And I've played a lot. The game has its flaws at the moment with a few bugs and some UI aspects that could use improvement, but the music is great, the graphics are wonderful, and the factions are highly various and balanced. The game has a ton of complexities to it; as someone who's sunk at least five hundred hours into Shadow Magic, and now probably reaching one hundred on AoW3, I can definitely say this is an improvement, and well worth the wait. I don't understand the other reviewers here getting upset over the game requiring an email address so you can use a cloud network, which holds your saves and custom leaders, which seems to be the only reason anyone dislikes the game. I understand hating DRM, but signing into an account is hardly intrusive.
I purchased this game on GOG because I adore RTSs and this game has got some pretty good reviews. I found, though, that the game is simply too poorly made to be playable for long. Units veer into abysses and kill themselves even though there is a very obvious path for them to go around. Squads refuse to form even though all units necessary are present. Build queue numbers magically disappear (although the queue itself still continues building). These problems just make the game too frustrating to play for more than a couple hours for me. The ideas behind the game are great, it's just unfortunate they didn't have better programmers.
First of all, you get what you pay for: it's $15, so it's not going to have as much content as a $40 game. That having been said, quality may trump quantity here. This sequel fixes a lot of issues people had with the first Alan Wake: there is a wider variety of much more interesting enemies, a great selection of weapons that you actually want to use, and unlockables adding more replay value. The main gripe you'll hear about the game is that it takes place in just three areas that repeat, but the repetition fits nicely into the story and the developers did a good job of making even returning to the same place feel interesting and fresh. There is more for live-action cutscenes, too. The main reason I want to review this game and give it a healthy four stars is because of the antagonist, Mr Scratch, who is possibly my favourite antagonist of any video game now. He's sarcastic, sadistic, charming, and absolutely despicable, and I love him.
So, King of Dragon Pass on GOG. The game was originally released in 1999 but if anything that just makes it better; the graphics aren't very important, you see, since the game's meat is all in the text. You run a tribe of people in a fantasy world with cultural and social elements strongly inspired by those of pre-Christian Germanic peoples. All your economic, religious, social, political aspects are completely under your control, as is warfare. Sounds pretty simple and straightforward, but with the myriad of events you have to deal with in the game, from a runaway bride asking to take refuge within your clan to discovering an intelligent and destructive wyrm on your land - and sending it to torment one of your enemies - the roleplaying aspect of the game skyrockets. You leave behind your modern morality and have to start really thinking about what would be best for your clan, and no one else - but still feel a little bad when you have to leave hostages to be killed in an enemy camp. The heroquests are icing on the cake, and rather delicious icing. They're something you would never see in a modern game: in order to do them well, you actually have to know the lore of the game, read the myths that you're attempting to emulate. So essentially, you are forced to be immersed. It's awesome. It's also neat to note just how close the game is to what we know about tribal European societies. War happened all the time; you couldn't escape it, and just because someone came in and stole some of your stuff or killed some of your men didn't mean he hated you, it was just how things worked. Even in full-scale battles, you didn't have any more than two hundred people fighting on either side, and maybe an eighth of them would be killed. Most of your combatants aren't professional warriors, but farmers looking out for their clan and for a little loot on the side. And they fight with spears. Wealth is even measured in cattle. The game also is quite long, can be quite difficult, and has immense replay value with all the factors that go into building your clan as well as the random elements at startup. So, if you love a game that can suck you right in without all the flash, something where you can really rule the way you want to, in your idiomatic fashion where there may not be a single right choice (there may even not be a single good choice), or if you're just a heathen looking for some legit tribal fun, the game's just $6 and comes highly recommended.
Symphony is pretty cool. I was never able to really see how my music was influencing anything in games like Audiosurf and The Polynomial, but it's incredibly clear here. Not just in the colour of the background or how hard it is, but you can often actually see the beat in the way the enemies move and even some of your own weapons, and you can tell the difference between just loud and heavy - where there's just a ton of big shit that wants to kill you - and something that may not be so heavy but is legitimately chaotic. The customizability is fun too, as is the fact that in one song there is a spoken lyric, "We ain't trying to expand the scene, we want the scene to erupt!" and right at that point a bomb pickup appears and everything explodes. I don't think the Fourier Transform did that, but it made me happy. The game is also ridiculously frustrating. So if you ever wanted a reason to punch your monitor in its stupid face before tearing your mouse out of your system and whipping it at the nearest living thing before screaming inaudibly while your avatar continues to get assraped by your favourite song, I highly recommend Symphony. I would to four and a half stars because the game itself is not terribly well optimized and there are a few bugs here and there, but I imagine updates will be forthcoming, and there's no such thing as four and a half stars.
