The AI of this game is pretty bad, and I hate micromanagement, but I still had a good time. What allowed me to enjoy the game was how carefully the game made me invest in my army and gave me control over my units. You get points for completing objectives that you can use to requisition units for your army between missions. That's common. However, unlike many games with this mechanic, what actually persist in your army are the soldiers. Most self propelled vehicles, including tanks, come with a crew. It's the crew, not the vehicle, that gains experience. If a vehicle blows up, the crew exits. If you manage to save that crew, you can give them a new vehicle later at a lower cost (because you are not requisitioning a crew) and they bring their experience to the new vehicle. In fact, if you change vehicles mid mission, as you can freely do, you can potentially get a deadlier unit with the same experience. Towed guns can be operated by any infantry. Between missions, you can freely switch vehicles and customize your army without any point penalty. Infantry get upgrades like different grenades or binoculars or even a boat, and those can also be freely switched between missions. This uncommon army mechanic made my army feel valuable yet flexible. So I didn't mind the micromanagement so much. To further strengthen the micromanagement, the game gives a lot of freedom to control your units in battle. Infantry has three stances with different characteristics. All units can be set to active or passive combat. There is a dedicated reverse move button. In fact, if you try to move a vehicle backward even a short distance without explicitly order reverse move, your vehicle will turn around, move to the new location, then turn around again. Pause is just a spacebar press away whenever you need it. I used it a lot. Codename Panzers feels like a compromise between CoH and Men of War. It's not as complicated as MoH but still has enough complexity and persistence to be addictive.
30 minutes into the game, I was cursing under my breath and sorely tempted to delete it from my PC. I had been in about a dozen fights, and it seemed like the only thing the AI knew how to do was charging in for a couple cheap hits then dodging back like a rubberband freak. "Who the hell made this shit?" Fortunately, I figured out a reliable way to cheese all humanoid enemies about half way through Chapter 1. I made a post about it on the forums. That allowed me to beat the rest of the game without trouble. I was able to enjoy the good part of the game without much frustration. The good part is, as many fans would tell you, the freedom of the game. This freedom creeps up on you. As I was liberated from the frustrating combat and my character developed into a mage, I began to think: Hey! What if I just used my spell to nuke as many tough enemies as I can, slept to recharge mana, then repeated? There doesn't seem to be a time limit on anything. Instead, I opted for a paladin, I froze my foes and power attacked them to death with my sword. Summoning a skeleton to distract the AI also works well. In the beginning, when I had none of that, I managed to kill some ogres and ghouls by luring them to NPCs. You get companions who fight with you later in the game. It was all actually kinda fun. Risen is a contradiction. The main quest is bland in the worst possible way, but characters you meet act and interact surprisingly naturally, and even the occasional fetch or kill X quests feel organic. The combat can be excruciating. Yet once I figured out the cheese, I thought maybe this was done intentionally, like a puzzle. There is nothing realistic or immersive about paying a bit of random gold and skill points and suddenly you can forge a sword better than the blacksmith. I was still immensely satisfied after I forged said sword. Many initially bad aspects grow on you. Since the graphics and sound are pleasing, Risen is good to try. I know what I hate, and I don't hate this.
In the tutorial, there is a sentence that says your units will move to try to get to the best position to execute your command. I wish my units didn't move and just told me, "enemy out of range" or "no line of sight." I have seen my medium tank move next to an enemy light tank then move away several times without firing a shot until the light tank finally killed him. This was on a bridge. Maybe that made my tank's AI dumb. I have sent an entire platoon of Tigers and Panthers rushing over enemy infantry in trenches, putting enemy AT guns and tanks in their sights, only to have them turn their turrets around to shoot at the enemy infantry with their main guns while the inferior enemy AT and tanks killed them from the FRONT. You might say, if I were better at micromanagement, I could have avoided the horrible AI behavior. That's true, but this is still a strategy game, isn't it? Am I playing a commander or a babysitter? Which is a pity because there are things to like in this game. There is a simple, brutal, but effective damage model for vehicles. Most light vehicles will cook off with one shot from even a light tank. Tanks have differnt armor at different places. Guns have damage and penetration. So lighter tanks can quickly take out heavier ones from a good angle but maybe not with one hit, just like in real life. Infantry are fragile, but they can also scout and storm buildings (going inside to clear out enemy infantry) and can threaten a tank if they are close enough. Disregarding the AI, the combat mechanics are quite solid. The graphics are also good, a little dated but still very appropriate for a war game. And the destruction from three level bombers really puts CoH to shame. Infantry bodies disappear, but destroyed vehicles remain. You tanks may act dumb, but they look good doing it. In the end, I decided to keep the game but not play more than the first chapters. It's good WWII fun when I don't have to see how bad the AI is, but I see it much too often.
