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It is a small game which gives you what it shows you. It is for people who like bullet hell games and want to have a twist on them like a rogue-like progression.

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This game is fundamentally bullet hell game. You will be focusing on your character and making micro adjustments to your position. You will be memorising projectile patters and dodging them. Everything else is just a twist on old, bullet hell genre. Rogue like elements are fun, but they do not alter core gameplay.

This is good, albeit short game. You will soon complete base game and the longevity supposedly comes from repetition. Beating game with other characters, hunting for achievements, better scores, higher difficulty levels, etc.

I only disliked seemingly randomly thrown assets together as game lacks a little bit thematically. For example, in military level boss is a pyramid? Then it is a plane? Bosses generally tend to suffer from multiple stages which neither of them is interesting or difficult. These are just stages pilled upon stages and game even lacks simple coherence. Like: this is military level or this is pirate level as assets are not always consistent.

I had missed an easier mode for starters and greater focus on rogue like elements.

Rogue like
• When I had played this game, I had expected various interesting upgrades which would allow you to play this game differently. However, all upgrades are rather tame. They all are focused on various interactions of your shots. Make them bigger, make them slower in order to scale up in a way which would allow you to fill entire screen and instant kill entire wave in a dozen of seconds. This game has only this kind of interactions.
  
  I was expecting to get regenerating shields. Amour. Stealth. More interesting drones which wouldn't just be extension of you shooting. Even something as regenerating health is very scarce in this game. In this game you will have 100 ways to augment your attacks, but few powerful combinations to make your character really powerful or interesting.
  
  Easy mode
  
• Game lacks an easy mode. It has a practice mode, however it is so trivial that it is not interesting to play. You essentially have invincibility turned on which is neither interesting or gives you are real practice.
  
  This game needs to start with on easy mode for a new player. An easy mode should be just a normal mode with ballerina pick up enabled by default. The core issue is that this game is unforgiving. It is for people who love playing bullet hell type games. Thus, you will have to beat level after level without making a mistake. For a new player it is difficult and they will make a mistake along the way. Mistakes will accumulate and they will get frustrated. Ballerina gives a player 1 health if they take no damage. It is an easy way to make an easy mode for players to play on as it allows players to make mistakes and learn how to play base game. After player beats an easy mode, a normal game mode will be unlocked which is just how the base game is now.

This game is what you see. It is designed for people who enjoy bullet hell games and is unforgiving to others. If you know that you like these types of games, it is a good purchase. If you don't, then it is more of an open question. Lack of an easy mode for people unfamiliar with the genre will cause frustration. Lack of interesting character customisation might feel shallow and game lacks narrative to make levels interesting as they can feel cheap at times.

Here is a list of various small things which could be improved.

• Is a giant resource hog. Game uses surprisingly little RAM, but a lot of GPU and CPU resources. The problem resides with having no cap on FPS and thus my hardware max out unity FPS cap of 900 FPS. Game needs to have an option to cap FPS.
  
  
• Game has a standard white cursor which stays on a screen when you use keyboard aiming. I would like to just get rid of it in options or hide it when not in use.
  
  
• It is little bit annoying and tiresome when all bosses have 3 stages of ever increasing difficulty.
  
  
• Game has only 1 health regeneration pick up and that is very situational.
  
  
• Game has upgrade tier system which is not very clearly portrayed. Each upgrade has different icon with different kind of stars to show that it is better. It would be nice to see icons with unified scheme of rarity.
  
  
• Game waits until last projectile to finish. When you are dealing with boss, it is kind of anti-climatic to deal with remaining spawns.
  
  
• Barrels/bombs slow down gameplay significantly by denying you access to part of a map where are a lot of them.

Calicifer's Reviews

If you are interested reading full review or want to discuss something with me, please follow the provided link. I do not allow endless discussions under my reviews, because it rarely ends well.

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Bioshock is one of those good old games when developers cared and worked their asses off their game. Even if story falls flat to someone as jaded and experienced as me, you still can appreciate the effort developers took in developing campaign. It is one of those campaigns which provides you with unique experiences and is why I love playing video games.

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Game is touted for its story and memorable moments. I can see how it would be impressive to young adults who did not seen much, but it really falls apart under expert analysis. Story in its entirely is silly with cliche elements. Unexplained super-soldiers. Super power who is too dumb to feed its own people. Villain who is ridiculously evil in order to fulfil his master plan which changes every chapter. Bioshock has all the writing of B tier movie.

The Twist
• Game has a big twist in a middle. However, the entire premise of this game falls flat. I even went to see a speed run and had documented it in order to prove it to you.
  
  Atlas mentions 'kindly' only 4 times:
  1) When he asks you to pick up a wrench in order to defend yourself;
  2) When he asks to lower your weapon when you are away from a big daddy.
  3) When you get security key from the surgeon.
  4) When his signal gets jammed by X. He asks you to continue to do what you were doing before.
  5) When you are heading to kill Ryan, he asks you to kindly kill him.
  6) Atlas asks to put key into a machine in order to prevent self-destruction of Rapture.
  
  As you can see, the grand coup de grace of developers falls flat on its face. Moments like these only work when they are genuinely well woven into the story. If you do not foreshadow that you do not have agency, you cannot then have as a grand reveal that you are mind controlled and have no agency at all. it is equivalent of poking fun at a player for not having any choice in a matter. It is a video game! The only choice I have is to stop playing and then it will only mean that the game is bad.
  
  Bioshock fails to properly foreshadow its twist. Key word is uttered either in irrelevant moments or when it is completely pointless. Your character wants to survive and he will put key back regardless of being ordered or not, because...he wants not to die. Your character wants to kill Ryan, because he for some reason constantly tries to kill him. Throughout entire story, you as a player choose to do what you do. You choose to help Atlas family. You choose to kill or save little sisters. You choose to help Atlas with his quest. Mostly because of how ridiculously silly the story is with it since Ryan pretty much just wants to destroy Rapture and your quests usually are about "lets not destroy the whole city. I'm in it and I might die if everyone dies in it".
  
  Even grand reveal of "would you kindly" with Ryan is nonsensical. He issues command. You start doing that command and then Ryan asks you to kindly do that thing. However, you were doing that without a key word! Then he asks you to kill him to prove a point. Really? Why he would do such a thing? The entire story is poorly done and simply does not work for someone as clever or as attentive as me.
  
  The Setting
  
• The entire premise is equally as ridiculous. We have a standard sci-fi nonsense of unified force with no opposition and infinite resources and technologies collapsing or at a brink of collapse. Rapture had failed, because people were starving and dying out of starvation on the streets. They had resulted in importing goods from the surface which was ought to be incredibly expensive. This speaks volumes at how expensive local food was. Throughout the story you can see how miserable one family rented apartment was for even "wealthy and needed" residents of Rapture.
  
  What Ryan did to address all of this? Nothing. No charity. No labour laws. No investments into steady supply of food or shelter. He built a nation and tried to run it as a business man. When he encountered opposition to his rule, he betrayed everything he believed in. He nationalised all of the relevant industries. Made a massive government complex which was solely dedicated to militarism. Then he launched war against its own inhabitants. Let that sink in. Situation at Rapture even before all the plasmid situation was so abysmally bad that people were living in the maintenance rooms. They were constantly starving. Situation got so bad that Atlas or Fontaine could bribe a man to do whatever he wished just for a good meal. Ryan had run this place into the ground and it is a small miracle that it did not disintegrated on its own.
  
  Our Villain
  
• Atlas or Fontaine is poorly written. Their motivation seems to vary between their monologue. First, Atlas claims that he has a family. Whatever he had a family is irrelevant. What is important is why he wanted to get to the sub. This would imply escape, but later he is shown that he wanted to stay in Rapture in order to gather all the Adam for himself. So, why you spent first third of a game going to the submarine?
  
  As a whole, villain is one dimensional. It has nothing interesting to say. Constantly monologues of how evil he is. He then tries to kill you through rest half of a game. At the end he speaks you as of family. He even has an audacity to say how you betray him. In the end, his end goal was to get all the Adam in Rapture and go back to surface world while looking like a giant, bronze statue... Conversations and a plot in this game is nonsensical. Don't try to look too much into it, because it will fall apart.

