Ulasan terkini oleh Soxxox Smox

Planetfall puts a fun spin and flavor on the AoW formula, and due to its meta-progression system, "Empire Mode," as soon as I finished conquering one planet I immediately wanted to start a new one. Empire mode adds secondary missions and special modifiers to each scenario, which award XP that allows you to start future games with a head start. It's what I always wanted from a 4X game - a compromise between small, self-contained campaigns where nothing carries over, and massive, grueling ones that take days of real time to complete.

The introduction of unit mods takes the same joy of tricking out your heroes with cool abilities to create the most broken builds possible, and introduces it to other units as well. Each of the civilization and tech combos feels like it has its own strengths and weaknesses, even if some are more potent than others.

Overall, Planetfall isn't the most challenging or deep 4X game out there, but it scratches that same itch of a gradual ascent to power, and encourages a focus on completing smaller, more varied scenarios with some progress maintained between each one.

Kenshi has a reputation as a brutal, unforgiving world full of impossible challenges, and to be sure, the hardest part of the game is figuring out how to get started. A typical character begins, dirt poor and clad in rags, with essentially no meaningful skills. You're easy pickings for anyone to rob or kill. It seems like the game is setting you up to fail, and you'll quickly find that scraping out a meager profit scavenging corpses and mining copper ore, and retreating to the walls of the nearest city at the first sign of a threat is just about the only thing you can manage. It's hard to see what anyone would enjoy about the experience.

The key to finding the fun in Kenshi comes with the realization that combat experience is based on how overleveled a given threat is to you, and many of Kenshi's threats will leave you unconscious but not permanently worse off. Once you discover what doesn't kill you (usually) makes you stronger, you'll find yourself eager to jump into impossible fights, knowing that losing is just as valuable as winning.

And gradually, you will start to gain ground. You claw your way up to even footing with the packs of emaciated bandits that beat and rob you. You gain a small party of fellow adventurers to even the odds. You replace your rusty blades and wooden sticks with razor sharp masterwork weapons. You establish a base of operations and build up its defenses. Threats that were once insurmountable become frustrating, then fairly mundane, and finally trivially as you advance from a hopelessly outmatched nobody to a legendary swordsman who can single-handedly take on an army.

Beneath Kenshi's hostile exterior is a game about the grueling march towards self improvement, and the satisfying look backwards to find that all your hard work has paid off.

Necesse is a little lacking in the visuals department, and clearly copying off Terraria's homework in it's progression scheme, but the colony management elements are a cool edition, and there's enough interesting things to find in its world that it's a distinct experience. There have been several updates since I started playing too which add lots of neat stuff

If Wildermyth were *only* an excellent fantasy tactics game, I would already recommend it. When combined with the best shot at procedural storytelling I've ever seen, Wildermyth is an absolute must-play, and sets a new high water mark for how much heart can be found in a handful of randomly generated characters.

Simple, (sometimes overly simple) mechanics of luck and scarcity create an ebb and flow of tension, facilitating a story about people finding humanity in the cracks of apathetic systems. Sentimental, (often saccharine) writing, lovable characters, and great visual and audio direction all Citizen Sleeper an engrossing visual-novel style story with simple underlying TTRPG mechanics. With a campaign lasting 6-12 hours, it doesn't overstay its welcome - it does everything it needs to, does it well, and ends wonderfully right around the time the mechanics are starting to exhaust their potential.

The economy of the game becomes a little *too* forgiving as you discover more locations (and thus, more ways to gain and exchange resources). But even if it kills much of the game's scarcity, weakening its primary theme, it makes for satisfying progression.

The roleplaying is pretty sparse. Character building is more a matter of what order you'll eventually max out most skill trees. Every questline can be resolved favorably in nearly any order. Conversation options are kinda flat and don't seem to affect the outcome of anything. With the major exception of choosing your ending, you're mostly along for the ride as a good-natured font of altruism who occasionally gets the option of expressing mild annoyance or disagreement with people.Still, if you're willing to project yourself onto the main character a bit there's some room for your own interpretation.

In my playthrough, I spent the entire game with my eyes locked on the ending I was sure I wanted - but when the time came to commit to my decision, I realized I had found something more important, and couldn't leave without resolving my unfinished business. Watching that timer tick down, and that window close, was agonizing, but I knew it was the right choice for me.

Citizen Sleeper is a game about moments like these, as you juggle countdowns and resources and dice rolls, and sometimes have to make difficult compromises. While I would have liked it to be even harsher experience, the fact that you *can* tie up every plot thread nicely if you play well is very satisfying.

Beautiful, melancholy, hopeful, and tense. Can't recommend it enough.

cute and good

As a fan of other games in the series, I found this one to be a bit of a disappointment.

It starts off pretty fun, taking the existing mechanics of the game and expanding them into a more open-world experience. The best improvement by far is fleshing out the survivor mechanics. Survivors now have more detail, as well as randomized backstories and appearances to add some much-needed color. The best feature by far is the ability to recruit any survivor you meet into an ever growing squad to tag along with you when exploring.

However, there just isn't enough variety in the content to fill out the runtime - as you progress further, progress slows to a crawl, performance starts to chug, loot variety is abysmal, and weapon damage doesn't scale well to enemy health, resulting in fights that can take entire minutes to kill a single enemy as you keep them stunlocked while your party bashes them into the ground. Settlement management gets horribly out of hand, with no convenient way to manage equipment or positioning for your dozens to hundreds of survivors. Looting becomes a chore. Combat becomes a chore. Managing equipment becomes a chore.

