There's a sometimes tenuous balance between fun and frustration in games, where the frequency with which a game tilts towards the latter determines overall enjoyment. For me, as a middle-of-the-road skill level Hollow Knight enjoyer who didn't complete much of the harder endgame content in the first game, Silksong is a fun, challenging game that occasionally stops being fun, but not often enough to be a dealbreaker. Other reviews do a good job of nailing down the specifics of why some of us feel this way and the general theme is that the difficulty sometimes feels needlessly punishing or excessive as opposed to fair with the necessity to "git gud". On the other hand, the more I play the game the more it seems to offer solutions or workarounds to at least some of this, for which it deserves credit. Learning the movesets of the more difficult bosses and seeing progress after each attempt does actually feel satisfying--most of the time. The environmental/biome challenges like platforming and fighting normal enemies seems worth it--most of the time. For me, on balance, the equation is still favorable after 30 hours of game time. I would say that regardless of my complaints, the game and its predecessor are a phenomenal value for the price paid. It's entirely worth it for players to get a feel for the mechanics via the great first game before jumping into Silksong, which I think is potentially the intended path.
I first played homm3 around when it first came out. I didn't understand it, was terrible at it. It is mostly unforgiving of bad strategy and wasn't easy to get into even though I really liked the gameplay. Years later, I bought the Complete version of the game here on GOG and eventually played through all the included campaigns. Every couple of years I've gone back to it, but this has been the year where I've really gotten into trying to get better at the game. The reason? The Horn of the Abyss and HD+ mods and watching people stream competitive homm3 gameplay! The game is now easily among my top 3 favorites of all time. While neither mod is necessary to enjoy the game, the HD+ mod alone will reinvigorate gameplay with tons of quality of life updates. It includes menu changes including hot keys to split unit stacks and transfer armies between heroes, artifact swaps and a way to save artifact "costumes", battle speed options, auto-combat that can be replayed or canceled easily, proper graphical scaling for modern resolutions and aspect ratios, and many more useful things. HOTA adds another town faction, a number of tweaks and balances to heroes skills and gameplay and a set of very difficult campaigns as well as being oft-used for online competitive play. Even without these mods, homm3 is a masterpiece, but the GOG Complete version combined with these two mods has brought me back to the game for hundreds of hours of gameplay. The HD+ mod should probably be considered a necessity because of UI changes that I consider essential, but it's also great because if HOTA is installed one can still choose the vanilla game version as the executable in the launcher and play the original campaigns. It's absolutely brilliant.
I had to purchase a Mac for work last year and, otherwise lacking a PC, ended up buying an external GPU enclosure to be able to play games like this one. I forced myself to start with the first two games for the story and experience even though I had a pretty good idea that this one was the crown jewel. I'm happy that I did because both games have their merits, but loading Witcher III for the first time was a special moment in gaming for me. It compares to moments like leaving Midgar for the first time in Final Fantasy VII, or getting underway in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, that feeling of excitement at entering a world of choices and not knowing exactly what to do first. From there, Witcher 3 only gets better as the game unfolds. It met and exceeded every little compelling snippet I'd heard about it over the years from friends, which thankfully were spare and entirely free of spoilers. I first played the game almost exactly a year ago and I'm trying to force myself to wait just a little longer to play it a second time, just so that I might forget a few more details and have it feel new again. If you somehow have waited longer than I did to experience this game and this type of open world fantasy action role-playing appeals, this is the one against which all others should and will be measured for awhile to come.
I bought this game in early development because I really liked the concept, but it ultimately wouldn't work on my admittedly very outdated 2008 Macbook Pro. Even though the hardware is within spec, the game didn't like my setup. First it ran but randomly occurring abysmal FPS made it unplayable. Soon after it would load with a black screen. I tried some hacky stuff to get it to work but never could, so I shelved it and forgot about it. Fast forward to buying a new computer and I just dusted off the game, put ~65 hours into it and can finally say that it was worth every penny I paid for it. This game checked all the right boxes for me. There's a nicely polished combat system with a ton of options for character buildouts. The music in the game is really good. The storyline is quirky and creative. The puzzles are diverse and, although they seem to be the most polarizing part of the game for most people, I enjoyed them. That said, I like being a little frustrated and some of the challenges in CrossCode harken back to games where you really might be required try something many times before completing it. At this point though, every part of this game has a walkthrough on YouTube as well, so it's hard to actually get stuck. Aside from playability issues early on, I really enjoyed this game and will look forward to upcoming DLC releases.
As a keen fan of HOMM3, I was pleased to find these campaigns available after finishing the main game. Aside from the fact that they lack game mechanics from the core game like the random map generator, they're satisfying in their own right. The story is entertaining and the maps, though not as engaging overall as those in the core game, are worthwhile. I believe I bought these during a sale but even at 9.99 they are well worth the price, especially considering how expensive they would have been during their original release. Even though these campaigns are supposed to bridge the storyline between HOMM3 and HOMM4, it might make sense for someone new to the game to play these first before tackling HOMM3 Complete simply because the Chronicles campaigns are far, far easier than the core HOMM3 campaigns. True, the difficulty can be adjusted in Chronicles but on the Hard setting, for instance, the maps are still quite easy compared to maps of the same difficulty level in, say, Armageddon's Blade. The first few campaigns even have hints included in the dialogue to guide new players. If I'd known about these before, I might've played them first and been more prepared for some of the difficulties of the main game. Conversely, they're also not as good as HOMM3 complete so it could be better to just start with that. However one chooses to order their approach to these games, they are well worth it and for fans of HOMM3, the story of Tarnum at the very least provides another 40+ hours of gameplay.