Game does a good job to present Big Daddies. They are big, lumbering and powerful beasts. However, as you progress through the levels, you notice all the inherent flaws with such a simple system.

The problem is that Big Daddy, Little Sister often ignore enemies on the level. They pass right through each other. This is due to Big Daddies being neutral to everyone who does not attack them and do not get too close. This means that Splicers can just ran past them without entering into a fight. This really breaks my immersion when a splicer springs to a room through a big daddy rather than fighting it. Enemies in general seem to be rather pacified when it comes to fighting a Big Daddy and interactions which were meant to happen all the time can simply not trigger. In part due to NPC view system, in part how they are programmed.

Another issue is that Big Daddy can just decide to end a fight on its own. It is extremely frustrating to fight Big Daddy most of the way in. Take cover and come back only to discover that they had entered into animation to transfer little sister into the vents. It is such a simple system, but in this game it barely works and you might get frustrated fighting them due to all the bugs surrounding these two. At least, it certainly pulls me out of immersion when they are just chilling out on a level, letting splicers just ran past them to me.

Or how about trying to hypnotise Big Daddy? I throw a last spell out of my reserves. It gets blocked by him entering into animation. Sigh. Reload save. I try again. I bring him to a fight, but clip him by a single machine gun bullet. He turns hostile. SIGH. Quick Load again.

To me Bioshock seems like it was underdeveloped. It has more than enough content and effort put into it, but none in the right place. Game is quite a long one, but it fails to establish a proper story. Most of it is down to it being spread paper thin across various characters, some do not even need to be here. When game has time, it spends it on needless details and conversations. It is very rare when audio logs are done properly. Mostly they just rant about unimportant, uninteresting things or how great one or other character is.

After the big reveal, game becomes a slog. You have to go through tunnels, Apollo Square or how it is called. It is one big brown level. It is designed like a living apartment. You have to go through each floor, room by room. It is not exciting to explore living quarters. What might be even more surprise to you or developers is that it is not exciting to go through railway lines. You heard me right, in this level there are living buildings connected with railway lines. It is really boring level and it highlights how game quality starts decreasing after first levels. It is uninspired, it is uninteresting. It is more of a same, but with nothing what made first half of a journey so good. Eventually it recovers, but game really overstays its welcome. For me, just playing first half of a game would had been enough. Some levels could had been cut in order to make other levels more interesting, because there is a noticeable drop in quality and game does overstay its welcome.

Bioshock is type of game which I love. It has a grand campaign crafted with love which is an experience in its own right. When I was in high school, I was afraid to play it and only made to medical pavilion. Now I completed an entire game and I seem had completely outgrown my own childishness. Game was exciting as it was a world which I could explore. Love and attention which developers had put into the game is plain to see. The story and the angle they were taking would had been interesting to me as a teenager. However, now in my thirties, story fell flat and is quite primitive. It is surprising how I liked this game despite its main narrative aspect falling flat to me. It might be due to general quality of this game which speaks highly of how good this game might be fore everyone else.

Despite harsh critique of this review, I'm glad that I had finally played Bioshock 1. It however did not convinced me to play Bioshock 2. I also dislike Bioshock Infinite due to its outdated combat design which is taken from this game, but made a lot more bullet spongy. In the end, I do think that this game is the best in a series and every true gamer should try at least one game out of a trilogy.

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Stalker series on its own or in lightly modded form isn't that great. Call of Pripyat lacks personality in its gameplay and atmosphere. Game shines as a modded experience, but mods tend to be overtuned for an experienced Stalker player which leaves series as a whole rough to a newer player.

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Cult classics often are beloved by their fans. Often this love is blind and people ignore or might not even ever played the base game. Stalker series is a perfect example of a cult classic. It does one thing very well, it has extensive modding support. However, does anyone remember it without the mods? Do you review your nostalgia, mods or base game today? Well, I'm here to remedy this and to shine some light upon base game and mods.

A base Stalker game is terrible. It was nigh unplayable back then too with how broken it was. Over time it received patches from developers and community. However, Stalker games in general remain deeply flawed and not worth playing. They are a diamond in a rough which become great through work of modders which fixes all the issues devs could not bother and emphasise the strong points of a series. In order to enjoy playing this game, you need to know long and extensive of mods which you want to have and then to slog through over-tuned levels which are designed for players who had seen it all, replaying this game multiple times.

Truly Scary Gunplay
• Stalker games are broken at a fundamental level. Its gunplay simply does not work. You cannot fire an assault rifle or a pistol accurately beyond point blank range. The recoil is massive. Bloom takes half of your screen. Recoil is uncontrollable on most weapons. Game has a terrible shot deviation system where your guns won't fire straight. This alone would make for a terrible shooter experience, however, there is more. Even on Misery mode (the intended experience), enemies are still bullet spongy as hell. I could use an entire magazine from a pistol to kill one Flesh. I could take a two bore shotgun and it will have an effective range of 5 meters...literally. Gunplay is absolutely abysmal in this game. It is kind of game where each enemy is deadly accurate and are bullet sponges while you can die from a single hit from nowhere.
  
  Story
  
• Writing in this game is silly. Quests are mediocre at best. A best example of silly is a starter quest where you have to expose a doctor. Initially it seems that Stalkers encountered a Bloodsucker which were ample in the area. However, you soon discover that it is doctor that had drained all the blood, because...he has a hemoglobin addiction. Writing can get just this silly at times. Other times, cutscenes and character dialogues are delivered in a completely flat fashion, trying to make a joke about supposedly hilarious situation of a soldier hiding in a fridge. It is so bad that only amateurs with no skills, experience or time can make it. Other elements of a story is equally ridiculous. For example, military has anti-anomaly devices on their helicopters. Except story forget about that immediately as it is mentioned. Army also forgets that anomalies move after each emission. So their helicopters crash down. Except zone also forgot that anomalies move after each emission and our military forces also forgot that again. So they just radio in for a helicopter extraction and flew out. This is an actual main story of a game. It is just bad.
  
  Anomalies
  
• Anomalies got a lot easier and boring. First of all, all anomalies are located to certain areas. There is no real danger in those areas outside of being overly eager or careless. You simply throw bolts and pick an anomaly. There is no challenge for it and they all are comfortably and boringly placed to special zones which mostly look fine from far away, but is a mine field from nearby which tick down your life, mostly very slowly with dedicated gear and consumables.
  
  Artifacts are also of very dubious use. Most of them have minor bonuses to elemental resistances. However, each artefact generates radiation. This means that you cannot put an artifact without another artifact which would constantly drain radiation from you. Your 4-5 slots for artifacts are essentially cut by 2 just of counter-weighting effects of radiation. Furthermore, even really useful artefacts are as painfully boring as they can be. The best ones are things like +20 kg carrying capacity. System is very primitive and quite honestly, boring. It is here only to serve as a cash cow to enable you to purchase best gear quite early on if you know where to go and what to do.
  
  Unfair
  
• What annoys me the most is how these pseudo-realistic games pretend to be realistic, but are as far removed from it as possible. First, they make weapons unrealistically deadly. In real life you are unlikely to die immediately if shot. Here you will die a lot quicker than in real life. Another problem is how accurate NPCs are. They can quickly zero in on you and snipe you while your own weapons are hilariously inaccurate. Then comes the fact that enemies can soak a lot more damage than they should. My first encounter of that was a single dog. I shot his back with my starter shotgun. I hit, but dog had leaped and killed me with a single bite... A dog which can't even be a serious threat to a man instant kills you in a game. A lot of encounters can feel equally unfair. Burers for example take an enormous amounts of punishments. However, they are just dwarfs. Most enemies are unarmoured. Bloodsuckers for example can take whole magazines of ammunition before going down, but their claws can one shot you. Enemies in this game are complete bullet sponges while difficulty only makes them instant kill you with deadly accuracy while your own weapons remain crooked, ineffective and inaccurate at more than 5 meters range.

Just mod it you say and all of my problems will go away. Just install these X mods and it will make game so much better! This is the usual argument people are making when an old classic games with heavy modding support are critiqued. I would like to make few points of why such line of thought is flawed.

