Review done after finishing the game on highest difficulty. Tl;DR One of the greatest stealth games in existence, even my modern standards. There are some issues that prevent me from giving it a perfect 5* score, but know that even if I leave it with 4* - it’s the highest-tier 4* can be. Pros: + General gameplay Your sword and blackjack (mace) can be used to kill or knock out enemies. Your bow can use different arrow types, from the damage dealing broadheads, to water arrows that can put out torches, moss arrows that make your steps quiet, or gas arrows that instantly put enemies to sleep. You also have rope arrows that can be attached to any wooden surface and will produce a thick rope for you to grab onto and climb. Human and some monster enemies will be very dangerous in combat. You are a thief, not a warrior – while you can fight, it’s not usually a recommended option as wounded enemies tend to run away to seek help from other guards. + Weight of movement Your character has a momentum. It takes a fraction of a second move at full speed from standstill. Slippery surface will make moving difficult. Metal or tiled floor is loud to walk on. All of this has to be taken into account while sneaking. + Difficulty selection Each map can be played on Normal, Hard or Expert. Higher difficulty not gives you less HP, but also gives you more objectives like stealing specific, rare items. On Expert you are also forbidden from killing any humans, while on Hard you must avoid killing civilians. Cons: - 3 out of 16 maps are pretty bad I won’t spoil them whole, but I have to talk why I think they are bad. From least to most bad: Wizard towers – idea behind the level is nice, the execution is not. This map makes it very annoying to navigate and finish stealthily. Casino – about half of this map are samey looking sewers which you will easily get lost in. Escape – one of the later maps will make you fight a lot with low resources and enemies are plenty and difficult.
Friendly warning! This ain't a Heroes clone, if you are looking for a HOMM experience - you'll be disappointed! IMPORTANT! Play with a patch from the fellow named "verokster" available on his blogspot (I don't want to post link in a review, but it's easily googable). It let's you play in high resolutions, windowed/fullscreen with upscaled graphics and has many improvements like increasing the speed of animations for when you would have seen them many times already and just want to play quicker. Patch works for both Disciples 1 and 2 and is easy to set up. All negative reviews that complain about compatibility did not use this patch! I also fully recommend savescumming your way through this game, since it's pretty unforgiving and quite random at times. 'Q'uicksave is your friend, manual saves every time you accomplish something big recommended. Pros: + Plays well (with patch!) Cons: - Looks dated - Spell insta-kills - many units will have a max HP of about 100-ish on max XP level, while there are global spells that can deal 150 damage in a single cast, killing your troops instantly. The only way to avoid this is to always end your turn in a town, or savescum. - Disciples 2 is better in every way Lowdown In every way worse than the sequel - Disciples 2 - which makes the original irrelevant unless you are a fan of the series and want to play the first game for the story/nostalgia or out of curiosity. I don't mean that this is a bad game - far from it - but it faces the same problem as Heroes of Might and Magic 1. At the time of it's release we didn't have anything like it, now we have a better option in the sequel. I think it would deserve a positive score back in a day, nowadays since Disciples 2 is so much better I'll give it a neutral score of 3* - assuming you play with the patch I mention above. Seriously, don't play without it...
