My title is a bit tongue in cheek as I quite enjoyed this title. Essentially you are walking around an empty Base investigating what happened, but its done well. The voice acting is very good, and the banter between the 2 protagonists never crosses over to annoying. Its very linear however and quite short. But if you are looking for something to play for a weekend or an evening, its a good choice. My completion time for a first run through was 3 hours and 7 minutes. I will probably run through it again to get the notes and videos that I missed. I never got any of the slowdowns other people are reporting. I turned off Film Grain and Motion Blur, which I find insufferable, so that probably cured any slowdowns. Otherwise it ran perfectly fine on ultra settings.
Wow wow wow. This is a glorious return to form for Gaming. The original is kind of a flawed Masterpeice. I played it originally after playing the second game as I wanted to get some of the background. Essentially, you wander around into various dungeons killing Bosses using your expanding abilities to solve puzzles. The combat is fluid and the ability to shift back and force between the shadow world is an important part of puzzle solving as the landscape shifts around you, and you might only be able to get into areas in one world or another. What sets it apart are the voice acting, from the righteous rage of Raziel to your fellow Vampires to the Elder God itself, every voice actor brings his A game to this project. One fun little aspect that a lot of people don't realize is that you visit a Human city as part of the story, and if you don't kill any of them, especially the 2 humans you meed first who do attack you, they wont harm you. In fact they will kneel and worship you, letting you pause and snack off them if you want. It does not affect the ending at all but its a fun little hidden Moral choice. The Second game is another tour de force, from the streamlined mechanics to the time traveling Mechanic. In terms of the Story you run up a valley, change time periods, run back down to the castle again, change time periods again, etc But again, its done with such style and killer voice acting that you don't care. You visit tombs that contain puzzles for you to solve to empower Your weapon, the Soul Reaver, but they are not too difficult. Again the Combat is there but I really don't think its the focus. One thing, is that at one point Kain says he has looked to the end of our tale" and "found it crude and ill formed" This is actually a hint that the story changed after SR 1 and , because the creators DID think the ultimate end of their story was lame and changed it. and made changing that part of that part of the story! Anyway, much recommended! Buy buy buy!
This is a decent little game. The Basic Game loop is to go fishing for money then come back and use various fish stuff to upgrade your boat so you can fish more, with a plot that makes you go to various regions to fish more. Every region has a "Wandering merchant" that serves as your home base for selling fish, repairing your ship and buying gear. You quickly find out that dropping Crab pots by the Merchant is one of the best moneymaking techniques in the game. The 2 DLCs included with the Complete edition are fairly decent. The Pale Reach is the shorter one with the more understandable story. The art is very pretty and in general its pretty fun to run around the Ice Area, Its fairly short though, I finished it in a couple of hours. I would recommend doing it first as the rewards are good. The Iron Rig can be played concurrently with the main story as it takes you to the same areas as the main plot and in the same order. Its concerns building up an Oil platform and how the Evil in the area reacts to it. The ending is really abrupt however. All in all this was a decent experience. The Complete edition is a good way to play the game and has a fair amount of content. Well made and above average. The story is pretty vague, however. And, without spoilers, there is a good ending.
First of all this is not an RTS in the sense you harvest resources to spit out Units. It's more squad based tactics. But once you get that out of your head this becomes an absorbing game. That does mean that if you mess up you have to restart, but to be honest that's ok Some friends and I spent our gaming nights playing this for 6 months back in the day. Second every unit has a special ability, and once it's used, that's it. The campaign does its job, in that provides excuses for the missions, which are in general pretty interesting to play through. Ya its not great writing, but the 2 leads are likable and you know where they are coming from. Just don't expect too much and you will enjoy the story well enough. The units are very fun to use, and Vehicles Armour is interesting. If a weapon dles less damage than a units armour it does no damage. Vehicles have different armour per facing. The mechanic of only having a few charges per special ability gives depth The expansion, however, is pretty boring, and it has 2 problems, The Missions and story are a step down from the main game, Second.y, the new faction are awful. Their weapons are Fire based, clunky, and somewhat short ranged, but you could live with that. Their biggest problem is their version of Hovertanks. When you have to make any kind of maneuver. They stop. Then they turn, and then slowly, slowly accelerate back up to full speed. This means in practice that you spend ages of time trying to slowly push these paraplegics around the map, when in the other campaigns you had responsive and fun units to command that you can move about to deal with situations. It's infuriating. And in combination with their weaponry which I didn't like, means the Expansion campaign is a slog, even without the uninspiring missions. So, buy this for the main Campaign, and then try the expansion campaign to see if you enjoy it. Even if only for the first game, this deserves its 5 stars. All told, a very unique experience.
We... Live. *distorted computer noises*
Ok. I suffer from anxiety issues and some other stuff, and this pretty much hit the mark on that. My "Voices" are non verbal and are more images and feelings, and are probably not as intense as this, but otherwise it pretty much nails the experience of being constantly pulled and pushed by these bloody things that will not go away. I HIGHLY recommend you play with headphones to get this experience. If you just play from a screen I can imagine it would get annoying very quickly. The world is wonderfully detailed, the acting seems to be really good, and the Developers heart seems to be in the right place with what they were trying to do. The PROBLEM is the combat. I have not played the Light heavy counter combat style of game before., and I cant do it. That second fight had be dying over and over even on easy mode. I literally have no idea what I'm doing, and my one "voices" came roaring in telling me how useless I was and I just hit the exit button as I couldn't deal with it. Couldn't the game least give a tutorial to let you know what each combat button does? And honestly, I don't think the story needs the Random combat at all. It would probably suit the Bosses, but I didn't get that far. An option to forgo most of the combat would really help, as I see people complaining about the combat all over. So ya, this is my experience of the game after a few hours of play. I would love to continue more into the game, but the first second fight is a brick wall and it's just against the most basic gits. Maybe I can pull myself together enough to try it again and learn it, but right now it will be a few days. Infuriating.
This really focuses on the HW1 remaster. The main problem is the fact the game scales things up depending on the amount of ships you have. The Bugger your fleet the more ships get thrown at you. The other things are not that annoying but this makes the game really goddam frustrating. I could handle that until Mission 5. Sweet Mother of Jesus. Vanilla enemy force. 9 Assault Frigates, 3 Ion Cannon Frigates, 2 Destroyers, a single Carrier + Strike craft. Tough but manageable. Remastered. I didn't count the rest of the stuff (there was a LOT) as the sight of the 1 destroyer followed by 4 destroyers lumbering into view kind of broke me. I don't even know if that's all of them as that's where I ragequit. There could have been 5 more sitting there for all I know with yet another giant wave of smaller stuff. This punishes the Player for playing well and preserving your fleet, and encourages gaming the system By retiring your fleet and rebuilding it at mission start on the nest mission. Which would get tedious fast, Thankfully there is a fan patch that gives you the option of Removing this. Search for Homeworld Remastered 2.3 Players Patch. Apply it. It fixes bug and does further rebalancing as well as the option to remove the Scaling. So, basically... it breaks my heart, but I have to give this a 4/5 due to the scaling issue. Everything else I can forgive, but that broke me. If you want to play Vanilla HW1 then play the original included in this bundle and enjoy a 5/5 experience, graphics be damned. If they didn't include that then my score would be lower. Also, bear in mind I haven't tried the HW2 remaster yet, but again Vanilla HW2 is included so you can just play that if you have issues with scaling. HW2 is a very enjoyable game, different to HW2 but a 5/5 in its own right.
