I found this game extremely mediocre at launch, it felt like a competently constructed RPG framework, that didn't do anything interesting and as a result left me almost constantly bored. The writing is abysmal, despite the serious situations unraveling in the colonies the game just keeps treating everything as a joke and it didn't give you any options to take matters into your own hands. You are always required to conform to the limited options set by the writing. As a result, none of the choices, including the "secret" third peace options, felt worth doing in the slightest. I tried to replay this recently in preparation for The Outer Worlds 2 and I couldn't bring myself to even get to the halfway point before I wanted to do literally anything else that didn't involve playing this game. I hope to god the sequel is a major improvement in the writing and isn't just a rehash of what transpired here.
Legacy of the Forge adds the story of Martin's past to Kuttenberg. Henry will find the forge his father apprenticed in completely run down and proceed to join the Blacksmith's Guild to take over the forge. The DLC adds: - Story in which you will endeavor to repair the forge and Astronomical Tower in Kuttenberg, as Martin once did. - A house and yard to repair, decorate and customize. - Daily tasks to earn Prestige (a new 'skill') for yourself and The Guild, that unlocks new forge furnishing. - New gear via your armorer and caster. - A sales chest, where a resident will slowly sell your weapons and armor. - Several new side-quests I was originally a bit disappointed as I hoped the DLC would be a way to expand the smithing further, but the system remains unchanged. However the story was good and the new home is great. It does have significant wait time between each quest, during which you will: smith items, recover looted Guild property, play dice, enter duels and archery competitions, and help The Brotherhood further. There is maybe 3-6h of story content and much more with Guild tasks. The house has probably around 60-70K groschen worth of upgrades/decorations, although you only need to buy one of each, I spend about 40K by the end. Once you buy something you can toggle back-and-forth as you want. The furniture provides unique buffs for Henry. Great: - The house is easily the best in the game, fully upgraded house will let you use all crafting stations in the game and get new buffs. There is also a sale chest where an NPC slowly sells you weapons and armor (20-1000g a day in my case). - The main story is somewhat short, but I liked it. - New side quests are pretty good. Good: - The new tasks get a little stale after a while, but its a nice way to earn money without theft or murder for newer playthroughs. Bad: - The storage chest is upstairs in your room, not in the forge, making forging a bit annoying. - No additions to the smithing minigame.
A great survival/builder game set in feudal japan, with some stumbles and poor mid-late pacing. Great: - Beautiful environments. - A large set of buildings and structures to build with. - Customizable interiors. - Custom difficulty with a massive amount of options to tweak almost any aspect of the game. Combat can be disabled entirely, resource-free building modes, cheats and much, much more... - I liked the narrated 2d cutscenes as rare as they were. Decent: - The blueprint unlock progression could use improvement, it feels very confusing and convoluted at times. - Combat can be surprisingly good as long as you play in 3rd person with lock-on. - The user interface mostly does its job after a while of learning it, but it is unintuitive. Bad: - There is almost no narrative to speak of, there are maybe 5 total story quests. - Your villagers have no personality. They all look the same, there is no option to change their appearance, clothing or give them gear. - The Dynasty interface quickly becomes cumbersome and painful to use. The moment you have more than one village, it becomes almost unusable. - Different bandit factions should stay within their own region. Making progression from region to region more impactful and making earlier regions less painful. - Performance is only ok. The game also freezes for several seconds, in the evenings of each day once you have a lot of villagers working at once. Awful: - The raids escalate too quickly and villager AI is useless. The enemy difficulty compared to dynasty size is too harsh. - At some point mid-late game, trying to balance later dynasty needs (faith, luxury) clashes with the base ones (food, water), slowing expansion to a crawl. - Having to set 3-20 builders for Special Projects between seasons is miserable. Trying to reassign villagers back to their old jobs sometimes took half the in-game day.
