Recent reviews by Aida

If you are dyslexic take a hard pass. The limited customisation do not get around many bits of text that you must read and are extremely hard to, turning it into a chore. Happy to revisit when the game adds important accessibility options.

While I applaud the attempt to refocus from their strength into tactical game, it came out as, well, studio's first foray into tactical games. It looks like one, but the implementation behind is shallow, lacking and just uninspired. Example is where you set up overwatch with your MG on open stretch of a field, and watch it manage to do nothing, while your random soldier with a rifle, firing from cover, absolutely wrecks open enemy after another.

Or then you go to attack someone in high cover, by the time tutorial finished explaining to me why and how should I bayonet charge that position, my rifleman sniped the opponent already.

The stealth is just best not mentioned. There was clear inspiration from Commandos series here, if you only saw that series from a moving car.

It's a shame, as the game looks stunning, and the story seems interesting, but I don't want to pain through game mechanics.

What a game!

I could grouse about some minor bugs, issues, or the fact that the game has an unnecessarily restrictive and superfluous inventory system (seriously, this concept of encumbrance needs to just die in 2023. I want to simply carry all my stuff without worrying about where it is distributed among party members, etc.), but honestly it all becomes instantly negligible as you continue playing.

Most importantly, the game, which has three progenitors (Baldur's Gate, D&D, and Divinity), pays fitting respect, love, and passion to all three of them, and this is evident at every step of the journey. It's hard to find any passion in games nowadays, but to have it for three different source materials is just uncanny, especially when it's all brimming with love that just permeates nearly every interaction you will experience.

The combat is excellent. Even though it's under-explained, I never bothered to plan well ahead or read online guides; I just went with what made sense and had a nice, challenging (but not frustrating) run on the hardest difficulty setting. If you want to min-max and plan, you will need to resort to Google, as they didn't include a primer in the rule book.

But that's just a minor thing amidst the absolute ocean of epicness. I wouldn't even know where to begin cataloguing my favorite moments. What I do know is, I spent 90 hours on my playthrough and don't regret a single one. There were a few (like the fight with a certain inhabitant of the outer plane, featuring an absolutely unique and amazing soundtrack) that will linger in my fond memories, just like some moments of a few other great games, such as the Mass Effect series and the death of Mordin.

I feel privileged to have been able to experience this masterpiece. What an absolute wild ride it was!

This game, which is all about art and music, was delivered with little consideration for either.

Firstly, let's discuss the graphic art. It appears to be concept art that's been roughly pencilled over and colored in. Furthermore, it's of low resolution, and playing the game on a high-resolution screen makes the pixelation painfully apparent. The lack of attention to detail is also evident. For instance, when a character grips her hair tightly with blood-stained hands, why is there no blood on her hair afterward? This kind of oversight suggests a disregard for detail that you wouldn't expect from a passion project. Though the simplistic drawings could be an artistic choice, the pixelation and lack of consistency certainly are not.

Next, we have the sound. The lack of audio balance is a significant issue. I spent most of my time adjusting the volume to avoid either straining to hear or going deaf. The volume fluctuated greatly from one line of dialogue to another. For a game centered around sound, this is disappointing.

The game's dialogue system is another drawback. Selecting dialogue with the mouse is frustrating, and annoyingly, there are no key binds for alternative responses. Although this system worked well in the Mass Effect series, here it seems unresponsive. This might relate to playing the game on an ultra-wide screen, but it generally doesn't respond in the way I expected.

There are also basic user experience issues. For example, none of the options in the settings are explained. It merely assumes people will understand terms such as "night mode". And why can't players specify what type of audio device they want to use? Surely the game would require different settings for a 2.1 sound bar versus 7.1 headphones— yet it doesn't seem to.

On a positive note, the game features Felicia Day, which is a blast of the past for me.

The storyline seems intriguing, but it's challenging to become immersed due to these problematic and distracting issues.

As a backer of this game, I question where the funding and time were invested. The final product is unequivocally not worth the advertised price. I anticipated a much higher-quality product with superior artistry and passion reflected in every detail. Yet it seems apparent corners were cut. Sadly, the numerous delays and subsequent excuses did not yield the fantastic product we expected.

A solid follow-up to Xenonauts, while still with some rough edges it presents the old-fashioned XCOM experience I've been craving but with new visuals, functionality and fun. I especially enjoy the new twist on the alien-invasion story.

My impression from 5h and conquering the first ilsand? It's very fun.

The love is there, and respect for the spirit, just developer who wasn't the most experienced, but defo did their best. That and tight budget, as unless you check the text dumps (which won't even be prompted to you) you will miss out on basic mechanics, like how to stealth.

Same you will miss exactly how overwatch works. It's not like xcom, its equivalent of the interrupt-triggers-interrupt-trigger-interrupt system, but with set overwatch on top

But honestly most of the issues are relatively easily fixable, especially performance as that's something that's hard, but gets A LOT easier when you get tons of data.

And UI/UX stuff also i expect mods to fix in day or two, at least the most painful ones like real time movement not tied to grid, even though it really should be

I am having a blast.

It's dwarf fortress that kept all it's complexity, but now has interface that doesn't require hours of study to be able to do anything. All the fun, tons less of the hassle, and losing is still FUN.

First ~40 minutes are great, as you actually play as a cat. And then with flip of a switch (literally) all that goes away and the only way you are a cat is in the visuals. Outside of that your cat talks, understand complex concepts, does tasks, operates machinery and so and so forth. If you are going to make him a humanoid by proxy, with all the brain power that comes along with it, why bother with the catness in the first place.

And then all you are left with is a mediocre adventure game.

Meh.

Massive downgrate compared to The Guild 2, with almost no redeeming features. A shame.

Port review.

An actually well ported game, and the performance chart they've published didn't lie either - 3080, Ryzen 7 5800X and on my ultrawide (3440x1440) I am playing at stable 90+ FPS with everything maxed out. Not even microstutters that plagued previous ports by those devs, colour me impressed. For review of game, plenty of smarter people have done it already, I just waned to highlight that this is properly done PC port. Well done.