If you like zombie games, open-world exploration, the freedom to go pretty much anywhere in huge maps (including on top of things), this game is worth picking up! If you like FPS action, blood, shooting, blood, slashing, blood, decapitations, blood, explosions, blood, fire, electricity, and, did I mention blood? Then this game is well worth picking up! The graphics are good. The voice-acting is good. The feel of free-running and combat are both good. The zombie apocalypse survival atmosphere is fantastic! The crafting is nothing spectacular, but is useful and simple enough to be a nice bonus to the game rather than a chore. Even the writing is engaging, clever, intriguing, funny, interesting . . the writing is really quite fantastic . . . but only as long as you stick to side quests. As good as the writing is for everything in the game other than the main quest, the main story line is terrible, terrible, terrible, and the reason this game only gets 4 stars from me. Actually, the writing for the main quest is so bad that the game drops to 1 or even 0 stars immediately after suffering through another main story segment. I've never played a game where the primary bad guy has stood in the open right in front of me while I am holding a rifle, and I not only can not just shoot him and be done with it. No, you MUST watch cut scenes filled with annoyingly terrible speeches, absurdly stupid or out-of-character decisions, or which end with you magically, illogically disarmed and thrust into ridiculous combat situations . "I just killed 20 of your men in here, but now you have 5 of them with you, so I SURRENDER!!" <facepalm> And I had to do an extended platforming section at one point while my character hallucinated and I was subjected to another annoying, idiotic speech, which did absolutely nothing for the plot but did make me motion sick. But the play keeps me wading through the miserable story parts! Buy this for the game, not for the story.
I still have both of the Etherlords games on disc, and I still play them. My original review was too long, so here is a bullet-point version: Pros 1) Heroes, units, spells, and battle scenes are rendered completely in 3D. When you play a unit card, that 3D unit appears on the battlefield and is completely animated. I can understand why this has not been done since, that I am aware of, because it is so much cheaper and easier to crank out a bunch of 2D cards for a 2D game, but, after playing either Etherlords games, it will leave you wistfully imagining how much better all CCGs could be if they were all rendered the same way. 2) The five races in the game have very distinct and interesting looks, play-styles, and strategies. You will play with all of them during the course of the campaign, and never feel like you are just repeating an earlier race with a re-skin. The races are all well thought-out, and their units and spells always stay true to the nature of each group. 3) The SP campaign is decently long, interesting, and challenging the first time through. It can be frustrating, because it is more of a puzzle game rather than a "always just play your obviously "best" cards". There is no one deck or strategy that will get you past all of the fights. Some fights will take a bit of trial and error to figure out. 4) The deck building/management tools and interface are very straight-forward and easy to use. Cons 1) There is no MP, and no "random map" SP battles like in the first one. The studio released the game before it was finished, with a place for random map and MP play but no content there. When they later released the modding tools, everyone found out why. The scripting system for the game is so complicated and unintuitive that nobody can make it work right. 2) The lack of random and MP play makes the game repetitive after the first run-through (though I still play it). 3) The studio is still in business, but there's still no Etherlords 3.
