Recent reviews by Christmas Treant

Hundreds more hours played on another account.
I can only recommend Medieval 2 to partake in its impressive, long-developed modding scene, which is worth exploring. While this was one of my favorite childhood staples, it is simply outdone by later TW titles in all areas except atmosphere (which to be fair is excellent - probably what many people come back to it for) and some obscure mini-mechanics that don't make practical difference. The clumsiness of the basics in this case does not make up for the cool factor learning how to exploit what's going on under the hood.

If you aren't enchanted by all things Total War to begin with, you'll encounter some baseline issues.
You can't see which overworld characters have actions remaining before ending the turn - you have to remember where everyone is and to check up on them or they'll just rot.
There is no auto-run in combat.
It takes a long time to tech out of militia and peasant archers without wrecking your economy, such that you can be effectively done with a campaign only seeing 1/3 or less of the units in the game.
There are no range indicators for ranged units and towers.
The camera sucks.
If you get a quest to build a chapel in a castle, then convert that castle to a town and then build the chapel, it won't count and you fail the mission because you built a town-chapel instead of a castle-chapel.
There are degenerate force-you-to-reload mechanics, like random chances for no-general parties to rebel even when your empire is happy. When you can't even retrain wounded units outside of the settlements that can produce them, and keeping up manual reinforcement routes is required, this is silly.
What's also silly is how neighboring empires make ridiculous unfavorable alliances with those of the opposite religion that you're attacking, which forces reputation loss with them for attacking their "allies," so that you end up defending against your own countrymen, which means you lose religious-leader favor for killing fellow christians/muslims, which leads to excommunication, which leads to the rest of the world declaring war on you. Rather than making progressing your campaign naturally more difficult, the game forces random friends to randomly hate and backstab you as you do progress, of course with none of the punishments you would face if you did the same.

Listen to the OST. Listen to the speeches and the unit responses. Extract the UI sounds and put them into a custom theme for your PC or something. Watch a LegendOfTotalWar video or two. At that point you'll have absorbed the best parts of the game and can move on to a different TW or dive into one of its crazy overhaul mods.

Works great on Windows 10.

RT is worth it.
It's a rollercoaster of quality, but if you can hold on through the occasional lows, the many highs will reward you with an experience that will stick with you forever.
As a representation of 40k, it's good: neither too depressing for casuals nor, I believe, too nerfed unless you want something really hardcore. It onboards noobs pretty well and has mysteries for veterans.
The writing, which is the meat of the game, is both fascinating at a plot level and excellent at a prose level, which makes the occasional dips and mischaracterisations stand out. Furthermore, there are almost always plenty of options for character expression and enacting your specific intentions. The rest is usually minor enough to be confidently headcanoned.
My first completionist playthrough with two DLCs enabled effectively took ~140 hours. I bumped that to 200 by keeping a detailed journal as I played and backtracking/reloading to fix errors.
Loading times and performance for the visuals are okay.

I have three main criticisms.
One is that, as a game, it is not much more than the sum of its parts. Many of the systems like ground combat, naval combat, items, leveling, cargo & reputation, alignment, assets & colony development - they feel grafted onto the core, and are somewhat neglected and unrealized within their own cool frameworks that could support more. For example, for how much the ground combat condenses down to buffing one or two squadmates and clearing the room the same way, there are too many items and too many character features. Reputation is only checked once at the end for some narrative flavor, and is otherwise a source of more items, and unlocks some colony projects which get you... more items and character features. They don't affect the plot, and even the per-tier planet dilemmas don't change depending on what projects you pick. How you do combat rarely affects anything either: all of the encounters are "kill all the things and move on". Worded most harshly, it's a graphic novel with looting and minigames to use the loot on. Despite this, it's still fun and persistently immersive. The feeling of having to chase alignment points paired with the sometimes dumb stuff they would make you do to get them can get annoying too. In the worst case, you can be unable to choose an alignment-locked option you really believe your character should be able to make, all due to silly point-based circumstance, like not talking to a beggar in some city. That didn't happen to me, but it has happened to others, especially those who have mid-late game changes of heart. They've patched it to be more open and forgiving while still keeping a feeling of meaningful progression, yet to me that proves that the whole system is a bit tacked on. Anyway...
Two is that the dialogue choices will betray you. You will have to kinda metagame which ones conclude the conversation, which dumb insulting comments are the gateway to the wise and heartfelt threads you seek, and which ones are "free info" versus which have a permanent affect. In addition, a number of choices only appear when you "earn" them, and these choices are always "the best", but they're often hard to identify or worded unattractively, so it's easy to blunder an outcome you very much intended and desired, because it wasn't clear which option was the one you had worked to open. If you're vigilant, you can usually catch them the few times that does happen and reload before it's too late.
Relatedly, some quests in the earlygame are timed and some aren't, yet the language used to describe them is the same. In one nasty case of meeting the Jae companion, there is no language that indicates her quest is timed, but you'll fail it and miss her permanently if you go rescue your stranded, burning, and starving capital world instead of rummaging around in a pirate sewer. Thankfully, there are no more timed quests after the beginning of Act 2, although that does remove the significance of your travel decisionmaking that is impressed upon you in Act 1.
Three is that your companions are less responsive and involved in what's going on than they should be at important moments, and at times it feels like they're missing content. I specifically have Act 4 and 5 in mind when I make this comment. The earlier in the game, the richer the interaction.
Finally, some of the ending slides are messed up and contradictory, but by then you'll have such a strong involvement with the things you've paid attention to that you shouldn't feel wrong treating them like "what could happen" versus what did. They are called "shadows of the future" after all.

