I was aware of Warhammer Quest tabletop game back in the day, although I didn't actually play. Based on the old White Dwarf articles, however, it had quite a lot more going on than this. Warhammer Quest 2 is a turn-based, grid-combat, dungeon crawl. It is possibly the least ambitious game to come out of a major studio. Minimal plot and writing, minimal combat depth, minimal graphics, sound and interfacing. Whether Warhammer Quest 2 is worth purchasing is almost entirely decided by the price point you pick it up at. I picked up my copy for less than a half of lager. For that, I expect an hours enjoyment. I got that, and although the cruddy interface and game design are plainly rubbish, sometimes all we need is the ticking over of levels and the promise of new gear. A lot of people seem to be complaining about the difficulty. I only went as far as story mission 5/10 but in my time it didn't seem difficult so much as repetitive and tedious. Choke point, kill, repeat. I find myself somewhat in awe of how lazy the development is with this, but as the GOG review guidance tells us, this isn't what we're here to discuss. So my advice is - if you like a turn-based dungeon crawl - come in and have an hour's look at this rubbish, rubbish rpg.
Like many others I watched some of the beta footage on Youtube and became incredibly excited. My initial plan was to watch a few Let's Plays and then pick it up when it came down in price, but my excitement got the better of me and I grabbed it on release. This War of Mine is quite as gripping, fun and well-designed as those videos suggested, but in its current state it is extremely short and after a test playthrough is, somewhat at odds with its concept, incredibly easy. I played my first game and got my characters into a real mess through some poor decisions on my part. On my second playthrough I completed it without using any saving and reloading, and without ever really looking like getting into trouble. It took me a couple of hours. A great deal has been made of the randomly generated situations of the game, but in my experience this is very limited. Both my playthrough, and all three of the Let's Plays I watched began with the same characters. The scavenging areas had only a handful of differences across the entire map in each, and the random visitors were so sporadic and similar that they did not encourage further playthroughs. While the resources available of course change, the general availability does not - arguably it cannot without breaking the core mechanic. I enjoyed This War of Mine, but at $20 (£15 with a £2.50 GOG voucher, which I don't consider to be quite the "Fair Price" that GOG likes to claim) for a game that is over by my second day of ownership does not equate to value for money. As it is, if This War of Mine enjoys a price reduction and several content adding patches, then it will slide up to four stars, but at present it sits as a rather expensive purchase for what it is.
So, after holding out so long, I cracked and got a steam copy. Two days later it comes out on GOG (-_-) but whatever. I'm two days in, and am considering deleting the game and calling it £30 lost. The game mechanics, style and general feel are fine, but the loading times on my computer are cripplingly long. I understand that this is an issue on 32-bit machines with under 4MB of RAM (that is most machines still running XP). The game plays fine, but load times of several minutes combined with difficult battles and plenty of crashes to desktop make this a no-goer. I'm sure there's a fine game in there, but if you're running 32-bit XP I'd leave it until you get a new computer.
Shadowrun for the SNES is one of my favourite games of all time, and I was extremely excited to hear that they were doing a new Shadowrun game with old-school values. Unfortunately the old-school "values" of Shadowrun returns are not the exploration, difficulty and balancing, but instead are low-grade graphics, minimal music/sound and a distinct lack of polish. The writing is, whilst not offensive, very mediocre. The multiple response options in dialogue suggest that dialogue trees were once considered, but ultimately the standard 'good/neutral/bad' responses all take you on to the same npc response. The combat is taken almost verbatim from X-com: Enemy Unknown, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, the frequency with which Karma points (exp) are given means you are constantly several steps ahead of your enemies. I played through on normal and, barring the first out-of-tutorial combat (in which my minimal hp character had to survive two hits before they could act) I have never had to reload and have never looked in danger at any moment. Shadowrun returns is an isometric, turn-based, party-based rpg - my favourite genre of game. Yet it feels very disappointing and the fact that it is outclassed in almost every department by a SNES game produced some 20 years previously is desperately sad.
I had Wizardry 8 recommended to me by several other rpg fans, but I found it to be a very lacking game that lacks the quality of the other rpgs of its age. It starts positive, with a superb party creation system, and adds to this an excellent scope of tactical positioning that other FPRPGs could do well to learn from. However the combat scales horribly (fighting one group of mobs will always be easy, two always hard, and three always impossible); the graphics, while not an important feature, have dated horribly to compared to other games of the time; the setting feels profoundly ill-thought-through; what story there is lacks any depth or quality; and the questing system is both desperately unintuitive and profoundly unrewarding. I had to use a guide from the first town, only to find out that the advancement of the MAIN quest required breaking into what appeared to be a random house without any hint that I was to do this. Personally, I enjoyed it far less than M&M7 or Morrowind, both of which I find deeply flawed, and it really doesn't hold a candle to any of the isometric rpgs of the time. However, many people do love it, so it can't be totally without merit, but I recommend tempering your expectations if you are to play it.
