Последние обзоры The Gaming Archaeologist

Here we are again, back to Taffin' around and being a Taffer in the Dark Fantasy series where you play the thief, Garret who ends up getting pulled into much larger mechanisations of what's going on.

My own gameplay/stream: https://youtu.be/DviiFp6XX1o

Returning as Garret, you have a new mechanical eye from The Keepers after the events of the first game, which allows you to make use of certain unique tools, like a thrown item that can be used for you to look around corners, as if they were your actual eye!

Garret has fallen on hard times as recently the city watch have been clamping down on thieves and their fencers. The first mission, in fact, is something he tries not to get involved with as despite the agreements made with this indentured servant, this noblewoman isn't allowing her servant to get married and taken away from her, so your mission is to help out your contact by clearing the way of guards so he can get in there and break her out!

Garret voices his disdain, but jobs are thin and sometimes having a favour can be worth far more than gold! This is just the start though, as changes are going on throughout the town, new mechanisms being invented under a splinter group from the Hammerites, known as the Mechanists under the lead of a man who sees himself as a Messiah, called Karras.

Thanks to this, not only do certain locations now contain cameras, but also traps, turrets, alarms and mechanical soldiers who not only raise the alarm, but the larger ones actually fire explosive bombs at you!

After having played the first game I really wanted to play another like it, but tbh, there's no much else out there where the goal is to steal items, let alone how damn good the story is in this game and the previous one! Much like the first, you soon get sucked into a new plot to destroy the world where past enemies become allies and the world will be forever changed due to the consequences of what happens.

A pretty hot game of a evil creature that makes it's way into these couple's life and corrupts the wife, making her addicted to him whilst the husband becomes a cuckold.

The images are quite hot and everything, but it's also ultimately a very short short with no alternative choices and such. Unlike Ravager, which I recommend much more, despite how IGDB won't let me add it, but they'll add this?

Peeve aside, it's fun for what it is, but considering it's length is very short (unlike the creature's ♥♥♥♥!) then you will have to decide if it's actually worth the money.

I'd never played this or any of the games from the series before, however, as I started playing it, after using a flawed patch to play it as a more appropriate resolution, I really wished that I had played this earlier, especially as there are many elements within the game that remind me of what Fallout 3 and subsequent sequels SHOULD have been.

My Stream: https://youtube.com/live/6wIlIVd3b2c

As the name suggests, the game is set in Chernobyl that after the meltdown, a mysterious barrier surrounds the area that's called "The Zone" which is filled with radiation, mutant creatures, unstable anomalies and humans struggling to survive whilst surrounded by these dangers.

The opening scene was of a military jeep transporting dead soldiers that is hit by lightning, with one of the arms having the tattoo "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." on it that belongs to the main character. The wreckage and bodies were being searched over by a human that was scavenging, but as he finds the main character, he also appears to be alive! So he takes him to a broker who cannot believe they have found a living person on one of these body transports. He also helps you, "The marked one", to give you starter missions and also get you in contact with people who may help you find the person you were tasked to hunt, as your PDA says "Kill The Strelok" with no explanation or details as to why or when.

The Trader, Sidorovich, is your first and main trader for a while and good place to buy ammo, weapons and other gear and items, but as I found when playing the game you can trade with every single NPC you're able to communicate with. This is what gave me memories of Fallout and Fallout 2 where you can trade with anyone/everyone who is willing to talk with you. However, unlike those games, currency is still a thing and so you deal in Russian Rubles and with the way I often like to collect weapons and such I built up an absolute fortune fairly quickly!

However, unlike Fallout you can't increase your base strength and carry more that way, so it'll be difficult and takes many visits, however, I do have a lot of fun with games like this too. The weapons are all based on real-life ones, many of which could reasonable be found in that area of Ukraine at the time. Similar to Fallout 3, your weapons and armour have a quality that degrades over time due to usage. The more it degrades, the higher the chance of getting a gun jam or the weaker and less-effective your armour becomes so it's always best to keep it maintained, which traders can offer as part of a service, though you can find a repair kit, but they're quite rare, but handy if you want to repair stuff in the field.

