It's interesting that after 9 years of 5th Edition D&D with no true CRPG representations of the game, we now have two: Solasta and BG3. What's also interesting is how different the two games are despite both being turn-based, isometric adaptations of the same TTRPG. Where BG3 focuses on story and character development, in Solasta those concepts are an afterthought at best. In Solasta, the game is about the fighting. In fact, I would argue the game plays more like a tech demo than a full game. Or at least I would have. The base game story was a flimsy excuse to nudge you from one fight to the next, and there was basically never a solution besides hacking your way through a screen full of baddies. In Palace of Ice, by contrast, we have a game where the story is just an excuse to nudge you from one fight to the next, and there is basically never a solution besides hacking your way through a screen full of baddies. Which is kind of the same, except the story is actually pretty good this time around. The best thing I can say about Palace of Ice is that it honestly feels like playing a pretty decent home brew D&D game with your buddies. One of the biggest weaknesses of the base game is that it's D&D, but it's lacking many of the trappings of D&D, like the iconic locations and characters of the Forgotten Realms. In Palace of Ice, the world gets fleshed out enough that the game loses the feel of being a generic hack and slash and more like it's grounded in something that makes the player actually care. So I played through Solasta: Crown of the Magister, then tried to play it a second time with a new party but couldn't summon the interest, and basically forgot about the game for two years. Coming back to give Palace of Ice a try and not expecting much, I can honestly say I enjoyed this DLC, enjoyed what a true D&D experience they've crafted, and hope to see more from Tactical Adventures in the future. But maybe try to include more than just fighting, next time?
I liked this game a lot. Played through it twice - once as the 'good' guy, once as the 'bad'. Tried it a 3rd time before I got bored and quit. Almost everything here is great: Graphics, sound, interface, gameplay, story. The experience is quite linear, though, so there's no much pulling you back once you've finished. As far as being a BG game... well, it is in the sense that it's D&D, and there's a lot of depth in your party. That's forced on you, because you get to make at most one character and the rest of your party is pre-gen NPCs. Which is a blessing and a curse, because if you like their quirky personalities it's great, and if you can't bloody stand them, well, sucks to be you I guess. Personal preference, but I'd rather be able to make my whole party rather than have NPCs forced on me. The game is capped at level 12, which you'll probably hit when you're only about 2/3 of the way through the game. That's a downer, because a lot of the incentive to explore side quests and just generally do stuff evaporates when there's no more XP reward to be had. My chief complaint is that the game feels very constrained. This is Forgotten Realms, a planet-spanning campaign of sprawling lore. Yet BG3 takes place entirely on a stretch of road leading to Baldur's Gate and a small section of that city. It makes an epic game feel incredibly small. I'd rather they included an overland map and allowed you to explore a larger number of smaller area maps, as opposed to cramming everything into just a handful of large area maps. Sometimes the tiny game area impacts the story's believability, such as when goblins can't find the druid hideout, which is actually just a couple of minutes walk away. But, overall I think this game is worth playing. I'm hoping it spawns some other 5e D&D games that leverage the engine without being sequels, like BG did with Icewind Dale. My current fantasy is that they remake the Pool of Radiance series using the BG3 engine. That would be really cool.
Battletech is a big game with a lot of history, so generally speaking when a Battletech video game comes along, it needs to be judged by how it takes a slice of the game and presents it in a fun and effective way, while hopefully being true to the source material. From that perspective, HBS's take on Battletech is very good. It feels like a faithful rendition of the board game (which I haven't played since 1989, so I can't say whether it IS faithful, but it feels faithful). Aside from that, it's a fun tactical sim game with some light managerial elements. If I'm going to criticize the game, it's because it makes me want more. So I suppose that's a good thing, because I can't imagine wanting more of a bad game. But HBS's Battletech is funny in that it centres itself around a very specific storyline - the restoration of the Arano government after a bloody coup. It does this quite well, with a well-told storyline, although the game limits you to a single lance of 4 'mechs in all missions. Which is weird... your ship clearly has docks for 2 or 3 drop ships, so you spend the whole game waiting to acquire more drop ships so you can do big complex missions with multiple lances... and it never happens. So it does tend to stretch your credulity to imagine you fighting a galactic war with just four guys at a time. From that perspective, the game is very constrained, which is a big part of why it leaves me wanting more. The thing about Battletech is that the mechs range in weight from 20-ton scouts up to 100-ton assault beasts. But it's not meant to be a progression like leveling up in an RPG... a 100-ton mech is not "better" than a 20-ton mech, it's just designed for different mission roles. So the best Battletech missions let you mix light, medium, heavy, and assault lances to carry out missions that call for different mechs to do different things. Unfortunately, HBS's Battletech is too constrained to allow for that, which is too bad.
