Pros: just-right sized story, highly replayable, non-combat builds highly viable, intricate and original worldbuilding, real Actions & Consequences gameplay, cheap for what it offers. Cons: awful to look at, mechanics encourage savescumming, too few music tracks. This isn't a game all will enjoy and that's fine. Coming with the right mindset, you can get a ton of enjoyment out of AoD, as meta-knowledge you gather through subsequent playthroughs will let you crack this game open like a mollusk. Despite being released in 2015, AoD is not a modern RPG by any standards. It is built around an unforgiving but exploitable combat system (which you can choose not to interact with at all) and an intricate web of stat/skill checks in dialogue options and world interactions. In short: don't expect to roll any character and then experience every single quest the game has to offer. This isn't a Bethesda RPG. This is a choose-your-own-adventure book in a game form, so play accordingly: save scum to the extreme, save skill points and spend them only after learning what the thresholds are in particular interactions, then save over and continue only if you're happy with the outcome - and get (un)pleasantly surprised when said outcome has unforeseen consequences two or three acts later into the story. The game is also ugly as sin (and I find the text dumps hard to read, the font just doesn't vibe with my eyes), and somewhat janky, but the save system, by far the most important mechanic, has never failed me.
I purposefuly avoided the hype, news and leaks around this game. Witcher 3 blew me away, so this one should, too, right? It thoroughly disappointed after just 2 hours of gameplay - that's the full intro and an hour spent "freeroaming" Night City. This game is tagged as role-playing, but there's no role play to be had here. Your influence on the goals and actions of the protagonist is negligible - you can say the smirky option A, smirky option B, or stay silent. You can't change V's ultimate goal, his aspiration. You can't even customise his appearance all that much: neither in character creation, nor during gameplay. Mechanics are all over the place. Shooting is OK, but you're shooting at bullet sponges. Melee is completely overpowered and AI doesn't stand a chance (as long as it doesn't massively outlevel you). Hacking minigame is engaging, but the results of hacking are incosistent (I can hack something to distract a guard standing right next to it and he just won't react). Part of the game loop is looting, which was a terrible choice. Ultimately this is a shooty-looty, where you constantly hot-swap weapoons for the latest "ebin drop XD" English writing is mediocre, on par, nothing to write about. The story structure is just horrendous. You're railroaded terribly, forced to follow events in sequence and you better read the devs' minds and not deviate from the path, lest you get a game-breaking bug. Parts of the UI, especially the inventory, in which you will spend a lot of time, are terrible to navigate and make important info hard to read. At least I wasn't getting game-breaking bugs on my system, although a fair share of broken pathing, objects hanging in the air, and T-posing happened. This game is NOT worth its pricetag, and I doubt it will be, even after bug fixes and discount.
I own this game on CD and still remember not playing it for quite a time, until my parents upgraded our old PC; it was quite demanding for the hardware when it came out, IIRC. WK is a strategy game in which you manage a base with food, housing, lumber and gold. You produce dozens of units of different kinds to crush your enemy. Units come in tiers, have unique abilities and require simple logistics: for example ranged units must have a supply of ammunition. In the campaign your actions will determine which technological path you take: holy, renaissance (think: hi-tech) or pagan. The paths can be combined: holy with renaissance and renaissance with pagan, so you come up with 5 tech trees overall, each with unique structures and units. What's really fun in WK? Your small base will slowly turn from a village into a sprawling city, with walls, castles and fortified gates. Your pack of units will grow into a massive force that will take up the whole screen. There's a nice scaling to all of that. What's not so fun is the pacing. The game feels slow, maps are vast and most units don't move quickly. If you're not into RTSes that feel almost like turn-based, you might want to skip this one.
