Recent reviews by zemnmez

If I was going to describe this DLC in one sentence, I'd say 'Impressive, but uninspiring.'

The hard work on the scripting, story and art really comes through, but the core gameplay it introduces feels like doesn't reward me for what is actually fun as a player (shaping my story) instead of what is not (boosting stats to get good RNG and waiting).

CK3 is best when striving toward a multi-generational goal, shaping the world around you as you do -- but this DLC creates a cult of personality around one mortal, and provides nigh zero benefits until it pays off. When it does pay off, the benefits are relatively big, but they feel unrelated to my actual contribution to the game.

I really wanted this DLC to make the significant things my characters achieve feel like they have more cultural payoff -- buildings, items, religion. But in reality, unifying an entire empire under a single culture gets you just as much as laying claim to a kingdom; which is, you get to wait 50 years and then maybe change the map a bit.

I played a run where I unified Britannia, starting as the sub-roman Prince of Gwenydd. I thought this would play well into the enhancements to ancient cultures and legends. In actuality, battles won or achievements do nearly nothing for your legend. Reforming the whole of Britannia as Brythonic culture only gives you a generic 'Great Deeds' "legend seed" -- one which notes absolutely nothing about the monumental achievement. Pursuing the Arthurian legend is pretty interesting, but has practically no difference to any other.

These legends aren't really achieved by the deeds themselves, but spread slowly from person to person using a similar mechanics to plagues.

DLC is just a guy saying like "yes, i euthanized a man, but i also take care of orphans" and V stroking their chin saying 'wow. truly he could not have helped but to have euthanised that man. truly i can either just kill him or have him walk free

and I understand that Edgerunners does this kind of thing really well. i just couldnt deal with another character sitting me down to say their life was Super Sad and thats why they did a little Evil while my character sits there quipping like "oh yea choom? 2 wrongs makes a right huh

Cyberpunk continues to have really good bones with very little meat on them. i feel like the really positive stuff I've heard must have been from people whose expectations were it would be as clumsy as the base game. it's not, but it's not great

and that's cool and all. it would work in Starfield. except everyone is sooo self-pietying and it's trying to teach you this big moral story. oh it's hard to be a good person. and then you blast a guy's head clean off with a railgun because you need to go to Gatsby's Big Party

i'm not sure why but they leaned even further into the Street Kid writing. so you're an ex-arasaka security analyst and when someone tells you they're having a hard time you say "♥♥♥♥ choom. that aint preem. wanna hvac tonight?" or something like that

to recap, the main idea of cyberpunk is that you have space cancer. novelly, Cyberpunk considers seeking treatment for space cancer to be a moral wrong. so all your friends inexplicably hate you for it. the new ending for phantom liberty is the same except you do it on Medicare

Ultimately, if you really liked Cyberpunk, you'll like the expansion. If you liked Cyberpunk but were disappointed, it'll feel like a slighly more well-polished simulacrum of the main game.

BethSoft games have come to a point where they try so many game systems at once that usually at least one has to stick. Though Starfield has some genuinely inspired moments it feels like a time sink with very little payoff.

Whether you're trying spaceship engineering, or outpost building, or exploration, or crafting, or questing there are flaws that make the game feel like a slog, rather than an experience.

These individual parts require each other in a frustrating way; your weapons suck so you need upgrades, weapon upgrades need materials, materials need outposts; outposts themselves need materials to build which you'll want to carry on your ship. And so on.

Levelling and Scaling

- You will likely complete the whole game without unlocking a late-tier perk like having more than 3 people on your ship or accessing better components to put on your ship. I and friends completed the game after 30+ hours without having a single second-tier skill.

- There are 82 skills, each of which has 4 levels behind which much of the gameplay is locked.

Missions and Quests

- For the most part, your decisions do not come to anything, and have little effect on the story.

- Despite many missions asking for non-lethal options, the game does not consider incapacitated NPCs to be defeated. Many, many times an NPC will refuse to talk unless you shoot a totally comatose NPC in the head. Many of them. There is no non-lethal way to take down a ship, despite NPCs asking for it.

Outpost building

- This mechanic can't decide if it's a cute planet builder or a way to play the game.

- The manufacturing component is a slog and is required to build anything without breaking the bank. Every outpost unless you are very lucky allows you to extract on average 2 resources. There are 67 different resource types, and these become about 25 different derived components.

- Since even the very rare unique resources like Caelumite are used for, at most, one single armour mod, Outpost building just becomes a time sink with little payoff that is neither a cute base builder nor a potential way to play the game.

Exploration

- Like in previous BethSoft games, your walk / run speed is slow to allow the terrain to load in. However, environments are dramatically more sparse as this is space we are dealing with.

- You will fast travel everywhere. You must. Incidental encounters aren't really a thing in the same way as Fallout, or Skyrim, or Oblivion as a result.

- A planet is colossal. Your ship is the only real way to traverse its surface, but it cannot actually be flown inside a planet's atmosphere. As a result, you must teleport from procedurally-generated instance to procedurally-generated instance.

Spaceship Engineering

- This is a very late game thing. You may only have reasonable access to it in your last 4 hours of gameplay.

- Parts of your ship are connected seemingly randomly, with no loops. Any ship with a capacity of more than 3 people will be labyrinthine without using glitches or work-arounds.

- You cannot really decorate the inside of a ship, despite houses having a fairly fleshed out decorating mode. You can place items manually in the ship, but any modification to the ship will remove all of them.

- EM weapons, the game's 'non-lethal' ship boarding weapon are broken.

