Recent reviews by Slim Lizzy

This is the only good thing that happened to me in the last three years

yeah

I have literally investigated every pixel of the original game and its DLCs and penned two guides (translation and walkthrough). Today I've completed the Rise of the Golden Idol and currently in the process of translating it. Unfortunately, I can't say I'd recommend this game, especially to people who are not familiar with the original.

While I do appreciate the developers' efforts to deliver the sequel, it falls flat due to certain reasons. In fact, by the middle of the fourth chapter I lost all the interest. Why?

Unfortunately, some cases seemed like fillers and were not interesting at all. They were "somewhat" related to the main story but served little purpose. In the first game you were presented with political struggles, mysterious cults, intricate plots, and other sweet atrocities. Here you have to decipher some weird guy's dance, find a perv who took a photo of a woman, or assemble a book on fictional birds. Problem is, if you already know how the idol works, some things will be obvious from the get go.

With all the honesty, the final plot twist was nothing special. In the first game I literally felt "wow, that was unexpected!". Here I asked myself: "and that was it?". You'd expect that the game becomes more complex and gets better by the end but in fact the first few cases were better than those presented in chapters 4 and 5.

Sometimes it's clear how to solve a case and what actually happened but you keep struggling with the precise wording trying to construct a sentence that the game wants from you. What's worse, sometimes you need to browse other cases (as they are presented in a very chaotic order) but the loading times are unexpectedly long so it becomes even more annoying. And yeah, the UI is not ideal. Can't say I hated it and I do understand why it was made like this but still it wasn't too great.

So, I dunno. I'm really sorry to give a negative review. Hopefully, the upcoming DLCs will be better.

Great game

This is a nice DLC. Peter Clement promise

This is art. Heavily recommended for all fans of the original game

One of the best games I've played for the past years. Great puzzle, great story, great jokes. Very much recommended.

Don't trust other reviews saying this is a very easy game with no consequences because you can rewind everything. This is simply not true: you can rewind only during your own turn, and after that there's no going back. There are a bunch of relatively complex levels where you'll need to do a lot of planning, especially if you're aiming to complete optional objectives. Still, it's not a "new xcom" game, it's more like a puzzle.

You won't like Wizards if:

- You're looking for an x-com clone

- You're looking for a dead-serious game. Or if you're not into jokes that sometimes go over the top

- You have panic attack when seeing women

- You're not ready to solve puzzles

- You're not ready to read dialogues (even though these can be mostly skipped)

Yes, it's very good

I'm very sorry but I cannot recommend this (even though I wanted to play the game for quite some time actually). I've played loads JRPGs and some TRPGs but Troubleshooter just isn't my cup of tea. While it has bright sides, for the most part it falls flat. Still, I can see that the developers do care about the game and community so for that I'm grateful because unfortunately it seems to be a rare thing these days.

Some thoughts in no specific order:

* The story is all over the place and, what's worse, it is painfully bad. The main hero is yet another your average schoolboy with superpowers with no background and no personality. Then you randomly meet some other heroes but you know absolutely nothing about them, they come and go, and you forget who they are in 30 minutes. The world is boring and I had no interest in it. Dialogues are very bad, heroes keep saying the most generic lines I can even think of. They try to add jokes here and there but it seems like the script was written by a child. For example, there's a cult that literally worships a spoon, and I'm being deadly serious here. I mean, such jokes *can* work: for example, Naheulbeuk featured a cult of evil guys who were worshipping sleep, and it was quite funny. It just depends on how such jokes are presented and executed.

* 3d characters are plain ugly. I literally did not want to open the roster screen because I knew I would once again see *that Albus' face*. Harrier Du Bois is more beautiful than him.

* The missions are very easy but very long. There are loads of enemies that you have to kill (arrest?..) and it takes forever for everyone to act. In fact, 50% of the time you just wait for others to take their turns. At the same time, you don't need to think about strategy at all: you just rush there and things happen by themselves. I read that after around 20 hours the game becomes more complex but I can't imagine playing 17 hours more to get to the "interesting part".

* The game presents loads of mechanics, stats, numbers (all written in different colors) but I could not care less because I can just faceroll and kill everyone by using a single attack command. This is (partially) because you always get backup from characters who are much stronger than you (I mean like 2-3 times stronger).

So, I dunno, I have absolutely no desire to keep going and study the game further, unfortunately.

Yes, it's good