The graphics and assets of the mod are honestly fantastic. The fact that Team FOLON was able to succesfully translate Fallout Americana into the United Kingdom is fantastic. The weapon designs, animations, character work, all of it is great. But this is a bad game. The combat balance is a disaster. No, it isn't hard, it just isn't well made. Ammo is handed out at survival horror levels, but sometimes a radroach can take 2 mags. Most foes can drain your health in an instant, and the cover system that was fantastic in Fallout 4 is not present here, or at least not functional. Battles take place in areas with no cover and no room to manuver, and one early game set piece locks you in a boat, disables movement, and makes you fend off about a dozen raiders. Don't let people tell you that this combat is just "old school" It is poorly designed and not fun to play. Even without the crashes (which the store page oh so elegently blames on users), there isn't a good game here. There is a half decent mod in here, but it isn't worth muddling through bad combat, awful encounter design, and incredibly dull quests (no, breaking 30 eggs so a door to a crashed airplane will unlock is not fun or interesting.)
This is a review that will be lost amoungst the noise, but honestly there is not a game that brings more apathy to me than Witcher III. The world and story are fine enough, but there is so little engaging throughout the many hours of gameplay. Geralt is deeply uninteresting, and functions as a self-insert Mary Sue, and his cool-guy voice grated on my nerves really quickly. The dialouge is just painful. The women are writen as depressing objects and exist only to fawn over Geralt's manly and foul smelling hair. The big issue here is the gameplay. The combat is fine, and i can see why it is well liked. Fast, frentic and dynamic. However, this isn't the main part of the game. Instead, most of my 40 hours is either holding W and shift to travel around the map, or holding down the right mouse button and W to follow a red line. Between this riviting gameplay is more dialouge and quests. Despite the insanse amount of praise for the side quests, most every quest boils down to almost the excat same thing. "I want a thing done" *Cool dismissive response from Geralt* "Please" "Sure" "Go talk to my freind for more info" "I know his friend, he is missing, please follow the red line." "Thank you for saving me! I was doing somthing very NAUGHTY and lost my trousers, follow the red line to find them!" *Snark from Geralt* "Thank you for the pants!" There are thousands of RPGs in the world, and they all deserve far more attention than this janky mess ever should.
Others before me have already said how good the game itself is and I don't disagree with them. The climbing, fighting and driving is fun and fluid, the disguises are fun and neat and the map is plently large enough. However, as someone who loves history, this game is infuriating. Some things are correct, like the invasion of France taking place in May 1940, but almost everything else is just painfully wrong. MP44s can be found in 1940 (The 44 in MP 44 stands for 1944, the year they were issued) There is never a mention of "Poland" or "Norway" with people sayign "Germany has started a war" when they invade France, even though France was already at war with Germany at this time, and of course the idea of the Maignot Line is never even thought about. While this does not affect most people, I find these little errors very irritating. This is less of a WWII GTA, more of a WWII themed game. Sure two of the three tanks are based on real actual tanks. one is based on the French B1 and the other is the Panzer III. Then you have the massive tank that has two cannons on its turret. Overall i really like this game, but I am obsessed with history, so the glaring errors really stick out to me. If you don't really care about history, there should be nothing stopping you from buying this game. If you do care, just make sure to turn off the historian part of your brain before you play.
When I saw this pop up it looked like my kind of thing. After messing around with the settings in order to get it to work full screen, I was amazed by what I saw. You play as a lesser English Knight in the early middle ages. You start with an undeveloped fief and a small amount of money. From here you are free to raise massive armies and siege your rivals, develop your struggling fief or earn glory in tournaments. Sadly, 1 of these activities has aged horribly. The tournaments are great fun, split between a doom-style Melee contest and a kind of awkward joust. The fief development is a city builder-lite, you can develop your castle, the village, and the surrounding forest. This is where you make your money, and you really need to make money. The battles though....the battles are awful. After raising troops you can fight wandering bandits or attack other knights. Once you engage them, the game switches to a simple RTS. Unfortunately, the interface is so crude, the units move so slowly and the battles take so long that these are simply unenjoyable. The worst part of it is that most of the time your troops literally line up in a single file line and wack at the enemies. I recommend this game, but I also recommend auto-resolving the tactical battles. If you do that then you are in for a wonderfully absorbing simulation of the middle ages.