Thanks in no small part to the writers and the voice actors. Is its strategy better than that of Civilization 4, 5, or 6? Not necessarily. But the premise of the game is both more desperate and more hopeful than the cheerily generic Civilization backdrops. Go watch the intro on YouTube and see. Every wonder has a short cutscene. Every tech and base facility has a voiced quote. These hail from a time when people were more hardy and adventurous in their mental constitution. Here is one of my favorite quotes, for the Unified Field Theory tech: "Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the graden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem." -Sister Miriam Godwinson, "But for the Grace of God" I was headed to engineering school when I first heard this, and it made me smile.
The AI in this game is better than a game of this caliber has any right to be. When several enemies attack you, some will guard like tanks, some will flank (and it makes a big difference), some that are wounded will run away. I have seen mages that have DOT auras cast that aura then rush me. But not just the enemy. Summoning can be a big part of your mage character. I was carried through the game by my summons. My favorite are the warriors straight out of Cthulhu mythos. I have never played an open-world RPG where the combat carried the game. Combat carries Two Worlds II, thanks to its solid mechanics. Combat lacks a certain gravitas, but it's dynamic and responsive. I am talking specifically about melee. You can choose between several different weapons, both one and two handed. The cool part is each kind of weapon has its own special move. You can pull enemy's shield away with your axe, for example, or kick some enemies prone with your foot then insta-kill them with your sword. One handed and two handed weapons also have their own moves. Your shield can block a lot of damage, but it only works in an arc, which varies by shield. Choosing the right weapons for the fight (you can switch 3 sets during combat) is a very tacitical and fun experience. As for the two other styles. Many have praised the magic system, soI won't repeat. As for bows... Both drawing the bow and casting magic can be interrupted by damage. Enemy likes to rush you. You do the math. The game looks pretty, even today, especially the lighting. It has some of the best imperial-era Chinese architecture I have seen in a game. You can ride a horse on the savannah. If you are a chill player, you will have a good amount to enjoy. The biggest downside is although there are four chapters, by chapter 3, the game feels like a high schooler who ran out of time on an exam and cut the third paragraph by 2/3 and tacked on a one sentence conclusion before the bell. I want to be funny, but this isn't a joke.
I only played one mission in Battle Isle 2, so I cannot give a comprehensive review. I did read the entire manual though. One drawback I found is the interface feels dated. It is still very usable, just not as convenient as modern games. One surprising feature I found was that difficulty governs the complexity of the game and not (necessarily) arbitrary boosts to AI or enemy strength. On higher difficulties, for example, the flanking mechanic is first introduced, followed by flanking dependency on the weapons of the units doing the flanking. That has got to be the coolest way to change difficulty I have seen in a strategy game. It gives some insight to how the game developers approached the game. I think Battle Isle deserves to be checked out just for that.
Playing Last Light Redux immediately after 2033 Redux, L.L. felt wrong. L.L. plays very much like 2033. The weapons, the mechanics, and the environment are mostly the same. Outdoor levels have more green, which is a plus. The main attraction is still a story driven single player campaign. Unlike 2033, which is a consistent experience, L.L. goes wrong at several places. The boss battles are the #1 offender for me. I warn you now to be prepared for your first boss fight at the end of the swamp. That one surpsied me when I had 1 minute of air filter left. You don't get any filters before the fight. Later, when you find that an otherwise human boss character can survive more than a dozen Abzats hits directly to the face wearing nothing but a gas mask, the immersion breaking is almost comical. With their gimmicky mechanics, the loss of immersion from the boss fights is not worth a bit more variety in game play. Another big issue for me is some of the level design. You wear a gas mask a lot more when underground than in 2033. There could be a fire or some other hazard. The visual effects from these hazards, coupled with the low light environment and reduced visibility of the mask made me feel like I was fighting in soup in several missions. And the swamp? A difficult to nagivate mess. These had good atmosphere but were bad level design. Finally, the quality of writing decreased. There are no narratively memorable missions and only one memorable character: Pavel. The decreased writing quality is reflected in Artyom's notes, which gradually degenerates into the repetitive musings of someone who finds faith. So why the extra star? You can watch a complete, albeit short, variety show in a theatre, complete with an audience. It's good. A few of Artyom's visions of the past are well done and well integrated into the game. There are a few nice set pieces. These brilliant little touches feel honest and refreshing in a game that seems to have gotten a bit too full of itself.
