Neue Rezensionen von Adam

It took me more than a year, nearly 300 hours, and multiple attempts, but I’ve finally done it. I’ve beaten this game.

This game is monumental. It’s a true rags-to-riches story: You go from barely managing to kill rats (literally, you start the game in a sewer) to, if you play your cards right, fighting two gods at the same time and easily dispatching both.

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I’ve played a lot of RPGs. Few of them tell a full zero-to-god story. They hold back. Baldur’s Gate 3 is fantastic, but you only get to level 12. In this game, you not only reach the maximum level in the Pathfinder system, a pen-and-paper RPG system similar to D&D, you also get up to 10 levels in a special Mythic path. This represents your journey into something rivaling godhood, as an Angel, Demon, or similar trope.

The characters are wonderful. Daeran is a joy. Finally, a gay-coded character that isn’t boring. Many seemed to love Dorian’s mopey story in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but not this gaymer: He was just too sad to enjoy. Daeran, on the other hand, is fun, witty and delightfully taunts every one of the other characters in the game. He also has one of the better quests and story arcs: Dark, but hopeful, and with the right guidance (and note-finding) you can help turn him from evil.

Points are deducted, however, for the importance of finding needles in haystacks for Daeran and most other companions to avoid bad (and boring) outcomes. It’s a problem with all companions throughout the game - you’ll have to do some very specific thing, or find some very specific item, and sometimes that involves backtracking, going to places you already found, or other needle-finding, sometimes without knowing that there's a needle at all. It’s a shame. I get that they want to make some gameplay around companions, rewarding players who go the extra mile to figure out how to get the outcome they want with a puzzle of sorts, but I dislike it.

That issue aside, the companions are wonderful. Seelah is a joy, and her quests were probably my favorite. (Like Daeran’s, it includes a party gone wrong.) Regil is one of the most unique Lawful Evil characters in the genre; his cold calculus isn't evil per se, and provides a great foil to the traditional goodness found in the rest of the cast. Woljiff was fine, though I would’ve enjoyed more of a redemption for him. Lann had a very sad ending for me, but his end was voiced wonderfully, that I couldn’t bear to reload a save and rob the party of such a glorious finale. Great - and limited - voice acting is excellent in this game. If an actor is speaking, you know it's worth listening to.

Even the non-companion characters were surprisingly good. The romance between Irabeth and Anevia felt so genuine, and I felt emotionally committed to ensuring that both of them lived through the end. Queen Galfray is a wonderful character, though her feud with the player character never felt earned in the game.

And of course, there’s Areelu. Possibly the best villain in any RPG of all time. Areelu’s machinations are slowly revealed throughout the course of the game, deliciously unveiling the game's mystery one act at a time. The final revelation isn’t unsurprising, but it’s voiced so wonderfully, and feels so natural in the story, I felt like I finally understood in those final moments what this entire world and conflict was all about.

And now, the bad stuff. The game is too long. And it’s too long because so often you’re made to do b******t after you’ve sat down and decided to play. There’s a lot of clicking and waiting in this game. I would love to see the developers watch someone play and observe the time they spend doing less interesting things and in their next game, cut all that stuff out. Like, to take one example, Drezen should not be as huge as it is. It takes my slow mage PC literally minutes to walk from the Citadel (where you spawn) to the nearest vendor. That isn’t okay.

The puzzles suck. Not all of them - most, maybe 70% of them, are totally doable without hints. But some puzzles are so hard that the internet still debates why the known answer is correct. You have absolutely no shot of figuring out all the puzzles in the game on your own. It is not possible. (Well, you could brute force a solution, but if you’re going to do that, might as well just look it up, right?)