Played on Win 10 and it crashed once. It also has some weird bugs like sometimes an enemy corpse will slide away out of bounds of the map or the spell having weird, inconsistent casting times. None of the bugs were enough to make me not enjoy it, but it does mean I can't give full stars. If not for those problems it would be an easy 5* from me. Sacrifice is a hybrid RTS with third person perspective where you control your summoner with keyboard and mouse, summon creatures to fight for you and support the battle with your own assortment of spells. The campaign lets you take part in a conflict between 5 gods and depending on what missions you do for them they will give you access to different spells and creatures. Depending on which missions you choose to do, other gods may not want to deal with you anymore so while there is some non-linearity, you will still be looking at about 9 missions per god + 1 last mission that is largely the same for everyone. It's still a quite good piece of content and each god's campaign (should you choose to stick with 1 god per playthrough) will take you about 4-6 hours to complete, giving 20-30 hours of campaign and since most spells and units are totally unique the replayability is high. There is also the matter of story - which is presented with almost no exposition. Things will happen and characters will react naturally like they are familiar with the rules and characters of the world, there are no lengthy explanations of who's who and what's what beyond the absolute minimum. This means you will have to play more than 1 god's playthrough to have the full picture of what's going on and uncovering the story is pretty entertaining. The voice acting and sound design is top-notch with pre-mission briefings being fully voiced. Pros: + Great gameplay + Visual design + Sheer amount of units and spells + Story and it's presentation Cons: - Uneven difficulty curve - Bugs - Some models for units are reused, reskinned as different units
Review written after beating unmodded game as a fighter on 2 difficulties (out of 3) and then playing some popular mods. I recommend playing vanilla first. Vanilla game: Diablo 1 + Hellfire It's not Diablo 2. Enemies don't respawn if you leave the game, you can save anywhere and when loading you start off where you saved instead going back to the town like in D2. If you die, it's game over and you need to reload a save. If you get stuck with not enough levels or items to progress, then you can reset the game, keeping you character and items, but starting over with all monsters and quests available. This give the game a totally different dynamic than Diablo 2, making it similar to traditional RPGs like Baldur's Gate. The game is much slower than Diablo 2, there is no run button and if you play a fighter you will have no options for closing gap to catch ranged enemies quickly. This forces you to develop strategies and take fights slowly, utilizing corners or doorways to divide and conquer enemies. The game is very rewarding if you are willing to put in the effort and in my case - playing the whole thing with no resets gave me a good sense of accomplishment. There's no stash and gold takes room, but you can throw items on the ground in town and they will stay there. Now for the mods, there are 2 popular ones. Belzebub (Diablo HD mod) More items (including item sets with bonuses which were not present in vanilla!) many more quests and in general more content. I played this as a Rogue and it felt very similar to playing D1 vanilla, but the whole dynamic with non-respawning enemies and save/load style of gameplay is gone. Now if you leave game, you start from town with all monsters respawned. There's stash and waypoints like in D2. It's ok, but I wished it didn't change the save/reset mechanic. The Hell 2 Adds a lot of new classes, reworks items - now all classes will have specific items/spells for them and let's you run out of combat.. Makes the game grindy as hell.
Note: I played the english version of the game. Pros: + Story Especially the main plot for base game and both DLCs are well done, interesting, and involving. Wanting to learn what happens next is easly the biggest reason to slog through all the problems this game has. + References to folklore I especially enjoyed the part in Blood and Wine DLC, where you visit twisted versions of fairly tales like Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood. There are other references in gameplay, questing and dialogue, many of which won't be cought by western, non-european audiences, but are welcome nontheless. + Many characters from books make cameos and have at least small quest associated with them To list some of them would be spoilers, but I've always appreciated how well done all the characters were introduced. Cons - COMBAT It tries to do the context-target combat seen in games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, newer Assassin's Creed and Shadows of Mordor. However while all those games had simple, but engaging, responsive and snappy combat, Witcher 3 feels all wrong. Geralt will target random enemies instead the one you are looking at. He will slash in random directions after dodging. He will miss attacks that are supposed to hit. It's terrible and on top of that - it tries to be difficult and punishing which only adds to the bad. - Inventory, weight limit, durability I remember in Gothic series not having any limit to my inventory and game was better for it. Why do I have to manage my weight? It's not fun. This is no simulation either, you can carry 20 swords and 10 breastplates, but add 1 more and suddenly you can't move. Durability is annoying and unnecessary. - Traveling World is too big with to sparse fast travel points. At least a third of gameplay will be wasted on travel. 2nd DLC dealt with it by adding dialogue options to move the story forward without travel. - Some dialogue is cringy and Skellige accents are unbearable: I'm out of character limit for review. Can't say more.
