Recent reviews by LordBlade

An excellent builder with an entertaining story and some neat RPG mechanics. In a lot of ways it's similar to Minecraft for general building, except that there's a lot of special buildings and zones you can set up. Putting specific items within a room will make the room count as a certain type (like putting beds in a large room to make a barracks). Your townsfolk will make use of various rooms and will ask for specific ones to satisfy their needs. Along with that, you can make rooms of varying styles and fanciness based on the materials used and decorations put in them. It makes the town building aspect very interesting and unique. My wife and I both played through this game and by the end our towns were vastly different. That freedom is part of what makes the game great.

Combat is decent. Pretty straight forward hack and slash for the most part. You can craft new weapons and armor as well as tame monsters to battle alongside you (or take your villagers). There's a TON to explore in this game. Each island is huge and has its own story and missions, along with plenty of secrets and puzzles to find and conquer.

For anyone who enjoys the building games, this is definitely a must have.

Can't recommend this game enough. Simply put, it's like the original Mount & Blade, except better in every way.

You create your character and set off into a massive open world of warfare and politics. Join a faction as either a mercenary or swear your loyalty. Help out towns and villages. Start trade caravans. Siege cities. Raid the weak. Capture prisoners and sell them off or execute them... or keep them around long enough to wear them down so you can recruit them yourself.

There are several factions, each with their own troop and cultural styles. You have classic medieval empires, along with Mongol style nomads, and Celtic freemen. Pick a faction to work with, or just wander the lands working for the highest bidder. Make friends and enemies, find love (or at least a good political marriage), have kids and build a dynasty.

This game is still in Early Access, but what they've got out already is wonderful. The finished product is going to be amazing.

An amazing sequel to a truly unique game. Six Ages is the sequel to King of Dragon Pass, this company's first big release, and masterpiece all its own.

Six Age puts you in charge of a bronze age clan in a magical world, where gods and spirits are everywhere and gaining their favour (or ire) can be a gamechanger. You compete with other clans of your people, as well as clans from different peoples, trying to make the best of your situation.

This game is like a massive living story that slowly grows with every choice you make. Unlike other games that claim that "choices matter", this game is built on that idea. EVERY choice has an impact, some noticeable, some not. Some choices don't truly reveal their outcome until years later (such as having one of your clan marry into another clan, and years down the line their child might become chief and bring your clans together).

Every story is different and every story is full of ups and downs. This is a must have game for anyone who loves games where their choices have a meaningful impact on the game itself.

A fun little dating sim that's silly and suprisingly complex. Great fun to play with friends.

Castlevania lives again!

Bloodstained is the Castlevania game fans have been dreaming of for years, even though Konami decided that players "don't like this style of game anymore". Gotta love corporate marketing. :p

This game us true to its roots. Everything from the super slick combat, the wide array of platforming puzzles, the varied enemies and the huge gear list feels just like the Castlevania games of old. The graphics and music are simply perfect. This game is Castlevania in everything but name. A definite must have for fans of the series, or those who enjoy a good Metroidvania style game.

I never thought I'd enjoy driving a truck. This definitely isn't a game for everyone. But for those who enjoy long trips, listening to the radio, it can be oddly soothing.

This game is a buggy mess.

I want to like it. I really do. There are a lot of very good points to the game. Aspects that would be nice to see in more RPG's today. Interesting mechanics. Great writing. Fun characters.

The problem is the game had absolutely no business being released when it was. Even now with the recent 1.1 uber patch, there are still a TON of bugs and glitches in the game. Many of which are game breaking. In a few months, or maybe a year, the game might be fixed enough to recommend to others, as the gameplay it offers is good. But the bugs and complete lack of testing that it suffers from just ruins everything.

If you enjoyed the first Hitman, you will love this one. Essentially what we have here is more of the amazing gameplay from the original along with some improvements and touchups.

Hitman 2 offers amazing gameplay, putting you in the role of a world class assassin taking out an array of targets in many creative ways. This isn't your typical "stealth" game where you try to hide and when you're spotted just turns into a standard shooter. If the guns come out (other than a sniper rifle from a nice safe spot), things have gone horribly wrong. Hitman is all about studying your target, learning the environment and making the most of what you have access to. Stealthy neck snaps, "accidents" over railings or with falling items, poisonings, being fish-slapped into the ocean... and many more. Hitman lets you be creative and find your own route to success.

The levels in Hitman 2 are much larger than those in the original. You start off in a tiny intro level, to learn the basics of gameplay, and then you get thrown into Miami, which is downright massive. Each level has a bunch of "story missions" (previously called "opportunities") which you can do to get your targets into the perfect spot to disappear. You can also often do multiple story missions in a single run, though some are going to cut off other avenues. But the game's all about replaying stages and exploring new ways of achieving your objectives.

