Neue Rezensionen von Solus Grimwelder

I recently received Legends of Eisenwald as part of the latest Humble Bundle. I was unfamiliar with it going in, but as a fan of classic turn based strategy games like Heroes of Might and Magic, Disciples, Warlords, and so on, I thought it would be worth giving this game a go.

I'm now 10 hours into the game and on the third chapter of the campaign. There are definitely some rough edges here but I'm enjoying my time overall. On the negative side, the interface is a little buggy and obtuse. There is no easy way to compare the stats of two different items and considering the game is asking you to fully equip up to a dozen soldiers, that can make inventory management a bit frustrating. There are also a number of item abilities, but to my knowledge there is nowhere to go to see what effect an ability has. Some are obvious, such as one called something like Vampiric Touch. I can get a solid idea of what that does, but others are not as clear. More problematic, is that I also have been unable to find a way to look at the upgrade trees for various soldiers, making my choices pretty much random. And even when I have made a choice there is often little explanation of what has changed or improved with the upgrade.

So poor inventory and stat management combined with a decent but not excellent translation (I assume from German) makes the game a bit hard to get into, but as someone who has been playing games for 25+ years, I can easily remember a time when every foreign game required a bit of guesswork, so that didn't bother me too much. That said, I can easily see how a less patient gamer might just end up giving up on this before they figured it out.

Once you do get a hang of things most of the rest of the game is a big positive. You have a fair number of upgrade paths for your soldiers without things being overwhelming. You need to outfit your entire force but there doesn't seem to be an inventory limit so you are free to keep things for future use, and combat is tough, fun, and quick while not being too complex. There are also a ton of hidden secret areas in each level you can find that would earn you high quality gear if you go exploring.

As a final note, numerous reviews here and on professional sites have said that the quest log is poor, but I have not found that to be the case. You can hit the magnifying glass on most any quest where you need to go to a specific location and have it mark it for you on your map. Others have said rumors aren't saved in your quest log, but that is also not true, they are just located under notes.

Lastly, there is the debate about losing your soldiers and inventory at the end of each level. While standard practice in this type of game, traditionally you are allowed to choose a couple soldiers or items to keep and take with you to the next level. Here you just get your main character and whatever equipment he has on him at the time, which is fine but I would have liked to select one or two additional units to progress with me. As it is, you have to start your army from scratch each level, which can be a bit deflating.

All told I would recommend this game to fans of classic TBS titles from the 90's, as well as any younger gamer who enjoys slower paced titles and is willing to put up with some rough edges they might not be accustomed to.

As a big fan of Prison Architect I decided to try out Planetbase when it was included in the latest Humble Bundle. Sounded like a similar concept but in space. While visually impressive and well optimized, Planetbase is missing one key component from other similar games that allow them to function. That is the ability to restrict different groups of people to certain areas. Without this the AI will often do incredibly stupid things. For example I've seen an AI walk around the entirety of my colony to pick up a lone resource, in the process nearly dying of both starvation and asphyxiation. When your base is small towards the start of the game the problem is not really noticeable, but when you need to have certain character in certain locations at certain times to make a massive colony run smoothly, the lack of any sort of system for controlling AI behavior just ruins this game's potential.

All told there are a couple key systems that could be added that I think would fix almost all of the problems with the game.

Firstly, a system where certain areas can be designated as the work places or living places for a certain group of colonists. Even if the system just broke colonists down by profession that would still help a ton as you could instruct all your medics, for example, to use the beds and canteens near the medical centers and labs, so they would never be far from where they needed to go.

Secondly, a more granular system for controlling who is allowed to go outside and when. Again splitting this even just by profession would be a big help as it would allow me to keep certain people doing their job. Also, a setting that allows only robots outdoors would be very helpful in a lot of situations.

Lastly, and I think this could come afterwards, I think a logic system for doors and airlocks that let's me program who can pass through any door would be a big help as well. Being able to evacuate and then seal off a portion of the colony would be great in case of an emergency, plus it would allow the developers to build a more accurate system for simulating oxygen needs. Plus other hazards like fires or nuclear radiation could be added and dealt with using door systems that let in and our the atmosphere.

