The gameplay of Grim Dawn is very similar to Titan Quest. Despite all layers on top, the grim atmosphere, disturbing NPCs, the numerous layers of customization (like the devotion system) cannot hide that this game is a re-skin of Titan Quest. What is new, and interesting, is the faction system. It comes at the cost of enemy variation, however. Being a re-skin is actually not a bad thing. I think Titan Quest and Grim Dawn are both very enjoyable games and I highly recommend both! Instead of telling you why it is enjoyable (which will no doubt be addressed by many other reviewers), I will try to explain why the game doesn't deserve the full 5 stars, in my opinion. 1) Fighting for and against factions means that you will be seeing the same monsters over and over again and again from the beginning of act 1 to the end game. Your first enemy is a zombie, your last enemy is a frozen zombie (okay almost last enemy ;) 2) You can respec your skills, but only at a price. That you cannot respec at any time means that you will be using the same skills from the end of act 1 till you change characters. Some people love this, like they loved it in Diablo 2, but I find characters with a limited set of skills less appealing in the long run 3) The AI is poor and has not improved since Titan Quest. Nearly all heroes (and bosses) have some unnatural speed skill to overcome range-style characters. Monster can also run back-and-forth between their spawn location and your position, like they cannot make up their mind. Basically monsters have two behaviors: "go straight for the player" or "just walk in random directions and shoot". These patterns are more prominent than in Titan Quest, because there are many interesting range skills in Grim Dawn 4) While characters have endless skill customization options, they all look alike. The grim settings is great, but not for customization of how you look in the game Still, two thumbs up for the (small) dev-team!!
In the olden days, I was really into MoO I and II. The first installment because of its simplicity. The second because of a deep SF approach on Master of Magic. Even MoO II was not without flaws as, like the old Civilization games, it suffered from too fast progression. Scientific discoveries were done at such a rate that planets had an endless build-queue till all research was done. Discoveries were also significant in a way that your entire fleet was obsolete before it was even built. Together with a very strong (or cheating) AI, this actually made the game brilliant. You were always balancing between the build queues and the need to produce a fleet that could just hold of the aliens. Then came MoO III, a spreadsheet disaster with braindead AI. I never finished a single game. So here comes MoO remake. It takes flaws of the old games without a compensating strong AI, and throws in poor design choices of other games. It has the endless build queues, a broken AI (warning: incoming scout!), and it borrows near to non-interactive space battles from Endless Space, and star lanes from Sins of a Solar Empire. Star lanes were a answer to controlling a RTS, not a brilliant idea for a turn based game. And then the UI! Omg… all the (nice but) slow cinematics when changing menus, hiding of crucial colony info when opening the build menu, the inability to go over the ship space limit while still designing your ship. Why not handle space capacity just before you save a design? And the manual one-by-one transfer of population between science, food and production. MoO II did all better, 20 years ago. Okay, it is fair enough that MoO remake is better than MoO III. At least I finished 1 game before, … uninstalling … The devs call this game a passion project. I think they are in love. So much so, that they are blind to all the mistakes they are making. I’m sorry WG. Please, sell the license asap or replace the dev-team and take another year to make a worthy MoO successor.
This is both a question and a review. Question: This game was in early access on steam, and I wonder why it left early access? Let me explain. I have played an early access version in Nov 2015. At the time, the game felt still unfinished and very "Unity"-like. The devs promise (at least on steam) that they are currently working on a large free update. These things combined make me wonder if the devs 1) made tremendous progress the last two months, and 2) will they keep improving the game, or 3) are they going to sell "early access" updates as payed expansion in the near future? Review: Don't get me wrong, the game is a blast, with good game mechanics & concepts. But the game is also tedious. Also, I turned the music off after my first play through. I really like the semi-random skill progression of your people. It makes you change and focus people to specific tasks. Combined with an extensive crafting system will make some unique characters. If you get to know the skill system, you can find satisfying solutions to otherwise straightforward kill-or-be-killed encounters (in the built I played, social skills made to game too easy however, but this can be better balanced in the current version). Also, the way to progress in research depends a lot on how much you craft. So, you will be crafting (and using) low level equipment. That is actually a tip... top tip: craft whatever you can and see your research explode! The tedious part is when ravaging monster groups become strong. You can no longer send out small groups and expect them to survive. Therefore you will most likely have no more than four groups. One will stay in your village. You want two groups to gather resources outside your village area... which leaves a single party to scout, hunt new monster lairs and explore increasingly difficult events sites. At this stage, I was often bashing the "next turn button", when I suddenly realized the game ended because I met some silly win-conditions.
This game was my first entry to the Anno series. It is one of my most played game ever with over 500 hours (believe it or not). For some silly reason, I own 3 different copies... and, yet I do not understand the price tag!? In every local toy-store you can pick up the game for a meager 5 bucks, and occasionally including the next iteration Anno 2070. Apparently, it still sells well. Therefore my equally nonsensical 4/5 stars. To start off: Install the game (incl. Venice) and look on the web for the 'unofficial patch', and install it. This patch removes bugs that were left by the last official patch, improves the UI, gives you some minor cheating options (like cheap water in the desert... which I really do not recommend), and it goes as far as improving thousand pieces of text. So why is this game NOT for you? - You need tons of hours, which means it will cost you the time to play several other games - It is not a war game... yes, you (can) fight a war, but it is slow and mostly by means of attrition - You are a casual gamer, in which case I recommend the new Anno 2205 And why should you play it? - You like boats or sinking boats - You like trade - You like city builders - You like puzzles (on land: layout of buildings, at sea: trade routes and balancing trade/war ships) - You like planning of conquests - You like a real-time blend of all above on a single continuous map - You cannot do without coffee
About the game. It is an old classic, and it is (abandoned) freeware. To have some challenge you should setup with 2 waves of monsters, 49 in the first and 50 in the second. Selecting more monster lairs in the first wave reduces the number in the second, and I think the total limit is 100 (or 99, if I remember correctly for years past, when people like me could spent days on understanding the mechanics of a game without the help of internet...). Anyway, while everybody his/hers opinion, I have mine. The game is worth 5 dollars. Would it been release today as indie game? With its outdated interface and gfx? Yes, still it is worth 5 bugs. Yet, you actually don't pay for the game, you pay GoG for making the game a windows executable. Then the complicated stuff: goto DosBox at http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1 and after a simple install, you can drag any dos-executable to the dosbox icon. It is a simple as that... Once you installed Dosbox, you can skip that step and find, download and play any old game "newly released". Personally, I do the following: I don't spent 5 dollars, I wait till there is a sale of let's say 80% and buy it. Why? I like the GoG concept. You have a nice online storage of games, and you can download games, store it at a local drive and play it, even when by some unforeseen event GoG ever quits.