You will start stages with practically nothing. Often just your basic suit and perhaps a gun or tool. But as you master stages (completing various challenges and story missions) you will unlock new starting areas and stashes to hide an item on a stage for you to pick up later. Of course, every stage is full of items that can be used in different ways. Tools like wrenches and screwdrivers that can be used to take out targets or sabotage items around a level. Small items for distractions, large ones for lethal attacks, perhaps some rat poison to make someone sick to get them out of the way or to set up an unfortunate bathroom "accident".

And of course, there are the disguises. Take out a guard and put on his uniform to walk through areas that would otherwise be off limits. Knock out a food vendor and take their outfit to man their stall and feed your target something nasty when they come by. Grab that scientist's labcoat and arrange for some unfortunate lab shenanigans. Just remember that disguises aren't foolproof, and various people will still see through them (that guard's uniform might fool the engineers in a lab, but some of the other guards might wonder why Bob's got a new face).

Two of the really nice additions over the original game are blending and briefcases. You can now blend into crowds of people to help yourself hide from people who would spot you, which can be a real life saver. As well as being able to hide in bushes and tall grass. While blending in, your detection radius becomes a tight circle around you, so as long as you keep threats several feet away you are generally going to be quite safe.
The briefcases are new items to let you hide things that could get you in trouble. Trying to bring a rifle with you as anything other than a guard authorized to carry one is generally going to go badly for you, unless you have it stashed out of sight in a briefcase, which you can carry around with you. And where in the first game, item stashes were always in containers built into the level, they will now appear in a briefcase. So if you stash a sniper rifle away, you can easily just pick up the case and only pull it out when needed, which makes many objectives far easier to accomplish.

As for the graphics and sound, the game continues to impress, just as its predecessor did. The game is beautiful and delivers incredibly detailed environments to explore. The production quality is top notch. It does require a rather decent system to hit the peak settings, but the game runs quite well with reduced settings on older systems.

IOI has added an extra bonus as well. Anyone who owns the first Hitman will recieve "legacy" missions in Hitman 2. Essentially all the content (minus elusive targets) from the original is brought into the new game, with updated maps. The new maps mainly fix some of the bugs from the original, along with shuffling some items and NPC's around and generally "cleaning up" the levels. For those that don't own Hitman 1, the legacy missions can be bought as DLC for this game.

All in all Hitman 2 delivers more classic Hitman gameplay. So go get your murder on.

Easily the best of the "survival" games available on Steam. The awesomeness of dinosaurs aside, the mechanics in ARK are very well done and balanced. The progression flows well, and allows players to move at their own pace. Beyond a basic hut and fire, you don't have to worry about rushing up a tech tree like in most of the other games.

While the game has a huge multiplayer focus, which can either be a fun group experience or a tough fight for survival based on which servers you choose to join... it also works amazingly well single player. While things will naturally take longer, you're not actually missing out on any content by playing alone. So if you want to have a solo experience, you can do so with ease. Or just have a private server for you and a handful of friends.

Absolutely amazing.

I've been playing the Monster Hunter games since the beginning, and I have to say that World is definitely a shining example of the series. There were fears of the game being "dumbed down" or oversimplified to reach a larger audience, but that's clearly not the case. The core gameplay is the same classic style. Pick a weapon, learn it's moves and timing, study the monsters and learn when to attack and when to evade. This isn't some button mashing game like God of War, this is a skillful, methodical hunting game where the monsters are lethal and you need to fight smart.

Of course the game's been out on consoles for some time, and everyone already knows how amazing it is. The real focus here is how good is the PC version. Simply put, it's mindblowing. People again had fears of some bad port, poorly optimized and all that nonsense. Happily, none of that's an issue.

Firstly the performance of the game is vastly superior to the consoles. Not only does PC get better graphical quality, but it gets a much better framerate, with the ability to play at 30, 60 or uncapped FPS. My system's a couple of years old now, but I'm easily able to play at max settings with uncapped FPS and generally seems to float around 90 FPS for most of the time. My wife's system is actually quite a bit older, but she is able to play on max settings at a steady 60 FPS. The main thing is that the game is far more CPU dependant than GPU. So having a top of the line graphics card won't help much if your CPU is garbage.

One tip is to turn off Volumetric Rendering. It barely does anything graphically, but with it off you'll notice a huge jump in performance it the feature itself is a massive drain on resources for some reason.

As far as controls go, mouse and keyboard works wonderfully. Not only are the controls smooth and responsive, but using mouse and keyboard lets use use hotkeys for inventory (instead of an inventory wheel or cycling like with a controller). You can set up 4 batches of hotkeys no less (hitting F1-F4 for a list and the 1-8 for an option). This lets you use what you want, when you want, without having to worry about cycling through your inventory or finding the option on a radial menu. Need a heal? Need antidotes? Need to grab your fishing rod? All super quick and easy. I can't imagine ever going back to console after having this benefit.

Monster Hunter World is definitely a perfect example of the series. It's fun, it's challenging and the multiplayer is awesome and easy to do. Definitely a must have for any fan of the series (many people have switched from console to PC, even after owning the console version) and an amazing game for those who love epic boss battles in a Dark Souls style combat system.