Recent reviews by Mogarass

dggL

I played this game as a kid and had a lot of fun. It is and was fun to play with a friend for a few hours.

With that being said, this game does not hold up very well in my eyes.

First off, this game is not worth $30.00. At most, it is is worth about $10, which thankfully it goes on sale quite often and if you are a huge fan of the Baldur's Gate series, is probably worth playing through at least once. There are also some Easter egg characters in the game that a fan of D&D will be aware of.

The reason for me not recommending this game is mostly due to the length of the game itself and the core gameplay loop becoming very stale.

Combat:

Combat is about 98% of the game and is fun for about the first 7-8 levels. After this, you tend to just hold the A button (or B button if using magic) until the enemy dies. You rinse and repeat for the entire game with 0 thought process involved. Very few bosses have any mechanics you need to consider and basically all of them are just target dummies. I found myself being super bored of every combat encounter and towards the end of my first playthrough and skipped the majority of the enemies to get to the boss. It felt like the game was wasting my time.

To my surprise there is a decent amount of enemy variety throughout the game, but because the core gameplay loop is pretty boring, these unique creatures do not get the chance to shine very often. Every enemy feels the same with different health, armor, and damage volumes. If each unique creature behaved a little differently, I think the combat would be more enjoyable. For example, Trolls require Fire to actually kill them. This is great! Another example is the rust monsters only attacking you if you have metal equipped (seemingly only applies to the weapon of choice, but still) is another great idea for monsters. There is just not enough of those little unique features to enemies which make killing them, fun.


Story:

The game has a pretty cookie cutter D&D plot, which is not bad for a game this old, but it gives you the illusion of choice without any real payoff. I am unsure why they decided to give me a dialogue selector where 99% of the game gives me one choice option. It does not feel meaningful to zoom in on an NPC talking to me, only for my only option to be "Okay." At this point, why give me the option at all? It would have been wiser to have a silent protag so that you could at least self insert or perhaps have prerendered cut scenes instead of the in game dialogue options.

There are also some aspects of the game which clearly are a relic of its time, for example, every "important" female NPC having massive breasts, most of them in revealing outfits. Coming from a perspective in 2023, it feels very off. If I feel like the males got the same treatment, I would be more on board with the sexualization of characters, but it is not the case.

Act 2 is needlessly long and tedious. Almost nothing in act 2 is memorable and the idea of going on 4 separate fetch quests back to back to back to back without any break between them, felt really bad. I think if you ended up cutting all of act 2 and maybe giving me one fetch quest towards the end of act 1 instead, this game would improve dramatically.


With that being said, It was a nice touch having your previous characters from Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 1 be involved in the opening cut scene + later on in the game, so I give them props for that.


Overall, if someone is a big fan of D&D and or Baldur's Gate series, would I recommend them this title? I really wouldn't. I would point them in the direction of Baldur's Gate 1 or 2, or even more so with the upcoming BG3 from Larian. I think it is possible to make a Hack & Slash game that is great with the setting of Baldur's Gate or D&D in general, but I think this game just isn't it.

I just finished my first play through and I enjoyed it very much. The art and music is great and all the characters felt unique and special. I am excited to go back and try and get all the achievements for this game.

With that all being said, I have some pretty frustrating issues with the game play mechanics. There will be spoilers for my run in the review below.

Throughout my run of the game, there are a few instances where I assign my crew to various tasks, thought I was perfectly okay for the day, and without any warning, an "event" happened where I needed 3-4 available crew. I understand this is likely due to the games sense of "anything can go wrong at any moment," but for someone who enjoys strategy games, it feels pretty bad to have an unexpected event in which you were required to "play bad" and have crew doing nothing during the day.

Example: Near the end of the game inside the tent and patching holes. I was given instruction that there will be holes in my tent that I would need to repair. Sure I can assign the crew to it, no big deal. I look around my camp to see no active holes in my tent. Great! I assigned my crew to other tasks and fed them dinner. At this point, a hole popped up in my tent. Frustrating since I had just assigned everyone seeing no holes, but no worries I have 2 people available. Only for this not to work because I need 4 people, no more and no less, to patch a hole. These type of random events happen throughout the game, but the way the game is laid out mechanically, you would be forced to 1. Already know this is going to happen, or 2. Play "poorly" with your given information during the same night. A simple way to "fix" this would be for the holes to appear instantly after you read the dialogue so I can prepare crew for this, or alternatively, happen the next night around. It does not feel like a "new challenge," but feels more like BS. Perhaps also a way to reassign crew to various tasks? These are just a few examples that could easily solve these issues.

