Purchased on steam. Play time: 26 hours Graphics: 10/10 Sound: 10/10 Story: 10/10 Mechanics: 8/10 Tilt: 9/10 Total Score: 94/100 Baldur's Gate 3 wastes no time raising the stakes. From the moment the intro cinematic rolled, I was enthralled by the story. The voice acting and sound effects are Hollywood quality and the graphics look great on both medium and high settings, regardless of whether you're zoomed in or in an overhead view. This is the finest realization of D&D since Neverwinter Online released, and that really helps add to the creepiness of the material and give a sense of even further time constraints to a turn-based RPG. To spoil a sidequest: I passed a burning building and could hear a man dying. As I rushed in, I could see realistic smoke and smoldering overrun the house as every turn brought the man closer to being burned alive, trapped under a fallen pylon. I failed a strength check, and was too slow in getting to him my first time. I saw him lose consciousness and die in front of me. But I was still trapped with him, my route in now catching flame. The sense of fear and desperation in a panicked 12-second bashing of a door that wouldn't come loose was real as I succumbed to the smoke and burned alive. Moments like this - of urgency and danger - were consistent throughout the first act available in early access, which lasts a good 20-30 hours. Be warned though - 70% of the story isn't available yet. Mechanically, the camera is a struggle sometimes. Pathing issues regularly caused my party to run through fire or acid. UI bugs like npcs dropping group, missing corpses behind or under terrain, and deactivation of turn-based mode in combat and competing cinematic triggers sometimes caused me to replay up to an hour of story. That said, the game lets you do almost anything you would want to try in pen and paper in combat. Clever combinations of spells with terrain elements and multiple ways to solve every puzzle leave it feeling remarkably open-ended.
Episode 1 racer is an excellent futuristic racer that's fun while it lasts, but doesn't hold much replay value. The sense of speed is great, as is the boost mechanic that constantly requires you to balance speed with overheating engines and to play chicken with tight turns. The AI is pretty terrible, and you would often need to crash several times for it to pose any challenge. Races allow you to upgrade your pod with winnings, and how much you earn is based on how you set the prize pool (you can choose winner takes all and gamble that you will win, but come out with no winnings if anyone beats you). It is only possible to earn winnings the first time you complete a track in the top four, which means if you do lose a race it may be possible to lock yourself out of upgrades for that playthrough. There are plenty of unlockable racers, thought the entire game can be beat in 3-6 hours depending on your level. Debug options available on consoles are locked to button presses that you likely won't have on PC (mapped to N64 buttons). A fan-made executable to up the AI speed and difficulty for the GOG version as was possible in the debug mode on N64 is available here, and significantly improves the experience: https://github.com/Tehelee/SWEP1RCR_CM
What it is: A bullet hell typing game. As of writing, the only one on the market, with excellent pixel art and enough story and one-liners to keep me engaged the entire time. Pros: Challenging, but rewarding Unique mechanics Leaderboards for high-scores Cons: Sometimes difficult to shift from moving to typing, though arguably that is the point of the game Irreverent, which might be a detractor to some Playtime: 6 hours to complete the story, though I didn't know that you could type and move at the same time until the final boss Typing in English/latin/latin L33t speech feels amazing. This is one of those games that will stick with me for a long time. It is so rare to find something truly unique in gaming these days, and my hat's off to Morbidware and Headup for knocking this out of the park. While the experience is short and left me wanting more (would love to edit the text and use this as a way to gamify memorizing lines/verses), what's here is well worth the asking price.
No! We both knew you shouldn’t have read this review. That spoiler was mind-boggling! There’s only one way to rectify this disaster – we must return to the time before you started reading and ensure you are incapable of remembering the spoiler you read. Of course, there is always a risk that our meddling with our past selves could create an infinite loop of cause and effect, one which could end in only two ways: the confusion natural of such an event, followed by reluctant acceptance that some things just are the way they are. OR the cataclysmic cessation of existence itself- not just all life, but all time could be erased - never having happened in the first place! Don’t let your future self interact with the past noticeably, if at all. Spike your own drink with a forgetful serum, perhaps not affecting the future you any more than you’ve already forgotten to remember. No need to sweat the details. Forget the fact that the future time 300 years in the future that we visited to collect said serum had carbon copies of your five best friends from your present time with identical personalities and near-identical names. It’s almost as if someone has orchestrated the timelines to fit a series of tropes or interlocking truths that define our destiny (or perhaps that the script of the past, present, and future is written by the same person, who happened to write that movie you loved from the 80s). Best not to think about it – you’ve forgotten the spoiler, and that’s all that matters. But if you’d never remembered the spoiler, how could you warn yourself of it in the first place? Have you created a consequential series of events that could alter your future forever? Ack…sometimes, things just are the way they are. Who cares? We went Back to the Future – and came out better for it.
