Recent reviews by CthuluIsSpy

Jank movement, buggy, limited weapon selection and some truly atrocious game and level design. And worse of all, its kind of boring. They try so hard to make it over the top and ludicrous that it gets old real fast.
If you were hoping for a revival of the only Return of the Triad games you will be disappointed.

It's fun at first, but it quickly outstays its welcome. Some of the later chapters take an hour to complete and most of it is just long, drawn out encounters after encounters to pad out the level. Just when you think one of the pain-killer wannabe fights are done, the game spawns in another 10 trolls with a shaman or some nonsense like that and it's just tedious.

It doesn't help that most weapons feel anemic, with the only worthwhile weapons being the sword, the crossbow and the missile launcher, and even then the two latter are way too slow for a game that wants to be fast paced, but at the same time has ADS and a stamina bar for some reason. There's also a sprint but you'll never use it because its bound to the same button has dash and consumes a lot of stamina for barely any speed increase.

I see a lot of people calling this game old-school, and it makes me wonder if they actually played a build engine game, because the build engine games did not lock you in drawn out combat encounters, did not have weak guns and did not have needlessly bullet-spongy and obnoxious enemies that the game just throws at you.
Berserkers are one such enemy, which have an infuriating habit of turning on a dime when chasing you making them incredibly hard to avoid, they have a lot of health AND you can only hurt them if you shoot them on the back.
Most competent developers know that for such an enemy should only charge in a straight line so that players can, you know, actually exploit that weakness and not die, but apparently not FWH. On higher difficulties cheese is pretty much a requirement, which is just poor design.
Having a few secrets and being able to move faster than a light jog does not make a game old-school.

Symphony of War is a JRPG that takes heavy influence from Fire Emblem and Advance Wars. You can build a fairly impressive army of up to 200 units and the campaign is a fairly decent length, around 35 missions (30 story + 5 bonus).
Mechanically and tactically speaking the gameplay is pretty solid, if obtuse; terrain plays a huge part in combat and you'll want a variety of units in your army and squad to take advantage of their different attack patterns and defenses. However, the game's UI leaves much to be desired; if you were hoping for detailed records of stats and after combat breakdowns, then you'll most likely be disappointed because the game does not provide as much information as it probably should.

In terms of unit variety you have your typical allotment of medieval cavalry, heavy infantry and archers, but you also get access to more esoteric units, such as dragons, gunpowder units, cannons, mages, paladins and clerics, all of which open up various tactical possibilities.

In terms of campaign structure it's ok. It does feel really easy at first, even with permadeath, but the battles do ramp up towards the end and you will get to deploy a fairly sizeable chunk of your army. There is one part of the campaign that I really didn't like midway through though, which quickly outstayed it's welcome.

Overall it is a fairly solid tactical JRPG game.

It has nice ideas. Every faction has different base building mechanics, tech trees (except aliens) and you can customize your units (well, most of them).

They did try to make each faction play differently. For example. the Eurasian Dynasty has a central industrial hub that expands using a series of pipes and tend to have an industrial, rugged look, the Lunar Corporation uses modular towers and have a more sleek sci-fi look with an emphasis on energy weapons, the UCS are all robots and also have modular buildings except they are built similar to how the Protoss build their buildings and they can teleport entire armies across huge distances, and the Aliens don't even build proper bases, instead several of their units can clone themselves and mutate into more specialized combat units, requiring only time and one of three resources. The only buildings they can make are defensive towers, which you use to defend your resource patches while you mutate.

They even differentiated how each faction collects resources; ED has flying drones that can just sit on a resource patch and provide a constant stream of income, LC uses mining facilities that can fly to a new resource patch and the UCS are more like your traditional RTS faction, with a refinery building that your worker robots go to after collecting resources.

However, for every brilliant idea they had they made several incredibly inept gameplay decisions.
One of the most infuriating is when the game takes away your ability to control it during dialogue but not pause it, so you get slaughtered. But at the same time there are dialogue sequences where you can control your units, so the devs clearly thought that stopping you from playing the game is a good thing.

There's also a lot of questionable balance choices, such as the Anti-Missile module not working against what are clearly missiles, shields only blocking energy weapons (thus leaving reflective armour useless) but making chem weapons incredibly lethal (except against aliens who deal mostly chem damage and tend to have high chem resist) and infantry being absolutely useless.

Faction wise the LC feels very weak, with slow resource gathering speed but fragile and expensive units. The Aliens on the other hand feel way too strong; despite requiring less resources their units are much stronger than most other factions. They aren't even fun to play, as most of their gameplay involves waiting. Since they don't have infrastructure or research, a lot of their gameplay involves waiting for bars to fill, clicking on individual units to clone and mutate and hiding behind long ranged OP defensive structures until you're ready to steam roll every other player with damage sponges that hit like trucks. So not only are they incredibly OP but they are also boring, and that's just sad.

