Syberia 2 is definitely a better game as a whole compared to the first game. The first game sets the (most amazing ever) lore, the characters, the style of playing, the (amazing "autumn") atmosphere, but it lacks better adventure moments. It´s good, nice, but could have been better. From the gameplay perspective, Syberia is more streamlined that I would like. There are especially two moments Syberia´s gameplay that are confusing and somehow misleading. But this is is fixed in Syberia 2. Gameplay-wise, this game is smarter and more mature. There are more real puzzles, there are really difficult puzzles, there are less difficult puzzles - the most important thing is that the gameplay of the game is much more interesting (more better gameplay). There are three downsides tho: 1. The first is that the game lacks of the "wow" effect of Syberia. Tho you cannot blame Syberia II for that as it is not the game´s fault that it was released as the second game. The next two are more serious. 2. The characters are not developing anymore. Remember how the relationship between Kate, Dan, Olivia and also her boss was developing? It was beautiful. You cannot find anything like this in Syberia II. The characters are now static, no further development happening, even Kate was a bit controversial at the beginning as some her lines did not correspond with the ending of Syberia. 3. The third one are the cutscenes from New York that totally break the atmosphere of being somewhere only god-knows-where far far away from civilization. The first game did it beautifuly - no cutscenes, just some phone calls. Those cutscenes are too disrupting. They also bring a subplot with a detective sent after Kate which is just awful. Totally pointless and unneccesary for the story. The ending of this subplot is just as ridiculos as its whole meaning. The ending is beautiful as was the one in Syberia. Inon Zur´s fantastic soundtrack is just out of this world. 84%
This game is a pure gem. I loved it when it originally came out despite its flaws and I still love it, despite its flaws. This game has such an unique atmosphere that basically cannot be found anywhere else at all. The VHS filter fits the beautiful old school Hong-Kong action movies from the 80´s and the shaking camera just adds the needed adrenaline for a game of this type. There are bugs, there is the main flaw (the infamous shortness), there is no way to turn off or at least reduce the shaking which can be really difficult to handle sometimes, but the shooting/cover system works and it´s fun, at least on EXTREME difficulty, the action is brutal, the intro is just cult, not to mention the mission when Lynch is completely naked, full of scars, deep cuts and bleeds from all his natural (and unnatural) holes on his body and runs through the rainy streets and shoots everything that moves. The game is short but sweet. There is a lot of brutal, almost gore scenes, that you just do not find in modern videogames. I am actually wondering how come it even passed through rating boards. Well, definitely a game of its age with all its cons and flaws. To be honest? Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days feels even better than before and I am glad for it as it proves that my judgement from 2010 was not mistaken. I recommend this game even for its full price 20 EUR on GOG. It is just a must have for all fans of movies like Killing Angels, Devil Hunters, Under Police Protection or In the Line of Duty.
I considered Nightdive Studios the most relevant studio for remastering the old gems. Not anymore. After basically perfect Shadow Man Remastered and not so great, but still very good remaster of Exhumed, we are witness to the worst remaster coming from Nightdive Studios, Blade Runner Enhanced Edition. From where to begin? From the absolutely dreadful, ugly MAIN menu that looks like the menus of cheap porn sold on DVDs back in the day? Or from the "improved" pre-rendered backgrounds that lost many details, many of its original atmosphere? Or from the bugs like at the very beginning scene in the streets in front of the where you cannot move the character the usual way but only after clicking an interactive object? There are gameplay bugs (the shooting section), there are visual bugs (bad scene transition), there are new ugly menus (the main menu, or the "inventory" menu), there are reports on sound bugs and there is a lot of lost in "translation". By translation I mean the improvement of the original prerendered backgrounds completely killed many little things like rain or fog and made the graphics too muddy. On the other hand the voxel characters remain pixelated and jagged as the original ones. Did they even tough the characters? Forget this piece of crap and play the original game instead. For a non-native English speaker there is just one pros in this Enhanced Edition - you can turn on the subtitles which strangely was not the case in the original game.