Another issue: Core difficulty. Respecs are not allowed in Core difficulty. Yes, you can totally turn on just respecs and keep everything else the same, but that turns off some achievements, and besides, I wanted to play the game as it was designed. The problem is Core is so challenging that you absolutely need meta specs. There are good feats, but there are many more bad feats, and it’s all but impossible to understand what's good without looking it up, or experimenting. The problem with experimenting is, feats are final, and they often build on top of eachother. You might not realize a feat is bad until 2 or 4 levels after you pick it. That’s dozens of hours of gameplay.

So, it leads to a situation where every time you level up, you could spend a whole hour, or even a whole evening, figuring out what to do with your characters. Eventually, I decided to restart and just use a guide. That felt like cheating, and I would love for Owlcat in the future to do a better job of balancing feats, classes, and removing bad ones. And just bake respecs into the core vision of the game, please.

Crusade Mode is fine. I see other reviews saying it sucks. It does. But it’s a small minority of the game time and I sort of enjoyed walking my armies around the map, exploring, building outposts and such. Sadly, again, the problem of no respecs rears its ugly head here too: Generals cannot be respecced. And you can’t even see what future options exist, so as to plan to build towards them. I just used a guide.

The difficulty is an issue, from the puzzles to the companion outcomes to the feat system. It feels like it's designed to be solved by the whole internet, not a single person. To use an analogy here, I recently played the remastered Demon Souls and found it to be impenetrable. I eventually used a guide just to complete the game. It, too, felt like it was designed to be solved by the entire internet. Elden Ring, by contrast, is absolutely beatable without any guides at all. It might be the most beatable game FromSoft has ever created -- and it's better for it. In Owlcat’s future games, I hope they make the game designed to be beatable by one person without help at Core difficulty. Figuring things out on your own is why games are fun.

As I re-read my review now, I'm realizing I haven't said much about combat itself. It's pretty good. Unlike BG3, there are no gimmicks allowed here. You can't just shove-off-cliff or explosive-barrel your way to victory here. You'll need to position your characters correctly, use your abilities at the right time, prioritize the right targets, and so on to win an encounter. It's fun.

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All in all, fantastic game. Great story. Great RPG experience. Excellent combat. Though the difficulty isn’t quite right, it’s still the third or fourth best RPG I’ve played, with some standout characters that rival even the best other games have to offer. Recommended.

While I'd love to see more PVE group shooter games, this didn't do it for me. Matches are separated by lengthy unskippable load screens. Maps are randomly-generated and, therefore, lack the excellent design of human-developed maps. The unlock system is lengthy and feels quite grindy; I was only able to unlock a single weapon in two hours of play. The gameplay itself was extremely easy and lacked tension. While I'm sure if I'd played beyond two hours the game might get more difficult, I'd have preferred a comfortable challenge from the opening.

I couldn't help but compare this game to Left 4 Dead, which has better gunplay, better designed maps, and a gun progression system that you experience within a short 5-hour campaign itself, rather than a huge meta campaign that seems, to me, to be designed to milk out a grind slowly.

I refunded the game after two hours.

I want to write a longer review later, but like, this is the killer RTS we've all been waiting for. Could it also be Stormgate? Sure. But this game rules. It's aged very well. The new civs they've added are great. Ladder 1v1s feel fantastic. (And I say that having lost 9 in a row after coming back.) The campaign is not amazing, but if you're looking for a competitive 1v1 ladder type RTS, it's just fantastic. All the pieces are there. There is depth to discover here, and a big community of players to play with.

Valheim is an incredible achievement on many levels. Combat is snappy and responsive, base-building mechanics are fantastic, and the art direction, music, and minimalist graphics are all wonderful. What's here is well-made and has a lot of charm.

But it's held back by the uninspired procedurally-generated map, punishing death mechanics, lack of base-related gameplay systems, and grind.

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In detail:

The procedurally-generated map is far too big for a solo player, and too uninteresting to justify its size. The only human design in the game is the biomes themselves, but there’s only six of them. Once you’ve seen them all, you’ve explored the whole game. The computer repeats what little human-designed content there is many times across a world the size of Azeroth. This doesn’t have a hand-designed world like Subnautica or Satisfactory; and areas of special interest are few and far between.

