(Review based on Epic Game Store version from free giveaway; I'd like people who spend money on this to know what they're getting into.) The art and sound are actually great, but the gameplay is barely there; and what's there is unexciting and frustrating. If the game explained anything, it would have been immediately apparent how shallow it was. So instead, the game hides everything to make you "explore." The problem is, exploration in this game is fundamentally unrewarding. Since the gameplay is shallow, there is only one way to win and it's fairly obvious once you know what everything does. There are no clever solutions to be found in your exploration. You keep trying random things until you find the one thing that's obviously the best. To hide that, the game slows down how fast you can explore by giving everything a non-refundable gold cost, and making gold trick in very slowly over time. Then, to hide how slowly gold tricks in, the game gives your horse a stamina bar, making it painfully slow to move across the map and explore, so by the time you're back to your base you'll have a meaningful amount of gold to do something with. In the end, none of it worked. The early gameplay consists of arbitrarily doing random things only to find them almost completely useless, and waiting for more gold to come in while you're holding down a direction key to slowly move from one place to another. Outside of that, there is very little game left.
... is the game actually or what? It's frustrating how many alternative routes are for male character only. There isn't even a story setting justification like in Mount and Blade. There is no social commentary on the subject. It just *happens* to be the case that the only people you can disguise as are all male, on two completely separate occasions. Even Fallout 2 with its some-say-edgy-some-say-problematic aspects never went out of its way to frustrate players who chose female characters in gameplay. In a game that prizes itself on player choice and freedom, the design decision to close off options arbitrarily to female main character is baffling and frankly unforgivable.
When I play games like this, I like to be able to explore the different options. The game basically begs you to do so by telling you about the alternative routes you've missed at the end of each chapters. BUT when you do try to replay an episode for the alternative routes... you have to sit through hours of unskippable cutscenes and dialogues that you've already seen before! You can't even save the game manually before choosing between the alternative paths. The game only has one autosave per profile. If you want to see the alternative path in a chapter, you have to replay the whole thing from the start. To make matters worse, the game doesn't make it clear which areas you can't revisit, or what events automatically block you out from other content. You know those options in all the RPGs that say "give me a moment to get ready"? They are severely lacking in this game. You walk into the wrong door, or talk to the wrong person first, then forget about exploring the rest of the content... that is, unless you want to restart the chapter and sit through all the unskippable cutscenes and dialogues again. These design choices are so baffling that I cannot recommend the game until they are changed. Unless you are the type of person who feels fine missing out on large portions of the game, or has the time and patience to sit through the same cutscenes and dialogues multiple times.
The game was fun for the first hour or so, but it soon becomes repetitive as you face waves and waves of similar enemies in uninspired terrains. It got so boring I cranked it up to the highest difficulty to experience something fresh, only to find it more annoying and nonsensical than challenging. Some of the random patrols on the map are impossible to beat if you don't stop and read all of their abilities, while some enemies guarding key locations pose no threats at all. It also doesn't help that the characters have less likability and charisma than a piece of wet towel, making you want to skip every cutscene, which happens to be the only content outside of combat. If you can get it during a sale, it's worth getting and playing for a few hours. I do not recommend this at full price at all.