I love COD. I love the set pieces, many of the stories and characters, and the short feeling of badassness that marks most COD campaigns. Where COD falters is when it tries to add substantially more gun play than usual. It just feels repetitive and a little boring compared to the more cinematic sections. Metro 2033 succeeds where COD fails. Metro makes several improvements to COD's story driven formula. It solves the boring human enemy problem by introducing additional mutant enemies with different behavior. It further spices up the basic gameplay by adding horror and survival elements to its shooter framework. It expands on shooting mechanic by adding pneumatic guns that you have to manually pump and modifications that make drastic changes to the guns beyond some some token stat difference. And these unusual guns and modifications look and feel right. Finally, although its campaign is completely linear, Metro has missions that take place in friendly settlements where you could trade with merchants, practice your shooting, listen to the banter of regular folks, and get mugged by a hooker and her posse. These nice little touches add variety to Metro's campaign so that I never sighed in exasperation at "this again?" That is not to say Metro 2033 doesn't have problems. It's AI can be downright stupid. I once set off an explosion not 10 meters from an AI sitting at a camp fire, killed his buddy in the process, and the AI just blissfully continued staring at the camp fire. There are no masterful set pieces or scripted missions like those in the original Modern Warfare trilogy. The environment begins to blend together after looking at only Moscow's snowy ruin and metro system for the whole campaign. Once you are done with the campaign. That's it. These issues shouldn't be dismissed. However, there is a lot of fun to be had while the ride lasts. Oh, there is very little QTE, only a handful of pressing E for a few seconds.
CAYNE starts off with a bang. Your character Hadley visits a doctor in a nice medical facility for her pregnancy, goes under general anaesthesia for a procedure, [I won't spoil the best and only scary part of the game.] And your anaesthesia has worn off. The game goes downhill from there. Notice that inane joke I inserted near the end there? Hadley makes constant snide remarks like that throughout this very short (couple of hours) experience. The rest of the support cast fare no better. Even in their text logs, everyone is preoccupied with their gross fetishes, usually sexual in some way. Hadles sometimes talks seriously about her lifes with... a disemobied voice. Yeah. This game is more Sanitarium than Alien. And even less scary but twice as annoying to navigate. There is no genuine horror, environmental or unknown or otherwise. A bit of grotesquery, yes, but more comical than horrific. I guess that's why everyone including Hadley is taking the situation in strides. I was, however, horrified everytime I had to traverse this giant lobby that connects all the other locations in the game. Hadley takes many seconds to traverse it, has to do it often, and you can't shorten the process. I don't remember another horror game where I am put off by the one thing that's as far from horror as I can get. Fortunately, the inventory puzzles are still mostly sensible. Though with many fewer puzzles than STASIS, even a couple obtuse ones seem a little much. There are also easter egg puzzles that are much tougher to crack. They don't bear on the plot but could provide a distraction for those so inclined. Maybe I am too hard on CAYNE, having finished STASIS only yesterday. The drop in the quality of the world building and the horror atmosphere was shocking. I can't help but feel CAYNE should have ended the way Sanitarium ended. Alas, the nightmare was real.
It's not easy to to make a horror point and click adventure game, but Stasis pulls it off admirably. Instead of relying on jump scares and grotesque imagery, which the game has in moderation, the horror comes more from the fear of unknown and the darkness of man. This is also where the game falls apart a bit toward the end. Once you learn what happened and the depth of depravity of the bad people, much of the horror is gone. You end up with a generic inventory based point and click adventure game with a sparse and mediocre main plot. Before then, Stasis is an engrossing experience. You explore a dilapidated science ship the size of a small city called Groomlake, slowly uncovering not just more of the ship and its horrors but also more of the ship's history, as though going back in time. It's a remarkable bit of world building. You learn about the ship and its history mainly through text logs of crew members. These are surprisingly varied and well written, giving small glimpses of what feel like real people. Occasional set pieces and radio conversations break the pace of reading to make the game feel more dynamic. Environmental story telling rounds out the narrative structure. Although the environment feels interesting overall, some of the details are not fleshed out enough to make sense when examined closely. Overall, though, I was constantly motivated to explore and learn more about Groomlake and its former denizens. Knowing its strength, the game doesn't bog down the exploration with gameplay. The control is minimalist with a contextual cursor and an inventory. Most puzzles are logical inventory puzzles. A few are obtuse due to unexpected interactions with the game world. Nothing that's "What the hell?" I read a guide at a couple spots, and it did not take away from my experience. Stasis is a short game, lasting several hours depending on how fast you read text and solve the puzzles. However, little of that time is wasted. P.S. Double click makes you run.
