Recent reviews by DerWizard

Okay. I am sorry to say this, but I will have to go against the mainstream. I am aware that the game has a lot of positive reviews praising some of the new aspects, such as customization and graphics. I will not question that it was an interesting and decent addition to AOW4; however, it does not make the game good in itself. I have played AOW for almost 20 years and had high expectations from this new chapter in its series, and as I said in my review of AOW 3, that game placed the bar very high, which means that Triumph Studios had to work thrice to make a better game.

I love the AOW series because of its exciting campaigns, characters, dialogues and music (especially in AOW2 and some in AOW3). I was hoping this game would have a decent drive and compelling story, and, to my surprise, it does not have either! Yes, the game has no exciting stories, characters, or campaigns, and basically, the entire game is just a series of random maps I quickly get tired of. There is no feeling of wanting to play "another turn" before you go to bed, and most of my thoughts while playing were wishing to beat this map as soon as possible in hopes that the following map will be more enjoyable.

As for music, the game has yet to have any memorable compositions. I simply do not remember any strong themes after playing several maps of AOW4 (though I admit that I only played some factions and not all maps). The main theme is interesting, but other than this, most of the different compositions do not feel unique. Having said this, I still can easily distinguish between most of the themes from AOW2, even after not playing the game for a long time, because each of its pieces has a soul. I also liked themes of AOW3 from Michel Van Den Boss which could give inspiration in battles and world exploration. It is very unfortunate that I cannot say the same about AOW4.

Currently, the game has no handcrafted maps, and the only way to play this game is to enter a random world that often needs to look more attractive. Some of the maps I saw seemed so unrealistic (even by magic standards) that I had to restart the game several times to get immersed in the world. The sea exploration/battles seem incredibly dull and unnecessary (although previous AOW games also had this problem, at least sea exploration was more thrilling and rewarding back then). I also want to question the decisions of Triumph Studios to casual the game by placing harsh restrictions on the number of cities and removing workers/builders units so that the heroes can build new cities. The fun part about the previous game was developing the world on your own, building roads, and eventually migrating your nation to different parts of the world, which is impossible here. This is a massive downturn into more casual gaming, which is a bad sign for TBS games. Look at what happened to HMM series, whose developers decided to take a casual approach.

The series of maps they call a story is the worst-written campaign I have seen in a long time. To me, this is just an insult, for I care little about army customization and grinding wheels. The developers clearly spent too much time on the "unnecessary" graphical improvements that they forgot to hire qualified writers. It is funny that I seriously think of sending Triumph Studios my CV/Resume to consider me as their writer. So, if you see a new DLC that adds an exciting campaign, you know what has happened :).

I am sorry, Triumph, but you can do better than this. Because of this, I cannot recommend this game in its current state. Notwithstanding, I hope that the game improves, and so will my review.

I am being sceptical about modern RPG games, but I must say that I really enjoyed this game. It reminds me a turn based version of Icewind Dale 1, where you can make your own party and venture forward, which differs from other similar games of the kind such as Pathfinder, Pillars of Eternity and Baldur's Gate from Larian.

The main Crown of Magister campaign is interesting, and does not end up being boring by the end of it. I also enjoyed many side quests, which do not feel generic and repetitive, such as background quests, and all party members dialogues were written surprisingly well. There were even some situations that made me laugh :).

Spoilers below.

My only concern is that the main campaign fails to integrate the new classes and races that were added recently. This creates very weird situations such as your Dragonborn hero will not recognise a Dragonborn statute and will not be bale to read book in dragonic language. Other than this, the game is a solid 8/10 and deserves a place on a pantheon of turn based RPG games.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North is that type of game where the name means everything. If you remove the name Lord of The Rings, it would probably be a great action RPG. However, if it was not the case, then nobody would buy it.

It looks like the developers were so eager to create another epic scenario in the Middle Earth so that they forgot about basic things, such as - the characters, the story, the writing. The playable characters are so generic and not interesting that you will soon want to skip all conversation in the game. They do not have any background, goals or motiffs, as to why they do this, why do they follow the orders of the Aragorn in the first place? Okay, maybe ranger had to do but why should a dwarf and an elf follow him?