Should I review the game or the mods?
• If a base game is not worth playing, then what I should review? Should I write a review for a base game or a mod? Which mod I should write this review in particular? It is easy enough then there is just 1 mod which is just a massive patch just to fix up a game and to bring it to modern standards. However, what I should do with something like Stalker series?
  
  What if mod ruins your experience?
  
• Enthusiasts are usually blind to the faults of a mod. They played it so many times that they know what to do. However, what a newbie should do? I played ARB mod which spawned like 6 Burer's in Iron Forest. Spawned an entire Monolith platoon next to a helicopter on a hill. Put Bloodsucker hunting parties everywhere. I wanted a mod for a game which would just fix it up, but would retain what developer had intended as much as possible. However, in reality it had broken the game as it made game vastly more difficult and frustrating.
  
  What about set up?
  
• Stalker barely has any good mods for English speaking community. I looked for mods, I found one which had ruined my first impression of a game by making game way more difficult than it is originally. I assume a lot of those advanced mods to be like this. However, how this then improves my experience with a series? Furthermore, how the time I spend searching and trying to set up a mod makes a game better to me? I do not relish my hours spent on trying to install a dozen of smaller mods just to get one big mod working like with most advanced mods in Skyrim. Should I consider this horrible experience in my review?

I cannot recommend Stalker: Call of Pripyat. While it was an atmospheric and immersive experience at times, most of the time it was rather tedious, sometimes really unfair and eventually too easy. A lot of stuff in this game is broken and I'm not talking just about technical crashes. Basic shooting in this game does not work. Weakest enemies can take an entire magazine to kill. Your guns are not accurate beyond five meters. Anomalies are boring. Writing and questing is banal. It was a challenge in finding good mods on my own and ones which I installed ended up ruining my experience of a game.

Stalker: Call of Pripyat can be a good game. I believe it can become a good game with right set up/mods. People who already had played this game in the past will find it more fun and will bypass all the unfairness the newbie might encounter and will be able to head straight to the best mods he likes. For everyone else, it just takes so much time and effort for a modern gamer to experience Stalker. Due to this, I believe it is not worth of giving it a try. Stalker 2 is coming out, there is now similar games to Stalker too. Try them out first before jumping to this one.

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It pains me to write a negative review for this game. I used to love this game, but something went wrong along the way. It seems that the old game with tight balance which felt like playing poker is long gone. Nothing in this game feels fair or fun anymore and it had fallen into same trappings like other TCG games.

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This game seemingly draws a lot of inspiration from MTG. It is a very popular game, however, it is extremely unbalanced. Balance is achieved more through deck archetypes and trying to control the worst excesses through extremely powerful deck countering. Same design philosophy is adopted and in Infinity Wars. Pointless affinity system, cards which can obliterate your opponent in specific match ups, but are next to useless in others. While developers have lofty ideals, I would appreciate more solid gameplay foundations. Infinity Wars are making same mistakes as other TCGs did.

Hard counters
• The best example of that are Heat Wave card. Red Dawn's bread and butter is a Red Dawn Aspirant. Its stats are 4/2 with charge for 1 mana. Heat Wave is 3 mana spell card which deals 2 damage to all enemy units. This one card completely shuts down Red Dawn rush decks. When enemy has that card, I auto-lose. There is no counter-play to it despite developer's marketing that game is decide by skill. No, it is not. If an enemy has this card, most of my basic units are easily killed. I cannot play a guess game if enemy has it. If I will pull out my Aspirants due to threat of it being there, I will not be able to rush down my opponent. Most decks do not have it, but ones who have it will auto-win a game against Red Dawn rush decks at turn 3.
  
  There are quite a few similar cards in game which just outright shut down certain decks. It is damn if you do and damn if you do not kind of balancing which is awful for everyone. If you do not have a specific card, you feel awful playing against a deck which requires that card. If you do take that card, you feel awful in all the other match ups when that card is just a dead weight. This old balancing relic is left out of MTG balancing design. They create a paper cards which once printed can't ever be changed, only banned. Thus they must have super powerful cards to keep tabs on unexpectedly powerful combos. If something breaks the meta, those cards would come in and provide crutch by hard countering a specific playstyle. However, in a digital card game such conscious or unconscious copying of MTG just make game feel worse.
  
  Pointless interactions
  
• Game in general has a lot of pointless interactions. A card with two lives which for some reason just dies. Flamestrikes which just deal extra damage afterwards. Minor attack boosts via buffs. Locations which gives you 4/2 recruits for 4 mana. However, we are talking about a game where enemy can bring 30/30 monsters in mid game... A lot of interactions for various factions tend to be rather useless. Red Dawn is the best example of this. It is a rush faction which has next to none late game, but has plenty of mid range buff options which often relies on having a lot of cards on a battlefield. Except, they have only 1 summoning card which is very expensive and does not provide too much value on the board. Game is filled with traits which were never developed properly and a lot of cards which you wonder why they are even there. Don't tell me that you are going to use same excuses as Hearthstone developers with their legendary bad balancing capabilities.
  
  Wacky stat balancing
  
• Just consider something as basic as Enraged Hulker. It is deployed on turn 3. On turn 4 it defends with an enrage. It is 13/14 beast which will utterly devastate your whole rush seeing as Flame Dawn Aspirants are 4/2, its two cost infantry are 7/2 or similar. Its 4 cost leaders are 8/8. Even when we take basic unit which meant to scale up later in a game - One of Many. It is still 8/9 unit which will often trade with two if not three of your cards. Every faction has a lot better stat value than a deck designed to rush.
  
  This serves as a great example how stats in this game are busted. Red Dawn bread and butter Flame Dawn Aspirant is quite a terrible card. It dies to everything. Trades poorly. Are hard countered by any AoE. Unlike in better balanced games like Hearthstone, early aggressive drops usually can trade upwards to cards one mana above them. 3/2 will trade out to 3/3 with an ability thus allowing to keep tempo. However in this game there is no such stats curve. Faction which was supposed to get most stats for mana often gets least of it and have attached weird and pointless interactions next to their cards. Going upwards mana curve, 1 mana gets completely dominated by 2 mana drops. 2 mana drops gets completely dominated by 3 mana drops, etc. This game at its core is not designed to respect card's statistics. This lack of balancing painfully shows if you try to play anything other than a slow combo deck.
  
  Faction Purity
  
• Now for the deck types. This game surprisingly has very few actually good cards locked under faction purity. I have only 2 Red Dawn cards which is decent pick. Flame Dawn Fanatic and Nix, The Justicar of Dawn. This is it... For dedicating yourself to a cause, you gain very little. However, super-powerful cards like Death Ray which are faction flagship card is only unlocked with 1 purity... This game actively punishes people from playing mono faction decks and gives most of the most powerful cards under 1 or 2 purity. As a result, meta is this abomination of miss-match of various factions. It is very rare for someone to play mono deck, it is especially so when it comes to actually being competitive. Balance seems on its head in this aspect or rather, complete lack of balance. Developer seemingly never got an idea to balance card's power under its faction purity. The opposite is true, they love mixing factions so much that this bias is even shown in their other game, Infinity Heroes. In that game you do not even pick your cards. You mix whatever heroes you like into one meaningless blob. As a result, game feels chaotic, without structure. It is like playing a wild format where any card can be used and wildly unbalanced decks can be created.
  
  The only really impressive thing is that Infinity Wars did not needed years after years of card bloat to create those combinations. They had managed to recreate the worst aspects of TCG with its vanilla base set! Game seems to be inspired by MTG and its concepts are being copied without a thought or desire to do better. In that game, the most powerful cards are easily reached with only one or few mana, because it needs hard counters against disbalanced cards. A card which can end you in few turns requires equally ridiculously OP removal like Path to Exile. Those cards are there in order to achieve painful state of balance due to inherent disadvantages of physical TCG. Digital TCG does not need to follow same design principles as it can easily change balance at the moment's notice. I do not want to play reskined MTG. It is a horrible game in general. I want to play TCG with really good balancing and matches which always feel fair.
  