The control and UI isn't great either; double click is an attack move, but at the same time you can just A move. Why both of those? Why not just the A move like a normal game? Double click for attack move just makes the game clunky, especially when its also how you command units to run. Its a game where you can design your own units, but there seems to be a cap to the number of designs, they aren't organized in the build menu and the icons all look the same. You can't see enemy stats so you don't know what armour and weapons they're using, so you have to just guess. That just outright kills the whole idea about tailoring your army to counter your enemy from get go.

The campaign can be pretty exhausting to play through; the missions are very long and there are many missions where the AI just spams armies so you have to constantly grind through them. And when it isn't a constant deluge of enemies they're incredibly easy; sometimes the AI barely attacks you.

The voice acting and music mixing isn't good. The music isn't as bad as Earth 2140 where it just starts suddenly playing smooth jazz over a massive battle, but it is pretty generic, a bit too loud and has a habit of drowning out the dialogue the devs want to force you to listen too by taking away your control.

Just stick to Command and Conquer or Starcraft. They are much more competently designed games.
Which is a pity, because this game did have a lot of potential and there are some fun moments. I really enjoyed the UCS campaign because they are really fun to play. Unfortunately, the Alien campaign (which is also the last one that concludes the story) wasn't as fun for the aforementioned reasons.

I should probably mention that despite what you may read you do NOT need to register to play the game and provide your personal info. Registration is completely optional and was a hold-over from a time when that was an option.
Starcraft, if I recalled correcty, did ask for registration, but much like Earth 2160 you didn't have to do it.
You do need to input a serial code (given to you by Steam, check your library) and it does give an activation code (which does nothing)? But no, you don't need to register.

The match making is close to dead, you'll be lucky to get a party of 3, and its also really buggy and imprecise. For a game that's meant to be a co-op looter shooter this is a big problem.

The loot system I feel is a little too generous. Its better than Borderlands 2, which was too stingy, but on my first playthrough I found something like 10 legendaries, which doesn't feel right at all.
The actual gameplay is fine and they made a couple of quality of life changes, but the UI is worse in that you aren't told what the quest rewards are and the fast travel process is clunky, and you can't skip a normal playthrough straight to True Vault Hunter Mode like in Fight for Sanctuary.

The main campaign's pacing is atrocious, with scripted events where you have to wait minutes for the characters to stop spouting exposition so you can continue playing the game, and this happens either before every mission, after every mission or even during the mission. It just feels like padding and kills the frenetic flow of combat.

Overall, I don't think its worth the price the devs ask for.

If you liked the gameplay from the first FEAR game you probably aren't going to enjoy FEAR 3, as they introduced regenerating health and a cover system that is largely inferior to how FEAR handled cover. Basically, instead of having lean buttons that allow you to peek behind cover, you now "stick" to cover and the game lets you pop up to shoot like in gears of war. The problem though is that you can't really move that well when you are using cover like that, and as such it feels really awkward.

You just aren't as mobile in FEAR 3 as you are in the first game, and most of the game will see you hiding behind a piece of cover while your health regens.

The guns don't even feel that great either; I found most of them to be pretty anemic feeling, even the shotgun takes like 2-3 shots to kill a grunt.

In terms of atmosphere its lacking even compared to FEAR 2; its really easy to miss the "scary" moments, and the constant rank notification and points pop ups don't help.

This game is probably the weakest in the franchise.
For starters, its quite linear compared to the other 2. There's no central hub and it feels like you are just going from point A to point B.
The faction war system is interesting, but its poorly executed and is quite buggy. Enemy spawn rates are absurdly high, and the devs decided to program mutants to attack bases as well. Nothing is more frustrating than wiping out an enemy main base, only for mutants to kill the garrison when you aren't looking, resulting in the enemies repopulating the base again. Its even worse when the mutants wipe out your faction's base, meaning that you have to run all the way back, kill the mutants, and wait for the AI to send friendly NPCs to repop it. And that's assuming the AI didn't break and is working as intended.
The combat in vanilla is also pretty jank, as the devs decided to make guns have a random chance of dealing no damage, which means that even it would take only 2 shots to kill a bandit, you might end up spending a clip. And the AI doesn't suffer from this mechanic.
You don't even eat now, which is a pity because that was a neat mechanic in SoC, and I'm happy they brought it back in Call of Pripyat.

Now, you might be wondering why I'm recommending this with all of these terrible features.
Well, for 2 simple reasons - Mods, and legacy

Mods improve the game considerably, fixing all of the terrible design choices the devs made. SRP is basically an unofficial patch and it even comes with a feature to make the guns work properly.
Probably the only mod you'll need, really.
It might sound odd to recommend a game based on available mods, but with the Stalker series you pretty much need a couple of bug fix mods to make it stable or to iron out some of the more poorly implemented features. You don't really need more than that, imo.

By legacy, I mean that whilst the game does get a bunch of things wrong, it does add some new features to try to mix things up and make the zone feel alive and dangerous, and it can be pretty fun once you get your bearings.

