*The Good* I used a texture mod which makes the game look quite decent, especially for its age. The world it is set in is a bit generic but still interesting because of the factions and various details. The strongest part are probably the handful of moral choices you have to make, especially because they're not 'easy' choices between an overly good and overly bad side. *The Bad* So yeah, everything else is bad. - No fast travel. At least half of the game is just walking to places. Locations are absolutely riddled with invisible borders so travelling is a total pain. - Ferry travel is the worst. Click the ferryman. Dialogue. Select 1. Dialogue. Confirm payment. Dialogue. Select 1. Cinematic. Loading screen. Cinematic. - Constant backtracking. Even for this type of game it has an excessive amount of sending you back and forth. - Boring combat. You can either spam an AOE fire spell or use swords. The latter require you to time subsequent clicks to built combos. Both are completely uninteresting. Igni is the better option since it's 10 times faster and requires no tedious weapon/stance switching. - Dreadful inventory system. You get far too many items for the space available and your stash is often in an inconvenient location. - Looting is really bad. It requires precise clicks on bodies that obscure each other. Worse still is that you always have to wait a few seconds for combat to end before you can loot. And this happens 100+ times... - The game practically forces you to have sex with half the women you meet, even if you don't want to or think you're just having a conversation. And you get "rewarded" with cartoon porn. Ugh. - Drowners. The swamps are filled to the brim with these worthless things. Their loot is irrelevant, they only give 1 XP and they lock you in combat mode. *Conclusion* The Witcher is a bad game that is not worth your time. Not even with mods. You're better off downloading someone else's savegame and importing that into The Witcher 2.
*The Good* - It looks great, especially for a fairly old game. - The setting is still fairly interesting. - There are some nice dilemma's. Basically, i still like all the same things i did in TW1 and some elements were improved. Of course, they did add new bad stuff. *The Bad* - Combat is still worthless. There were only a couple of interesting fights. - Since you get so few skill points you basically have to focus on melee or magic, making combat even more boring. - Literally nothing is explained. Stealth, signs, looting (Space collects all), etc. - Button-mashing and QTEs. Why, oh god, why? - Tons of backtracking... again... - Still no freaking fast travel. - The worst verticality in a game ever. You have to walk to a specific point for the climb trigger to show up. It completely kills the flow and sometimes make you seasick with its janky camera movements. - Vergen seems to have been designed by M.C. Escher. - Constant doors everywhere in Flotsam. Seriously, did they order too many doors or something? - They keep mispronouncing Roche's name as "Roach". Took me a while to realise they were the same person. - At the start of Act II you regain all your items, easily putting you at nearly double the weight limit. There doesn't seem to be a storage or shop nearby, forcing you to crawl to town. - Multiple sleep-inducing sections in which you have to stay inside a mage's magic bubble while not being able to do anything other than walk. - Utterly moronic conclusion to the story. *Conclusion* TW1&2 have the same strengths and weaknesses. The gameplay elements are bad, the other stuff is decent and should have been the focus. Without the bad combat, dreadful navigation and related nonsense (inventory/trading/crafting) these could've been passable games. Or they could've just added fast travel and made combat even just interesting-adjacent (not bloody likely).
I wrote a 1138 word review that won't fit here but i'll share the conclusion: *Conclusion* Let me just start by pointing this out; I've put 21-23 hours into Hitman: Absolution. I've put over 330 hours into Hitman 2016. Hitman 2016 is one of my all-time favourite games (out of 950+ games) and i can't wait to replay its missions with new options in Hitman 2. Hitman: Absolution is ocassionally fun but deeply flawed and i'm completely done with it already. But if you do love being "sneaky kill man" and you've already played most Hitman/Dishonored/Deus Ex/etc games then you can certainly enjoy this. Because sometimes, even for just a few minutes, Hitman: Absolution is really good. ___ If you want to read the full review you can find it here: https://www.grouvee.com/user/anarchistica/reviews/1402388/
Tharsis is basically a board game. It's very similar to the Battlestar Galactica board game and to FTL (another indie rogue-like). In all three games you play as the crew of a ship and you have to survive various random events. I love BSG. I quite liked FTL. But Tharsis just doesn't do it for me. Luck is far too big a factor and you don't have people sitting next to you to bemoan your bad luck. The game is also simply too hard, even on Easy, even compared to FTL. These two elements combined just lead to a lot of frustration for most people. Tharsis is by no means a bad game, but it has a very specific audience and doesn't try enough to cater to those who aren't part of that audience.
