From the makers of Amnesia they did it again, and better. This is hands down one of the best horror titles that I have ever played by far, right up there alongside Dead Space and Darkwood for GOAT horror contenders imo. The only problem I can even find is don't believe the redditor tiers about "muh philosophical depth." I personally didn't find the story all that necessarily deep or engaging the way some people claim like it's a philosophical treatise, instead basically just being that basic Star Trek tier posed in your materialist Philosophy 101 class turned into a game, which I didn't believe. If you can suspend disbelief about the premise though, it's damn good, so good it's replayable and sticks with you. There are parts that fill you with the kind of deep dread the feel of thinking about going back to that one facility you finally escaped fills you with dread years later. I'm adding this now because it's on sale for the ridiculously low price of $2.99, which is absolute theft. This game is a priceless gem among its genre. Very few games I ever played got remotely near this kind of perfect atmosphere, it's incredible. You must buy it and play it.
Seriously one of the best games I ever played and quite probably contender for best horror game I played. Don't let the graphics fool you. This is an unbelievably spooky game to play late at night especially if you're anywhere near a forest. Just get it. It's shockingly good.
This is a great PC RTS game, and I have no clue why someone called it consolized. It looks, feels, plays just like what it is: a PC game just like the rest of the Homeworld series. I thought the story was actually pretty good and gives more background to the Hiigarans. Gameplay is great, fun game overall. But what really brings me here is to talk about the graphics and optimization. To this day I'm completely blown away by it. Not because of things like you can shoot planes down and they actually bounce off the sand leaving permanent trails of debris, or how gorgeous it is in general. No, what amazes me is the fact it looked this good even by today's standards and yet I could play the game at highest settings no problem with a freaking HD 7570 1gb graphics card. Granted that was 768p at the time, but still. They just don't optimize games like this anymore. Imagine playing any game on a meh tier 1gb graphics card, imagine getting buttery smooth performance paired with a 4core/4thread Ivy Bridge, and imagine it looking like this. Homeworld games always were known for looking fantastic in their time, but while this is no exception I'm still just blown away by how good it looked and how well it ran on the lowest most inferior hardware. I see 2020 first person games that try to hide how ass they look with film grain and post processing and they still run like garbage on a 1080ti. That, or geometric shape, featureless, textureless phone trash made to run on an android and call its lazy total lack of development "an aesthetic choice" and then port it to PC. Deserts of Kharak looks better and it can run on an actual toaster. You can literally run this game on a used office machine. It looks great even in 2021, has fun gameplay, an engaging story, and a good soundtrack as usual. Hard recommend and praise for the dev team's optimization efforts.
It's one thing to offer a purely cosmetic costume DLC for a singleplayer game. It's quite another when it doesn't even bother to change the heraldry. FYI the yellow tree/red field and white sun & moon with blue squares *does not change.* Seriously do these guys not know how heraldry works or something? So in other words this DLC doesn't even change the heraldry. It purely changes the look of your banner and color of your clothes so that it does not match anything else now. This is just inexcusable at this point and I regret having paid for it on sale. You could at least justify wasting your money on this thing if they changed the other heraldry which they did not. Same yellow/red and white/blue heraldry. Your new costume will now match nothing. There is no conceivable reason to buy this, not even just for the looks.
