I bought this a while ago and essentially got the last campaign for free, but even for the price it is now, I can recommend it for the hours of awesome retro gaming this will bring you. What is Shovel Knight? Easy: Mega Man but with knights and fantasy stuff. Ok... is it hard? Well, only if you are a potato, tbh. It has its hard moments, but generally it's more like Mega Man X than Mega Man Zero, in terms of difficulty. Is it good? Very! Really? Yes! Why? Fluid controls, tons of spells and gadgets that will allow even casual gamers to tackle every enemy and level in their own way and develop their favourite strategy. How much gametime do I get out of this? For the campaigns only? Around 30 hrs, depending if you are godtier gamer or handicapped potato, more or less. Are the campaigns worth to be replayed? Yes, there is tons of different strats to go through each stage. What if I am done and don't want to replay the campaigns? Well, apart from you being clearly a worse person for that (/joke), there is a versus mode which is great fun. So yeah. Mega Man but with knights. Can't go wrong there.
I enjoyed Kathy Rain immensely, the writing is smart and fun and quite suspenful (despite what other reviewers claim) and there really is something at stake and that feeling is transmitted quite well to the player. The puzzles aren't very hard, imo, but they are reasonably intriguing and let you focus on the story, which is really quite nice. Plus, unlike other point and click protagonists, Kathy isn't a completely inept moron that insists on performing a task overly complicated. The story feels much more lively, because the setting seems real, as do the people in it, especially the protagonist. There is a playable Demo of the game, so I'd say: Don't believe me, just try for yourself, it really is an amazing point and click that follows its vision to the last.
My expectations were virtually non existant and I was pleasantly surprised in the beginning, as this game is intriguing and immersing, but after the first two hours or so it starts to get extremely convoluted and messy. Riddles not working correctly (E.g. the scale riddle, is bugged as F!), the game sh*tting all over you with useless "info" that makes it hard to sift through what is a hint and what is actually just a useless collectible, walking around with about a dozen of solutions to riddles you haven't even encountered yet, to some extremely obscure answers that make no logical sense even in the context of the game, all these flaws are infuriating and pile up extremely quickly. And no, I don't mean these riddles are "hard" or you have to pay extreme attention to detail, they are utterly garbage and expect and answer that no logical thinking person would EVER try, because they make no sense whatsoever. If you wanna get it for the art style and the general idea, I'd say only do it if it's on sale (-75% or more!), because as much as I love the artwork and the premise, the devs clearly had no idea whatsoever how to construct good riddles and just ended up half-*ssing a large part of them. The way your character thinks alone is extremely illogical, e.g. she recognises a "magnetic tape player" but don't know how to use one... I mean, that's the logical equivalent to somebody knowing exactly how DVDs are made, while being unable to put them into a DVD player and pushing "play". And that's happening A LOT. E.g. she clearly knows something to be a generator but again, wonders how this works. Really? How wrote this drivel, nobody thinks like this. NO ONE. So to reiterate, broken puzzles, bugs, dumb premises, bad riddle design all take away massively from what could be an actually amazing game. The devs risked quite a few things to move away from classic point and click gameplay, but failed at the core which is required: actually good riddles.
1.) Constant stuttering on high end PCs, nothing helps. 2.) Hit chances are a joke, ppl can't hit stuff that is right in front of them, while enemies shoot over the entire map with 100% hit and crit. 3.) This game was programmed by a monkey, half the stuff doesn't work properly (Overwatch not triggering, while the other guy casually moves about and shoots directly AT THE GUY OVERWATCHING). Often your guys will shoot in a completeley different direction. Was this POS even playtested? 4.) Anything less than 90% hit chance feels more like 10%. 5.) Again, hitchances are a FKING joke. Optimal range, no cover? Yeah, best I can do is 60%. Sorry, even a basically trained grunt can hit a moving target 6m away with more than 60% success rate. TL;DR, if you think X-COM 1 had its share of bugs and BS moments, then X-COM 2 is ALL of that, minus anything that made X-COM1 playable and enjoyable. If you love watching your soldiers struggle with hitting enemies 4m away, then by all means, this is for you.
