Ignore reviews of this game from people who bought it in development. People become jaded about a game once they've been playing half-baked and ever-shifting versions of it for several years already--but if you're buying the game now, you're buying a solid, finished product. I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Terraria, or space exploration, or fun. There's a huge range in the kinds of things you can do and the styles of gameplay available--you can focus on building, or exploring, or questing, or all three, depending on how you like to play. If you like building, the number of different building materials and items you can acquire is just astonishing. Exploring is also lots of fun because each planet has a couple major structures (a village, large castle, prison, sewer dungeon, etc.) plus lots of little pretty things to find. It's more varied and interesting than exploring in Terraria, and after exploring upwards of 20 planets so far, still every planet I land on has things I haven't seen before--some new materials or items or a new variety of tree or a new cute little critter, all of which I can take back and put in my base. I also really like the reactivity of the villages of NPCs. Each NPC has a unique appearance. If one gets attacked by monsters and dies, they're gone; if you rescue a friend for one of them, that friend will now be a permanent part of the village; if one of them asks you to pick up a mask from a friend for them, they'll be wearing that mask from now on whenever you see them; if you do one of them enough favors, they'll offer to work for you. It's not 100% polished to perfection in every respect (yet--they're continuing to polish and add content regularly), but I've found no bugs or serious problems. Also, the game has been deliberately set up to be easy to mod, and there are gazillions of quality mods out there to add content or to tweak any element of the game you want tweaked.
If you liked Pillars of Eternity, you will like the expansions. If you didn't like it, then obviously don't go buying even more of it; that's silly. However, I recommend you buy BOTH expansions at once, since they are really two halves of one story. For example, if you buy only Part 1, you will get the companion Zahua but you won't be able to do his quest line or see how his story turns out. Go here to get both expansions bundled: https://www.gog.com/game/pillars_of_eternity_the_white_march_expansion_pass
I have hundreds of hours put into Terraria and I'm still playing. One of my favorite games ever. I like this game better than Minecraft for building, because even though it is *somewhat* more limited in terms of what you can make, it has the benefit of having graphics which are intrinsically pretty. I really like the naturey aesthetic of the game, and the fact that it has attractive art makes building much more appealing. Plus, the developers are STILL working on FREE new content for the game, 5 years later! One of the planned future updates is to add even more wiring and mechanism options. Terraria allows for many different styles of play. You can play multiplayer, either PvP or cooperatively, or you can play alone. You can just try to survive and beat the game, or you can enjoy building and creativity, or you can invent new group games to play--there are servers out there where people have organized bunny races and parkour courses and things like that. You can make maps and upload them for others to use; for example there are maps where people have re-created Zelda-type games within a Terraria map, for others to play through. There are so many options! The only caution I have is that some of the most popular player-made mods work only on the Steam version of the game. The excellent player modding community is one of the nice things about Terraria, so this stinks a bit. I'm a loyal GOG-er myself, but if you think this might matter to you, it might be better to buy Steam's version.
The game universe--its cultures and history and divine realm--is highly original and fascinating and very well fleshed-out. The story is also a really interesting, original storyline. Most fantasy-themed games feel really *generic* in the sort of universe they depict, and they use one of about 5 generic heroic storylines that all games use. PoE is not like that; it really feels like the world and story of a well-written, highly original fantasy novel. The companion characters are also amazing, well fleshed-out, well voice-acted, and you really care about them. They each have a personal quest, most of which are excellent. I literally started crying at the completion of one of the companion characters' personal quests, because I'd gotten so invested in her quest and what it meant to her. Oh, and the game is also beautiful. Movingly beautiful. There are also some significant flaws, however: 1) Combat is often tedious. They tried to improve on the flaws of a Baldur's-Gate-style combat system, but I found the result less fun than combat in BG2. 2) The game starts off frustrating and slow. In the beginning, combat is scaled way too hard, and you have very few companions, and those companions don't start spontaneously talking until you get to a major city (I have no idea why) so you have no interaction with them. It gets better later. 3) The game is clearly trying to appeal to folks who don't mind reading, who want the cerebral, Planescape Torment-type game experience and not just hack-and-slash and pretty pictures. But someone needs to tell their writers that more words isn't always better. Characters tend to speak in overly long, overly literary monologues, rather than talking like real people, and it's both boring and off-putting. The game also, bizarrely, puts most of the party member interactions in one big dialogue tree you have to slog through, rather than having it come out in small pieces through spontaneous conversations like in BG.