Overall, I wish that there was LESS stuff do to so that the rest of it could be more connected and refined, but my engagement and satisfaction outweighs my disappointment. I wouldn't be disappointed if I weren't so well hooked. If you read all of that and wonder how I can still be positive about the game, well, that's how good the rest of it is.

I'll talk about the DLCs.
You should get Void Shadows because it adds a nice amount to the game outside of the DLC missions. The beginning of its content is deterringly queer and heavyhanded, but then it gets better. And then it gets awesome. I wish it was rearranged a bit so it didn't sabotage itself with a weird introduction. Also weirdly, there are 20x more ways to end it early than to progress it, and sometimes it presents itself as wanting you to abandon the mission. Why?
Lex Imperialis has one particularly great mission and the rest is pretty good. However it adds seemingly little to the world outside of its missions. So, it's definitely a plug-in "DLC" versus the "mini expansion" that Void Shadows ends up being.
For both, the new classes are cool (if the difficulty is high enough for it to matter) and the companions are to-taste, yet their strength is their interactivity with the core game that is sometimes more than the core companions.

It's fun, it's weird, it's cool, I have wonderful memories, but don't do it.

Everyone says the first Civ they started with is the best. However, I started with 4, and I say lightly modded 5 is is most satisfying of all, despite the annoying change from local to global happiness from 4 and the loss of districts from 5. You know what? Districts suck and so does overdoing it on adjacency bonuses. Also, unit stacking sucks and the combat system introduced in 5 is very fine. There, I said it. As for Civ 7, no comment.

Mods for example: "FlagPromotions" (UI tweak), "Super Starter Settler", "Wonder Race Lost - Gives Hammers Back", your choice of buff for the civs with abysmal traits, and whatever mod brings back the Gods & Kings menu and loading screen images+music. Or just drop in whatever you want in there, it's easy.

Dark Crusade, but with two new kitchen-sinky races, a bit lamer campaign - still worth playing (and suffering through) at least once - and flying units you likely won't use.
Will you do it for her?
DEldar are technical and punishing both ways, but they seem designed for high level skirmish multiplayer and feel somewhat incompatible with the campaign stronghold missions. SoB is superficially easier, but ironically requires more research to understand the fundamental role of each unit and when & how to use them.
Speaking of multiplayer, it does exist, but it is split between previous games and 3 big mods, which, in my opinion, are "fun" but terrible and will make you crash.
I recommend a camera and scaling font mod which should take only a few minutes to drag and drop in. Otherwise it runs great on Win 10. Video options support large screens and it doesn't crash. Make sure you're running a frame limiter software though, and if the game freezes when you alt-tab, try tabbing out again, waiting about 10 seconds, and tabbing back in.

Save yourself.

Guns and gunplay are great, better than BL2. MCs all have good and interesting abilities, better than BL2. Then it got to the "ok now let's make the actual content" phase, and they created the 11th Plague of Egypt. Loading times, crashes, and essentially removing snipers doesn't help.

My actual review exceeds the Steam review character limit by 1.8x, and it cannot be condensed any further. The above is a lightly worded poor summary of that review.

Arguably better than Soulstorm. Very much worth playing no matter who or when you are. Stronghold and special resource maps make for great and challenging campaign missions. Doesn't need gameplay mods, they're generally bloat for veterans to toy with, though I highly recommend a scaling font and camera mod. They take 3 minutes to drag and drop in. Of course, make sure you've played campaigns of the base game and Winter Assault as well.