To justify its size, the game offers a hefty grind. At its default settings, you’d have to mine out a whole island to complete a suit of armor, and you’ll have to spend even more time lugging them back to base, then more time still refining all those materials. To put it clearly, this is the game: Mining resources on a relatively uninteresting map, and bringing them back to base. Thankfully, you can increase the resource drop rate by 3x, which every solo player should do from the start of the game, in my opinion.

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Base-building is the best part of this game. It's easy to put a home together. The snapping system is fantastic. I loved how the building system is grounded in real objects: You need a rake to flatten the earth, for example, and can equip the rake in an action bar button that makes sense to you. It's not easy to make an intuitive interface for building in three dimensions, and Valheim has really knocked it out of the park. I especially loved building little emergency shelters out in the wild for repairing my items, or taking a rest.

But the base-building system is hampered by a lack of gameplay around it. The optimal base is a single room, stuffed with storage lockers, with all crafting stations crammed together. Crafting doesn’t automatically take resources out of nearby crates, so you’ll want those resources close at hand. There's a (wonderful) system of heat and ventilation, but it's easy to satisfy. The comfort system gives you a reason to decorate a room, but there's no reason to build multiple rooms! I'd love to see the game present more problems that building would let me solve.

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Sailing is the weakest part of the game, and made weaker still by the fact that you can't build on your sailing vessel, like crates or a crafting station. It takes 20 minutes or more to complete a voyage across the ocean, and along the way you aren't likely to encounter anything interesting. There's only one aggressive creature type in the ocean, and fighting it at sea while solo is so risky that you won't want to try it. And given the very short view distance, there's not much to look at while at sea either.

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The combat system is intuitive, snappy, and comfortably challenging. I loved encountering new enemies and learning how to dodge them. I was disappointed by the limited number of unique enemies, however; there are just 6 bosses in the game, and 3-6 aggressive enemy types per biome. I would've loved to see something like rare elites that drop better loot, or treasure goblins, or more bosses, or just something extra to surprise me.

The exploration and combat system are marred, sadly, by a punishing death and save system. When you die, you respawn with nothing, and must find your corpse to regain your lost loot. It’s especially punishing when this happens across oceans. The save system is more like an emergency backup system (for things like power outages or file corruption), and does not allow you to easily undo mistakes. This punishes limit testing and experimentation. Purists will tell you it increases the tension, but I think the design is more to encourage multiplayer interaction, which is lost on solo players.

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There's a ton of promise in Valheim. The foundations for a great game are here. I just tried Enshrouded, and though it might have more features, it isn't nearly as snappy as Valheim, crafting and base-building isn't nearly as good, and the combat system is clunky by comparison.

Could the developers give us a reason to build more interesting bases? Can they make the world itself more interesting, perhaps by hand-designing a map, or adding a unique, hand-designed point of interest on every island? Could they just add in a regular save system? Could they lessen the grind, and add in more bosses instead?

Part of my problem, I think, is that I have played Subnautica, Outer Wilds, and other small indie games with fantastic single-player journeys. I wasn’t going in with the expectation that this could be anything like those giants, but still, my brain can’t help but hope I’ll have experiences like those again. Valheim, with some changes, could be that game, but it's not today.

I'm a lukewarm fan of Stellaris. I wasn't in love with its anthropomorphic animal factions and generic setting.

Star Trek Infinite, as a 4X game, is worse than Stellaris, but its fantastically improved IP makes me optimistic for its future. I'm looking forward to where the developers take it.

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In detail:

I loved the Mission tree. The game gives you goals, in the form of a small branching tree similar to Hearts of Iron 4’s National Focus trees. The Federation mission tree rewards you with an Enterprise-D, a unique ship capable of research and combat. Once built, you get six specific missions to complete with the Enterprise, each rewarding you with a “graduated” member of the Enterprise’s crew, who joins as a Faction Leader. I was partial to Troi, who became my lead diplomat (or envoy), and Data, who became one of my best Science Ship captains.

