Последние обзоры Luigi Mangione

So I've played this game on and off since about 2017. I've got friends who've played for much, much, much longer. I like Warframe, I like it alot.

It's a little like all the genres, but I'll try to keep this review as concise as possible.

It's a space ninja game. The gunplay is fun, the warframes usually look cool. The movement is slick and precise. The melee is fun as hell.

However, it is a grindfest. It's more of a grind than even War Thunder. However, the way to get the stuff you want is by playing the game. There is no pay to win - it is all a cooperative game. Do not do the PvP stuff, nobody does it anyways, but it's not P2W there. PvP just isn't fun.

New player tips, in short: Excalibur is still the best starting warframe. Don't listen to anyone else about that. If you prefer other playstyles, then pick a different frame. It's a very, very easy game.

Also, to get out of Mars, you need cephalon fragments. Those are the glowy blue things. Buy Codex scanners off the market - go to the market, in the top left, search 'codex' and find the NORMAL CODEX SCANNERS. Synthesis Scanners, if they can be obtained on the market, will also do the trick. You buy them with credits, which are earned ingame.

Everything in the game can be earned through grind.

Give it a whirl. You don't gotta spend money on it, but if you do, DE is at least a nominally competent company and not total crap like, say, EA or whatever.

There's a few other downsides:

NOTHING IS EXPLAINED. The Tutorial gives you the absolute basics and then dumps you out into the whole wide world without explaining much.

THE MODS ARE OBTUSE. A new player's brain will shut down when they see the mods screen. Mine does it sometimes after 400+ hours. Once you figure out the intricacies of Mods (modifying your weapons, warframes, and companions, etc.) it can be quite fun. Sometimes I will also spend an hour just futzing around with the mod screen. However, this doesn't make it any less obtuse.

POWER CREEP. Over almost a decade or whatever, the game has experienced enormous powercreep. Try to band together with players of a similar or slightly higher mastery rank (level) compared to yours. Some players will be kitted out to walk into a room and kill all the enemies. This is not as fun for you, if you just have a shotgun or assault rifle.

EXIMUS UNITS. Not a complaint per se. They are enormously annoying but also must be prioritized to kill first and soonest. You'll see what I mean once you encounter them. On higher levels they come out of the woodwork more and more.

These aren't downsides necessarily, except for the lack of good explanation. Find someone who has been playing for a long time, and ask their advice. Do it in region chat, too.

As Space Uncle says...

Do not be afraid.

This is one of those games where the only way to win is to never play. Otherwise, you are almost entirely guaranteed to see ten, fifteen, thirty, sixty million dead - and that's if you're better than the other guy.

Like a lot of Paradox GSGs, this is a complicated one. I'm not gonna waste your time. You can bang your sister. You can bang your cousin. You can bang all kinds of people. You can make little inbred children, and make them bang eachother. You can create an inbred family just like they did in real life! The game takes a lot of getting used to, if you're not of the Paradox GSG type.

But i'd recommend playing it, learning it, figuring out how it works... and just like that inbred cousin of yours, you need to push this game to its absolute limits in every possible way. You need to seek out every little nook and cranny. And when your lineage is in ashes, then you will have my permission to die.

But for real, this is quite excellent. The key is to think dynastically. Don't worry so much about your own immediate power - that's greed, and it won't serve you here. You need to think long term - you need to think about where your heir's heir will be. That's where you need to aim a lot of your efforts. When your grandson becomes the king of France because you became friends with the French king, had your own son marry his daughter, and then had that son trained as an absolute top bloke, well...

There's nothing quite like when a plan comes together perfectly. The problem is holding on to that power once you've got it, and that's fun too.

So yeah, submit thy wallet. Submit thy bandwidth.

There's something really good about this game, but there's something really wrong about it as well. You see, this is quite similar to another bunch of 4x space strategy games - it's got the scope, the typical things you find in 4x space strategy games, it's got the machine races that are evil... it's got the neutral ones, too. It's got the federations, the empires, the weird plant beings. But it wasn't always like this.

Early on, you had to pick from animals. So, mammals (which included humans), arthropoids, reptillians, molluscoids, fungoids, and avians. That's all well and good, I suppose. But there weren't enough Aliens. Everything had a clear thing in human understanding that it had evolved from. Bit of a nitpick maybe, but it's the little things that help make at game better.

As time went on, this didn't change so much as improve. Fine, we got plantoids. Fine, we got humanoids (so the humans were placed into a different group which was later expanded on.) Fine, so we got mods, and DLCs and all sorts of stuff. But none of that ever fixed the game. There was a sort of lonely, boring emptiness to the game.