I got this for $2.50 and it was worth that; I'm glad I bought it. I would have been disappointed if I'd paid much more, though: it's only 1 or 2 hours long, with very little replayability. The game is definitely more of an interactive movie or art piece than a true game, let alone a simulation-type game. The interest is in the emotional and aesthetic experience of living out a pretty specific, pre-set story through the mother badger's perspective. It does that pretty well: I felt immersed and emotionally engaged in the story. If you evaluate it as a *game* though, it's a little boring--the game mechanics aren't particularly interesting or fun in their own right. The game has a particular aesthetic which is strongly reminiscent of a certain style of children's picture-book illustrations, which is sort of charming. The slightly whimsical style won't be to everyone's taste, but it's well executed. One neat feature of the game was the way that it comes with no instructions and, once you start the game, involves no words. You just start playing and have to figure things out as you go, and the game is generally set up to ensure that will work. One way it does this is by giving you occasional tips in picture form at relevant times: a representation of how to catch a frog, a warning about a danger from flood waters, etc. Those involve no words and seem to represent your own badger instincts guiding you, which is neat. The one downside of this is that there were one or two cases in which I needed some guidance, but the game didn't give me any, and I was confused about what I was meant to do. During the night-time level, I kept losing babies and had no idea why until I googled a walkthrough. And having to google a walkthrough is precisely *not* the immersive, intuitive experience the game is trying to give you.
I never played this in the old days, but I love old games and have a lot of patience for them. So after reading all the positive reviews here, I was surprised to find myself hating Wizardry 6. It's just tedious and dreary. You have to map out every step you take on graph paper or you'll be hopelessly lost, which gets old really fast. If you want your characters not to be pitifully hamstrung, you have to save-reload over and over again in order to get good bonuses on level-up, which also becomes very tedious. Also, the fact that they use the same grey castle wall graphics for *all* environments (forests, caves, etc.) is ridiculous, and it means every location looks the same. Text descriptions of the locations would be far preferable to graphics like that! Oh, and the game world is a nonsensical mishmash of random things, and the plot is neither funny nor deep or emotionally engaging. So there's really no pay-off for putting up with all the game's flaws. Wizardry 7 is fun though! It still requires repeated save-reloads (*sigh*), but it maps the game world for you as you go, which eliminates the worst of the tedium. The game world feels like a real, coherent universe that I'm excited to explore and figure out, and the NPCs are interesting, if poorly voice-acted. The puzzles are generally interesting rather than tedious, and the graphics are colorful and pleasantly old-fashioned. If I were to do it again, I'd just skip Wizardry 6 and start with Wizardry 7, even though that would mean missing out on the high-powered items you get to import from 6 into 7.
5 stars with the caveat that it's not for everyone. Starflight was one of the very first computer games bought in my household. My older brother had a notebook with careful notes on the game and had diligently marked up the map to note locations of wormholes and so on. So the game had a sort of halo around it in my mind, but when I finally played it myself as an adult, it was everything I had expected. It's amazing to me that they made a universe that felt so rich, so big, and so open-ended and got it all to fit on one 5 1/4-inch floppy disk. And Starflight 2 is even more colorful and entertaining than Starflight 1--it takes all the things about Starflight 1 that were fun, and makes them better. The game-universes are fun to explore, and the story lines are inventive and surprising and satisfying. However, to enjoy these games, you must be willing to keep a notebook and write down all important information, and you must like slow-paced games. You cannot beat the games without diligent note-taking and a lot of patience. Furthermore, a lot of time in the beginning will be spent just driving around picking up minerals: I find this deeply satisfying somehow, and enjoy that aspect of the game, but many people would quite reasonably find it utterly boring.