Remember the Lord of the Rings? Each member of the Brotherhood had reasons to follow Frodo, even each of the Hobbits. And what do we have here? The first chapter: the ruins of Fornost (uhh.. what?) are dwelled with goblins? Okay, if we can ignore that part, what do you think our guys will do there? Yes, your guess is correct. They will assault the enemy citadel to fight an entire enemy army without any reasonable explanation as to why should they do this. I say reasonabloe, because the only explanation that was provided was just stupid and illogical. I wont spoil it though.

However, despite what was said above, as an action RPG is great and perhaps one of the best of its kind, if you can deal with the typical console controls of course. I like the game as an action RPG, I really do, and I recommend to play it. But if you are looking for this game to expand the Universe of the Middle Earth, you will become very disappointed, like I did.

v.1.1

Before we begin, I would like to make a note that this review is not a standing stone - it might change in both depth and final grade because of patches, updates, dlc, etc.

I play this game since Civilization 1, and had certain expectations from this game, which unfortunately have not been met... yet. But this is a different story, because for now you want to know why this review goes against a mainstream - why cannot I recommend it?

1. Unfinished / unpolished product. I was afraid of this most, "for this has never happened before, and here we go again..." The game is not only half-finished - in fact, it also misses some key and significant things which ALL previous civilizations had always been proud of, such as:

- NO STEAMWORK
- 0 scenarios (all previous games contained some scenarios in vanilla games),
- 0 maps other than computer generated ones, it does not even have a simple Earth map to start with (even Civilization 1 had it).
- can rename a religion - which is a bad thing in mp
- though cannot rename your country or cities (which is very strange)
- no auto work function for builders
- no alert button for units
- the game makes it clear from the start what future DLC will contain (which in my opinion is an insult to players considering the $ 80 price tag for vanilla game)

Of course, many of those things will be fixed by modders sooner or later - but that would be a different game, why should Firaxis get a credit for the things they were lazy to implement on their own in vanilla game?

2. AI. Lots of advertisements pointed out to the improved AI. I have not seen it, for I only see some scripted personalities which predictably react in certain way. In other words, there have been no significant improvement here:

- AI still makes similar stupid mistakes as in Civilization 5 - for example, exploring with its own settlers, building cities in illogical places, having no tactics against a player other than sending waves of enemies until being defeated.
- Adding to all that, AI does not know how upgrade its own troops, so you may end up in situations where you see chariots, archers, etc. accompanied by submarines... This might look funny but when it happens over and over the game not only loses immersion but also some logic.
- Like in previous games, AI still spams player with useless offers, praises and denounces

3. Multiplayer. I must admit that there is a big improvement here compared to civilization 5; however, it is far from being ideal. Desyncs, crashes happen very often, mp games are still very slow, especially at late game (wait times before player turns are unusually long). Also I do not understand why the game "does not officially support" more than 8 players in multiplayer (you need to manually unlock it) - even though we managed to play with 10 players, the fact that game says it is a bad sign as it only adds to what I said in point 1 about unfinished product.

4. Although the district / Wonders placement is interesting in theory - it has many issues in practice which only make life harder for players (which is especially the case in mp). Thus, when the game starts, you can only guess which tiles might later be useful (where is oil, iron, etc.) - so you start building districts, Wonders, and then in late game you realize that (1) you have no room for new more districts or Wonders (if you play on small islands map, this is a big problem), (2) the above mentioned tiles contained some useful resources which now lost forever.

- This would be not a big problem - (a) If the AI was in same circumstances - but unfortunately AI always know where to build due to scripts, (b) If the resources could be obtained by having Wonders on it, or (c) If the districts or Wonders could be transferred to other tiles. Now, keep in mind that you cannot remove your districts or Wonders, even if try to build it once but in few turns decide to build something else - you will be stuck with cosntruction on this tile forever.

- Unfortunately, all this makes Wonders a bit useless, especially if you play an island game - where every tile might make a difference. So, I think the game will improve if players would be allowed to build Wonders in districts (for example, 1 Wonder per corresponding district) - this would greatly conserve the space on the map and simply make the map look better.

- Another problem with Wonders is that sometimes they look weird - I understand some Wonders like Pyramids or Colossus must be built outside of the city but why cannot Eifel Tower, Big Ben, etc. be built in the City Centers, which is the case in real life? Also, why do they need to look bigger than an actual city on the map?

There are also some bugs and mp glitches which I do not want to talk about for now - I will give developers an opportunity to fix them, for we know that they know about it - they did test a game after all, am I right?

So, at its current stage the game deserves 6.0 out of 10.

