Dreadful game with dreadful mechanics. You have to play within a "fun budget" of dice. Run out of dice, you have to head for home and end your day. Want to explore that market. Too bad you ran out of fun dice. Need to see a doctor? Too bad you ran out of fun dice. Need to buy food desperately or starve? Too bad you ran out of fun dice. You use the dice to complete tasks, which progress a wheel, you need to fill out the wheel. But you have too few dice. Fail at a task and the game punishes you. Run out of dice and you literally can't do anything else. The type of dice you get is random. The number you get is determined by how strong or weak your character is from day to day. On day 2 my character started to starve and I couldn't get anything from the market because I was unable to fill a task wheel and I ran out of fun dice. I could sort of tolerate this mechanic if the story was vaguely interesting. But it really isn't. refunded.
I played this bitd on xbox. It really felt like it was configured for a controller. A spy game with some cool mechanics and felt like it was riffing on Jason Bourne and Mission Impossible. It was however quite janky in places and some builds were pretty naff and others were pretty OP. Shotgun and/or melee builds for instance were pretty awful and some boss fights could be brutal if you played one. Pistol and stealth builds were incredibly poweful. The pistol had an ability to one shot enemies and could be chained to auto take down up to 3 at a time. It was also useful against bosses as well. I don't know if this was ever addressed when it switched over to PC. Its difficulty system was unique as I recall. You picked between an unskilled agent or a vet with established skills at the beginning.
I remember getting this game when it came out. Played it a lot and did a lot of pbem and online games. The community was really active back then. Played in some tournaments had a lot fun. Lost my disks a while back and of course now most PCs don't even come with CD disk drives anymore. So it was quite a surprise to see all three of the original titles on GoG for under a fiver. So I bought them all. The graphics a basic, but they were considered basic 20 yrs ago. But the gameplay still holds up. Next to steelpanthers, this is still my favorite wargame on PC.
Because of some stupid "games for windows live" requirement, I cannot get this game to run. I have various solutions including mods but it simply will not run. Best avoided.
No matter how often I have tried, not matter how many mods I use...I simply can't put up with oblivion. For me, its the weakest entry in the scrolls games. From level scaling to the mediocre main story, it was an absolute chore to play. I have never been able to finish it. Skyrim was a major improvement but that isn't saying much. Neither manages its main story very well. But Oblivion seems worse than its successor. The gates of oblivion are opening! The Emperor is dead! devils are coming through, but from the reaction from NPCs everywhere, you'd think it was just another tuesday. No sense of drama. No sense of unfolding horror. No tension. The world seems asleep and unware of whats unfolding around it. The DLCs don't really help as they just add to the lack of urgency to a game that already feels like its sleepwalking to a conclusion. I can reccomend this at all.
This is the new entry into the venerable Baldurs Gate series. It has big shoes to fill as the original entries have become lionised by players over the years. What I can say is this is a very good game. Built around 5e but not exactly 100% RAW. It is broken into three acts. The 1st deals with setting up the story and the dilemma the players find themselves in. Alliances can be made and broken. Eventually your travels take you to the underdark in search of answers. Act 2 sees you following your first real clue and you enter the shadow realms. Act 3. This is were you head to Baldurs Gate and trying to come up with a plan to deal with the dilemma once and for all. Acts 1 & 2 are very well fleshed out. Not surprising they got the most attention during development. Act 3 feels very undercooked and rushed at times. It just about holds together though. The final end scene is a little rushed (no spoliers) and was a little underwhelming. The combat is amazing. The spells are very satisfying. There is plenty of cool loot. Characters look amazing as is the voice acting. Its just let down by the curse of xcom - dice roller clusters around the low end making you miss high % chance to hit targets. The undercooked third act was frustrating at times. I am sure that Larian will work on this as they are bound to release a GOTY version at some point. No DLC is planned, so I suspect it will be QOL changes we will see. Its a good game. Not a 10/10 or a 9/10 but it is a damned good game.
I play a lot of TTTRPGs - but I have never seen such a messy system as Pathfinder. It started out as a bells and whistles version of the old 3rd edition ruleset. But it has morphed over the years into a rules heavy mess. There are too many character classes. Even these are broken into numerous prestige classes and subclasses. This requires a fair degree of knowledge to build a optimised character. I actually found this intimidating. Crunchy and rules heavy systems really do not appeal to me. So this was the first sour note I hit with the game. The second was the story. In a story based game, if you as a player don't care for the story being told - thats a game thats not going to remain installed for long. The characters you control as part of your party also grated with me. I didn't like them. So strike two. I don't care for the story and the characters annoy me. The acutal gameplay...the combat takes too bloody long. The devs throw way to many enemies at you for a turn based game. The combat is satisfying as long as it works. But the RNG rolling the dice in this game is a barsteward. One early fight I had with a couple of low level enemies took 20 combat rounds. The amount of missing was staggering...given my characters had decent starting values and were fighting low level monsters. Somehow the dice always rolled lower than results, every round for 20 rounds. By the time I finished what was the tutorial mission. I was introduced to the main game. When I saw the crusade mode...I hated it immediately and so there was strike 3. I'd wait for Baldurs gate 3 or maybe try Solasta
Unresponsive controls, means I can't even play the game. Has really not aged well and looks awful.
I cannot, in all good honesty, reccomend this game. Its based on a popular series of novels which I read years ago and still own. The story sounds interesting, largely because the author Raymond Fiest, wrote it. The gameplay descends into drudgery, largely through its core game mechanics. The endless tedium of the combats, that despite its open world nature, cannot be avoided. They are made all the more annoying by the party constantly missing, despite having higher than average chances to hit. This high rate miss ratio is matched only by the combats unfairness at times. The game does not level scale and the designers clearly thought mobbing your small party and wiping you out a lot is fun. So getting through this opening chapter is an exercise in patience. Its really not until the third chapter of the game that your party becomes less of a victim to these combats. Roleplaying games are not just about combat and story. There should be missions and small sidequests and opportunities for loot. Missions/Quests do exist, but the game has no in game journal keeping track of what you have taken on. This means that unless you keep notes, you will find it hard to track missions and quests. The loot is a typical mix of badly damaged armour and swords. A few coins but no real powerful loot or healing. Healing is a real issue here. Your starting mage, is not terribly powerful and its going to be a long while before he develops anything useful. The end result is that you have to camp for days on end to heal. This requires food. Which the game is quite stingy on passing out. The devs also put in spoiled and poisoned food. Because nothing makes recovering from a hard fight quite as fun as dealing with an entire party dying because the food was spoiled and poisoned. These elements made the game a chore and in the end I have no patience for this style of game anymore. Go back and read the books instead.
This is the 2003 sequel to Deus Ex 1. Where the first game was and still is a classic of story telling, hampered by some iffy combat and inventory management. This is a game with a paper thin story, the same iffy combat and almost no inventory to speak of. From the get go this game is handicapped by the decision to make this launch at the same time as the original Xbox. As a result of this a lot of the game is simply missing. The world building is reduced to playable hubs connected to a fast travel system. There is little in the way of exploration. There are very few side quests. And as I said, the story was paper thin. It is a continuation of the original and is recognisably Deus Ex. Its just that it is the diet coke version. Just 1 calorie and not deus ex enough. everything is just...stripped down to its basics. From inventory management to mods. Even the levels themselves are stripped down and small. Which is wildly at odds with the story which has some interesting elements to it that have big ideas. Shame it was watered down to fit into a tiny box. Not terrible but not great, but also not essential. It is quite average at the end.
