It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea in the RPG community, but it does enough things well to be an ultimately satisfying, if flawed, experience. I played the base game with no DLCs for around 100 hours. Pros: - Storytelling and worldbuilding - WH games can be pretty hit and miss with engaging the player with a decent story and keeping dialogues immersive and informative without seeming overly dense or hokey. Owlcat did a good job here of treading a careful line between providing detail and lore dumping. There are some factions that are well-defined and a good number of character motivations that are believable and nuanced, generally. It's enough to hook you and keep you interested in how things play out. Your teammates aren't exactly the most unique characters ever penned, but they do align with certain types of personalities in WH40K / SciFi gaming and some have enjoyable commentary in places. - Turn Based Combat - Unlike their previous outings, Owlcat fully embraces TB combat in this release and the results are impressive. Good base settings and various options that can be tweaked to your heart's content make it approachable for most RPG gamers. There are a few interesting mechanics employed by various mobs throughout the game that must be effectively countered, but nothing too obnoxious to make you wonder if you spent your XP incorrectly some 20 hours ago. - UI / Stability - Aside from the Level Up screen and mechanics, the UI is also an improvement from Owlcat's prior games (and those had a pretty good UI already). The game ran well with minor hiccups every now and again, and seems to be a bit more resource-intensive than the resulting graphical fidelity would suggest. I experienced a minor bug or two in the early releases, but never had a crash or a corrupted save. Not so good: - Choices & Consequences - while there are certainly some aspects of the story that can be melded in a different direction depending on your choices, there are parts that are unnecessarily railroaded, and not merely to advance the story in the way Owlcat intended. There are some differences to your ending slideshow if you go one path vs another, but not as many IN-GAME differences for your decisions as there could be, particularly the further you advance in the game. Which brings us to: - Inconsistency - Most Rogue Trader players rightfully complain about the decline in quality, variety, and overall impressiveness of the later game content, and my experience reflects this. The first two chapters are very lengthy (especially if you are seeking out opportunities to explore the space map in Ch 2 whenever you can), but this gets derailed in Ch 3, and once you overcome the baddies in Ch 3, the remainder of the game becomes a mop-up slog comparatively. Lots of copy-paste mobs and settings, and some half-hearted companion quests really stand out as flat compared to the care and intricacy often on display in Owlcat's constructing of the earlier acts of the game. - Player Builds - The builds are fairly on rails aside from the base class traits, no doubt about it. Some have gone into greater detail than I will about that. There are fairly limited options to make your character's abilities and traits more distinct and specialized. Yes, there are CHOICES, but said choices with where to spend your XP are more window dressing than they are difference makers, for the most part. I'm not a min-max gamer, personally, but even I was a bit disappointed, and people who loved to tweak the hell out of their builds in games like the previous Owlcat games, Underrail, and Age of Decadence are going to be very irritated by the limitations. Overall: 4/5 for being a fun ride overall, especially at the start of the game, and for delivering on some excellent combat and dialogue moments, if not consistently throughout the entire run of the game.
MFL was a fantastic little Blitz-style football game on release. The gameplay was very well "tuned" so it resembled football while still being challenging and unique. Seasoned football gamers might actually need to work to get wins, but you never felt cheated and user input on the controls seemed to actually make a difference. I logged many an hour playing with the various bizarre monster parody versions of NFL franchises before shelving it for a while. That version was 4.5 stars. Fast forward to the current version, and the devs have added more teams and stadiums to the mix. The gameplay has changed, however. Now the user's input is less impactful and the CPU can seemingly make plays at will that make you feel like a spectator instead of a participant, which is always a BIG problem for a sports video game. The fun factor from the prior version is gone. The current version is 2.5 stars. On sale, as it is now, it's still a worthy purchase if you enjoy football video games and haven't yet played it. The graphics are quite nice and MFL is actually a pleasant change from overly realistic sports sims. If you never played it before the fun was more or less patched out, you may still enjoy this! It was challenging but fun and fair - now it's a bit unwieldy to control and feels unnecessarily scripted. A pity. Finally, about the reviews mention bribing the ref as a problem - to be fair, you can turn that "feature" off completely as well as adjust the speed of gameplay to make it more forgiving. There are options to make the game a bit more "realistic" if you want.
First, the devs deserve credit as the game has improved quite a bit since its initial release - there are less slowdowns now and it runs well on even lower spec systems. My initial impressions of the game were negatively colored by it seemingly chugging at first, as well as the overwhelming amount of options in the UI plus the smallish text (it's pretty small even at max size). So I put it down for a while and came back. I have to say it was worth being more patient this time around to familiarize myself with the options using the tutorial and allowing myself to fail often in my initial layouts. Some things aren't made perfectly clear in the tutorial, and that is OK if you are willing to experiment a little and take your time. It's quite fun to build up a small airport into a larger one handling commercial flights - there are many options you can employ (or choose not to as the case may be) that are pleasing to see in motion. Some builders don't really allow you to appreciate the production queues and logistics planning you put into them - FORTUNATELY, this is one area where Airport CEO absolutely shines. As others have noted, it's a relaxing game to get the hang of while you learn the ropes. There are some minor things, such as the smallish text and the time it takes to build / delete structures that bother me a bit, but others may not mind so much. It's possible to turn off the "realistic contractor construction" options if you prefer (this makes building faster), but I ultimately left it on default settings as I got used to building taking a while at times.
I've tried playing this on several systems of various specs and operating systems. Crashes at startup every time. Win 7 gives a ntdll.dll error at crash. Nothing on GOG or Steam forums and the dev is no more. I stupidly waited 3 months after purchasing before trying to install and play, so I'm screwed. Caveat Emptor.
Gameplay is almost identical to the first Xenonauts, which is a plus. Multiple QOL improvements to the UI and functionality are nice (rotating camera is a great plus, as are prompts to direct your attention to situations throughout the game). Yet, some old issues remain, such as enemies easily shooting through walls / cover without having to destroy said cover first, and line of sight / fog of war being inconsistent. The biggest issue is that this game, in stark contrast to the first title, is a resource hog that cooks the CPU. This needs to be fixed and no doubt will be as development is ongoing.
Low Magic Age is not for everyone, though. I'll start with the current limitations: The graphics are 2d and there is minimal animation. Also, the main quest in "adventure mode" is at present very limited and not highly fleshed out. Here, the dev might benefit from opening the main quest up to mod support as there is quite the community for making D&D-like modules for other licensed titles. Those items out of the way, this is a great RPG-lite title with D&D 3.5 rules. The adventure mode is similar to Battle Brothers where you lead your party around the map and can typically pick up supplies and quests from individual cities. There are monster lairs to explore which are randomly generated, though not very visually detailed. I've probably sunk nearly 20 hours in already and it is a great time waster. Don't expect much quest depth yet. People who play CRPGs for the stories should avoid until at least version 1.0 is released.
Still a fun game. This one is a 2D sidescrolling action-oriented game compared to the strategic RTS that the original DK was. More suited to a controller than the mouse-oriented original, DK:AS features a wealth of pre-designed maps to beat plus weekly challenges and a randomly-generated tower mode. Only criticism so far is that some of the maps get a little bit nutty with throwing waves of enemies at you after you have "cleared" areas already and there are some very random difficulty spikes here and there.
