Recent reviews by Trable

A hellish holiday for the main antagonist, a hell of a ride for the player!

Far Cry 3 came out pretty long ago but I did not get around to getting it till now. It tells the story of Jason Brody, whose vacation went wrong and had his friends kidnapped and his brothers killed. He manages to escape, joins the local tribe and wants to rescue his friends and get revenge.

The pros:
* Very long game, with an island open to your explorations.
* A decent story for an open world game.
* The choice of going in silently or Rambo style... or a mixture! Whatever you feel like!
* Decent basic RPG elements to form your character to match your play style.
* A variety of weapons from silent killers to grenade launchers, RBGs etc.
* Many side missions and challenges to complete.
* Many collectibles to get further information about the island, develop your character further and gain more funds.
* Having the game put you into many playing styles from silent to Rambo during the story and making you try all of the weapons.
* A basic crafting system to temporarily improve your skills, health, fire resistance,...
* Many vehicles to man, gliders, boats, etc.

The negs:
* Like in most open world games, you get all of the skills prior to ending the game and you have more money than you need with nothing worth buying.
* Perhaps way too aggressive local fauna.
* Some illogical placement of weapon cashes, e.g. inside tombs that have been sealed years ago etc.

All in all, I enjoyed the game thoroughly and I am looking forwards to playing the following installments, even though they say that "Far Cry 4" is very similar to this one.

Highly recommended!

The Withcer 3: Wild Hunt is the latest game in the Witcher franchise. It is an open world RPG with aplenty of freedom to explore and enjoy at your own pace!
The pros:
* Very long game. Took me 116 hours to complete with all contracts, side quests etc.
* Very good graphics, the characters and locations look like if they dropped off the book pages.
* Great voice acting!
* A decent main story with a couple of surprises along the way.
* Interesting plots of some Witcher contracts.
* Very innovative combat system allowing you to combine melee, ranged and signs attacks very smoothly.
* Nicely challenging.
* Battle preparations with potion brewing etc, just like on the pages of the books!

The negs:
* Some parts of the game felt drag, like the treasure hunting in Skellige, but again, you are not obliged to doing ti.
* Some graphical glitches, but it is to be expected in such a huge game.
* Some technical issues like not responding to certain commands or walking out of control

All in all, this is an excellent open world RPG that I would recommend to any fan of the genre.

Prey: The spiritual successor of "System Shock", "Bioshock" and "Deus Ex"!

Prey is an excellent game that holds clear inspiration from the three aforementioned game. Telling anything about the story is killing the thrill of finding out and a few good plot twists. Suffice to say that you are fighting Typhoon, a space entity, in which a certain subspecies can mimic anything it likes. While the game is very thrilling and difficult to put down, you cannot shake the feeling that you have seen and done that before. The fabrication system is similar to the Adam system in "Bioshock" and the RPG progression reminds you of the newer "Deus Ex" games (Invisible War, Mankind Divided".

The pros:
* Great story that you put together piece by piece from e-mails, audio logs etc. A few unexpected twists and turns along the way
* Very nice graphics
* Good jump scares, mainly at the start of the game
* A wide skills tree to modify the character to suit your style
* Very long, took me over 41 hours to finish the main story and all of its side quests

The cons:
* The final plot twist while surprising, it tries too hard to swoop you off your feet
* When you finally meet some survivors, you have no feelings that you did something special
* "Seen this, done that" feeling

"Divinity: Original Sin" is a rich RPG that gives you endless options of experimenting and developing your character. It is old-school, yet modern. All of the "Baldur´s Gate", "IceWind Dale", "Planescape: Torment" and "Pillars of Eternity" fans should play and enjoy it.

The pros:
- A good story that unfolds overtime with good pacing.
- Creating two Source Hunters from a wide variety of classes and the possibility to modify them to suit your playing style
- Many quests, some with more than one possible solution.
- An environment that reacts to you, e.g. make it rain to create water puddles then shoot a lightening into it to make your enemies stunned, throw a fireball on an oily surface to make a huge area engulfed with flames, freeze the surfaces to make your enemies (and yourself!) slip down ...
- Finally, it is possible to smash wooden doors and chests, set them on fire etc if you do not have the key!
- A variety of skills, spells and talents to choose from and make your character unique
- Very long game, took me over 90 hours to finish
- Nice cartoonish graphics
- Nice scaling up of difficulty as you progress to keep a challenge

The cons:
- The diary can be confusing, I did not finish some of the quests as they were very vague to say the least
- The side characters that you can recruit are not very interesting and they back stories are nothing too exciting
- The voice over of some characters is simply horendous
- Some of the quests are plain stupid, e.g. Kitty Love

Dishonored 2 offers an updated version of dishonored!
Pros:
* Two different playable characters
* Very long game, longer than the first
* Most situations have more than one way to solve them
* Great special powers
* Nice graphics
* An interesting enough story to keep you going
* The possibility to finish the game without killing anyone

Cons:
* The story fails to leave an emotional impact, the ending did not spark any emotions what so ever
* Some of the questions are left unanswered, e.g. who is Delilah really?
* The wooden voice acting

All in all a worthy follow-up of Dishonored, giving you more of the same but in an updated and more sophisticated version!

