Talisman is fundamentally a game that wants to be played with a bunch of your friends around a table and plenty of beer, so you can all have a good laugh at whatever ridiculous stuff the dice and cards dump on you. I'd give the tabletop experience 4/5. As a solo computer game, the level of randomness gets more frustrating than funny, but it can still be an amusing time-killer. I got it on sale, and feel like I got my money's worth, but I'm not sure I'd feel the same at full price. Yes, there is a lot of DLC, but none of it is mandatory. It's all what DLC should be, add-ons to mix things up once you're bored with the base game. Wait until it's on sale, get a couple of friends to play with in chat, and have fun.
I like it better, tho, I think because the characters are more blank slates, so I can make up my own backstories and stuff for them more easily. I disliked most of the characters in Halfway enough that I didn't get very far in it. In terms of pros and cons, I feel like recline187 summed it up pretty well. There's a lot of cool stuff, but some options are clearly superior to others, and, like so many TBT games, it ends up heavily pushing you to a reactive (i.e. hide around corners on overwatch) playstyle, which I find to get kind of boring. Also, it's a minor thing, and maybe it's just rng, but my team is almost all dudes, and I want some more variety. Wish there were more customization options, or at least more recruits to pick from, so I could have some more ladies around.
As it stands, this is pretty much a more polished version of Sanctus Reach, with a different selection of factions. The graphics are better, the controls feel more intuitive (and you can now rebind keys, which is a very welcome improvement), fewer units feel so weirdly balanced as (e.g.) the Killa Kans in SR, and the campaign missions don't stick you in a winding canyon that violates the laws of geology. I like the Momentum mechanic they added a lot, since it rewards playing actively rather than just sitting around on overwatch waiting for the enemy to make a mistake like some games. There are some downsides. The Skirmish and Planetary Supremacy modes have pretty boring missions compared to the campaign, so there's not a whole lot of replayability. Really needs some more proper campaigns with specifically designed scenarios (which, as far as I can tell, the added Factions aren't getting). There's still no brightness control in the settings, which seems like an incredibly bizarre choice to me. At certain times of day, the game is unplayable for me because everything on the screen is too dark. It still has some of SR's issues with not being clear which areas are or are not available to move on, and there's no way to highlight interactables, which is really obnoxious in one mission in particular. Also, and I know this is a tiny thing, but it still bugs me, there's no way to assign an "End Turn" key. You can only do that with the mouse. As with SR, the soundtrack and voice acting are perfectly serviceable, but nothing special. I got bored of them after a while and just muted the game and put something on the stereo.
The Chaos Daemons fight quite a bit differently than the Orks of the core game. It made for a nice challenge figuring out how to deal with their different strengths and weaknesses. They also did a great job of differentiating the units belonging to each of the 4 Chaos Gods. Nurgle is the most durable, and hands out debuffs like candy, Khorne is in your face with a bunch of axes, Slaanesh is fast and deadly, but fragile, and Tzeentch has a couple of really nasty magical tricks on top of the ranged attacks and magic force fields you might expect. The big stompy war engines, Soul Grinders and the Lord of Skulls, are really nasty, and will wreck your entire day if you let them. The campaign is maybe a bit short, but playing it after the endurance event that the Sons of Cadia DLC involves, that was kind of welcome. It also has no shortage of variety, with missions playing as each of the three Space Wolf Great Companies, and even one as the Orks. Definitely recommended if you liked the core game.
It's cool to get to play as the Guard, but the lack of Infantry Heavy Weapons leaves the Infantry feeling short-ranged and ineffective. That said, it is really fun to rumble around with a bunch of tanks and Valkyries (and Knights in some missions!), so if you just play it as an Armoured Company, it works pretty well. The other issue is just inherent in the matchup: With Orks vs. Imperial Guard, we've got two armies with tons of cheap units, and the campaign includes a bunch of missions with a very high points limit. Combined, this means that many of the missions take a LONG time to play thru. I could usually get thru a chapter or two of a book during each of the enemy turns during the early-mid game of each mission. Mostly, tho, if you've played the core game, you know more or less what to expect here. Overall, most things feel and work more or less like they should based on the fluff, and the game scales up to some truly epic battles. Worth it if you liked the core game and want more.
The Good: It really captures the feel of playing 40K. Units generally work more or less as I expect them to. Being experienced with the TT version, it was really quick to get the hang of the tactics involved here. The graphics, while not great, are more than serviceable for a game viewed on this scale. You're not going to be spending much time zoomed way in to appreciate detail, so there isn't really a reason to go that detailed. The Bad: The UI feels like it's from around the turn of the century, not 2017. Line of Sight and movement costs, in particular, are really badly presented. Not helped by the fact that a number of terrain pieces are clearly based on TT models that allow Units to fire over them, but are complete LoS blockers here. All the dead units staying around is cool, but there end up being so many that it's hard to tell what's actually still there some times. Could really use an option to hold down a key to highlight important stuff on the screen. Some Units have really weird balance issues. Playing both as SW and as Orks, I found that VenDreads, Kanz, and Deff Dredds were far stronger than Knights or Gorka/Morkanauts, which just feels wrong. Also, the SW have nothing that consistently works well on heavy armour. Meltas, Lascannon, and Thunder Hammers all just bounce off even Kans. And they work better than what the Knights are packing! The Meh. The sound has so little variation that it just gets annoying really fast. Just mute it and put on the Mechanicus soundtrack instead. Not much replay value, but if you pick it up on sale, there's enough content there to be worth it. I'm not a big fan of the "XP only for kills" system, since it makes it very hard to level up some units, even tho they're doing huge amounts of damage, but rarely strike the finishing blow (e.g. Whirlwind, Flamers). All in all, tho, I'm looking forward to picking up the DLC campaigns when I have a bit of spare cash again, so I'd call it worthwhile.
The Temple of Elemental Evil is a classic D&D module for a reason. It's an absolute masterclass in adventure design, with all kinds of interesting hooks and details and backstory. This is a pretty faithful adaptation, and the best CRPG implementation of D&D 3.5 that exists to my knowledge. Unfortunately, it's pretty buggy (even with the patches), and the interface is incredibly awkward and frustrating. No ability to zoom or rotate the main map view makes some rooms nearly impossible to find, some enemies nearly impossible to see, and some positions completely impossible to stand in, which can make certain fights far more difficult than they need to be. I've reloaded so many times because of characters getting killed by a mis-click, or because the game doesn't clearly indicate when an action will trigger attacks of opportunity, or what parts of a room are or are not impassible/LoS blocking. There are also a ton of things that use a really awkward drag and drop interface, like inventory management (including looting and buying/selling) and things like spell selection, which where handled far better in games more than a decade older with simple select option:select action button or hotkey controls. I also highly recommend looking up a walkthrough or something. There is a ton of stuff that I have no idea how anyone found, short of just brute force working through every option in every NPC's dialogue tree and/or pixel hunting until they found stuff that changed the cursor. If you can fight your way through all that, tho, there really is a truly great adventure underneath it all. I'd love to see a remastered edition or something that redid the interface and updated the graphics while leaving the mechanics all exactly the same.
