Good artsyle and music, complex mechanics, tedium, completely random obsicles and despite all your efforts there is absolutely no feeling of satisfaction or progression. It's like working retail, except you don't get paid. If you are a determined masochist who wants to put 50+ hours into understanding every little mechanic it's a must buy for everyone else, avoid.
There is a good core here, the mechs, weapons and general gameplay are excellent, MW5 is also mod friendly and has a strong modding community. Unfortunately that is where the positive points end. The main gameplay loop consists of procedurally generated missions with a story that is devoid of any compelling events or interesting chartacters, try as they might, the voice actors can only give a mediocre performance with the script they have been given. Mission design consist of the same limited objectives on a procedually generated map and tonnage mismatches between your lance and the enemy force will determine wether the mission is a walk in the park or impossible. Companion AI is an oxymoron, they have no intelligence and command options are too limited to make up for Artificial Stupidity. You can't tell your missile mech to stand back and focus on launching missiles or tell your fire support mech to stay in formation and stop walking in front of you right as you fire both your PPC's. DLC The DLC goes some way towards fixing the story problems with better crafted mission design and at least some character, hardcore Battletech fans will get the most out of seeing lore relevent characters and events. MODS MW5 is easy to mod and essential if you are going to get the most out of the game. Considering that modders are not paid for their work the quality is going to vary wildly.
The art style, humour and music are all great but the gameplay can be frustrating for those not willing to bash their head against a wall for a few hours attempting to figure out just how perfect each jump needs to be, mitigated somewhat by fact that Sunblazer is very easy to pick up and put down. For the right person, this is a 5 star game, for everyone else, probably a 1
A detailed, complex RPG, with good characters and decent story and a beautiful world to explore. Veterans of the Divinty series are going to absolutely love it but new players might find the opening stages of the game frustrating due to the non-combat mechanics being poorly explained and early game combat being heavily weighted in favour of you opponents. To expand on these issues, the crafting system is simple but feels tacked on and completely irrrelivent, you will also need to seek out crafting materials if you want to make anything. it is also never explained in any way, even a simple quest requiring you to make a shirt would have been appreciated. You are never told that every almost every NPC can be traded with, easy enough to figure it out but this has causes another major issue especiialy in relation to the crafting system, if you want a needle to make a shirt? Have fun talking to every single NPC in the area to find who has a needle and then finding the other NPC who has some cloth. Now the combat, detailed and complex, great for Divinity veterans and hard core RPG gamers, a hellish frustration test for new players. Spells and abilites interact with each other in a variety of ways, figuring out combos is fun and interesting, sadly combat initiation is frustrating and will more than likey result in a few party wipes and resets, top of my list of issues is combat initiaion will likely involve your characters clumped togtether in a group and the first round will involve your entire party getting hit with muliple area of effect attacks, you will start yourt turn with no armor, a nice chunk of your health missing and possibly on fire. The worst part of all, you cannot reunite Buddy and Emmie. This point in particular Larian should ashamed of (there is a mod to fix it).
Disclaimer: I received Reforced for free as I already owned SF3, this is awesome, thank you. First off RPG - Good story, good writing, good voice acting, all of this can keep me playing despite the parts of the game I have problems with. The visuals are also excellent and the music is good as well. None of the charaters are complete idots, their actions have reasons and make sense from their point of view, there are no comically evil villians in sight and I love it. Now the RTS part - It is passable at best, lots of frustrating elements that really bring the entire game down. There is a good variety of units and structures to build and each faction feels unique. To start off my biggest gripe, the Artificial Stupidity is very apparant, enemy aggression is ludicrious and you will be attacked by massive hordes almost immediately, good luck trying to scout or attack between the massive enemy waves. This may just be my personal preference for smaller unit tacics, but death balls are no fun for me. Enemy pathfinding is also really bad, they will sprint through 3 occupied territories in order to attck a different outpost stopping for nothing. Once they get to their intended target the will realise they don't have the strength to destroy it, turn around and run all the way back. There is no unit formations (that thing that was in Age of Empires 2), your units just run in a massive clump, medics in particular seem to really want to die as they run into the center of the enemy. Some things just don't make sense to me, I can build a forge in early missions to upgrade my units, but I can't actually build any of the upgrades so what is the point of letting me build it? Overall: It is a verry good RPG but is let down by some frustrating elements of the RTS system. If it were not for those SF3 would get a 4.5 from me at least.
