Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYyqaqjvvDI Project Highrise is essentially a city builder but instead of horizontal construction, you have have vertical construction. It is a 2D skyscraper builder and management game featuring some minor scenarios but mainly a sandbox mode where you can build your skyscraper to the best of your ability in varying economic conditions. The gameplay essentially revolves around micromanaging the constructing, placing, and utilizing of every single tile on the map. And when I say utilizing i don’t mean making use of something. I mean setting up the utilities in the most annoying, repetitive, and drudgerous nature I have ever seen in a building sim. You place offices, stores, apartments, or whatever you so choose to place as there are no real cons to focusing on something. In fact you’re sort of penalized if you place different types of rooms on a single floor because they all require different utilities which makes you then have to pay to set up the ones you’re missing. You have to keep a good eye on economic conditions, because when they go down some of your inhabitants will leave and take the room with them (yes I’m serious, they take the room with them) all because you didn’t give them a rent break that they never asked you for beyond an angry face emoticon that comes up over their office which could be 2 by 2 squares on a something like 80 by 40 square map. You have to micro placing everything and if it doesn’t work out and someone leaves, you have to micro placing it again. It doesn’t just auto-fill with someone new. To read the full text review (Since GoG doesn't allow full reviews) view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/423580/
Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1pVqkDOW7g ichdom Battlemage is essentially a linear hallway-based first person shooter, but instead of shooting guns you’re shooting magical spells. That’s sort of an odd concept. What’s even odder is how all of the advertisements tried making the game look more like some sort of open brawler instead of the narrow linear experience it is. The gameplay is alright. For a while. It’s extremely slow-paced for a first person shooter, but the placement and selection of your spells and constant action of it all keeps it very intense and engaging. It’s single player so unfortunately you can’t bring anyone along to fight by your side, and honestly that is exactly what this game needed. The game likes to spam you with the exact same enemies over and over and over as you drudgerously pace through spell upgrades in a surprisingly in-depth customization system that I didn’t even try to wrap my head around and instead just let it upgrade things for me, which I realized is actually a pretty bad idea because it takes any tiny upgrade it can get, even if it sacrifices a boatload of effect damage for 2 more base dps. The graphics of this game are pretty damn good looking if a little hard to immerse yourself into with your floating hands which shadows reveal to literally be held up in front of you like an idiot at all times. The sound effects and music are nothing memorable. They get the job done. The story is...well, it’s a story. Basically you pick a lusty-for-vengeance male protagonist or a bitchy fuck everyone female protagonist and whichever you don’t pick becomes a useless scout that gives you information so useless that even the game makes fun of them. To read the full text review (Since GoG doesn't allow full reviews) view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/261760/
Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA3VfF6FuE0 Consortium is a first person RPG. It’s a very unique game that’s for sure. It has RPG elements, shooting mechanics, and quite easily the most impressive conversation simulations I have seen in my entire life. The buttons for conversations however are in the F keys like F1 and F2, so that’s a little odd and has led to the occasional mis-click on my part that had...undesirable results. But honestly, I have never seen a game more capable of having the most realistic and intelligent conversations as Consortium. The shooting mechanics are solid, AND entirely optional. You never once have to shoot a gun in this game if you don’t want to. Consortium is a very choice-driven game. Every action you make, everything you say and do has a reaction. You can play this game as a pacifist, as a rambo, or as someone just trying to survive or what have you if you wish. The gameplay is very solid and a definite pro in my book. You can even explore the plane through all the maintenance corridors above and below where you’re supposed to be just like in Star Trek or that one scene in Mass Effect 2, it’s really cool the first time you discover it. The story of Consortium is an interesting one. It’s essentially one big murder mystery with some extra things happening. You have to use the in-depth conversation mechanics and your own ingenuity to discover why the casualty was murdered and who was behind it. It’s actually pretty awesome, and I HATE murder mysteries. The reason I think it is so awesome is probably because I’m a huge fan of Star Trek and seeing as all of this takes place on a futuristic plane that is essentially a flying fortress that can laser zap missiles and planes out of the air by the hundreds... To read the full text review (Since GoG doesn't allow full reviews) view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/264240/
Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mad5Z-cncI Stronghold Crusader 2 is an RTS, but I am not sure what kind of RTS it is trying to be. It has city building, castle sieging, and a lot of other neat mechanics with zero depth whatsoever. The gameplay of Stronghold is inherently flawed. You are supposed to build up your castle, your army, and then go attack the other person with that army while protecting what you built. The problem here is that the castle building is bland and boring, the castle sieging is lacking so much that the other stronghold games had. For example, you can’t even make laddermen to scale walls. Why not? Because NOW regular soldiers get to pull out picks and break away at walls like it is nothing. Watch entire towers come down to your meager band of peasants and their picks. The building of an army is also tedious with unit caps and having to multitask the castle building every time you start a new match so that you can afford the units in a way that feels like a drudgerous chore. The campaign...or…”learning campaigns”, most of which are sold to you as separate DLC, are the most uninspired storytelling experiences I have ever seen in a videogame. Shooters tell better stories than these. These campaigns are essentially just sequences of scenarios with guided objectives and starting conditions instead of the open gameplay the rest of the game offers. Forget the in depth campaigns and mechanics of Stronghold 2. In Stronghold Crusader 2 we don’t need quality, we need DLC apparently. To read the full review (Since GoG doesn't allow full reviews) view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/232890/
Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba4VjMd0h_8 Shadowrun Dragonfall is a standalone expansion to Shadowrun Returns. Shadowrun is a turn based strategy game filled with RPG elements such as choice-based dialogue as well as character creation and customization. The thing that allows Dragonfall to stand out from Returns is that its campaign is almost twice as long as the original, features open quest hubs and removes the linearity of getting a quest, being teleported to the location, and then being teleported back without any choice or say in the matter. This time around you get to actually get a permanent team together instead of having to hire generic NPCs that you never get to talk to like in Returns. The gameplay here is one and the same with Returns though. Your typical turn and cover based strategy game with abilities and characters inspired by the world of shadowrun. The intensity of the fights for a turn based strategy game is actually surprising. You can have a decker hacked into the matrix and fighting off hordes of defense programs while the rest of your team is trying to protect his actual body from hordes all the same. It’s a lot of fun, but this time around with the extended campaign length? It’s VERY repetitive. Shadowrun Dragonfall features far less choices of how to go about things than Returns did. While you can avoid certain confrontations, most jobs and situations you get into will end in a fight no matter what. This game LOVES to force you into combat and spam groups of a dozen enemies per room at your four man squad. The entire last mission was four levels of unit spam. Because of this the gameplay, while fun, does become tedious very quickly and even disappointing if you were hoping for more options for diplomacy or tricks that could help you avoid combat. To view the full review (Since GoG doesn't allow full reviews) view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/300550/
Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-xfKauiobM Legends of Eisenwald is a turn based strategy adventure RPG type thing. It’s really a very interesting concept. The battles are all turn based strategy, navigating the map takes place in real time, and the story is advanced with very RPG-esque mechanics involving branching dialogues and choices in the storyline that can affect how things go for you in the future. The most important thing to note off the bat is that this is a game where if you want to be a completionist with quests you’re going to be looking at a guide a lot since the game doesn’t mark all of your objectives for you and isn’t always the clearest on what your objectives are. A lot of quests for example tell you to go somewhere, but refrain from letting you know that the trigger for the quest only occurs between eleven at night and five in the morning. The story of this game however is absolutely its biggest strength. The world you are thrust into is bitter and gruesome. And the thing that got to me the most was just how horrific it is. There are little to no positive or well-moraled characters in this game, and the ones that seem to be are either killed off quickly by someone else, or you are forced to kill them. This game will constantly play with your emotions assuming your heart isn’t a frozen cinder block as it forces you to choose between lesser evils, do horrible things to survive, and to continue on as even your closest allies turn against you and your even slightly immoral actions come to bite you harder than you could ever have imagined. Whoever’s world this is? Whoever’s characters these are? Congratulations. You made an amazing gritty masterpiece of a struggle with this game. To read the full review (Since GoG doesn't allow full reviews) view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/246760/
Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmnbZH4zI6w 80 Days is an interesting game and I’m not quite sure how to classify it. It’s strikingly similar to the Oregon Trail if you just take out all of the survival mechanics and add a lot more encounters and events that no player will ever experience without playing the game through a dozen times or more. The game is played out by traveling from city to city. In each city you are greeted with an event that allows you to look around the city as you desire and have any number of things happen to you. You can visit the market to buy and sell items, the bank to withdraw cash, and plan the rest of your journey out. While travelling you also encounter similar events and the goal is to circumnavigate the world in 80 days. You have to pick your path and balance your budget while attending to your rich master of whom you play the servant. Collecting certain sets of items along the way will help make your travels easier, but there is one giant flaw to this gameplay. Time ALWAYS moves outside of events. You have no time to leisurely play this game and examine things or get up and get a drink without hitting the escape key. You’re playing a strategy game where you’re on a time crunch and to make the time crunch even worse, you’re given about a minute upon arriving to each city before it’s too late to travel out for the day and now you have to spend money to sleep at the hotel because there is no pause button for time. To read the full review (since GoG doesn't allow full reviews in its review system) view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/381780/
Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8XAta_BYeQ Shadowrun Hong Kong is a great way to start off your Shadowrun experience, but not a great way to end it. If you’ve never played a Shadowrun game before and you’re interested? If you like turn based strategy? Love reading in-depth stories? If Shadowrun lore is something you can get behind? Get this game. Don’t hold back. Have fun. But if you’ve played Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun Dragonfall? You’re in for a HUGE disappointment. Allow me to tell you why. First off for those that don’t know what Shadowrun is. Shadowrun Hong Kong is an isometric turn based strategy game where you organize a team of mercenaries known as shadowrunners, equip yourself with gear, and complete your missions in any number of ways whether that be by going in guns blazing or finding a way to use your skills with people or technology or what have you to get around the threat. And then of course there are some forced sequences as are necessary to push a narrative. It’s the third title in the series and the big fuckup here is that nothing has really improved since the previous title, Dragonfall, which was a standalone expansion at that. The story is very bland and the characters are the most unrelatable, unlikeable, and uninspired characters that I have seen all year. Their reasons for coming together make literally no sense and their backstories are the most uninteresting thing that I have ever read for 60 minutes straight in my entire life. For the full text review, go here (since full reviews don't fit into GoG's review system): http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/346940/
Video Review: https://youtu.be/3YRbF77zgkY Victor Vran is an isometric action RPG in the style of the Van Helsing games. It’s actually in that style in multiple ways. They both draw on pretty much the exact same lore, but just change some things around. In Victor Vran you play as a lone hunter of all things monstrous and evil in nature. You get to pick your weapons and learn how to best use their abilities while upgrading your gear. There’s also demon powers as well which are all skills that get dropped by enemies or that you can buy. The game surprisingly lacks an actual skillset of unique character based skills. This surprises me because it has a very similar class system to Van Helsing. It just lacks anything to add any meaning to the classes other than the base stat differences. Most of your time in Victor Vran will be spamming the same 2 weapons abilities over and over with the occasional demon power or potion. It’s very simplistic. The graphics are what you’d expect from an indie ARPG like this. The sounds are all on par, and the voice acting is very interesting. They got the voice actor of Geralt from The Witcher. I find this so funny because no one in the steam reviews seems to know that when they mention it and I see plenty of comments bash on him for being a horrible voice actor. The cutscenes are rare and mediocre and all dialogue is just text on your screen that is read by the voice actors. It’s a very low-budget game in this regard. The story is likely something most ARPG players don’t care about and luckily for you the game doesn’t have much of a story. That’s the thing with these diablo-esque ARPGs. They’re entirely based around fighting and killing a large amount of enemies to improve your gear and get better drops and things like that. (To see the full review, since the full review doesn't fit in the GoG review box, view it on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/345180/ )
GoG does not support anything longer than short critiques so the following links will allow you to view my full-length review in whatever format you prefer. For a video review, go here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlkNNmgMHiA For a text review, go here: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Resoula/recommended/261030/
