Neue Rezensionen von Riko~Nyaa

I didn't know what I was getting into with this one. After reading reviews, testimonials, everything about the game it describes how you will die by chocolate. I did not die by chocolate on my first five tries even once... I did have a number of other grisly fates however.

Those fates are primarily the crux of the game, the idea that there are plenty of ways to get killed as a monarch, and you must survive them all for your dynasty to continue. From looking at reviews, and achievements, there appears to be innumerable ways the story can permeate, which leads to a lot of replayability. Even in my few hours I was able to notice major differences in the story... as well as consistencies. As nice as a diverging main plot is, it doesnt seem very diverging. All five tries had the same main plot driving the game forward, same series of major events. Maybe it was just my choice of side events, but I didnt see anything personally which led me to believe these were my choices. Even when i tried to diverge, i ended up with the same main plot. Maybe once i sink my hours in I will see more content.

The content I did see was very well done. Nice pictures, backgrounds, emotes, and music all add to the experiance greatly, giving an emotional depth to it. Of course, its not a tightly story driven "visual novel" (which is a term I personally reserve for romantic or eroge styles of the genre, LLtQ is a game pure and simple, not an interactive novel), but it still is able to make you see the lore and story of the universe, showing the intense effort put into crafting this world. Everything about the game resounds quality, and in such a small and concise package. Simple, elegant, yet deep and complex, and resounding with feeling from every ounce.

This intense feeling gave me chills even. The idea of playing a "king simulator" or in this case "queen simulator" is a very intriguing game type that highly interests me. The idea of being so vulnerable, but having that power still is something that I really want to like and play with, but I always hate being assassinated. But with this game at least assassions means you start all over and can make better choices, unlike some other king games where you just might end up in a worse mess than before *looks at crusader kings 2*. Either way, the tense edge-of-your-seat feeling the game gave me, as well as the feeling of power when I -spoiler warning- disintegrated a thousand peasents in a second with a fireball, was really satisfying.

The game has no major issues from what ive seen, other than maybe no "randomised" plot but thats just a personal want from me. So I would recommend the game if you like king games and can stomach the kawaii desu desu aesthetic.

See more reviews here- http://gtm.you1.cn/groups/JSJaRG

Does anybody remember the time when video games were about doing? Not what a lot of fancy games have now with their set-pieces and linear levels and platforming sections. Some nostalgia freaks would call that "the good old days", but I would like to just say that it is what video games are about. It is what they are supposed to do, and what Wolfenstein: The New Order happens to do very well.

I still remember the sound of the old Polish man in the game telling me "Kill all the Nazis" right before handing me a gun to blow their brains out with. This sort of mentality has two major plays within the game.

The first way this mentality applies is through the games atmosphere, dialogue, story, and character interactions. The game takes every opportunity to be very open that it is a "dumb shooter", and does not take itself too seriously. It is full of humorous lines poking fun at the average gamers' behaviour when you do something that would be weird to do in real life, but people do in games all the time. This makes the game natural, and connect with the player, making light about otherwise boring and mundane tasks in the game. These random pokes at the gamer do not come at the expense of the main character, whereby Mr. Blaskowicz never leaves his characteristic self to do things that he would never do. Which, his normal self of course is a dual assault rifle wielding human tank of ♥♥♥♥ killing death.

That leads to the second way the particular line of dialogue exemplifies the game: The game and its gameplay. The levels are pretty large to say the least, with lots of differing pathways and areas to explore, and go about completing fighting the Futuristic-♥♥♥♥ scum. Think Deus Ex: Human Revolution size and style, but bigger, a lot bigger. All of this is crafted in heavily stylised, and excellently modelled and textured environments, that look absolutely gorgeous to be covering in a fresh coat of blood. Which happens when your head gets blown off by two autoshotguns firing miniature flak rounds out simultaneously. Yes, yes you can do just that. Dual wield any two weapons in the game (with the exception of the two handed weapons) at the same time, and rip through your foes at an astonishing rate. Of course this does not replace the good old fashioned iron sights, which are complimented nicely by a leaning/stationary-viewing key system that is smooth to the touch; the same goes for the rest of the keyboard inputs, making you leap, lunge, duck, run, and throw weapons with utmost fluidity.

