No I'm sorry, I really am (no I'm not actually, not for the last review either). I didn't finish the last game either. I should stop playing games on their hardest difficulties out of the box for my own sake, but if a game's gameplay isn't fun on it's hardest difficulty, if it isn't engaging and fun, if it doesn't feel fair, it's gameplay isn't all that well polished is it? Now the game is going to test my skill this time around is it? Nothing says good design like being frozen in place even after the animation of a spell or attack has finished, your attempts to dodge completely vain. It is beyond infuriating. It is a poor choice to have such a demonstratedly powerful and capable character through cutscenes all of a sudden fall to a group of grunts. Enemies can block you all day, but not only do you still take damage blocking, but you have very little ability to continue blocking. One person I was talking to was quick to defend this design decision saying it's to encourage players to be agile, use spells tactically, and learn the alchemy system. Geralt is a powerhouse in the game's universe. He is not a thief, acrobat, or tinkerer, at least not primarily (I want to emphasize the player choice aspect here is not wrong, but with no strengths at the beginning of the game at all, he should at least be a good swordsman). He is consistently shown to be a brutal and efficient swordsman. Right off the bat some grunts should be easily dispatched, especially so close to the beginning of the game. And no predictable way to gauge how to break through their block? What the hell is the heavy attack for then? That ugly, out of character orange slash trail? Manipulating the hell out of shitty AI to maneuver around an opponent doesn't feel right the way the game wants you to do it. They could have incentivized tactical play (gadgets and alchemy) and agility without going about it in such a twisted and arbitrary way. The Arkham games (minus origins) do a great job of this.
This game is absolutely terrible. Everything bad about AAA RPGs. Terrible presentation and graphics. Nonsensical, ridiculously bad dialogue. Grind grind grind with no variation, dungeons recycled again and again with no apology. Quests have you going back and forth over and over. A game who's sole challenge is memorizing arbitrary alchemy and monster jargon rather than skill or tactical play. It is an absolute miracle that this game garnered good reviews. The next game is much much better, but still guilty in terms of gameplay, which still suffers from the same thing, and in some ways in a far worse way.
It looks like this was a cheap attempt at a sequelitis cash grab. Since it's a prequel that adds nothing to the continuing story, the disgusting betrayal that is the cheap toon style Worms 3D nonsense, upon numerous complained upon gameplay changes suggested by other reviews, it looks like you can disregard this one in the series.
Mouse smoothing What the fuck were they thinking?
This game is stripped, basic, and unintuitive. How about not being able to select groups larger than 20 at a time eh? Revolutionary amirite? This speaks to the laziness of the developing team behind this game. You ship out an RTS and don't fix such a glaringly obvious problem? Oh it's by design? My ass. There were many other reasons to hate this game but I don't feel like buying it again just to make a more honest and detailed review. When developers ignore the little things that affect a game in a big way, you automatically know they didn't give a shit and that's proof enough why you shouldn't buy this game.
Really people, I mean come on. Good Old Games; this is not a game, and it's not even good literature, and it's not old, it's just cheap as hell. Why anybody would buy a clichéd fantasy text based game like this is beyond me.
A text based game? For 6 bucks? Hell no. I'm all for old games, but it's appalling how shameless people are. If you're going to re release a game from before 2000 at least, it needs to be even less than 3 dollars at least.
>Implying that you can criticize a multiplayer game just for being multiplayer. Now that that's out of the way this is my first GOG review: I've been disappointed often by GOG's catalog far too often, and this is partly because of the misleading community ratings and reviews. Everybody gives games that I have come to hate very high ratings, and for all I know they give excellent games low ratings. Indie games are touted as being perfect, original, and unique while in reality they are mediocre games with about as much substance as a browser based flash player game. Older games are championed as "timeless classics" where their mechanics are horribly dated and the game is painful to play through. A timeless classic would be a game like Ocarina of Time. I'll let you know when I run into a game like that here (maybe Outcast?). I'm not saying that this is always the case with either category, maybe I've just had some bad luck, but this is all I've come to find of the games I've been purchasing on GOG. Smurfs are at the helm of user rated content, and that they are unworthy to rate any games is that they ALL use the same &quot&quot[insert random word that didn't need to be &quoted here]&quot&quot off of eachother. Who knows, maybe they actually believed they were being original or even funny. This is not a three star game. This deserves an equal or greater rating than the average community rating given to Darwinia, so I give it 5. Let's compare this game to the "perfect classic" Darwinia. This game controls much better than Darwinia. Tab is used to cycle through your special units saving time you might have spent incessantly clicking, promoting an officer requires only a right click again saving time, and also there's pathfinding again saving even more time. I probably missed a few things, or maybe I haven't, but generally the game is just more elegant to control. In Darwinia I found myself constantly fumbling through number keys whose units they corresponded to were always changing, and going in and out of the taskmanager (the ingame one) proved redundant and tedious enough where I started using the F hotkeys instead. Here you just press tab to cycle through and place or control the highlighted unit, and that tab key is in comfortable reach of your pinkey. Also, you can control Darwinians directly now. Some people argued that this is a contradiction to the idea of Darwinians having free will, but using officers to control the Darwinians is the same thing, just indirect. This direct control is limited enough that you'll still be using officers for pretty much everything, and using these officers is alot more fun too. These too save you from doing alot of clicking. The decision to not include pathfinding in the original Darwinia is often defended by the claim it was a "core design decision." The obvious fact of the mater is that Introversion was too lazy to include it into the original game. There's no story reasons for not including pathfinding unless maybe we're talking about the programs, and it only serves to make ordering things around tedious, so it is a fact that it adds nothing to the game unless you like having to click alot more often. The graphics are better. The polygons are still simple and the Darwinians are still flat, but everything looks much more crisp, this in addition to new more dynamic lighting. I haven't noticed any bugs (...holding... the urge... to say something unoriginal and unfunny...), particularly the random mouse movements, and/or the random jaggy mouse occurences from the original Darwinia, both of which could only be fixed by going into and out of windowed mode depending on your situation. About the only complaint I have is that you can't disable the extra factions on maps that support multiple factions, and the game while elegant in it's simplicity gets old fast because of said simplicity. I hadn't even beat Darwinia when I started playing this game. Jeez was it a breath of fresh air. If only there was some way to port the levels from Darwinia over to Multiwinia, the mechanics are so much better, and bug free (no pun in10ded! aeehm soo funny and original!).
