I've never played these sorts of games before, so maybe in this Genre AOW3 isn't some masterpiece, but my first full campaign has been very eventful. I just took an enemies metropolis and just as their reinforcements came from the East I used my magic to create a massive forest between them and me, costing them several turns, by which time I had brought forward my own reinforcements. I gave the city to a vassal, which allowed me the ability to focus on a different front. Really enjoyable, hours deep into this huge map and as far as I can tell there's still a lot to discover, as there is a massive underworld, 'legendary' caves all over, and so-on.
Balrum starts strong as a hardcore survival game with old school influence and charming graphics, however I feel like there is a quick falloff not far into the game's story. Characters start to have nothing to say, your ability to build is restricted to some strange pocket dimension, and you quickly find yourself griding and fighting for any little bit of progress. I really dislike the disconnect between your pocket dimension and the rest of the world, so if that doesn't bother you, you may enjoy this game more. I was excited to find the perfect plot of land outside of town to start making a house, and quickly realized that isn't possible. NPC's wind up as decoration painfully fast, often having only a few lines of dialogue before becoming statues. Considering this whole game revolves around like 2 towns, that also started to chip away at my interest. Maybe they get more dialogue with the game's story. After some time with the game I feel like I would have loved it had it dropped the main story completely and just focused their time on fleshing out the world, characters, and our place in it.
I beat this game when it was released, even my friends who loved PoP didn't buy this game. So I'm the only one I still know personally to ever even play this specific, and sadly, last version of the series. Honestly, I'm curious about the development of this game, because it's very odd. The combat system is a strange combo/rhythm ... "thing" that I never enjoyed, and honestly, all the fights just come across as frustrating. It feels like they made one of the only 2 things this game does, combat and exploration, a weird minigame, rather than an actual thought-out combat system. The other piece is exploration, which is fine. I don't enjoy parkour necessarily, PoP has more going for it than just free, fluid movement. It's set in a really cool world with great things to see, and while this world is graphically amazing it's, for story reasons, completely fucking empty. So you run around dead worlds, with nothing but light orbs in them, reach blatant arena areas to fight copy-paste minigame DDR dance battles with evil dudes, and eventually do the same thing again, but for the boss. I titled this "potential" because I really feel like this exact world, in a different game, would have been amazing to experience. With NPC's, actual combat, an intriguing story. Instead, I guess the developers played Shadows of Colossus and lost a bet, because what we got is the strangest PoP experience that rightfully killed it off for good.
Honestly, this game ticks a lot of boxes for me. It's sci-fi, it's management.I like being a space trader... But this game just doesn't quite get it right. It's a slush of ideas and non of them are very distinct or interesting. They took the Fallout Shelter idea and made it a space trucking game... But that's about it. The world(s) feel uninspired, generic 'goofy' sci fi stuff you saw a lot in the 80's and 90's. The 'Shelter' part is just tacted on and lacks depth... So is the trading and honestly, the entire gameplay loop. I've tried playing this game many times, but it's a weak attempt at a good idea.
I love this game, I wish there was a remake, but Covert Action is fascinating to me. The controls are horrible, you spend a ton of time trying to break into buildings with rooms like "Chair room" where almost every single tile is filled with a chair, often times facing each other in such a way that they are both unusable as anything but a crappy bed. There's also the popular "office" which has desks that have absolutely no logic to their placement, and it's common to enter the room and have to hop over a computer desk because your path is blocked. It's even better when you can enter a building into a room that isn't connected to any of the others, this isn't game breaking, but it wastes your time, and time is a HUGE deal in this game. The basic premise is that you need to prevent a horrible terrorist activity from happening by solving clues using cryptography, breaking and entering, and finding evidence. If you can, then you can track each member of the plot and throw them in jail. This is a very challenging game even on easy. Like I said before, the controls are bad, so each one of the many minigames might control completely differently from the last. Combat is.. rough, and on higher difficulties it's unfair. Cryptography is one of my favorite activities, as is the wire tapping, they are both fun minigames that need to be completed in a timely manner. Time is your biggest adversary in this game as, depending on your difficulty, you need to rush to figured out what's happening and who's doing it. On easy, you have plenty of time and can make quite a few mistakes with, at worst, a couple of guys escaping. On hard though? It's insane, and things start going down immediately, almost demanding a innate knowledge of the game mechanics to even be remotely possible. This probably isn't a good game, but I still happily play it from time to time.
I've put many hours into Oblivion and have never beaten it, not because it was too hard, or confusing, but because the story is by far the least interesting thing about it. With its massive mod selection, goofy buy dynamic AI, and glitchy jankiness, Oblivions fun to play just to see wtf will happen every time you boot it up. I can't say I like Oblivion though, it's more of a love to hate situation. It's a huge world, but very bland with only a few areas that really feel creative outside of typical high fantasy fair. You fight lots of goblins and bandits, and other equally generic enemies with a "alright" combat system. Really, there's a lot of bizarre gameplay choices in this game, but I guess that's what makes it so interesting, it's bizarre.
I've had to restart my playthrough 4 times before finally deciding this game wasn't for me. I suppose it's for very hardcore Fallout fans, as it's ridiculously brutal and demands save-scumming as you can't possible predict some of the dangers that get thrown at you unexpectedly in this game. It looks great, sounds great, has good writing, that's why it's so frustrating that the difficulty is so brutal. It often feels like my build is just unplayable, which is why I restarted multiple time, but by now I'm just assuming this is the Kaizo-Fallout for people who love a challenge. It really is quality as far as I can tell, and I wish I was good enough to enjoy it.
I really wanted to play this game as it reminds me heavily of Morrowind, but in a massive cave system. My initial feelings were positive and I was digging the idea of introducing point and click style puzzles into the rpg gameplay of a typical fps-rpg. Then they added magic into the mix, which is sadly not optional. You have to use the magic system in various situations. The problem? The magic system uses mouse movements to cast. You trace a rune and cast the spell. This DOES NOT work at all for me, ever. I'll trace the symbol exactly and I get the 'fail' sound. Right from the start of acquiring magic, which you need to use to progress, I was hit with this bug/issue/whatever. I can't progress any further and I'm very disappointed. Is it my mouse? the game? I have no clue. I looked for a magic mod that maybe turned them into hotkeys or something, nothing like that exists, so as for now, I have to give it a low rating. The system is janky regardless, I get trying to implement unique gameplay, but man, this seems like a very poor choice for something that has to be used to make progress in the game.
I could never actually beat this game, as I tend to lose interest in the late game, but the real draw for me was the character interaction and romance themes. It's done really well, probably the best effort from Bioware in general, far better than the cringe of Mass Effect's romance. It kept me engage and wanting to play even with the sometimes long, tedious dungeons/caves/areas made me want to quit. The level design is very uninspired, and I think that's really what just pushes me away from it. Long, long corridors of repeating enemy encounters, with nothing really to see or find, intill you either make it through the area or complete the objective. It grew really tiring and although the story was interesting and the characters were cool, I never could bring myself to beat it. The combat is a nice blend of early CRPG's and modern streamlined ARPGS, but it doesn't go far enough in either direction and like the level design I just stopped caring about combat. It wasn't fun, but it can be fairly challenging when it wants to be. It's deserving of it's high score and legacy
This game knows what it is, is sleek as hell, is very addictive and fun, and of course, very frustrating. I feel like there is plenty that could have been added, because the game overall is fairly simple. but what it does it does extremely well. It's a blast in till you hit a brick wall, and the best idea is to simply stop playing for a while and try another time. Really, for such a cheap price, I'd say to just get it and try it out. It's fun.