Where to begin when everything has already been said? Yes, the first third of the game is quite good. You have a city to explore, NPC to talk to, sidequests to do and its quite good. Not on the Fallout 2 or Baldur's Gate 2 level but still quite enjoyable. However after you leave Barcelona for Montserrat, the game stars to change. After that section the game becomes much more linear lacking of everything what made the Barcelona section good. No interesting sidequests, no interesting characters, just a series of brutally long dungeons with tons of enemies and no way to rest to heal. You cannot rest in a tent, you cannot even rest in inns, you just have to wait. While HP comes up fairly quickly, Mana is a completely different story. 1 single point of Mana takes 4 seconds to appear, which means, when you want to fill your Mana to the top and you have no blue element around you, you just have to wait several tens minuts! I am not kidding. Good luck when you are going for a full mage build. While the game uses the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. RPG system known from the Fallout series, it just does not feel right in this game. Something's wrong in Lionhear, but as if you had much more control over you progress when developing your character in Fallout. Maybe it's that the game punishes you for increasing the power just in one or two categories. At the end of the game I had to use 3 points just to increase my electric magic by 1 point. I used all 21 points I got after leveling on the electric magic and it did not matter at all. The power of the magic barely increased. I have my suspicion that just some builds works here, otherwise you are doomed. The story and the world-building were good but not even close to the perfection of Arcanum. This game has a potential but it's broken, badly designed, very rushed in the second half and dont get me started on how awfully bad your companions can be/are. The battle system is just button mashing. Nah, one of the worst RPGs ever.
I love this game. I love its attention to detail, the way how it represents the world, lore, the story, the choices you make, the reputation you build, great sidequests, how the story gives the player two main quests in the same moment and the way it lets the player to decide what to do and where to go. The game respects the player and his ability to think. I definitely consider the RPG system the best RPG system amongst class-free RPGs. I love how technology affects magick and vice versa. I cannot 100% say that there is a perfect balance between these paths, since I have to play as a 100% mage yet. I love lvl 50 cap and that you are given just 1 point after leveling (2 points every 5 levels). This forces the player to choose the path immediately from the beginning and hold to it. There are tons of skills and just 1 point when you get a level. When you do not plan, you just may end up being a very poor character. There are problems: 1. the difficulty balance - It is just not good when a game forces you to fight lvl 1-10 monsters in "story" areas even close to the end of the game. You just constantly fight much lower enemies during the whole game (except the beginning). 2. the battle system - the game can be played as a turn-based RPG and a real-time RPG and neither of the two is good. The real-time is very fast-paced and it's nearly impossible to control anything at such a speed, turn-based's just basic, bare boned and does not require almost any strategical planning or playing. 3. the ending - NO SPOILERS (just to be sure) While I love the plot, all the plot twists and how the game ends - meaning the main point, I just did not like the final battle, it was just laughable. After it a couple of short videos are shown, the short ending and you appear in the main menu. 4. the bugs - Due to them I do not know what summary at the end I actually got. I killed the main boss three times with all my characters alive and every time I saw a different summary.
This is not a game I had been expecting. I expected a revolution in open world gameplay and what I got was not even an evolution. There is a potential but so far it's been missing. The game tries to feel like a next-gen experience, but in reality it's very old-gen. I stopped playing the game entirely (RTX 3070, everything ultra, 1440p) because I am offended by: - the stupid/boring side quest system - the horrible AI - tons of visual bugs - the horrible in-game map - the game's missing potential to be exceptional I actually dont mind frame drops at all, yeah it's annoying but...the game treats me like if I was an idiot. VentureBeat is right - Cyberpunk 2077 is a map game. This level of immersion and map quality is expected from Ubisoft, not from you guys. I had expected more than just looking at the map and walking towards exclamation marks. This city is not living, the city is actually static. Where are those thousands of people with their routines like you had claimed it would be? There's nothing like this in the game. Geez the cops next to my room had been knocking on the same door for 3 days! On the street there are two cops standing there maybe for a week. The people on the streets really do nothing, they just randomly walk, they randomly appear and also randomly disappear. Yeah I also experienced this when I ran over a pedestrian and a cop appeared out of nowhere and started to shoot at me. This is Cyberpunk 2077 goddamit! It was supposed to be revolutionary! Why does it have to be played like every other open world game? You did The Witcher 3, an open world game with the best design of the world and quests! Why did not you evolve what you had started with The Witcher 3 into a perfection?
