Recent reviews by Caldrice

Pokemon, if designed by Karl Marx.

Elden Ring's a visually appealing game with open world elements that keep the player engaged for numerous hours. However, if you're looking for a relaxed adventure like Skyrim - you're in the wrong place. Mechanically speaking, some of the bosses are leagues more difficult than Raime from Dark Souls 2 and in some cases makes his boss fight seem like a joke in comparison.

Having beat the game, I will say it's a more accessible FromSoft title in the Souls-Like genre, but only for the early game. Past certain areas the difficulty takes a sharp spike and may discourage some players from continuing.

Back 4 Blood currently has a lot of potential, but because it's trying to do so many things at the moment - in my opinion - a vast majority of them fall short.

The mutations are intriguing, and were interesting for the first few maps of the game. However, as the game progresses the mutations go from an interesting addition to cumbersome with how often, and in how sheer of volume, they throw them at the player - making it seem more like an off the cuff way of throwing in artificial difficulty to drag the game out longer. The worst act that does this is Act Three when they throw boss mutations at the player(s) constantly. If a game throws boss encounters at you, you want it to feel badass, you want it to feel rewarding. Often times when I encounter an ogre, it's more or less, "Oh, great, another bullet sponge." instead of something special that was a treat.

I believe that B4B is trying too hard to live up to the cult hype that Left 4 Dead had and trying too many things with the mutation system, and using that as a crutch to prolong what little of the game they currently have at the moment through using the mutations as a means of artificial difficulty through the sheer volume that's thrown at the player later on. The card system is a good way to counter-act this, and keep each run feeling a bit fresh with the cards you receive through supply lines, but the corruptions can throw the balance out of favor if you don't have an adequately coordinated team, or are unlucky enough to be placed on a team with exclusively bots.

As of writing this review, another issue is that even with crossplay at various times of the day enabled, 9/10 times your crew is filled entirely of bots which barely have any type of AI assigned other than following the host player and a generic aimbot during the campaign mode specifically which is fine and is adequate enough to get a lone player through the entire map except times when cooperation is a crucial part of getting the objective done I.E: Loading shells for the Mine, or managing the sheer volume of Ridden with T-5 grenades.

TL;DR: Cool concepts, but the game studio took on too much to fully flesh each concept out and everything kind of feels clunky and unfinished.

After finishing my first play through of Disciples: Liberation, I'm rewriting my review with a complete view of the game (outside of Liberation mode which I'm still working on completing).

As with my previous review, this comes from a fan who originally played Disciples: Sacred Lands, and every installment in some capacity since.

To begin, the reason why I'm not recommending this game is because of how it handles the lore of the previous games and just completely retcons roughly 85% - 90% of the original pre-established lore. Whenever it does reference certain characters from the lore - Bernard of Cahuzak (the first boss of Disciples: Sacred Lands), for example, is no longer a renegade noble trying to break free from the empire. He's one of the Kings of the Hale. Hubert De Layle is no longer a power-hungry despot seeking to sell his soul to the Legions of the Damned for power to consume the Empire, but rather an altruistic man who wished greatness for his people.

As a turn-based strategy game, I believe the combat is geared more towards a modern audience - and to that effect, with how certain units synergize, I'd recommend this game to people with no knowledge of Disciples lore, or general fans of TBS style games.

From a writing standpoint, I believe this game is lacking and as a semi-professional writer myself I believe the writers tackled so much during development that they wanted to bring across, that everything fell apart. Certain character actions aren't logical, and in most cases don't make sense given their perceived loyalties or motives. I feel as if this game was given more time for development, and certain portions were packaged into DLC content for further storyboarding, that this game would've been significantly more immersive and enjoyable.

However, the game we got is what I generally regard as a bit of a hot mess - the aforementioned writing feeling rushed and sloppy, each character feeling like a way to progress Avyanna's story, instead of being standalone characters with their own personalities past a certain point. What good writing and plot points there are simply fall apart due to the over-saturation of romantic/sexual themes which at certain points may leave the player going, "Really, is this actually an appropriate time for this?" I understand that the game was marketed as, "Mature, Dark Fantasy" however, it's better to let the game speak for itself instead of trying to lump several tags to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible.

As I mentioned above though, the game play is typically where this game shines, but it took the parts of Disciples III, which the audience generally hated, and improved on the combat instead of taking a step back to previous Disciples titles that used more of a stationary grid style of combat.

The combat though, from a thematic sense in regards to previous titles, may irritate fans of the series, as the game's general plot involves attempting to unify all factions under a single banner - that of the protagonist Avyanna. Why this doesn't work is because of how historically each of the five (now four due to them writing the Mountain Clans and Wotan as canonically extinct and dead) races have been at war on a theological level. The Humans, and Elves - prior to Disciples 2, being historic allies, and the Undead Hordes and the Legions of the Damned being dubious allies once motives aligned (Not to mention how the Greenskins and Merfolk are now suddenly extinct too...). Better yet though, to unite the races - during the game's events - Avyanna slays the physical manifestation of Mortis, the god of death, herself - as well as destroying Gallean's Beast avatar due to her "incredible" power of being a nephilim, an Angel/Demon hybrid race.

I believe this game would've been better served as an ode to the classic series; that being several self-contained stories that intersect at certain points of the various factions as they fight for their place upon Nevendaar. However, what fans of a long-awaited sequel got was a Mary Sue, powered by the sexual lust of a Tumblr erotica writer, with limitless godslaying capability taking control various points of limitless power to subjugate the world under a single banner with the tool to even subjugate gods should those that survived managed to get out of line.

As a disclaimer, I did enjoy the game - I think the gameplay is great, but it would've been better served to have taken a different name and lore to become something that can stand on its own, instead of crawling into the corpse of a dead franchise and bastardize everything that it previously had going for it story wise. If anything, what this game does with story, is take a little of everything that happened previously in the story, and mash them all up with each taking on aspects of an alternative universe that just don't make sense with the previous storylines.

TL;DR: The game play is pretty fluid. The story is lackluster, and is more like a sex-fueled alternative universe with how most everything contradicts previous story arcs and elements. I'd recommend it if you're not familiar with the previous Disciples games, but would recommend others stay away if you were previously invested in the other installments as this will not be the game you're looking for.

A re-imagining that brings to life the full potential of the first Half-Life.