I really wanted to like this game. it has great art and atmosphere, tricky survival and crafting. But it's not for me. Basically if you're the type of person who plays Minecraft\Terraria\Diablo on hardcore/permadeth you'll love it. If you shrink at the idea of putting a ton of work into something only to slip up and lose it all then take a hard pass. If the game had been designed with a lesser curve, reduced randomness and a save feature it would be pretty solid. Lots to do, lots to explore. But it's designed as a roguelike so you will frequently die to randomness and it has a high difficulty cuve to keep you dying. This is a problem since the game loop is looooong. A good RL should take less than an hour to beat. this game blows way past that with slow and methodical play that often is unfruitful. To boot it's not "progressive" some RLs like Rogue Legacy even if you die you move the overall game forward by being able to buy permanent uprgrades and things that help you on subsequent play-throughs. Other than new characters spending 4 hours only to get snookered by an enemy nets you nothing. game over, try again. better luck next time.
not very difficult but a clever puzzle game that twists perspective. Nice art, relaxing ambient music. But very short (< 1 hour) so not a lot of bang for your buck there.
I never played the original so I don't have any nostalgia for whatever it was. Graphically the game looks wonderful, a lot of work went into the sprites. Game-play however is lacking, it definitely feels like an old NES game and not in a good way. Your character is painfully slow, jumping is slow, entering doors is slow. your jumps are weighty and there's a lot of inertia. takes time to get going , takes time to stop. even playing at 60fps it *feels* like you're playing at 15 fps, like your character is always in molasses. It's a keen reminder that the good ol days weren't always good and a nice graphical overhaul isn't a substitution for good fundamentals. In an age where amazing indie platformers can be found in abundance this game falls flat.
tl;dr if you haven't played the X series before and are thinking about X2, skip it, get X3 (make sure it's the Full 'Terran war pack" version) Having recently replayed X2 it's still a fun game and generally representative of the classic X experience. Slow to start, menu heavy, steep learning curve. and X2 does have a certain 'feel', certain character that X3 does not. That said there's almost nothing X2 does that X3 didn't improve on. Additionally X3 while old itself still has better and active modding resources. finding non-dead links to mod files for X2 is a challenge and I had to get a few resources from the wayback machine. Overall the only area I can praise 2 over 3 is they did try a lot harder to build a compelling story and do some worldbuilding. There's scenes on planets and some lengthy scenes with characters. does it succeed? not really , the story is ok but nothing to write home about. and while the voice acting is passable the NPC models are pretty cringy. but I can praise them for trying to build a more involved and compelling world. X3 really just goes for sandbox, the story missions feel more like an afterthought than anything.
Didn't finish the game, got through the first few areas and few abilities but was unimpressed. It's not much of a platformer: while there's lots of platforms and vertical tunnels and spiky bushes the platforming is pretty simple. You get a double jump early and can jump off walls. Nothing was particularly difficult in the platforming department, little skill is needed to move through the world. Combat Is button mashy and enemies are spammy. The game likes to throw lots and lots of enemies at you at once. Generally as you move around there will either be nothing, or suddenly a smattering of enemies will filter in from nowhere. then you'll just hit an area and it will just keep throwing a horde of enemies at you. At this point it's mostly just get away and spam attack until you can use a finisher move for more damage. Fighting is unsatisfying since it's just a mess of enemies onscreen all at once so strategy and finesse really go out the window and you end up just mashing attack. though even that in itself is annoying; your character moves forward as you attack so it's hard to stay back away from enemies since your attacks draw you into them. On top of that some enemy types are just plain annoying. Not long into it these cannon-bots will spawn and they can shoot you through walls from very far away. The game likes to spawn groups of 3-4 of them throughout areas, usually behind you as you travel either forcing you to backtrack to kill them or move forward for a long time while they shoot at you through the walls, more tiresome than exciting.
Fired it up but found that the game has no options for remapping controls. I like to play with a Wii U Pro controller so it's pretty much a requirement to swap the buttons (because everything is x-input now and AB XY are flipped on XBOX controllers) In this day and age there's really no excuse for leaving out basics like that.
Fun to see where Warcraft started but the gameplay is extremely dated. Units are slow to respond and have poor overall AI. Controls are primitive and group size is max at 4 Good for a walk down nostalgia lane but overall the game doesn't hold up anymore.
GyK is not a terrible game, it offers a pretty chill "Harvest-Moon-like" experience with a pretty unique setting and mechanics. A nice feature is that the Day/night cycle is less stringent than HM games, you can stay up late and there are no seasons, only a 1 week cycle so the pressure to get things done "this season" is not present. The problem with the game is it's just not finished, it's missing QoL features, there's unused stuff and there's lots of mechanics that are interesting but obviously not fully fleshed out. This is apparent in the frequently uneven tech progression and in the rather sprawling crafting mechanic which seems to dominate the game-play more than actually keeping up with your graveyard. Overall I can't say GyK is a good game but it's unusual enough that I don't regret the time put into it. It has a lot of potential to become a good game and I would give it 3 stars if it looked like the developer planned to continue to patch and flesh out the main game but it appears they have gone the route of DLC to fill in some of the holes.
Tried to get into it but I struggled to figure out how to make money trading. The economic model is finicky and seems opposite of all the other trading games in that trading in bulk seems to loose money not make it. The price of a good changes for every individual item sold or bought, if you by 10 of something at a time it give you a weird average of the cost if you had bought 10 single items. this continual shift causes weird trades: EX I was in a port that manufactured brick, wishing to sell to another port in need of brick. The port had 95 bricks, if i buy 10 bricks I get an average price of 98 a unit, if i buy all the bricks the average price *increases* to 145 a unit.. So buying low means i can only by a handful of bricks. On the other end it's the same, i can sell 1 brick for 167 but if i sell 10 bricks the average was 128 and gets worse for selling 100 units. SO in this case despite the manufacturer having lots and the recipients having zero stock if I buy all 95 bricks and try to sell all 95 bricks I actually loose money (buy at 148 sell at <100) the only profit to be made was only buying <10 bricks. This created an odd micromanagement where it wasn't even about finding low prices and selling high it was finding how much could be bought or sold at a low price. buy too much and you'll never make back your money, sell too much and you'll also loose. I prefer the usual model that when you find a low price you can buy the whole stock at that price and also sell at the high price rather than work with the average for some quantity SIDE NOTE: you might totally experience weird water glitchyness. there's a number of work arounds but you should be able to get it to work with one of them. took me a bit to get it running right.