I play Civ games since Advanced Civilization, and having invested about 500 + hours into Civ 5, I think I have a clear picture of what this game truly is, and, unfortunately, despite the fact that I enjoyed this game a couple of times, I still cannot recommend it, and here is why.

1) GAME IS SLOW. Yes, you hear it right. The game is super-slow at huge maps, and especially if you are going to play World Map scenarios on Epic or Marathon speeds, the game will become almost impossible to finish just because it will take enormous amount of real time to end each turn. Imagine you play a huge Empire, have lots of cities, workers, units, and in order to end each turn, you need to physically move them ALL. This honestly is not even funny, considering that you cannot simply end your turn without moving your troops (as in previous games). Unfortunately, this is only one part of the problem - now imagine you play a multiplayer and your friend forgets to move its worker and goes AFK...

There is no real explanation why a 2011 game runs slower than all of the 2016 games on my pc (which is brand new). It looks like the developers only tested the game on tiny maps with 3-4 opponents, but I do not care about that, for I only play huge maps with lots of civs, and I do not understand why they never did anything to optimize it for huge maps.

2) GAME MECHANICS. I know many people play civilization games for role playing purposes only. I am not among them, but me too likes to play world maps, or mods such as Faerun, Lord of the Rings, etc. (I also created my own mod in the Witcher universe), and unfortunately very often the game mechanics restricts your ability to fully enjoy the game.

For example, let’s say you play a Russian Empire on the World map, and you want to colonize as much areas as possible including Asia (obviously before anyone else, primarily China and Mongolia). Although this was quite possible in other civ games, this is not in CIv 5. Why? Because the game mechanics won't allow it (or allow it in very restricted way) - period. You cannot have a huge empire in civ 5 if you play on hard difficulties, because of the "happiness" modifier. In order to fight with it, the game "suggests" to build colosseum, circus, zoo and other similar buildings in the city which on the other hand will deeply limit everything you do, for not only it will take ages to build it in every city but will also destroy your economy and therefore will force you to focus on commerce rather than science or culture (as it is very expensive).

In the end, you will ask yourself? Why do I need to build more cities? This is a question I always asked myself playing civ 5. There is no real benefit of having huge empires as in previous games - no at all. This is a real shame, considering that this was often a valid strategy in previous civ games.

This is only one example of some game limitations which will prevent you to create your ideal pocket kingdom, and there are many other examples, which include a stupid 4 tile restriction rule for founding cities (which is bad if you play a world map in Europe), inability to destroy buildings in your cities, and “flowing Wonders”.

After playing this game, you realize there is nothing less aesthetical than spotting Pyramids on the ocean (you hear it right). I am surprised that developers did not even attempt to fix it, nor they were able to fix "roads" issue which sometimes look even more ridiculous than in a previous game.

3) AI. The worst AI of all times. I have seen many examples of dumb ai's, including old strategy games, and I will tell you that Warcraft 2 Ai will look like a "Skynet" compared to this. No matter what you do, no matter how you play, how you interact with it - it will always backstab you, "denounce you" for no reason, or do some other stupid and illogical things. In war, the AI is even dumber, because it simply does not know how to beat an above average player even on hardest difficulties (I am surprised that it is actually able to beat another AI).

I just give you a couple of examples how a typical Civilization 5 single player game will look like. You play and make declaration of friendship with A, in 10 turns A asks you to attack B on the other side of the map (totally useless to you), you refuse, in 10 turns they denounce you, and from now both A and B will attack you any turn from now (very often with some other AI). But fear not – AI does not know how to fight. Basically it only has 2 tactics - first, sending “lines” of units which are very easy to beat one on one (this is especially a joke if they try to attack a coastal city from the sea), and second, it won’t do anything at all... The result will be the same. In several turns, they will concede defeat one by one and offer (!) their own cities which you have not ever tried to conquer. Very often to get that “was score” all you need to do is to capture a worker, and it should be enough for an enemy to show a white flag. And this will happen every game, no matter how many cans of coca cola you have opened, and how many opponents you will face (obviously, the more AI, the more chances for a fight). Diplomacy / Military Alliances / Coalitions / Strong bonds with a player you ask? This does not exist in Civ 5.

In summary, this game has a lot of problems which unfortunately were not fixed by developers in any of the DLC (and there were many DLC) and for this I cannot recommend it.