*Intro* This is a game in which you walk about a space station going through people's lives by looking at their computers, and where they lived and worked. You also play through several interactive scenes where past crew interactions are represented digitally where they took place. There is no combat or action or any form of threats. *Improvements* Obviously, comparisons to Gone Home are inevitable since it's the same developer and the games have similar gameplay. I'd say Tacoma is better in many ways: - The Augmented Reality bits are nicely done and make it easier to empathise with the crew. - The environment is more interesting, and it seems like a fairly realistic representation of what such a space station would be like. - The worldbuilding is nice, with space politics among space factions. Plus all the books, food, technology, etc. I criticised Gone Home for lazily re-using the same clothing texture in the same drawer but they really went the distance here. *Demerits* - It's harder to really feel for the crew because they're from the future and there's six of them. - It lacks the nostalgia of VHS tapes, cassette tapes, zines and 80s/90s bands. - The AR-bits would have been a lot better if they had actually shown people instead of wire-framed blobs. *Conclusion* Tacome is really well done and definitely one of the better 'walking simulators', but it didn't grab me as much as Gone Home did. Even though at 3 hours it's twice as long, you don't get to know the crew quite as well as the Samantha. Good but not great.
I never got why people like Torchlight. There are a bunch of different Diablo-clones and this is the very worst one. Diablo II was great because it had fairly open maps, a wide variety of classes and character builds that allowed you to cleverly combine skills and items to great effect. Torchlight has none of that. Instead it has only 3 classes that are rather samey. Maps are small and mostly linear. Half the skills are just awfully boring upgrades like "+2% magic find". Its cartoony style is awful and off-putting. The music sounds like a cheap imitation of Matt Uelmen. And it's so boring. In Diablo there's some sense of danger even early on. It's completely absent here. Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Victor Vran - they all have their own problems but they aren't boring. Torchlight is just damn boring.
For some reason i had never played Unreal. Blake Stone, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Doom 1-2, Quake 1-3, et cetera including Unreal Tournament but not this game. I do remember a bit of the hype about the graphics with the infamous "Can you believe these are real graphics?" magazine cover. Now i'm going to blow your mind: Unreal came out in the same year as Half-Life. And, oh boy - it does not compare well. Unreal tells a story through logs that are just bits of text without even any narration, in Half-Life you play through the story. In Unreal the levels are generally a straightforward go to place X, press button Y affair. Half-Life has these amazing levels that still hold up with all kinds of challenges. Finally, the combat in Unreal is fairly mundane "dodge the missile" stuff while enemies in Half-Life have more advanced tactics and attacks. Pretty much everything Unreal does, Half-Life does better - even something as basic as communicating the nature of power ups. But i will say this for Unreal. It worked right away. Sure, not at the right resolution (which left me really confused for a few minutes), but it works in Windows 10. And even with the dated graphics you can still feel the atmosphere, especially when they lights cut out and the red demon attacks you. When that happened i briefly felt a bit of a rush. Epic knew what they were doing (for the most part). But i wouldn't recommend this game to modern-day players, it's just too dated.
In Postal 2 you walk around fairly empty areas filled with people who are just randomly walking around. The areas are tiny and even on a modern PC with a SSD loading takes several seconds. You can find weapons everywhere and shoot the people with it. There is no aiming or reloading. There are basic fetch quests and unskippable cutscenes. That's it, that's pretty much the entire game. It's basically an asset flip with voice acting and the ability to sometimes pee on people. I didn't expect anything from this and it's even worse than i thought it would be.
Ziggurat crashed my PC 4 times before i figured i'd try to run it in 640x480 compatibility mode. I've never had this problem with anything on GOG and only with a few games on Steam. It still had problems in the Settings menu and refused to let me change the resolution. It wasn't worth the effort, the game is really bad. If you can't be bothered to create something balanced and build actual maps you just call it a "retro roguelike" and have an algorithm generate maps for you. It's basically Doom or Quake, but without the effort that went into it. If you think grinding is a feature you shouldn't be making games.
I played this back in 2017 and decided to give it another go. They changed some of the weaker aspects (3 lanes, all gold cards untargetable) and added a more interesting progression system (Reward points). Unfortunately this does not change the fact that the game is frankly rather boring. Every match takes 2 or 3 sets. You're stuck with the cards you start with, there seems to be little drawing. Interaction is rather limited and it can feel like you're two people playing Patience [Solitaire]. There's no combat, you can only play 1 card per turn and you only use 12-15 cards for the entire length of the match (which can easily take 10 minutes). The game also still has a bad interface, crummy default filter settings in the deckbuilder (show unowned cards as the default?) and serious connection issues. Two of the three games i won were due to people losing their connection. Oh god, and why did they get rid of automatic turn ending? You literally can't do anything after playing a card, what possible reason could there be not to auto-pass?