This comes at a price however: the id tech 5 engine. Many gamers, mainly AMD users, seem to have issues running the game at all, or running it well once it is running. Considering this is a AAA contemporary release at the time of writing this, this is not surprising as game requirements are going up, and many people would expect to be able to run it on old systems would be disappointed. But the game leaves the gamer disappointed in other ways as well, mainly how the game handles some particular parts of the itself. One way it fumbles itself is sometimes the game will throw a “serious” part at the player (I can only think of one off the top of my head, and while it was sentimental and a legitimate plot point, it felt out of place). Another way the game messes up is with rather disappointing boss fights. While they are impressive to look at, and awesome to take down, they seemed a little weak compared to how some of the super soldiers in the game would kick your butt over and over and over again until you rage quit. This does not ruin the game, but this dichotomy does slightly take away from the experience.

Some honourable mentions before I finish: The game has a stealth system, which is a little broken like in most games, but still viable for the most part. Nothing more satisfying than one shotting a ♥♥♥♥ with a throwing knife. As well, the OST is very atmospheric, and fitting for the game, lending itself well to the experience the player will feel throughout. The game has a lot of collectables to collect, including new difficulty modes you can unlock. The game has a perk system to make playing on higher difficulties marginally easier. The game uses limited regenerating health (just to a low threshold, like 20% of your hitpoints), and uses the health system where you need to find med kits to replenish your health (even allowing you to overheal yourself!). The game has a lengthy campaign lasting from 9-20 hours, with multiple endings and plot divergences. Lastly, the game's beds are just pure awesomeness.

If you could not tell by the thumbs up recommendation, I would recommend this game. It is a good old timey inspired, arcade shooter that is a boat load of fun to wade through pools of blood in. Killing ♥♥♥♥'s has not been awesome.

This game legitimately makes me angry it even exists. The game itself is an atrocity, the devs and community is what puts the cherry on the top of this terrible cake. Especially now that it is actually a finished game, the game just screams out how terrible it is.

What is wrong? Everything.

With the newly added 1.0 features in the game in particular, it does not help they are poorly implemented, and glitchy beyond belief. The water/lava plane is ugly, and does not work well with the voxel terrain, and EVEN the voxel terrain is still having rendering problems, almost 1.5 years since they introduced it. The character and creature models are abysmally bad or are canned stock assets the developers tried to pass off as their own work. The soundtrack is just random selection of noises strung together to appease the kids who listen to modern day garbage music. As well, the indiegogo rewards they implemented in the game actually break the Indiegogo terms of service, as they never communicated with the backers that they were changing what the rewards actually were. This update is both terribly done, and is actually illegal in some respects. Heck, calling this a full complete game should be a crime in its own right.

Moving onto the game's theme: the game is one of those style games that tries to hop onto too many bandwagons for its own good, trying to appeal to as many of steams userbase as possible, without satisfying any of them to any degree. Anyway you look at it, whether its the actual gameplay, or the music and sounds, it is terrible and cliché to no end.

The game runs worse than Skyrim with max everything mods, with enb's, running on my easy bake oven that I had when I was six years old. Now that the game is finished, performance is a major criticism I have towards this game. Even on the best machine, the game struggles to perform on the highest settings. I know this is an indie game, but this is performance I expect from laptops, not top of the line rigs.

The game is not fun in any way, except maybe in a Gmod style sheer stupidity of the whole situation-style of fun. Many people who say they “have fun” may just be secretly regretting their purchese and just want to justify spending upwards of $75 dollars on this game.

