Best played in core difficulty (which really forces you to use all the portions, scrolls and whatchamacallit you have), it is really Baldur Gates III.
I found it is best played in core difficulty, which forces you to use the whole game (scrolls, potions, etc). Otherwise it is a bit too easy so details no longer matter. Obviously, it means slower in-game progress.But that is worth it, especially if you are familiar with the similar titles. I think Baldur Gates 3 is challenged by this natural successor to BG2.
As pointed out by many reviewers already, the last chapters are cut from a different fabric from the rest of the game. And the first part is better ; then end seems a bit pointless, with moot dialogs, events and atmospheric walking sequences. The game is still a good game, worth being played, even if after playing the prologue something else could have been expected
Promising demo, between late Sherlock Holmes deduction system and Shadowrun ambiance.
This is a decent followup of Stalker (both the video games and Tarkovsky's movie). Great ambiance, decent weapons/gameplay. Worth it, including the DLC that offer some perspective. It covers lot of possible outcomes of a nuclear fallout.
At that time Paradox-game follower, I was looking forward to it. The game started by an option, with a checkbox, to play a female character as if it was a male; so it starts by misrepresenting ancient Rome in many ways, for an undetermined benefit, in a game that takes history as its setup. Minus for the immersion. And then the gameplay felt dull to the point I played less than 4 hours. Maybe this kind of game is not for everyone? Sure, but I usually am ok this this grand strategy genre (600~ hours of EU4, ~830 hours of CK2 or 460~ hours of HoI4, etc) so that's not exactly the problem. If I could I ask a refund.
I dont know what is all the fuss about bugs I'm hearing about. I found no blocker bugs. I cannot complain about the interface/gameplay that is overly fluid and logical to me. Unlike RDR2 for instance, or Fallout 76/4 that is still has the same unusable interface since a decade of earlier games. Granted, the environment isn't has rich as the Witcher series: it should not come as a surprise to anyone that actually read the books; it is not an obvious and easy task to invent something so deep. Maybe they spent too much time on stuff that should not matters so much and no enough on some others. Maybe they should have avoided the mass advertisement. But it is still a very good game, one that all players I personally know are still playing after many hours, which you cannot say for many expected releases this year (CK3, Empire of Sins, etc, also heavily advertised and clearly not delivering the goods, or even THe Outer Worlds, not bad but not captivating either).
French, sponsored by EU and CNC, as you can expect : nice images, nice paintings, visually pleasing, a bit some sort of contemporary Versailles 1685, lip-sync quite off, crash like hell (never seen a game crashing so often, seriously), terrible user interface (a disorganized index of characters is named a "journal") overly manicheist understanding of History beyond some pretention sophisticated vernish (not even mentioning conceptual errors like confusing democracy and republic while mentioning Theseus, authors claim christian crusades were the starting point of religious wars - as if any war in most of history was not half-colored by religion like everything else, as if even this first crusade they discuss was unrelated to previous attacks of the Oriental romain empire by muslims), lazy confused inconsistent main plot (beside the conspirationist rant, they could have built real plot, instead of some esotheric easy bullcrap - back again to manicheism ) that end über-ridiculously, but puzzles are decently made. As other pointed out, later episodes seems much worse than previous. A considerable part of episode 4 consist about walking back and forth on the same path as before (including a labyrinth), for instance. Typos were not even checked (volWöllner or Won Wöllner ?). An six letter code to type? 3 clicks and the same dialog to input for each of these six characters. And it even crash even more often (to the point that giving more than 1/5 is not an option), bugs even more stupid (de-doubling?). And everything seems half-done: on a same room, one window door is not clickable, the other is there with a minus, while previously you could at least try to open such windows. I wonder how exactly EU and CNC funding played a role in this game development.
Technically, this game aged badly : interface not up to custom key bindings (always give wrong info etc), gameplay is clunky (clipping issues, stuck in a stair...). The characters have odd practices, the kind you'd be curious to see someone actually try: descending on a rope as a zip line just with gloves or free falling 100 meters and then grabbing a pole to hang with one hand, etc. The main plot is inconsistent : a failed humanitarian mission seems to have almost unlimited ressources and, altogether, no connection to the homeland. Why? It is as inconsistent has having troops fighting with knives on the side of guys in überarmor with miniguns. There is supposedly some sort of philosophical twist about how you can be evil by trying to be good. And surely some humanitarian mission caused scandal (trading blankets for sex, etc). But creating a genocidal warzone out of nowhere and that is a bit too much nonsensical. It completely miss specific context for instance of yougoslovia or syrian civil war. You are supposed to believe that you are forced to do horrible things just because. Well, the setup is that people are doing terrible things already. As example, you are supposed to feel bad to use weapons to defend your friend being hanged violently by a mob. Should you?