What is here is a nice start, and I have to give kudos to the developer for creating a very in depth tutorial which many of these games don't have. Plus visually this is a step above a lot of similar titles. That said, the lack of control makes the late game simply not fun.

I guess as a final suggestion for the future, adding the ability to create secondary bases away from your main colony would also be really nice eventually.

EDIT 9/11/16: While I appreciate the support this review has gotten, please note that I will immediately delete any derogatory, offensive, abusive, or in any other way insulting comment towards either the developer or other members of the Steam community that are posted below this reivew. Keep it polite and constructive. Name calling won't fix this game's problems nor will they make the developer any more likely to respond to your requests. The developers are aware of what the fans want. That's all that we can do at this point. We don't know what the circumstances of development are for this team currently. Please give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they want to create the best game that they have the ability to create and are hindered by any number of financial, personal, or technical issues that make game development incredibly difficult.

Management sims in a lot of ways live and die by their UI. How easily can I get the information needed to make a decision and how quickly can I implement a plan once I've made my choice? When done well a UI is something you never think about, a seamless extension of yourself. Other times it is like the UI of Holy Potatoes, a game I have to assume was ported from mobile devices due to UI design choices that make no sense otherwise.

But to back up a little bit and explain the big picture, in Holy Potatoes you run a blacksmith selling weapons to various questing heroes the likes of which most of us have played as in any number of RPG's. Your main currency beyond money is fame and fame is determined by how well heroes perform in the field while using the weapons you build. It's a decent concept for a game and there is a fair amount of depth later on as you manage 10 different smiths and their various needs. In the end though, Holy Potatoes is sunk by two key issues.

The first is difficulty. Simply put, the game is a cakewalk. You are presented with a series of missions to complete, one at a time by the game. Usually these involve increasing your fame or leveling up the heroes that hire you by giving them superior weapons. And occasionally the game asks you to hand over some money to the shady owner of your smithy. But there were times when I would complete an objective only to find the next three objectives were already completed. The best management sims show how difficult it is to balance the various parts of a major business, but even towards the end when the game becomes a bit hectic, I never came anywhere close to running out of money. And because there is no pressure there the entire game becomes a series of bars that need to be filled. And filling them is inevitable. The only thing making better weapons does is speed up the process.

But even an easy game can be fun for a while if the act of playing is enjoyable enough. Who doesn't love the occasional power trip or even a game where overcoming a challenge isn't nearly as important as making interesting narrative choices? But this game is neither of these things. For one the narrative choices you make don't seem to have any effect on the story progress, but more damning for a game this easy, you never get that sense of being all mighty because of an awful port job from the mobile version I'm just going to assume existed before this one.

I assume that because of the ridiculous way certain aspects of the game are designed. A key example occurs when you send out a smith to buy more components to make more weapons. You'd expect a menu to pop up that let you type in how much you want of each component but as far as I can tell there is no typing in numbers here. Nor can you hold down a button to have a number increase at a rising speed. No, to buy each and every item you must click on a button over and over, turning something that should be an automated process into tedium. I should be able to tell some smith under me to replace certain resources whenever my stockpiles drop below a certain level. I should be able to research multiple new weapons at once. I shouldn't have to click on an icon every time a smith returns from a job just to put him back where I left him.

Holy Potatoes is a game with potential and I'm curious to see if the recently announced sequel lives up to that potential. In the here and now, though, realize that this game barely qualifies as a management sim, considering how little actual managing you do.

Decent art design and audio work make the game easy to look at and listen to, but the referential humor is just lazy and none of it hides how many key features this self proclaimed management sim is lacking.

Ignite is a five year old racing game that would barely pass muster on the PS2 a decade ago. In fact, despite releasing in 2011, almost every element of this game feels ripped from the Burnout and Need For Speed titles EA released two console generations ago. The logo, font, and overall UI are all based heavily on visuals used in tuning culture, and the heavy metal soundtrack would fit right in with EA's Underground titles. Meanwhile the visuals themselves certainly don't hold a candle to EA's 360 and PS3 era games, nor Codemaster's more simulation based Dirt and GRID games. Despite looking like an Underground knock off, Ignite somehow performs worse than any of Codemasters or EA's games on my computer. I can run all of Codemasters games (haven't tried the new Dirt in Early Access) maxed out at 1080p/60 just with advanced lighting turned off, while EA's titles that allow 60 fps playback also run at that refresh rate.