ISSUE: WEIRD CAMERA

So far the only issue I have with this game is a camera mode. Because this "enhanced version" of game is designed specifically for consoles, obviously the default camera in this game looks very weird and controller oriented. But the problem is that even when you disable dynamic camera, the problem persists, and camera still acts in the same way. I do not know why other people do not notice that, or is it just a glitch that only my eye spots but the original camera mode of Divinity was way player friendlier in my opinion. For example, in the first dungeon - the camera turns mad at times when your characters stand in front of the wall - you cannot do anything about it at all.

Yes, as I explained above, you can still turn it off in the options and observe the map but every time you start a new dialogue, or battle happens, or just randomly, the dynamic camera mode is somehow restored, which is weird in the first place. I may be mistaken, but I do not remember having this issue in the original game at all. I never even thought of that.

I realize that it is not a reason to complain but for me this is an important difference, because I enjoy the new features the game has had so far, including dialogues, rewritten story, lots of new things on the map and I want to exlpore everything, but this new camera makes me to play the game as it is on console but not pc. I do not use controllers to play RPG games, and I want a normal Divinity Camera back.

Update:

I tested both original and enhaced games, and camera modes are really different in both. So, those people who tried to prove whether default cameras are the same, please do not confuse people.

P.S. If this issue is fixed I will change this review to positive

This game is great. I really like that the developers chose the right path, they not only did not move towards contraction but instead they actually introduced lots of new features into the game, which was very risky in the first place, knowing how conservative are fans in such games like AOW, Disciples and HMM. But in reality, compared to Heroes of Might and Magic and especially Disciples, which both went the wrong direction, this game is a masterpiece.

The new added features make the game different on the one hand, but also more interesting. I do not want to compare this game to Age of Wonders II, which of course is a living classics, but I can tell that this game has set the bar very high. This is obvious when you look at everything - the picture is amazing, it creates an impression of a beautiful fantasy world - very often I stopped the game in order to look at the map, take a look at the river, mountains, forests, and to look at how my pocket kingdom is doing. The music is great, altough I always consider the Age of Wonders II contained the best soundtrack of all times in games, the compositions of Michiel van den Bos are very powerful, and are used when they are actually needed, very often giving an additional inspiration in difficult battles.

I think the best argument which summarizes overall impression of the game is that there is always a wish to let the game go even when the map is already won. This is paradoxical on the one hand, because each map takes very long time to beat, but it was always a part of Age of Wonders gameplay, and compared to the previous games, in my opinion, it feels way faster. There are always so many things to do, do some research, build more buildings, recruit more units, build improvements, and to build new cities... So sometimes I regret that there is no single unified map like it is in Civilization, where you could develop a huge Empire and allow it to stand the test of time - this is perhaps the only bad thing about this game.


8.5 / 10

As a person who knows the story very well, and read all the novels, I feel that my impression of the game is twofold. On the one hand, the game is great, it has amazing dialogues, storyline, quests, lore, characters, etc. - it is obvious that PC Project did a great job. However, I highly advise to read the actual novel prior to playing this game, or many things might be totally unclear to you (the entire story of 7 books is very long though, and it is understandable that not many people have enough time to do it) or at least, try to find the Polish movie of 2000 (which is a crap though).

Unfortunately, the Witcher series are not that popular as Game of Thrones in North America, which becomes a problem because majority of people know nothing of this Universe and what had happened in the world prior to this game - and there were lots of things happening. I ll try to summarize everything in one sentence - a war had happened which united the Northern Kingdoms against an army of Southerners, the war was won - at the same time, there is a huge Elven rebellion happening, and of course, Witchers, the mystique organization which had sworn to protect humans from evil, is slowly disapepearing from the public. Geralt is among the last ones to survive.

Of course, devs did a good job explain everything from the start, but still the game has enormous amount of flashbacks which test your knowledge of the series, and in order to enjoy the game in full extent it is advisable to know what the heck is going on at least.

On the other hand, there is some element of uncertainty. A. Sapkowski, the original author of the series, made it clear several years ago that the story of Witcher did not end in his books yet, and if I understand it correctly - he is working on another book currently. In this way, I am just very confused whether how this game as well as Witcher 2 and 3, would fit into Universe. But this is a question which cannot be answered yet. For now, I give a strong A + to the game.

9 / 10

First of all, allow me to explain.

