Recent reviews by Commander Llama

There are dozens of us that think this is a fantastic historical Total War! Dozens! And I'm one of them!

Its a little rough around the edges in spots (typos, config defaults, etc.), due to getting minimal post launch support as Creative Assembly contracted after layoffs. I like it a lot more than Total War: Troy and about the same as Total War: Three Kingdoms (3K).

Recommended on sale (I got it for $19 CDN). Amazing value.

Pros:
- The Resource system combined with Diplomacy makes for the most engaging diplomatic opportunities in a Total War game since 3K.

- In-depth campaign customization options, this is needed in all Total War games.

- The Dynasties update brings ancient Greece/Troy and Babylon into a vast campaign map.

- The Lethality (critical hit) system in battles

- The Outpost system adds a lot of variety to settlement planning. Turtle with tons of forts. Build buff superhighways across the gigantic campaign map.

- Unit weight class system, terrain system, and dynamic weather really shakes up a lot of the battles and helps make up for lower unit diversity.

- Stable and runs great (up to 240 fps in campaign map and 130 fps in battles)

Cons:
- Bronze Age is a long long time ago, not very much cultural connection to people/places for most players

- Very limited cavalry and no artillery. It was a simpler time.

- There were about one thousand times where I wanted the Trespass Warning system from Total War: Warhammer games, trying to police armies roving your lands

- 2 player co-op campaign limit (could have bumped it to 4-8, for a map this big).

I recommend this game, conditionally.

- It's really short.
- It's probably not that engaging if you're new to The Expanse series (book or series).
- It's a standard Telltale experience.

If any of the above three statements put you off, don't get the game.

But if you're into the Expanse, and still okay with a short and simple narrative adventure game in this year 2024 and beyond, its fun. Telltale does a pretty good job with the IP, given their skill sets.

I think what the game REALLY stirs in me is my need for a much larger Expanse video game project. 6.5/10.

Game has a very, very solid foundation. Tight PvE shooter with up to 4 players, where you embark on missions to spread Managed Democracy, kill bugs, and kill robots. A better Starship Troopers game than any of the actual Starship Trooper games. There is a balanced amount of upward progression via gaining levels/resources, but a lot of your mission success comes from skill (both self and team). Variety in loadouts, and a lot of gear feels viable. The chaos balance in missions is awesome, and frequently leads to Great Moments in Gaming.

Game needs:
- 6-8 player squads, 12-16 for "big" or "raid" missions.

- "Big" or "Raid" missions.

- Better anti-cheat that doesn't infect your kernel like state-level malware and Error 114's 20% of your potential squad mates, and yet despite all these anti-cheat issues, there are still cheaters

- More enemy variety (go full EDF, bugs+bots+more factions, all at once missions)

- To not acquire Super Credit Creep aka objectively superior gear starts to cluster in Paid (/Slow Dripfeed) Content

- To not add extra layers of launchers, logins, etc. Click 'Play' and then game run, wow its that easy, can't believe it's not butter.

- More interesting, simple activities to do on your Super Destroyer. Bar, showers, shooting range, cape laundromat, etc. Make it a place to hangout and mess around, see Deep Rock Galactic for game design tutorial.

Outstanding! I have played this game, and only this game, for more than three months. Gleefully. That's how long it took me to finish one campaign.

So if you're a value for money gamer, one fairly in-depth campaign (including reading lots of lore books, and some careful stealth operations) took about 140 hours. And yet, I sit here thinking about starting up a new campaign.

PROS:
- High powered D&D 5e with house rules that, usually, increase power even further (quintessential example, Haste is a full unrestricted additional action, rather than the 5e RAW restricted one). Jump and Shove are ridiculous and amazing in this variant. Some of the gear in this game is extremely powerful. You can make some really fun builds out of all these options, and this variant of 5e plays great. It could be even better though (see last section).

- Excellent presentation, gorgeous level design, character models, etc.

