I just beat the game. Everything about this game was right up my alley. It's a fast-paced character action game. There's a distinct lack of the usual BS you get in games. No absurdly big fall damage or annoying controls. Moving and fighting feels good. It has a bunch of mechanics, not just the time rewind stuff. But the time rewind feels really good. The plot moves at a breakneck pace. But the characters are thinking about their situation and actively address things you think they should. So the entire thing was very engaging. The only two problems are at the extreme early and end of the game. Shooting the initial rifle really sucks, like it doesn't have consistent controls. But early on you find a Machinegun that makes the guns go from 0 to 100. It's outstanding and feels great. Then, the final boss has an overtuned attack that kills you way too quickly. It's probably a bug. But unless there's a mod to fix it, you just have to suck it up.
Other than that really souring the mood, most of this game was pretty good. It looked really bad at first, but I stuck with it and it grew on me. But yeah, bosses have way too much health. Way too much. They should literally be cut by 50%. If there's a mod that does that then this might be worth playing. Otherwise, just watch a Let's Play of it.
I am about two hours in. There is so much wrong with this game. Do not bother. As usual for GOG reviews, the top 5-star reviews are clearly paid for, or done by bots, not genuine human beings' opinions. For one, I keep forgetting what the game is called. Black Geyser: -- I had to stop writing this review to go check what the subtitle was. Couriers of Darkness. There are no hooks in that name. The art of the guy with his two faces does not hook, or link, or click, with the name Black Geyser nor the name Couriers of Darkness. Neither did anything I saw in the first two hours of the game. I was interested in this game a few weeks ago but struggled to find it because I could not remember its name. I'll probably forget it again after writing this review. It's clunky. A game inspired by the classics from the 90s and early 00s should not play as bad as they did. But this is that bad, or worse. The buttons are tiny, the icons are not descriptive. It's not clear which tab is open on your character screen. Feedback comes in slowly. Games today need to be better than games from 20 years ago, not worse. There should be an inventory sort option for price:value ratio. That should be mandatory for these sorts of games. Tutorials appear in the top right of the screen, instead of the top left, where they should be. We read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. If something new appears on screen you want us to look at, like a tutorial box, place it in the top-left. Furthermore, tutorial icons use the same color scheme as the rest of the game, so they blend in with all the other brown and off-yellow colors on screen. They don't stand out. The voice acting is painfully bad. The voice actors do not speak like English speakers speak. It's as if they got people who do not speak English to voice these lines. Their intonation is all over the place. I don't mean accents. I mean the pitch and volume of their voices flails wildly about with each line. Why bother having voice acting then?
I bought my copy of this from Matrix Games, not GOG. This game is boring, plainly put. There is nothing to recommend it. Usually a 4x space game has some kind of trick up its sleeve, some kind of trick, special mechanic, new take, or something that otherwise makes it stand out from the other hundred 4x space titles. Distant Worlds: Universe does not. It's bland, dull, drab, any other synonym you can think of. They all apply. Its UI is horrifically old and outdated - it comes from Matrix Games after all, and they make games for old grognards that'll run on Windows 98. I played the tutorials and then the introduction game for as long as I could stomach it. This game is simply NOT FUN, and I highly recommend against buying it if you are not able to get a refund for it. I got burned by it. Don't suffer like I did.
Head over to Larian's tech support forum and find the gigantic thread about corrupted save files. There are serious problems. Some report the Steam version of this game has since been fixed, while the GOG version has not. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME UNTIL THOSE BUGS ARE FIXED! Don't spend your money on a broken product! And ignore all these silly 5-star paid reviews that aren't telling you about these bugs!
The game just came out and there's 3 pages of 5 star reviews? Come on, these reviews are obviously paid for. You should never believe a 5-star review.
I bought Risen 3 on Humble Bundle for $1 along with 3 other games. You can think of it as costing $0.25. It wasn't even worth that. It just plain is not fun. The controls are awful, the animations are janky, the combat was bad, the voice acting was abysmal, the inventory was unintuitive, and the same overall is simply bad. It feels like a B-team on a shoestring budget made this. Do not waste your money on this trash.
It's good to see another game trying to pick up the pieces of the shattered hopes Spore left us with 10 years ago. Hopefully it succeeds, but I'm probably going to forget this exists for the next 2 years until I hear some big news about it.
Some things you need to know: 1) The loading screen says it may take "up to a minute." What it's really going to do is take SEVEN (7) or more minutes. In return for this ENORMOUS load time, quickloading (QL) takes about 10 seconds each time. Unfortunately you will be QL a lot. Many times I would QL, play for just one second before making an error, then have to spend 10 seconds QL again. Imagine repeating this a dozen times until you stop screwing up. QS saves everything about the game at the time you hit the button, including your camera angle, currently selected ability, currently selected character, etc. 2) The bugs in this game are minor. I've had a few where my characters would stop playing their movement animations but would otherwise behave just fine. However if you give them move orders to the same position you'll notice your characters bump into each other frequently and impede each others' progress. 3) It took me three days to beat every mission once. Missions are made to be replayed at least 3 or 4 times each, to achieve every challenge. If you're a completionist you'll have a good month of gameplay here. 4) You can select multiple people at once by dragging a box with RIGHT click. RMB. Not LMB. 5) Characters' selection hotkeys are fixed. You will regularly be given a selection of characters who are not conveniently labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. If this bothers you you will need to rebind the selection keys. 6) You will often be clicking on things you can't reach because they are on different height levels. 7) This game has some kind of eye tracking software support. It's not TrackIR but it's something similar. I have no idea why they have it. This game would have been vastly improved if instead of QS and QL they let you rewind or jump back in time up to so many seconds, like you see in Achron. Something to keep you in the game and not staring at a QL screen multiple times a mission. Gameplay is solid; story and OST are forgettable. Play for the gameplay.
