Recent reviews by Aristiden

People saying the game is too short or rushed or awful are simply overexaggerating. Every time I look up something about the game, the reddit/forum post about it is titled something like “Are Owlcat Kidding? This game sucks!” and it complains about problems I have never encountered.

It’s a good game! It’s a great WH40K game. I think people are complaining that it isn’t a perfect game, and it never really hits a consistent high quality. But you have to remember that this is effectively a creative sequel to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which was an exhausting, clichéd, and flawed CRPG itself. If you look at any one part of Rogue Trader and compare it to its predecessor, Rogue Trader is better at almost everything. The combat is much more satisfying. The universe is gorgeously rendered and immersive. And there’s more varieties of that world to see. The dialogue and narrative writing is generally stellar work. The voice acting, although irritatingly rare, is seriously wonderful.

The tone that Rogue Trader is going for is appropriate for the 40K universe, so you are not going to be guided through a straightforward theme-park experience.

There are a few things holding it back. The companions themselves are mostly good, but we do not get to spend enough time with each of them as people. That complaint is more or less constant throughout. The world is cool, but there are plenty of locations or situations I wanted to spend more time with. Combat can take a while, but even so there are usually one too few encounters for every environment after Chapter 1, or too few levels to explore in a given location. I don't think it's fair to say the game lacks depth, because every cut it takes is deep, but it just doesn't take enough of them. This hurts even more when a particular mission doesn't feel like its worth taking up the space it has.

Combat balance probably gets strange depending on your team comp. Before the end of the game I had to turn up the difficulty despite starting on normal. Because a bad build might double the time needed to play this game, your experience may vary and it's worth it to share mine. With this comp, I was capable of finishing most encounters after Act 3 in a single combat round:
- Pryomancer/sniper player character (sniper only before Act 3, main party DPS after unlocking Molten Beam)
- 2 melee tanks (high toughness, dodge, or parry. Not heavy armor)
- Navigator Officer (first turn in combat, only buffed and gave turns to snipers)
- Burst ranged soldier (Bolter specialty)
- Assassin Sniper (capable of 500-3k damage in a single shot)

I have an outdated PC (GTX 1060, R5 2600X) and was capable of running the game on low-medium settings with 25-45 fps. Not ideal, but it's not a game that requires 60+ fps performance to play or high settings to look good. Cutscenes were occasionally near-broken with 10-15 fps.

It's a detailed game, so there are a lot of overlapping systems. Not all of the systems overlap properly, but I only remember having to reload a save to continue the game once. Again, that's not ideal, but certainly playable. You'll get visual bugs pretty often and sometimes I feel like I shouldn't be able to do thing things I did with the colony management system, but I only encountered one potentially progress-halting bug near the end of my playtime so it didn't bother me that much.

First and foremost, the art and historical detail is masterful. The only game I've played that comes close to capturing this level of accuracy in a game is Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but because this covers a different period and perspective of Medieval Europe, there's so much to learn.

I won't spoil the story, but the game has some issues, to the point where I disagree with its overwhelmingly positive reception. The purpose and impact of your decisions is not well choreographed. There are plenty of situations where my decisions resulted in the exact opposite outcome from the one I wanted. I wasted plenty of time (maybe an hour in total) trying to cover every potential option I had since the game did not always clearly communicate when all of my options had been expended.

There are 3 acts, and the first 2 are very well done. The third is disruptive but never delivers on any advantages that the disruption promises. By that, I mean that the story established in the first and second acts would have been significantly more effective if it was allowed to conclude in the way it seemed it was going to. Instead, the third act introduces a variety of plot lines and story decisions that neuter an otherwise beautiful story. I don't regret finishing the game, but it promised something different and better than it delivered, which keeps it from sticking out in my mind as a game I would ever mention when listing my favorites.

I don't like MMO endgames because I almost exclusively play these games solo. Regardless of that, ESO has probably the best quest writing in any MMO, and they have at least 300 hours of story quests in the base game, and a couple hundred more in expansions. The lore that ESO explores in the Elder Scrolls universe is occasionally very surprising. The world and art direction is beautiful, even if it is lower fidelity than modern games. Combat is single-target and thus un-immersive, but the PvP component is fun to engage in once you've reached a reasonably high level.

Reviewers I trusted told me this was the best ARPG out there. Better than Path of Exile, better than Diablo. Well it's certainly not better than Path of Exile, and I haven't played Diablo.