Another mechanical frustration I had was regarding the medic. You can use scientists to create a medicine that instantly heals your crew at the doctor. This sounds wonderful, but it fails to tell you that your doctor's beds remain full, even after using the medicine. Which does not make a lot of sense gameplay or art wise. You will assign your injured crew to the doctor, and their character will appear on the bed of the doctor. You can use the medicine you have and the character is no longer there, "freeing" up the bed space on the screen. However, you cannot assign more injured crew to the now open beds. This somewhat minor thing makes you think you can heal your entire crew in one night, but instead still only allows 2-3 people to be healed.

Finally, the last issue I had with the game is the loyalty mechanic. This is a big factor in the game which leads to big decisions towards the end of your story. This is the one major writing plot point that I did not enjoy. The former captain has abandoned us for 9 months on ice, stealing supplies, getting 3 of the crew killed, and left us for dead. The head of the exposition (Templeton) has been an antagonizing force throughout 95% of the game towards the entire crew. I, as the new captain, has kept 90% of my crew alive in a situation where no one could have expected to live for more than a few weeks. However, the crew voted me out as captain at the very end of the game because of -5 loyalty on a few characters. These characters do not act like people. I kept almost every single person alive for 9 months, stranded with no assistance, but because my loyalty was not above a specific threshold, the crew claims I did a poor job. And not only that, the crew who voted against me, was loyal to me for 35/38 weeks. This is not how people would react. If I survived 9 months stranded on ice because of someone's leadership, but they piss me off for 2 weeks, I would not suddenly vote against them. Furthermore, I don't care how long you might have known the former captain, I don't believe any human would vote for their former friend after they literally left you for dead. This was the only part during the story that I raised my hands up in the air and said "this is bad writing."

Overall, the game is a fun strategy game with a lot of replay value. I would say this game is worth picking up for $20. I am excited to see where Bellular Studio's goes with their next gaming title (if any) and hope they learn from the very few mistakes they made in this title.

If you like D&D and understand how this version of D&D works, this is a must play game. With that being said, if you are not ready to strap yourself in for some BS (play a wizard is makes so much of the game easier imo) I would probably just wait until BG3 or play more modern games like Divinity. The combat system will throw some silly fights at you and if you are not ready, there will be some headaches.

The music is great, the characters are great, combat is mostly great if you play it turn by turn, and the choices you make really feels like you are making meaningful choices in this world. The overall story is pretty cookie cutter, but for a game this old, it probably felt more fresh back then than it does nowadays.

Overall, is the game worth picking up at full price? Yes! You can easily dump 60+ hours into this game and it is regularly on sale for under $10.

NWN Enhanced Edition plays exactly like the original, which is a bit of a problem. For $20, this game is probably not worth the price. However, it regularly goes on sale for 50%+ off which I think that is the sweet spot for this very old game.

I have only played this game solo and never touched the multiplayer, but have heard a lot of positive things about the online RP elements of this game.

As a solo only player, the campaign is a lot of fun and the characters are memorable. The choices you make can slightly change how things develop which is also a fun element for a game this old. Comparing this game to Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, I can't help but feel like the spell casting mechanics in this game is much worse than those similar games. Perhaps I was just not spacing myself correctly, but that was a common complaint I had when playing spell casters and I never had this issue in BG1 or BG2.

Overall, worth playing at least once to experience the story, but it seems that the majority of the fun is in multiplayer.

Divinity Original Sin is a great game to play with friends or solo.

The only real negative in my opinion is the elemental effects on the ground. It feels as though the entire game is balanced around this system, which is fine once in awhile, but the fun soon wears off soon after Act 1. This is mostly subjective since I have heard some people quite enjoying abusing this mechanic for their own benefit, but for my own personal game play style, it was mostly annoying.