To compound this, the game's community is pretty much dead and dying. The forums are barren, most of the old regulars have moved on, and the player base is a ghost town. Only time play numbers raise by anything is when there is an update, but by now, nobody seems to care anymore about the game, so even then the numbers only raise slightly. Source[www.steamcharts.com]. Even after the supposed Beta update “fixed the game”, the player number still trail off pitifully to dismal numbers. Now extrapolate this to the full game, within no time at all after the release, and with no more major updates, the player base will dwindle even further than it has in the past, until it only has 10 people left playing it like it did not too long ago. This is not good for a multiplayer hyped game.

Then of course, there is the developers, who happen to be the reason I am writing this review. They produced updates at an abysmal pace, and released very little noteworthy content when they did make something. Now that the final release has arrived, they have pretty much stated they will not add any meaningful updates to the game anymore, pretty much assuring that they are abandoning it. Their “backend tech” fails on every corner, as it none of it works properly, or the stock unity versions are far superior then the custom one they made. In the past they used to cause community upheaval by making promises to do something, then never fulfilling these promises.

This is what we call lying. They did it quite a bit, but they seemed to have learned their lesson. But would you want to trust someone who lies to their player base about updates, and update schedules, with making a game with your money?

They made numerous other highly questionable and shady actions, like unceremoniously canning their excellent community manager from 2013, and replacing them with someone who caused innumerable PR nightmares. If this is their idea of a good decision towards “improving” the forums, then I would question their decisions regarding their game design as well, as the game thus far is a monstrosity. To add onto this, they even fired the second community manager, as well as ALL their experienced developers. They tried to do everything themselves, and ended up causing an even bigger mess. Source

The best analogy I can come up for the game it is like the monster Frankenstein. It has changed so much over its development, from starting as a F2P MMO shooter, to a space epic being able to fly across the stars, to a sandbox building game and tower defence strategy game, to finally a mishmash of all what it used to be into one messy monster. Is is just a complete disaster.

I feel sorry for the people who paid money for this game, especially the game's legend perk owners. Let's just forget this game happened, and move on to better things.

July 12th 2014 Edit: redid review for the beta version.
September 22nd Edit: Redid review for 1.0 release

Sequals usually fall flat when people play them. Not very often does a sequal come by that impresses and wins over an original games audience. Lets face it, Bioshock 2 is a cash in on the success of Bioshock. Despite this, it does not fail as game, nor as a sequel.

The overall gameplay of this game is far superier to that of the original. The weapon variety maybe not as diverse, and the weapon designs do not change drastically like the original, but still good weapons nonetheless. I mean, what other game can you play as zeus in a metal diving suit, with a gatling gun? In addition to this, the balence is better, the research process is better thought out, plasmids are not stupidly OP anymore, and you can actually get some neat tonics and upgrades to your Big Daddy. The little sister and escort sections are not tedious anymore either, they offer a nice break from the monotony of the main story. This is broken up with some nice tea parties with former co-workers of yours, and some swims in the community fish tank. The games pacing is fluid from beginning to end, and does not chug at any point, unlike the original.

Originally, my main criticism of Bioshock 2, is that it did not have that "AHA" moment the original had. Well lets just say that the DLC Mirvenas Den solves that problem. Everything I thought Bioshock 2 was lacking, that DLC contained. What it did, is offered that "AHA" moment that made the original so good. At first, I thought the DLC ending would be generic and terrible, only to find out the big plot twist at the end. This twist, along with the ending area/cutscene, offers a conclusive end to the rapture experiance. It finally wraps up the city in a satisfying way, something, neither game alone could do.

In short, this game improves upon even facet of the original, maybe not to a shine, but certainly to some degree, and offers a conclusive ending to the original Bioshock series/Rapture. Giving this God-Forsaken underwater dystopia, finally a sense of peace.

Almost as bad as it's fanboys.

The game itself is fine as its initial iteration. A tech demo stocking stuffer only, but as a full price game? No, not really. That means it is short, and unrefined. It fails to last long enough to even contemplate having complicated, or challenging puzzles.