The game is also quite scary too. The mutants often can come out of nowhere, like the Bloodsuckers who turn invisible or the Snorklers who run on all fours and leap at you like the rabbid dogs and all kinds of other creatures native to the zone. You often hear the haunting sounds of cat meows and monster growls, even when you are nowhere near such creatures, often putting you on edge when you think you're alone and you'll suddenly feel like you aren't.

There are also multiple groups who operate in the zone who you can win favour with by doing missions or helping out in fighting off monster attacks or attacks from opposing groups. So not only do you have your own mission, but you soon get drawn into the main conflicts of getting into the centre of the zone where it's said a Monolith sits that can grant your every wish. But perhaps this is just a fairy tale.

Though as enjoyable as this game was, I found the ending a little lack-lustre. Looking up other alternative endings and many of them are similar, so I have no idea how they were able to make sequel games afterwards, but we'll have to see what I stream this myself.

Another real fun tower defence game from the creators of the previous Kingdom Rush games, this time focusing on some earlier time in the storyline and allowing your heroes to keep their max level earned from experience and having a variety of abilities to put levels onto.

Just like the previous ones, your earned rewards from different levels are used to improve magic spells and towers, granting passive bonuses that carry on through to the many levels in the future.

After finishing the game, new additional levels are released, being fairly difficult and forcing you to think extremely carefully on how to tackle the waves and bosses.

Backloggd: https://www.backloggd.com/u/TGA_backloggd/review/2005934/

I caved during a recent sale and bought this, even though I have MANY more games to go through in my own backlog on steam, but nvm. I initially picked this game up because I love the idea of commanding a group of ants and ants were one of my very first special interests!

The story revolves around this ant colony that's being experimented on as a new species known as "Gene Stealers" who are able to adapt and add genetic material from other ant species into their own colony such as leaf-cutter ants, fire ants, black ants and more. You have a set of "documentary missions" where you play as one of the new ant genes that you've added to the colony, attempting to live out in the wild. I like to think it's genetic memories from those colonies that were extracted for this experimentation, but it doesn't state that.

Each colony has it's own playstyle, that's also somewhat educational like how leaf-cutter ants don't eat the leaves, but use them to grow the fungus that they actually eat!

You also have to acquire royal jelly by playing these missions, which are used to level up and improve your colony in regards to upgrading the basic stats of your ants and unlocking new abilities that can work with synergy with your group and get ready for the next tests where your colony will have to face dangers and adapt.

Food collection is for general colony upgrades like improving the stats of a tile, regardless if they're a brood, storage, movement or whatever tile. It's always good to have a extra supply of food before starting these tests as whenever an ant dies, a new one is born on that same tile to replace it. How much territory you can acquire is also capped, going up as part of mission rewards before you take on the gateway test, which will allow you to advance and gain a knew gene group and new connected documentary missions, however, each time you replay a mission, the rewards are reduced so if you're struggling with trying to pass another mission you might have to replay a level multiple times. Now they try to cover this by adding challenge alternatives to those missions, which can add new threats that make the missions more difficult, sometimes extremely difficult in regards to enemies that can't easily be killed or often hide like the beetles that hide in their traps or the Phorid flies that inject their brood into the head of your ants, killing them slowly and you can't effectively target them.

The base building reminds me games like Dungeon Keeper where you can mine out areas to either make corridors or into chambers to build up a new brood group.

Each brood group that you make can be assigned to one of five (plus a home-group) of squads that can be directed with waypoints, which is how best to get your ants out and collecting resources, hunting enemies and organising a large enough group to take out a boss creature that might be on the map. You can also set up their behaviours if you want to make groups dedicated to combat, resource collection, mounting an enemy or medical assistance. All of the above are fairly explanatory, the last one something only unlocked with the last gene in the storyline as they can heal up your troops and the mounting is where the swarm climbs up on top of a creature, often weakening it for the others to attack and some ants are good at injecting toxins, like the fire ants, whilst mounted on top of it to weaken the enemy further, but there are times that mounting an enemy like this isn't beneficial.

There New Game+ feature allows you to restart, but have all the upgrade and unlocked ant species, even taking all of these upgrades into the documentary levels, whilst also making the enemies stronger too, however, this feature irritated me because, thankfully they warn you, that achievements are disabled for this section which I do not understand why they did this as this is not cheating and even if it was, it's a single-player game. Who's going to get irritated at someone having achievements someone else doesn't have?

