If you're familiar with 2 of Spiders other games, Bound By Flame and The Technomancer, and happen to enjoy the particular niche they fill, or liked what they were trying to do but couldn't get past the ridiculously unfair combat, this is a safe recommendation. Stop reading here and just buy it. If you're not familiar with them, this is the best entry point. You have to bring an unshakeable tolerance for janky mechanics and a constant feeling of unpolishedness with you, tho I haven't encountered any game breaking bugs. This is a BioWare/Witcher type experience on a fraction of the budget. You have to make meaningful choices in how you allocate your skills, as you can't unlock them all in a single playthrough, gear progression is just simply fantastic, and respec tokens are abundant enough that you can try out every playstyle in a single playthrough to see what suits you. You'll probably be save scumming a ton of conversations in the early game tho. Less so in the later game when your Charisma is maxed out. That being said, Spiders are clearly biting off more than they can chew here. This comes across in the extremely overcliched setting of "Nature/Natives good, colonizers/technological progress bad", which the game constantly bashes you over the head with. The game throws so many plot twists at you in the early stage that you start seeing them coming from miles away before you're even a quarter through, and you'll be predicting the ending halfway through. The story has nothing original to tell about the human condition, and, despite its quite ahistorical constellation of factions, perpetuates the worst historical myths about the age of discovery, and relentlessly so. Even the mostly excellent voice acting can't carry the obnoxiously preachy story, characters and their conflicts. It shouldn't be a surprise that I got the most enjoyment, in that order, out of everything involving the Coin Guard, Nauts and Petrus, while the Natives were a permanent nuisance that make a second playthrough a dreadful thought, and I'm glad that Aphra can be ignored as soon as her introductory quest is over. The game also treats missionaries and the inquisition - the only factions directly named after their real historical counter parts - as cartoonishly evil. The factions are also not at all ethnically distinguished whatsoever - not even the Natives. Which heavily undermines the believability of the setting, especially since members of the Coin Guard exclusively hold German names, while the Nauts have exclusively Portuguese names, the Congregation has French names etc. You get the gist. The otherwise fantastic art direction of the game is a bit undercut by the fact every region looks the same. Which is a shame, cus the fact that it's constantly autumn helps the game stand out from the crowd of (pseudo) open world RPGs. The visual fidelity - especially facial animations - is nowhere near industry standard for the release year of 2019, but you can just stop moving and take a screenshot at almost every corner of the game because of said strong art direction anyway. Overall, I'd recommend wishlisting the game and buying it on sale. It has too many flaws that you won't regret paying full price. But it's also far from the worst way to spend 40 h.
-runs on DX8 -neither keybinds nor mouse sensitivity can be changed in-game and only 3 keys can be changed via the launcher -no mouse cursor in menus -obnoxiously unintuitive default keybinds
Where to start with a game like this? It's set in Venice, but not the historical Venice. It's not even clear what year it's supposed to be. For history buffs, there is nothing to chew on here. As for RPG fans, the game does feature some pretty unexpected twists and turns. Your decisions often have consequences way later down the line that you didn't consider or anticipate when you made them. But on the other hand there is no build crafting here. Since you're supposed to use the right weapon against the right enemy type, you're forced to become an allrounder, rather than speccing into one particular weapon and combat style. There are no classes and only 4 attributes that raise with each level. They govern your standard stuff like HP, damage output and mana. Weapons and armor are not gated behind levels, you'll never find yourself unable to use an item. But armor needs to be tailored by a smith, since Scarlett is a woman and enemies drop armor made for men, which is a nice touch. But you can tell that Deck13 were under severely harsh time constraints when making this game, as it's quite janky at times - but not Pyranha Bytes levels of jank, don't worry. The game has its fair share of game breaking glitches, but nothing that closing the game and loading your last save file can't fix. The story does end pretty abruptly, all things considered, and you're not shown the consequences of most of your actions, further demonstrating that this game needed a lot more development time. But when all is said and done, the game is well worth its asking price nowadays. It also has some replay value due to the choices and consequences, and 3 mutually exclusive guilds to join. The graphics are also surprisingly good for a 2009 release and everything looks handcrafted, even if the asset reuse is comically obvious at times.
So this game came out in 2020 and still hasn't received a single update. I can only assume the devs have abandoned it. Don't waste your money on it. This project is a dead end. It'll remain in early access until someone at GOG comes to their senses and removes it from the store.