Of course this game is good - there is no question about it, same as there is no question that the Sun rises on the East and sets on the West, and I have spent lots of happy days playing this. However, it is important to note that for such a good game that has history, a huge fanbase, its own universe, culture, traditions, and previous games which defined the genre, this is not enough to be just a good game. This is a good video game until you realize that it is next part of the legendary TES game series.

Daggerfall and Morrowind, which are the best games in TES Universe so far, were far closer to to canons of open world sandbox game than Skyrim, where a player could do almost anything he wanted without restrictions, with deep RPG systems, game mechanics and interesting non-mandatory major storyline. And what do we have here? We have literally zero option from the start - we are literally forced into a conflict of two factions where we simply must take a side from the start (neutrality is not an option, as you may wonder), and more than that, we are also forced to become Dragonbornes. Hey! Is this how an open non-linear games look like? I do not think so. Nevertheless this is possible to live with, because what I am going to tell you next, just makes me (and not only me) dislike the game most.

So, the thing I dislike most in this game is.... casualty.. I already said this countless times and I will say it again - consoles ruin games. We might argue whether it is a good or bad thing , but we cannot argue whether it does not happen - it is reality. We have seen this in many other games including Oblivion when devs had to remove lots of original game features, skills, dumbing already dumbed ui, etc. all to meet the demands of console audience because they want action, not deep analysis of what is going on. Another problem is that consoles place certain restrictions on pc games - including interface, size of the world, etc. In other words, the game was developed for consoles first, where focus is always made on action rather than RPG system, which is a shame since it was PC that gave the birth to this game and made the game so popular.

The biggest issue I have is that in Skyrim they went further and not only they significantly cut down the skills and made them very casual, but also they totally removed the abilities points substituting it with Health, Mana or Stamina.... Seriously? Do you guys think Daggerfall would be the best game of all times if you have done this in 1995? No, and, I agree that times have changed, but the game name did no - it is still The Elder Scrolls, not The Elder Sword. If someone want to change something, maybe try a new project? I cannot imagine that Bethesda would do something like that to Fallout 4 - if SPECIAL system would be removed from the game the fans would simply tear it apart. Speaking of which, fans actually saved the game from the abyss. If not fans, which we all should be grateful for we not only would be forced to play a boring vanilla game designed for specifically consoles but also would be charged for mods, which is an absurd.

So, let me say it again - this game is good but if this game had no TES in its name then my review would be positive, and it is not. However, I cannot recommend this game in vanilla state. I say it again - DO NOT PLAY this game without mods, because it was made specifically for consoles this game plays not as great as you might think on PC. And one more sentence - Bethesda, you have to say a big thank you to the community members which saved you from an embarrassment.

But because of the fact that mods are still free, the original grade for this game of 5/ 10 transforms back to 8 /10.

Amazing game. I was skeptical when I launched it for a first time, and the feeling I had was that it was going to be another easy to play low rating game for an hour or two. What surprised me most is that despite the fact that the game is cheap, has low poly, lack of voice dialogue (it would be strange to have that for such a price though), it still feels great and plays much better than many other AAA games of the same genre. In fact, it feels like a quest, a parody, a mix of modern RPG and old school dungeon crawling at times, which in my opinion, is very interesting way of making a computer game.

What I really enjoyed in this game is the game mechanics - I am not saying it is something new, but you cannot just hack and slash entire game without some strategy. Every move, every battle, every level up of your hero requires you to think twice. What is interesting is that, unlike many similar RPG games, this game is challenging, if not impossible at times (especially for people who never played RPG games before) - in fact, you may end up reloading a game several times after every single battle (!) because of the one mistake you made either in battle or (the worst) if you developed your characters wrong (and trust me, for a first time you will do this). So if anyone want to avoid the mistakes before they are made - do not follow a typical RPG paradigm - your heroes will be useless if you focus just on what is best for their classes in other games - thus, if you think STR and con are great for fighter, INT is only issue mage needs to solve, and good ranger only needs to have high DEX - then you will need a new keyboard because you will kill it by hitting the same reload button 1000 times. Again, universality is key in this game - this will be clear once you enter the pits.

Second thing I liked in game is the sense of humour. I thought I saw everything of the genre but this game made me laugh so many times, I am still trying to understand how weird the situation can end up from a usual (as it seemed) dungeon crawling attempt. Yes - you have to be prepared to read the story, listen to your companions, and pay attention to details in order to really enjoy the game.

9.5 / 10