Don't get me wrong. I don't usually play games for the story, except for the god tier games, like Mass Effect or KOTOR. But you'd expect a like this to have some broad, really vague story. Well, maybe it does, but I've never, ever, not even once, gotten to a crisis. I've never had the patience to sit through all those hours to face off against one of a few random Flying Curbstomps.

Does that say something about me as a gamer? Well, my typical game is going to have some sort of fast-paced action. Either it's a slow burn like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or frenetic insanity like Unreal Tournament or maybe something tactical and "psychological" like Counter-Strike. But I play Total War games. And I play Civilization. And Civilization takes utterly mong to get to the end. So maybe it's not because I'm impatient, because I am perfectly willing to shell out an entire day, or an entire weekend, or two or three weekends to a single playthrough if it can hold my interest.

But that's the issue. Stellaris can't hold my interest for long enough.

So why do I have so many hours? Let me explain.

Every time I boot up Stellaris, I have a specific reason. This reason is usually linked to a not unreasonable desire for that 'one perfect game.' No, I don't have to be the big dominant douchebag, but the idea of becoming the evil overlord everyone scrambles to beat is quite nice, so I'm not opposed to that, either. So what could the perfect game be? Well, I don't care so much about winning or losing, because the game will take forever to 'win' or 'lose' anyways. Even if I conquer the Galaxy, if I keep playing, I still have to face the likelihood of a Crisis. And I've ever gotten that far. I've never even conquered the Galaxy .

The best I've done in that regard was make a machine race - Driven Exterminators, as I recall - and making an alliance with a neighboring race of Driven Exterminators. We worked together to conquer one enemy, and I ended up annexing the majority of the enemy's territory. By this point, I had won. I had achieved the mass necessary to carry me further, because my power relative to my ally had increased, and his own power had been decreased (he lost quite heavily in the war) that he actually asked for me to be his overlord. Naturally, I accepted, and he became my protectorate. I then worked to bide my time for ten years, slowly but surely building up a massive naval force and constructing the first of my megastructures. I was a scientific powerhouse, but even more importantly I was big. I was so big that I was needing to recruit more leaders to govern my sectors.

Soon enough, I diplomatically annexed my protectorate buddies (you can diplo-annex vassals or protectorates after enough time. It takes a while.) Then I turned my attention to the most isolated of the enemy empires. They were our immediate neighbors, and we had completely encircled them in terms of territory. So I created a huge army and just invaded them. Naturally, I won.

This is about when I left off. There's something to this game that feels very, very good. There's something also very wrong, but I don't know quite how to explain this. It's almost as if the game's just boring somehow. There's no number of DLCs that can fix this. There's no amount of patches that can do this, because it's not a bug, it's not a 'forgotten feature' that can be added later. And I'm quite disappointed that I'm unable to precisely elucidate what's wrong with this game, but it feels awfully empty, like it doesn't matter. It's sort of like none of the other AI are playing to win.

But what's good about it? Well, it's pretty. It feels good to play. It gets the exploration thing spot on. The soundtrack is Most Excellent. Sometimes when it feels empty, it's not so bad. I've legitimately fallen asleep to this game, and that's not a bad thing, because it was almost always Most Comfy.

Would I recommend this? Well, I don't know. I really, really hate the entire viewpoint of a good portion of the community, and the devs, that 'DLCs will fix a game.' Early on, the game was kinda screwed. But they shipped it anyways, and that's not fair. Why would I have to pay $40 - $60 for a game that isn't even finished, isn't in early access (which is nonsense but that's for another time) and then pay additional money just for features that are now integral to my experience of the game? Old DLCs in old games were just expansion packs you'd buy in stores. You'd install them and get like a whole new campaign, or a bunch of cool missions or whatever. For instance, the expansion packs for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The core mechanics were unchanged because they were solid. You got a few new weapons and a lot of new environments in which to Git Gud.

Why isn't this the case anymore? If they had released MOHAA but didn't include, say, AI that walked around and searched for you when you were spotted or your cover was blown, the game would have sucked. I would have never played it past that realization. I would have never bought Spearhead or Frontline. But I did, because the core game was not fundamentally stupid.

This is how it should be. I should not be 'expected' to download the latest Paradox DLCs so i can have fun. I should not be told that 'it'll get fixed with the DLC, dw m8 xDDDDDD' because that doesn't matter. A game should be reviewed based on its non-DLC state.

