It's a shame that they ruined their solid gameplay with the disgusting pervert trash writing. I was looking forward to a fun fantasy adventure, not degenerate porn.
It's a solid basegame that can't fully realize both it's gameplay promise or 40k setting potential. The story is barebones and the insight into the Necromunda setting and characters is very limited. It suffers from janky animations and a serious lack of content and enemy variety. The environments are pretty great, but the hub is kinda lame. The user interface is kinda infuriating at times. It needs some polish as well as more content. But if you're looking for a decent shooter in the 40k universe, this is probably your best choice.
I didn't expect much to begin with, but developer PGI still manages to underdeliver even more than I thought they would. This game is barebones. The story is an afterthought, the missions are repetitive and the gameplay is janky. Your friendly mechs are nearly useless and run into buildings you need to protect. Enemy A.I. is dumb as a brick as well but laserfocused on the player to provide any challenge at all. Even for mechwarrior fans this game has very little to offer, if anything at all.
The writing is pretty bad, which obviously isn't a good thing in a visual novel. I have a feeling that whoever wrote the main character took the "write what you know" advice to heart, but that's not a good thing when you don't have much life experience to draw from beyond being an unsuccessful freelance journalist or the like. I'd mention that the game doesn't capture the atmosphere of Vampire the Masquerade, but then I remember that the writing in 5th edition is just as bad. So if you like V5 you might get something out of this.
The fact that this is the debut title from czech developer Warhorse Studios is very surprising. After extensive bugfixes Kingdom Come Deliverance cements itself as one of the best open world rpgs available. It's fairly well written, offers quite a bit of freedom and the world it lets you explore is very open and beautiful. There are many things to discover and exploration feels meaningful. Combat takes a bit of practice but is engaging and challenging and does not fall for the usual trap of "bullet-spongy" enemies like so many other games in it's genre. The game is set in middle age Bohemia and as a result does not feature any kind of fantasy elements. Even if you think that a lack of magic and monsters might be a deal breaker for you, I would recommend to give it a try anyways. Despite some shortcomings, especially in the endgame stages, I found KCD to be an outstanding title among RPGs. It reminded me a lot of Gothic 1&2, which I would consider high praise. I am very much looking forward to whatever Warhorse Studios will do next.
The graphics are pretty impressive and the atmosphere is very thick. I don't think I have ever played a game that drew me into it's world so completely. Unfortunately there are many things that take me out of it again. The game has definitely been released prematurely, but while bugs can be fixed eventually, the game suffers from a few problems that run much deeper than that. The most obvious one is the lack of meaningful choices. You are pretty much on a set path and your dialogue choices barely matter. Even in side missions you are often prevented from really making a choice. This extends to the gameworld which has a surprising lack of interaction. You can't change your appearance in game at all and the options are fairly limited, which is very strange for cyberpunk which is all about style. You can't eat or drink at bars or shops outside of scripted missions and there isn't really anything to do besides shoot people and buy things. You'd think there'd at least be some arcade minigames or a matrix to jack into, but all you get are a few websites with a couple text entries. Lore only comes in the form of collectible text files. Which brings me to my biggest problem with the game; It's a looter shooter. This decision is utterly baffling to me as I would have imagined them to stick closer to the Cyberpunk 2020 source. You are constantly collecting, buying, selling and crafting things which feels like a huge waste of my time and actually takes me out of the game quite a bit. Games like Vampire Bloodlines did this a lot better. The skill tree too offers only a few choices I felt where meaningful with the majority being merely increases to your numbers. Some of the earlier visual designs they showed also looked better by comparison, like the character generation, UI and HUD. Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece, but unfortunately sabotages itself a little too often. I'm looking forward to fixes and DLC, but it still has a long way to go.
Gothic is a game that manages to overcome all of it's shortcomings with its atmospheric world. The prison colony and it's inhabitants are a joy to explore and interact with. The gameplay and mechanics may feel minimalistic at times, but this just serves to make the game more immersive as very little will remind you that you're just playing a game.
Disco Elysium is clever. Not just the writing but also how skills are presented. Similar to Planescape Torment, it is a game cought between two genres. Half roleplaying and half adventure game. But unlike PT, where the roleplay elements feel rather insubstantial, Disco Elysium re-invents the way skills are used in an rpg and uses this to it's advantage. The world and it's characters, especially the protagonist, are great fun to explore.
The gameplay is clunky, unbalanced and often frustrating. But if you can look past that you will find an engaging story and what might very well be the best world-building in any fantasy rpg to date. Exploring the island of Vvardenfell and it's denizens is pure fantasy roleplay bliss.
Very disappointing as a successor to Morrowind. What hurts this game the most is the uninspired writing and worldbuilding. Also, after the success of Morrowind on Xbox, the series' focus has shifted from PC to console and so the UI can feel very clunky for pc players.
