Decent, short experience, delivers expectations
Great atmosphere, great graphics, great soundtrack. This would have worked even without using the Hotline Miami design of 1HP player, because it is a great game in many aspects. The only cons are some sometimes floaty controls, some annoying enemies and the fact it has an ending. It definitely has not overstayed its welcome and i would like to see more of this.
This game is long, is beautiful and it is fun until it's not. Exploration is pretty nice, graphics are good, enemies are funny, puzzles are decently creative and combat on the ultimate difficulty level is brutal. The early game has the sense to be half a survival game, like the grimrock games. Encounters are hard and resources are scarce, so you explore everything to the fullest, evolve your chararacters the best you can, use all you have and every battle won brings a good sense of progress. This was a really good part of the game. After the half point though, it looks like InXile's budget ran out. The game threw everything at you the first half, and now things start getting recycled. -Enemies start getting recycled. -Your characters stop progressing as you got all the perks you needed. -Your weapons may get some tuning but nothing significant.- -Recycled puzzles become more and more abundant to keep you from progressing. -Trash mobs everywhere. Now fighting is not progress, it's just annoying. You start getting so powerful you can blast anyone by having nearly infinite turns. -Story keeps repeating itself as they ask you to kill the next bad guy around the world -Lore is really shallow despite the early promises -One secondary quest has you LITERALLY fight 396 low level enemies and waste like an hour. Last level gets so annoying that they really slog you with 10 of the most annoying puzzles they can think of. Then just before the final battle your characters get like "CHAARGE! YOU WILL PAY FOR THIS", But wait! The game has another 6 puzzles for you. No. Bad design. F this. On a separate parenthesis, the lore gets all tongue-in-cheek about "human guilt for colonialism", racism, persecutions and its association with humans and bland, unjustified, one-faced EVIL. I see your message but it makes me think you hired antifa writers. "Races" are even displayed as "Cultures" COME ON WHAT IS THIS is your studio threatened by activists? It's not bad but it's a shame...
I played this after a while, knowing it was a technical disaster on launch. Major bugs have been fixed. Some glitches like texture popping, lighting flashing, and monsters getting stuck are still there. The game is really different from what it was advertised: Open world? No, just very large maps just like in the previous titles. But larger open fields for fights. Legion system? No, just in the last battle. Vehicles? There's a system for it but it's just some vehicle sections. Perk tree? Yeah, they can give you extra firepower and they are fun, it's not an RPG and it's not trying to be. Instead you get: The carnage: there are tides of enemies, more than i could think on previous titles. Many levels have above 1000 enemies, and the last one had only 1800? Trust me, it felt like there were 5000. Soundtrack: awesome as ever Enemy variety: better than 3 and 1, worse than 2. Weapon variety: more than ever. With alt-fires and dual wielding. Graphics: A step down from 3 but allows for huge maps Animations: Clunky and crappy as ever Story: it's generic and spoonfed but who cares, it's enough. Humour: Not too serious, makes you laugh sometimes. Mechanics and design choices: Reloading is bad but dual wielding is fun. Sprinting is fine. The fake jumps you make do not let you avoid projectiles like in previous titles. Maps: HUGE but they don't seem to have the same level of care like the previous titles. Fun: Very fun. And I was prepared for disappointment. This is a Serious Sam game and it's good. I have no serious issues on it as a fan, and bugs didn't plague my experience. I missed these games so much... Main issue is that the marketing team of Croteam made a horrible work, giving light on the worst and most insignificant aspects. I mean: French "open world" map doesn't make sense and it's there because it's in the trailer. It's clear that the marketing team does not know its audience.
Pros Gameplay is decent Customization is decent Setting is good Cons Levels get repetitive and there are too many. Story is a boring wall of text. Events are nonsensically random and promote savescumming. They are "Your solution makes sense but your weapon suddenly explodes for no reason and screws you" kind of bullshit. Game is easy to break The "Impossible" difficulty did not help much. By about half game, after upgrading the right skill trees my squad became an exponentially everbuffing shower of death that could get 50 damage buffs and kill everyone on the map (even bosses) in a single round. It became a game of watching my priests' buffing and running animations and i didn't even manage to see what the hardest bosses do besides dying. This really burned me out.