  Development of a game
  
• I frankly have no idea what they are doing. They are small team with very limited resources. However, they had somehow managed to start 3 separate projects at a same time. Infinity Wars receives updates at a glacial pace. Infinite Heroes seemingly is dead. God knows how quickly Infinity War 2 is being worked on. Are they mad? Do they want to fail? I have no explanation of why they are working on so many projects at the same time when they do not have resources for even one game. As a result, everything they do seems extremely unrefined. Their games do not even feel like pre-alphas. More like concepts, prototypes. I even saw black and white card artwork done seemingly in microsoft paint! Imagine that!
  
  As for Infinity Wars. Developers had somehow managed to break it. For something which a programmer could do it in a month, they managed to make this into a massive, multi-year project. Instead of restarting servers, maybe promising an expansion to rise interest again and launching everything back at the same time. They instead chose to release a very early version to the public. On top of that, they started remaking the whole game. Previously, game lacked in refinement and quality. Infinity Heroes and Infinity Wars 2 suffer from same issues. Its interface feels so much worse than of an original. Even original isn't a looker and needs a new shiny GUI.
  
  However this relaunch had completely butchered the artwork. Main page has an amateurish piece of art. Stylish lore bits on cards had disappeared into ugly info window. Card menu was completely replaced to a lot worse looking one. Developers had managed to change interface for worse to the point it feels painful to even play this game. It does not help that their artwork did not improved one bit. It tends to shift from serious and professional looking to complete joke. Both in quality and tone. At one hand, developers are making a serious universe with its lore. At the other hand, they are drawing silly meme cards. It is a sign of immaturity when one still does not have a strong vision for their project.

The game which I know and loved is dead. Its remade only made me see it in completely different light. Pointless changes which just broke the game. Doing work which makes game look worse. To top it off, game is profoundly unbalanced and unfun to play. It already developed cancer decks which has no counter-play and are unfun to play against. For some reason I remembered it completely differently. Maybe meta wasn't developed yet. Maybe most players did not had strongest cards in order to make experience horrible.

I do not know what had happened along the way, but seemingly simple project had turned into a prolonged slog. All what we needed was relaunching of Infinity Wars servers and letting us to play with our beloved series. Maybe make one more expansion to flesh out factions and to make some hype for launch, but that is it. All the actual changes and improvements were meant to be reserved for a sequel.

Infinity Wars is still a game which I love in principle, but developers seemingly had went into entirely wrong direction. Focus and execute on your foundations first. We do not want your ideals about death to pay to win. We first and foremost want a bloody good card game to play.

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Simple, but functional old school 4x game which was overshadowed and improved upon by its competitors. GC II was an amazing, innovative and well written game. Its sequel however stagnated and introduced massive amounts of questionable quality paid content. Series seemingly only had progressed in terms of graphics throughout the decades which is just too little as most 4x games have amazing aesthetic. The final nail to the coffin is the fact that this game simply does not work. Its fundamental mechanics are broken which makes it an obsolete product.

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This is what I felt while playing this game. It might be a lesson to me, that I should play my childhood favourites when they come out and not when their development is long over. Everything this game does seem so similar to GC II game. This might be fine for an old or remastered game, but is far from fine for a new game. It feels that everything what this game does, someone else have done it better. Game is stuck in the past with next to little actual development of its mechanics. Play Stellaris for better immersion. Play Endless Space for more casual and straightforward 4x experience. Play Distant Worlds or Aurora for complex simulation. This game is in a weird place where every competitor have done everything it tries to do, but better.

This question solely depends on how experienced you are in 4x games. Do you have nostalgia for GC II? Experienced players have nothing to see here, however it is still a charming little experience. Morality events have their own charm, research tree is sometimes funny or tries to be creative. Developers once put effort into this game and it is now in remade form, all the things which made previous game great is still here and they might be worth experiencing for returning players or ones who do not have extensive library to compare games to.

Despite this game being developed for decades now, it is still a broken mess. From its combat system, economy, surrender mechanics or diplomacy. It is hard to find an aspect of this game which would just work. You sure can play this game, but do not expect it actually working. Soon you will notice just how poorly thought out and refined all of its internal mechanics are at which point, all the gameplay becomes about meaningless min/maxing and computer exploitation.

AI
• Artificial intelligence in this game is really terrible to borderline broken. It simply fails to be a credible threat. It has no function which would tell it to create a massive deathball and try to invade you. All it does are interceptor building which really are good at anything besides protecting your planets from ground invasions. It cannot keep up with a player, after an early game where AI seemingly cheats, it falls behind rapidly due to its ineffective build strategies on its own planets. The difference is so immense that after a while, you start a war against them only to discover that they had failed to properly max out their planets and construct any worthwhile fleet against you. This game was in development for so long and developers still had failed to make a simple boolean-based AI which would actually work.
  
  Diplomacy
  
• Diplomacy option received quite a bit of adjustment over the years, however AI still remains very bad at it. It will never trade planets or their own far out stations for anything reasonable. You might give your whole empire away for one of their colony planets. They consistently ask you to invade others for insultingly meagre rewards. They randomly ask for tribute with no relationship to the threat (or lack of) they pose to you. They sometimes give everything away in their own deal. They sometimes randomly decides to hate you when their ally declares war on you. They sometimes randomly declare war against you when you camp on of your fleets next to their borders even if they are ridiculously outmatched. They do not show any initiative to ally with you and only get pissed at you for trying to research high end tech. In this game diplomacy is very rudimentary and is little more than a button to min/max your own gain.
  
  Surrender
  
• After all this time, this game still has major bugs. After enemy empire surrenders, it can decide to give all of its planets to their own ally. They can surrender even when you sign peace treaty with them and leave them with quite a few planets. They will just decide to end themselves and will give all of their planets to their allies. This however causes all of their controlled planets to disappear. In my play through, whole south of the galaxy was unpopulated, because enemy AI decided to surrender and all of its planet vanished, leaving only their token influence on the map. It is a major bug which developers never had bothered to fix which I think is quite telling of their commitment to these series as a whole.
  
  Combat
  
• Combat system is equally broken as rest of a game. Ship building is all about stacking specifics weapons. It does not have any counter system. Shields, armor and point defences are effective to a certain level before late game tech adds modules which essentially nullifies all defensive capabilities of enemy ships. With something insane as 100% armor piercing, it becomes pointless to add any armor to your ships. In fact, the only effective protection is maneuverability in sub-light speed drives. You can add easily stackable 20% evasion bonuses from a single such drive upon any ship. Interceptors which casually dodge shots is one thing. However, you can even make super-maneuverable capital ships which will dodge most of the shots coming their way. In this game, there are no counters, just abusing broken stacking mechanics which make combat one hit - one kill affair.
  
  There are also issues of ship roles. Even if you make light aircraft carrier on cruiser hull, it will still rush to the combat regardless of its combat role. Support ships with no defences will still close in instead of trying to stay behind. In this game, setting ship role does not matter. Entire system seems to be completely broken and there is no organic inter-play between various ship types. Capital ships just outright annihilate everyone and there is no point of trying to counter their spam with light interceptor-bomber ships which could hit them without being hit themselves by their massive cannons. It is such basic inter-play, but it is missing in this game.
  
  Economy
  
• Economy in this game is solely reliant on stacking bonuses. Eventually every civilization becomes incredibly good at something. They receive such immense bonuses that it makes you wonder why even try doing anything. It is a game about specific builds and strategies as your entire galaxy spanning empire can be less productive than few worlds in the corner. It is such 4x gamey mechanic. It is typical of such games to make things like that, but I would like something more complex than straight, infinite spamming of 30% bonuses from your citizens which you relocate on a planet and then tech rushing technologies which add flat out bonuses on top of it.

...and kill its momentum. Send it in places where nobody will ever see it again. Where gravitational forces cancel each other out and its lack of momentum will ensure that it will be stuck in cold, dark and irrelevant place forevermore. This game is as average as it gets. I cannot even recommend on a basis of refinement and maturity, because there is none. Game is just and old game with new graphics and countless ideas which were never properly implemented. This game does not enrich your soul, it does not provide you new experiences, it does not challenge you. It is just here to waste time with.