Moving beyond the embarassing presentation, the question is if the actual racing here is worth putting up with the shoddy performance. The answer is largely no. The handling here feels most similar to Burnout among other PC releases, but I would say probably handles most similarly to Ubisoft's mobile Asphalt series in that the game never requires you to break and seems to correct your steering at times as well. I wouldn't be surprised if Ignite began life on iOS or Android phones, simply because of how damn easy the game is. You'll note that my playtime sits at 3 hours. In those 3 hours I completed the entire single player campaign on its sole difficulty, and went back and completed many of the earlier races with late-game vehicles to beat all the time trials. If you wanted to do that for every race, and complete all the offline achievements, you could maybe eek 5 hours of content out of this game.

While spending $10 for 5 hours of content isn't terrible as far as entertainment goes, these aren't 5 great hours, nor five challenging hours. The game claims that players can use various tactics to achieve success, and that statement is true. The problem is that simply holding down the gas and turning when needed with the fastest car unlocked will get you victory in every race on your first attempt.

The ease with which you can beat the game is a shame, as early on when you don't have any fast cars you can see the beginnings of what could be a great set of mechanics. Boost in Ignite is earned through all your standard means. Drift, draft, smash things, and so on. If you've played Burnout or Need for Speed in the past decade you know the drill. Unlike in those games, though, there is no limit on the amount of boost you can hold in reserve, and any boost not spent by the end of a race is converted into bonus time that subtracts from your total. It's a system with potential but both the ease of the game and a lack of nuance hold it back. As far as I could tell you receive the same amount of bonus time for your remaining boost regardless of the car you are driving. This means that early on, saving boost is more valuable as a car's max speed is low enough that the couple seconds shaved off at the end might be more than would be shaved by using nitros in the race. Balancing it all makes the first quarter of the game fun and occassionally nail biting. But once you get past the first half an hour or so, you'll find that it really doesn't matter one way or the other, as the cars you are driving easily smoke the competition by 10 or more seconds even on the very final race.

There is an online option in Ignite that I didn't bother trying, and every car can unlock additional liveries that provide various bonuses to the rate that certain tricks give you boost. One even offers a nice double or nothing bonus where you get 200% boost per trick, but lose all of your boost if you hit into a wall. This type of give and take upgrade could have allowed players to focus on getting through races in a particular style, but as it is, most races can be beaten with the default cars. no upgrades required.

Being easy isn't always bad, but in the case of Ignite it renders the tension of racing innert, leaving you with a driving game that mostly drives for you, filled with a bunch of options that are entirely meaningless when faced with such abysmal competition.

This was a fun little game that took me only an hour and a half to complete. That includes getting all four of the achievements. There were no secrets or collectables that I noticed so I assume that I saw all the game had to offer in 90 minutes, and that was with half an hour on the final two puzzles. Of note, the player walks a small figure across the pop-up book and this walking takes the majority of the time. If you recall playing old LucasArts or Sierra adventure games before they introduced the ability to quickly teleport to the edge of the screen you'll have an idea of what I am talking about. Remove the walking and this entire game takes no more than half an hour to beat. The content there is enjoyable enough if you like unique puzzles in your adventure games, but outside of a handful of haikus there is no story here to speak of, which is often one of the key components of adventure games. The music and art are lovely and the puzzles at the very least aren't frustrating and all but the final one I felt made a decent amount of sense. But as quantity goes down, quality has to go up to even out the value, and in this case, unless you are a huge sucker for this style of art, I can't recommend this game for $10. If you get it in a bundle or on a major sale for 75% off I would say it is worth playing, but for a game this short a complete lack of a story component and puzzles that are smart but not brilliant just make the whole package not worth the cost.

If you have the money to spare then I can say I enjoyed my 90 minutes playing this game. But if you have a limited amount of disposable income there are many better games that can be had for $10 that will also last you far longer.