They really did fix many of the issues. The RTS component feels solid now. The UI is much better than before The AI is not AS clunky Story elements and characters are even better. Still, it is not a perfect game I would have liked my main PC to become a god instead of capping at lvl 20 and just being really strong. Too few stat boost potions. 2 revive limit means you can't let your heroes die and that's lame. I would have also LOVED to keep the old broken Circle Mage difficulty of SP3 that had the enemy throw you entire SCREENS of enemies. While your heroes are more balanced now, enemies are fewer and attacks are not as constant as before, probably because of the 200 unit limit regardless of the map. Still a great game, i'll gladly buy the next expansion
This game is much better than its predecessors on many aspects. + The RPG parts are good. + The voice acting is great and high budget. Feat. General Geralt. + The story is well crafted and fully voice acted. + Graphics are great + The characters are interesting and fleshed out. Too bad you can't recruit the dark elf. + The lore is pretty standard but easily digestible + The game on the hardest setting has you fight and obliterate LITERALLY ENTIRE SCREENS OF CONSTANT ENEMIES. This is awesome! Still it has some downsides - AI is pretty basic - UI is clunky - Animations often glitch, ambient characters usually glitch during cutscenes - RTS economic elements are clunky and hard to manage - No really special units on the different races. It's always pikes vs cavalry vs soldiers and no abilities on units - RPG elements stop mattering after a while and the 3 active abilities limit stops you quite early from becoming a demigod or exploring new abilities Still had a good time for 70 hours
This is still a good game but i have a stupid yet serious complaint: I know this might sound like a stupid complaint but i remembered Vaporum for being like a more combat-oriented version Legend of Grimrock. And it did work fine as that as there were many enemies with many different attacks allowing for some frenetic arenas. This time i feel i did not whack nearly as many enemies as i did in the first. Every unexplored room i get into i lose the feeling of adventure because of course it's puzzles. EVERY ROOM is a puzzle about squares. Rarely you get an enemy and it's often just a stress toy while you think of the puzzles you have left behind. Many enemies are used once or twice in total. Exploration and RPG elements are inferior to LOG2. Even the puzzles don't hold a candle to Grimrock 2's approach to open world persistent puzzles so i don't know why they insisted on them so much. It's just squares and boxes and buttons and pits over and over where my character matters absolutely nothing. In the end, I found it quite disappointing and I feel i had a worse time than with the first. Still, the world needs more games like these, and I need them too. I have to thank the devs for making this and i hope they will find the perfect balance of things in the future. I'm still a fan.
It took me 70 hours to win my first game. There is a lot of side content that i had to skip through. Because winning means JUST traveling to the bottom of the dungeon with one life and fighting a boss and that's more than enough for now. The hard thing is EVERY THING is trying to kill you. Toxins, lava, your own spells, surprise snipers, surprise worms, the angered shopkeeper, the perks you picked, the places you explored, the teleportium you just stepped on, the electrified staff you held while swimming, the electrified monster that walked on your same steel beam, the barrels hidden in the sand close to you, the polymorphium and again, the grain of dirt intercepting your nuke and even monsters. Every death teaches you about a risk and there are REALLY SO MANY RISKS that you will have to die 80 times before learning how to blow yourself up with every spell and have a chance of reaching the boss. No matter how good your run is going, everything can end in an instant of miscalculation. No matter how many times you try, you will never get the same things you got the last run. Good thing is, many combos between spells are pretty interesting and every run feels unique. Bad thing is, if you plan to explore the side content you must be a really lucky masochist. This game broke me for now, but i will try to get the other secret and side content in later updates
I've been really impressed by the quality and love they put in this: Everything is complete, well crafted, detailed, complex and in the end, admirable. (unlike some other modern RTWP RPGs) The combat is serviceable but clunky on par with Baldur's Gate 2 and other RTWP RPGs. The game is REALLY long (hundreds of hours) yet the plot stays interesting until the end! Your choices REALLY matter throughout the whole adventure and you will be impressed at how much the game really has something to say on every little thing you did. Characters are not annoying or too dramatic and yet well developed. They make your party really look like a party of heroes on their path to solve everything. I never encountered ANY bug whatsoever despite the claims in the other reviews. Maybe the game was already patched enough to be bug free by the time i played it The only annoying things I can think of are "too many trash encounters" and "buffing your party takes too much time" But if those are the only bad parts i can think of after like 200 hours, it means this game is worthy to be considered one of the very best RPGs on the modern market.