---

You need big brains to play Trine 3. Game requires 3D coordination from a sideways glance. An average player does not have enough brain power for that. A simple game which easily can be completed under 6 hours requires over 20 hours for a simpleton to finish. Do you have mastery over advanced mental faculties like depth perception to complete this game? Many had tried, only the most intelligent will succeed.

---

Games like these remind me why I started reviewing games myself. Public in this case completely failed to properly evaluate this game. Yes, it is sometime difficult to navigate in such games, however other games are highly regarded like Castle Crashers despite suffering same problems. The underlying issue I believe is that an average player is just not very smart. I had no issues in this game, it was trivial really. Though, judging from reviews here, a lot of people just do not have sufficient mental faculties required to beat this game. It really puts into perspective how much smarter individual can become over course of their lives.

There isn't much to it. It is standard Trine formula, but in 3D. It is questionable if it is a good decision, because such 2.5D games do not add anything to gameplay, but they do require a lot more developmental resources. It also significantly raise the IQ bar for your game as game will be beyond capability of most plebs.

All of the Budget Went into Pretty Colours
• Trine was always a gorgeous game. This game is no exception. Unfortunately, you do start noticing low detail textures which is masked by a good art direction. 3D assets and games require a lot of developmental resources and as such, game is very limited at what it can show us. It is very linear, there is quite few in-game assets. While game is pretty, it suffers exactly because it went towards 3D. It lacks resources to create greater variety. Under closer inspection you can see that graphics are cheap, low polygon in-game assets. In the end, game does not really benefits from being 3D as it does not have better puzzles or gameplay due to that. Even environments we are visiting feel like they could be done better. First levels were quite nice as you move with a rogue. However, later on they all fail to show something beautiful and reverts back to showing arbitrary and gamey platforming. If you wanted to go 3D route, you had to maintain this level of quality through out all game, as it stands now, you only had to do a lot more work to render simple assets in an artificial and uninspired terrain which nobody would appreciate.
  
  Cooperation
  
• Trine was always a game where you had questioned if you completed puzzle as developers intended or you just cheesed your way through. It is the same here. However, when it comes to co-op, this formula falls apart. A wizard essentially can beat the whole game by itself. Rogue is occasionally useful. However, what knight is meant to do? To fight? Rogue and Wizard can do that just as well and game is not combat oriented. What we have here is a co-op game where 1 player is completely useless, another is semi-useful and one who controls the wizard is fundamental in completing the puzzles. It would be nice to see if Trine could improve the formula. Puzzles are too simplistic and classes are completely pointless. It is partly because game has to account for solo experience, but solo player has capability to switch between heroes at any time. Maybe it is time to give him a real reason to do so?
  
  A Minimalistic Journey
  
• This game is quite short. What you see is what you will get. You will get transported to board game like map and you like a miniature will be able to run and jump around this board as you unlock main and side missions. In those missions you will be able to gather triangles which are required for unlocking further missions. You do not need to do anything special to gather enough of them, but it provides something for completionists to do. It is nice and focused adventure which ends before it gets tiresome, but I kinda wished for something more. Either more complex puzzles which would not feel just like obstacles. Or I would like to see more pretty sights like at the start. A giant fisher, a giant skeleton trying to bring down the wall, rogue jumping with her rope through wide canyons. Stuff like this is interesting, but there is so little of it. All the puzzles in this game are trivial. Sights seen in screenshots are literally the best what this game has to offer. You will be staring most of the time at mario like levels. Platform there, rolling ball there, etc. It feels like overly fancy 2D platformer where you are being shown most ordinary and unnatural environments. Since those environments feels gamey, they never can blow you away as amazing. Developers do try to tell you a white lie with their screenshots and trailers.

Trine 3 despite being 3D plays exactly like Trine 1. The most surprising thing is maybe just how faithful Trine is to their roots. It is both good and a bad thing. I did enjoyed my time here and even finished this game on my own. It is game like all the others in the series and does not deserve such poor reception as it got. Though, it does require to be pretty smart in order to play Trine 3. Are you smart enough for this game?

---

It is a game where you wish that some other developer would take this game and would make something great out of it. It has great engine, but game never feels to go anywhere with what it has.

---

It is difficult not to recommend games like these due to arbitrary Steam review system. However, while game is great, it is nowhere as good as other people suggest it to be. It feels like a hollow shell of itself. A game which never went from EA to anywhere it was supposed to. Developers had focused and improved random generation of their levels. It is an amazing piece of tech they have, but beyond it, they do not have a game. Any system they did feel like it is just tacked on. Nothing in this game is fulfilling or fun. The only exception is when you are having fun at your base which is great, but that does not make the rest of the game, does it?

There is only one real gem here which you won't find anywhere else. It is procedurally generated maps. They are amazing, beautiful and complex. It creates a sense of wonder as you travel through unknown terrain. Somethings it is harsh, sometimes it is simple. It has variety from frozen wastes to bio-luminescent caves. Game creates its own maps which makes this game a lot more replayable. Where other rogue-lites would have static maps, often just bad maps (I'm looking at you Gunfire Reborn), this game not only can make good maps, but it does it randomly. Some proper love and care was put into it needs to be given proper credit.

Unfortunately, I cannot be as supportive about anything else. Level generation is ground breaking, revolutionary in game technology. Game is full of personality...while you are in lobby room. Everything else does not live up to such high level. It is all sub-par systems, shallow gameplay and is a giant grindfest. The little content there is, it is spread very thin. I struggle to think or find anything good to this game and while I enjoy it and will enjoy it for a little bit more, I can see writing on the wall. As soon, as I unlock all level types, the little additional content I'm being fed will stop and I will be starved for gameplay.

Where is the content?
• The first real problem this game has is that it seemingly never went out of early access. It severely lacks content. There are 4 dwarf classes and each of them have 1 unique weapon and 1 unique class ability. They also have semi-unique grenades. Some being identical, some more unique than others. That is it. I played a lot more off the record and again with this account when game released. I never seen possibility to unlock anything else than different kind of grenades or how your special ability functions. There is supposedly other weapons in this game, but I had never saw it nor there is any mention if I will ever be able to play with them. This game is so incredibly poor with content that you will be playing dozens after dozens of hours unlocking practically nothing. Only few upgrades to your weapons, most of which are nothing more than power creep which feel nothing more than straight up stat increases. Then there are few skins which you will be able to unlock from the store. Skins and character customisation in this game is equally trivial. Developers had made the whole system and just put few skins in game and the only way to get something is to buy huge, overpriced skin bundle. Shop is barren and what is in there, it is locked behind grind wall. You cannot customise your dwarfs. Even with all the DLC, it feels surprisingly empty. Where is the damn content in this game?
  
  Making giant hordes boring
  
• You would think that they could make combat interesting. Sadly, it is typical Left 4 Dead combat. You severely lack firepower, but zombies...that is bugs, do not do any damage. So, they will surround you and slowly nibble your health away. Even the biggest of bastards are not that scary. Few mechanics which made Left 4 Dead gameplay bearable like special infected are severely toned down here. There are flyer bugs and stationary half-life kind of pullers. They are completely out of place in this game where the main goal is to split and to gather as much ore as possible in between waves. Here they are a lot rarer and weaker while completely ruining solo experience. Well, except until you get a perk which makes them absolutely pointless, so they are here just to screw newbies.
  
  Enemies themselves are quite boring. None of them require you to adapt or to play smart. Simple bugs could swarm in great enough numbers that most effective way would be explosives. Big tanks have no counter play other than lazily going around to hit its giant weakspots. It would be nice to have dedicated concussion or armor piercing rounds. It would be nice to see bug artillery or more determined grabbers. To me, enemies do not create an interesting interplay. I imagine how awesome it could be when swarm of them is coming at you. Where engineers could lay down massive amounts of fire with their set up turrets. Where explosives would thin otherwise unending horde of small bugs. Where you would have to stick together to cover each other from flying enemies. I wish a lot more than there is in this game. It might be unfair to critique as this aspect is not badly done. However, it has nothing interesting to it. It is as average as you can expect from this title and combined with game offering nothing more, it just frustrates me. It is pretty sandbox with nothing in it. You go, you discover new environment and that is the most enjoyment I get from this game.
  