Fallout is a real gem but this finding can only be found when you beat it 10 times. Only then you will be able to understand the complexity and possibilities in the game. Not only decisions matter but also the order of your decisions matter which leads to one of many endings. You can follow the main path - to find a water chip - or you can create your own story. Hell, I even beat the game without finding the chip (tho the Overseer thanked me for helping them, which was weird to be honest and the final cutscene should have been adjusted IMHO). There are many places you can go, many situations you may win or you may fail depending on how much developed your character actually is. There gare many quests you may not find if you do not look around properly. Tho, the game has some flaws. First of all, it's really short which also lead to minimalistic writing which moves the plot forward. Cmon, you found the chip and the Overseer then calculated that there are many Mutants out there so someone must create them, so you must destroy a lab. What? Just like that? Out of the blue? How did you calculate it? Why actually? How do you know there is a lab? If the game was longer, the writing would be ritcher so the plot would make more sense and overal it would be much more believable. Also combat can be frustrating as despite you have your companions around you, everybody just attacks you, so often every turn you have just one option - to heal yourself. Despite these flaws, Fallout is really a gem, especially when you take into account the year when the game came out. Fallout is a 1997's game and when you look even further into the history, there was no such a game in 1996 or 1995 or 1994. From today's perspective the game may look and feel a bit primitive but as I said there was no game like Fallout in 1997. Fallout is an unquestionable RPG legend. (I own GOG's classic version of Fallout which had been sold till Bethesda re-released it again scrapping the old version).
I am going to say it straightly - The Temple of Elemental Evil is the worst cRPG based on DnD I have ever played. The Temple of Elemental Evil is a game about ... nothing. The game lacks of any videogame concept, there is no story, there is no reason why you are doing what you are doing, sidequests are often resolved just by a bit of talking and they are underdeveloped and lead to nowhere. You did a favor for the lord of the tower in Hommlet? He would just tell you to go to Nulb. That's it! LOL...Why? Why am I supposed to go there? What's the purpose? .....Or the situation when your characters force evil traders to tell you where The Temple of Elemental Evil is. Why the heck they want to know that? They even did not come to the town because of it and they have absolutely no idea something like The Temple of Elemental Evil actually exists, so why are they asking that out of the blue? On the other hand, I love the game's dark atmosphere, fantastic graphics and awesome ambient music. I liked the combat system as well, but the turn-based system here is too basic and battles can become stereotypical after a few hours if they are too easy. The game is also too short - aprx. 50 hours. The manual notes that the level cap is 10 but my ranger reached 11 before the final boss so I really do not understand it. Also the manual "lies" in some aspects, as for example absolutely ignores the option to flee combat. The manual acts as if there was no such option but there is actually. The Temple of Elemental Evil may be the purest DnD PC game (personally I cannot tell because I havent played any tabletop DnD RPG) but that actually does not matter at all because as a computer game it fails basically almost at everything. Yes, I am disappointed.
In 1999 Hideo Kojima created a timeless masterpiece. This is no ordinary action game, this is an intelligent, cleverly built, amazingly written gem of art that stand over generic action games with no added vaule. It is not only about the fantastic atmosphere, amazing characters, superb writting and twists, voiceover or beautiful level design, but also it is about humanity, love and philosophy. Every spoken line here has its own purpose, no scene is a filler, every situation adds to the thrillness. The game tells a personal story about a man thrown into a pit of betrayal rather than a story about a man saving the world like a hero. Metal Gear Solid is the only action game I gave a 10/10.