After 30 hours (3 games) worth of Endless Space I feel like I've exhausted its options. Maybe that isn't so but after a first runthrough learning the systems I was able to beat the game on easy on my next attempt in about 250 turns. Moving up to normal added little challenge. The game simply ended more quickly because the AI forced my hand earlier on. Strategy games thrive in that thin line between being too simplistic to have lasting appeal and being too complex to learn in the first place. Sadly, Endless Space is both difficult to learn and easy to master. It's the exact opposite of what a game of this sort should be.

That said I still had a lot of fun with Endless Space. I liked the addition of hero units to space based TBS Game. It's something common in fantasy titles but not something I had experienced in this specific type of strategy game. The combat to me was pointless. I found a handful of cards that worked and just used them in almost every battle. The AI didn't adapt to this strategy and I found myself easily winning every battle without having to fight it manually.

The main issue with the pacing of the game is that once you reach the point where you are close to victory you are so insanely powerful that there is little tension. In my first match on the normal difficulty level I built 4 of the 5 wonders needed to win the game and left the fifth one with a couple turns left to build and enough money to finish it instantly if I needed a quick victory. Meanwhile I also researched every single item on the tech tree but the science victory. I made numerous diplomatic agreements for no reason, getting my score very close to 100, and built up a massive army capable of destroying all of my opponents with ease. Eventually an opposing team got too close for comfort to reaching an economic victory, forcing me to finish my final wonder. But the point is that at the very late point in the game I was at, any victory method would have been viable. I was toying with my opponents. This is something I would expect to be able to do after a hundred or more hours of practice or on an easy difficulty setting. But it seems to me that unlike the best turn based strategy games, focusing on one area (say scientific research) does not have to hinder your abilities in other areas. That takes away from the strategy of the game.

So while I enjoyed my three matches of Endless Space, I felt by the end that I had nothing more left to see. I could play as one of the more unique races. I could up the difficulty and see if I could beat a cheating AI, but neither of those prospects excite me greatly. I still play Galactic Civilizations 2 over half a decade after it was released. And in my mind it inarguably remains the greatest sci-fi 4x game on the market.

So let me start off by saying that I am a big fan of the original game and its development team. I've played everything People Can Fly have developed, including Painkiller and its expansion, Gears of War Judgement, and Bulletstorm. I've also played the games made by some ex-People Can Fly developers, like Flying Wild Hog's Hard Reset and Shadow Warrior. And I've played the first game by Farm 51, Necrovision. Suffice to say I have followed these guys and their games from the beginning.

Now this new Painkiller plays pretty much like the original. It has many of the same sound effects, the same weapons, and you can still bunny hop to get places really fast. And the levels are pretty much remakes of the original levels, as promised. So far so good, right? Here are my two problems.

This is just a matter of personal taste so people can disagree but looking at all of the games I've listed above one thing that has been included in almost all of them since Painkiller is an upgrade system of some sort. Now I don't need a Shadow Warrior style, complex, almost RPG-like, upgrade system. But the stuff in Hard Reset, Bulletstorm, and even The Farm 51's followup to this game Deadfall Advenures all have a nice upgrade system. Now for some people the lack of such a system here will be a plus. But in its place you have the tarrot card system which can make the game incredibly easy or incredibly hard if you want it to. That is of course up to the player, but it's a system I don't enjoy nearly as much.

The second issue is the amount of content for the price. The game "only" costs $20 but this isn't a complete remake of the original game. Only about half the levels are included. If you want to triple that cost you can get everything that has been released for the game. Yes, that would make this game your standard price of $60, but this is a remake here. While the graphics are spruced up, at its core this is a decade old game. If you look at console HD remakes you'll see they rarely cost full price. The upcoming Halo Collection for the Xbox One includes every Halo game outside of Halo Reach (4 games total) with one completely remade from the ground up, and the others getting boosts to visuals and performance. Note that Halo 2, the game being remade from the ground up came out in 2004, the same year as the original Painkiller. Yet for its full price the Halo Collection also throws in 3 other games that have all been spruced up themselves.

So ask yourself a question. Do improved graphics and Steam achievements make a 10 year old game worth $60 to you? If the answer is yes then just buy the Collector's Edition and the two DLC packs (the final piece of DLC is a top down shooter not additional levels) and you can relive your childhood days of blasting hellspawn with ridiculous weapons. Personally I would wait for some sort of ridiculous sale before buying (it's what I did), but if you are willing to plunk down the cash then know that the game itself works and plays pretty much like a prettier version of the original.

