I am going to talk only about the worst thing about this game. In every mission, you can get "reward points", which is a currency for buying upgrades for your main heroes. You get these points for fulfilling specific objectives and not exceeding certain limitaions. Problem 1 - you can't see these objectives until after you've finished the mission. Completely nonsensical and it basically forces you to play every mission twice to have a chance at acquiring a decent amount of points. This ties into the: Problem 2 - the progress gets saved immediately and is irreversible through loading. Example: You make a save at the end of a mission, finish it, buy an upgrade for a hero only to find out it's useless, you load the game, finish the mission again aaaand... the upgrade is already purchased even though you loaded a save game. It also allows you to infinitely farm items, ruining any sense of progression. Problem 3 -This basically shoehorns you into using only one of the 4 available heroes because you dump all the reward points on him/her. The moment I stopped playing was when I completed a mission, chose 3 items to take with me to the start of the next one. Saw that it was a bad idea and loaded a save in the previous mission, only to find out that those 3 items are gone forever even if I load a save from the previous mission.... Anybody who though this was a good idea should be lynched. If you want it to make sense, you would have to first play through the mission, find out what stupid arbitrary "play this stupid to get rewarded" (like recruit 3 units max or use only 300 resources etc.) objectives you missed, spend NO points at all, play through the mission AGAIN and only then decide what to buy. With the knowledge that anything you do buy, you are stuck with for good. A solution would probably be to backup the save files and only then try out anything but this game isn't worth the time. Game seemed fine, shame it's ruined by the save system....
A game with tactical fights and a pause button which you MUST utilize or you will get utterly destroyed. Avoiding damage areas and projectiles or planning your moves, basically impossible to play in real time. There are 8 characters in total from which you can assemble a team of 4 (you get the last one at the beginning of act 2. You have two characters of each, Magical damage, Tank, Support (healing) and Physical damage. But you can assemble any team you want and take 4 DPS characters if you want. Every one of them has 4 skills which you can upgrade and early on, pick from a branch which focuses on something else for the skill. You can freely change this any time you want to fit the situation if you wish. There are loot drops. Every character has an Earring, Amulet, Ring and Relic slot. They just give generic stat bonuses and you should just take those that fit what you are going for with the said character. They are completely random though, so I recommend saving before every chest and reloading until you get something good. You can also scrap items and after a certain amount, an item of the highest quality will be created. Again, save before getting the item and load until you get a good one. I played on the hardest difficulty and some fights were pretty challenging. You have to learn the enemy abilities, prioritize enemies and counter what they are doing. There are some cheap encounters where enemies spawn behind you and such, but those are fortunately not the norm. With proper tactics and positioning, you will prevail. Sometimes, you might feel forced into taking certain characters because of the enemies you face. In Act 3 for example, enemies spam healing. One of your characters has a healing reversal that changes healing into damage. I just had to include him in the party or the enemies were basically unkillable. It has a story but nothing stellar. I give it a 7/10. A nice 15-20 hours experience for the connoisseurs of tactical combat with pause.
First off, ignore everyone that says this plays like Borderlands. It absolutely does not. While in Borderlands, you have to pray to RNG for a good gun, weapons in SW 2 are static. You can find most of them in pre-defined places. So every player will have the same base weapons as everyone else. The only random loot thing in this game are the gems with different stat bonuses which you can put into the weapons + armor. It might seem overwhelming at first but you should quickly be able to tell which stats are desirable and dispose of the rest. And you don't have to upgrade constantly, just once in a while, do a revision and install better gems. You also have to be ready to conform to the game's elemental system. If you don't customize your weapons properly, the enemies will take forever to kill. Just shooting stuff in this game with whatever you find does not work here. There are 4 elements + physical damage types in the game. Every enemy will spawn with resistances, vulnerabilities and immunities to some. So it is always desirable to have at least one weapon of each element ready to go. You change the element the weapon deals by using conversion gems. Each element except physical also has a special effect. Fire burns, Lightning electrocutes + immobilizes, Cold slows/freezes and Toxic poisons + makes enemies explode on death. Later on, these damage over time effect will deal much more damage than regular shots and proccing them will become a priority since they deal % based damage (which directly counteracts the increasing enemy health as you progress through difficulties. The skill system gives the game some longevity. Unless you grind, you absolutely won't max every skill there is. Combat is extremely dependent on quick movement. If you remain still, you die. Simple as that. Otherwise it's visceral and the sound design is perfect. For me, this is a 10/10 game. Never played a second of co-op and it is probably the best FPS game I've played in the last 4 years.