The ending was a lot of fun and what's great about the credits is that they provide you links to all of the free resources that they used, so that if you wish to make a game and want some of the sounds provided in the game for your own project, the credits have all of them linkable that you can click on and be taken straight to that sound!

I love it when developers are willing to share their resources with people, especially when said resources are free anyway and it can be used to support future developers. They even wrote down what the sounds were in the game so that you know how these people used them and you have a good idea how you can use them in your own future projects!

Keep gaming out there and good luck to anyone who wants to get into game development as this game can be a great resource. Especially if you want to make a similar type of game too.

Backloggd Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/TGA_backloggd/review/1954632/

I initially started playing this offline, seeing how it was going to take a very long time to finish in regards to how the game runs and I certainly wasn't wrong there! Worse so in the other game-mode, but I'll cover those now.

There are two game-modes to start off with, with each one having it's own achievements involved too and that is, admittedly, what took me so long to finish and get to actually reviewing this game.

Settlement: The main goal is to build a community from basic to the top. This mode is the easiest to do the 300 bot limit, which is ticked by default. There's also less variety of resources to exploit as well. With only one true food source tree to make the food from berries.

Enlightenment: Same as the other, only you have far more resources unlocked including fish, mushrooms, pumpkins, cotton and much more. Including different animals to have too. After completeing all of the tasks you then have to create a pyramid and ascend your folk to the other side!

By default, instead of a limit of robots you have the setting to have them running on a charge, which adds more to take care of in regards to winding them back up when they run out of energy and a new bot part that holds the charge for longer.

Free: All technology is unlocked from the start so you can do whatever you line and have fun with the world like a blank canvas.

Creative: Have the freedom to do whatever you like and go however you like. I'm not sure what the difference here as I've only played the first two.

As a big fan of games like satisfactory I instantly fell in love with this game, however, when attempting to replay it I found that the grind too soooo long. Hence why I've spent just under 280 hours on it!

You start with basic robots who have a limit of commands that their brains can contain. They also have the least carrying capacity, only one upgrade slot and are the slowest, but much of this can be rectified and I even found them useful late game when I wanted them to carry one item from point A to point B that didn't need to be there in any urgency. Especially as they're much easier to build than the other bots in terms of components and resources.

The robots do for you what the conveyer belts, pipes, drones and ect do for you in Satisfactory so upgrading your robots and replacing them with better ones is the main focus as the newer ones have better basic stats in regards to carrying capacity, speed and able to take on more complex commands.

The commands remind me a lot of coding, but simplified. Due to buttons that can give you the ability to make a function repeated in regards to forever, until a container is full or some other dependency. Some of this is taught to you at the very beginning with the tutorial and you get to learn how everything works, but as you get a better grasp of the game you can get a better idea of what commands you can exploit and I'm sure there's many out there who would look at what I did and suggest better ways to streamline it.

There's also workshop support in case you wanted to add any new elements to keep playing the game, but for me I did find it fun to scratch that itch whilst Satisfactory was being updated (thought i'd finish this before 1.0, but was wrong) and you get many different cosmetic choices for the robots, making them look like famous ones like Rosie from The Jetsons, Wall-E from the disney movie of the same name or even a Cyberman from Doctor Who which shows that the creators behind this game have some great taste in TV shows. One of the designs even looks like K-9, again, from Doctor Who.

However, the automation does get very boring and repetitive. The ones when they're running on a power supply get really irritating as, if you aren't watching a certain supply chain, all the robots will end up shutting down and cutting off that supply chain entirely!

My only solution to fix this was to record data on the robots that were created only to recharged robots in a designated area, though the issue there is that who recharges the recharger? I should've made a second/third recharger, but never did, but that's my fault in the end.

Regardless, sadly the game does get pretty boring, but that's why I'm interested in the game that came after. Autonauts VS Piratebots! Adding the combat section to this might make it much more fun and maybe more like various RTSs I've played in the past, but I'll hold any opinions until I eventually play that one.

This is only for those who really love these kinds of games and I wouldn't push anyone to try it if they aren't a massive fun of the Resource Management genre.