  The most tacky of all the tackiest systems
  
• I will use Deep Rock Galactic from now one to describe the most uninspired and average progression systems in this game. Starting from how you unlock power. It is just some minor or very situational bonuses which you have to unlock almost dozen of times. They evolve from completely insignificant to game changing over the course of their upgrades. However, those perks have are in an ugly tree. Most bonuses are as boring as they can get. Faster revive, faster ammunition refill, damage resistance when you are standing next to mule, ability to press a button when you are falling. Like who came up with this stuff? It is so incredibly boring and uninspired. It is a prime example how developers seemingly lack passion and talent to develop their game as it did not become better since EA.
  
  Then we come to various cosmetic unlocks. Oh boy it is a terrible system. First, you need to unlock special points via seasons. The only way to unlock those points is to play a lot. You need to go to completely separate in-game system to see what you can get with them. It is one giant cosmetic tree. It is so incredibly bad as it lays down complex paths towards your desired gear. What if you want something cool from two branches? Sucks to be you, because through incredibly long grind you can only get one (point earn rate is very low)... Even worse, class specific skins are mixed in. I play with engineer and by mistake I took skin from not my class. Why class specific skins are even there? I want to level up my class, why I'm getting random rewards?
  
  When it comes to class levelling, it is also incredibly boring. It is just straight up upgrades. Sometimes you unlock something interesting, but often it is just more power to whatever you do. A lot of upgrades have no point. Why I should extend my ammo count and magazine capacity when it is competing with direct power upgrades? In a game of quick reloads and near-infinite resupply, those upgrades are worthless. Where are my OTHER weapons? Do you know that this game only has 1 weapon per class? Yeah...you will be grinding dozens of hours until god knows when you will get something new to play with.
  
  They will never learn...
  
• That pure RNG is incredibly bad design decision. This game relies on random dice roll where player structures will land. This results in more complex maps dwarf rocket landing on a hill with no way down. It is also enemy nest. So, you get instant wiped. We had an unlucky streak where we were wiped several times in a row due to nonsense like this. We are being landed in a middle of an enemy nest while on some hill with no room to fight, but with all of the opportunities to fall down and die. Same happens when you need to evacuate, your escape pod can and will quite frequently get stuck in the air with absolutely no way to reach it naturally. This game relies on primitive system of randomness. This results in very frustrating experiences where you land on top of enemy hive, bosses or just get stuck in the air with no way down. Firaxis had same issue with their XCOM series, I guess developers had never played it to know how much grief community has with its flawed hit chances.

To me, it is an amazing game which never went anywhere past early access. It has no content. Cosmetic shop is empty, there are only single weapon per class, enemies are quite bland to fight against. There is not a single feature which would make this game fun to play. This is really unfortunate and I'm not sure how this had happened as developers are adding content and they do have an incredible level generator. However, everything around it feels like empty, uninspired, rushed, unfinished. It is first time where I see fantastic game and I wish that some other studio would take it over and would do something with it.

When we started to play in early access, we had far more fun in this game than anyone else. It was tense as we lacked ammunition and weren't familiar with cheat code - nitro. It was hectic as drop pod would land and we would have to escape through winding tunnels under enemy attacks. Some friends were left behind. Some hilarious situations born like trying to dig through the map as we had given up finding route to drop pod. Oh, it was fantastic. Sadly, this was just us misplaying and having way too much fun than we were supposed to. What happened to this game? Where is complex navigation via maps and terrain? It was challenging and fun part of coming together and working together to create paths through challenging environment, using mini map trying to figure out cave system. This aspect is gone, it was never there. Where are actual mining in this game? You drop in, do objective, but you cannot look for resources, mine to your hearts content. Why place these arbitrary resource limits and then locate resources either in incredibly easy to reach places or incredibly annoying ones like on roofs? There was so much potential and all of it was wasted here.

There might be some fun found in it after spending hundreds of hours, but no game is good if it does not become fun after playing dozens of hours.

---

There are countless 2D roguelites, but there are few decent 3D roguelites. This game takes up unfilled niche and does what it does fairly well. I do hope that developers will continue on improving the game, because in many ways, it is still an amateurish mess.

---

You are sitting in the tavern as one of several characters, each modelled after an animal. Your goal is to stop Arthas Bear from destroying the space crystals. In your way you will be fighting bandits, possessed statues, wild animals and UFOs. As you can guess, it is a game which does not take itself seriously. Gameplay is king here.

In this game, the greater importance is given to an individual skill. It is more of an old school shooter where your movement and ability to dodge enemy attacks are most important. In this rogue-lite, organic shooters skill is the king rather than items which you get. The opposite rogue-lite would be Risk of Rain 2 where it is more important to get good items rather than to play well. In a same way, items which you get in this game are mostly irrelevant.

Empowering your character with new found talents
• Talents are also in a same boat. There isn't much in terms of building your character. Each character has a fixed talent tree. At every stage you get one or two talent points. You can choose one out of free talents out of fairly big talent tree. There is no way to change or to re-roll choices you get. This results in a game where you do not have to think what you should take as options are very limited.
  
  Since talents get considerably more powerful as you reach third and the last point in a specific talent, there is no reason not to max out them as soon as possible. This applies to rarer talents who only need 1 talent point for considerable boost in power. Talents in this game play only a second fiddle to your skill.
  
  There isn't much depth in it either as each character gets around 2 ways how to play their character either focusing on their active or passive skill and everything else is survival or gun play which are good in any situation. The most you can expect to learn is which talents it is good to combine and which are inefficient. That is mostly comes down to not stacking different survivability talents or knowing which guns can handle extra ammo demand. It is something which a shrewd player could pick up in 50 hours of play.
  
  Never Ending Wheel of Improvement
  
• There is a nice mastery tree in this game where you spend in game currency to unlock additional features and power in game. Tree does not get grindy and it allows you to improve something after every run. In addition, to unlock more power for your heroes. When you finish with your mastery tree, unspent currency is used in a special game mode where you can buy enchantments for that run which positively alters how game is played. I only wish that mastery tree would have more subtlety. Buying merchant upgrades are great, buying straight up power increase is terrible. It makes me feel like my skill at a game is less relevant than my character level.
  
  Foes and Challenges which you shall face
  
• Gameplay and bosses are fair. There isn't any cheap enemy spawning behind you. There aren't any impossible to dodge attacks. Bosses also are very tame and fair. Everything they throw at you can be learned to counter and when you do, bosses which previously had given you trouble become trivial. However, these easy bosses can quickly kill you if you become too cocky and start ignoring their mechanics.
  
  There is also a problem where you can learn tactics which do not work on higher difficulties. For example, when a sand worm channels its beam attack at you, on lower difficulties it is actually more optimal to dodge to the direction from which beam is coming and in this way to get on a right side of this attack. On higher difficulty this move will cost too much of your health where on lower difficulty it barely damages you.

As good as this game is, it is down due to the base gameplay loop. Everything else is quite flawed and could be done better in so many ways.

Talents
• There is nothing you can do to pivot your build towards one or other direction. Game has no system in place to reroll talents. This results in some runs being horrible build wise as game fails to deliver talents you want or talents you chose, resulting in second level being completed without any single talent being maxed out. Due to pure RNG nature, sometimes you feel helpless and can't do nothing at all in making meaningful build options.
  
  Occult scrolls
  
• The issue with occult scrolls is that colour coding in them is completely pointless. Some white scrolls are better than legendary scrolls and vice versa. There is no power relation to colour. This creates an issue where systems where you cannot make a system where you could pick scroll rarity. If cursed chest gives you an option to pay more for better rarity scroll, that is barely meaningful, because there is no guarantee that you will get anything better even excluding occult specific downsides.
  