A decent 2D platformer but nothing groundbreaking. Finished it on keyboard and mouse with zero issues so no idea what all the fuss about controls is about. The main problem is that the game is simply too short. It took me 3 hours to complete it and there is pretty much no point in ever replaying it. So if you ever want to get this, 100% wait for a sale. Do not buy at full price as it is simply not worth it. Would have given it a 6/10 if there was more actual game but the extreme shortness brings it down to 5/10.
An awesome arcade racer. One of the best I've played actually. If you are a fan of the genre, you can't go wrong with this one. The main gripe however is that it commits the most often repeated sin any racing game can. To proceed in the game, you HAVE TO get a certain amount of points in any of the championships. In this game, it means you have to get at least a 3rd place on average to qualify for the next event. I have no idea why racing games do this but it is extremely annoying. It can result in situations like "I won the championship with a huge lead, yet didn't qualify for the next one because I didn't meet some arbitrary point requirement." What? Also, there are 20 racers and only 5 of them get any points. It is way too strict and the main thing that can drain enjoyment out of this game. Example: In a championship that has 4 races and the places are awarded - 1st place - 10 points, 2nd - 8 points, 3rd - 6 points, 4th - 4 points and 5th - 2 points, you are required to get at least 30 points to be able to play the next championship. So a single bad race means you might as well restart the whole thing. This leads into the pretty demanding difficulty. DON'T play this on hard. It speeds up the opponents so much it is basically impossible to win. Even on normal difficulty, you have to drive very well to be able to reach the top places. Enemies also get a massive head start for some reason. Every single one of the AI opponents will get a massive boost immediately after starting the race, meaning you spend the first lap just catching up to this artificial deficit. And one smaller gripe - there are only 4 worlds with 3 tracks each, meaning 12 races in 4 environments. That is definitely on the lower side and thus can get repetitive pretty quickly. But the main thing, the racing itself, is stellar. Along with the power-ups and weapons, genuinely fun with some very tense moments. But I have to take a point off for the things I mentioned above. So a very good 9/10.
Still probably the game with the most sophisticated melee combat system. You actually have to care even about little things like momentum behind your swings. In most other games, just touching your opponent with the weapon in any way is enough to do full damage to them. Here, if you just gently touch them with your weapon, you will do close to no damage. Landing damaging blows requires mastery and skill, looking for an opening in the opponent's defense and exploiting it. There are even damage zones (head, arms, legs and torso). Limbs and head can be cut off. You can completely disarm an enemy by cutting his weapon arm for example. Weapons get stopped when clashing with the opponent's weapon or shield. A fight can be a long sparring match where you just slowly chip each other to death or end in a single powerful blow to the head, decapitating the foe. Movement is equally as important as the swings themselves, since they add additional momentum behind them. Doing a forward lunge in combination with a slashing attack and timing it correctly can deal much more damage than just the swing by itself. Campaign is decent but after that, there is also the arena mode where you can play as any character in the game and fight a pretty long gauntlet of scenarios of ever increasing difficulty and arenas with various environmental hazards and layouts. The game can be brutally difficult in either mode. All your actions have to have a meaning a purpose. Mindlessly flailing around with your weapon or button mashing will get you nowhere. The AI can exploit that kind of behavior pretty well. Every enemy has different strengths and weaknesses. Skeletons are agile and well protected but pretty fragile. Ogres are slow and clumsy but one good hit from their huge mace can literally send you flying across the room. When it comes to controls, I always found the mouse to be extremely clunky/unprecise. At least for first time play, I recommend using keyboard only. Truly a unique experience.
Not much to say. If you liked Trine 1 and 2, you will enjoy this one. A bit on the casual side when it comes to overall difficulty, but still very enjoyable. However, I am taking the one star off for simply discarding the story started in Trine 3, completely ignoring it (outside of 1 very minor reference after you collect all the secrets) and pretending it never happened. I get that they wanted to distance themselves from Trine 3 as much as possible but getting rid of the previously started story by just saying "we won" simply won't do. Especially when Trine 3 was probably the only one that had an actually interesting plot (before it abruptly stops).