At the end of the day, is it worth spending full price ($39.99 as of writing this)? Yes I would say it is. It is also quite often on sale for 70%+ and is 100% worth the 12 dollars you might spend on it.

Skyrim is a great addition into the franchise and is 100% worth picking up and playing even in 2023.

With that being said, as someone who loved Oblivion and Morrowind, I think they took a few steps back in the favor of a more "modern audience."

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but for someone who has the tastes in RPGs like myself, I enjoy being able to customize everything about my character. In previous games, you could put points into strength, agility, int, etc. where as in Skyrim, this is automatically done for you. For 90% of players, this is perfectly fine, but as someone who might want to make a 0 int, 9999 str character, this option is no longer possible for me. I am sure there are ways to get around this, such as mods, I wish there was an option to turn this feature back on so that I can fully make "my" character.

Another stylistic choice is level scaling in the world. I never feel significantly stronger than before as the enemies level with me. The itemization mostly makes up for this, but I strongly prefer when I can go back to the "starter" zone and crush things I once thought was difficult.

With all that being said, this game is great and still a good time.

Where do I start?

343 continues to disappoint.

The Campaign:

343 once again decided to say "ignore the last game, it wasn't important" and decided to scrub all the major plot points from Halo 5 off-screen. I am sure the average gamer is going to purchase Halo: How Cortana Lost book for $25 at their local Barnes & Noble to fill themselves in. Unless you want us to forget?

The campaign starts off strong with Master Chief doing his thing, Cortana 2.0 being a nice addition, and the pilot rehashing the same story beats as previous characters in other games. However, the BBEG turns out to just be a bunch of red holograms for 95% of the entire game and never feels threatening. He isn't even someone we should care about because the BBEG from the first cut scene "dies" off screen?? Why?? Why not just have the guy who beat MC's ass be the BBEG??? This made no sense to me and still doesn't a year out.

The grapple hook is a great addition to halo, but somehow 343 made a open world Halo game with less biodiversity than Halo: CE. Every other equipment feels somewhat pointless to use.

I have beaten the game on LASO and Co-op (they also decided to scrap couch co-op despite promising never to do so again), and I gain nothing but some sorry ass skins for multiplayer.

They have retroactively added this into the game, but how did they forget to add a "replay" mission button? At launch, I would have been forced to replay the entire campaign if I missed a few skulls.

They leave the game off with a cliffhanger and at first, I was giving them a pass. But with the news of the layoffs at Microsoft and 343 cutting most of their campaign team for this game, any DLC seems unlikely. I guess the next 10 years of Halo's story will have to be in another new game instead of continuing this one. I cant wait to see them ignore everything from this game and restart for the 3rd time.

Multiplayer:

The overall game play feels great, which is why the servers being so bad feels so much worse. The amount of times I have melee'd someone only to somehow die first is astounding. The amount of very obvious desyncs is laughable. Why is there no pregame or post game lobbies? The party system is also very out of touch and clunky. It feels like they spent the most time on multiplayer and it shows, but there are still a ton of minor issues which really make the average player frustrated.

Hopefully with even more time, 343 can figure out basic multiplayer systems. I am sure the 4th game they make will build on Infinite's mistakes, instead of revisiting all the problems again copium.

Monetization:

EVERYTHING in the shop is overpriced. Why am I paying money for colors? It is clear that they learned nothing from Halo 5's loot box system and instead decided to limit everything to battle passes and 20 dollar variations of the color purple. There is almost no way to earn the skins in the game without paying real money, and IMO that is a problem. I had more customization options in Halo 2

Summary:

Give the Halo franchise to someone else so that I can feel happy about the state of this series.

This is a really fun game to play with your friends. It is exactly what it says it is, and it delivers with some extra game modes for variety as well.

With that all being said, the achievements in this game make me want to end it all. All the achievements make sense, but some of the holes require pixel perfect placement and if you mess up on hole 16, you better hope you played the first 15 holes 100% perfectly or you have to restart and play for another 30 minutes to try again.

Game is worth picking up on sale, but the DLC is hit or miss.

This is a fun game to play for about 2 hours, but the fun soon runs out.

The gameplay loop is pretty boring and the end game achievements turn into a grind fest.

Worth buying on sale when its under $2.00, but I probably would not pick it up for $5.00