Studious 最近的評論

I managed to put 20 hours into this game, and I still couldn't tell you anything memorable about it. It's a nice piece of art, sure. There's a great amount of care put into it... Its, uh... dark fantasy- ish? Or possibly more of an ambiguous kind of fantasy.

For all the craftsmanship, there's nothing particularly drawing me to this game over the hundreds of others that I can pickup at a moments notice. It's good- decent even, and that makes it 100x more tragic. I keep seeing this in my library, and I'm like "Hey, I should get around to playing that some time." and then I just throw it on the backburner for more exciting games.

Good art tells you a powerful message. Masterful art leaves a powerful message left unsaid.

This game hits very hard. It dresses itself up with color and whimsy; but make no mistake, this is a monster. Absolutely more than the sum of its parts. If you can get past the obvious inspirations, and the ludicrous amounts of grinding, you'll find a treasure.

As a side note, I personally despise grinding in RPGs, and I regularly do everything in my power to avoid it. This is the one game I hope to remember that broke that, even for a short time.

The 50 islands of Aebrethwywalbwebshire are under attack! Are you a bad enough dude to defend the hamlet from pagans?

Bite sized micro intensive strategy. The primo starter guide on medieval amphibious tactics. It's up to you to make every landing as miserable as possible for the invaders. By the end, you'll be pike-walling with the best of them.

Recommended on sale. Designed well through and through.

Does what it sets out to do. No real surprises here. Some genuine heart and good set pieces put into this one. My only nitpick is that the AI get intensely aggressive to the point where perfection is required. Also the times I got shwacked 3mm in front of the finish line made me cry real tears.

I'd recommend it on sale.

If crushing my spirit was a contest, baby you'd take first prize. This game is obsessed with dread on a level previously unknown to mankind. Every fiber of my being is screaming to not continue; yet I can't help but admire it's proclamation. So here I am stuck in this endless loop, and all I can muster is a thumbs up.

Is there anything that needs said that hasn't been already? No, not really. This is just pure distilled Supergiant, all decked out in their big boy mythology pants. This is the rougelike of rougelikes. Well designed, if a bit cruel. Really captures the feeling of trying to swim out of the ocean, only for Greece's finest to slam dunk to back down to the seabed any time you get close.

Well worth your heard earned drachma.

Gotta give it to this game, nothing dredges up those teary eyed memories of stolen nostalgia quite like this. It's big, its colorful, its as surreal and low rent as it needs to be. This is a holy love letter to a very specific place in time. It scratches an itch that needed scratched, and that makes me happy.

This game is like if Quake and the NecroDancer had a lovechild, hit the digital spliff together, and then went to a Viking themed Halloween rockout party where they blasted tang and cayenne pepper shots. I love it.

Whelp. I got what I was looking for.

If you're familiar at all with what this game is attempting to offer, it's a very unique blend of strategy and real-time combat. This company took an engine that they had been building for over a decade and said "Naw this is too clunky," and rebuilt it from the ground up. The result is what you see before you.

Fights are more kinetic, the action is spicier, and the interactions have (relatively) more depth. The AI can think more actively but still stumbles on its face a good 40% of the time, which is a huge improvement over the 80% we got last game. There are also systems rebuilt to be fairer to the player, including a more comprehensive recruitment system and a (rudimentary) vassal voting system. So now when an enemy lord is defeated, they wont respawn with 60+ troops in one of their cities! The player can actually (vaguely) follow what's happening in the realm! (Yay!)

I'll give this game some sass, but I still think that this is leagues above the last game in terms of ambition and potential. It's no easy feat to create a game world that feels alive and breathing, and TaleWorlds is inching ever so closer with every few years of development. Maybe within another decade we'll have a game I feel compelled to complete? Nah, probably not.

I entered into this world with bright eyes, hopes and dreams, etc. I was in awe of all these new factions, mechanics, and all these new quest givers. But lying underneath this veneer of bakery freshness was my old lake monster nemesis: grinding. Everything is a number that needs to go up, which is good because it's never felt better to make the numbers go up. It's also bad because you get to the midpoint of the game and you realize the content just stops...

There are a lot more resources to get you going now. It feels like getting to the point of vassalage is a bit easier. But once you're there, it seems like things just sort of end. You run out of leavers to pull. You talk to your fellow vassals and there are only a couple options when I should have some way to influence things. I should have a reason to interact. I should have ways of subverting, obfuscating, challenging, persuading... But I don't. I have a barter menu that's new and shiny, but ultimately worthless.

And like so many before it, the moment I feel compelled to cheat is the moment the magic gets sucked out of the jar. Mount and Blade has always thrived on the creativity of modders to fill in that gap where the magic should be. Fingers crossed that this gets the same love and attention that its previous iteration did, and if that's the case then it will be a feast indeed. As for what's here now, it's good. Enough to hold my attention, to make me want to make numbers go up for a good while. But enough to make me complete this main quest? No. I got closer than ever though. This time I got a couple of cities and castle fiefs before quitting instead of just one.

So hey, good amount of progress there.

It takes a lot to make a game this immersive. There's clear passion here to recreate an authentic medieval experience. So I'll give this a very measured amount of kudos.

There are some clear parallels here between this game and Skyrim. Both feel like huge expanses of questing and fighting. The major difference is the controls. It's not as smooth as other games in the genre. It feels more like I'm piloting a mech then a human. Every action feels like a slightly clunky grind of bits and bobs. Every odd NPC behavior, from the random alarm that peasantry feel when they see you, to the just-slightly-off placement and interaction just builds on a sense of uncanniness with the world; and ultimately chips away at the barrier of immersion surrounding this game.

I would've said at the beginning of the game that something like this could've realistically happened. That the game is more of a theater of historical context than a brawl of good and evil. To some degree I think this game does achieve that within its means, but fails to stick the landing on the other side. There's a difference between playing a historical themed RPG and having someone read me medieval Bohemian thesis papers for 30 hours.

So, true to form with the controls feeling as chunky as a peasant's boiled soup; the combat suffers. Fighting anything is a chore that feels progressively harder and harder to ignore as the game goes on. A delicate, yet equally infuriating dance of: jab, block, feint, block, clinch, clinch, clinch over and over. This system felt novel enough to carry though the game at first, until I hit a roadblock.

After what felt like a very lengthy build up of story quests, a good amount of which felt like chores and filler, there was to be a climactic battle. Finally facing down the villain, you get your one on one duel. In my experience I got destroyed, demolished, and demotivated. My choice was to load a previous save, grind more stats and levels, and start the quest chain from the beginning. Or... simply not.

A little divine intervention later, and I'm past the hardest part of the game. The climactic bossfight, the catalyst for most of the story thus far... was only a lackey for some nameless smudge you haven't met. The train comes up to the station, sees the stop, and just barrels through anyway. I don't know how much of the game is left. I tried bearing through it for 5 or 10 more hours, but it just kept going and going.

So in between repeated bouts of CSI: Bohemia and classic RPG- you were sent here to do this thing, but I won't let you unless you run an errand for me; I couldn't suffer myself to finish this. Maybe it ties all together? Maybe some of the villains that were introduced come back? Maybe it wasn't all for naught. Maybe after all he returned to Kingdom Come: Deliverance.