Even the time the game does stick with you, it fails to impress on many levels. Many of the puzzle mechanics, or solutions are simple, or just plain annoying. For example, the energy ball. Does anybody really like that timed-only-a-few-bounces ball, that never seems to connect with the target, nor do it within a respectable amount of time. Is it unique? Ya sure, the game is fairly unique, but a bent fork is unique too, does not make it any good.

Is there good things about the game? Yes. The music is rather good, as everyone can probably agree. As well, the game can run on any dinosaur system you can imagine, probably DOS systems as well. The game does not overstay its welcome as well. It at least has the brevity to end quickly so you do not have listen to the inane jokes, or fiddle with its rather annoying puzzle mechanics.

And lastly, the pandering of this game as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and the reiteration of the phrase "the cake is a lie" has made the games community, and fans insufferable. This only makes playing the game even more painful, because you know that saying anything bad will come with backlash.

What other game can you command a squad of elite commandos, be in an 3D simulated isometric world, and explore the world, plus for it to actually be good? Well then, Commandos 2 is the answer you would be looking for.

This game is able to capture that epic feel of being an elite commando, not one, not two, but eight. In a variety of missions all around the world, taking on the Japanese Empire in Asia and the ♥♥♥♥ Forces in Europe. This wide variety of missions are all housed on massive maps, with plenty of ways to tactically go through. As well, each map has bonus content hidden in each one, which unlocks even more maps for the astute players. The level variety, and enemy variety are amazing, with tactics unlimited, as well the music is sublime, unique to each level, and keeps the tone and gravity of the high stakes game of warfightering.

The commandos themselves are a particularly interesting note to mention in the game. Out of all of them, there is only one American character, which is a nice deviance from the typical video game standard of making every character in WWII an American. The commonwealth is strongly recommended, france has their own few commandos, and even the USSR is represented. All together, the human interaction, and true comradery between these "Men of Courage" brings out their grin worthy character and qualities. Its that feeling that its more than just a game with pixels, that this is high stakes, that the world is there to be saved by you, and you alone.

This is why the game can be appropriately recommended, because it simply is excellent. It doesnt hold your hand, its not gonna treat you nicely sometimes, but it manages to not matter. You keep pushing, you keep trying, you keep reloading. You need to, do you know why? Because the world is at stake, and you are the only one to save it, now get out there soldier, and kill me some Schutzstaffel.

Still better than Age of Empires 2.

Strike one for imperialism.

Looks nice, sounds nice, cannons are a great feature, has a working online service, trading cards, steam hours counting, *breathes*, all the DLC you might have missed in the old days, great 3-tiered base campaign which follows a families lineage.

Takes place in the times of exploration, which is a nice departure from ancient times.

The simplification of some game features were hit or miss, some were niceties, others just are too simple. An example of one that was a miss was the removal of individual farm squares, and collection buildings, although it can be assumed that it is automated, it still seems too simple.

Has a nice variety of units, although, the crossbowmen seem kind of weaksauce when I got Janissaries with guns and cannons so big they can be used for artillery. Its let hack and slash, blow for blow of some other strategy games, and more so the style of "you mess up, you just might die".

Price is a little on the high side however, and if you can get it cheaper than $40, I would whole heartidly recommend it.

A game of limitless choices, possibilities, and complexity; something an RPG wants to be at its core. Fallout New Vegas is truly an 'epic' experiance, with a whole world of choices and options at the players fingertips, all of which is explorable and playable space. Want to be a space cowboy firing lazors and lever action rifles, sure. Want to be a swat trooper who bashes peoples knees in with a katana, you can easily do that. The game just has a lot of things to do.