You may have heard complaints about Necrons being crazy OP in DC, but at this time I believe they are echoes from the original generations of DoW players who didn't like how they punished mass attack-moving. Necrons are slow. Slow to move, slow to regenerate, and slow to build resources and tech up. They also have pretty low range in general. Craft your strategy around that, e.g. rush earlygame, be evasive midgame, and invest in siege lategame. All their stuff is weak to anti-armor so you can safely, and should, stack that for your whole army.

The new dm maps are excellent. Multiplayer just werks. Video games are fun again. Campaign level design really shines on hard. Looks great but not too great, you know? All the options that should be there are there. Small bugs to be fixed notwithstanding, this is what it's supposed to be.

(more playtime elsewhere)
In a vacuum, Overwatch has decent core gameplay and is one of the very few large population higher-TTK FPSs available. It's polished, it's updated, and it has a wide enough range of modes/experiences. I have very negative opinions about the art-style and presentation, certain intents with its launch, the company developing it, and the genre itself (MOBA FPS/"hero shooter"), but they would be pointless to express right now. More relevant is the fact that it's actually pretty fun and engaging, and the barrier to entry is nonexistent because the F2P model is generous: You can unlock every hero, even new ones, with a bit of time, and you're given free credits to spend on most customization options if you care to.

The primary thing acting against a recommendation is that it's scientifically proven that suffering is a guaranteed outcome if you take it too seriously. Here are a few reasons why:
1) Due to how strong healing is and that 2/5 of a team is healers, and the "tank" will control you and be equal to or better than you in nearly every way after the fact, the potential for solo performance is heavily suppressed. Teamwork and coordination is required to make things happen. But because real, skilled communication only occurs at very high level competitive play, getting coordination elsewhere is down to whether your team "gets" each other or not. Or it's just pure randomness of chaotic interactions. This also means that players who go ahead and get picked off out of sync with the group will severely gimp their team in tense faceoffs.
2) The tank role is intended to be a type of protector, initiator, controller, and soaker for the team that enables them to survive and make plays, but in practice most tanks are supercharged damage dealers with 2.5x HP, mit & sustain, and CC. Like a hero class among peasants. Odd.
3) You can dominate an enemy team for almost the whole match, but due to how overtimes and objectives work, the ultimate winner is often the team who saves up all their I-Win buttons (even the game calls them that) for the final fight. Yeah, you can play around it if everyone pays very close attention and plans minutes in advance, but, c'mon.
4) Questionable matchmaking in ranked modes.

There are other reasons, but 1-3 are why I call the core gameplay decent instead of great. I think a lot of potential fun would be unlocked with increased team sizes on battleground-style maps, and another pass on the configuration of the 5v5 standard format (down from 6v6 before Overwatch 2). Anyway, if you can enjoy games in bites and move on quickly from bad losses, the positives will win out and you will have a good time.

If it wasn't clear, I don't care much about "leveling up" or "maxing out my battlepass" or collecting all the best cosmetics. If you do, then you will likely encounter some issues I missed. There are a lot of FOMO, limited-run tactics employed in place of the lootboxes. I can't make my Zarya curtsy because that victory pose was a season 3 BP exclusive REEEEEEEEEEEEE

I will end on some technical positives: The graphics are well optimized, my fans are cool, the size is... reasonable, and the load times are surprisingly impressive. Suspiciously good. You can play other modes while you're queued, and it's completely fine. Even if you get a match just after starting to load into something else, it'll work out in seconds. I don't know, call me scarred.

I recommend Filcher to anyone already familiar with the genre as a neat new iteration upon the original concepts. To a newcomer, I can imagine it being a tough and weird tasting biscuit. Going by the numbers, there's a high chance you'll end up not finishing it, but it may be worth the experience anyway.

+ Excellent and distinct artwork. Wanting to see the level transition comics is what motivated sometimes. Their style and subtle audio cues are premium presentation.
+ The tone is set in stone immediately and is consistent throughout.
+ Level design and guard placement is very well thought out. These are good, intentional challenges. While you lose some aspects of the "immersive sim" that you may expect, in return you get a tight puzzle. This means that playing flawlessly is not an afterthought, and you are directly given the tools and the avenues to get that max score.
+ Slide move is silly but ultimately fun and not as overpowered as one might think. It doesn't make much sense, but it fits and functions well as part of the game. Nice mechanic. Mastering it is key to turning a level into your playground and it is satisfying.
+ The delay on the dart gun is a great idea. I also applaud making some NPCs immune to the blackjack. However the graphic for whether NPCs are wearing a hat or a helmet should be a lot clearer.

