Indisputably, Horizon's visual artwork is stunning. You walk from one grandiose vista to the next. The world designers did an excellent job here. The ambient music transports perfectly the feeling this lost world. Unfortunately, the game itself is mediocre at best, often disappointing. The biggest disappointment hit me immediately when I fist played the game myself: Wait, this *is* Rise of the Tomb Raider! And I mean literally: the climbing, the sneaking, the fighting, the perks, the quests, the weapons and armor. They only dumbed down the climbing (which requires no timing anymore) and removed the physical puzzles, ignoring that these were a few of the assets of the Tomb Raider game. Horizon is just a different world and different plot for the Tomb Raider game-engine! I venture to say, that the fact that protagonist is a female is also due to a restriction imposed by the Tomb Raider engine. When I buy a game, part of the fun is learning to play the game. And learning its weaknesses. For the Tomb Raider games this is for instance the weak AI when it comes to patrolling and back-stabbing. Also, close combat is infuriatingly ineffective and chaotic. The main quest is meh, with only very few revelations or surprises. The main character, Aloy, is rather annoying. I do not know if there is a single dialog without sarcasm, a snooty remark, sulkiness or being offended on her part. The dialogs are often boring. Exploration of the world is a mayor part of the game. But there is no intrinsic motivation to do that because the visually dazzling world of Horizon is just a beautiful scenery with nothing to do and no secrets to uncover. So the game developers littered it with collectibles, hoping to connect to the compulsive tendencies of their players. I got them all. And I did not enjoy getting them! What a letdown, to climb on a pinnacle in the sunset only to find a loot box on top. It is a monument to the laziness of the game developers.
Since everyone likes to compare The Witcher 3 to Skyrim, I will do so too. The landscape of The Witcher is less grandios but still very pretty, the fighting is more complex and more satisfying when mastered than that of Skyrim. But it is the story and the characters where The Witcher outshines Skyrim. One of the missions, the one of the baron and his wife and daughter, just plain made me cry. It was the best story I ever experienced in any computer game! There and in many other missions of The Witcher, your decision matter and turn the story drastically. In contrast, the missions in an Elders Scroll game play like something the the developers were forced to add, while the player should really just gawk at the landscape. The way the whole world revolves around the player chararcter in TES is just embarrassing. You will not find that in any Witcher game. All the above are for the main game, the addons however are more like "meh". The Addon "Hearts of Stone" I completed, but the story and many of the goodies felt rather shallow. I distinctly did not like the boss fights which felt like from console game, with a distinct choreography and a script to learn. I quit the game after finishing the main game and the Hearts of Stone addon. Coming back two years later, I could not bring myself to deleve into the "Blood and Wine" addon though its compelling graphic style is very different from all the other region in its bright pastell colors. For me main story concluded this game. Playing each addon puts you before that conclusion and I never could cope with that. My recommendation is, if you play the game and like it, play both addons before attempting any of the final main missions. And now, go and buy it!
The game delivers a decent Master of Orion experience but the later gameplay is just plain tedious. Here are some of its problems: - Planetary and resource management is complicated. 25 hours into the game I still do not understand it. - The in-game documentation is lacking. The provided tutorial offers some hints but many important aspects (e.g. resource, war and diplomacy) do not become clear. I had to frequently browse wiki sites instead. - War rules just suck. After a certain time you are forced to make peace. You may loose whole occupied sectors that you controlled for year just because you did not had the resource required to "claim" the systems. - Relocating ships takes forever. This is especially bothersom if you happen to start at rim of the universe. Then your territory might well stretch into a belt. Moving your army from one end of the belt to the other takes years. When your fleet arrives at its destination its ship designs will most likely be outdated and the forced peace period on the front they just left will be over. - Having more than one effective fleet seems impossible due to the cost involved. - Even with auto managed sectors, developing your empires is complicated and get quickly out of hand. And did I mention that resource management is a complicated mess? Appart from the games flaws, I am insulted by the DLC rip-off! You can easily tank twice as much money into the DLC as into the main game. Most of the DLC do not offer much, just a few missions. At worse they include game-mechanics which should have been in the main game. I would have rated the game three stars, recommending it to MOO-fans. But because of the DLC-ripoff its only two.
I happend to play The Witcher 2 after part 3 and part 1 (in that order). It is really impressive what the developers have archieved and how they improved the game in each iteration, keeping the good stuff and pruning the things which did not work. In the beginning, the story seems to be just Geralt versus some super-villain, but it unfold to a much larger scale. Soon Geralt is caught in political intrigues and has to choose between factions, his friends and morales. At key points, your decisions really make a difference and from time to time a cut-scene will tell of the consequences. I enjoyed the dialogs, the acted-out key-dialogs just as well as the personal dialogs. They never feel empty but you always get a better picture of the world or the characters. (This became even more apparent because I happend to play Ghost Recon Breakpoint at the same time. Its dialogs are similar in style to The Witcher but are a big bore because the characters there just babble shallow nonsense.) The journal which is constantly written on by Dandelion also adds much to background, though I found reading it a bit uncomfortable on a large modern screen. I did it anyway because the writing is good. Battles have much improved from The Witcher 1, where they were just a click-mess. I preferred the dodge and hit style of fighting. I suppose this is the most effective style. Sadly this makes blocking, spells except Quen (shield) and an occasional Aard (stun), traps and daggers fairly useless. Also most alchemy seemed useless to me and I only ever used two potions Swallow (healing) and Cat (night vision) leaving most of the alchemy skill tree undeveloped. CD Project RED adressed those problems in The Witcher 3. If had had to name the thing which I liked least, then its the games over-reliance on the mouse. Looting, climing and a few other actions require clicking and it never felt good. I don't know why they did not make the space bar an alias for that. That said: just buy it already!
