Recent reviews by Gkika

ALL! HAIL! MONOCAT!!!!

BUM BUM BUM BUMMMM
BUM BUM BUM BUMMMM BUMMMM
BUM BUM BUM BUMMMM
BUM BUM BUM BUMMMM BUMMMM

I hope Geoff Castellucci got a nod for them using his entire face for the main character, lol!

No singing, sadly- he's not actually involved in the game, aside from the striking resemblance- but this game does still have some of the best voice acting I've encountered in a hidden object game. It's just overall MUCH higher quality than the fare one normally encounters in the genre. Artifex Mundi haven't been this good in ages! (Suspension of disbelief is still necessary, of course. But we're at least given a reason to have believed, in the first place.)

There is also a recurring mini-game, seen in the trailer, in which we, the king's knight player character, fight off opponents w/ our sword. (Not gory, though dead bodies are occasionally shown.) It's a nice switch-up from the common HOG-trope of being a police officer/soldier w/ a weapon, & straining credulity to solve villain encounters w/ Rube Goldberg plot devices like shooting a chain to drop a chandelier instead of shooting the bad guy. No egregious use the banana-on-the-goat's-elbow moon logic here, either. Hidden object scenes don't look like a garage sale at a high school theater prop room, either. They're pretty much as pictured, & not maddeningly pixel-hunt-y.

TLDR: If you even kind of like HOG's, this is a great one!

Action! Adventure! MAD SCIENCE!!!!

Each faction offers different strategic advantages, all rooted in the history of the real cultures on which they're based, which makes for near limitless replay value.

Also, as Otto von Bismarck, you can defeat Barbarian encampments & then make the defeated Barbarians your new redshirts. 10/10 would Borg.

At first, I loved RIFT. The open world, the collectibles and unlockables, the innumberable quests- Plenty to discover and do without ever getting bored, and as a Free-To-Play, no pesky subscription to shell out every month. Unfortunately, in an effort to monetize the game without making it Pay-To-Win, they developed equally innumberable special events for players to complete, to earn prizes- usually in the form of vanity mounts. Who doesn't love those, right? Gotta catch 'em all!

The problem: Each event has its own special currency, through which players progressively earn their prize mounts. And. There. Are. No. End. To. These. One is bombarded on a seemingly daily basis with in-game notifications about "Last Chance!" this and "Don't Miss Out!" that. The stacks of currency actually built up in my inventory, to the point that I was having trouble making room for quest items, let alone all of the crafting materials needed for my three professions. (Seem like a lot to keep track of? It is.) The myriad events and currencies and quests and storylines all start to get so overwhelming that I eventually gave up. It was fun while it lasted, and many players will find this easy to overlook, but I needed a break from the barrage.