But this really screws with me. What's Stellaris like with no DLCs? Boring. There's no midgame. I've never gotten to the lategame because the midgame has never kept me around. No amount of DLC can fix that, because the problem isn't content; the problem is the thinking behind the scenes. If the Devs had focused on each stage of the game equally, rather than stuffing in all the good stuff in the early and late games, I might have actually faced down the Prethoryn.

But maybe I just don't have the patience.

The other side of the coin is the part that screws with me. You see, the DLC feels fundamental to the game. How can I recommend this game but also rag on it like this? What's more is, how can I recommend this game without being hypocritical? Because I can only recommend it with its DLCs, and I just said we shouldn't do that. So my choice is to keep to my own rules and not recommend it, or break them and recommend it.

Well, I don't know. I wish there was an 'ambivalent' setting. Because I don't actually know how to feel about this game. I have a good friend, a very good friend, who likes it. Yet I recommended it to him - he got the game, got the DLCs, got a lot of mods and what-have-you... and he's hit the late game. But he's the smart sort of guy who isn't bad at games like me.

I'm ambivalent. But I'll recommend it because the idea is good. It just needs a midgame, somehow, some way. It's like my abusive wife.

Ah, Civilization V. I'm always extremely slow on the draw when it comes to games, and I won't write a review for something that doesn't work. Well, this is good, because I've got like a lot of hours in Civilization V, and it works. Admittedly, I'm not at all what you'd even call 'good' at the game. I play it for fun. It's extremely addicting.

It's a pretty good game. Most buildings are actually useful depending on your playthrough, but not strictly necessary (which is good) and most policy trees are pretty useful (though a few usually aren't all that useful. Honor never seemed useful to me, except if I wanted that dank Great General bonus, or the Statue of Zeus. Tradition and Liberty, though? That stuff's my bread and potatoes. And I love bread and potatoes.

So the review. What's to like about this game? Well, it's accessible. Everything is relatively well explained, but it's up to you to figure out how to excel with what you're told. Let's see... you're told about commerce (gold) being something that tiles can generate. Well, some tiles generate more commerce than others for various reasons. You're told about customs houses being a tile improvement created by great merchants. You're told that great merchants are generated using certain wonders and buildings and policies. But you can't only rely on commerce tiles. See, to create that great merchant, you need a productive city. To get a productive city, you need to put a city on a productive tile. Me, I like to have my cities in these tiles: A desert hill, with other hills nearby. There should be a river beside the hill, with lots of flood plains. Ideally, an ocean would be on one side. These are my favorite starts because they cause my population to skyrocket.

But these are also my least favorite because they cause my population to skyrocket. And why is that? Why is a high population good and bad? Happiness. Or, rather in my case, unhappiness. You get unhappiness for higher population in cities. You get unhappiness for having higher numbers of cities. This includes ones you conquer, I believe. You fight unhappiness... with luxuries. So you need to be near luxury resources (stuff like dyes, pearls, gems, gold.) So what's all this got to do with customs houses?

Well, the creation of powerful things requires equally powerful things to be developed over time. And this is something Civ V gets pretty well. It makes you feel like you are constantly improving. if you ever lose this sense of constant improvement, you are doing something very wrong and need to re-evaluate your strategy.

Let's see, what else does this game get right? Well, it's aesthetically a very good-looking game. You see, there's games that age poorly (things like Oblivion and Fallout 3) and games that age well (things like the Homeworld games, or even Unreal Tournament 2004, which still looks quite nice in my eyes.)

Civ 5 has a sort of timeless feel to it, by focusing on this sort of humanistic art-deco aesthetic. It looks good. it's colorful without being gaudy. It's just nice. The leaders are all rendered in full scenes, and all of them look quite realistic and well-proportioned. I was never a mega-huge fan of the cartoony-style stuff of Civ IV. The art design is quite excellent, with particular praise for the paintings, which I assume to be in-house. The actual graphics of the game are pretty alright, but they look a little dated in 2018. However, since graphics aren't that big of a deal, I won't spend much time worrying about it.

The sound design is very mucho excellent. Tres bien. Pas mal. It's good, alright? I've come home to this game, extremely stressed out or angry from work or life in general. I've sat down, booted it up...

...and find myself looking at the clock at 7 in the morning, wondering where I've spent my entire night, cursing myself for not getting to sleep, but thankful that at least I don't have to go to work because it's the weekend. The sound design is integral to this. The ambient sounds are soothing, and the music in peacetime has this sort of sweet, affectionate quality that does weird things to my chest.