The visual style of Grim Dawn, while consistent and pretty, is not as evocative and stylistic as Path of Exile. The story is worse, too, since Grim Dawn is a generic grim dark setting where the player character fights against a couple fantasy factions who have very little depth. New threats appear and attack without explanation, and the faction which is clearly designated as the existential threat at the start of the game disappears and is replaced with another (who is not introduced) halfway through the campaign. In Path of Exile, your story evolved with your actions, and so did the enemies who matched a constantly changing setting. The writing for dialogue and text notes in Grim Dawn is ineffective, lacking any passion or poetry to immerse us in the world.

Grim Dawn's level design is more directed than Path of Exile, but it's also more straightforward and lacking environmental hazards. Moment-to-moment combat is largely the same as Path of Exile, except with less choreographed AOE attacks and status effects (making boss fights confusing at times).

The progression and character builds behind combat, though, are seriously lacking in Grim Dawn. In Path of Exile, character progression can be daunting, but there are a ton of ways to build any class, and at least in my experience, a particular build will still allow for at least one movement spell, a couple AOEs, a summon or two, and one or two strong primary skills.
In Grim Dawn, my final build was completely reliant on a single skill, and the 4 other skills I used were vaguely effective support skills. This is because when you level up, you get a skill point that can go toward specific skills, making investment into those skills necessary to produce reasonable DPS. This disincentivizes players from using multiple skills in a build, because investing more into a single skill is always better than spreading out those skill points. Grim Dawn also forces you to double-class, meaning that they expect you to invest points into more than one class. This conflicts with the incentives of the leveling skill point system I described, which means points invested into the second class are usually wasted.

I played an Arcanist main, Occultist secondary character. My goal was to maximize spellcasted elemental damage with the Arcanist powers and have a few summoned Occultist pets to keep me protected while I casted. By the time the first playthrough was over, my Arcanist build was fine, but I completely regretted choosing Occultist, since I could have been twice as strong with all of my attention focused in Arcanist skills. Only characters who have completed the campaign once can move on to the Elite difficulty, which is meant as a way to continue your character's progression (new levels and better gear) by repeating the game with the gear and skills you've already earned on harder enemies. I wanted nothing more than to choose a different secondary class so I could change my build slightly, but the damage was already done, you can't change your class or remove skill points from class levels. I could barely hold out against enemies in the new difficulty because of the build. And why would I want to suffer through the campaign a second time with a character I didn't really like when I didn't even like the campaign or the world to begin with? So I didn't, I stopped playing.

In conclusion, I mostly regret playing Grim Dawn. I spent $6 for a... fine 30-ish hour campaign. Path of Exile is free, twice as long, and has a better soul than Grim Dawn (stronger style, more varied combat). Obviously I'd recommend that first, if you haven't played it.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance succeeds at what it sets out to deliver: a world that looks, sounds, and feels like the Holy Roman Empire on the brink of the Renaissance. If you enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077, you will enjoy KCD. It takes about 110 hours to complete.

The story of Henry, the main character, motivates our exploration of the land and the difficulty of living as something of an adventurer. He is a step above common folk, solving disputes and taking some real responsibility in military endeavors, but he is neither a knight nor a nobleman, never taking undue control of serious situations. There are occasional moving scenes that develop a world of emotion beneath Henry's surface, but his dialogue's writing often blunts these suggestions down to simple anger.

This game falls into the growing trend of grand RPGs whose content is mostly driven by optional and well-varied side-quest-lines helping or romancing characters and solving mysteries. Most of these are quite satisfying. Many of the smaller side activities are fine and at worst, excuses to get rewarded for mindlessly leveling up your hunting or pickpocket skills.

As far as combat goes, this game fails. It certainly looks and feels like you're swinging and blocking with a longsword or a mace, but many of its decisions to include limiting mechanics breaks the immersion and leaves you looking for ways to exploit enemy NPC animations/AI protocols. The primary issue is that, while the game tries to say that changing your stance is important, it isn't. If you change your attack stance (the direction you swing your sword), the AI will immediately match it, meaning that all attacks are blocked, and a large portion of blocked attacks will be parried by your enemies, throwing you around into a bush or dealing unblockable damage. Combos are a joke because you will never have an enemy open to attacks long enough to pull one off, which is why only 2% of the Steam playerbase has the achievement for pulling off 100 combos (you will be in combat hundreds of times) while 12% have completed the game.

