Recent reviews by jb abrams

This should have been part of the game.

paid 20 AUD to sell my army to france and not be able to use trade leagues because i have more than one province

got the game for 5 dollars and i still regret it

The worst of all the DLCs they have released, it doesn't really add anything aside from a wheel that changes the events you gain and minor opinion changer traits. At least it's only 8 dollars compared to the general 15 dollar DLC pricetag that Paradox puts on them. I'd probably pay only 3 dollars for it though.

The first 3 hours consisted of looting villages with their residents not caring and running away from small pigs that headbutt you to death as well as monkey-goblins with sticks.

The next 3 hours contained running away from giant trolls with large sticks and orcs that you can only see from 6 metres away because of the game's render distance system.

I ran into a giant city with a forcefield around it and killed myself accidentally because I didn't realize I couldn't enter the city at all.

In this game, the deer equivalent are packs of wolves roaming together in lofting green fields, and the wolf equivalent are small pigs that can kill you in groups of 3. The wolves jump through the fields gracefully, chewing on the grass happily with their kin. The pigs however, are meat eating, campfire starting, forest lurking beasts that are an unwreckable force when there are more than 5 or 6 of them in a group.

The game is quite fun, but the only issues I have with it are the previously mentioned render distances which also affect landscapes harshly, the lack of a good tutorial system, and the fact that it still carries some bugs involving combat and movement around steep terrain.

yeah its alright

The game really isn't worth 25-29 dollars on Steam. I honestly expected more use of the CryEngine rather than just volumetric effects and light rays through window shutters.

The engine looked beautiful at first, but then I noticed that it wasn't gritty and destructive like I expected it to be for a WWII game. It looks like a Crysis port but lost in time and ended up in World War II due to the colour of the trees and the sky.

I partially enjoy the storyline, it opens up stories about the characters in the game but only briefly. I don't understand why the protagonist is an American fighting in Poland against Nazi Germany, he mentions at the beginning that his mother was Polish but I wouldn't think of that as reason to fight for the country, especially since Poland became completely occupied in WWII at the beginning. There is also the problem of it throwing you right into the action, you start off at the very beginning defending a blockade on a street in Poland, with the tutorial teaching you the controls of how to shoot and move around.

As mentioned before, I expected the engine to be used much more extensively like other titles previously on it, especially when it's the third generation of such a game engine, you would expect so. There is an option in the advanced settings for the physics to be changed from low, medium and high, but that doesn't make a big difference at all since the majority of the areas that you go into are static objects, and that also includes wooden crates and barrels which were moveable in the Crysis franchise so that was a big disappointment. The engine does use the light rays through window shutters and glass reflections which looks rather beautiful, but it's a detail that goes heavily missed due to the constant rushing around and shooting, it is only really noticed when walking down corridors on the sides of buildings.

The AI isn't very good. If you walk straight into an enemy you can completely stop them from shooting by standing right infront of their gun while they are just standing there waiting to shoot you. Some people say they can be quite difficult as they flank you and force you back a bit into previous areas of the level, which I haven't encountered at all. I have found that you can counter this situation simply by killing them as they are moving towards you. A lot of the time you find yourself sneaking towards new sets of enemies and then turning it into an instant bloodbath that also seems to end in a matter of seconds. They have some unique things not seen in other FPS games, like taking enemy soldiers hostage, holding a knife to their throat and a pistol in the other hand to use them as temporary cover, however that disappears quickly as your hostage's friends decide to willy nilly blow the ♥♥♥♥ out of their body rather than think of the loss of a comrade if they did so.

There are explosions, yes, but they are very odd. At the beginning of the game, I sneaked into a small plaza with three men doing shooting practise on a wall with a target on it. Just on their left of them I could see a giant box of TNT or something similar with wires and fuses hanging out, and decided that I could eliminate 3 of the 9 men in the situation by shooting at the box of explosives a couple of times. The box was literally 2 centimetres away from the nearest enemy, and when I shot at the box it took only one bullet to set them off, and the explosive was like as if the entire thing was soaked in water and all the explosives were duds. It was the tiniest explosion I have ever seen in a videogame. The three men simply turned around away from the explosion and start blazing rounds at me rather than look at the exploded box and think of as to why it exploded in the first place.

I have an i5 3570k, 8GB of RAM and an overclocked ASUS GTX 560 Ti with 1 GB of memory. When I started the game, I was getting an average of 40 FPS and further into the game I decided to lower the settings a bit, so I turned down post processing and shading, but it looked exactly the same like as if I never turned down the settings, and yet I got 80 FPS after doing so.

I wouldn't say the game is non-linear as the description suggests, you have two playing styles in the beginning of every situation which turns into just one full on combat situation with bullets whizzing past your head. You can sneak and kill probably 3-4 people silently but then someone will always notice the dead bodies even if you put them into a place where they can't find them and you have to go loud to get through the area. Oh, did I mention you can drag bodies around after you kill someone? You place them over your shoulder and you pull out your pistol with your other hand to shoot people. Although I ran into a bug where my hand holding the pistol was just holding it up to the sky like as if I was trying to avoid friendly fire and I couldn't fire it at all which was useless. I also ran into another bug where I picked up a Kar-98, a semi rifle which requires you to click out the casing of the bullet everytime you fire, but I ended up with a fully automatic sub-machine gun that was nowhere to be seen.

If I was to rate this game out of 10, I would give it a 3.