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
The Red Solstice
I’ll skip the stuff about it beeing 8 player coop and sooo on and start talking about the stuff that might not be mentioned as often in short reviews:
The game offers multiple difficulties.. however the base difficulty is intended to be rather challenging for Players.
Which is definitly a good thing since it’s all about improving your own skill and after many defeats rewarding yourself with your very first win… somewhat darksouls-esque..
Classes:
So far there’s a total of 8 classes and depending on what the player wishes to accomplish every class has one or more distinctive roles.(Tank, Healer, DmgDealer,Scout….)
– Real player with 2514.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time with Pause Sci-fi Games.
I played this game when it first came out and I immediately fell in love with it.
It’s a slick tactical shooter. With hordes of alien zombies trying to kill you. Meanwhile your team of husky voiced men attempt to complete your objectives.
Again it’s a great game. I stopped playing it for some time and decided to get back into it and immediately fell back in love.
Great set of classes
Assault-great all rounder very good beginner class. he’s great with light weapons and rifles and he even smokes a cigar. Do you want to live forever?
– Real player with 1210.3 hrs in game
Serpent in the Staglands
A friendly reminder that taking on a pack of wolves with a kitchen knife, or single point in a first level spell is a bad idea.
Serpent in the Staglands is a modern ‘old-school’ style crpg in both look and feel. Gone are the arrows of patronization, the quest log, the terrible bland puzzles that a brain dead toddler could figure out, and in is a true return to form of open world crpgs bursting at the seams with love and attention to detail. For a game made by a team of two people, it is one of the gaming masterworks of this decade in my eyes.
– Real player with 39.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Real-Time with Pause Isometric Games.
Serpent in the Staglands starts of with you, the Moonlord, trapped in a mortal body.
With very little info you set out throughout the Staglands in order to put the pieces of what happened together.
From the get go the story pulled me in, I really liked the mystery and the continuous search for clues to figure out who trapped you and why.
Being in mortal form also strips you of your powers as a God and this is a very refreshing take on the genre: you’re not the typical hero which everyone asks for help, you’re just a peasant which most people ignore.
– Real player with 35.4 hrs in game
Drakensang
A party based RPG with great potential but quite unfinished and unpolished. Some people compare it to DA:O, NWN, BG, etc…(that being the reason I bought it) but that’s a big overstatement.
The bad:
1. The story/main quest - linear, blurry and uninteresting - does little to motivate the player to save the world.
2. The side quests are scarce, petty, uncomplicated and unrewarding.
3. The companions are plain, stereotyped and boring. They have no personal quests (except one), don’t develop with the progress in the game, rarely have something to say about quests/environment. Puppets with no personality, no conflicts, no banters, no life. The majority of them can be recruited too late in the game, so, for the first half, you will probably be stuck with the barking amazon and the cliché dwarf.
– Real player with 178.9 hrs in game
Ah, so this is where Dragon age origins stole all their ideas.. Of course that most likely isnt true. Judging by the release dates, the guys and gals over at Bioware were almost certainly unaware of the osbcure German title Drakensang, even tho Drakensang did come out first.
After beating Drakensang and enjoying it greatly, I couldnt help but notice similarities. Four member party- check. Pause and play tactical combat- check. Mages have magical skills and fighters get erm, fightery skills. Your archers stand back and sling arrows, you’ll need a rogue to open locks, disable traps and even smooth talk out of a situation or two. Its all done well, and made with obvious care, so if your into that sort of thing, your gonna like this.
– Real player with 138.8 hrs in game
Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition
Can’t express enough, nor can I make this a full review as it would take far too long, how amazing this game is. Still survives more than 18 years after launch through the Enhanced Edition and I’ve been playing since that launch. Roleplaying online for over 15 years, as well. It continues to get amazing improvements as it goes along, and I’m excited to see how much more it can bring.
– Real player with 7840.3 hrs in game
You know what you could be playing instead of a MMO?
Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition.
– Real player with 965.0 hrs in game
Tower of Time
Tower of Time
Tower of Time is a squad-based dungeon crawler with predetermined character types whose attributes and skills can be leveled up occasionally and who fight in battles that require strategic and tactical thinking.
