Recent reviews by Seraguith

If you're a former Warband player like me and was looking for "Warband but better", unfortunately you won't find it in Bannerlord.

Bannerlord has improved combat. But everything else is a sidegrade. They did diplomacy, economy, fief management and NPC relationships so differently that it's not "Warband but better", but "Warband but different".

If you can accept that, then you will enjoy the game.

Are the new systems better? They're all more convenient. Everything is more 4X-like.

But NPCs lost their flavor. You don't really care about particular characters anymore. They're just another lord that will pump armies for you.

Overall I would argue the sidegrades are weaker. Warband is much closer to a real simulation sandbox.

Bannerlord 4X-ified too many things and Mount & Blade lost the chaos and randomness you may find in Warband.

Is it fun? Yes. I don't regret playing Bannerlord.

But I also have 900+ hours in Warband. And Bannerlord isn't compelling enough for me to spend more than my current playtime.

Another problem with Bannerlord is how community-unfriendly all the updates are. Mods constantly break every update.

I can understand why many mod authors would lose motivation to update, or refrain from making a mod at all.

Tactical Breach Wizards (TBW) doesn't lack second-order motion for each player action, allowing so much synergy between characters regardless of the situation.

Planning out the numerous possibilities then executing the plan almost makes you feel like you're playing a top-down tactics immersive sim. It's not an immersive sim, but the gameplay of ( Plan -> Execute -> React ) combined with synergies, makes it feel like one.

Most tactics games rely on % hit chances or simple player actions such as only melee attacks and ranged attacks. TBW isn't like that. Every attack does not miss, and there's a variety of different actions and environments to allow the player multiple approaches on any given situation.

Progression is also almost purely horizontal. Whenever a character levels up, they don't gain more hit points and you earn a perk to upgrade an existing action. The perk upgrades the action and allows new strategies to come out. It's never usually a simple "+5 damage". And although the game does have "+1 damage" perks here and there; the game doesn't rely on those upgrades. In the overall tactical gameplay, they're only a convenience for the player.

The type of gameplay that TBW brings is honestly what I'd expect from a tactics-based CRPG like Wasteland and Pillars of Eternity. The problem with many of these CRPGs is that upgrades typically don't introduce new and interesting strategies and situations. And when they do, the sheer power creep of the game makes it so that later in the game the upgrade becomes pointless; forcing the player to rely on pure numbers upgrades through equipment and broken builds.

I'm more of a procedural-gen guy, and at first I thought it was a shame it wasn't a roguelike. As I continued to play, the levels are so fun and varied that it makes sense not to rely on proc-gen. (I still think a roguelike that plays like this game would be great).

The story is also great. It's not mankind's masterpiece but the characters have distinct personalities and backgrounds that make them fun to read through, and help create some attachment once you finish the story.

The world building is awesome. I always love modern military fantasy stories with superhumans and soldiers. If you love worlds like F.E.A.R., Trepang2, Metal Gear Solid, X-Men, you will love the Tactical Breach Wizards setting.

For those looking at replayability, the campaign missions are all fun enough to replay and get perfect Confidence. It's like figuring out a puzzle and completing it. Players can also make their own custom missions through the level editor.

One critique I have about the level editor is that it doesn't allow you to make your own dialogue, so people like me who are a bit more story-oriented can't make story-based custom missions.

Finally a very small nitpick I have about the writing, is characters would sometimes complain about billionaires. It takes me out of the moment, and instead of enjoying the scene, I would begin to question the writer's worldview.

The division of goodness between rich people is the same across all wealth classes. 10% truly bad people, 10% truly good people, and 80% in-betweens. The in-betweens are in the gray area, and will look either good or bad depending on how you want to see them. With a negative bias for high-class, you will only see them as 90% bad.

Not to mention, the individual power and influence of billionaires can't make a real dent on any front; whether the political landscape, financial system, etc.

Not many people are aware that hidden trillionaires exist and they are the ones who have the true foundational influence over many people's lives. If you keep getting angry at millionaires and billionaires, all you're doing is you're doing exactly what the old banking families, old religious orders and political dynasties want; you're too distracted to blame them for all the systematic oppression they've slowly introduced generationally for the past few centuries.

They make the rules and everybody below the rules need to comply. Sometimes, complying to these rules will lead to the oppression of the poor and needy.