I just want to say--and this isn't a helpful review for that very reason--that these devs really do deserve the extra credit for not going full-on triple A bullsh** company and actually giving us free DLC. Lots of other studios would have charged all you guys like five bucks for this, especially the Swedes (or whoever runs Paradox and the studio that does Trucking Simulators). Honestly while a lot of you guys could say it's crap or not on its own merit for content, at least in my enhanced edition this all is showing up as free. So, I'm just happy about that. Back in my day companies would do that, and they would just call it "patches" or "updates". So for free content yes 5/5
Everyone will tell you why they don't like it so you can read theirs. Frankly I found its first person real time tactics about the best I've ever played. This was developed back when Mass Effect was big, successor in a sense to the KOTOR games, both of which had three person squads, and ME introduced cover mechanics. This does that way better than any of those games ever did and if you can get past the reasons people disliked it (the bulk of which is it not being a real XCOM game) and judge it on its own merits this was actually a pretty good hidden gem. The gameplay itself is awesome imo. I enjoyed it a lot, even though I dislike FPS mechanics and am a fan of XCOM games. It's also way more challenging than XCOM believe it or not. Set the difficulty above easy and you'll see what I mean. The DLC in particular is a massive challenge. I would recommend this. The biggest problem I had with it was introducing pretend ME like dialogue wheels which go nowhere and affect nothing, clearly showing it being another bandwagon on something popular while also running over budget and out of time so seemingly they had real RPG-esque dialogue trees in mind but cut them. Shame. The gameplay itself ended up great though, it's a hidden gem, and it will also give you a different take on some of the really mysterious stuff the Elders say to you in XCOM EU and XCOM2 which Firaxis seems to have deliberately put in as nods to this being at least semi-canonical.
I really dug Stasis. This game is the same, but different. Sort of more open world with a different vibe, I wish it was a true crpg than a more point and click adventure/puzzle game. Gorgeously imagined world, I liked this game a lot and was one of the most memorable games I played all last summer. There's different possible endings, although I really wish they'd made the ending a bit different as it almost got there to being something truly profound but [spoiler]was it all just[/spoiler] detracted from it. I would highly recommend this to anyone into this genre.
The gameplay felt awful, the writing was bad, the graphics are dated, the navigation confusing (back when you needed IQ above cheese seeking rats). Seriously this is not a good game. It is amazing. It's one of the worst WoD games I ever played, the other game being VTMB which was straight amazing. I played this game--and beat it mind you, not a common thing for me or many others with backlogs these days--back in about 2017 so I have no nostalgia goggles. The AI is ATROCIOUS here, like hilariously so to the point it feels like one giant meme with half your party eating the other half and immediately panicking because your whole coterie just dumped their entire blood pools on...a single rat. The 5hp rat proceeds to eat the survivor. The level progression is the usual bad late 90s 1-2-3/boss fight stages and there is no map so you have to a complete map inside your head of each location to not get lost. Sadly, the most difficult to navigate is the very first one in Prague. OH. And the writing. Oh God the writing. Somehow whoever did the script decided that the best way to convey 14th century Prague would be to...write everyone with pseudo Shakespearrean dialogue. Because a turn of the 17th century English author is basically the same thing apparently. As for the story itself it is a pretty sappy love story minus the depth of Romeo and Juliet. I mean, it's bad enough that they even went so far as writing a fishmalk. All that being stated I actually enjoyed the game for some perverse reason. It has been pretty wellish received on here for a reason and it's not just because of nostalgia or something, or some misplaced love of VTMB--This Is Not VTMB. What you will find is an absolutely amazing soundtrack whose OST I listen to out of game sometimes, spoopy atmosphere, and just an otherwise really well crafted game in spite of its numerous glaring shortcomings, part of which I think is attributable to their faithfulness to the source material. Flawed but worth a play.
Wish I could beat it the first time again. Don't listen to the butthurt backers they whine everywhere. Most of the bad reviews are because of things like the one character, the Toy, not being present on release hence you'll notice most of the super butthurt one star reviews are from like 2017 or right after release. I honestly ended up liking it slightly better than Planescape. It didn't have the absolutely tedious combat of P:T for one. Most atmospheric and just weird game I've ever played and it's been absurdly difficult for me to find anything like it since. I suppose the only two real complaints is that the gimmicky five color morality system never feels fully fleshed out in an organic way enough, and that the ending can be a letdown for some people although I liked it (I caused endless torment because I thought I was calling a bluff). I've beaten it twice so far and each time was a totally unique experience. I'll probably play a third time later as I've still not beaten it with Callistege or played the other class. Would highly recommend if you're into playing a book in vidya form. If you're looking for combat and hate reading, avoid. This is more like a future fantasy scifi Disco Elysium.