1. There is no automatic turret for EM weapons
2. EM weapons do no damage to shields
3. You cannot board a ship unless all other enemy ships are destroyed (perhaps also incapacitated but I have never managed this)
4. Perks that enhance ship EM weapons are tier 3 skills that you likely will not be able to access until your first NG+
5. Auto-turrets cannot easily be toggled on and off, so they will murder the ship while you're trying to incapacitate it
6. System damage, which EM weapons do is quickly repaired (an unlimited amount, and for free) by its crew, so you can incapacitate at most one ship at a time

What I would have loved to see

- Any interesting planet or planetary anomalies. They could have implemented even 5 of those in Stellaris has and I would have been happy (https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Planetary_features). I'm not asking for reinventing the world here -- space games have been around for a long time.

Do a dead civilization. An alien zoo. An archaeological site. A pre-FTL species. An underground civilization. A poison planet. Anything at all that allows story to flow from setting.

- More fun in the early game in your spaceship. It's the place you're going to spend most of the game. So why is it so bland?

- Ability to play as anything at all non-human. More drastic traits for your character.

- Cybernetics. BethSoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that a cybernetic augmentation is a hat.

Really interesting game on the basis that it simulates economics in a way I've never seen a game do before. As a state, you can do stuff like pay a huge amount for your military and get it all back by taxing the profits of the companies you pay. I appreciate the more laid-back approach to warfare and gameplay than other Paradox games, but I think that key elements of the core gameplay loop are clunky, and the scale of the game means that it's best played at max speed and even then takes a good 5-6hrs to complete a game.

- Railways are an economic anomaly because industries need them to sell their goods, but do not pay for their services. Railways do sell "transport" to the middle class, so can become self-supporting in very developed economies, but this is rarely the case. This means your economy doesn't grow and people starve. To try to solve this, the game requires you to subsidise all rail, which affects the distribution of labour. Industries should pay for rail.
- The game is ideally played with "auto expand" on so that market forces dictate industry expansion. However, "auto expand" is annoying to use sometimes -- its state often gets lost, and you have to click a button for every single industry to auto expand.
- When your economy is highly developed, you need to make one of each building manually in each state to allow auto-expansion to expand industries into less developed states. This takes forever[/]. Please allow auto-expansion to expand industries into other states.

Divinity is a strange game. It does not fit the modern model of any RPG I've played, from the gameplay or story perspective. The game has a million features, many of which are not all that important or useful, but which, in some cases *do* weave together to make a great RPG, but, in other places serve to make the game a frustrating experience. In places the plot is deep, and meaningful, and compelling -- and in other places someone does genocide just because, or you dig up a character's parents' graves because they have a high-level amulet. Divinity feels like playing a tabletop with friends in this way -- with all the wackiness that goes along with it, and in that respect it's best played with as many friends as you can find :)

This game is super fun. I can't help but feel that the developer saw the awesome videos of people playing a level over and over until they got it just right and made it into a game. The absolute only shortcoming it has is that the plot is incredibly shallow compared to the dark magick that dishonoured has. I almost wish this game had no ending at all!!

I just literally cannot. This game is a series of copied-and-pasted unity levels where you have to catch flights. The dialog is like reading someone who wants to be 'feelings of dog' or whatever on twitter. There's an overwrought romantic relationship with an s/o who you have to say 'I love you weirdo' all the time to. This game thinks it's 'holds up spork' made into a statement about people and relationships, but it just feels like a very expensive unity asset dump.

I cannot praise this game enough. It continues to be one of my favourite games of all time. Dishonoured 2 is a wonderful game, of course; but this game strips many of that games complexities down to their essence and remakes them as a much shorter, brighter game. A key part of this game's appeal, aside from the streamlining it lends to Dishonoured's mechanics is that it is not set in what is fundamentally a time of crisis. Instead of taking place in a series of quarantined areas and military checkpoints, it takes place in a small part of a living city, where the player's primary concern for some time is only guards at checkpoints. In this context, the player can flit about the city and talk to locals, experiencing a lovely interwoven set of character stories about the members of a small cult and their lovers, friends, and associates.

The main character of Death of the Outsider doesn't feel like a blessed demigod wrenching a city out of the depths of hell like the base game, but like a character who has history and meaning. You can go to an auction and buy off the possessions of an evicted small business owner. This affects both the story, and some characters around you. You can choose to visit a bar your enemies hang out in, and simply leave them be, or rampage your way through its passages.

I know this series is basically over, but it's this game I wish would be the template for games following in its footsteps: a game about people, and place, where I can see the city of Karnaca alive with its florists and tattoo shops by day, and plan a heist into the most vaunted bank vault in the kingdom by night. It doesn't need to be Skyrim, but not every game needs to be Half Life 2 either, if that makes sense.

I just don't know who this DLC is for. It adds very few things, and they're ... kind of rushed?

Example: the DLC introduces more passages (clearly a rip-off of the popular player mod). The mod extends the base game's single passage type ('passage 1'), but the mod introduces 2 new types of passage, 'passage 2' and 'passage 3', both of which are wholly incomplete, leaving the base game's single passage block as-is. No passage has a floor, and there is no block type that works as a floor. There is no way to get air into a passage.

Passage 2 and passage 3 are clearly modelled by different artists, and do not work well together. Passage 3 is gorgeous, but only has four variants: lit, unlit, half, and a 4 way intersection. Passage 2 only has 2 variants, a half version and a full version. This DLC provides no way of making any kind of corner, two way, or three way with a passage. Since passage 2 has no lit version, it is impossible to see anything in them. There are no passages with windows, and the passages don't fit on any of the game's doors all that well.

The idea is great, if poorly executied -- but it's not the developer's idea. I can't help but feel like the developers commissioned some models and flipped them for £3 a pop.

I hope more games learn from this game. It's really great, but like most Paradox games is not without its rough edges! I especially love that the endgame is not some arbitrary point, but defined by a catacalysm that the game rolls for, similar to Betrayal.