- Decent storytelling overall, nothing mind blowing. Definitely better than DOS1 and DOS2. Some of the party companions are very well done. I ended up getting a lot out of reading the lore books. Plenty is hinted, foreshadowed, and fleshed out. The writers did a great job.

- Extremely fun in multiplayer. Once the chaos gets going, it really starts to feel like a pen and paper D&D session.

- Outstanding post-launch patch support. Larian is quite literally setting the new high watermark for AAA game support, and it's sad that so many games fall so much shorter.

CONS:

All of the issues I'm going to list impacted me during all patches thus far.

- Not without some hitches or glitches, most frequently for me: Character portraits bugging out and becoming "shadow cursed" looking. Only possibly fixes itself on level ups, which can take a while, or respec, either way a waste of time.

- Dialogue/conversions bugging out a bit, infrequently, but there's enough dialogue in this game that it comes up numerous times. Dialogue getting clipped off. Character animations going weird. Various immersion-breaking, but sometimes funny things. The ending cutscenes in particular bugged out pretty hard, enough so that they were buzzkill on an otherwise exciting finale.

- Lag/desync between ordering an action and it happening. Happened the most during Extra Attacks.

- Physics failing during Jumps. For example, a Jump looking and seeming possible, but the jumping character 'catches' on an object in the environment and falls short. Usually just minor annoyance, but occasionally resulted in death or hilarious slapstick fall damage.

- Act 3 performance does drop quite a lot compared to Act 1 and 2. Act 3 itself was awesome, but my FPS often halved. If you find your Act 1-2 performance is struggling, you might be in for a bad time.

- AI lag sometimes while taking their turn.

- Spell/ability descriptions could use some polish. Some are misleading or inaccurate.

- The lack of any real use for Adventuring Gear (rope, crowbar, etc.) is a fairly big letdown, even though Jump is superpowered, and magic spells tend to get you where you're wanting to go quickly. It would have been nice to integrate these kinds of adventuring options, both in exploration mode, and in dialogue mode.

NEEDS EXPANSION:

The modders will probably tackle a bunch of this, where they haven't already.

- Way more race/class options. Right now BG3's 5e is fairly barebones, compared to pen and paper 5e in 2023. Check out the race and class options on 5etools if you're wondering what I mean.

- Take this thing to Level 20. Screw game balance. Let us destroy this game at high levels. You can always go the TES Morrowind route, and let the player know they've screwed over the fates bla bla bla, have Withers chide us, and if we care we can save scum. More Larian, MORE.

- Classic Import/Export Character features, a la BG1/BG2/NWN. Let us roll characters, store them, and bring them into another game (such as multiplayer) with ease. This day and age, we could roll these characters on a webapp, and import them into our game later.

- Full-on worldbuilding tools a la Neverwinter Nights seem like a stretch, but admit it, an amazing stretch.

Amazing trilogy, crappy remaster.

But if this is your only way to play the trilogy, then I guess I recommend it. With modding, you can upgrade the games to a higher graphical standard.

=== IMMORTAL EMPIRES / UPDATE 2.0 RE-REVIEW ===

It's definitely worth your time now.

=== ORIGINAL LAUNCH REVIEW ===

There is a great game and excellent finale in here somewhere, but it needs at least another year or two of development time. The game is still pretty fun and mostly playable (there are crashes, bugs, and desyncs of various kinds. Patches have addressed some but not all). I mean if it was completely trash, I would have much less play time already.

The eight player campaign multiplayer is AWESOME. Truly awesome. Standout feature of the game.

I like the base game factions, but it's easy to imagine players who might not. I think Ogre Kingdoms are the best new faction, they feel the freshest. I also like Cathay and their unique mechanics are cool, but you could view Cathay or Kislev as "Empire-likes" so more of the same. After that, it's five Daemon factions, which can feel a bit samey even if they are each unique in their own ways.

If you're sitting on the fence about this game, Total War: Warhammer II is the more complete, patched, and polished experience with much better mods. I'd just wait for more patches, Immortal Empires, modding tools, etc. Mid-2023 on sale probably.