Doom 2016 is a welcome return from a dormant franchise. Doom brings back the classical formula and improves it in every possible way. It is action packed and great fun.

On the positive side:
* Action packed from start to finish. The game design does not allow youto stand still or hide but instead to engage in combat head first
* Gorgeous graphics
* A very decent story for a FPS, establishing the mythos of the "Doom Slayer"
* Plenty of things to do, objectives to accomplish, secrets to find, ...
* A basic but functional RPG system
* A nice collection of weapons (including the infamous saw and BFG)/ Almost all weapons have two mods of action, can be customized and offer special missions to get the best out of them
* Rune levels allowing you to acquire various bonuses that you can later upgrade through gameplay
* Hidden "Classic Doom" levels
* Visceral Glory Kills

On the negative side:
* The gameplay feels like an arena. You always progress through the level and then get locked into a certain area that you have to clear of demons
* All good things come to an end ...

Deas Ex: Mankind Divided picks up two years after the events of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Some of the old characters are back, some new ones are introduced. Here the pos and cons for this game:
* On the positive side:
- Excellent and intriguing story that gets you hooked, always wanting to see what will happen next
- Plenty of side missions, usually with very good stories
- Open world game play, you can spend hours just exploring the environment without progressing through the main story
- Character development system, allowing you to shape your character in the way that best suits your play style
- Many possible solutions for most problems
- The possibility to finish the game without killing a single enemy!
- A reasonably enjoyable way of hacking PCs, locks, systems, etc
- Very long game! Took me over 60 hours to finish the main story arc }but I spent hours exploring everything)
- A "Breach" game story mode to elongate the gaming experience even more
* On the negative side:
- The story ending leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn't answer some major plot lines. The ending of the main story leaves you with a feeling of "To be continued ..."
- The majority of the story takes place in Prague. You have some short visits to Dubai, Switzerland and London though
- Being a Czech person, I found some of the grammer mistakes irritating, also the pronounciation of Czech words and names by non-Czech people is mostly wrong. I would have expected Eidos to spend more money on making it as authentic as possible.
- The animations during the dialogues could have been better, the characters do not display much emotions
- Sometimes, unpredictable AI. Enemies can spot you even when they should not be able to, for instance through locked doors
All in all, I rate this game very highly and it is only a shame that we will most likely never get a follow-up to see, where the story would have led us.
Recommended!

The final game of the Arkham series is here and it is sure worth it. It does wrap up Batman's story that started in Arkham Assylum.
Here are the pros and cons for this game. And yes, I did not get the game till December 2017 so I cannot comment on the start up technical problems!
Pros:
* Good story with some unexpected twists
* If you do all of the "Most Wanted" missions and the Riddler challenges then it can be a very long game
* The possibility to play as Catwoman, Robin and Nightwing on a few occassions through out the story
* Some of the Riddler challenges are very smart
* A great villains gallery
* The Batmobile can be fun
* Great voice acting

Cons:
* You can guess whom the Arkham Knight is fairly early during the game
* The game ending was a bit of a letdown. No major final battle.
* Some of the villains have very small roles (Two-Face), while others are reduced to a mere tank fight (Deathstroke, forget about the awesome battle from Origins! Hush's role is barely a cameo)
* Mr. Freeze and some other iconic villains are not available till a DLC
* Some Riddler challenges are purely annoying (Condemned for instance)
* The Batmobile can be forced and irritating at times

A great return for Miss Lara Croft!

"Rise of the Tomb Raider" takes place after the reboot "Tomb Raider". The game has an indulging story that takes you mostly into Siberia but there is a brief flashback taking place in Syria. "Rise of the Tomb Raider" carries on in the modern definition of action adventure. An epic, cinematic, Indiana Jones-like story that sees non-stop action with plenty of side quests, challenges and puzzle tombs to discover and complete. The graphics are top notch and the voice acting, mainly Lara Croft and Konstantine is amazing. Can't wait for "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" coming out later this year!

Pros:
* Indiana Jones-like indulging story
* Two fairly unexpected plot twists
* A cinematic adventrue
* Characters that you actually care about
* Dynamic game with lots to do
* Nicely challenging tomb puzzles
* Nicely long, took me over 40 hours to complete with 100% completion score
* Great graphics
* Great sound acting

Cons:
* The climactic batlle, while indulging and action packed, is OTT for the otherwise fairly realistic game
* The DLCs, while they are not bad and I got them as a part of the "20th Anniversary Pack" I would not bother buying them individually. They are fairly short and not all that exciting.

Pros:
* Decent story
* You get to meet the Burning Man and to learn what became of him
* Two various ends, neither of them is completely "right"

Cons:
* Rather short
* Technical issues: the only part of the Ultimate edition that crashed a few times while playing
* Outdated graphics, but again, that is the problem with the whole "New Vegas: game

In conclusion: this is a good, albeit short DLC. Worth playing if you are getting the Ultimate edition, otherwise nothing too exciting.