levels are same same, no meaningful mech customisation, shallow gameplay, poor control of lance consisting of stay where i am or hold fire/rejoin me. absolutely no tactical depth. only positive is you can just get a fast light and strafe your way to victory till you get to the mission parts where not only have you had to trigger by (proximty btw nothing to do with stealth, approaching via cover has anything to do with it), waves of mooks, then taken down a full lance, oh you now have to take down a second full lance. even with mods the numbers and tonnage is stupid from cbills payments, to repairs and what your asked to do. any real merc commander would sardonically ask the mission briefer if 'they would like fries with that'. It's utter garbage just get battletech or play MWO.
Just downloaded it and gave it a whirl. while it's more free form than worse installments of the series; it struck me just how intrusive and obnoxious both the (tos) terms make it out to be and of course it's implementation of constant online tracking & DRM. What else can you call it when mid game if because you have a sketchy wifi signal (living in essentially a Faraday cage) the game comes shuddering to a halt threatening to dump you to the main menu so you don't access those items/start position you have progressed from if you don't return immediately it's ability to track your 'everything you damn well do'. How dare I.. already being confirmed to be able to access legally all that content enjoy it even after once verified. Needless to say this 'game play feature' left an entirely sour taste in my mouth metaphorically speaking; even with it being one of epics 'free games'. However it is not the only instance as I'm sure others will better elucidate as to the GOG version; but essentially the main point of the game seems to be getting people to redo missions for different challenges (one of them is usually a sniper rifle kill [which you won't be doing without it phoning home to it's server & constantly managing your right to it]). It seems to cover different starting locations, different equipment, different starting outfits. While technically yes you can play hitman without any of it's soul, you won't access the full product nor experience as intended without constantly being monitored as to your digital rights and should 'through no fault of your own' have a dropout in your connection i doubt even steams lauded 'offline mode' would save you.
https://www.wingamestore.com/product/8426/XCOM-2-Collection/ The in game play is worth 13 dollars and is not representative of the experience of the same product price point available elsewhere of this product. For example even though you are paying the Xcom 2 collection amount ($20), you do not have multiplayer or full DLC. As a second class digital citizen having a parity in game play is important and cutting out parts or denying the full experience is a misstep in in-game game play value. Simply put you are paying more and cannot receive the full experience; ergo you are getting less. If your in game game play experience isn't tarnished by this corporate disrespect to the value of you as a customer, it's an alright game that has stupid time mechanics meant to keep tension. For me products that don't allow a full experience to me a customer paying the same currency on the same hardware as anyone else; it always tarnishes the experience.
Not a fan of capital fleet ship lines. Essentially you go to grab tech in order to make decent frigates and you find out that it's locked like most things in this game; in this case behind capital ship experience that you attain from arduously attacking AI ships. It seems it's the theme of the game, lock individual control under automated processes that while one can argue streamline the process in fact end up in a lack of fine control. As an example capital ships being used as carriers. You pack up your blob of units transport the carrier to what you assume is a just within range distance, then you let the frigates pour out willy nilly. Then in the clusterf%$( you try to pick out the ones you want to move in only to have your shield unit land on another and randomly divert and not look like they intercept much anyways. Oh did I mention that blob is not firing at anything in particular? Good because there is no target toggles from what I or the tutorial can tell. It's unblob and fire at random units in range or ctrl shoot that one thing. Oh and your units will then scatter to get their max distances from there, automatically splitting forces that move at different speeds *facepalms. It's hard to explain all the small reasons why removing direct player controls from a range of instances affects this game poorly; it is much easier to point out that if the idea is to spamforce the galaxy then control via the galactic map should of been a higher focus instead of the clunky tab in tab out and am I still selecting the unit mess that it is; or how utterly abysmal the tutorial is. Frankly speaking i don't know why developers don't simply make a lets play tutorial on Youtube these days; because tooltip click here to continue tutorials are the height of stupid design. For starters they are slow, secondly they are extremely picky with actions, thirdly they are too specific to the most core concepts and as such fail to go through the actual motions employed in game.
First off kudos for it trying to make it all about new minion types at points; the detractor here is that it's shoehorned in as a railroad experience every step of the way. I mean anouther gripe ... your an overlord and in this exceptionally short game you are constantly being forced into transferring yourself into a minion... but you can still use them for combat as normal so.. why?!? Speaking of short the game is like 3 levels and a tutorial; I believe the original overlord had like six or more. These levels also feel forced to be stretched and in particular I didn't enjoy the mind control every villager tasks (seeing them behind locked gates in the village you bought out). You end up running around a lot to try to find a way to them that is heavily gated to getting every minion hive. Which of course the last one you get is in the end game where you suddenly have everything finally openned up; a problem that is no doubt come about because of the 3 level design. You start out with nothing, continue basically to have nothing, oh crap we better give the player all the spells and equipment worth squat. Then try grinding for minions... didn't seem to many spots to collect souls there for brown minions *rolls eyes* the ones I upgraded as my primary force. The ones that cannot be used in the final battle because only green and red have any ability to do damage (I'm not joking). Customization: You'd think with this game having 3 mistresses it would be good, but like the tower only seems to get fixed after the second level and then it's like what's the point. On top of this you don't spend time there (other than arduous traverse time) there is no treasure room to gloat over, you don't really notice the fixtures because your trying to get to the arbitrary place to upgrade 'X' and I mean it's such a small amount of things why do i constantly have to sit through massive cutscenes in between rooms? Run out of words... In short the game was painful, short and overall sucked.
-Needs Authentication through non-gog website for basic features (multiplay & update parity). -Puzzle style production ramping game with alien resistance (difficulty) scaling to the ramping. -Point of game is to produce the next most grindy thing you need to produce in order to rinse and repeat. -Has undergone successive changes to make progression more tedious, progression still has no 'climactic moment' and game has little story behind it to give it any feeling. -Updates seem to have slowed to a crawl and pricing has at least at my end doubled to that of a fairly recent AAA game without any real 'polish'. Monotous, superfluous progression that gates the one redeeming feature it might have, multiplayer.
Don't get me wrong the new area's look nice; the Necromancer has enough mooks (with a few items and being a shaman you should be able to get 20+ minions); but it still hasn't got a lot of Q.o.L improvements like a map overlay and ambiguous info tooltips. [It still has problems with short summon time outs] What I am getting at is it adds a bit of content, but it doesn't necessarily improve the game; which is fine if you are in love with the base game. Just don't go in expecting the balance to be different or every monster not to be packing a DoT AoE of several types like they've thrown the kitchen sink to have them keep relevant as a threat. You'll still be tripping over items while trying to shoot, having shots blocked by poor hitboxes, all the detail gone into weapons rather than decent looking armor or heaven forbid simple actions (like varying attacking), glaring compromises to classes that try to be jack of all trades and a return to the slow grind pace of the main campaign. That being said there are worse buys out there and worse 'expansions' to games on GOG.
Barely a game as it's just a jumble of videos around a central narrative. If you want a good engaging visual novel try 'tender loving care'. It's writing is still as stunted, so it must cost a lot to make anything with any truly branching story line; but it is a hell of a lot more interesting and fun.
