XO
(I backed this game on Kickstarter, and helped out with alpha and beta testing…)
XO has a lovely mix of tactics and strategy within a relatively short three to five hour game run. But learning XO well enough to survive that final run will take you much longer. It’s a game to be played many times as you learn more about the ships, the factions, the enemies, weapons and circumstances. Each time you’ll learn how to survive longer, how to make better use of the ships, systems and resources you encountered, and how to better choose through the event paths in order to win faction allies as you go.
– Real player with 89.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time with Pause Dark Humor Games.
I’ll split this review to what I enjoyed and what I did not.
What I enjoyed
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You really get the feeling of trying to build together a rag-tag fleet of military and civilian ships, fleeing away from a seemingly unstoppable enemy while building up your arsenal, firepower and the capacity to support your fleet. Awesome feeling. :)
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Lots of interesting concepts, boarding, resource harvesting, different kinds of weapons to counter different enemies. Really enjoyed different weapons, upgrades, ship types, keeping civilians in cargo holds (then performing a crew transfer to abandoned/disabled ships) and the ability build up my fleet. :D
– Real player with 51.9 hrs in game
NeoBalls2
Still haven’t encountered Neo from the Matrix nor did I have to do anything with balls. Just got achievements for being myself and not doing drugs.
– Real player with 10.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time with Pause Simulation Games.
You get what you paid for, 2K achievements at minimum price. If you’re an achievement hunter looking to increase the number of achievements on your profile showcase, then I highly recommend buying this. Else don’t waste your money. This is not a game, it’s just a way of distributing achievements.
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game
Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition
Dragon Age: Origins is a God-Tier RPG. However I like to elaborate on my reviews, and so let me elaborate. I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but please note that I might let a couple things slip.
Now as a prelude, I’ll cover the gameplay, graphics and mechanics. Personally in RPGs this matters so little to me. I still play Fallout 2 and enjoy the hell out of KOTOR and Mass Effect. But…lets be real here. They suck. The graphics are…okay-ish? The gameplay has the pacing of tetris and the mechanics are just…old. None of it is fast paced nor are there any really cool abilities looks-wise. None of this is important to me, in fact, its clunkiness brings out a personal enjoyment. But yeah…its definitely really aged. It would also be remiss of me not to mention the fact that the game is ancient, and therefore crashes on newer PCs. About once an hour for me personally. Now I was able to fix it by way of a guide a while back, but going into it expect performance to be less than stellar. Now onto the meat.
– Real player with 182.8 hrs in game
❤ Audience ❤
☑ Beginner
☑ Casual
☑ Hardcore
☼ Graphics ☼
☐ Bad
☑ Alright
☐ Good
☐ Beautiful
☐ Fantastic
♬ Music ♬
☐ Bad
☐ Alright
☐ Good
☐ Beautiful
☑ Fantastic
☠ Difficulty ☠
☐ Easy
☑ Average
☐ Challenging
☐ Hard
☐ Brutal
§ Bugs §
☐ Bugs make the game almost unplayable
☐ Lots of bugs
☑ Few bugs
☐ Insignificant or contains humorous glitches
☐ None encountered during normal gameplay
☯ Story ☯
☐ There is none
☐ Bad
☐ Alright
☐ Good
☑ Fantastic
⚔ Gameplay ⚔
☐ Frustrating
☐ Repetitive
☐ Boring
– Real player with 170.9 hrs in game
Dragon Age™: Origins Awakening
Dragon Age Origins Awakening is in no way an anomaly. It does what is expected from an expansion pack, adds a little here and a little there, rehashes everything that was in the original and doesn’t add anything new or major. And, like most expansion packs, stand alone or otherwise, it is only worth it for fans of the original as taken by it’s own merits, it’s not much of a game.
Awakening starts you off short after the end of the original Dragon Age, you can choose to either import one of your old characters or just from scratch. The latter option gives you an Orlesian Grey Warden background which adds plenty of interesting dialog concerning your heritage throughout the game. Importing a character however, yields almost no interesting dialog throughout the game and even in places and with characters that you original play through should have had a profound effect on you will find that nothing changes regardless of your actions in Origins. This leads to a highly disappointing experience for those of us that have actually played the original and like to think our choices actually mattered, if only in terms of storyline.
– Real player with 71.3 hrs in game
If you were a fan of Origins, you would like this, featuring your gray warden and a whole new cast of colourful companions (and Oghren.) This Expansion deals with the aftermath of the war, and you need to quell another darkspawn uprising. I didn’t find the game as compelling as base, but it was entertaining enough.
However, I wouldn’t really recommend getting it as is because it’s as expensive as the main game but with only a quarter of the content. And don’t play this if you haven’t played the main game either.
– Real player with 16.1 hrs in game
STAR WARS™ Knights of the Old Republic™ II - The Sith Lords™
Good game but there’s a game breaking bug that I cannot find a fix for. I Tried around 6 different fixes to no avail. After combat, around 80% of the time, the game will not allow the player to move. You are stuck unless you save and then load. If it happened 20% instead of 80% it wouldn’t be a problem, but as it stands, at times it’s every 20 seconds you have to spend another 20 seconds to restart.
– Real player with 169.2 hrs in game
Phenomenal game- probably the best Star Wars game I have ever played!