Chaos Realms suck. Special shoutout to the animators of Nurglings and audio engineers of the Rot Flies. Chefs kiss.

Now this is value

I played the Reassemble campaign (main single-player campaign) during the free period, and ended up not buying the game after, but it was somewhat tempting. It's worth pointing out that the free period came with a x4 (quadruple) XP gain event. This means I leveled up a lot more than I oughta, which felt good. But it makes the normal XP gain seem paltry and grindy.

So my Yes recommend is pretty conditional. As a free game I enjoyed playing it, but the live service aspects of the game are unsavoury. Hero / character building system is a live service snoozefest (constantly swap out new gear to make 4 numbers go up.... or focus on a couple numbers of your choice to slightly specialize your hero...zzzz.... we can't add any more water to this RPG punch).

Gameplay is generally fun, but it is constrained. Common example, oh nice I'm Iron Man! It's a dream come true! I can fly!!! Game: RETURN TO COMBAT ZONE...3...2...1... Or you hit the "ceiling" of the level in no time flat. Eh.

Having a somewhat balanced hero design also means that The Hulk doesn't seem particularly stronger than Black Widow. Large dissonance coming from the movies. Hard thing to solve given what the developers were aiming at (co-op).

Enemy design is probably the most boring part of the game. Various robots and a few human opponents. Bosses were quite disappointing. Mostly boring robots. HP sinks.

Despite all this, you get to play as Avengers characters in a fairly competent third-person action brawler.

Marvel's Avengers at full price? No.
On sale? Maaaaaaaaaaaaybe.
Free? Yes, give it a shot.

It's not "the" mythical superhero game and doesn't move the subgenre forward. Batman Arkham City and the PS4/PS5 Spider-Man games still the peak. Probably because they aren't live service trash.

Let's put it this way: It's a rare single player FPS that I play four times.

A very worthy sequel to Pillars of Eternity, and to the cRPG genre. Good character stories, a well developed world, multiple independent but interconnected major questlines, multiclassing. Every system from PoE has been iterated, and I only have some relatively minor gripes. Better modding scene than PoE too. Not entirely finished yet, but it does seem a bit shorter than PoE, although still very good per-hour value.

Edit: Finished all of the DLCs and really enjoyed them.

Beast of Winter DLC: Nice content expansion into the God of Entropy's realm, and particularly nice for the lore that we get to dive into the Saint's War and meet Waidwen.

Seeker, Slayer, Survivor DLC: It's an Arena DLC, so YMMV. However, it's the best Arena chunk of gameplay I can remember playing. Tons of different battles, replayable if you just enjoy the battles in and of themselves, lots of great loot to be had.

Halls of the Unseen DLC: Huge library, puzzles that did include a fair bit of reading. Damn it I'm an Eoran lore nerd now. It's always fun to be playing with the archmages.I was finally able to kill one of the megabosses, thanks to the level cap mod, with a party of 25th level characters. It's not really worth the loot, but an epic fight.

Overall Season Pass/DLC review: Worth it on sale, and integrates nicely with the base game. I feel like I got more out of the total experience.

Minor gripes:
- Biggest design gripe: a great many small areas (common given the game occurs in an archipelago) means a great many loading times. They aren't very long, but they are collectively too much.

- Framerate drops surprisingly low in large battles. I don't mind too much since in combat I'm in slo-mo anyway, but worth mentioning. I ran into it a lot because I really enjoyed the big crew-to-crew pirate battles.

- The ship mini-game needed further development. I found myself just skipping it after trying it once or twice.

- The Level Cap of 20 is too low for completionist play. I doubt I caught everything, but I do all the quests I find. I reached Level 20 before doing any of the DLC of the Season Pass, which are all content expansions. And I haven't triggered the "point of no return" act of the endgame, but not sure how much occurs after that. There is a mod on NexusMods that raises the Level Cap to 33, and it's working great. Level 21 and counting... [edit: I finished the game at 25th level, well worth the mod].