The game comes with a level editor, but no in-game browser for community made levels. So, if you're gonna buy this game, buy it on Steam instead. Other irritations are a completely broken fullscreen mode. Don't even think about using Nvidia's DSR feature, it doesn't work, and prepare to fix the fullscreen mode on every game launch, as it doesn't save properly. The female protagonist should also not be listed as one of the game's selling features. She's not voice acted, she doesn't even have a name, and therefore, might as well be a male. That would at least make the enemies' reactions to her kicks more believable. For a studio's first title, this game is nevertheless absolutely impressive. It's a no-nonsense fast paced action FPS. The game natively launches in DX12 and without RTX, but both DX11 and an RTX version of the game can be launched alternatively. The only RT feature the game has is reflections, but they are appreciated, as there are entire rooms and hallways with reflective surfaces.
If you buy the game now, make sure to install version 1.32. CDPR went back and implemented raytracing after developing the technology for Cyberpunk 2077. However, just like Cyberpunk, this game will be riddled with visual glitches when you update to any version post 1.32. And CDPR don't seem to care enough to fix those. So, just play the version of the game that became the gold standard of narrative driven, open-world action RPGs. If you haven't played Witcher 2 before, I highly suggest you do, as there are a handful of choices that will carry over and you won't understand particular parts of the plot if you're missing the context of Witcher 2. Chronologically, the games are set in a Witcher universe post Lady of the Lake. Which means they undo a ton of events from the books, and provide definitive answers to questions that Sapkowski purposefully left the readers to ponder upon putting LotL down. The most obvious one being that Geralt and Yennefer are back from the dead. Blood & Wine even revives Regis, thereby completely voiding the gravitas of the sacrifice he committed for Ciri's freedom. There are also some side quests that attempt to tie up loose ends from the books while violating the very simple rules established in said books. And while Witcher 3 acknowledges a handful of choices the player makes in Witcher 2, it ignores the fates of several extremely influential and powerful characters entirely, or only mentions their fates in passing. If the game had cut 50% of its side quests involving random commoners and instead focused on continuing the stories of Foltest's heirs, Saskia and Iorveth, the development resources would've been utilized for a much better end product. This goes even more for Gwent, which is a massive waste of development time.
This game is an 8/10 for me, as it has 2 major problems: -The splitting headache inducing "plot" that breaks Tolkien's lore in every way imaginable and wouldn't even make sense if it wasn't borrowing from said lore. -The absolutely unfair encounters that can and will randomly occur to disrupt the flow of the game. Maybe it's my fault for playing on Nemesis for my first playthrough, but according to the difficulty description, it is the setting that will let you experience everything the Nemesis system has to offer. Now, onto the positive things: The gameplay has been expanded in every conceivable way, with gear and skill progression being revamped, QoL improvements across the board and most notably more than double the number of playable regions. The biggest change is the new siege mechanic which is introduced very early on, where you use your wachiefs and captains to capture and defend each region's fort. It's great that the GOG version comes without Denuvo, but I would rather the online features would be emulated or removed outright rather than giving me an error message when trying to activate them. They're not integral to the experience tho, thankfully, and thus it's not a big deal that they're not working. It's just irritating. Now, the DLC isn't great. I would only buy the expansion pass on sale, as Eltariel's story was - albeit a nice change of pace - completed 100% in just 4 h. And the tribes don't add a new region each, they're just plastered into the existing 5 regions. The DLCs feel very tagged on, despite the fact that the main story leaves a hook for both story DLCs to latch onto. In the end, you're not missing anything by not having experienced them.
If you ignore the title, the franchise this game belongs to, skip every cutscene and just Black Mesa your way through every level, the game's actually a decent experience. Gunplay is snappy, hitting shots has satisfying feedback. Not much else to ask for. Besides, ya know, a Hitman game being an actual Hitman game. But who asked for that, from the Hitman franchise?
I will say this much: Everyone who praises this game's atmosphere is absolutely right. But I don't play shooters purely for the atmosphere. I mainly play them for the gameplay. And Metro Last Light is heavily held back in that department for one simple reason: It's way too scripted. And no, I'm not talking about how an explosion in a cutscene teleports you from the left side to the right side of the room because the game needs Artyom to get stuck underneath a piece of debris in order to play the next unskippable cutscene. I'm talking about how many linear sections there are in this game that can only be completed in one single manner with no possibility for player choice at all. The few times the game actually lets you play are when it's the most enjoyable. Problem is, the game has a story to tell. And not a particularly good one, either. So for huge chunks of the game you'll be following other characters around, wait for them to open the next door as if this game is aping Call of Honor Battleduty. I can't believe I have to say this, but Metro is NOT Call of Duty. Yet some of the largest sections of Last Light remind me of its worst iterations, and not just for the automatically regenerating health. I respect the game for at least having open world sections where you're free to explore. But if at any point you feel lost or just wanna get on with the story, you can bring up your compass and it'll point you into the direction you need to go. If the whole game was like that, I would give it 5 stars. But it's not, so I won't.