The game could be awesome, but everything you do is so stupidly and unnecessarily convoluted. Plus, the game literally throws stones at you at every occassion. Finally you figure out how to actually earn money, BAM, primary route blocked off. Sometimes you have to research technologies in a very, very specific way not to get stuck for ages, but does anybody tell you? Nope, of course not. This game is the best example of how to unnecessarily overcomplicate every single step. Example: 5X = 2Y, but 2Y doesn't do anything on itelf. So you have to take the 2Y and turn them into 4Z per Y, and every Z needs to be used on something else to gain two "blue tech" per instance. Why make it so stupidly overengineered? Just make it so that X directly translates into Z. Also, the game starts out with bombarding the player with "Do this for XYZ", but 95% of all these tasks cannot be completed unless you do dozens of other stuff first. How is that not the most stupid quest design ever? Imagine that EVERY quest in any cRPG would start out something like "Fetch apple for old guy" just to find out in order to do that you need: 1.) Learn farming. 2.) Learn botanics. 3.) Plough field which you need to buy first. 4.) Find sapplings and fertilizer. 5.) Grow the actual bloody tree. 6.) Wait a season. 7.) Finally get apple. 8.) Deliver the thing just to find out, that the dude won't accept it unless you stamp it with a special royal stamp. 9.) Try to buy royal stamp, which costs 30 Silvers (You get 1,5 silver for every corpse buried). 10.) Find out that no new corpses will arrive, because the resident communist talking donkey won't bring them (yes, all of that is literally in the game) UNLESS you grow carrots (5 per body) for him AND oil the wheels of his cart. 11.) Learn how to bloody make oil, which is a high end tech. If that sounds dumb, then because it probably is. Which is why I am probably never gonna play this game again. Too many unnecessary hoops.
Wadjet has produced gems, but this certainly ain't one of them. Characters are extremely shallow and stereotypical and the riddles are straight out garbage. Worst Wadjet game of the litter and that includes gemini rue which is broken AF. Welcome to the era of mentally handicapable protagonists and riddles that go like "I am perfectly aware of what I have to do, but the main character wants to do it in a certain, completely idiotic and awkward way which ends up combining stuff that otherwise makes zero sense or exhausting dialogue options, even though you already uncovered the crucial piece of intel and it should be enough." Not sure about the good reviews, but it strikes me that people giving this so many thumbs up are either diehard wadjet fanboys or simply never played a good point and click in their life. Wow. What a POS. I got this for a few bucks on sale, and I think it isn't worth the money. Buy at your own risk.
Wadjet has produced gems, but this certainly ain't one of them. Characters are extremely shallow and stereotypical and the riddles are straight out garbage. Worst Wadjet game of the litter and that includes gemini rue which is broken AF. Welcome to the era of mentally handicapable protagonists and riddles that go like "I am perfectly aware of what I have to do, but the main character wants to do it in a certain, completely idiotic and awkward way which ends up combining stuff that otherwise makes zero sense or exhausting dialogue options, even though you already uncovered the crucial piece of intel and it should be enough." Wow. What a POS. I got this for a few bucks on sale, and I think it isn't worth the money. Buy at your own risk.
I have exactly one single gripe with the game, which is the over-reliance on the shoddily scripted melee attacks. Sometimes your character does or does not perform them while they are crucial in some bossfights, which is a serious issue for me, given you die in one hit. If you make bossfights rely on a mechanic, make sure it checks out, ffs. Often enough, my character will happily fire his gun instead of performing the actual melee attack, effectively killing me. In some bosses this costs me 1-2 lives per run, because it simply isn't clear, WHY all of a sudden it won't trigger the melee attack. Yes, that is 2 stars for me, because I want to ace this game as I did Contra back in the day, and it absolutely wouldn't be an issue for me, if the melee attack would trigger with a different button, but reliably so. Dying in these kind of games is a given until you know what's up, but dying because the controls are shitty, unintuitive or janky is a big no-no and ruins for me what could have been an absolutely perfect experience otherwise. At least give as an OPTION to have melee assigned to a button press. I mean, it's 2019, that shouldn't even be a thing! Look at Shovel Knight, where you can choose how to use your sub-weapon, why in the hell would you force me to use the same button for melee and range when it apparently doesn't trigger sometime? And the game is very unclear on why that is, sometimes it just doesn't trigger the melee atk. It's not on cooldown, it's not the distance between the enemy and me, it's just some enigmatic BS that I can't even test. I tried it over and over at a boss who has a lot of opportunities to use melee, and I can reliably prove, that sometimes it just doesn't trigger, but why that is, I couldn't find out. Shame to ruin a perfect game with some janky BS.
I have this game on another platform, but after coming back to it in october 2019 what did I see? The devs literally changed everything that had been criticised earlier this year. They listened to the community feedback and really did a great job. I can wholeheartedly recommend this game for everybody who wants a light-hearted but well done turn-based combat game with an indiana jones feel to it.
Plays pretty great, polished gameplay, reminds me very much of FTL with an actual story. Visually extremely well done, and the soundtrack is dope. My biggest gripe: the way shipweapons work and the way you "customise" your ship. Long story short: there is a bunch of different ships, everyone has a fixed upgrade roster, e.g. ship A can't upgrade weapons to bigger than 2, ship B can't have more than 2 squadron bays, etc. Interesting, but just a tad too restrictive. Ship weapons are either ship-to-ship weapons that deal reduced dmg to squadrons or ship-to-squadron guns that have area, additional effects and are rather interesting to play with, but deal NO dmg to the enemy battleship. Not really bad in itself, it just seems a bit half-baked for what otherwise seems like an amazingly well done and polished game.
