Like the first BloodRayne, this one didn't age so well. In fact, it aged worse than it's predecessor. Playing the first BloodRayne on W10 was doable, but the AI would most often break and enemies would float or spawn in the air constantly. The good part is that the gameplay remained largely unnafected - it was funny more than anything - and I could just tweak a .ini file to run the game at 1440p. Playing BloodRayne 2 is just plain impossible. There's a bunch of reasons why: - If you play at more than 60fps, the game's physics break and you or your enemies might get stuck in the air. There's no option to cap your frame-rate in-game and every website that used to host these fixes, skins and other mods for both BloodRayne games are gone. I'm using a GTX 970 and tried using Nvidia's control panel to limit it and even that didn't work. - If you play with M&K and have a second monitor, you'll have to unplug the latter or your mouse cursor will go through it when you're playing and pull you out of the game. By the way, alt-tabbing might crash your game. - You can't run the game on widescreen. There used to be a mod called "BloodRayne 2 FSAA Patch" which would fix all of the things I've mentioned, but even though a new user took it and updated it on 2019 to make it work with modern machines, it doesn't work anymore. Or at least, it does not work on my case. I've done 5 clean installs now, and whatever was the fix does not appear to fix anything anymore. Forums both on GoG and Steam are dead and no guides are left, so good luck trying to figure it out. Just skip this awful piece of software for now.
I'd rather name it "A sandbox ruined by missing and flawed features which turn into annoyances in the long term." But too long. As another reviewer said, there's no plot, no end, no objective, no actual characters (unless you consider some pixelated face with a body and weak background a character), no nothing. You're in this big world (that you can only see through the world-map) and you can do nothing but keep doing infinite, repetitive quests until you get bored and "Retire from adventuring" -- the one and only Game Over -- or start your own kingdom and dominate every other one. Ok, so you're interested in becoming Emperor or Empress of your own kingdom (which is the only "goal" you're encouraged to do a/w). Then you will have to face the hassle of dealing with one of the dullest parts of the game: Politics. Simply put, the promise of a deep system of entangled webs of alliances and deceit is just: - "I declare war to you!" - "k." (8 months later there's a peace treaty) or - "I want an alliance!" - "k." (Next 2 months alliance gets broken). Getting married with a Noble is just as useful as melting your gold to make a golden statue; pretty but useless and a big waste of money. Time consuming too. Getting in good terms with their families and/or your future couple takes a lot of time and it's unrewarding for what you get: a generic wife/husband with very little use. And do not get me started on how awful managing your empire, even your tiny little kingdom is. Even with mods, these problems do not get completely fixed and remain annoying. The only major feature left is the combat, a rather debated feature on all M&B games. This is where most opinions divide on "How deep" and "How bad" it actually is, hence the popularity on massive multiplayer battles of up to 200 players and Horde-mode mods. It's complicated to explain, so I recommend you watch some gameplays or play the demo (Steam). In what everyone agrees, though, is that sieges have always been terrible.
Uplink offers fun and intrigue for the first 1-2 hours. After that, you realize that the life of a hacker is just about dragging your hacker tools (powers) onto certain icons relatively fast and letting the game play itself. You'll also find yourself repeating the same tedious jobs, over and over again, to grind for exp and money so you can unlock and accept "better", more rewarding missions. It grows tiresome and tedious really fast. The game has quite a steep learning curve too. Often-than-not, you will need to figure out what the hell are you supposed to do to beat the missions. There's basically no tutorial, no hints. You'll learn through trial and error. Worst part is, if you get caught, your game will get deleted as a bonus to "immersion". This means that all the time you spent grinding on the most simplistic and tedious missions (the initial ones) of all the simplistic and tedious missions of the game will be for nothing. You'll have to start all over again, grind all over again and then lose your progress all over again when you get confused on what to do on a certain mission. I don't get what do people call "immersion" when the game pretty much plays itself. I didn't feel like a Hollywood hacker on any moment. At least on movies hackers just press random keys on their keyboards to achieve something and rarely use a mouse.