Gameplay/stream: https://youtu.be/tbmbp5gxCow

This was an admittedly short game, but still a whole lot of fun, where you play as this racoon who has been playing with an app where he can spontaneously create holes that everything falls into, often increasing the size and giving a similar feel to Katamari Damacy, but with a hole as it's the hole that gets bigger and bigger, but also you can unlock new abilities, including a trampoline to throw items out. Perfect for getting past certain section or solving little puzzles. There's also a collecting element to the game where you have a whole encyclopaedia of all the stuff you've collected to fill out in your own spare time when you return to it if you ever feel the need to.

The racoon tries to make a point of suggesting that "what makes a donut?" and that his whole thing of creating those holes to get the high score and get his own drone, is that he was creating donuts.

A pretty funny little game and quite short too, but was worth every penny of it!

Did Bethesda Change?

This is a question I've been asking myself when looking back. Now of course, we as humans have a tendency to remember the worst of our experiences, but I'll see what I can express here.

So at first I tried out the GOG version since, I had assumed, it would work much better, however, there was no damn audio! This version (which as of writing this, seems to have disappeared from my library...) was not as good and the steam version, which had been updated by Bethesda, had all the voice dialog for the beginning as I found out in my second stream. Apart from that, the game did show it's age quite quickly, being like many other early RPGs where developers were trying to turn their homebrewed D&D game into a RPG for everyone to enjoy, much like the Ultima series and many others and I can't fault them for that, though they do open up a lot of exploitation here by allowing you to craft your own spells allowing you to (if you want, but I didn't) create a single game-breaking spell!

The story is where you end up in a cellar for being an enemy of this evil wizard who is now attempting to take full control of the realm, however, there is one way to take him out and that's to assemble a long-forgotten sceptre. All of this told to you in a vision from a mage who had now died, but her spirit had not yet fully passed yet.

The sceptre was split up into seven parts and all those parts where hidden in all kinds of locations that are hidden away so that evil could never obtain them (or good, considering how damn difficult it is) and you have to fight in a first-person style, often leaving you open for back attacks as this is all in real time and you need to be careful where you go.

In the world of Elder Scrolls it seems like the city watch are on damn holiday as, walking around at night, can be a death sentence as you could get attacked by wolves, goblins, orcs, trolls and so much more! All these creatures just casually walking around the different cities at night, but in the daytime the humans are out there and if you select Argonian you get quite a bit of racism shot off at you too!

You do need to sleep every now and then to recover health and mana, so it's best to have a Inn you can return to every now and again, but this is a problem.

The cities have taverns and shops with pre-generated named as far too many of them came off as similar or made no actual sense, which made me soon realise that they must've just autogenerated these names to create enough names for every tavern in every location all over the world!

Technically, this game has the biggest map from the others since you can travel all over the lands into many different locations, including the starting location of Skyrim! It's kind of surreal, but also, nothing else is much interesting beyond the shops and even then, each one seems to sell different stuff with the same guy selling the stuff! Just like the mage's guild!

This is when your map is the most important thing in the game! You can write down notes and locations which for the town is perfect so you don't get lost. Especially if you're doing a mission to take a package from one place to another, it can be very confusing when some cities have about 8 taverns! All of them looking the same on the outside.

The map is especially useful in the dungeons as loot often drops in the same place so if you take note of where chests are or rooms filled with unguarded treasure, you can exit the place, come back and new stuff will be generated meaning you could potentially end up with a pretty nice magic weapon or set of armour if you do this enough times!

I ended up stopping after I was trying to find a hidden location that no one had ANY idea how to find, so I decided to drop this game and stream something else because it was so frustraiting and I'd spent over 20 hours to only get one part of the damn sceptre!

The real clincher, though, was that despite being an updated version, the game crashed a couple of times out of nowhere. The similarities between old-school Bethesda and modern-day Bethesda are hard to shake. Even though I can forgive many elements due to it being a much older game, it was still quite a slog and I might return to it in the future, but I wouldn't bet on it.

My stream of the game: https://youtu.be/vsGK1vvyGNY

Brought to you by the creators of Plague Inc, once again the PC version has all the newest updates for free (apart from a new recent DLC) and it's kind of fun, though much of it is trying to bring stability to the region, which those who are against you and want their own government under their control, will hate you for doing that and spready hate along with destroying any and all repairs you may do for them, that said, you can win good will with people for doing these things that'll affect certain regions more efficiently, much like how Plague Inc's viruses had preferred climates. Afterall, an education in banking isn't going to help people who live in a rural community and everyone's farmers afterall.