I recently finished Arkham Origins after purchasing it on the Steam sale and found that despite claims of game breaking bugs in the forums, I only encountered one major bug throughout my 15 hours of play, which did not stop me from beating the game or any of the side missions. Those who enjoyed Arkham City and would like more of the excellent combat and stealth mechanics from that game will be pleased to know that they'll get plenty of that here, but also that nothing significant has been added to either gameplay type. A couple new enemy types have been added, and players can unlock shock gloves that let you beat up foes more abley, while a new gadget can create a permanent tightrope in the environment, replacing the line launcher from the previous games. Both the gloves and the remote batclaw are fun new additions but those who value story canon in their games will almost certainly wonder why Batman would ever get rid of these upgrades once he found them.

Meanwhile the story is good with some surprising twists. This is NOT a Batman Origin story or an Akrham Asylum origin story though. You do get insight into the origins of some of the characters to an extent, but in most of those cases (like Joker or Gordon or Harly) they are origin stories that have been told countless times elsewhere. All told the story is fine and goes in some directions I didn't expect based on the marketing, but a lot of it feels like a retread of the recent Christopher Nolan films with many elements lifted almost directly from CW's Arrow TV show.

My main issue with Arkham Origins, though, is not the lack of new mechanics or the familiarity of the story, but how uninspired the missions are. In Arkham City there were certainly collectables but most side missions featured some sort of unqiue gameplay or at least a unique setup. Here all but a couple side missions are collectables. Enigma (not yet The Riddler) has you doing your normal collectathons, although you must now first take out a tower to unlock an area of the city similar to any of Ubisoft's open world games. There is a distinct lack of creative set-pieces in the side missions, though. The Mad Hatter makes a return but his level is more frustrating and confusing than disturbing and weird like his mission in the previous game or Scarecrow's levels in Asylum. At one point in Wonderland I spent 10 minutes trying to decipher a puzzle only to somehow solve it without doing anything differently than I had been doing the rest of the time. The Mad Hatter congratulated me on solving the puzzle, except if he hadn't said anything I wouldn't have even known I had solved it.

The main story missions have unique elements to them but they aren't nearly as interesting as missions in previous games. Penguin's hideout isn't guarded by a shark and you don't have to get around a freeze gun to take Penguin out at the end. Of the 8 assassins most are just standard enemies with more health. There is a reason you have likely never heard of Copperhead, Shiva, Electrocutioner or Firefly. They just aren't very interesting. And we've fought Bane, Killer Croc, and Deadshot in previous games. Deathstroke is the most interesting of the bunch but outside of that this rogue gallery pales in comparison with Batman's usual lineup who are mostly MIA in this game. Penguin and Joker are really the only two A listers on display, and Penguin has a very minor role. Black Mask, Anarky, and the others are bottom of the barrel villains who even Batman fans are likely unfamiliar with or only familiar with in passing. The whole game simply lacks the inspiration and creativity of previous entries.

Arkham Origins isn't broken like many would have you believe. Your mileage will vary but from my experience, while not super polished, the game works. There are visual glitches aplenty, as well as odd camera angles and the like. But as far as my experience went the game functioned. The core Arkham mechanics are all in place as well and working just as well as in previous games. If you are just looking for more thugs to beat up and terrorize then Arkham Origins will serve you well. Even the story was surprisingly good and threw in a few unexpected twists by the end. No, in the end Arkham Origins suffers from a real lack of creative situations. The set pieces are occasionally visually impressive, but they also lack the wacky flair that makes Batman such a great comic. In a sense Origins is closer to Nolan's films in its lack of the odd, magical, and over-the-top. These villains are all largely believable people and it makes their plots feel a bit to formulaic. Without your Poison Ivey's, Two-Faces, Scarecrows, Cat-Womans, Ra's, and so on, all you have are gangsters and mercs. Those make fine videogame villains, but this is Batman, and the setting here just lacks insipiration compared to the previous entires and that leaves a game that is good, but not masterful.

So for those who simply enjoy the gameplay of this series I do recommend it, but for those who want some of that patented Batman crazy, this entry is a bit lacking in that regard, with just the Joker to hold the fort.