The game bleeds (pun intended) atmosphere. The sound effects and music perfectly capture the world of vampires living in a modern city for me. The background graphics are also often really good and somewhat detailed, but, sadly, the drawn characters don´t hold up to that standard. Some look ok, some just stupid, and they never change appearance. The story is not as bad as some reviewers make you think. It includes many unique characters and lore. Yes, it has kind of a cliffhanger, yes, it doesn´t make sense at once.. but once you look at it from different angles and review what happened in the beginning, it becomes a bit clearer and less nonsensical. For the asked price of 20 i have been well entertained for 10 hours, and I that´s only one playthrough. The reasons for 4 instead of 5 stars: - you actually can´t "complete" the game, some storylines will be cut short by the "grande finale" before you know it. - "the hunger" seems to be a bit buggy; although i´ve fed, it still shows the dialogue for being hungry. - some answers fit to all of the story choices, making it seem like the choice didn´t matter
BC4000, a chess-simulator with -at that time- superb graphics and animations. There was a sticker on the box, warning ppl that this game would only run on the newest gpu, iirc. Ah, those were the days... The game itself.. it´s.. Chess. With animations. They are very well done, but after 30 minutes, you have seen them all and have 2 options: partially switch off animations, or use the quite ugly 2d mode. Biggest con for me is that the ai is slow, like, very slow. Takes up to 1 minute per turn for thinking to fight an easy opponent (me). The AI is supposed to be variable, but I´d have liked it better to just have a setting of XX Elo or something.
Rogue Mage is now the... 4th installment of a "Gwent game", iirc, but the FIRST one that does not totally mess up the rules and gameplay you maybe know from another gwent game. This one uses the engine and some of the cards from the Gwent online game and turns it into a game of several one round battles with random card rewards. Is it "roguelike"? Yes. You lose one battle, you can start the map all over. Is it fair? Depends. Some bosses are way harder than others, depending on the deck and starting hand. Is it fun? Yes, but I liked thronebreaker better so far. OK for the price, I´d say. 3-4 Stars.
this game is awesome. now it´s 30 years old. I played it back then, and loved every bit of it. Now, 30 years later, I gave it another try.. and what can I say? It still grips me with it´s humor, the art style, the gameplay.. I STILL know how to solve the first hour of the game, still remember the scenes, even where the game gives you different options on how to solve a situation... I think that says it all about how great an impression the game made on me. For those who never played it: Good animations, superbly colored backgrounds, funny dialogue,.. what more do you want from a game? Just play the first 10 minutes.. if it catches you, you´re sold ;) This game is gold, one of the best.
There are games that define a genre. Witcher 3 was far too late to have done that. But then there are games that take everything there is in that genre and take it to the next level. This is what Witcher 3 has done. The combination of graphics (+animations, weather effects), sound effects, music (!) and story telling is still unmatched, even after 8 years. And just when you think you have seen it all, you start the add on "Hearts of Stone" and witness the most beautiful display of a peasants´ wedding in gaming history. Finally, you are in for another surprise in "Blood and Wine". This game is ART.
The game absolutely grips you with it´s atmosphere for .. let´s say, 10 hours..by then you will have failed the first playthrough but should have almost finished the second try. At this point, the "endgame" is mostly dealing with bad guys that one-shot-kill you. And since you are not allowed to save, you need to hectically hit alt+F4 to get out of the game before the death is saved into the automatic savegame, ruining the whole playthrough so far. That´s where it starts becoming more grind than fun, imho. Also, due to the random events, the difficulty level is also very random. On my second playthrough, I was unable to get the much needed parts, but was totally overflowing with wood materials. Trader showed up very rarely, so the whole game ground to a stop because of me unable to secure enough spare parts.. Overall: very intense, not perfect.