The only unrealistic part is that you don't, as a choice, manipulate the people to grow things like Poppys for yourself, much like the US has done in the past along with committing numerous atrocities.

The idea is you're meant to be an NGO trying to bring stability without the might of a country's military which can make things so much worse!

It has similarities to the game in that most of what you do is add strengths and such to boost your effectiveness in taking control, however, you can also command soldiers, much like certain viruses, to take the fight to the enemy and eventually box them in a corner of the map before taking them out!

Still a fun little game just like Plague Inc and I like to go into it every now and again to help have a chill time.

Been meaning to return to this and may do at some point, but for now I feel I've played enough to do a good enough review of this.

So back in 2023 I streamed this (lost the streams, sadly) and my main interest in this game was my own heritage as my Grandfather was a member of the Polish Second Corps who eventually ended up displaced and many staying in places like the UK or Canada due to the treaty that was signed by the Allies and the Soviet Union.

(A bit of a contentious topic to the Polish, due to how many of them gave their lives and fought like absolute madmen, often breaking rules of engagement to have a go at the Nazis in hopes of getting their country back, only for Poland to be given to the Soviets in the end. People far more learned than me can argue the moral position on this topic, but that's not the point of this review.)

This game takes place in the capital of Poland, Warsaw, which saw a lot of action and combat with the resistance fighting both Nazis and Soviets in an attempt to free their home from their hold. The game itself has combat similar to Darkest Dungeon, so if that's not your thing, you may want to give this a game a miss. Especially as your characters are limited. All being unique people who have their own backstory and stories of what happens to them after WWII ends (if they survive) but similar to XCOM (more like Chimera Squad, being on a smaller scale for one country VS the world), you need to be careful what areas you go on a mission as too much inaction in one area secedes it to the enemy and then you have reduced resources coming in, making your ability to fight worse off and stretching your already thin resources extremely thin!

Resources are strictly restricted however, so you need to be careful in your management with who you bring with you as your people will need rest to train and heal up, not to mention as ammo is separated between Small Ammo (pistols), Long Ammo (Rifles, Heavy Machine guns), Heavy Arms (explosives, often grenades or even the PIAT you start with. Mostly for destroying cover or an enemy vehicle such as a tank or armoured car of some description) something you might want to do is use most who use similar weapons as you can only carry so much and you don't want to be running out of ammo as often your characters will be unable to do anything but mellee, which considering the enemy likes to stay back and shoot and you can't move them unless you manipulate them (with abilities like Darkest Dungeon) you'd be more of a big target who can't do anything (Apart from specials that don't require ammo like healing, ect) so be certain to be careful with your supplies and as fun as it might be, try not to wipe out every enemy on the map! Sometimes you'll want to get the hell out of there due to your supply limit or having taken some heavy wounds without the supplies to fix that until your at base.

You can also collect broken weapons which can be sold for more supplies (which I did for all of them) or you can be smart and spend those supplies to get a potentially better weapon with better abilities. More damage or actions that spend less points, ect.

I also loved the codex in the game where you can review all of the stuff you've come across. Not only weapons that you've discovered, but also the locations in Poland during the war, the different units (Which, it seems ALL of the SS are in here. Including the horrific Dirlewanger Brigade and the similar Soviet Union's Shtrafbat) which gives you all the information we know of these groups, including the danger they were to not only the resistance but even the casual law-abiding citizens since they weren't the "right" citizens or were under suspicion of resistance activity. Regardless if warranted or not. Regardless, the game has a great wealth of knowledge on the subject and I'm always interested in learning about as much of this is never covered in school.

I hope to return to this sometime, probably offline, then get a better ending than I did last time.

Edit: Just played a little to remind myself and yes you CAN get more characters, however, these characters are random NPCs who do not have as good abilities as the main ones and you can choose what ability and weapon they start with, as they're generally used to fill in the gap when, say, your healer is wounded and needs time to recover or has been killed as there is no way to get them back again until you start over again.

Great game for a history buff and if you are comfortable with playing a fairly difficult game then this should certainly be up your alley!