Star Wars KOTOR II is a straight upgrade to the previous game. The overall levelling system has been improved with more informations of what bonuses you gain. There are also many more abilities you can wield to win your fights and access a variety of content. With a new upgrade system to play around with should you access the components for one. The characters are even more interesting with their own perspectives, inner conflicts and past. The influence system is also interesting as you need to properly understand them to see how to gain more of their trust. It is also fairly simple and easy to access most of the content they have to offer. A big minus is blocking one of the characters behind the Exiled's gender. Why ? No idea, but the if you want to avoid this situation you should download the handmaiden for female mod. Talking about mods, they are quite mandatory as it is very easy to softlock yourself on certain places (which choices that may or may not be obvious). I urge you to install the community patch and restored content mods to have a much better experience. Graphics have also been massively improved, with a display scaling properly to your screen and better looking characters. All in all, this game, despite of all its flows, is great. It is also perfect with the previously mentionned mods. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Star wars KOTOR is a fantastic game demonstrating the early talents of bioware. It offers a great game to discover with a well written and interesting story and plot lines. Very in advance on its time, you can visit the places you want in whatever order you wish. However, you better get yourself well prepared with a good idea on you want to play, as this game doesn't easily forgive mistakes. Some planets can be more forgiving than others and you will need to carefully select you perks, feats and stats while leveling up. Otherwise you will probably get filtered at some point in the game. The story however, while with a basic premise, is well written with interesting characters and moral dilemnas you will have to ask yourself. It does go deeper into what each side truly represents for its followers although the sith are laughably evil in this game. You will have former sith jedis, mercenaries, evil corporatists and a whole lot of more to talk to. Many of the NPCs you can talk to have many lines of dialogues with its fair share of information. Why a 4 then ? Well you can have steep difficulty spikes in the game, the free roaming comes at the cost of you properly waging your chances, which not be an issue for the players accustomed to these games but I am somewhat of a neophite in the genre. So be careful of what you do, your actions are choices may be deceptively easy at times only to followed with a grueling battle. The final segment of the game is also insanely tough, at this point I will just believed that games from this period took too much inspiration from Halo CE and thought that a grueling battle with 100 enemies is good game design.
Vampire: The masquerade - Bloodlines is a great game with fantasticly written dialogues. V:TM-B is the last game ever made by Troika Games, a game studio more known for Arcanum and being the precursors to the creator of the fallour series. Arcanum being the well known predecessor says a lot, it's a great game too but the combat is poor. Regarding the dialogues, these are some of the best I have seen in a video game. All of this accompanied by a fantastic voice acting and early but good technologies of facial animations. The dialogues, if you spend skill points into it, can open many options and favors for yourself. With it, you can avoid fights altogether, get more money, and more or less have more options to get what you want. There are entire clans which skill sets are centered around speaking well to the crowd. For combat, you pass onto third person (unless you wield a gun) and start fighting. For the most part, the combat is actually fine, that is especially for dealing with humans and various vampires. HOWEVER, the boss fights are actually terrible from what I have experienced. Your only reliable option being rifles, which for a game that is about choice, is kind of ironic. If you play a faction that is centered around using your blood wielding abilities for damages, you are not going to have a fun time with these. Besides the combat, it still takes some of the best elements of other games, be it deus ex or thief or other immersive sims/RPG that succeeded in the past. The arching story of the main quest is also good and forces to make a choice for yourself with high stakes. But remember, the jyhad is a game of chess. Choose to be a pawn and you will be sacrificed to protect the king.
Deus Ex is deemed a classic of PC gaming by many and rightfully so. It is a very well crafted game which lets you pieve together what is happening behind the curtains and how did we get heres. Gameplay wise, stealth is what is intended for the most part. You aim and wait for the reticle to be small enough so that you hit your intended target. You also have various skills and upgrades, all of them are good and offer different options to deal with what's in front of you. Also, stay out of the ladies bathroom, it embarasses the agency more than it does you.
Rogue Trader is a great game with a solid writing, interesting game mecanics and a compeling story for you to explore. The characters are well written. They have a solid background story for the most part and your interactions with them do not feel off at all. You can also romance most of them (that includes the eldars) and your interactions within said romance are also very good. The game offers you a large variety of build, psyker, gunner, support, sniper and whatever can come across your mind is possible for your character. Your crew has less choices due to its base preset of abilities but you still have some freedom of build for them regardless. The game is full of powerful gears to use as well. A good combination of your character's build with the right weapons can offer devastating results against your enemies. The endings are good ngl. They offer an extensive amount of writing for absolutely everything that is going on the expanse after your victory and how your retinue will live after the events of the game. However... Despite all the good things Owlcat has been cooking, the release is rather rocky at best. Many critical bugs can be found, forcing you to back to your previous save. Some bugs will even lock your save forcing to redo the entire game from the start. Personally, I only came across one of these. It is also poorly optimised at times, too many enemies can cause the game to lag a lot in certain areas. I have played the alpha and the beta. Considering how short the development time was, it is a miracle that owlcat managed to get this far. Only 6 months of dev time after the beta release and another 6 months between the beta and the alpha. I would give it 2 years of development top. It is likely that Games Workshop breathed down their neck on this one as most Warhammer 40k games tend to release quite quickly. Despite all this, it's a good game and you should wait some time before purchasing it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is, overall, a good game. You might hate it because of the bugs and lack of optimisation at launch pushed by investors. But i really enjoyed playing it. First recommendation to play this game: have a good computer. Don't think like the console peasants, you can actually modify your computer. You can easily run it with a correct 500€ build (not prebuilt of course). Second reommendantion: Take your time. The game is not made to be rushed, you have to take your time and enjoy the sidequests. There are many of them, some of them unlocking other possible endings, or just having a good relation/story with other characters. The game has definitly less bugs, and is more playable than it was at launch. CDPR made a huge effort to fix the bugs and patch their game. The map is great. It's big, filled with quests and the neighbourhoods are clearly different from one another. You can pick up a random quest, help the police/criminals to fight againt each others or just collect items and profit. However, most the NPCs can not really be interracted with. It is mainly summurised as a single quote. They are also quite liveless and identical, they move like they are the same despite being completely different physically speaking. Another criticism is the vehicles, many of the GTA players would have loved to used their new found car/motorcycle but you struggle to do so as the vehicles feel like you are on ice. So drifting is not very easy. There is also a lack of impact for some quests, some quests feel like very important in this world but doesn't really have any impact. Crimes are also not very good, the police spawning was clearly rushed. Instead of hacing stronger police forces slowly coming to you, a literal army will spawn instead at around 3 stars, plus you can't own your private tank. Literally 1984.
