The action is fun and characters are engaging. I'm wracking my brain trying to find something negative, and I can't. So I guess it's kinda perfect.
This is the original, and graphically, well it shows its age, but it's as good a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as any, and very much worth playing while waiting for the new 2024 generation!
This action-adventure, rpg-light game has beautiful graphics, interesting and believable characters, refined storytelling, a humongous amount of content, and... it's just too easy. If you like stories you will love this game. If you hunger for a challenge, you will be disappointed, as even on the hardest difficulty, combat is easy and unchallenging. For this reason I can't even finish the game, the lack of challenge makes me bored, even though the world is beautiful AND ugly and is immersive and interesting in and of itself. I am disappointed, as The Witcher 1 & 2 provided enough challenge to remain interesting throughout, but with this one, I breeze through fights that are more than 5 levels higher than I am, on the hardest difficulty.
This is the only game I know of which is a LIVING WORLD, open-world sandbox RPG. What do I mean by living world? The game plays itself, and you are just one more cog on the wheel. Not only are you not special, with the same rules applying to everybody in the world, but the NPCs deal with each other exactly the same as with you. Get one to hate you and his friends will dislike you, too. Help somebody and his enemies will tell you that you should have let him "learn his lesson". And so on. But it's not just a tidbit of dialogue. Everything has ramifications. You've failed a few tasks too many, you won't get to be Marshall, commanding the armies, and your capacity to effect change ni the world will be limited. Etc, etc, etc. It's infinite. The combat system has everythin an excellent action game should have: skill-based, easy to learn, and difficult to master. As such, you will be perfecting your combat skills for a LONG TIME, even though there is a lot of combat in this game. Nowhere else cna you charge through the morning fog with your cavalry, knowing that somewhere ahead is the enemy army and a clash of steel, crunch of bones, screams of pain await just ahead. It's simply exhilarating. And there are dozens of fantastic mods. Enough to keep you busy for 10,000 hours. The graphics are relatively simple for 2020 but they hold up very well, keeping this game as relevant as it was 10 years ago. Sure, Bannerlord is in Early Access, but it'll be a while until it's as feature-complete as this. In the meanthime, I'm playing the best game ever made.
