The game was a horrible experience for me, I tried to finish it, but after more than 50 hours of game time, I stopped playing and completely gave up. Here are some of the reasons why: - The game is a literal translation of the Pathfinder RPG, without a second of thought how those mechanics function in a digital game. One example - you level up a powerful sorcerer, who can cast a strong spell once a day, after which he becomes utterly useless. - You have a giant world to explore, but are stopped from doing so by invisible walls and quest railroading. - You are constantly on a timer. ALL THE TIME. It was understandable in the tutorial section so people concentrate on the main quest and do not exploit the game in some way. But through the entire game you have to keep to a timer which ends the game when it is done. - Kingdom management is a low point. It is more of a hindrance and most of your decisions carry absolutely no weight beyond whether the kingdom survives or perishes. - Once I had one of the mandatory quests run out on me, without any idea I even had it. I was lucky enough to have a save from two months ago, which allowed me to (barely) complete the quest on time, even though I had removed character deaths from the game, because I did not even have the time to rest. - There is no fast travel, even through explored regions, which is just another time sink in a time-demanding game. - Even if you turn on the "Invincible Kingdom" option, you still fail the game if you do not finish one of the mandatory quests on time. - You can spend 60 hours in the game and get locked from continuing, because of one of the aforementioned timed quests. - Horrible inventory management, the inventory does not have a dedicated slot for quest items. You can drop, sell, and even completely miss quest items which are VITAL for the conclusion of the timed mandatory quests. There is much more. The game design is quite poor and I am not ecstatic for the second game in the series.
I've been playing BloodRayne more or less since the first game came out. It is fun, action-packed, and has unapologetic sense of humor. The second game is also quite fun. These remasters upscale the graphics and give minor improvements to the game play. This collection is worth a buy for these two games alone. BloodRayne: Betrayal is a disappointing and irritating platformer.
If you have played the flash games, this will barely hold any surprises for you. You reclaim territory, take care of the needs of you people and murder a lot of zombies. There is a story mode implemented into the game, but it quickly turns repetitive and dull, where no actual new mechanics or interesting story elements are introduced. The entire story mode can bu summarized in new town -> reclaim X number of territories -> deal with the other factions. TL;DR If you liked the flash games and want more of the same, this is a good choice. If you are looking for new, surprising mechanics, or an interesting story you can miss out on it. Still, for what it does it is an amazing game.
I think I received the game for free, which is its one saving grace. The graphics are a bland of grey/metallic grey and red for blood. The models for the characters are probably less tahn 6x6 pixels wide, which makes them look like little grey spots. The player and enemies have the same color, which blends with the background, which makes locating the enemies a stranious proces on both eyes and mind, which will leave you tired quite fast. As far as the difficulty is concerned, it is "bullshit difficulty". You kill everyone in the room, go next to a button and then, a bunch of enemies spawn from nowehre and start shooting at you. If you do not have prior knolwedge of this happening, you die. Even when you have prior knowledge of this, you will still die a lot. Your ammon runs out fast and your chainsaw is next to useless. Image if in a game like DOOM, or Serious Sam the chainsaw did not quickly dispose of enemies. This is the feeling the game leaves you with. You run out of ammo, whip out the chainsaw and instead of dismembering everyone infront of you, you get to tickle someone for a second while everyone else from their squad turns you into tomato paste. It is not the power fantasy that the demo promised and I feel this is where people feel most disappointed with it. I am not one to back from violent or gory games, but this is just not the game for me.
The game is fun and quite entertaining. I managed to pass it in slightly over two hours. Still, these were two hours well-spent and even though I successfully concluded the game, I still have not visited even one quarter of the available locations. This means, that I will get to play it at least a few times more. A word of warning, the game does not have any voice acting and it i practically a choose-your-own-adventure book, so be ready to read and read a lot. 10/10 a great title that is worth both your time and money.
As far as books go, this is one of the better ones. It was interesting to read it and see where the author would take my characters next. The characters in this story have their own personality and sometimes, you can distinguish them from dialogue alone. Still, this is not a good game. In games like the "Divinity" series, there is a lot of reading, but you also get to fight a lot and do the occasional witty quest. In "Torment: Tides of Numenera" it is the same, just without the fighting and the witty quests. Player engagement is minimal and you are forced to read pages upon pages, upon pages of text, which rarely relate to the world building or even the main quest. There is a lot of fluff which could have been trimmed in favour of getting something more than a single battle every 70 pages you read. This game is not like "Diablo" - where you get to constantly murder enemies in-between the occasional paragraph. It is not like "Divine Divinity" - which is also a story-heavy game, where the story presentation has been condensed in order to give you enough to go on, while learning new things of the world. It is its own things with little to no player engagement in-between reading walls of texts. As I said in the beginning as far as books go, this is a pretty good one.
Do not buy this game. I was very excited about buying it, since I am quite into economic simulators. I bought it and the first screen I was met buy was "Upgrade to (The Newest version of the game)" Which is just a dumb scheme to get you spending 4 times over what you spent on the original game for a product which is not even available on GoG. I understand that this is a pretty good lesson on how Cpitalism works, but still, fuq these asshats. If what you are greeted with is the announcement that you have to spend more money to get a viable game experience they can go and perform analingus on themselves. In the end, the people who are selling you this are horrible opportunistic pieces of Adam Smithiens who will do anything in their capabilities to push more senseless shit on you, instead of keeping hte capitalistic opportunism to the title and gameplay alone. -1/10, go spend your money on some hentai dating simulator'n'shiet. You will not be greeted by a home screen which forces you into spending even more money on a game you have already bought. If you really, really, really, really, really want to play it, just pirate it off of some p2p torrent site or something,
As far as the base game goes, it is a pretty accurate representation of the Talisman tabletop game. You pick your character, traverse the map, gain power and enter the inner circles until you reach the end. Th AI will occasionally cheese you to death and there are some glitches and bugs, but the devs offer support for the title and often new patches are released. The base game is worth playing, because of these things - it is a faithful representation of the board game and it has active support. Why 1 star review? Because instead of releasing the game and 2-3-4 BIG EXPANSIONS to it, they decided to release a two-digit number of small DLC packages, which include a couple of characters or a handful of new events. The complete collection of the additional content reaches to over $100. The way it goes, they will probably release additional DLC to pile it up even more. I do not know why everyone thinks that the Paradox approach to selling your game is so good, but it has been infesting the market more and more. Yes, I understand that the continuing support has to be funded in some way, but that is where the 2-3-4 big expansions, one released each year could do you good work. When done making expansions, just make a new game. It is not that difficult, trust me.
