Recent reviews by thule

Tremendous, beautiful game.

Amazing game.

Brilliant.

Not sure if it's that good tbh, need to play some more.

Great game, I hope it survives and attracts more players.

Combat feels great, there's many unique vehicles, the combination of occasional high speed racing and mostly just vehicle brawling works surprisingly well.

Perfect to crack open a cold one, turn off your brain and channel the inner british hooligan for a few games at a time.

Слава предкам!

Previous review is still kind of true when it comes to the game itself, but CA did a lot to repair the damage and change their attitude. They have shown humility and released a good DLC, and a good patch, for a good price.

Truth be told, there's nothing quite like Total War: Warhammer. It has a lot of flaws, but it is the best iteration of Total War to date, and a fantastic realization of the Old World on the PC.

I still love it, and when CA does not behave like a complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, it's a lot easier to love it.

====== Previous review
I'm just tired of this company's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You can clearly see how passion for Total War is gone, replaced with dollar signs in the eyes.

We haven't had any innovation in years. The sieges still suck, the AI still sucks, dozens of items and abilities work incorrectly. Not to mention the power creep where characters render the rest of your army irrelevant. The last good improvement was end turn speedup.

But they keep nickel-and-diming us for content. Three times I bought this game full price, not counting the DLC, and still the only thing they care about is how much money they can squeeze out of exploiting FOMO releasing overpriced lord packs with rehashed mechanics.

The one trilogy that truly deserves the "legendary" title. The trilogy (what "andromeda"? Never heard of it) is true science fiction of the highest caliber - from galactic politics to smallest nerd details on how tech functions, it all makes sense.

Mass Effect 2 is still the one of the best written games I ever played. If you only have time for one game, pick that one.

For the world and the lore, they made one - ONE! - addition to actual physics as they were known at the time, a fictional "element zero" that lowers the mass of matter around it when subjected to electrical current, and derived everything else from there, from guns to starship drives to space magic. You only need to suspend your disbelief on "element zero", the rest comes logically out of it. It respects the actual science and physics, and yes, cadet, sir Isaac Newton is indeed the deadliest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in space.

The politics and society is neither happy-go-lucky, nor black and white, nor grimdark. It is lifelike and complex, where races mostly cooperate, but its history is still full of atrocities past and present (you can count how many genocides are described in the games -- you will be surprised at the number). The characters are likewise deep and... adult, a rare quality these days. Replaying these games now, I'm amazed how much harder a lot of the stories hit now, when I can relate more. Characters face hard, adult problems, and can deal with them in a more or less healthy way, often depending on your choices. The game does not preach, and often faces you with choices that are truly hard to make. In some instances it's more subtle, in other less so (you would know what I mean if you played game 1), but it's never the choice between good and evil, but between interpretations of the situation and lesser evil.

If you never played Mass Effect games, you should.

I do not hate this game, and it isn't bad, but I'm still leaving a negative review. Why? TL;DR: it's very limited in scope.

You likely came here expecting something akin to Sunless Sea. It isn't. Sunless Sea is hundreds of stories, this is ONE. It's not a bad story, in fact, it's enjoyable. But it's very straightforward Edgar Allan Poe stuff, and it has no ambitions to be anything beyond it, and the two finales are OK, but a little underwhelming.

Now, to gameplay. The core loop relies very heavily on repetitive activities - fishing, dredging etc. The fishing itself is fun at the beginning, but grows old very quickly. I really like how every fish had a different shape, giving it a distinct identifiable profile even before it was discovered. Unfortunately, there's very little depth here. You blitz through the upgrades very quickly, and even in that short time the fishing mini-game gets really really stale.

There are some secondary mechanics, like evading "children" fish of the monster in a volcanic area, which are a 1000x more interesting, but they go very underdeveloped. There's a lot of potential of interesting interactions with the environment, but it largely goes untapped.

Graphics are very clean and nice. They are heavily cell-shaded, which is more of a cost-cutting measure than artistic choice, but they do the job.

Overall, this is a nice concept, but I think calling it a finished game is a bit too optimistic.