I know this review is probably getting buried as, apparently, everyone on GOG is in love with this game and the whole Witcher franchise. But I feel obliged to write this review to show why The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is not the great game that everyone claims it to be. It's actually extremely overrated. Here, let me explain why: Pros: + The story The strongest point of The Witcher saga is it's characteristic dark, gritty story. CDPR succeeded in bringing again a mature story full of hard decisions for us to take. One particular decision affects what will we see and how much of the potential background on different characters will we learn. This offers quite a lot of replay-ability. + Great soundtrack CDPR never disappoints in this department. You can expect a true delight for your ears in TW2, just like you did on TW. + Beautiful graphics CDPR created a game with true next-gen graphics even before the next-gen consoles were announced. Even in the lowest graphic settings, The Witcher 2 looks wonderful. Cons: - Combat is a complete chore to play Confusing, unresponsive controls; no option to remap keys and the game practically forces you to play using a controller because playing with keyboard and mouse is a real pain in the arse. Those are some of the things that make you despise The Witcher 2's combat. Hell, I even got to appreciate the dull combat from the original Witcher a lot more. The Witcher 2's combat mechanics are completely different from it's predecessor. Attacking options were reduced to 2: LMB makes Geralt throw a light, acrobatic attack while RMB makes him throw a heavy attack. Attacks are no longer decided by luck and skills, every attack will connect. In fact, enemies will stand motionless when you attack them to receive it. Some of them shouldn't be attacked on the front, because they will block you and sometimes stun you, making you defenseless. You're forced, in those cases, to attack them on their front. You're also a lot weaker than in the past game. Even with the best armor available, you're going to die in 2-3 hits on Hard and Dark difficulties. Blocking was made entirely useless. If you ever manage to successfully block, you receive damage and lose stamina. You're forced to keep rolling to evade attacks and keep yourself out of range. Signs were also changed. Aard and Igni no longer do area damage unless you upgrade them. Quen is now a barrier that prevents your stamina from recovering while it's active but completely protects you from damage. The catch is, it goes down on 1 hit. Yrden doesn't do damage now, it just paralizes almost all enemies. Axii is still the same useless sign for converting enemies that nobody uses. Spot the problem yet? If you don't, let me explain. Due to the game forcing you to play in a skirmishing way, the combat ends up in a Quen spam combined with more rolling spam and an occasional attack followed by even more rolling spam. Aard, Igni, Yrden and Axii now became useless tools for Geralt unless you spend a lot of skill points on the magic path, which would mean that you entirely forget about the other 2 paths (swordsman and Alchemy) because of the limited total skillpoints. On TW2, survival relies in those constant rolls. Now, if you think rolling is like in Dark Souls where it penalizes you for doing it and you need to time them, it's not. You can roll all you want and nothing will happen. It's Rolling Simulator 2011. Keep rolling and spamming Quen for 20 minutes until the battle is over. I honestly don't know if CDPR just doesn't knows how to develop good combat mechanics or if they dumbed it down for the casual/console gamers. Either way, the result is a very tedious experience when fighting the limited number of enemies that exist in the game. Oh, yes, limited. There aren't even half the monsters that existed on The Witcher. - New potion mechanics that forces you to become a psychic and read the future to know which one to use To use potions, Geralt now needs to enter on Meditation menu. Meaning you can't prepare your potions and use them when the fight required it. You have to advance, die and then load so you know which potions to use. - No option to highlight stuff and people's names. Instead, you are forced to use your very range-limited, timed medallion to find objects to interact with. Pretty self explanatory. - Too short There are only 1 prologue, 3 acts and 1 epilogue and very limited secondary missions. In the highest difficulty, on my first playthrough, I ended the game in 20 hours. - Decisions and imported savegames from The Witcher were pretty much ignored. This is something that really pissed me off. CDPR decided to start The Witcher 2 on a completely new story and setting so new players (*cough* console players *cough*) would be able to understand the story. This is a giant middle finger to everyone who played the first game and were eager to see their decisions impacting the world and story on the second game. Just some of these decisions were picked up and they only change pointless dialogues with some characters. I honestly felt betrayed and, hearing how CDPR are again doing a whole new story and setting for The Witcher 3, I'm starting to think that this will end just like Mass Effect. - Horrible and impractical UI. Changing the classical CRPG grid inventory into a Fallout weight system was a complete mistake. You will find yourself scrolling and scrolling and scrolling to find one specific object out of the hundreds you got on your inventory. Not only that, but everything is so convoluted. The objective of an UI is to reduce the time that the player takes to find a specific object as much as possible. The Witcher 2 fails miserably, making you scroll for hours. - Useless map Watch this short video from YouTube: /watch?v=bunzBQdB9EI&feature=colike The commentator is a complete idiot, but his video does prove how useless and broken the map on TW2 is. Why the hell do I want to see the entire continent? No, actually, why didn't CDPR use the original 2 tabs for local/world maps? Map is just confusing as hell; there is just no reason to use it. CDPR have good intentions and The Witcher's story is amazing. Unfortunately, they tried to do something new and it didn't go well. I have good expectations for CDPR and I know they will learn from their mistakes and make The Witcher 3 a hell of a game. But that does not mean I can give The Witcher 2 more praise than it deserves. 5/10.
Among so many modern stealth games that seem to have forgotten what the true definition of "stealth" is, Mark of the Ninja is a marvelous game. It does everything well. Maps are well-designed, gameplay is fluid, challenging and controls are responsive. Most importantly, YOU CAN BEAT EVERY MISSION WITHOUT KILLING ANYONE! What most modern stealth games seem to forget is that stealth isn't killing everyone silently, but leaving no trace or evidence that you were there. If you ever have to kill, it will only be your target. No collateral damage. The best part is that you can choose your way of playing. Kill everyone silently, strike fear into your enemies' hearts by killing people in a horrific way or by leaving them in a scary position. Or become a ghost, leaving no evidence nor bodies indicating you were there. Save your blade for everyone but for a special soon-to-be victim... Regardless of your style, Mark of the Ninja offers various gadgets and supernatural powers to achieve your goals. There are also various unlockable ninja suits with special traits to boost your style of gameplay. Mark of the Ninja is an amazing game. But then, why am I giving 4 stars and not 5? Well, 2 reasons: 1. It's too short and lacks replayability. On my first walkthrough, I took about 25 hours from start to end because I searched for collectibles, did the secret puzzles and had my ass destroyed because of my inexperience. On my second playthrough, on NewGame+ (which is supposed to be harder), I took roughly 12 hours. Although maps are well-designed, they become easy to beat once you learn where to hide, where to go, what to do, etc. It's a marvelous one to three times experience. After that, it becomes too repetitive. 2. The story was good, but it screwed up at the end. It makes you take a choice, a choice you don't know how to take because you lack enough background to know the truth. The length of the game is one of the reasons the story isn't as good as it could have been.