KoToR is one of the greatest RPGs ever made. You know this already! Just get to playing it, please.
I came from Hitman WoA. This is one of the funniest games I have ever played. It's dripping with angst, there's a naked woman in the first ten minutes who is naked because marketing, and the gameplay allows you to be extremely funny by either shooting everyone in the level or blowing past guards with the incognito feature or whatever. In the first assassination mission I walked around Chinatown for five minutes, then walked right up to my target, in just the perfect spot. Much to my surprise, in this spot I was just barely out of sight of everyone but the target. On a whim, I chucked a knife directly into his face, he died instantly and I walked away completely undetected. Other than that, the game is mostly a shooter, but it can be a funny shooter, so it's good.
Game is super unfinished. The art is great, the title screen is one of the best, most promising title screens of all time, but the game itself is bad. The art is great. Character portraits, and the battle sprites are fantastic. If you like the Fire Emblem aesthetic, welcome. The audio is incomplete. Music is bland, forgettable and too loud. Menu sounds are sparse, with many inputs missing a sound entirely, and the feedback sounds that do exist are too quiet and mostly drowned out by the music. This really dramatically harms the experience and takes away from the great visuals. The story is also sparse in light of the innovations Fire Emblem games have made with storytelling, with support conversations creating an "emergent story" in each players' game. The story is also... rough. Fire Emblem isn't known for great writing, but this game reads like a more lifeless version of Vestaria Saga. The characters have just enough there, but it never coalesces into anything. The map design is terrible, and there isn't a lot of strategy to be had. Fire Emblem 1 had more complex ideas in the first level than this game has in any five missions. Like the story, the basic ideas found in the gameplay never evolve.
Plays slow as balls, story basically not worth anyone's time, and the game has an issue with making its difficulty curve compelling. Still a decent title, Xcom with mechs, based off the Battletech tabletop game but streamlined, less complex, with its own simplified rules. It also has a metagame in which you manage your mercenary company and travel between star systems looking for jobs. The main story and emergent "story events" your pilots go through are so dry and boring they really bring the game down. Career mode is best for cutting sotry fat, but the dry flavor text and lifeless voice acting still harm the game's aesthetic really badly. The music is also very forgettable. I think HBS could really take a page out of Day One's book. Mechs that have personality and smash through buildings while heavy metal music blares really brings this setting to life. The game just feels dry and lifeless, in terms of story, pacing, difficulty, a gameplay loop that never quite comes together, a metagame that is too simple in the wrong areas and too tedious in areas that should be streamlined, and the game and its DLCs being very aggressively priced make this a tough sell. It is, technically, a competent game--but it never seems to really get going, and then you suddenly realize your company can steamroll everything in the game and the game is over.
Normally I hate dungeon crawlers and turn based RPGs, but damn if this game didn't have me addicted for hours. It's depressing, I'm not even sure it's fun, but the gameplay loop is so tightly crafted and trying to make the best party composition of the limited people you have is really a good time. It's one of those games where you really can't get a "game over," and you could theoretically grind safely through, but the game makes it fun to take risks and push past what you know is safe. Just like delving into an eldritch horror in real life!
This game is a classic! Very short, but it doesn't cost much and you get a little piece of gaming history in your library. :)
I don't play Homeworld for the multiplayer. Campaign is where it's at for me! This is the one. I love the story of Homeworld 1 a lot, but I bounced off the gameplay of that game pretty quick. Emergence/Cataclysm is a more intimate story--neither better, nor worse, but the characters have more personality. The gameplay is the biggest thing here. HW1 had a lot of missions that had minor twists, but just kinda... played like an RTS match vs AI. Emergence is designed with more unique scenarios to put you through. These scenarios are basically the most exciting multiplayer tutorial I've ever played. They teach you the rules of the game in a much more careful way than HW1, layering concepts upon concepts and making them feel integrated into the story and environments. Even though it IS prepping you for multiplayer, this game holds up entirely as a single player campaign, presenting you with all sorts of challenges to overcome, then specifically calling on you in future levels to use the same tactics you've already learned while also adapting to a new challenge. They do a good job of surprising the player to keep them on their toes. The scenarios, strategies and challenges are creative and make very thorough use of the 3D space. The game rarely gets boring, and can be fast forwarded if it ever does. Straight bangin'.
Brutally hard game, but the only thing to get me my Ghost Recon fix since Heroes Unleashed. Highly recommended. Hard game, doesn't hold your hand. Rides the line between milsim and arcade very well. One of my favorite kinds of niche shooter!
Why in god's name are you reading a review for Doom?
One of the few Star Wars titles to have an appeal outside of "being Star Wars." A great shooter and, in some ways, more concise than Battlefront 2, with simplified mechanics, small differences in classes between factions, and air vehicles existing on the same maps as everyone else instead of being separate. There is some fat on the game, like the ability to go prone, but it's part of the fun. Though the visuals may be dated, they have a classic look, and Pandemic has managed to cram a lot of good game feel in, especially with the player animations and the tactile feedback of shooting. It's all very simple, and it hits just right. The skill ceiling is very low and the skill floor is even lower--you can pick it up on a whim, play it for an hour or five, ideally with friends (but it holds up without), and have the time of your life.