I appreciated the smaller-form, hand-designed galaxy. Star Trek: Infinite gives you the lower half of what seems to be a medium-sized Stellaris galaxy. It’s still procedurally generated, but less so than Stellaris. There’s a design to the galaxy. Personally, I loved smaller Stellaris games, and I prefer hand-designed content over procedural generation, so these are great steps in my opinion.

Star Trek: Infinite draws content from the Rick Berman period of the 90’s-00’s, but mostly focuses on The Next Generation. We don’t see anything from The Original Series, Star Trek: Enterprise, or the rebooted classic period.

The game is far from perfect. There are bugs. The AI of other major powers is poor. The End Game Crisis never seemed to trigger in my game. Content gets a little sparse as the game goes on. I’d have preferred a deeper internal politics system for the United Federation of Planet, and a deeper character system. I’d prefer better voice acting, especially for the Klingons. No sound effects or music are brought in from the shows, and what we have in the game isn't very good. (Compare, for example, the early 00's Star Wars: Rebellion, which made excellent use of Star Wars' voiced dialog, sound effects and music.)

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I enjoyed my 20 hours. I'd love for Paradox to apply this same treatment for other IPs: In many ways, Star Wars is a much better fit for Stellaris than Star Trek. Dune or Foundation would be interesting, and I would absolutely love a Crusader Kings 3-based Game of Thrones game.

This is a tentative, qualified recommendation, assuming that Paradox is going to come through with a patch and content update for the game. For me, it was worth $30, and I’d recommend it if you’re sort of like me: If you like 90’s-era Star Trek and you thought Stellaris was at least “okay.” I hope it's financially successful for them, as I'd love to see it improved and expanded.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is not a perfect game. The first and second acts are, yes, very good. The third act has a number of problems, but is playable at least. The final hours, however, are a disaster. The lackluster finale betrays the trust it built with players throughout the rest of the game. All these characters, their arcs, their potential, are wasted in the conclusion. The rest of the game sets up high expectations for the narrative. The ending, sadly, is a return to form for the genre, joining the likes of Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition.

I do not believe that I hit any bugs in the final few hours. I got the sense that the developers simply did not add an appropriate level of choice, narrative, and voice acting work, to this section of the game.

I was left feeling so angry about the ending that I actually rated this “Not Recommended” with a bit of a poisonous message. I deleted that review. It isn’t fair to not recommend this game. There’s too much that’s good. Too much that’s so satisfying to play.

I may come back later, when I’m less upset about the terrible end, and write out why I do recommend it. But pretty much, what everyone else said is more or less right.

Elden Ring was a joy to play. Its beautiful, expansive world, memorable boss fights, solid RPG mechanics, make me wish I could play it fresh from the beginning once again.

It's a throwback to an age when games were about mechanics -- about playing! -- and not a C-tier Netflix series strung together with unchallenging gameplay.

It's a traditional RPG at its core, allowing you to explore a world, level up, and experience a power fantasy, growing from literally wearing rags to becoming a near-god capable of killing one.

Other developers should take note!

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In detail:

Elden Ring is "hard," but there's always a path forward. The game doesn't let you pick your difficulty, but instead has a difficulty slider built right into the content itself: If you think a boss or area is too difficult, all you need to do is go somewhere else, fight easier content, level up, and return later once you're stronger. It's how RPGs used to be designed! There's no level scaling here, thank Godrick.

There's no story, at least not a traditional story. The world, the environment itself, is the story. It's nice to see a game play into its strengths -- environments, monster design -- and ignore weaknesses -- cutscenes, voiced dialog. Personally, I only have the attention span for a couple of story-rich games per year; I'd rather spend my "story consuming" energy on movies and TV instead.

