Recent reviews by Jhereg

There is something cathartic about this game. The story is great for each character, and each progressions makes you want to keep going. It reminds me a lot of the old Final Fantasy, but there is something uniquely charming about this world even without chocobos and Cid. My only complaint was my own desire to fill out maps before I was ready for a zone, but that is not the game's fault but my own quibbles. hah. I'm glad it was ported to PC. I was never one for handhelds or consoles, and I feel like I would have missed this gem had it not been released for PC. That would have been a true shame.

One, this game is immersive, and that is a big part of its charm for me. You can quest in the first zone for hours without ever having solved the main quest. Of all the witcher games, I have loved this one the most, but that is not to say I didn't not like the first two. The game, however, feeds my OCDs. I have pick the plants on the map so much so that I have to turn off the notifiers so I don't spend the next 3 hours picking blowballs and false parley until crash head first into my keyboard. The quests require a bit of soul searching-- put coins in the purse or let the poor guy keeps his daughter's measley 23 crowns dowrey. There is humour galore, a lot of of dry. There is crafting, skill trees that aren't too obnoxious, and plenty of times when if you don't brew the right potion and put the right oil on your blade it's painfully obvious. I find that pretty good for a game. It makes you stick to the lore and not just overpower things. I forget how to counterattack most days, but at least I get the parries in. This is my kind of role playing game, and I'm still playing it almost what, five years after release? (Heck I still play Skyrim, too.) This game is a keeper, and I can keep coming back to it and feeling like I'm diving into something special. I will also admit that being able to turn it on ultra and admiring the sights and sounds has a great appeal too.

If you like micromanaging in the face of frozen death, this game is for you. There are a lot of parts of this game you have to preplan for, and you can only realize this when you've made errors by playing it through as people are dying around you and you have to fix it. I like it because you are juggling resources, heat (keeps you alive), and trying to do rescue missions at the same time. Survival mode is ever more crazy because it doesn't pause. My only complain is-- it's a frozen wasteland and it's greyscale. Sometimes all that snow puts me to sleep at the keyboard. That's a personal issue, though. The game is solid. The moral choices are a good touch such as religion vs order, sending kids to work or no, burying your dead or having organ transplants. It's more complex that most and there isn't one true path to success. It just has to work for you.

This game has a quirky original way of commanding troops that is somewhat awkward at first. I, for one, would prefer to command groups using number groups over the use of one key to cycle through what type of unit to summon to you. The healing is awkward as well because if you have a large army, they won't all fit in a small puddle to heal and you have to click around it a few times to cycle your things through. When you do have healing units the AI can just pick you off IN the healing pool and kill you, which is really annoying.

I feel l ike there is a lot of originality and potential in this game, but there are parts to it that make it a no go for me. The mission Frozen in Noe, for example, was a serious block to my enjoyment. 30 some tries in from base camp protect to trying to capture all the campfires and spam barbed war in, I could never survive the massive AI zergling (see squirrel) rush that just destroyed me. There was no visually obvious clue that I was getting too cold. No countdown. No blue bar that ticked. All that happened was the character started to slow walk, and by that time it was too late to get back to a campfire. Working as intended? Who knows. Annoying assuredly.

It annoyed me enough that as I sit here just after the "free weekend" that I no longer want to buy the game, and until this mission I had been ready to plunk down money for it and the soundtrack.

Pros:

Music
Voice acting
Originality of movement/command of troops
Some units good against other units strength/weakness dynamic

Cons:

AI is disgustingly close to what I'd call a cheater. It can do things (like micromanage a map) while you are stuck with clunky controlls and frustrated cursing

No save option. Screw up, and it's back to the beginning or suffer through what you just screwed up. Makes sense in multiplayer, but not single.

Minimap shows paths that are not paths (trees that don't let you through, etc)

Many a win is won by zergling rushes, which is not exactly strategy.

AI zergling rushes you too. Glorious.

Commander doesn't have one basic attack. Not one. So if you are down to one sliver on a stupid squirrel and your army just froze to death one inch from the green safe area, you're done for.

You're not safe, even when you're healing. Someone can snipe you in the water and you don't even have a chance to move.

The maps are random. Sometimes you spawn in the worst point ever. Sometimes not. This could be considered exciting, but not in Frozen in Noe, for sure.

Frozen in Noe... is by far the biggest CON of this game. Up until this point everything was managable in how annoying it was. I still wanted to play. I don't now.

Overall: I really tried to like this game, and I was willing to give it a good shot until that one mission. I wasted 2 hours trying to get past it. Some may say I just suck at this type of game, but I stand by the fact that no mission, no matter how challenging, should make me want to flip a desk. Some may find this challenge small, or they may have lucked out on it, but it's not for me. I play games to be fun, and slamming my head against my desk is not fun.

I'll be honest. I was a terraria addict for a long time. Then came Starbound, and I was smitten with that too. There were times I wanted to take the building tool for Starbound and give it to Terraria and other such things.

I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I started Dig or Die. The graphics are very simliar, but the playstyle is very different. The basic concept, dig stuff up, build things, survive the night. That's all there, but Dig or Die adds a few things. One of those things is water. Water pouring down from the heavens and flooding your base because you forgot to plug that hole that radioactive alien firefly punched into the dirt to come eat your face the night before...

This game instills paranoia. Water paranoia. There is also that moment of "oh crap did I kill something on accident with my plasma rife?!" and the moment when 50 angry friends of his come to stomp you into the dirt when night falls. That's paranoia right there.

There that frustration that the game has physics, but it is also a sort of love/hate relationship that makes the game it's own thing. You can't just pile up bricks forever. Eventually, that tower has to have support or it's coming down. You can't build a bridge without supports. You have repair walls that took damage or there is a good chance that the night waves will say hello through the hole in your wall.

Overall, this game had a very satisfying feel to it, despite it being early access. I happen to really enjoy the soundtrack and hope there will be more from said composer. Best of all, the devs are active on their discussion board, and they even had time to answer my noob questions (from the gal that literally has only been playing this game for 19.9 hours according to steam...) as well as l isten to my suggestions from a new players standpoint. That's the kind of thing I like to see, and that makes the modest price-tag on this game worth every penny.