In war, on the other hand, the music tends to sound accordingly martial, or otherwise tragic or dark. The music, of course, is almost invariably good. All of the leader themes are divided into peacetime and wartime variants. I very much enjoy Wu Zetian's peacetime theme, which has that sweet, affectionate quality I speak of. However, she is a vanilla leader (that is, she came with the version of the game that was shipped on release - which is the version I bought at Best Buy all those years ago, when I was just a kid) and as a vanilla leader, I am merely alright with the music for most of them. The vanilla themes, in my eyes (or to my ears?) all have a slightly muddled quality to them. They're no doubt good, but each theme is sort of quiet and lacks an integral sort of prideful power you'd expect of a song meant to represent an entire civilization.

However, this changed as time went on. With the Gods and Kings and Brave New World expansions, and with additional civs, we got even better music. That's right, folks. It got par excellence. My favorites are Phos Hilaron (War), for Theodora, and either of Gustavus Adolphus' themes (which are both just absolutely sublime.) Maria Theresa's themes are pretty good too, but Phos Hilaron (War) is just perfect. It sounds like something out of the Star Wars Prequels - like the Battle over Coruscant bit at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. It has this menacing, almost malevolent sort of steadiness, like this unrelenting storm trying to capsize your ship. Even the peace variant doesn't sound particularly peaceful. Rather, it sounds quite intimidating and almost villainous, which sucks because Theodora is hot stuff.

So, what's the verdict? Well, if you got this far you should know. Civ 5 might not be the deepest of the series, but it is a mechanically tight game that encourages you to plan far, far in advance and always knock out Gandhi before he gets nukes if you're going for a Domination Victory. It has good graphics, which were excellent for its time, but its aesthetics are timeless and the game has aged very well in my eyes. Its sound design is quite excellent and its musical landscape is one of the best I've seen in a video game (matched only by, among games I've played, Unreal Tournament 1999 and Crypt of the NecroDancer.)

So yeah, I'd recommend this. Just try not to play America - go Assyria and try an early game domination victory with your siege towers. It's absolute cheese (and cheese is tasty.)

It's pretty good. Each playthrough is different. Managing a commercial empire becomes difficult as you have to really consider supply and demand. The game has such a breadth and depth that it's hard to comprehend. It's entirely possible to go through the game peacefully, to only ever defend yourself and instead engage in purely commercial ventures. It's possible to be a bandit, or a mercenary captain, or become vassaled to a king. Eventually, you're able to become a king yourself, or to rebel against one of the current rulers and place a claimant on the throne.

There are certain patterns however. Swadia, being in the middle and surrounded on all sides, usually is defeated quickly. Typically only incredible luck or the intervention of the player can save them. Cities produce the same things in all playthroughs- that is to say, Suno produces certain things in abundance (supply) and requires other things (demand.) This is the same with other cities, which all produce a variety of goods. This should be taken into consideration when making commercial ventures.

Now for the actually good stuff. The horse combat is good. By this, I mean it's very good. It make sense. It's not a gimmick and horses aren't stupidly OP. There are ways to combat them (spears, or massed pikes) which the AI don't usually take advantage of. The archery is pretty good, and the melee combat is also good. It takes time to learn the intricacies of directional blocking, feints, and that stupid angling and yawing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ people perform in multiplayer. I remember Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy had that sort of nonsense. This kills the Camel. But don't let that stop you, the game itself is great. There's no story, of course, but that's fine. Who needs a story? You're here for good gameplay, to make your own story, to forge your own, um, thingy.

There are a couple problems. The graphics are a bit bleh, but if you want a good game, graphics aren't king. Some of the community are a bit weird, though I suppose you get that anywhere. If you desire xXxHISTORICAL_ACCURACYxXx in the year of OUR LORD 1257 (AD) then you'll be sorely disappointed. There's russians, vikings, plate-armored knights, saracens, hill-folk, and horsefuc- I mean MONGOLS. All of these factions exist in the same time frame, despite in reality being separated by centuries. You'll notice that none of these things are actually bad. None of these "problems" make the game less playable.

D'you know why?

Because this game is good, and it's weird that there's this sort of game, and that this particular game is actually really good.

Also, Bannerlord is never coming out. All hail Warband.

NAH NOPE NUH

DON'T GET THIS GAME

PAID MODS N ♥♥♥♥

♥♥♥♥ IT UNINSTALLING

NEVER WORKED RIGHT ANYWAY