The map is wonderful. Even now, 1.5 years since I last played, I can draw a map of most of the game in my head. This is Elden Ring's strongest feature, and a big benefit to forced backtracking: You learn and remember efficient routes through the world. For me, I love navigating mazes, and Elden Ring is a beautiful maze.

The melee combat system is extremely good. Dodging and blocking are a lot of fun. Though I did feel that plate-wearing was a little undertuned, and that the the magic system is, as in the prior Dark Souls games, clunky and a little boring.

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It's great to see a game that's unabashedly a game. You *play* it. You don't read it. You don't consume it. You're challenged by it, you learn its systems, you execute on what you've learned, and you master that challenge.

Bannerlord is experimental and incomplete, but had enough charm that I didn't want to play anything else for about three weeks.

Combat is super fun. Galloping on horseback during pitched battles, commanding two flanks of cavalry to hit an enemy from either side at the same time, laying siege to a keep and watching huge flaming boulders fly overhead: It’s straight out of any medieval fantasy movie. It’s impossible not to smile, when Bannerlord is at its best.

The non-combat portions of the game leave something to be desired. Though I admire the agent-based simulation of a medieval world--complete with mercenaries and merchants and noble lords--the AI is too simplistic, kingdom management too incomplete, and there's just not enough to do to satisfy my imagination.

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In detail:

When not in battle, you’ll be looking at a large map of the world. It’s more like Total War’s overmap than Crusader Kings. This is an agent-based simulation of a low-fantasy Medieval Europe and a bit of North Africa and the Levant, with equivalents for Saracens, Mongols, Britons, Byzantines and other ancient cultures. There are merchants, nobles, and cutthroats, all of whom can give you quests. You start off as a lowly peasant, and can climb the social ladder, by way of mercenary, merchant, arena combatant, or a combination of these paths, and you can eventually become a lord, and a king.

This part of the game is experimental and, sadly, unsuccessful. If you’re looking for a better Medieval simulator, try Crusader Kings 3, or Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Battles are where Bannerlord shines.

You’re always at a soldier’s perspective. You also command troops. Issuing commands is a bit awkward; certainly less powerful than the Total War games, but they’re good enough. It’s fun that you often need to find a good hill or large rock to stand on, just to be able to see what's going on.

I loved galloping around on a norse, chopping people down with a poleaxe. The environments are wonderful: Sandy deserts, forests, open fields. If it’s winter, there will be snow. If it’s night time, you’ll fight in the dark. Villages are, sadly, a chore, given that vaulting is terrible and your horses can’t knock down fences and clotheslines, and villages are full of them.

Siege battles, on both attack and defense, are fantastic; though sadly controlling troops is not advantageous in siege mode. You’ll find yourself in a situation not unlike Helm’s Deep from Lord of the Rings. It’s wonderful. I liked figuring out how to get my horse behind enemy lines.

Cavalry is wonderfully simulated in this game: Knights don’t behave like regular troops. They’ll charge through the enemy, group up at a distance, and then charge through again. It’s so good!

Melee combat itself is intuitive and extremely simplistic. It works well enough for Bannerlord, but personally I would’ve enjoyed a deeper melee combat experience. You can't be a Jamie Lannister or Aragorn regardless of skill point allocation, which is a shame.

I’ve criticized the overmap experience, but it’s important to note that it serves an important role. Your battles feel earned, and the consequences are important.

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All-in-all, I’m excited by Bannerlord and admire what they’re trying to do. But I’m more excited about where games like this could go in the future. Imagine a stronger simulation, with better AI behind the nobles, merchants and cutthroats you encounter.

I’ve given a couple recommendations of games to try other than this already, but if you’ve exhausted those and are looking for another take on the Medieval simulator, give this a try! For me, it was worth my time.

I have nothing but respect for the creator. It's a lifetime achievement, what Chris Hunt has made here.

I loaded the game up with recommended settings, wandered around the town, read the tutorial instructions, and tried to figure out how to engage with the game. For me, after an hour and a half of trying, I wasn't able to find where the fun was.