+- Alllmost art deco asthetic, but the graphics just a bit too basic for the world to be truly stylish. Colours are nice though.
+- The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th levels are weaker than the ones around them (9 in total), creating an unfortunate earlygame rut that might discourage players and turn them off if they don't perservere. They're not awful levels, but they're not very attractive places to get stuck in while the game's trying to show you what it's made of. The ones afterwards are much more grand and exciting.
+- No checkpoints at all is rough. You can argue that saves cheapen the experience and make tools and win grades irrelevant, but having the first half of a level become rote because you've done it 12 times, or throwing away a perfect first-time run 30 minutes in because you had to learn the hard way what part of a shadow graphic actually shrouds you, has a similarly negative effect. One save per level would have been great. The game is make-your-own-difficulty anyway. I don't want to dread having to redo everything perfectly.
+- The rating system is a great idea but could be tuned better. Firstly, one mistake generally implies or leads to the other, so having 10 points for not being detected and 10 points for not taking damage is not quite right when you take damage after being detected 90% of the time, given how quick guards react to shoot you. Also, you're probably using your dart gun right after that, which is another 10 points for harming someone. In effect, either you're a ghost (or master if you missed stuff), or you're all the way down to novice because you were detected. Steam achievements corroborate this: completion percent is 12.4, professional on all missions is 2.9, and expert, ghost, and master is 2.0. This means that, if you're getting expert, you're also getting master and ghost. Secondly, knocking anyone out is only a 10 point loss, but being able to knock out the whole map makes the other 5 stealth challenges impossible or trivial to not fail. (Avoiding security cameras is not difficult without the pressure of nearby NPCs)

- I don't know what the purpose is of sprites for NPCs and some objects. I'm not sure what it adds. I think it was a poor stylistic choice and that full 3D would have looked better, more cohesive, and functionally additive. With sprite, it makes it harder to tell the state of NPCs at a glance, far away, or in darkness, which is bad. They also do not cast shadows, which takes away from gameplay (harder to judge position) and looks. There is some awesome shadow work throughout the game, why remove NPCs from that? The environments are great; I'm positive they could have done a fine job. In fact, you can see that the sprites are rasterized 3D models!
- Sound distance and propagation is not quite there, most notably when there are a few NPCs around in tight corridors. It's hard to discern whether someone is about to come into view or is actually 2 walls away, or if someone is above or below you. Utilizing degrees of low-pass filters, or increasing how much obstacles reduce the volume of footsteps would have greatly improved audio clarity. It's workable, just not as obvious as it should be.
- The NPC awareness seems imbalanced. It's hyperactive for head-on spotting and you generally need full darkness to exist within their vision cone, but that vision cone is quite narrow and you can dance in their near periphery with your torch on at no risk. In other words, the light levels between "no light" and "full light" rarely make a difference. They are legally deaf as well, and you can do some serious ninja stuff once you realize that. Metal and tile steps are not nearly as loud as you'd think they'd be. I would love to trade some of their frontal detection strength for greater side and aural detection, but the way it's tuned now is necessary for the levels to work as intended. So, at least things were built around it. Some sections rely entirely on close calls that feel like they shouldn't work. Also, turrets see through all darkness once they have been activated, and will shoot you as soon as you enter LOS even in full darkness.
- All doors automatically close themselves unless you spam use to "refresh" them or block their way. Especially nasty when using a secret passageway with no button on the exit side. This is not necessary.
- Strange sound design, mixing 8/16 bit sfx and voices with ASMR-tier environmental effects. Policemen are crusty and compressed, but their dogs are realistic 128 kbps. It does make getting spotted less scary, but like with the 3d and sprites mixed together, I feel less immersed than I could be for uncertain benefit.
- Just a "sound" slider, so if you want the music and environmental effects at a good volume, you have to suffer the silly CLANG CLANG CLANG of metal footsteps as NPCs patrol overhead, or super loud metal doors and gunshots.
- Ripe for more VA

I will give special mention to the fact that this was made by one person. While that doesn't change the quality, I will say that this is one of the most coherent one-man projects I've played. The developer could have used all the same ideas (with some feedback) to lead a team to make a fully fleshed and watertight 9/10 renaissance title. I hope he gets the opportunity one day. The final cutscene teases a sequel, so... please?