– Real player with 164.2 hrs in game
Tyranny
Oppression, whether as fiction or as reality, seems unavoidable no matter how Tyranny is associated as it is difficult to love this game despite how players (and possibly Obsidian) feel pressured to accept its rulings. It will remain a mystery whether Obsidian had set their ambitions too high, again, and they were forced to release the game early, or if Paradox’s meddlesome content updates and DLC “expansion” model soured its reputation. After a year of patches, DLCs—which claim to be expansions—and hundreds of hours to see what Tyranny has to offer, the overall value remains questionably excellent. As a result, I can only recommend Tyranny on a steep discount or in a GOTY bundle to get the definitive experience. This is an act of kindness towards its crimes that allows players to enjoy all that Tyranny’s reign has to offer while also avoiding to give it the axe.
– Real player with 118.6 hrs in game
i make it short. its a love/hate relation. if they would fix some combat elements i would write a glowing review for it. as you see i am nearly 100 hours into the games so i definitely love some aspect. the reason why i cant recommend it right now are some combat related flaws where it will depend entirely how much youre willing to take if this game will work for you or not.
the +
- story aspects. its obsidian. expect nothing more than a world living up to its lore where every decidion has an impact on the story. thats awesome. thats the main reason we are here.
– Real player with 108.7 hrs in game
Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness
Cant recommend this yet. I have no problems with the usual early access stuff; broken game mechanics, bugged quests, and balance issues. Those are all easy to fix. However, I do have some main concerns that the small dev team may or may not be able to fix for main release:
1. Performance issues. Long load times and poor frame rates on high end machines with SSDs. Not acceptable from a game that looks like 1998. Since you get a loading screen every time you enter/exit an area or building, long loading times severely impact the overall experience. Pretty much every streamer who streamed this said the same thing.
– Real player with 66.2 hrs in game
Party-based computer rpg similar to NWN, Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, et al. If you like those type this game should fit your needs. It is RTwP for those who only play one type of combat.
I think there is enough here to support for sure:
Pros:
Quite a large variety of stuff to find for the hoarder in all of us.
Melee combat is fairly robust and healing gets the job done.
The painted map backgrounds are mostly pretty.
Good variety in classes.
I will cover cons in detail since they need fixing:
– Real player with 23.3 hrs in game
Dragon Age: Origins
Dragon Age is a kind of game that is becoming increasingly rare: a deeply immersive single-player RPG with an interface clearly designed for the PC. It’s easy to sling around the word “immersive” at any game that looks pretty, but DA isn’t messing around - the world of Ferelden shows a unified sense of design and depth that blows even famously vast games like Oblivion out of the water. Coupled with consistently excellent writing and across-the-board quality character design even down to relatively unimportant NPCs, the game truly does feel like it’s reacting to your choices dynamically from the very beginning, and how you play your character can have amazingly subtle effects on the way the story unfolds.
– Real player with 466.3 hrs in game
Still the Best Game in its Franchise…
The first game I ever had on Steam. In fact, this game was the reason I got Steam in the first place. Bought the game upon it’s first day of release and I have been playing on and off over the years. Shame, I played this at least 3-4x the amount of hours it says on my profile offline, and I’ve not lost my interest in the game one-bit.
Rating(s):
Visuals & Graphics: 10/10
- It was very innovative during it’s time. I can remember all the HYPE it received months before release. Considering today’s present standards DA 1 Graphics is already a bit dated, but I will rate it accordingly to the time period it actually got released, and for that time’s standard’s it was one of the TOP.
– Real player with 416.7 hrs in game
Last Days Of Tascaria
Disclaimer: I personally know part of the team behind the game.
The game is a party-based roguelike (up to 4 characters) that features two different gameplay layers. One strategic, where you advance through different types of randomly generated regions composed of locations and one tactical, where the combat is resolved.
The Journey
At the strategic level, to get to the next region you have to reach the portal location. In your way you will be hard pressed to make choices: you are in the way of a horde of orcs making time a luxury you don’t have.
– Real player with 27.4 hrs in game
I found it fun and engaging, specially the combat.
I’m a big fan of “Choose your own adventure games” and I really like how they integrated this genre with a very tactical combat.
I got this game in Early Access and I’ve seen how devs have enhanced things I complaint about, like polishing the story or improving music during combats.
Pros:
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Your decisions change the game
-
Replayability
-
Combination of attacks during combats
Cons:
- I’d like to be able to pick the other existing characters to start the game
– Real player with 21.0 hrs in game
Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition
Kingmaker is rough around some edges, with a few changes to the tabletop rules that aren’t clearly stated to the player. (If you’re unfamiliar with Pathfinder, it is a variant of Dungeons and Dragons.) A large number of frustrations I have often come from either the interface not being great at explaining when something is different, or not explaining anything at all until you’re in another menu. (A game like Pathfinder really demands a character creation/level up screen that lets you preview your whole build from levels 1-20 just to get an idea of what you’re doing.)
– Real player with 255.9 hrs in game
As a cRPG this is an excellent game - great characters, great companions, great stories - main plot and companions - and a combat system that works.
As a game, it’s a mish mash of systems, ideas and a rigidly enforced ruleset that sadly overwhelms that content a little. It is a massively long game with 6 distinct acts that do not flow one after another, but intersperse themselves with a poorly explained Kingdom building mechanic that ultimately just doesn’t work and really, really gets in the way of the rest of the game. Making numbers get bigger doesn’t really make for a compelling experience, but if you don’t do it you’ll get yourself in a right mess and the game will end. It has no respect for your time as a gamer at all, and will test the very limits of your patience.
– Real player with 209.4 hrs in game