  Scrolls with downsides is also an issue. They are scattered through rarity spectrum which prevents you from targeting more powerful scrolls and risking downside. For example, if I want to have a strong scroll, I can pick legendary option and get a completely pointless scroll which I will have to sell for scrap. Likewise, if I want guaranteed reward, I go for lower quality scroll and I can get a scroll which has only negative effect on my build. Lack of colour coding makes whole system pointless. In fact, there is no difference which option you take in game. You just pick things randomly and hope that lady luck is on your side.
  
  Obtuse information
  
• This game does not give you any specifics. How much damage your weapon does? That is in game, but anything past is hidden. How many modifiers I have? When they activate? How much damage I can deal? How much damage my scrolls due when they activate?
  
  This is rogue-lite game where you build your character to be one way or another and you have no way of knowing what you do. You have only a vague understanding, but specifics are very sparse. This game needs a separate character screen with live modifiers which would show everything in one place. Your weapons, your abilities, your scrolls. When they trigger? How much damage they do and etc.
  
  Hitboxes, hitboxes and more hitboxes
  
• Poor hitboxes seem to be a bane of poor teams who are developing 3D games. This is no exception there. Most weakpoints are fine, however others are so small and poorly placed that you are wondering if it is even possible to hit them reliably with skill. Some enemies like Giant Beetle has such small eyes that it is just pixel hunting. Others like Horse-heads have their weakspots at the back of their necks for some reason. Other times like during last boss fight, there are boss recharging stations. They have no weakspots which completely ruins pure sniper builds, because without a weakspot, you cannot destroy them in time.
  
  Lost in Translation
  
• This game is done by a Honk Kong team and it shows. They had translated game, but it is poorly translated. Some sentences do not quite make sense. Other times it is difficult to understand what they are talking about. They often choose unpopular words which native speaker would not use. Translation could be done better and hopefully team will get a professional translator for a possible sequel.
  
  Pointless Weapon Upgrading
  
• In this game you are supposed to replace your weapons per level as you go. However, game also has money system where you can exchange gold to upgrade your weapons. Why? To improve them? Yes, but you barely improve them. You can upgrade your favourite weapon through levels and be significantly higher level than what game drops you and it will still do underwhelming damage. Worse, it is not inscription faults. Each level drops inherently stronger weapon and your 15 lvl weapon will be significantly inferior to 10 lvl weapon.
  
  In a same way, there isn't enough opportunities to modify inscriptions on your weapons. You must rely on getting good inscriptions first and then think about upgrading your weapon. However, as we just established, even if you get good inscriptions, it still does not matter as later levels have vastly superior statistics to anything you could get early on.
  
  Confusing Status Triggers
  
• This game needs to do less with whacky and inconsistent status effects. Having overt 9000% chance to trigger status effect does not make me feel powerful. It makes me confused. I actually think about how something can have over 100% chance to happen. Please, don't do that stupid Asian stuff with overblown and illogical statistics.
  
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2829445282
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2829445254
  
  Graphics on a Budget
  
• Game is quite ugly to look at. First level in particular as a lot seem to be a placeholder for an early access game. Later levels become more pretty, but still, a lot of enemies are just plain out plain. Horse-head is a best example, it barely appears to have its textures. Environment is similarly devoid of details and textures. This makes me all the more disappointed with the terrible optimisation this game has. It has nothing to render, but eats GPU resources like a champ! Lazy developers be lazy, it is not enough to place invisible walls everywhere, it is not surprising that they do not bother making their game runs efficiently either.

I did enjoyed playing this game. Its mechanics are tight and it is enjoyable to play. However, inexperience of a development team shows. Lack of competition shows. This game needs a sequel which would be bigger and better in every way. It is a nice, simple and well made game which plays great, has its own charm and it is easy recommend to anyone.

---

An interesting game buried beneath old age and mediocrity. It is a forgotten series which people can only go back for nostalgia. Even besides questionable quality of a game itself, game simply does not work well on modern systems. It needs a huge remaster even to be considered worthy of someone's time.

---

Dungeon Siege I&II are unique games. There isn't any other major party based, action RPG game. Instead of typical one character gameplay like in Diablo, player has party of 4-6 characters to manage and how they work together in a team. It is an interesting concept and it almost feels like having whole WoW party going through the dungeon at an accelerated pace. It is unique game with its ideas never properly explored past the series.

Game itself feels like it is done by people who loved what they were doing, tried their best, but simply lacked skill and/or time to fulfil their vision. There is surprisingly a lot of effort put into this game, not seen from lazy modern developers. However, at the same time it features complete lack of play testing, in game systems ranging from boring to broken/pointless and most stereotypical chosen one story, with our hero having as much personality as a clone or a wooden plank.

The Journey
• This game has an unique charm where it manages to create an impression of long and epic quest. One where you travel all through the world. From jungles to deserts, through the highest peaks and deepest dungeons into the den of evil. Consistent journey forwards, regions unlocking as you go, being able to see where are you in the world in the map. It all adds a certain charm to the game. Game also encourages you constantly to go back for the quests and environments which purpose is sometimes revealed only later. What this game does well is creating a believable journey as other games do not have maps designed as a long road. It is something which modern games often miss with their disjointed areas. Only in Diablo I we had seen this before.
  
  Production Values
  
• Game has surprisingly huge production values. Which is probably are to be expected from its huge development team. Characters are fully voiced, there are conversations between your party. NPCs have their own dialogue. Everyone in cinematics do talk. What is surprising is that there are quite a huge number of various cinematics showing what you will have to do next. It is a nice touch which too many games are too lazy to do nowadays.
  
  There are also some truly outstanding moments. British Morden. Quest with some goblins and tree ladies and their power struggle. There are flashes of brilliance burred beneath sea of mediocrity. I luckily saved the British Morden encounter and I will share it on youtube with everyone to enjoy.
  
  Gear
  
• A little small thing what I liked is how many of the gear has well made models. Each piece of a set is sufficiently unique and you want to take a second look how your character looks with new piece of armor or a new weapon. It reminds me of WoW, but with actual good gear going from rare to epic. Still, there are no intricate and over the top sets like in that game, but I do like grounded aesthetic like heavy linen clothes which your mages will be wearing (grey coat with red symbols and high fire resist stats). Wood elves have fitting armor made from metal plates and leafs which looks light and agile. There is quite a bit of thought put into this game which I miss in other RPGs.

I had started writing my reviews, because I saw no one writing reviews like I wanted to. Everyone were either raving about games, being nostalgia blinded or solely focused on positive aspects of an experience thus twisting reality and heavily over-hyping games. Dungeon Siege 2 is a prime example of that, there is no critique which you could readily find online and people who are still playing or talking about it are as bias as they can get. This is why I took it upon myself to inform others what is actually wrong with these games like this one.

Surprisingly Difficult
• Game has a poor difficulty curve. At the start of a game, difficulty is something which you would expect. However, during mid-game, game becomes quite difficult. Bosses instant-kill you, simple enemies become massive sponges. However at the end game, you do get quite a power boost which comes from getting very powerful late game items and due to how activatable abilities scale. Your abilities not only become far more powerful, but also they charge far faster. Slow charging ability which would take ages to charge in early game, takes just one pack of mobs to refresh its cooldown. This is due to refresh rate being tied to absolute damage rather than relative damage.
  
  A good example how poorly play tested this game is. You will face Dark Wizards three time. First time you will face only one. Second time you will face remaining three. Third time you will face the Arch Wizard. The first Dark Wizard is the most difficult boss out of them all and it took me the most time to kill with the highest threat of being wiped. Second time is rather tiresome as you are forced to constantly move and to revive your teamates. Third time is the easiest. Same with last Boss, Valdis. In his supposedly strongest form with a sword, he is a joke. He is one shotted by plot devices and his attacks are easy to dodge. His second form is tiresome, but challenging and fair. When fight enters into second stage, you have to use plot device which is little broken and the biggest challenge becomes luring him into them. The hardest boss fights are at the start of the game and as a game progresses, it becomes easier and easier.
  
