Remember when you played Diablo and it seemed like you had to run miles after you died? Vampire's Fall: Origins said, "Hold me beer" and doubled down on that. You don't have to die to run miles. Quests often send you to far reaches of the maps, and the maps are drawn to force you to take the long way. Yeah, there's a potion of fast travel, but it only allows you to travel between a few places on each map, and the quests are always miles from them. It's so bad I'm quitting the game. The running absolutely sucks, and it appears the developers did it as a joke on us players. Otherwise it would be a decent game.
Rare that I finish a game, but I've nearly finished Shadow of Mordor. Would be 5 stars but for the controls Likes: Sandbox w/ good-sized maps. You choose the order of quests and where to go. Battles get ferocious, like you vs 30 uruks, and it's almost fair for them while a challenge for you. You can run from a mass fight, get a quick recovery/recharge, and jump back in. Bosses move around the map and can appear when you're nearly dead, in the middle of a quest, inside a stronghold. Then a 2nd boss appears with a 3rd boss as a wingman. You're wondering how to survive then you manage to stomp all 5(!) bosses. True story. Sow mass chaos in the uruk ranks! Sneak your way in and assassinate them. Set off big explosions, setting groups on fire. At higher levels you brand them and make them fight on your side. When you can do that in combat, halfway through a fight most of uruks are defending you! Getting an uruk elite captain fighting on your side is fun! Dislikes: The controls kill you. You try to leap up a wall but watch your character do a barrel roll on the ground. Then 8 uruks catch up to you, pin you to the wall, and beat you to death. When you're riding a caragor you can right click and get him to bite an uruk, but 9/10 you switch to shooting mode, which is also a right click. Very stable on Linux/Wine/Bottles, but I locked up the game fighting the boss Graug. Hit too many keys trying to get my character to take an action with the controls failing. Frustrating: Bosses can have multiple invulnerabilities. You MUST gather/use intel. One boss quest is to ruin their hunt. My target could kill a beast in 10 sec. No way to win that one. One boss ran when losing, but had "fast runner" perk. I was out of arrows; couldn't shoot him. He disappeared as I caught up to him. One boss could 2-shot-kill me, invulnerable to stealth and ranged, had a gang, and was always in a stronghold. It took many tries to draw him to a camp with explosive barrels so I could kill him.
Some reviews complain that it's trying too hard to be Fallout. If you really liked Fallout and wanted to get a bit more of that feel, this game doesn't suck. As a matter of fact, I like it a lot. This is a fairly open-sandbox game, and that includes the plot. I'm only about halfway through, but as I see it, instead of a defined narrative, there are competing factions and plots that you can participate in, and how you interact affects your reputation. Plot advancement is required to open up map areas, so it's not quite as open as Skyrim. I get frustrated when a game forces dialogue or actions that don't fit how I'm playing the character. This game sometimes butts up against that, but it's better than most. The writing is cheeky, sometimes too much so. The spelling and punctuation could use a professional polish. There are a few cases where it's hard to decipher who's talking because the proper punctuation wasn't used. Being able to link and unlink your characters means that you can preposition and draw your enemies into ambushes before it switches to turn-based, but there are a lot of enemies that can teleport or megajump, so prepositioning is only somewhat beneficial. Being able to shoot into melee with no penalty or risk of hitting your own characters is cheesy. I'm running the Windows version under Wine on Ubuntu 22.04 and it runs flawlessly.
Look up a walkthrough before you start, or your first hour playing will be very frustrating. There are fights that have to occur in a specific order for you to get strong enough to survive. Your troops move in groups, and never move quite where you want them to. Enemy troops can just run right through your lines to attack a weak hero, so keeping them back doesn't work. I played about two hours and got bored with it.
Too cutesy, and the storyline is tedious to click and read through - there's a setting to make the text appear faster, and you really want to do that. You're playing this for the battle tactics, but after the first few solar systems you're strong enough to beat everything. The food jokes and lame puns don't make it any better. After the first few solar systems I tried to quickly click through the dialogue because it was meaningless. The "hardest" boss battles consist of the bosses respawning several times. Tedious and annoying. The challenge is that you can't get weapons consistently. You have to be able to assess which weapons you have that can be used effectively against enemies. You need a healing weapon, at least one heavy hitter, and something that hits multiple targets to finish off weakened weapons on your enemies. Once you get a bridge that can handle four weapons, get a second heavy hitter. Early in the game concentrate on training your weapons builders. You want at least two. Each solar system you have a limited time to run amok and complete the objective before you have to run to the next solar system. If you run out of time, you get attacked by a ship that can't be beaten. It's far stronger than even the boss at the end. Once you figure that out, you can usually burn down your time in each solar system until you have three days left. BUT, in the last solar system you can't burn down time. You have a lot of objectives to finish - and each new objective pops up as you finish one off. I was two days short of being able to make it to the last battle and had to restart from my entrance to the solar system. There's also a weird mix of very shallow pop-culture references. Lots of references to Lovecraftian horror. A couple references to Star Wars. One character from Ghost In The Shell. All done in a "food" theme. It's not coherent.
