More of the same. If you have SotS: the Pit Gold and are looking for an excuse to dust it off and play it again, here it is. This content literally needs no review - $2 for an extra class with one unique skill (it controls Zuul) and a few new items. The new class isn't UP like the starving-to-death Striker, nor OP like the I-beat-the-game-on-Seriously?!? Seeker. It's fairly middle-of-the-road, like a Scout with less skill points and more Psi skills (but no TK). You'll get more or less what you paid for, and you'll support Kerberos. That is all.
The core game of Triple Town is a fairly straightforward match-3 mechanic with some sticky long-term considerations to be made. A quick trial play of the Facebook freemium version tells all you need to know, essentially. (However, there are money-unlockable turn limits on Facebook) The gog.com version, on the other hand, is fully yours upon purchase, as usual. But it retains the overall feel of a Freemium game in other ways, such as with "lose to win" game mechanics requiring tons of farming in order to unlock enough "stuff" to have a chance of completing achievements; only the gatekeeper has been removed. There aren't enough game modes in the PC release for my taste, and there is no "win to win" mode (that is, a mode where you successively unlock content by achieving stated objectives). Every game is a play-until-you-lose marathon. You pay coins to get bonuses to earn coins, making saving up seemingly impossible at first. The feeling of progress is somewhat absent, and you don't get much feedback on how you're doing in any form. The documentation is non-existent. Though the basic gameplay is self-explanatory, the purpose of the Capital City and the breakdown on resource generation is not given anywhere that I know of. Overall, it's a nice casual game that can sometimes take longer than you might hope. It can be hard to predict game length, but it should be less than 30 minutes typically.
Eador is one of the better games on GoG at heart, but some design choices bloat the amount of time maps should take by a factor of 2-4 while pigeonholing the player into tier-climbing strategies; this probably worsens at higher difficulties. * Tier-climbing and bottlenecks: There is no such thing as a viable "Zerg rush" strategy. Each player will typically hire a single hero unit on Turn 1, and only heroes are mobile; escalating costs prevent you from buying more early. Each hero can only hire so many troops, and heroes take time and resources to respawn. It is literally impossible to peck at a territory with repeated waves to wear them down, both because you may do 0-1 damage per hit, and because you do not have the option to retreat for reinforcements. Power leveling is strictly necessary. * Random events happen way too often, and there aren't enough different ones. You will quite often see the same event 6-10 times playing through a single map. There should be a wider variety, and they should happen much less often. Having the same 5 events every turn gets a bit tedious. * The restriction of only being able to build one building per turn forces every turn to drag out the game. Simultaneous constructions that take a while to complete would be more streamlined.
Alright. So I haven't played much of Beyond Divinity, and I don't know if I will. Too much of it feels unfinished or just designed for save/load spamming. I really liked DD and wanted to like this title. It sort of isn't happening. Life is short, there are too many better things out there. On to the problems with an hour or sample of the game: * Ghosts in first level: Open the wrong door at random, die. Not that you have any way of knowing which is which. It's just ctrl+S, ctrl + L to win. Um....... yeah, that's not what makes a game a game. * Interface wackiness. Going between two character menus is rigged up badly. Press I to open inventory, then press I to close inventory... not bad. But then if you open one inventory, then the other, then press I, then it just toggles between the two. The X to close the window is hidden underneath your portraits, and you have to drag the window down and to the left so that it's half-off the screen in order to either close the window or level up stats. Whoops. There's also no real indication of which character you're leveling up skills for, other than you just remember which is which and which one's open. * Bug - I don't know how, but on the first level, I somehow ended up on the other side of a wall that had nothing on the other side. I could just run around in the endless darkness. I have a save game of it for the lulz, but... it gets boring pretty fast. I have no idea if this is common or if I'm just... super duper lucky. * Ally AI is more or less MIA. You can pause, give orders for both, and then unpause, which makes it playable. But the only AI options are Comatose and Leroy Jenkins. Anyway, I'm not sure I want to wrestle with the interface *and* play the ctrl-s ctrl-l game. I liked DD, but if the first impression is to be believed, then this is simply an unfinished game with save-load gameplay thrown in for no good reason. It seemed to have potential otherwise, but... man, these basic things. How did it happen?