I have played nearly every CRPG from the Baldur's Gate series to the Icewind Dale series to Planescape:Torment. Deadfire has the most polished and exciting visual/UI so far. The character progression and combat is an absolute joy to experiment with, even though the game does force you to do a lot of saving/loading if you want to try out the different leveling/upgrading options. In terms of gameplay and visual Deadfire is a worthy succesor to Pillars of Eternity. So why the 4-star rating? The main quests are severely lacking. I overlooked the issue in the first game because there was enough intrigue in the world building to keep me engaged. While the political intrigues and dilemmas were very well set up in the background, I never felt I had enough time to explore what my main character should feel and do in those situations. There was never any real setback and challenge for the main hero to grow in. Nothing unexpected really happened in the main quest. Similar to the first game, the main quest line makes you feel like you skipped Act 3 and jumped straight into the finale. I didn't feel like I was on an epic journey, and I didn't feel like I knew who my main character really was at the end, like I did with great RPGs like Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape:Torment, Witcher 3. I felt like I hopped between a few islands, made some ethical choices based on my own real-world ideology, and the game ended. It's a real shame that this otherwise great game seems to be missing part of its soul. Finally, while bugs are expected for a game of this size and complexity, some of the bugs don't seem like the type that should have slipped through. For example, at the time of this review, if you respec your main character, you may lose the skill points you buy from trainers. It's not a gamebreaking bug, but it seems like very obvious thing to have been missed.
Saints Row 2 is an amazing old school GTA style sandbox game. There is a great deal of freedom in terms of customization and nonlinear game progression. You can unlock some extremely powerful lategame upgrades pretty easily by doing silly sidequests (instead of unlocking them with money like in Saints Row The Third). The best way to experience a game like this is to avoid game guides and explore things on your own. I've been having a total blast with it. All of this is despite of the miserable port. The oversensitive vehicle control is difficult to get used to. It can be an issue for some of the more challenging driving tasks. This is often exacerbated by the game dropping frames due to poor optimization. In addition to the vehicle control and performance problems, I've encountered issues with the game not registering repeated key presses for some QTEs and a few hard crashes here and there. If you can look past the port issues, however, Saints Row 2 provides a highly entertaining "good old game" experience that is largely absent in its sequels.
Darkest Dungeon is a risk/resource management game. Think of it like Cthulhu poker. Overall, it's a strategy game, but from moment to moment, it's a game of luck. And luck isn't always fair. (It's not always unfair, either... Point being it's random.) The game's randomness can be ridiculously punishing. A perfect expedition can turn into a disaster in 30 seconds because of nothing other than a string of pure terrible luck. Using poker analogy, it's like when you started with a pair of Aces, but somebody else got the Royal Flush in the end. It can feel terrible. The thing is, the game lets you fold your hand and cut your losses. You can retreat from battles. You can retreat back to town instantly when you're not in battle. You don't lose anything other than the initial investment into the expedition and the cost of nursing the team back to health. If your whole team die permanently in a dungeon, it's almost always because you went on tilt and took more risks when you were already in a bad situation. The flip side is, if you never take any risks, you'll never get enough loot in return for your investment into the expeditions. Your expedition fund will slowly dwindle away as a result. The balance of risk and return is the crux of the gameplay. If you don't like it, you probably won't have a good time with the game. Overall, the risk/resource mechanics, and how well they tied into the theme and atmosphere, are what makes this game–admittedly an otherwise good but not spectacular dungeon crawler–a fun and truly unique experience.
The Mac OSX version is 1.0 instead of 2.0. I don't know if it's different for the Windows version, but I have encountered no checkpoints in the game at all. It makes the game on hard quite challenging, at times frustrating, and overall pretty fun. I can see it being a problem with some players, however. On the game itself, it's hack-and-slash with very straightforward and solid game mechanics. The strength lies in the level design. The constant ambushes and environmental hazards keep the levels exhilarating. The lack of quest markers and item highlighting makes exploring and scavenging an engaging and rewarding experience. Overall, it's great mindless fun that makes you feel smart all the same.
Highlight: The randomly triggered events somehow managed to create believable characters that I cared about by the end of the game. What made the experience fun for me was that there was a story lurking in every corner waiting for you to discover. Problem: Gameplay is very simple. It took a few hours for me to learn all the ropes and the game offered little challenge since. Camping was especially repetitive, unchallenging, and tedious. Run of the mill: At the highest setting the AI for individual units is not bad, but they don't seem to have any concept of coordination. The basic combat mechanics is not bad, but there aren't enough special abilities to keep it interesting after 20+ battles.