  Pointless Restrictions
  
• Game designers for no apparent reason gutted its best feature - party management by restricting it to only 4 players. Playing with 4 players game is immensely more difficult and requires a lot more kiting. However, if you complete game once, you can unlock 1 additional character. If you complete game for a third time, you can have full roster of 6 characters. This is a game which puts its best feature behind a grind wall, a game which actively makes itself a lot easier with each successive play through. It is also questionable what kind of experience play will have with 4 players. As a kid, I found this game to be needlessly hard and I had to constantly kite enemies and especially bosses. Without additional 2 characters, game becomes an absolute kite-fest. Brute forcing 6 character form a start is a must which just adds to the long list of fixes you have for the developers.
  
  Broken Systems
  
• Game has quite a bit of content, however, it is mostly broken. Enchanting is completely useless up until very end when game starts dropping enchantable items with enough slots to allow you crafting something possibly useful. However, that is right before the end game, game does not warn you that previously useless system is now might be useful. You were forced to gather all the enchanting ingredients all game long only to use it at the very end.
  
  Crafting is also equally busted. It requires very specific items which you cannot obtain from merchants. I never were able to craft anything in a game and I even put some effort in trying to. Recipes are also hidden under obtuse UI, you do not know what you are crafting and you need items which you cannot actively seek and have to store a lot of crap in your inventory in order to take advantage of it. It is something which overwhelming majority of players will just ignore.
  
  Pet system is interesting, but completely pointless as they share same slots with heroes. Why would you replace NPC who can chat with you, equip powerful gear, gain powerful activatable abilities, level up and gain powerful skills? The answer, you do not. There was never a time when I could fill an empty slot with a pet. Pets never had better stats than my heroes. They also need to be levelled up, meaning that they quickly fall behind if they are not here with you from the start. The same levelling up flaw which causes all unused heroes to become pointless and obsolete as they fall behind XP race.
  
  There are Rampage and Mirror modes. Rampage mode is supposed to be this mode where each party member picks its own fight and your party fights against enemy group while you are controlling only your own character. In reality, enemies are always too hard and would wipe the party this way. Most effective way is to Mirror your party, focus individual monsters and to stutter step enemy AoEs and to kite bosses. Despite game being about parties, it plays as you would be controlling just one character.
  
  Cliche Story
  
• Story is so bad that it turns around to be good in a bad way. It is so cliche. Bad guys cannot help, but be bad guys. They constantly talk how bad they are. Your hero is a bread stick, always talking how he is supposed to save the world, how he changed and how he must now fix the world. There is interesting banter from various characters. Most interesting is half-giant, Spartanus, but only because of his aggressive sexual flirting with females. All the other characters are just strange. Your quiet half-giant who barely can form a conversation with how blunt and to the point he is. With wood elf healer who talks all the bloody time how killing is bad, how violence is bad while she literally slaughters thousands of foes. She never goes through any character arc or transformation. Even before final battle they ramble how she needs to be strong. When it isn't bad, your characters are bizarre as they "flex against the evil" and how uncompromising they are to it.
  
  Main questline is as cringy as it gets. Here are the key notes:
  
  1. Friend is having a bad feeling about this.
     
  2. You miraculously survive and are for no reason given special status.
     
  3. You want nothing more than to go back home, but agree to save the world, because it is on its way there.
     
  4. You meet mysterious old man who does nothing, but explain everything. He is supposedly super powerful, but only show up after you win your fights.
     
  5. You come back just before main villain and he ruins everything for no reason.
     
  6. Villains double betray everyone.
  The whole game like this. It is like developers tried and succeeded in making the most generic fantasy story. It isn't even bad. It is so average, so unremarkable, that only remarkable feature of it is how generic it is.

There are a lot of charm to Dungeon Siege 2. However, what is there is overshadowed by mediocre systems, grindy gameplay, cringy story. That puts nail in the coffin is that this game does not run well on modern systems. I had to play this game at 10-15 FPS, modify it to enable expansion for which I still did not got expansion's campaign. Multiplayer is dead, resolution needs to be fixed manually. There are ton of issues and even when going through all of them, you are still left with game which is barely running.

Sadly, the overall experience which this game provided is not worthy of trying out for anyone else other than just for nostalgia fix. Even with modern remaster, game remains deeply flawed design wise and offers little what you could not find in other games.

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Do you have what it takes to move around in a circle until you can become so powerful that you do not need to move at all?

This pretty much sums up Vampire Survivors gameplay, however like always, the devil is in the details

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Vampire Survivor is a new genre in itself. I had saw similar games before it on an android phone. However, Vampire Survivors was a first game which had bought such type of games on PC and done them better. Then few too many streamers had noticed this game and rest is history. There are many such games sprouting, but genre is unlikely to be popular in a long term. Further evolution is necessary like deeper and more complex builds or game quality which isn't horrible.

While gameplay is a bit tedious and monotonic, game is built around scaling. Making your character feel really powerful. Game is solely about out-scalling your enemies who at certain period of a game, DPS checks you with huge waves to see if you can continue your game. Eventually you die after 30 minutes. It is a nice, fixed gameplay period.

Content Stream
• Game's strong suit is its variety, references, memes. It has a lot of content. Not all of it will be good, but you will constantly be unlocking something new or you will have something to look for unlocking. This constant drip of new content, new power through permanent power unlocks gives a player incentive to keep playing. It is fun to see a meme about Mario when you discover coffin of another vampire. It is fun to discover hidden rooms in the levels. It is fun to constantly unlock new heroes and levels. All of this imbues this game with longevity and quality which outsiders can't understand.
  
  Building Your Character
  
• What is most interesting is that in this game you can and should build specifics builds. Some builds are better with one items. Other builds are better in one or another map. Some builds are better on one or another hero. All of this add depth to a game. It makes you motivated to see what fully maxed out and evolved build will look like. How evolved version of this ability will look like. Then you start wanting to make combination of various skills. This creates interest to play this game. A bonus is that those abilities tend to be very flashy and powerful in a mid game. This gives player a sense of power which motivates them to play. This sense of power is that made this game so successful. Uninvolved and easy gameplay with consistent content unlocks and some depth to keep people interested.
  
  Treasure Chests
  
• A honourable mention should go to treasure chests. They are great. It incentivises player to fight very tough enemies instead of running around. It creates anticipation of receiving much needed character power boost. That is more, opening cinematic is great. It makes you feel that you are getting a lot. It breaks monotony of a gameplay. It allows for those peaks when you discover legendary chest and screen is filled with colours and rewards. It is such a simple mechanic, but it makes game so much more enjoyable to play even if it upsets some hipsters that game is just too enjoyable for their tastes.

Game has many problems. Poor optimisation, shockingly low production values, lack of balance, redundant content, lack of variety in levels, lack of depth, etc. I will touch on the core issues for this game which had annoyed me the most.

Rotten RNG
• Quite often game will fail to generate sufficiently random seed. It will keep on giving you same upgrade paths with some never appearing. This is particularly problematic when you have to combine two weapons where one will appear while another might be absent in an entire run. It is unlikely to be changed since developer took a random function without testing it thoroughly enough and such fundamental and yet, difficult to notice changes are never fixed. It is enough to look at the massive games like Firaxis X-COM. It is a public secret, but everyone just accepts it and jokes about it.
  
  Flood of content
  
• While it is great that developer adds a lot of content which was his intention all along. The issue with it that most of it is just of low quality. Most heroes have generic abilities with no variation. Levels are poorly thought out with some being way harder than others. Some of them being a lot more monotonous and limited. Diary Farms versus Library comes in mind. Outside of secrets, there is little to see in these levels, in abilities. It is all random, thrown together and game feels like a mod or a flash game.
  
  Poor Balance
  
• While there are certainly a lot of items and characters, they are not well balanced. King's Bible for example is vastly superior to a lot of items. Some picks up range from adding flat 25% damage increase or 50% speed boost in a game where you do not need to go anywhere. Or a character who gets free resurrections in a game where if you die, it is probably because enemies had out-scaled you and you will be resurrected on top of a swarm which just had killed you. A lot of things in this game aren't good which is a side effect of developer solely focusing on adding more content rather than refining what he already has.

...and our time is running short. Vampire Survivors is the greatest example of game in its genre. It is fun, it does a lot of things well. However, it does lack depth and as a result gets tiresome rather quickly. Game also has poor production values in general. Game is fun and there isn't anything like it which is why I can easily recommend it.