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In detail:

NPC interaction. I wasn't able to find meaningful engagement with NPCs. Yes, you can ask to trade with traders or ask hirelings to be added to your base (though I wasn't able to figure out how to create a base); but none of the NPCs can be talked to about the world, or your place in it, or even work opportunities. This was confusing, considering this line from the copy: "Intelligent AI that allows for characters to reason and work towards long-term goals and desires." I didn't see that borne out in the 30 or so NPCs that I spoke with in the game.

Skills. There's a hard skill grind in this game. You'll need to spend a long time doing low-engagement tasks to increase numbers representing your skill, e.g., in a particular weapon. To me, I didn't find this to be fun. I understand that in this game, they were going for something with more authenticity. That's fine, but there's a way to do it that's more engaging and authentic than what's in here.

Resources. In the opening moments of the game, you need money. The game directs you to click a mining node. Other options I tried, such as combat, thievery or exploration, resulted in death or jail. As mentioned above, NPCs do not offer you a job/tasks for pay.

Interface quality. I have no problem with the simplistic graphics, but I do have a problem with the interface: It's challenging to understand and navigate.

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I understand there's a Kenshi 2 coming. I'd recommend that they focus on the early part of the player's journey. Show their best work in those first couple of hours; don't save it for the end! I'm excited to see how that second game turns out.

It's not for me.

Don't get me wrong; this game is incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint. But it's too much of a toy or dollhouse, and not enough of a game.

Yes, sure, you can collect lots of outfits, and you can make a base, and you can even tame pets. But if you're looking for something that has more direction and focus, that challenges you, that asks you to overcome obstacles, or entices you with an engaging narrative alongside meaningful exploration, then this game might not be for you.

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In detail:

The game is really easy. And by that I mean, there's really no meaningful challenge, anywhere. The game never asks you to figure something out. There's combat, but it's very easy. There are puzzles: Easy. You have to worry about oxygen and radiation, but the solutions are obvious and simple. You have to collect resources, but it's trivial, just time consuming.

There's a story. It's text-only; no voice over, no animations, and the writing could be better. So far, it seems to serve as just a tutorial for the sandbox. It lacks weight, focus, emotion. This is unlike, say, Subnautica, a similar game that I enjoyed more, which grounded me in a character on a mission from the opening scene, all the way through the ending.

Exploration. It's painfully obvious that each world and everything in it was created by an algorithm. I like other games that feature procedurally-generated content, but the extent to which No Man Sky relies upon it is unmatched. Better designed games create spaces specifically for humans to explore, in ways that lead to surprise, enjoyment, feelings of danger; gameplay! I didn't feel so moved by No Man's Sky's worlds.

Space has no verisimilitude. There's no gravity, except when your boots are actually on the ground. You don't orbit a planet. You don't need to think about your path through a solar system. You just point your ship at where you want to go, press a button, and you're instantly there. There are no gas giants, or anything other than terrestrial worlds. Our own solar system could not be modeled in NMS.

Base-building. Don't get me wrong, I love base-building games. But this isn't supposed to be a base-building game; it's supposed to be a space exploration game. The goal of the game (to reach the center of the galaxy) is directly opposed to base-building.

In fact, when playing the game, and seeing how fully featured ancillary features like base-building, creature taming, and space-suit customization were, I found myself feeling that they'd sunk all their development time in the wrong things. No Man's Sky feels like it's being led by something other than it's listed design goals.

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Conclusion: For me, I found myself falling asleep playing it. I don't hate sandboxes by any means, but this just lacked enough of a challenge or narrative for me to sink my teeth into.

All that said, this game really is incredible, technically. One wonders what they could do to bring a gamer like me on board. I love survival sandboxes like Oxygen Not Included; I love builder games like Subnautica or Factorio; I love games about space, like Stellaris. I'm in the developer's wheelhouse. Just... Make it a better *game*!