The DLC is split up between both the Trosky and Kuttenberg regions. Henry meets a troubled painter in a tight spot and naturally begins to assist him in his artistic endevours, slowly unraveling the painter's past. A shield painting mechanic allows players to customize any shield, more customization options unlocking over the course of the DLC. I ended up getting over 9hrs of playtime out of it, faster players may get closer to 5hrs I suspect.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is an incredible game, a fantastic sequel and an absolute must play for fans of KCD1 or RPGs. The story of Henry from KCD1 is scaled up and brought to new regions giving him a clean slate. Whether old or new, characters are well written and deeply engaging, with a wide emotional range. Most have hours upon hours of dialogue over the course of the game. Cutscenes are expertly crafted to bring key story moments to the next level, be they joyus, sad or horrific. KCD2 has the most beautiful landscapes of any game out there. The environments and lighting are stunning, and yet the game runs surpringly well for how good it looks. The audio design is near flawless. The music is heavy on ambiance as before, but there is a larger variety in themes and mood than before to completement the longer and more tonally varied story. The game is filled to the brim with details, and does a great job at reacting to player action. NPCs can almost always be checked on after quests for closure and following your own intuition is often rewarded, while following the quest objective blindly is not. Every system from KCD1 feels more refined or expanded. Skills have been streamlined or altered and level cap was raised to 30. The combat has overall been improved, but still shares some problems with KCD1, namely: the camera/targeting and master strikes ruining combos. New mechanics like blacksmithing have been added. The expanded crime system is easily the best in any RPG ever made. NPCs can now associate just your presence with thefts, and will accuse you even if they didn't catch you red handed. You can be branded and shunned, as well as executed for you crimes. The new additions not only enhance immersion, they makes the stealth more engaging, while making it more challenging to get rich quick as in KCD1. I think this game stands proudly alongside Baldur's Gate 3 as a true RPG masterpiece, that everyone should play.
How many editions do you expect us to pay for...
There isn't much to say other than: a must play for any RPG fan. The mechanics are complicated and the combat can be brutal, but the rewards for learning its systems and engaging with its story and characters are well worth the effort.
At a glance, this looked like a standard eroge taking place in a literal "horny jail" that will introduce its setup as fast as possible to get to the adult content, before concluding within 4-10h. In reality this is a **60h average** (72h for me) story driven VN, taking place in a prison that forbids and violently punishes any form of sexual language, activity or gratification. Guards dispense (in)justice at their own discretion, adjust prisoners sentences on a whim and the good are abused by the bad. Shuichirou the protagonist is send to this prison for 10 years, after he repeatedly exposes himself in public, claiming it was a form of self-expression. He is forced to conform to the prison's rigorous structure and unfair rules alongside other prisoners of different criminal backgrounds, including the three main heroines: Noah, Taeka and Chisato. As well as many fleshed out side-characters. The story contains themes of ostracization, isolation, justice and crime, abuses of power, bullying, mental illness, childhood trauma and neglect, self-growth and purpose throughout. The darker tone eventually starts mixing with more humorous scenarios and absurd character personalities. Including many visual and dialogue gags, often based around sexual topics. The shift in tone or humor itself may not appeal to everyone and the first time it happened, it was rather abrupt. Presentation-wise the game does a great job mixing simple visuals with zooms, overlays, sound effects and voice acting, to achieve a surprisingly dynamic look and feel in the scenes. Adult content ultimately is present, but very infrequent. Most early scenes being a component of the setting rather than traditional fanservice, which appears in later blocks of each heroine's route and in after stories/epilogues. Adult scenes are largely vanilla in nature, no extreme or non-consensual content is present. Some scenes have an issue of power dynamics. My recommended route order is: Taeka -> Chisato -> Noah
I'm impressed how well Alkimia has replicated the original look and mechanics. The world looks much better compared to the previous teaser, I tweaked the saturation down and increased gamma/brightness using the settings to make it look even better. I like the way combat was re-imaginated so far, it was a bit too easy though. Sword and bow were good, I'm interested in how other weapons and magic turn out. I can tell the developers took the feedback from years ago seriously, most people act like jerks or ask for favours before doing anything for you, unlike before. There are some characters who are nicer still. The English voice acting itself is pretty good, i noticed they mispronounced Khorinis however. The protagonist's movement blending and jumping animations are not great, the character looks like he has a back injury half the time. Its also somewhat difficult to tell where you can jump and where you will just slide off, but I do like the absence of the metaphysical white color or yellow tape creature all games employ these days. The performance is subpar, I had to turn down a lot of settings to get anywhere near 1440p60 and even then it felt inconsistent with a 60FPS limit. The limiter was also unavailable outside the main menu. Bugs (Spoilers): The stamina bar is broken or maybe that's the magic bar? The combat felt a bit too easy since there was no limit to when i can strike or dodge/parry even when surrounded. I broke the quest by pissing off Ratford and beating him up, which made the quest not advance after looting the note off the body. Even if I beat him up again and tried other things. I broke Kirgo, after loading a save and starting the duel, he told me to put my weapon away and after beating him up, he became hostile, but the dialogue completed as normal. I broke the main menu by going into the settings and then pressing back several times with nothing happening, until all UI items disappeared and I had to alt + F4 out of them game.