On the whole, Wrath improves on Kingmaker, the game looks good and I have not encountered any game breaking bugs. combat balance is better in most cases, with a few random difficulty spikes. The story is decent, nothing amazing but strong enough to keep a person interested, plenty of story paths to choose, that will affect how the story progresses. The mythic path choices are well done adds variety to a second playthrough. Your companions are okay, most are forgettable with only a few of them having interesting backstories or plots in the campaign. I am mostly disappointed that every conversation with Dearan does not include the option to punch him in the face. Then there is Crusade mode. 1 word describes the crusade - frustrating. A shallow copy of Heroes of Might and Magic's combat with little actual strategy and horrendous balancing. It's not fun when your army units get annihilated in a single turn by a fireball casting enemy general with no counter or you waste 10+ turns wailing on a gargoyle that can't do sufficient damage to threaten your weakest units. Reinforcements are also a long time coming, which pretty much causes all gameplay to come to a grinding halt. There is the option to skip crusade mode, which also skips all associated quests and rewards. Tip for developers, if you need to add the option to automate or skip a core part of your gameplay experience then you need to go back to the drawing board. Adding to the frustration is the Pathfinder ruleset which is good in concept, but terrible in execution. If you looking to play a ranged class or spellcaster your going to spending your first couple of feat choices, negating the weaknesses forced upon you by the rule set. You also have up to 4 levels of defence to pierce when casting a spell, one failed roll and your limited spell slots are wasted. Spellcasters are more powerful later in the game, but that's cold comfort for a 60+ hour RPG. Overall, good, but occasionally VERY Frustrating
In the tabletop RPG community there are tales of "That Guy". "That Guy" thinks all his ideas are great, he has no idea that his great ideas aren't fun for other p[layers and no matter how many times you tell him he doesn't listen. In this case "That Guy" is Owlcat games. Kingmaker is horrendiously balanced, on normal difficulty random encounters are so easy as to be pointless, most planned encounters are painfully overtuned with enemies having absurd attack bonuses, armor classes and saving throws. All this means if you aren't optimising your characters to the extreme you are going to be murdered by low level mobs repeatedly. Kingdom management is also plagued with horrible design choices, a single poor choice or failed saving throw can send your Kindom into a death spiral to which there is no escape. And I mean no escape, there are a few ways to fix your kingdom, most won't work because you have to roll to succeed and you will have massive penalties to your rolls. Promoting an advisor and actually improving your Kingdom takes 2 weeks in game time, during that 2 weeks you can't make any other decisions or take any actions, which means a critical action can take place and completely screw you over. The only saving grace here is you can turn the Kingdom management off, cutting out a significant portion of the game. There are positives, character creation is actually really good, there are enough options make a character for any playstyle. Story wise the world is interesting and the characters you will meet are well written mostly fun to have around with entertaining party banter (Except Harrim, seriously, guy needs some therapy). Buy it on sale.
An awesome throwback to 2d racers of the 80's and early 90's. Slipstream is easy to learn but difficult to master. There is a lot to appreciate here, from the asthetic to the simple mechanics, it looks and sounds great and feels smooth to play. Saldy for me, Slipstream has an empahsis on perfecting your races to the point that it often feels more frustrating than fun. There is some pretty blatant AI manipulation goiong on and tracks sometimes have blind corners that were obscured by objects or hills. None of this would be an issue if you are the kind of person to dedicate yourself to mastering the game and improving little by little until you reach the top of that leaderboard. This one is going to appeal to the hardcore rather than casual players.
