I can imagine Felix Jizzberg (and his many, many copycats) going for this, a lot.
Despite some improvements over the first game the sequel is tepid, tangled mess. Not having the source skill for the majority of the first map was a clear indicition of the devs falling out of the stupid tree and sustaining a large enough hit just once for it to affect (sour) the game for me. It always felt like an uphill slog that just once needed to chill out and not be faced with a laundry list of places to go and people to murder just to get X so you can now Y. Don't get me wrong there are some good ideas such as the speaking the ghost skill and having all the dialogue voiced for them but it comes after what feels like a 10 mile march in the rain beside Mr Naggy who constantly reminds you that you've got lots more sub-quests to do. And then having acquired said skill there's not an immediate thrill in using it when casting storm spell then lightning is more thrilling because you watch live people jiggle instead of dead ones moping, I mean floating and you've been able to do that since pretty much the start of the game. On the item/crafting side there is far too much crap and nothing to do with it and inventory management is no longer charming or desirable it's now a failure of restricting scope. Although I did like the power-skill item gems that you can put into equipment when you add this with said awful inventory management (or lack of) levelling up was no longer rewarding in a click a skill to make a better way but more of a tedious in a hunt under the bed for the thing to combine with the thing in the sock draw to make shield better. I've played this game through twice (second run was as the undead man whose bucket on head joke isn't funny when it hinders your combat options and only really comes into his own once you get a face-transplant thing WAAAAAAAAY too late in the game). I will probably return to it again in a couple of years but for the moment I really want something with less fragmentation in terms of maps and more in terms of focused gameplay.
Try this for a laugh: play the game and only click on one side of the screen. Now play again and click only on the other side of the screen. Congratulations you have just experienced cognitive dissonance egregious failure number 4 of video games, also known as, player choice means fuck all because the game dev is nowhere near as schooled in the fundamentals of gameplay as they think they are. Reigns is as crass as the premise it was built on. As a point-making mechanism about the Brexit referendum (or elections, more broadly) it doesn't live up to that goal. In the real world actions have consequences to which there is no undo, or re-do or restart. Once you pick left or right (collectively) then you live with that and said choice reverberates outwards opening and closing other choices later down the road (enriching or shitting on humanity depending on your perspective). In Reigns choices mean nothing because you're going to die quickly anyway and you will play as your heirs who will also die.. ad absurdum. In Reigns choices do not open up or cut off other choices (although the game would dearly love you to believe that) it merely unlocks crapola that you might encounter with your next game but that's it. In Reigns only the you, the Ruler, matter, not your kingdom (the aim is for you to stay alive after all). Vulgar, stupid and in desperate need of an education. That's the electorate in general and coincidentally the game dev of Reigns too.
Bad combat, poorly structured and with enough cut-scenes to warrant that the game director is awarded an honorary Palm D'Or for being a coward and being the sodding film director they've always dreamed of being. I am constantly amazed at the praise heaped on this series when once you strip away the graphics and movie-pretentions throughout the gameplay is crap and it feels like you're always getting a pile of quests and items puked on you for no discernable reason other than to distract you from the irrelevance of story and the limitations placed on your movement and character. Speaking of character, did Geralt just speak or did someone throw a cardboard box with a grumpy face scrawled on the side onto a duck and record it with an old tape recorder for added crackle?
Transitior is like two animals mutilated and stitched crudely back together by a foolish game director who insists that it's working and it's what we do and it's what we've always done and it will have twice the appeal of either animal prior to vulgar vivisection. The story for me is what needs to go, or never to have gone in. The combat shines and the mechanics and art combine beautifully. I just wish there was none of the waffle before, during and after action so I could zone out and enjoyed this game as a series of semi-tactical battles and it's gorgeous setting. Oh. Dear.
War is hell and so is my experience of this game. This War Of Mine is very, very worthy and grimy (sans Multicultural London English accents and sportswear) and wants to gently press your face into the horror of war with an intense sober look on it's face (much like the look on the face of an History teacher if you sniggered at the names of the architects of the holocaust). Sure This War Of Mine avoids outright pretentiousness and takes pains to go into detail about the detail of the thing about the detail of the event in the detail of this war.. and yet with all the reportage, monochrome aesthetic and asthmatic writing I always suspected that the devs had carefully removed their berets and well-thumbed copies of philosophical tracts before actual development but the lingering effects are just after every mouse click in tiny echoes of pretentiousness. (Now that's pretentious!) I found this game never amounted to very much but then I've read a lot of history books (no I am neither a history teacher nor a book reviewer) and perhaps my expectations were different. Or maybe I was expecting something that wasn't fundamentally a zombie survival horror game, without the zombies, that had fewer constantly decaying "life" meters whose constantly depleting display of life force would have accurately mirrored my own will to live while playing this game.
I loved the changing aspects between modern day and turn of the century-ish cities all to follow a detective story with a hint of the supernatural about it. The puzzles are logical when they need to be, timed-based when they need to be and daft when they need to be...pacing overall is really good and never feels like an endless slog of dialogue getting in the way of the chase moving you from location to location within each time period just at the right moment.
Get's dull quickly and the difficulty in the single player is horribly uneven. I wish there were more skills to do for each unit and the maps were a little larger because this game feels constrained in a bad way.
I liked this game a lot (despite the card as skills mechanic, personal prejudice) and the dice rolling mechanic worked well. The adoration the devs had for older isometric RPGs shows in every aspect of the game from the art, UI and level design and yet it still felt new when it could have gone lame and barely distinguished itself. I have two gripes: needs a longer story (after 20 levels I could have easily enjoyed 20 more) and the plot twist that screwed over my roster either doesn't need to be there or needs more satisfying resolution and/or revisiting later on.
It's not proper coding, let's be honest, but the appeal and thrill of assembling all your code and then watching the human get it right cannot be over-stated. My favourite part of the game was actually the babbling noises for the speech for the various the departments, subtle but funny.
