The artwork could make Miyazaki shed a tear. Seriously, the game is breathtaking. The music... wow... I can leave that on and never get bored of it. I listed my one complaint at the bottom. The game play? This is what games should be like, its Nintendo Hard, as per the Trope, this game will kill you with breathtakingly depicted imaginative and countless time honored ways. Crushing pillars? Check. Death Traps like boulders and grinders? Check. Miss that "outrun the time bomb while climbing out of Zebes?" Its here, in several lovely flavors. Did you like the floor and air dash of Mega Man X? Well, Ori has it all. Still remember that Flame Stag level From Mega Man X? We've got a volcano here too. Ori is a tiny kitsune type critter with an impressive array of athletic abilities, coupled with his companion's ability to blast things to kibbles. Teamwork is fun. To the reviewer who complained about spikes in difficulty, this is actually a book from old school designers who wrote the book on memorable games. The player's psyche needs a bit of release in between those high difficulty spikes, which is why you are given those not so tough areas to relax and cruise. Those games we play on the NES or SNES again, and ask ourselves "why don't they remake this with better graphics and leave everything else alone?" Well, our friends here have done just that!! Did you like games with levels which force you to use everything you learned? Yeah... welcome home. ********************************** COMPLAINT ******************************** In fact, MY only complaint is this: FIXED CONTROLS!!!!!!! Turns out the DEVS did give us this: %localappdata%/Ori and the Blind Forest DE/KeyRebindings.txt Edit that file to remap your bindings. You have to start the game once without it and then they are generated. Once you edit your controls, make sure you also set the [Activate] variable at the top from False to True or the changes won't take effect. Hope that helps.
I read some bad reviews, but I'm a sucker for airships (oh I'm a sucker for any building game too, though I doubt anything for awhile will dethrone Terraria.) State of this game for me: bug free. I haven't encountered bugs, though I imagine some of the prior complaints had to do with buoyancy in this game. (Example, whales killed become lighter the more meat you harvest off of them, and eventually you can kick an "empty" whale corpse by hitting one of the few remaining blocks and knock it clear across the screen, especially if you're wearing heavier armor and weigh 200+ of the game's weight units.) That said, the airship building is fun, the hunting and taming beasts is hilarious. The air currents are well done. They even took nice touches like the fact that a helium balloon is not flammable but also not as buoyant as hydrogen gas. They even nailed the ratios of lift to volume pretty closely which is awesome (a quality zeppelin bag is as follows: 34500 buoyancy units for H2 and 31050 for He, I won't go into further detail except to say that He is well known and documented to have 92% (give or take a percent) the buoyancy of H2, with 0% of the flammability.) 31050/34500=0.90 That's pretty close to real life in ratios. (They also did Hot air, for the smaller balloons as a third option.) The lift envelopes are smaller than a real life airship, but overall the game does a lot of things very nicely. It can lag at times, but this is fixed by having the game run with higher priority and setting the graphics to performance. There's all sorts of nice touches, a huge world to explore, animals which may or may not kick your ass depending what you use (try a shotgun at point blank on the back of a purple beetle and enjoy dying by ricochet, etc.) If there is one complaint is that I'm a quarter of the way through the game, and I haven't yet found any way to dismantle existing items to try to recover some of their resources. Plenty to mine though. Hope I helped.
(For forum overview, skip to the end.) After playing this game I went and grabbed the the master quest. (Both LOG 1 & 2 are spectacular dungeon crawls, and LOG 1 prompted me to buy the second.) Unlike the second game, this one still looks VERY good even with all the settings turned down, so I can play it on my portable. LOG 2 requires a fairly decent gaming system to play with full res and settings, but LOG 1, on the other hand, which I'm reviewing here, is fantastic, and very low end portable system friendly. Complete with an epic and badass final boss fight, and complete with monsters which resist all your magics (so there isn't "one spell to rule them all" like fire is in the second game, though lightning & invisibility paired with dagger backstabs would probably count as that in this one.) DO YOURSELF A HUGE FAVOR AND DO NOT PLAY WITH A GUIDE! You don't get a second chance to experience it the first time. I absolutely LOVE LOG, and the only thing that bugs me, is that like Dungeon Master, and unlike Dungeon Hack, it lacks procedurally generated random games after you finish the main quest. The engine seems made for a huge nethack style dungeon crawl. The same is true for both Grimrock 1, and Grimrock 2, this game would totally PWN the big publishing house games if it had that feature. With that said, game is EXCELLENT, and the company supports it with bug and balance patches and content fixes. A definite "buy" for anyone who likes FPV dungeon crawling genre. *** Which brings me to my one huge beef: http://www.grimrock.net/forum That forum is GARBAGE. Not because of lack of information but because I was perma-banned before making a single post. Search function was regularly broken (if you're searching for info) and the admins do not read nor respond to emails (and I registered off my work domain, with my actual work email, which is an IT company, so its not like I registered with some randomized email to spam them or anything.) Hope that helps.
