Recent reviews by Emo Duck

It's got speed, it's got number-go-up, it's got bright colours, it's got cute characters - every element feels designed to hit that primal dopamine fun-button in your brain. Add to that an existential plot about the end of the universe and characters trying to find meaning in an decaying world, and you've got a banger.

I feel like I like this game more than I should. It's a narrative resource management game in the same style as Cultist Simulator, but where I ended up getting extremely vexed with the real-time count-downs in Cultist Simulator, here I feel the desire to see how things pan out, thinking "just one more turn" a lot. Replayability is high due to the many different lines of causality (I hesitate to call them "quest-lines") that may or may not interplay in surprising ways, also depending which cards you have available to you at the time.

There's a lot of writing in the game, and I sometimes can't tell whether it's written strangely on purpose or whether it's a quirk of translation, but it's always interesting. As a feat of interconnected storytelling, this game is awesome.

The turn-based tank battling gameplay is simple to pick up, but the various crew combinations, character skills and enemy abilities make it hard to master. The plot and presentation are great - it hits a sweet spot, where the cuteness of little cat and dog dudes doing laundry and eating cakes is juxtaposed by serious and emotional moments of wartime atrocities (made palatable for a younger audience).

If you have kids that are just getting old enough to start learning about the darker times of world history, this game will give them a meaningful and emotionally resonant primer on what war does to people.

It's a budget Hades, but for its budget, it does its thing very well. Compared to Hades, It's light-weight in every respect: There's a veneer of a story, the customisation and build variety is more narrow, and the fights aren't as dynamic, but it's very easy to slip into and have an hour of fun with and get some meta-progression dopamine to boot. The sexy anime nuns are merely an eye-catcher, but the gameplay is solid and tight enough to keep you invested.

After playing for three hours during the time-limited "play for free" period, I think I gave Diablo IV a fair shake. There were things I liked about it, but the things I didn't just served to spoil my experience.

Pros:
- Awesome visuals and aesthetics. Love the return to the grim horror style of Diablo I.
- Interesting build variety, with skills and abilities that can be modified and customised.
- Decent enemy variety with different styles of attack.

Cons:
- Always online requirement, even though nothing I did during the trial involved multiplayer. Server hiccups meant I was booted out of and unable to play an essentially single-player game for brief periods.
- Unchallenging. Maybe the game becomes harder after level 20, but the only time I died was when I accidentally ran into a world boss 22 levels higher than me.
- Constant pop-ups that lead me to the Battle Pass page and bothering me about buying accessories.
- Unengaging plot and story elements. The prologue with the villagers in Nevesk was decent, but afterwards I felt I was just swiftly tossed from one anonymous quest-giver to the next. In Diablo II, NPCs would acknowledge your class and have different reactions, but I encountered none of that in this game.

In addition to the above cons, there is one specific detriment to how Blizzard chose to arrange this "play for free" weekend on Steam. In contrast to any other such time-limited "play for free" period I've seen on Steam, this is the trial version of the game. This means you can't advance beyond level 20, you are restricted from using the in-game chat (again, why is this always-online?), and at least one quest cannot be completed due to these restrictions.

Diablo IV has some nice elements, but my experience with it has just been sour.

Came tofor the inflation, stayed for the gameplay

It's a solid turn-based tactical combat game with strategic resource management, much like X-COM or Mechanicus. The mechanics are sufficiently deep and well-balanced to make it interesting. The presentation is a bit too colourful and cartoony for my liking, but it's a very good expression of the chosen aesthetic. The interface seems like it was designed for a console game and is a little clunky at times, but perfectly servicable. Bonus points to the devs for including a lexicon in the options menu that lets you look up the various in-game effects and mechanics.

Addendum: After putting another 40 hours into the game and completing the campaign, my appreciation of it has only grown. I became very invested in the story and characters, and the difficulty hit me just right to engender a sense that I was progressing mechanically and upgrading my ship and squad, while at the same time falling behind an increasingly mounting threat, and that I had to hurry in order to save the galaxy.

It's a fairly tense walking simulator as far as walking simulators go, but it's a very linearly told story interspersed with simple gameplay mechanics that are just there to make it a game. It would have been better as a movie.

Given to me by a Steam friend.

Pros:
- Tactical combat is fun, light-weight and easy to pick up.
- Engaging setting and atmosphere: Mad Max with a pinch of fairy tales and rural Sweden.
- The game is played through separate scenarios/missions, but structured to give a sense of an open world.

Cons:
- Outside of cutscenes, character animations are a little lackluster, especially when speaking.
- The player is encouraged to explore each level to find more scrap, but I've not found a minimap function, resulting in me either losing my bearings, or simply going around the border of each area to orient myself instead of taking the more natural paths of each level.

The game is a classic and will engage RPG enthusiasts of every stripe. The Enhanced Edition brings some interface and quality of life improvements to the table, with some options to tune the game toward the classic AD&D experience if you're a hardcore player. The additional NPCs added to the game are not quite as memorable as the originals, but they are a nice addition, and I did particularly like Dorn Il-Khan.

The new Siege of Dragonspear DLC fits the tone and story of the original excellently, and I would recommend anyone who enjoyed the original game to get it. I did get a somewhat railroady feeling from it in my playthrough as a villainous character, but the tropes and flow of the plot fit perfectly with the high fantasy of the rest of the series. It lacks a certain depth to make it truly remarkable, but it's certainly very enjoyable for any D&D fantasy fan.