Linear to a fault. Unlike Fallout that lets you shape the story or Dragon Age that shows the impact of moral choices, this is a paint-by-numbers affair. Your progress through the game is predetermined and almost unalterable. Dialogue is clunky if not baffling. Even the quips your characters utter are puzzling, such as a one who screams “you should have yielded” followed by “I never take prisoners”. I can imagine the monsters asking “well, which is it?” You only reach level 10, making the game less engaging once you hit the level cap. Once experience points don’t matter combat becomes a pointless slog rather than a rewarding challenge. Adventure sites are vast, multi-layered affairs of yawning pits and towering architecture. Puzzles have you navigate vertical mazes of walkways and climbs. Combat requires a new level of tactical awareness, as monsters climb walls or fly to outflank your party. Comparing to past greats like Baldur’s Gate, Solasta’s faults become apparent. Baldur’s Gate had personality. Characters were interesting, the world felt real. In towns you were surrounded by commoners and the bustle of activity. You could leave the main storyline to explore the world. Solasta is the opposite. Cities are pretty but lack soul, with quest-givers and shop-keepers, but there’s no one else. Everyone is oddly awake all day and all night. Saving the world means little with no believable people around to give that goal some meaning. Adding to the artificial feel, enemies of a type are all identical. With one type of enemy warrior, each has the identical haircut and outfit. You’ll rarely want to zoom in to see a battle up close, because there isn’t much worth seeing. I enjoyed Solasta, but I have no desire to play it through again. I know exactly what will happen and when, so there’s no point. I am impressed with the game engine and the possibilities it brings. What’s missing is a team that can take that engine and build a truly great adventure on top of it.
They've got the formula down pat now, so much so that it shows. Playing Wasteland 3 doesn't feel like an immersive RPG experience so much as a connect-the-dots exercise in cranking out the expected tropes of any CRPG. All the usual contrived moral quandaries are here, moreso as an excuse to get you to play the game twice (gotta try it once as a good guy and then again as a bad guy, right?) than a real effort to explore the themes the story introduces but then does little or nothing with. Wasteland 3 feels small for some reason. The story is so contained, squeezed into such a tiny area, that it feels more like a comic book than an epic novel. Once you've explored Colorado, you'll find yourself looking at the map and thinking... huh, that's the whole game? It's tiny compared to the previous two games in the series. No new NPCs of note are added - the only ones of any interest have been carried over from Wasteland 2. The plot itself is only surprising in that it offers no surprises of any sort. At the outset, you're given a quest to capture three bad guys, and you proceed to do precisely that. You find yourself waiting for the plot twist that never comes. On the technical side, Inexile's QC department obviously phoned this one in. You'll find broken quests and dialogue trees galore. Combat is especially frustrating as characters routinely shoot through walls and terrible AI makes your allies much more of a hindrance than a boon as they block your characters and inflict friendly-fire damage on your team over and over again. The game mechanics themselves work against the story, as recruitable NPCs later in the game can't really be used because their skills won't complement the team you've developed. There are some good ingredients here. If they introduced a mid-game twist that doubled the game's size and addressed the bugs, this could be an A+ CRPG. As it stands, I'd give it a pass.
Pros: - Feels like Battletech - Fun progression building up your mercenary lance and capturing heavier mechs - Well-designed turn-based combat Cons: - Agonizingly long load times (I'm talking "bring a book to read while you wait for things to load" long) - Surprisingly linear game play: Not the open-ended sandbox you'd hope for - Stability issues, game crashes - Repetitive, predictable missions - Limited to one lance of 4 mechs: You'll never own vehicles or be able to field more than 4 mechs - Every campaign plays out identically, little replay value If you like Battletech and can get this game on sale, you should get your money's worth. But you're just as well off if you skip this one and wait for a much better sequel to eventually be released.
This is a faithful adaptation of the Warhammer tabletop game, and by "faithful" I mean it doesn't pull any punches and it doesn't hold your hand -- it tries very hard to kill you. One of the most punishing aspects is that you can only gather a small number of reinforcements between battles, so over time you find your army shrinking unless you win missions with very few casualties, which is NOT easy. This can be frustrating because you might win through to the eleventh or twelfth mission only to be slaughtered, and then you realize the problem is that you took too many losses back in mission four or five. Because you have to conserve troops so carefully, a winning strategy leans heavily on artillery and wizards (kill the bad guys from range). But, there are some random rules (like artillery misfiring and spontaneously exploding) that can ruin even this strategy. The sequel, "Dark Omens", is a more polished game in almost every way, and I'd love to see that game on gog as well. However, if you like Warhammer and are looking for a great story and a challenging game, Shadow of the Horned Rat can be a rewarding experience.
Ah, Rebellion. Let me start off by saying that if this wasn't a Star Wars game, if they had used some generic sci fi setting, this would not be worth buying. In absolute terms it isn't a very good game. Mediocre graphics even for its time, terrible user interface, lousy AI. The other problem is that it doesn't really give the feel of the movies. You'd expect that playing as the Rebellion would feel vastly different than playing the Empire - that the Empire would outnumber you and keep you ducking from shadow to shadow. But really, whichever side you play feels pretty much the same. I guess I would say that this game is overly symmetrical that way. It feels very wrong to me, for example, that the Rebels get a huge capital ship on par with the Empire's super star destroyer, but there it is. Anyhow, despite the deep and myriad flaws, this game is just really fun. I don't even know why. Something about bringing your armada of star destroyers to chase down the Rebel fleet, or sending Chewbacca and a handful of commandos to sabotage an Imperial shipyard, just resonates and transcends the flawed elements of the game. Be warned - the game is not very user friendly or accessible. If this is your first time, expect to surmount a bit of a learning curve.
