Znakomicie się przy Hard West 2 bawiłem. Zastosowany system turowy sprawia, iż gra się weń nieco inaczej niż w inne tego typu strategie, bardziej przypomina to szachy/puzzle aby rozkminić jak najkorzystniejszą kolejność akcji. Na wielki plus jest to, iż zdecydowanie procentuje uprzednie solidne zastanowienie się i przemyślenie ruchów całej drużyny, a nie atakowanie na uraa! niczym Armia Czerwona. Bohaterowie są sympatyczni, a ich specjalne umiejętności naprawdę bardzo mocno wpływają na wynik starć, szczególnie teleportacja Flynn na początku gry - należy więc koniecznie nauczyć się je wykorzystywać. Znakomity też okazał się być Śmiejący się Jeleń, ten gościu bo zdobyciu broni zadającej 4 dmg oraz perka dającego kolejne +1 dmg, oraz z kosił całe łany przeciwników mających do 10 HP. Nie używałem Clay'lish oraz Lazarusa, obczaję te postacie przy kolejnym przechodzeniu gry. Grafika, muzyka, voice acting - wszystko to mi się bardzo podobało. Jedyne zastrzeżenia mam do długości gry (trochę krótka), oraz tego, iż w misjach można uruchomić starcie z bossem w momencie jak cała drużyna nie ma już punktów akcji; oczywiście częste robienie save'a pomaga, ale i tak jest to słabo zaprojektowane. Nieco drażniąca jest też obsługa kamery, np. po wycelowaniu w kogoś, a przed oddaniem strzału nie daje się ruchem kursora myszy do krawędzi ekranu zmienić jej położenia, trzeba z klawiatury; drażniło mnie to nie raz. Za to wszystko -1 gwiazdka.
I've finished "free" version, but enjoyed it so much I bought it on GOG, especially when it is 70% off - but really, this game is well worth full price. 1st, visuals. The feel-and-look is fairy/cartoonist, drawn astonishingly well. Characters are very nice to look at, and the same about locations. In short you just see the graphics is made by some true artists. 2nd, card part. Well, a scourge of card-based games, RNG, is offset here nicely by forcing 8 cards deck for all characters, and allowing each turn to replace up to 2 cards - this way very rarely happens you don't have any useful card to play. Also, there are quite many ways to create decks, though there is a little downside - characters whose join later gonna fall behind main ones level-wise (I had 8lv difference between my team and the rest). Not only that, there resources are so limited you just won't have enough money and materials to upgrade/unlock extra cards (by extra I mean these not in your main decks). I'm also not sure if you aren't forced to have one dedicated healer character. 3rd, gameplay and boss fight. It was so much fun I've played it 3 days in a row; it is very enjoyable when you start to see how your idea starts to work better and better. Boss fights were great, demanding, but not too overbearing - well, maybe except for the last one; at least on normal difficulty level. At some point you'll unlock access to arena where you can fight 5 quick matches, with a prize for 1st completion. 4th, user interface. Well, is a bit inconvenient to use solely by mouse, and checking description of the cards could be done definitely better. However, the game is so good it could be forgiven. 5th, music. Well, is nice, but "it is just there". I haven't noticed it till before last boss. 6th, story. Dialogs are humorous, however I felt there are a bit too much of them. The story itself has nice plot twist near the end. Overall, I can wholeheartedly recommend this game to people who like card games.
Imagine a game like Heroes of Might and Magic, but with camera centered on your hero all the time so you cannot look around by scrolling the screen, the only way is to open dedicated map. Imagine that all resources/clickable objects are invisible unless you're right next to them. Imagine also that you just cannot simply pick them up, but every time an circle-filing animation is played, and you have to hold down right mouse button to do so. Then imagine you want to expand your castle(camp, to be exact), but you're given absolutely no hits how to get say next level of workshop. And as a creme on a cake - imagine wonky movement animation of your hero, especially start and stop - looks like she is going to fall down. That's about main world map, let's talk about card game part. Imagine a game like Magic the Gathering: Shandalar, or Etherlords 2, where you rarely get new cards for winning/completing tasks, but you need to seek for specific objects on map (which are hidden unless you're close) Imagine that practicaly all battles are some weird, predefined puzzles rather than normal matches, or at very least opponent starts with several units already in play. Imagine also that just before a battle you can't make last minute updates to your deck - say it is written the battle will be one round only. Then imagine sometimes some cards are taken away from you because of reasons you might not be fully aware. Ah, and imagine there is absolutely no tutorial about Gwent rules, and info about such insignificant details like maximum number of copies of a card in the deck, maximum number of units in battle row etc. If you'll imagine all the above then you'll have a picture what game Thronebreaker is, for a someone with absoluetly no experience with Gwent, but several years of playing MtG, LotR, Star Wars, and Etherlords 2.
This game is heavily inspired by classic Master of Orion II, sadly, it does things worse than it - mainly due to cluttered GUI which they just had to copy from MoO2, and lack of instruction where all ideas and terms are explained thoroughly. Example - someone thought that sending a fleet to other system without a number below the icon indicating how many turns the travel will take is a good idea, naay, you must click the fleet and check that in separate window. Other brilliant idea is you don't see mineral richness of a planet till you colonize it; there is something called sector scanning via telescopes and perhaps survey ships, but that wasn't explained in detail in the manual. Ah, and they completely removed food production management. A pity, as the new ideas like cultural improvement, research tree, sector scanning etc. are in very core quite nice - but they are confusing/frustrating due to poor manual. If you want to play a good 4X space game Master of Orion II is still better than this.
Larian Studios should be ashamed to charge anything, not even speaking 60$ for such piece of not working crap. I hope a quick fixes will be released this week, and at least they will reduce the amount of crashes, memory leaks (my machine has 16GB of memory, and I get system message BG3 consumed it ALL) - this is reason for such harsh note. Putting aside quality of code and bugs, the rest is surprisingly promising. Beautiful graphics, interesting interactions (met an Elf rogue, and my warlock argued with him having dagger at throat; other one was with wounded Mind Flayer), rich options menu, pretty nice character creation and development (hadn't seen too much of it sadly, due to constant crashes. I managed to get to lv 2, and have 4 companions). I also find turn-based system way more playable compared to real time mess and stopping time every few seconds in BG 1 and 2, though it'd be nice to have later in the game more available actions. In short - once finished, or severely improved with stability is seems to be a great game. Will it be "true" Baldur's Gate? I think no one should care, as what makes a good RPG is interesting story, main character, companions, locations, combat system, quests and user interface. All of these components so far looks very promising, well can't say about quests yet as y'know, crashes.