This is definitely NOT Dwarf Fortress. It is also NOT Terraria (specifically Terraria is WAY more complex.) (This is no different how Darkest Dungeon is NOT Nethack, nor is any non text game going to ever BE nethack without a serious developer with experience in proper gameplay ever getting involved. Some of the issues people complain about can be compensated by giving your dwarves specialized gear loadouts. Want your dwarf to avoid combat and mine, remove his weapon and logging axe, want him to log, remove pickaxe. Want him to fight and gather? Equip a weapon and remove his other non armor gear (give him skills in that area too, it makes a huge difference.) Want him to oneshot goblins? Equip a bow and fire arrows, as a bonus, he'll kite, instead of charging in. Except for sending the troop in, each dwarf responds to job requests queued by the player based on availability. I had a master smith who was busy elsewhere (mining at the time I assigned the work) and another dwarf hogged the forge. However, if free, the most skilled dwarf will generally pick a job suited to that skill. When tools are required, just don't put every tool on every dwarf. The game will not send a dwarf with a knife to mine minerals if one with a mithril pickaxe is available. If all your dwarves are equally well tooled up and armed, the skills only make a difference for speed of action. The game is fun, but not Terraria, Dwarf Fortress or anything of the sort. It is what it is, and short of a crash to desktop (alt tabbing while the "loading" screen is up before the game starts up proper) I've had no issues. It is a semi casual game, and hilarious in many ways. I'll get a month or six of off duty enjoyment out of it, and got it for half off. No complaints, especially if they release extra content at some point like some kind of weapon or loadout customization. Otherwise the interface is basic and lacks some of the menus I normally enjoy. It is what it is and functionally so.
Okay, seriously, the game has awesome art direction, awesome music, that narrator is just epic (at the onset.) I really wanted to like this game, but here's what broke it for me: Being punished for good performance. Here's what happens. The game assigns "bad and good quirks" to your character based on RNG at the end of each mission. So no matter how well you perform, you can STILL get screwed. On top of that, while recovering at inns, you develop MORE bad quirks. Your guy might cheat at dice, develop naughty sex tendencies at the whorehouse or become an alcoholic (which he can also do by drinking unpurified swine ale in the Warrens area.) Negative manias acquired from "morale breaks" (D&D players should know what these are) become permanent until cured after a mission or occasionally healed by certain characters in missions which are long enough to be able to do that. And whoever says, don't get attached to characters, indeed. You could be a stalwart badass in real life critical situations, but in this game, good luck. Characters will get struck with random crippling effects literally out of nowhere. Performed stellar? Oh well, you're now limp wristed and can't score as many critical strikes. Tough luck pal. Performed like crap? Well we're still going to randomly screw you, not by throwing critters at you or things you can deal with, but just because its fun for us. Hell, Dwarf Fortress was more "fair" than this. And the moto for that game is "losing is fun!" I'm putting in for a refund since I haven't run into a game that was this RNG unfair and deliberately so, not even the Ice Cave in the original Final Fantasy (NES) with its random 5 to 9 sorcerer(mindflayer) or 3 fighter/mage enemy parties which always seemed to strike just before the exit. I honestly don't have enough time to put days or weeks of free time into a game which will then punish me randomly. At least stupid MMO parties can be avoided or mitigated... not so in this game.
Great game. With certain ships, this game is as unforgiving as a 9 sorcerer/mind flayer fight in the ice cave in Final Fantasy for the NES. Or maybe that secret succubus / demon king fight under Portsmith in Might and Magic 1. Yes, controller flung across the room hard or screwed by the Ranged Number God. Only with certain ships though. Others are a joy to play. All Zoltan ships and Kestrel Type B come to mind. In contrast, Engi type B is arguably the worst ship in the game. I won't spoil much, except to say those of you trying to beat the game with the Engi type b will have some early game moments where its best to just restart. With that said, I beat the game with the Type A and B Kestrel ships pretty soon after buying the game. With the B I only restarted once. Switched to the Engi ship and discovered that with some ships... luck of the RNG is essential!! Not as in "nice to have" or "you always need RNG luck when engaging rebels within ASB range." I'm talking... luck for the first map or two in order to land some good gear and manage to actually survive! This is very rogue like as in "oops, ate poisoned rations and I'm on my last 8 hps" or "oops, I just ran into 50 fire ants and they hit as hard as a dragon" or "oh crap, dwarven mines and I don't have a torch!! where'd that crossbow bolt come from?" With that said, who the hell is funding those rebels? THE IMF? They got more ships and batteries than the Federation forces. Holy crap! Otherwise, gameplay ranges from hard and fun to controller flinging hard, music goes from good to epic and back. Graphics... good, clean and very Xcomish. Writing is solid enough for this kind of game, with some real humor thrown in. Try having a Mantis on board your ship when you go to slug nebula for added humor. Its like taking a Klingon to a Tribble convention. Definitely worth the winter sale price, fun... and like all nethack/rogue type games... VERY ADDICTIVE.
I haven't had a chance to try the Linux version or recompile it myself, but running on a "mere" AMD A4, with 8 GB and windows 8 (nearly full solid state drive, this is my portable, after all) this game runs gorgeously in 1600x900 with everything maxed out. (This is directly in response to the user (uoowoo) who gave it one star... angry review written by someone who reminds me of my demented father calling any music except gypsy polka... "noise.") Also, any user bitching this way is entirely unfit to be logging onto the internet, since any cursory reading of GOG's policy tells you they will refund your cash if you are unhappy with a purchase. That said, I concur with the 5 star users. The game is breathtaking on an actual high end system, but pretty damn gorgeous even on my portable, which hasn't been high end since the first A6's came out (the second and third gen A10's are out now.) The dialogue does indeed sound childish, but that is because we're seeing the world through the eyes of a creature which, for all we know, is the survivor of the apocalypse, largely innocent, and... alone. Also, the creature in question is some sort of naiad/nereid (not little mermaid, sorry uoowoo, you got Disney on the brain.) I will include no spoilers except to say the game is indeed corgeous, and pretty difficult for the typical kill everything right now player. In true metroidvania fashion, there will be places where you'll literally try to exploit what you think are bugs, and fail, or succeed, only to realize you should have come back later with the right form. Occasionally you'll miss a boss entrance for optional bosses. There are tough as hell to reach places, etc. This and Dust are probably some of the most gorgeous cell shaded/hand drawn style games I've seen to date. Both also have excellent soundtracks. If there's one thing I'd suggest to GOG, its... This game needs its soundtrack extracted in FLAC and MP3. Seriously.
