I'll admit that I had my doubts about this game. I am a fan of XCOM and enjoyed the recent installments in particular. When I then had a first look at Chimera Squad I was irritated: From what I could tell from looking at screenshots, the graphics looked almost amateurish and the gameplay made a half-baked impression. At first, I thought I was looking at some sort of spin-off or remake by an independent studio or maybe a fan-made sequel. Then I played it anyways. Twice, I have beaten the game so far and it is a lot of fun! Finally, XCOM is garnered with some heroes you can play and grow attached to while the original formula remains intact. The graphics are humble in places, but do justice to the series of games that were released under the XCOM-moniker as a whole. Clearly, keeping them simple in parts of the game was a design desicion. Even the high replayability that is an important factor in XCOM's success story is still there and its even more fleshed out than it was before. The turn-based combat-system is still intense and fun, but emphasises role-playing a bit while sacrificing freedom of choice. All in all, I feel that this game is a more mature and thought-through, sometimes ironic look at what XCOM was, was not, has become and just might be in the future. XCOM was always a bit pulpish, especially the spin-offs and add-ons. This one is no exception, except that, unlike older spin-offs, it is a great game since it is reflecting on this.
I was axious to play this game because it looked like everything I liked about rpgs and it lacked everything I don't like about rps. Somebody wrote it is everything that Baldur's Gate 3 schould have been and from what I have seen, that might very well be true. The problem is that the game chrashes frequently to dektop without so match of an error message. It is bugged to point that doesn't really allow for any kind of play. All you get when the program chrashes is a pop-up from the Unity-engine with a unspecified progress-bar. Is it phoning home, like so many Unity-based games? I don't now and I don't care, because I will never play this game again. It should not have been released in this state. Period.
Battle Brothers is a wonderful game. I have played it for the last couple of years, again and again, and my gang of mercenaries still has not uncovered all the secrets the map I am playing on holds. But it's not the events or special mission and secret places that make this game such a joy to play. Its the hard tactical combat and the variety of melee weapons and perks on your mercenaries that make every battle a ton of fun. Note the word battle: While most encounters are more like skirmishes, the game is very capable of pitching more than just two groups of oppenents against each other and occaisionally allows for massive clashes. The graphics are nicely drawn, the color palette ist well chosen. The music is decent and the writing is good enough to allow for a chuckle at times. And I agree with other reviewers that all the add-ons make this game even better and also that if anything, the game lacks a storyline. Then again, it makes up for that by replayability because maps are generated at random. Also, I want to note that this is not obvious: The genarated maps make sense and you will feel right at home on them after a while, totally forgetting that they are a result of some random seed. In my opinion, there are few things that would improve this game apart from a storyline: The integration of battle sisters, since I see no reason that a gang of mercenaries should be all male. Also, I would certainly like a multi-player option that allows for different mercenary-bands to clash. Plus, I am not too sure about the level-cap and wouldn't mind seeing additional perks. Still, Battle Brothers is an excellent and challenging strategy game with a low-fantasy setting that everybody interested in the genre should give a try. I simply don't know what games to compare it to and I don't think anything quite like it has been done before.
This RPG has it all: A mesmerizing story, an excellent combat-system, good music, very good translations, nice voice-acting, a vast world to explore, a kingdom to manage, beautiful graphics, enticing characters, tons of side-quests, a good sense of humour and all the oddities you would expect from a fantasy game: Undead cyclopses? Check! Mutating monsters? Check! Crazy nymphs? Check! Interdimensional portals? Check! Prestige-classes? Check! A variety of both dangerous and fun side-quests? Check! NPCs with an agenda of their own? Check! The list goes on almost endlessly. So don't be fooled by all the negative reviews. "Pathfinder: Kingmaker" is easily the best RPG to see the light of day in recent years. It will keep you on your toes constantly and will do so for weeks on end, even if you are a seasoned player. Bugs are very rare to say the least and it runs very stable: Throughout the whole game, the only problems I encountered were some very minor typos in the german version I played. And the game features countless pages of well written story and dialogue. I regret having not played this game earlier. I certainly would have done so if it had not been for all the complaints and problems I read about. Be assured: As far as I can tell, its casual players complaining about the game being too hard. So let me put it like this: The game is not bad. You just can't fight.
Just like the classic RPGs that "Pillars of Eternity" stands upon and draws inspiration from, this game is great. The graphics, setting and sound lure you into a its fantasy-world and make you want to come back for more. The story has some depths and the characters are believable and as well developed as you could expect from a role-playing game. This game is excellent. The developers made all the right choices. So, if you liked "Baldurs Gate" but don't want to play it again, buy this. You won't be dissapointed. It is more than a hommage to great but old rpgs. It is a worthy successor in every way. That said, there are two points I came accros while playing that need improving: Firstly, the engine is capable of lower resolutions, allowing for the game to run more smoothly on slower machines. Buts sadly, it takes some tweaking to make these available as they are not included in the settings-section of the game. Also, lower resolutions work fine for the world-screen were the action and interaction is happening. But for some reason, inventory screens and character screens as well as dialop screens will clip out of the screen - the lower the resolution, the more they will clip. Since the game doesn't rely on cutting-edge graphics, this should have been mended in the definite edition. 2. The game has been translated into numerous languages. In my case, I chose to run the game in german, my native language. I switched back to english soon. The translation is flawed: Sometimes its just a spelling or typing mistake, sometimes its wrong grammar, sometimes its a bad choice of words, sometimes it just doesn't make much sense at all. The story is pretty deep and dialogs can take a political, spiritual or philosophical as well as an emotional turn. The game relies heavy on this to progress the story and immerse the player into its world, so it should also have been mended in the definite edition. Despite these flaws, I will still give the game five stars. It's unrivaled.