The game wants you to think that you just need to get better at the game on easier enemies. This is wrong. The only way to deal damage is to walk up to the enemy and force a clinch to push them into an obstacle behind them and then get a free hit or two on them because their defense animation takes a little bit to restart. Eventually you can learn to parry attacks yourself, so that becomes a second method of attack. The game will always throw multiple enemies at you at once. The only way to survive this is to have an open space behind you and keep backing up so they don't flank you, and also to get heavier armor. It feels like they never tested the balance in their own combat system because the mechanical building blocks are all there, it's just the execution which fails.

The game also wants you to think that stealthy decisions like pickpocketing and lockpicking are harder to pull off and more deeply punished than in games like Skyrim. This isn't true, and most quests will have you either lockpicking or pickpocketing quest objectives whether you want to or not. It's actually too frequent for my liking, since it precludes other interesting gameplay alternatives which the immersive sim elements of this game often offer.

DLC to get (when on sale):
From the Ashes - A nice light city building experience which has a number of pitfalls for players without enough spare money or a guide to follow. Start it after you are decently wealthy and before buying any expensive items. It takes some time but offers several good rewards.
Band of Bastards - Offers some of the best-written characters in the game. It adds a few hours of gameplay time which you should aim to finish a bit after the halfway mark in the main story.

I did not buy the Sir Hans Capon DLC or A Woman's Lot, nor did I buy the treasure hunt DLC.

I actually have had a lot of fun in this game, and I might change this review to positive if there were patches which fixed some issues:

1) The game world is bare. The environments look good, but there are about three unique structures above ground for the WHOLE game. And each of these structures is extremely far away from one another.
2) The caves are intriguing and occasionally well designed, but once you realize what you are supposed to do to progress the story, you have to backtrack across the island to go back through the caves multiple times.
3) The story is dripfed like breadcrumbs until everything happens in the last 20 minutes, some of it with no explanation. The ending is goofy, like a single indie dev making a game in 2014 level goofy.
4) There are no bosses. There is no final confrontation.

The reason I say that there's room for things to be fixed is that the game is clearly not finished. Half of the lore you find is about people trying to find golfballs, and it works. It just was clearly not meant to be the only story you came across. I think the team spent a ton of time crafting a very competent crafting system, satisfying combat, and a beautiful world so they ran out of time to execute everything past the first third of what they planned.

I had a lot of fun treating this like a Minecraft-ish multiplayer game: mostly build cool houses and occasionally go exploring with friends. I did not have a lot of fun treating this like a game with a clear path of progression. You can build things and do the basic survival elements playing alone, but finishing the story on your own would be torture.

Also if you are walking down a slope and pull out your crafting menu, you can surf and gain infinite momentum. That's a good thing, I couldn't imagine walking across the world without it.

The bulk of this review was written after I completed the first 40 hours (Act 2 of 5).
--SUMMARY--
Compared to the average CRPG, WOTR has good combat, slightly above-average writing, good graphics, and little style. Compared to its predecessor, Kingmaker, had similar or worse combat, slightly worse graphics, slightly worse writing, and more style. As a result, WOTR feels like a strong but bland CRPG which nearly anyone will have a good time playing. I have really enjoyed my time with it so far, but it doesn't hold a candle to the writing of Disco Elysium, the combat of Divinity: Original Sin 2, or the style of most other CRPGs.

--COMBAT and PROGRESSION--
Combat in WOTR is built around a port of the Pathfinder tabletop turn-based rules to a live-action experience.
There are round-based rules to help pace fights so you can manage your party's abilities when you need to and let the computer control your characters when you want to let your party run through easier enemies. This means that combat encounters are not nearly as deliberate as Divinity 2's turn-based system and so are not as high quality, but are still deliberate enough to feel like satisfying challenges to solve. Live-action combat also means that clearing less meaningful enemies is still satisfying, making immersive combat encounters like open battlefields possible. Animations, sounds, and effects are all well-crafted and satisfying as well. (As a note, there is a turn-based option but I haven't tried it).
When it comes to character creation and building, Pathfinder's systems really shine. There are plenty of interesting builds to create, though usually only one or two which are viable with each class. You encounter many different potential party members from a variety of different classes so you are forced to immerse yourself in the whole combat/leveling system. And as mentioned, that's a good thing because Pathfinder is a very well crafted, complex system with rules that feel almost meant for a simulation.
As for progression, you find plenty of loot which will ramp up your party's powers alongside meaningful skill and ability unlocks. There are both skills that increase your damage by a few percentage points, and skills which greatly affect how you play.