Somehow despite being several times longer than the original flash games, there is seemingly less progress to make - the engaging loop of Decision was gradually stocking up a more absurd arsenal of weapons and special abilities to turn yourself into an unstoppable killing machine. I'm about 20 hours into Decision: Red Daze, and there don't seem to be any abilities - only an ever growing pile of useless backpacks and shoulder plates, hundreds of copies of the same dozen guns and melee weapons, and no end in sight.

A survival sandbox sci fi game in the vein of Starbound or Terraria, with a surprising amount of depth. Although the game is development and has some jank, it has tons of unique and unexpected little touches that set it apart from its siblings in the genre and make it worth checking out. For instance, there is a deliberateness to combat and movement that feels clumsy if you're used to other games of this genre, but is very engaging in how it forces you to consider yourself as a physical object in the world. Swing a sword around in tight quarters, and it'll clang harmlessly off the ceiling. Use caution with digging, as jump-jets and grappling hooks have very limited energy, which could make the return journey very difficult.

Overall, Signs of Life distinguishes itself from other games of the genre not by its polish or pace, but by its tone and attention to detail. Very excited to see how this game develops further.

Additionally, when I encountered a technical issue with my save, the developers were very quick to reach out and help me fix it.

Action RPG with Arkane's trademark style - lots of exploration, deep and expressive combat, and a pretty neat story. A must play for fans of the Immersive Sim genre

A mechanically competent CRPG with some okay kingdom building elements layered on top that is torpedoed by poor writing, constrictive roleplaying, and terrible information delivery/consequence foreshadowing.

GAMEPLAY
It's fine. It's a pretty good implementation of the pathfinder roleplaying system. The balance is a bit whack, making it difficult to find fights appropriate for your level during much of the mid-game, but kitting up your party with cool weapons and abilities is fun.

TELEGRAPHING AND REACTIVITY
The game offers a huge amount of choices with significant consequences, and is pretty good about reacting to your actions. However, the consequences of actions are often poorly explained or don't clearly follow from the actions, making it feel as though the game world is arbitrarily punishing you.

In addition, the sheer scope of the game means little consistency across the board. Sometimes progressing one quest will fail others for unclear reasons. Sometimes it won't. Sometimes sidequests will be tied to invisible timers that punish waiting too long. Sometimes they won't. In the throne room, you'll be bombarded with decisions for your advisers, but often the results of those decisions are not clarified until you've already made them. One character's best story ending is tied to whether you pass an invisible religion check during a cutscene. If you don't kill a particular giant on sight, he creates an event of a drunken rampage across your kingdom that takes weeks to solve and damages your kingdom constantly in the meantime. On the questline where you're asked to destroy an entire civilization of trolls and kobalds, refusing to finish the ethnic cleansing causes a party member to permanently leave, unless you killed the bosses in a specific order.

The overall effect is to make the player distrustful of every choice and action offered, and remain glued to wikis and walkthroughs to make sure they're not about to screw themselves over.

ROLEPLAYING AND MORALITY
Roleplaying in Kingmaker is difficult. Often conversations just don't have enough options to express yourself. This is made particularly bad because Alignment is tied to conversation options. I actually was unable to maintain my Chaotic Good alignment because the overwhelming majority of Good options in conversation were Lawful or Neutral.

The persuasion skill is nearly useless, as you're rarely given the chance to resolve a situation nonviolently except on inconsequential encounters where it barely matters. Instead, persuading people, when it's available at all, is often linked to having made particular choices previously or having a particular alignment. At one point, one of your advisers runs off on a suicide mission for essentially no reason and can only be talked out of it if your alignment is Lawful.

Kingmaker suffers from adhering to the traditional 2-axis morality scale. while introducing more nuanced moral and political situations. This leads to strange situations when you might disagree with the writers on a moral issue, or when the reasons for a particular action being good or evil have more to do with the affect or motivation given for them. For instance, allowing a slaver who openly intends to enslave more people to go free instead of executing her on the spot is Good. Allowing a bandit who openly intends to do more banditry to go free instead of executing him on the spot is Evil. The exact reason for this difference is that the player would benefit politically in the former case, but materially in the latter.

The overall result of Pathfinder's moral and roleplaying choices is that trying to play my character was an uphill battle against limited choices and a moral code that was alien to me.

RACISM AND COLONIALISM
I don't want to make a big thing of it, but it's hard not to notice that Pathfinder Kingmaker pretty gleefully engages in some of the worst fantasy tropes. The treatment of the trolls, goblins, kobalds, and lizardmen who are native to the land you live on range from patronizing to outwardly genocidal. Normally this would be the kind of thing where you grimace and move on - bioessentialism is kind of baked into the setting - but because Kingmaker is a game *about* colonizing these lands, you will spend a lot of time being forced to murder entire towns worth of people whose only crime is that the writers of the game needed a group of people who could be slaughtered without moral consideration.

In a better roleplaying game, this would be interrogated, or I would at least have the option of trying to live peacefully with these other civilizations, or I could use the diplomacy skill to de-escalate conflicts. Instead, save for a handful of moments, most interactions with the natives of the Stolen Lands end in slaughter.

OVERALL VERDICT
Kingmaker is a huge CRPG with lots to do and good core mechanics, but it brings little new to the table. I found myself coming back to it because the core game loop was enjoyable and because I was invested in the world and my character, but I don't know that I would suggest it to others. There are many other, better CRPGs out there.