You face a seemingly endless dungeon with nothing but the scraps of rotten meat and weapons you can scrounge from your enemies. Necropolis' sense of danger is excellent. Game mechanics: Necro's combat includes a series of fast/slow attacks, blocking/dodging, and a zelda-like tab targeting system that locks the camera onto the nearest enemy. The targeting system does make dealing with large groups challenging, and players that charge into enemies rather than methodically learning their procedurally-generated attacks are likely to die quickly. Objectives are given by area, and permadeath keeps players on the sense of danger throughout the playthrough. Dyes and codexes (a way to buff players - you can hold one at a time) remain unlocked after death, but weapons/gear/progress/enemy locations/enemy attacks/dungeon layout are all reset, which keeps things fresh. Potions are color coded, but you only learn the effects through trial and error. If you die, the effects are re-shuffled randomly. So if red heals you, it will do so for the entire play-through. But if you die, then red might actually poison your character for the next life. Armor stats are all hidden, replaced with vague first-impressions of the gear's combat viability from your character's perspective. Considerations: At release and time of writing, the multiplayer component of the gog version isn't available. However, developers have made it clear on the steam forums that the gog version and steam version will not be able to connect for multiplayer, and that there is no local multiplayer functions (online co-op only). The soundtracks for those who pre-ordered are also hidden on the account page as a code that needs to be redeemed separately - a decision possibly intended to allows us to gift the soundtrack to a friend but that has caused some confusion. I really enjoy Necropolis, and will re-rate after multiplayer is available. Dungeon-crawling has never felt this dangerous.
Like world of warcraft, Impossible creatures opts for a simplistic, artsy graphical approach that lets this old school RTS still feel decent in that department. Although the RTS portion has all of the traditional components (two resources, mine one, auto-mine the other, build up armies, attack/win), it's the ability to create your own units that really sets this game apart from anything else. With excellent free community mods, you receive around 70 creatures to mix and match the parts of. Resulting units change in cost, special abilities, and stats as appropriate - so building a team of 9 of these units that suits your playstyle then testing your composition out on the RTS battlefield is what this one is all about. There's still nothing else like it, so it's easy to recommend if you've been looking for an RTS that dares to do something a bit different. A core group of modders has diligently updated the game over the last 12 years and continues to do so, re-balancing creatures, adding new animal options and abilities, modelling new assets and adding new maps. If you take the plunge, be sure to download the free community patch to get into the multiplayer matches and access everything: http://www.moddb.com/mods/tellurian/
(Review based on CD Copy) Star Wars Starfighter marked the end of the Rogue Squadron-esque arcade shooters released on PC. The story was decent, the voice acting was nice, the shooting mechanics were excellent and the graphics and sound were beautiful. The game plays much better with a mouse than Rogue Squadron ever did...but despite my love for the other games in the series, I found this one difficult to stick with compared with its predecessors, and never finished the game. I think this is because the earlier titles placed an emphasis on vehicle choice. Particularly compared with Battle for Naboo, where swapping vehicles on the fly was commonplace, locking missions into three ships felt like a step backwards for me. It's certainly worth playing - arcade flight shooters are rare on pc, and this is still a gem....but it could have been so much more. The definitive version of the game itself is also debatable: multiplayer was made a PS2 exclusive at the time, though the PC offers more control options. If you're willing to play on an old console system, I would strongly recommend Rogue Leader or Rebel Strike (which includes a cooperative multiplayer-only re-balanced version of Rogue Leader) on Gamecube over Starfighter. Regardless: I would recommend Rogue Squadron 3D here on GoG or picking up a copy of Battle for Naboo off of ebay over this title.
The Rogue Squadron series (Shadows of the Empire, Rogue Squadron 3D, and Battle for Naboo) remains unique on PC for providing the fast, non-rails 3D objective-based arcade flight shooter experience on PC. This is the definitive game on PC forflight fans that are NOT looking for a flight simulator. The license allowed the devs to focus on gameplay over realism, and it paid off in spades. Harpooning a tank and weaving between it's legs manages to feel right because 'it's star wars' while providing a unique challenge, for instance. Some of the mission variety would feel terribly out of place in a flight game based on the real world, but Rogue Squadron is much more enjoyable for it. Each mission's first playthrough locks the player's ship selection, with subsequent plays opening up additional ships after each victory. Medals are awarded for stats such as percentages of friendly saves, accuracy ratings, time to complete the mission, and hidden item collection. Earning each tier on all levels unlocks hidden missions. The digital version available here runs far more smoothly than my aging CD's copy, with no graphical hitches whatsoever and the CTD end-mission bugs completely fixed. It's nothing short of a miracle, really. RS3D is best played with a keyboard. Joysticks work, though the mouse is a bit oversensitive. The sound on the PC version was a selling point at the time, and the audio is as crisp as ever. For a mid to late 90s 3D title, the graphics have held up surprisingly well - largely due to the pace of the action, relative distance and constant motion of the targets, and a series of clever polygon tricks that still deceive in real time. Screenshots reveal flat 2D elements in all of the 3D models, though you'd never notice in normal play. I would encourage perspective players to download the demo, either for this game itself or for Shadows of the Empire (this game was based off the demo level for Shadows, which served as a tech demo for 3D flight combat).
Note: Review based off CD-ROM copy Essentially Age of Empires II reskinned for the Star Wars Universe, the real value in Galactic Battlegrounds is in the scenario creator. A community for sharing and rating custom maps carries on at http://swgb.heavengames.com/ . With their modifications and original stories, there is plenty of value to keep you playing solo or locally at LAN parties for a long time. Just don't expect to find players still online for multiplayer.