--STORY and STYLE--
The game is centered around a fight between good and evil, and you are the hero for the good side in a highly linear story. There are opportunities to pick non-good character interactions, but you are heavily incentivized by immersion and rewards to choose the good option. Your party members have lots of conflicting backgrounds, which bring good opportunities for moral grays away from the main questline. It's not going to leave you emotionally affected, but it gets the job done. The writing is actually very good on a line-by-line basis, and characters feel distinct, realistic, and properly motivated so you won't be rolling your eyes every time a character opens their mouth like in Divinity 2.
Regarding the style of this game, the story is focused on Heaven vs. Hell, angels vs. demons in a high magic medieval setting. That means it feels mostly generic since we've seen this countless times, and this carries over to visual style too. To be honest. there's a lot of Catholic symbolism and culture in this game that manages to resonate with me, so the bland style doesn't bother me like I think it should. There is also something warmly charming about how exaggerated and stilted the animations are in cutscenes.

--EXPLORATION--
A lot of CRPGs are built around exploring fantastical locations and dungeon delving. Dungeons in WOTR are expansive and rewarding to explore. Their puzzles and skill checks almost always feel fair. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there are many large spaces to explore focused on social experiences or otherwise non-dungeon/combat spaces. And because the writing and world is a little bland, what's there isn't very exciting to explore. The world doesn't feel empty, it just feels narrow.

--ROLEPLAYING and REPLAYING--
I have not yet completed the game. I assume it takes about 140-160 hours for a full playthrough. I am increasingly discovering that my investment in getting the "best ending" (whatever that means) makes me increasingly unsatisfied with WOTR. There are lots of places where you need to choose specific dialogue lines for further options to be available, and a lot of the time those options are well indicated, but sometimes a whole storyline may be gated behind one of two seemingly equally "good" lines or something like that. After you realize you want to be able to save or redeem or convert certain characters, you start to look up how to do that, which leads you to following guides to keep from making mistakes instead of just roleplaying. I don't think there is really much real replay value like others say there is. I think instead the general idea is to play through once to be immersed and sometimes unsatisfied with what you are allowed to do, and then closely follow a guide to see how to fix the mistakes you never knew you made.

I know I have literally 13 minutes with it, but the driving controls are mind numbingly stiff. Like this doesn't feel anything like you are a car on a road. It feels like a racing game in an arcade except none of the car impacts feel responsive or weighted.
What's worse is that I remember Need For Speed games looking twice as good as this running at twice the framerate on my Xbox 360 and I have a mid-range PC.

Yeah, I don't have any comment on the content availability or the customization or anything like that. I just can't get past how terrible it felt to drive in this "racing" game.

This is one of those long-grind games that you could play forever. Unfortunately, you can feel a bit uninterested at first, but there is a point about 10 hours into the story where the game finally shows off how cool its systems can really be. The story and themes are delivered very well through the grind, and there is a lot to work towards. Improvement can feel very rewarding, but because of the way new content has been delivered, it feels like some major upgrades are given to the player very early on.

I haven't been able to play this game consistently because it hard crashes my computer after a few hours of play, although I would like to play much more. In addition, it runs very poorly which isn't important in the survival/sandbox exploration, but makes combat miserable to slosh through. These problems happen on a system with a GTX 1060, R5 2600X, and 32 GB of RAM.

If I had never played Skyrim, I would probably think higher of Enderal than I would of TES5. A lot of the moment-to-moment enjoyment of Enderal comes from the superior core gameplay mechanics of Skyrim. Because of that, it feels a little strange to call Enderal a better game than Skyrim.

Regardless, Enderal is an impressively competent game with strong story elements, well-developed lore and history, detailed dungeons that are a joy to explore, and many opportunities for variety in play style. Its original skill trees encourage mixing up builds, and its HP/MP/SP resource mechanics encourage you to explore alchemy and other crafting. I bought Skyrim on PC only to play this mod, and I am thoroughly satisfied.

Although it is an unmatched feat of passion and design, it lacks polish in a few minor places such as voice lines not playing properly. Most notably, though, it crashes frequently. I have never been significantly frustrated with this, though, the game saves often enough. Personally, I have a strong distaste for generic fantasy writing, and while this game certainly rises above that almost all of the time, it is not "incredible" either. Most of the time, it's fine. Sometimes, it's overly preachy and direct. Often, it works pretty well. There seem to be fewer cases where a location will have enough contextual elements to piece together its story like in many locations in Skyrim, meaning a lot of things are told to you directly through dialogue or notes. This is okay, just not as effective.

Overall, if this was a game made totally from the ground up, I'd give it about 8.5/10. If you consider its context, it is probably the best Skyrim mod ever made. It is a crime that this was always free. I would consider Enderal among my favorite gaming experiences in a long time.