The settings and artwork absolutely capture the Mad Max vibe, except there are far more fresh corpses than the wasteland could support. The cars are cool and the landscapes nicely open-world. The inclusion of melee is also excellent. ...but... The vehicular combat is less Interstate '76 and more "mindlessly steer at other vehicles in hopes you can bash them in an unrealistic fashion". It's difficult to exert car control and the game-controlled cars routinely out-drive you, all while you're being exulted by the NPCs as a "great driver". Your saving grace is the completely overwhelming firepower you have. Never mind that you can only get the V8s at the very end of the game, and then you get all five pretty much at once, after suffering through the entire game with the V6s. That's bullcrap. I have three V8s in various states of rebuild in my garage right now, plus three more in vehicles. The only V6 is in my wife's car. GIVE US THE V8s! The melee controls are absolutely horrible. In theory they're great, but in practice they just don't work. It's far too common that a finishing move on an opponent pushes you past secondary enemies, but you can't get turned around to face them, and they punch you in the back while you're wailing on air. One of the "Legend" achievements is to defeat 12 enemies in a row without taking damage. I'm sure somebody's done it, but I'd click for a parry - with the parry icon active, but Max would just stand stupidly while someone punched him. Or some idiot would make a move that has to be dodged and Max just refused to move. Or some fool would throw a rock at Max. The boss fights are god-awful. You MUST defeat them in certain ways, and often the game just refuses to act in a way that makes that achievable. You MUST get Scrotus to attack barrels, but it only works in 1 attack in 10, but he can kill you in three attacks. Do the math on that fubar. Hitting him, even with a weapon, does no damage. This could have been so much better.
Runs flawlessly on Ubuntu 22.04 under Wine. Run amok on the high seas. Sink ships or board them. Grab the loot and carry on. The sailing and cannon fire are fun, but it gets old. The upgrades are a little broken. There's no way I should be able to get a battleship/dreadnaught to turn faster than a frigate or outrun a schooner. The ship boarding is janky. The ships are always aligned the same way, no matter how you pulled alongside. The controls have a delay and can be sticky - it's no fun to run up to an enemy, try to swipe at them with your sword, but your character's still running and flies on past. If you hit someone with your sword, you can't finish them off, you have to wait for them to get back on their feet and then you can try and swing at them again, but now they're ready and they parry you. Enjoy it for a while, but once you wear out you probably won't ever play it again.
The game is beautiful and runs flawlessly, even under Linux with Wine. The setting seems like a cheesy excuse. It's Van Helsing's grandson teamed with a ghost. Whatever. Their dialog is decent and the pop culture references are entertaining. The combat balance is downright criminal. For most of the game you're either plowing through enemies with no regard or you get your butt handed to you by a couple specific enemies. It gets to be a slog when you get to "Old Town". You spend more time respawning and marching back to where you died than you do trying to negotiate combat. You're either invincible or a combination of enemies kills you in three seconds. This game would be much better if there were half as many enemies attacking you so you could at least see what's going on. Often the only reason you're dying is because you're swarmed by twenty enemies at once and you can't move. Mass attacks help, but only so much. Health potions are pretty worthless because they don't work instantly, but rather heal slowly, which you already do if you run away. The best strategy I've found so far is set Katrina to melee while you focus on ranged combat. Still, when you're facing four cannonball-shooting behemoths at once and they fire simultaneously, you might get to take one shot at them, then they all see you and if you haven't already started fleeing you get hit with all four cannonballs at once and die. Rinse and repeat. Some enemies are incredibly overpowered. The whatsitcalledbeast can spot you from offscreen, while you're already facing off a wave of enemies. Suddenly it charges, manages to run straight through all the enemies, and kills you with a single charge. That's garbage, and it happens repeatedly. I've spent as much time trying to run through "Old Town" as I've spent playing the rest of the game, and I'm ready to find another game. I can't go ten feet without running into another batch of enemies specifically engineered to kill me instantly. Disappointed.
The game is more focused on managing factions than on the tactical fun. At a certain point you're going to have to really upset a faction, and when you do unbeatable enemies suddenly start showing up to pound you. Seriously, there's a "shield" mechanic, but overpowering bad guys have a magical shield-like system that's not shields, but works like shields and you have to destroy their pet "hounds" that project the shield-like shields on top of removing their shields, but that same mechanic isn't available to you. That's what you get for "succeeding" even though you can barely find enough medkits and healing abilities to keep your team from dying on a mission. Just to afford medkits you have to raid an enemy faction and auction off their secrets, but that drives up their "hatred" of you until they start sending the unbeatable mercenaries. So, fun for the first several hours, and then the game becomes unwinnable, unless you play the factions just the way the developers want you to, and you're pretty limited in that as well. If you support this faction, then you must upset that faction. You can't upset a faction too much, but the missions are randomly generated and so you end up having to upset one faction too much and the game sends you nigh-unbeatable opponents. On Linux, you MUST disable the free-look and set it to only work on right-click. Otherwise all the clickable stuff when crawling is offset in random directions and unclickable. Apparently it's a Unity/Linux conflict. Other than that, it runs solid and smooth.
I bought this and dove right in. It was disastrous, and I almost gave up. I researched a bit online and realized this game is very difficult. The problem is that it's very linear, and straying from the intended plotline makes it more difficult. I started again, playing an Assassin, focused on the Dodge skill rather than the Block skill (I strongly advise you choose one or the other). I quickly became dominant in combat unless severely outnumbered. Unfortunately, I got to the point where I could not advance the plot any further. I'd defeated all the human enemies, I was the Arena Champion, but I couldn't resolve the lore bits. I started playing again with a soft-skilled Praetor, but quickly lost interest because I'd already wandered all around the settings. Save often! You'll have to re-fight battles until you find a tactical advantage. You'll make a simple mistake that results in your death. You'll spend your xp and then suddenly realize you need a different skill to advance the plot. The tactical battles are what's interesting about this game. The replay-ability is limited. I wish it had a skirmish setting where you could face your character off against enemies in different settings.