This game is like Diablo, but with some more depths and a more interesting storyline. I bought it for the story and the roleplaying, not for the hack'n'slash and when I realized it acutally features extensive dunguens with tons of mindless butchering of enemies, I was out and never gave it a second try. Don't get me wrong: The graphics are great, the music fun, the characters well developed and the skill-system adds just enough juice to make you want to level-up. But I don't like playing games just to level up or get the next, even more powerful item. I like to play them for the story, to be immersed in the setting and the character or party I am exploring the game-world with. So this game is not my cup of the at all. It looked promising. After all, I am probably not the only fantasy-fan who, while playing Diablo, thought how good the game could have been did with a meaningful and less trashy story, with challenging quests and interesting characters. And Divine Divinity looked like it tried to be just that. But it isn't. It's just the most sophisticated Diablo-clone on the market - nothing less, nothing more.
It's a good game with a lot of different pathes and different endings. Your options throughout the game and the lore you gather while adventuring will vary greatly depending on whether you play a thief, a loremaster, a drifter, a mercenary or any of the other classes. The music and the story as well as the graphics are good, the writing is blantly funny, the setting very unique, blending genres from alternative history to classic fantasy, to steampunk and even cyberpunk. I also liked the combat system, which is turn-based and thus rather strategic, yet feels pretty fluent. The crafting system is one of the best I came accros in any game so far, the alchemy system lacks a bit variety but is still very useful. But sadly, there are whole areas which you will not be able to access with some builds and a lot of puzzles and quests which will be either very hard or downright unsolveable, forcing you to restart or reload or cheat. If you focus on your combat skills, you will be unable to finish some quests. If you focus on the skills that allow you to solve them, you will be unable to succeed in combat or in situations in which a skill is needed you did not specialise in. Thus, you get stuck again. If you try a balanced build, you will get to midgame and then get stuck, because you lack high-levels in certain skills. What you need to finish this game without restarting is a party of three or four characters. Sadly, this is not implemented, although you meet some npcs along the way that would make great companions. The developers instead published a very similar follow-up title called "Dungeon Rats" which features an adventuring party, but totally lacks all the different approaches and quests, even the whole skill-system. If these two titles features had been in one game, it would have been great. The way it is, it's a bit, well, unfinished.
I never was a fan of Icewind Dale. I remember abandoning the game after playing it for a while. It was shortly after it first came out and I had just finished Baldur's Gate and expected more: more story, more immersiveness and less linearity. It felt like a hack'n'slay-game in comparison. Now I decided to give Icewind Dale 2 a try and am quite happy with it. The combat is tough and very strategic. The amount of sidequests is just right and so is the layout of the different areas. It just almost never gets boring. It is still true, though, that, like its predecessor, it lacks the open world that Baldur's Gate offered. Somewhat like Neverwinter Nights 2, the game and it's storyline more or less run on rails and it is almost impossible to derail the whole thing. But while I disliked this fact about Neverwinter Nights 2, I actually like it about Icewind Dale 2. It never gives you the feeling of being forced to do something when you acutally want to do something else. Its like every curve of the railroad seems reasonable, every change of speed justified, every stop just in time. This is a hard thing to accomplish in game-design, I assume! Even apart from that, the storytelling is good: You have to act like a hero at times, but on other occasion, you need to make questionable decisions. All of them seemed natural enough for me. This adds to the overall atmosphere of the game and makes the story believable. I didn't finde any obvious flaws. It's challenging but well balanced, polished, well thought-out, features an intriguing enough story and runs reasonably well even on newer machines. If anything, it is time-consuming as it is surprisingly long. What starts of as a simple mercenary mission step by step becomes a deep story with some surprising twists. I would compare the game to the german title Drakensang, which is somewhat reminiscient of it here and there - and is equally long and winding.
This game is the best way to waste your time. I mean that in a good way. I spent days and weeks and months with this game. It's beautifullly thought out, highly challenging, educative in parts and a lot of fun. It's also relaxing and despite it's flaws the best strategy game I ever came across. The expansion packs add some more fun, especially in the later parts of the game and some more variety in the earlier parts: They integrate corporate structures in your empire or state, emphasize religion and culture a bit more and add new leaders and civilizations to play. Despite all this praise, years of playing this gem allow for some critique. There are some rather annoying flaws in the game. First of all, balance is an issue. You can tweak your random szenarios a bit to make the game more fair. But some civilizations still tend to be more powerful that others. And all will fail when confronted with a bad starting location or bad luck with random events. These - like everything else in the game that's based on chance - tend to affect the game greatly in the beginning and to become mere trifles towards the end. Also, the game becomes almost impossible to win on higher difficulty levels. While it will still be fun to play, you will end up on the loosing end more often than not. Also, combat can become weird with units stacked on top of each other. Often, you will do fine until one of your friends decides to wipe you out with the majority of his units stacked into one army. That will also be your best chance of winning, making other strategies obsolete at times. Other flaws are in the science tree and in diplomacy: The science tree is ludicrous if you look at it closely. Diplomacy is very underdeveloped, with threats or advances for help from rivaling civilizations becoming repetative and annoying. Nonetheless, the game was better than anything on the market when it came out and still shines today. With the following titles of the series not adding much to the concept, it is probably the best title in the whole series - and one that still runs smoothly on older machines.