That, and 90% of millionaires and billionaires today came from a low-class and middle-class background. They are exactly what you would look like if you became rich. Complaining about them just means you're getting angry at yourself if you became rich.

If we're going to purely look at the story of Tactical Breach Wizards from the lens of destroying systematic oppression, then Liv wanting to start another world war would be the closest thing to "restarting the system" and eliminate all the rules through war. Whoever survives World War 5 would become the new system. Not a good solution, but from this lens, Liv is the closest to being the protagonist against oppression.

Very solid VTT. Been playing coop RPGs and board games for 2 years.

Super easy to mod anything you want to help track information.

The combat is lifted from Fallout 1 and 2, and improved to accommodate fighting using a whole party of characters.

The first half of the game is good, but the story eventually starts to lose traction and feels like a slog later on. It's still fun to play. The reason it's a slog is because the quests are more of the same.

Spoiler for the story:
It was a mistake to wipe the slate clean when the players reach California. Most characters in Ranger Citadel become uncontactable, so whatever character development that happened in Arizona is dumped into the trash can. California was a shiny new thing that quickly erroded with rust. Old characters having zero interaction with new characters made it pointless to try and talk to the new NPCs. It felt like there was no long-term purpose to engaging with any of them.

The game also suffers from damage inflation and skill inflation. Max-level skill difficulties on normal locks and bombs don't make any sense later on in the game. Giving players +HP per level causes the need for new encounters to have higher HP and higher damage than the last.

The progression really should have just been about accuracy, weapon mods and new armor. It doesn't make sense why an M1911 pistol does more damage than a .45 revolver. They already gave the game a cover system, so making the combat revolve around tactical positioning would have been better than simply adding more damage to new weapons.

It's also apparent later that the game relies more on damage than positioning because the map design will rarely have cover in some encounters. It's as if they knew cover didn't really matter too much.

If they had followed the principle of high-lethality, lower HP means it'll be easier to kill everything, meaning there won't be any need to amass large amounts of ammunition. Lower amounts of ammunition would reinforce a feeling of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.

Early in the game, you actually did have to conserve ammo. You also had to conserve water. It helped make the game feel like a post-apocalypse.

Full heals on level up makes it so that you rarely used medkits from your medic. Not having to use any supply does not help reinforce the feeling of a post-apocalypse.

Overall, the game is a solid 8. Despite my criticisms of the story, it was still fun to play through it. The combat system and character skill system could have been braver. It was too similar to Fallout. HP bloat makes it so that headshots don't insta-kill unless you have a high enough damage weapon.

This is a major problem with guns in RPGs. They try to copy D&Disms which only make sense because D&D only has swords, bows and magic.

On the other hand, everybody in the 21st century knows the absolute lethality of guns. So when a headshot does not insta-kill, it will always come across as bizarre.

This is a very solid 10-minute roguelike. It plays like classic shooters but feels like a modern game.

My only complaint is that the game is about rebellion against control and the new world order, and how a lot of it is rooted in satanism. Which is all true.

But... the villains are billionaires?

In the real world, life is controlled by unnamed trillionaires.

Billionaires are a distraction. People care too much what they do. "The world's top 10 richest people" are only a list of people who were okay with their assets being valued.

The trillionaires don't really know nor care about their true net worth because they basically own entire countries.

So I find it funny the game is about demonizing billionaires when they aren't even the true enemies in the real world.

I have more hours than what Steam counted.

This is the most uniquely structured RPG on Earth. Very interesting approach to quests and dialogue.

Just like so many inkle games, if you don't pay attention or analyze from a game design perspective, you're just gonna write Sorcery off as "just another text adventure".

I have more hours than what Steam counted.

This is the most uniquely structured RPG on Earth. Very interesting approach to quests and dialogue.

Just like so many inkle games, if you don't pay attention or analyze from a game design perspective, you're just gonna write Sorcery off as "just another text adventure".

A real game enthusiast will appreciate Dark Messiah's unique melee combat.

It's literally the only game that does melee combat like this in the entire industry.

I did not buy the original 2020 version, so I am looking at this game with a 2023 lens.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a top RPG. This is what they should've released years ago.

If you loved to play Warcraft 3 RPG maps in the old days, but you wanted more RPG than RTS, and you love the custom-made community content;

This game is for you.

It's Warcraft 3 Custom Maps on steroids.