game. The image of this game you might have is battling your way through a long campaign, and each time you lose you get a bit more powerful but start from scratch. Wrong. Once you reach an era (by defeating the boss of the previous era), you get unlocks to skip to that era, and to start your daughters at a level appropriate to that era. So you can always skip right back to the furthest point you've reached. In theory you need to battle to unlock upgrades that don't persist between runs. In reality, starting with higher level daughters unlocked is so powerful you generally don't have to bother. Once you lose to a boss, you can just skip straight back to it on the next run. The final boss is an exception, it represents a massive power spike, but this just means you'll have to do some grinding with daughters who quickly become so powerful they trivialise the entire game. Ignore the "complex setups using the dynamic timeline" the marketing pushes - the most powerful combo abilities have huge AOE and are automatic reactions. "You have to sacrifice daughters to heal" - they can just be resurrected. You have to collect tokens in missions to do this. Except you don't - there's unlocks for those too. The UI is glitchy. What could have been a good strategy game turned into a grinding game thanks to the roguelite fad. It's rarely difficult and the grind is there to hold your hand. Worth playing if you like the look of it. Get it on sale.
This game has a bad rep. I almost didn't play it. It's actually better than the first in basically every way. Divine Divinity has a big premise, but in reality you are mostly a divine errand boy. Toward the end, when you finally get the crew together and the actual story can get started, you are ripped away, cut off from the open world and quests, and the game is declared essentially over. This irritated me so much I didn't touch the game again for several months. Beyond Divinity starts with a small simple premise, escape, and builds from there towards the satisfying conclusion of a story that you don't even know you are a part of at first. Each act improves upon the last, as the locations and characters become more interesting and relevant to the overall story. I finished the game in a week flat as I really wanted to continue exploring the world it presents. The voice acting is better than the first. Not a high bar, but it isn't a total comedy routine this time. Some of the voices are even... actually good. One imp near the end in particular had me smiling every time he spoke. Gameplay is better. I played as mage in DD and mage/warrior in this. DD was 90% dropping burning walls and baiting enemies into it to minimize mana use. This game was a lot of yakety saxing the two characters around, but also actually altering tactics (melee/ranged, damage vs disable magic, even sneaking) depending on the enemy. I had to leave this review as this game doesn't deserve the flak it gets. Give it a chance. - It may have been very buggy in the past, but isn't so bad now. Still, make proper saves often. - Don't find the amulet for the merchant near the end - The battlegrounds are entirely optional, feel free to use them only for trading - Stock up on potions, chug them like it's going out of fashion - Pause in combat - Read the novella - Not actually a 5 star game, this and DD are both poorly designed mediocrity, but if you liked the first play this
I got this for free on some offer, almost didn't take it as an indie side scroller isn't usually my jam. Finally got around to playing it, and it was worth the time. The story is by-the-numbers cyberpunk/singularity stuff, and no part of the gameplay is exceptional. But, no part of the gameplay is awful either, it is sufficiently fun, and the art and voice acting are good. If you're unsure, and like this kind of story, give it a chance.
Game is often touted as roguelike + base management. The base requires virtually no actual management, just somewhat tedious busywork. Impossible to fail at if you have your eyeballs pointed at the screen. The fighting parts are a normal hacknslash dungeon crawler with procedural generation. You can't save/reload mid-dungeon-run, but they take all of ten minutes. Not a roguelike or roguelite by any stretch of the terms. What it really is is a super shallow but quite fun cult simulator with pretty art. Casual fun. The hacknslash gameplay is fun, but very easy by default, playing on max difficulty + golden fleece made it a nice challenge for me, someone who has little experience with hacknslash games and is terrible at bullet hell. If you're actually good at those genres, it might be impossible to make this game a real challenge. I see a lot of older reviews mentioning bugs, I experienced no bugs except one where occasionally at the base everything would stop moving. This can be resolved simply by saving and exiting to the main menu.
The story is great, especially for someone who has previously played Control and wants to see the Bright Falls AWE 'first hand'. The gameplay is more fun than it has any right to be, not just the shooting, but even the driving, the cars handle nicely for a non-driving-focused game. Shooting enemies is ridiculously satisfying. The 'level design', if you can call it that, is abysmal. A frightening proportion of the game is just walking along nondescript completely linear forest paths fighting the same enemies over and over. The game uses the most tenuous of excuses to have the protagonist walk through the forest over and over. Alan himself even comments on this at one point. Even the grand finale, after Alan finds out what he needs to do and just has to go and do it, has an hour long slog of you driving/walking through the same old forest fighting the same old enemies before you can finally see the final cutscene. The devs clearly had a great story in mind, but were so dedicated to presenting it alternately as a book and as a TV show, they forgot about presenting it as a video game. The result is a whole lot of filler, hours spent walking between the locations relevant to the story, precious little time spent IN the locations relevant to the story. By the end I just wanted it to be over. 3 stars is harsh considering how great the story, graphics, and gameplay are. But all it needed to do to be a lot better was cut out some of the filler. tl;dr: A must-play for the story, but prepare yourself for a LOT of unnecessarily long repetitive hikes through the forest.
Boy was I hyped to find there was finally a fully functional offline version of this game, and boy was I disappointed to find that there actually isn't. I thought GOG was curated? Are they just stretching the definition of "DRM free" to make some extra money off people who don't know better, or actually just not bothering to curate anymore? Neither option inspires confidence.
