At the first glance I thought that this is UFO as it meant to be in nineties, but there are quite a lot of differences. It is faster and simpler. The storyline kind of presses you all the time pushing you in a certain line. In previous X-Coms the development of war with aliens was mostly about your skills in combat and outmanoeuvring aliens in technology. Here it is mostly a race in one direction. Also the tactical combat is simpler, which I don´t like so much. For example there is unlimited ammo. You still have to reload, but you will never run out of it. This takes away many tactical choices like using alien weapons (which explode almost always when an alien dies), stunning of important alien and dragging him away in withdrawal when outnumbered etc. Expansion Enemy Within adds a lot of more features and solves some of the issues. To sum it up. I enjoyed it a lot, it is decent remake, but it lost some of good features on the way.
As title suggest I went to the Stalker series from the end. At first I was a bit confused about the concept of anomalies and artifacts, but I guess that is my problem not playing the previous games. All through this game a word connection I had i my mind is that this is "Ukrainian Fallout". When you get into the system of the game it gets more interesting and I actually caught myself enjoying it more and more. On technical side, there are some graphical issues (bugs) and voice acting is really bad in English version. I am not sure about Russian, but listening to some dialogues in English made me "Wish for nuclear winter" or Russian version. The Russian battle chatter is quite refreshing, on the other hand. The open world feels good. The game definitely worth money and time. True is it ended quite suddenly without a warning. I felt I am just getting warmed up, and there was the end.
Even though I did not finish the game I decided to write this. For the time of its making the game looks very nice and it introduces very interesting concepts of using the space. Meaning; climbing, running on buildings, horse riding etc. Whole idea of the game is also nice and the feeling of medieval middle east and views are great. But after completing first part in first city it somehow becomes same. Honestly after about 30 climbed towers, I did not want to do it any more no matter the view. The same for saving citizens etc. Combat mechanics are weird. You can watch yourself massacre hords of enemies, but actually what you do is hit them three times, fourth kills (quicker later on). When you are dealing with one, other enemies mostly wait to die afterwards rarely approaching to hit you. Overall, good game, and probably very good reason for parkour to get super popular, but I had no patience to go through all the things over and over again.
After playing W1 which had few bugs, but so many great ideas, I felt really limted in W2. Mini-games are really bad in here, and sometimes the flow of the story depends on them. Framerate sometimes does strange things so the keys are irresponsive. Usually when you need a block a blow, cast a sign or dodge and you have a milisecond to do it. I got used to it, but then many fights are in something like invisible "arena" so you cannot run away when you started (example, you jump over 1m wide gap in a cave meet a golem, find out you are no match for it, and you just cannot jump back). So it ends you die 100 times re load and maybe with a bit of luck you can kill that. I would preffer not to die at all and solve it somehow smart. Or the fact you can drink potions only in meditation mode so far far from the combat, along with the fact that mighty Geralt can be stopped by a shrub filled me sometimes with desperation. All together it is a good game, with great locations (I loved Vergen and surroundings), and some quests and characters are good. But still compared to W1 characters feels a bit more blunt and for same strange reason most of drinkers drink vodka :-)
