Recent reviews by Bendersnake

Quality Assurance is NOT optional in a game-as-service that gets constantly updated with very expensive DLCs. It runs very badly at this point, minimum requirements on the Steam page are almost a scam and in a few months the game will double in size, cutting off other people that can manage to run it now.

The whole game design revolves around shopping for quality-of-life features, everything else is an extra, even the multiplayer itself (why can't I do quest with a friend but just "assist" him without completing the quest myself?). If I want a multiplayer open world I'll play something that doesn't punish me for having too many ammo in my inventory in the first hour of play .

Sarà ricordato come un classico della storia dei videogiochi. Un raggio di luce in mezzo a un mercato PC che sa proporre solo indie coraggiosi ma limitati dal budget, giochi console adattati (spesso) male, e sbobba-as-service il cui scopo ultimo è evitare di soddisfare il giocatore, che non deve chiudere il gioco col sorriso sulle labbra, deve rimanere incatenato.
Larian, libera da certe dinamiche di mercato (che spesso non hanno neanche senso, guardate che disastri sono stati Redfall o Back for Blood, ma vallo a spiegare agli economisti), ha sviluppato un gioco vero. Complesso senza essere tedioso, lungo senza essere annacquato (anzi, una parte del gioco ha forse il problema opposto), e con un'anima. A meno di non odiare profondamente qualsiasi gioco basato sulla narrazione e/o con un gameplay a turni, è un classico immancabile nella vostra libreria Steam.

A masterpiece. With a slightly better gameplay it would have been the perfect single player fantasy game.

I can't really put a thumb down because the production quality is stellar, gameplay is addicting, the coop should be mandatory in every game of the genre, and my gripes are mostly subjective. But I didn't found the masterpiece that this game is supposed, according to the community, to be; I'd rate it mixed.
The first big problem of the game is that the game is set a thousand years after DOS and... it really sounds like a random number because it feels like the events of the first game (that I didn't play) were fresh on the game world. The game should either have a better introduction to the lore or just ditch those infinite subplots about the tyrant of 1000 years ago that you are supposed to know as an old friend.
The result was that I really got uninterested in the lore as a whole. Combined with characters that I personally found boring (I didn't play with Fane and Lohse, but the game shouldn't punish me with Beast for my choice: more on this later), half of the reason to play a CRPG (the immersion) was gone for me.
Another thing that breaks immersion for me is that the game tries to play like a pen-and-paper RPG, but it just plays as a giant puzzle to complete. The game punishes you in the long term for not playing as intended (mostly killing everyone to farm XP, because there's no other way, the game contains a fixed amount of XP), or getting the boring character (to the point that a custom character is objectively a worse choice than an origin), or doing the quests in the wrong order: quest X will be far more difficult if you didn't get the item from quest A but there's nothing hinting you to do one before the other, they're supposed to be parallels.
It's not like the game doesn't warn you that is unfair: you get a black cat following you right at the start, so you try to keep it safe from explosions and acid (good idea for making you care about terrain). BUT sorry, you didn't knew in advance that a specific couple of guards is superstitious, so they will just oneshot the cat from afar and make you fail the quest while you talk with a quest NPC and you can't even see the cat getting killed. IF there's some warning dialogue of some kind it's drowned in the conversation you are supposed to have in that place, and they're on a platform so if there's a subtitle, it's higher than the screen.
The result was that I was constantly fearing to miss out XP, quests, important lore details, making constant saves fearing a bullsh*t to hit me at any moment because I took the wrong road. I got tired, I uninstalled. I tried again, saw that the fun ability I bought is "locked" behind the unexplained (where I can find recharge?) Source point system and so I wouldn't be able to use it a bit more carefree (it wasn't even overpowered, just fun), talked to other NPCs that I couldn't care less about, uninstalled.
I really hope that the writing got better for Baldur's Gate 3.

The best Just Cause, even if the later part of the game was clearly rushed during development; but the mechanics gets a bit repetitive near the end, so it balances out. DLCs are fun and varied, far better than the "main quest".

Great gaming for a small price. Don't bother with the Android version and buy this

The fundamental problem of Stellaris is that the game started as a fun 4X that needed one or two expansions, like most of the 4Xs, but gradually morphed into a game-as-service grand strategy like Europa Universalis IV because, well, selling tons of DLCs makes more money, and they cared more about the part of the community that wanted Victoria II in space.
It's not a problem if you add fun mechanics. Crusader Kings 2 is one of my favourite games, and had a ton of DLCs. But Stellaris was already pretty full: add hive minds, add megastructures, add ascension paths, one more crisis... and you already fixed 90% of the "content holes" the game had at launch.
At that point, they started to simply change the game for the sake of it, to have space to put new features (that sometimes the AI has access to, so you need to buy the expansion), and the game got micromanaging-intensive like a Victoria. The economic and population system was completely changed to resemble Victoria more, even if the AI of the game couldn't really understand it and the engine struggled a lot in the endgame, making it unplayable to a lot of players. Seems like they fixed those two last problems, but other developers make new games in the time Stellaris devs took to fix self-inflicted performance problems.
The result is that I had far, far more fun with this game in 2016 than now. I have 200€ of DLCs to buy to get the real experience of a game that feels like work compared to the old game .

I really don't understand the appeal of this game. Gameplay is incredibly repetitive and consists in using your squad to suppress the enemy, slowly flank them, and throw a grenade/snipe the MG guy. I played 2 hours and I did only that for I lost count how many times.
Oh, and don't bother trying to understand the plot if you didn't play the series or you are not a massive WW2boo. I enjoy the genre, but most of the time I was wondering myself what the characters were talking about.

A 20 years old freeware platform for tactical RPGs. A great experience for the fans of the genre.