These choices, compound into its ultimate game strength; the sheer amount of content there is. The game has a massive world, with easily 110+ quests, and probably even more unmarked quests. As well, the vast arsenal of weapons, the variety, and the balencing the game has in regards to these are phenoninal. Any playstyle is viable in this game, and it is an experiance where everyone can flourish. The game is perfecly paced as well, meaning that at no point are you this indestructable God of death, you are fragile, you are not the best, you are mortal. The game teaches you that very well, that you are human, nothing more. You live in this shattered world, dealing with your own human nature; whether it be the mortality, the drugs, sex, disease, or just plain stupidity.

But despite the games humanity, it falls into one major trap. That is, the game encourages metagaming at its finest. For instance, to get the best stuff/ending/quests, you need to know how/when to do things. This can be argued in the whole nature of the complex choice system as well, but because of the no turn back attitude of the game, it highly encourages veterans to play the game rather synthetically, rather than let it all flow together as it may. Yes, this does mean replayability, but its not as fun as a purely organic gaming experiance.

Despite the main criticisms of the game, and other factors I chose not to mention (for length restraints), the game is not bad. On the contrary, its quite good, very good. Why is it good? Because it emplifies its core concept excellently: Humanity, and what it means to be human. That focus in what its about, makes it a must own.

Most FPS's are bland slog fests, no fun, no colour, or vibrancy; just dull pieces of work. Bioshock, is able to capture the fun of running, and gunning your oponents down, as a game, and is able to succeed that as an art.

Game wise, fairly standard assortment of guns, early to mid 1900's themed. Interesting twist yes? Now throw in rag-tag modifcations to guns, a plethora of different ammo that does everything from explode on impact to cause massive electrical damage. Then throw in almost supernatural powers, with a wide variety of character augmentations, to help you adapt to the changing environment. Want to run at 500% speed hitting people with a wrench in the back that freezes them solid, and you can become invisable- Bioshock has that.

These augmentations to the self are not just a gameplay feature, they are a core feature of the games narrative. The game itself portrays a distopian underwater city, that, as you are forced to enter seemingly, without your own choice in the matter, forces you to see what has happened. It forces you to take on this role, and realise who the real villain of the situation is, who or what is the real monster behind sociatal collapse and anarchy. Everything in the game seemingly has a suitable purpose to back up a part of the narrative, and it works, because nothing is then ever out of place. The game is able to form a cohesive structure, that despite its debatable ending, creates a wonderful philosophical experiance.

There are those that this game is a dumbed down System Shock 2, or even a console port that is meant for lesser gamers. But until we look at games in their individuality, we cant see the shine each one brings to the table. Bioshock, as a single product is simply an amazing game, that is a must own for any gamer.

As far as RTS's go, I dont like them. Too many of them do their systems too incorrectly, or just dont plain make any logical sense, or reason. Dawn of War (all the expansion packs, consider this a recommendation for Dawn of War + all of the expansions), does some critical things right, which makes it stand out from the crowd.

First, it actually focuses on strategy for the most part. Instead of spamming 1000 tanks at your enemy (im looking at you Ruse), you actually have chose a limited number of units to bring into battle. Meaning, every man, tank, and resourse is valuble, and losing any of the above can cost you the battle. This tension, and balencing on the brink of death keeps tension high, as players must constantly have to outdo their opponent on a mental capacity, not necessarily on a quanitative capacity. This conbined with some rather unique in game mechanics, such as morale, means interesting strategies can arise, when those similar would fall flat in other RTS's.

And secondly, the game is able to keep a consistent feeling, tone, and atmosphere. Even for a strategy game, this is important, nothing takes you out of a game more than an interface, so even immersing the mission select screen in 40k does its job. Everything is plastered with 40k jargon and logic, a dark universe of war, death, and betrayal. As well, the game itself feels fitting, with you not taking resources, just getting requisition points to send in more troops, as you are successful in conquest, just as an example of many different things the game does right.

The game is fitting, and is able to keep a consistent feel to gameplay and atmosphere. For this, I must heartily recommend Dawn of War to RTS fans, you will not be let down.