TL;DR
Though I felt the game got off to a slow and perhaps not so interesting start, after aquiring a few companions and getting down to level 5 it grabbed my interest and continued doing so as I progressed. I ended up enjoying the game quite a bit. This is one of those games that you need to get into a ways before you really start grooving on it. The fact that I bothered to write such a long review shows how much I liked this game, even with some stuff that bugged me.
– Real player with 81.6 hrs in game
In short:
AMAZING 50+ hours RPG with gorgeous graphics, an enticing story, tactical battles, balanced gameplay and original mechanics!
Summary
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Very smooth gameplay, with gorgeous graphics and scenery and non-claustrophobic dungeons
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Unintrusive interface, with sophisticated RPG mechanics
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Original take on RPG mechanics, specially regarding the battles
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The battles feel very tactical, due to the slow time feature. It is not turn-based, but it feels like XCOM, and has a lot of variation like diverse objectives and scenarios.
– Real player with 68.2 hrs in game
Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition
Baldur’s Gate is truly a masterpiece. Despite it’s beauty, tactical depth and great story, the game does not take itself too seriously. This cannot be said of many other leading RPG titles, which I soon begin to find rather corny. If you like RPGs and have not played Baldur’s Gate, then this is an absolute must, you do not even need to waste your time reading this review but of course you are welcome to. If you have played the original BG and are curious about Beamdog’s boob job, I share with you my opinion.
– Real player with 425.6 hrs in game
Classics are often thought to be timeless for future generations to enjoy, but the same cannot be said for Baldur’s Gate—and it’s not because CRPGs are uncommon. To go blind into BG in 2016 is practically impossible because how modern expectations are at odds with the brutal accessibility of ’90s computer games.
Baldur’s Gate, simply put, is an sarcophagus; it is a coffin of a bygone time of design philosophies and of late ’90s player expectations, immersed in the counter-culture of D&D and of fantasy-fiction that is written in its code like hieroglyphics to modern eyes. The game’s reverence is both a nostalgic call-back as well as an appreciation of BG’s systems as a traditional role-playing experience.
– Real player with 203.9 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
Drakensang: The River of Time
It started really well and I really began to enjoy this game, then the awful combat system kicked in during critical times, which can be a real pain. Though I like the pause and ensuing tactical planning elements, it does not always work. For example, I could be hit by ranged weapons and despite having high level ranged combat, I could not fire back despite pause, select targeting, etc. I could set the attack up and… waited… and… waited… Nothing happened, all the while I was getting hit until my party was decimated by three low level dwarfs with crossbows. No matter what I did or where I stood I could not fire back, yet they were in clear line of sight and within range. Whether or not I was being a numpty, I don’t know - it just seemed to spoil what is a good game from being a great game.
– Real player with 80.8 hrs in game
Like Drakensang the Dark Eye, this is a totally underrated RPG imo, and almost all the bad reviews refer to it being “unplayable” on newer versions of Windows, although it only takes a few min online to find a fix. I have Win 10 and I typed -windowed and -novideo in the Steam preferences (rightclick on the game in Steam Library and select Properties - Set launch options) and it didn’t crash a single time, which is more than one can say for a lot of older games by non-defunct companies, so so much for that. The -novideo did actually disappear later, so idk if it did anything; so as is clear I have no real idea what I’m doing but still managed to get the game to run with next to no effort. There are few loading screens in spite of large areas and the loading times are fast, unlike some other games I could mention where I end up going online all the time as I get bored waiting.
– Real player with 77.2 hrs in game
Pillars of Eternity
I’ve always consider the progress of graphics and telling stories with well made CG instead of words are good things for game industry, I thought the stunning graphics could bring the game world closer to us than the classic literature did.
Yet I found myself totally immersed by Eroa ,in this game than I’ve ever been in other games before, the astunning details I read from these words,just makes me questioning if the game industry is on the right path consider all those games with great power of graphics but turn out to be a total nightmare.
– Real player with 94.0 hrs in game
The game is just inredibly boring for me, never played it more than couple of hours from the start. Comparing to old BG/IWD series and Planescape:Tormet the only advantage of PoI is the graphic.
Game mechanics like allowing to sleep only when you have camp wood or some enemy beetles opening a door you close a moment earlier to hide from it is just lame.
– Real player with 87.4 hrs in game