For starters, there are now Emissions. Most people seem to hate Emissions, but I like them; it provides a sense of danger and gives you a better impression of what makes the zone so dangerous, that at any moment all hell will break loose, and the only thing you can do is hide and wait for it to end.
For anyone not familiar with the stalker series - an Emission is when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant suddenly releases a massive burst of psychic and radioactive energy, killing anything that's out in the open in the Zone. The only way to survive is to find a nice solid bit of shelter and hope it holds.

You can now upgrade and repair weapons, which is a nice change from Shadow of Chernobyl, where you had to ditch a weapon or suit because it got too badly damaged. As of Clear Sky, if you like a weapon or piece of armor you can stick with it, which opens up some Role Playing options.
One of the more interesting mechanics it introduced is the ability to detect in hunt artifacts; instead of lying out in the open like in SoC, you now have to look for the damned things with a detector. Again, this adds to the atmosphere of the Zone, and provides a bit of tension to artifact hunting, as sometimes you will have to go deep into an anomoly field before the artifact spawns.

All of these features would later be implemented in Call of Pripyat, so I would argue that its worth getting Clear Sky just to see the evolution of the Stalker series. If you are a fan, that is.
Just be sure to mod the hell out of it, and take a lot of health kits for that damned machine gun nest in the Cordon.

All in all, its a good game. It has its problems, but they can be easily solved, and the game can be quite fun despite of them, as the core stalker mechanics are there still and are pretty solid.

If you don't have a SSD I wouldn't advise getting this as the load times are extremely long. I don't know why SSD isn't in the recommended requirements, but if you are using a hard disk then expect load times of 3-10 minutes, sometimes longer.

Other than that, its a good game. It's the closest thing you'll ever get to the Table Top version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, as its been replaced with Age of Sigmar, complete with ranked combat, and I like how they made each faction unique with their own set of special mechanics. AI and Diplomacy is still pretty screwy, but its better than in the other games.
You have a total of 9 factions, 4 of them available at the start, 1 is free and 4 are behind a paywall. Which is a greedy move on CA's part.
For what its worth, the 5 factions you get with the game (Bretonnians, Empire, Vampire Counts, Dwarfs, Greenskins) are pretty solid and cover most of the mechanics in the game. The roster for each reflect what's on the table top and they did a good job translating each faction from the table top. Vampire counts are probably the more unique faction, as they are the only faction that lacks a ranged option (of those outside of a paywall) and they don't rout, instead taking damage when they run out of morale, and can even summon units in battle. Just like on the table top.
There are some things that don't quite translate though. For example, you can shoot in combat, something that outside of skaven you can't do on the table top. This makes ranged units way deadlier than they should be. In fact, ranged units seem very dangerous in this installment of total war; they tend to kill more units than anything else in an army.
Furthermore, the autoresolve is a bit screwy in that it favors ranged units way too much, which means two things - AI armies will spam artillery and missile units (I once saw a stack with about 10 mortars), and Vampire Counts, who lack ranged units, will get shafted by auto resolve.

Other than those little mechanical quirks its a good game for a total war and a warhammer fan like me.
I just wish they optimized it so that it doesn't punish hard drive users. Because of that I can't really recommend it, and there's no middle option so I'll have to be negative I guess.

This game had potentional and is a Warhammer game with reasonable production values. Not as high as THQ's, but higher than other games outside of THQ's and Creative Assembly's. However, whatever promise it has is bogged down by questionable design choices.

For starters, rather than an isometric view like most games of its type, the game uses more of a 3rd person view like you'd find in a RPG. Whilst unique, its also really hard to navigate and tell where everything is. You can undo movement, at least, but its still awkward to play through.
Deployment is especially a pain, as you have to cycle through each deployment point with the keyboard. Why can't I use the map to deploy my warband?

There is no grid system either, so there is no frame of reference for have far everything can move. The game tells you that a unit can move a certain number of meters per strategy point, but it doesn't tell you how far that actually translates to in game. If they had a grid system, where each square would be 1 meter, then the player could effectively plan out his strategy as he would then know exactly where everything can go (you know, like every other tactical wargame ever). But as it stands the player is effectively blind when it comes to judging distances in game, and that's a bad thing. There isn't even a grid system on the map, where you'd think there'd be one.

You don't actually have that many options for customization, and your warriors will tend to have the same face. You do get a large suite of skills, at least, so you can customize your warriors in that sense.

The stances aren't quite that well thought out.

Parry and Dodge do functionally the same thing. Parry allows you to attack if procced, but only if you have enough Offense points, which you probably won't have enough from as you'll want to spend all of it attacking, and as such its no different from dodging, which like parry avoids damage. Wouldn't it be better to allow a free attack? Its not as if such a concept in the game doesn't exist; if you flee from combat every unit on the opposing side gets a free attack. Why are there free attacks in that case, but not with parrying?

Overwatch and Ambush are flawed in so many ways. For starters, there's hardly any counterplay; it has a 360 degree field of vision, so you can't flank it, and ambush doesn't tell you where the enemy's ambush zone is, so you have to inch forward and pray the charge prompt shows up. Which it won't, because the AI always seems to have longer ambush range than you, and knows where your ambush zones are, so it can always somehow find a way to circumvent it.
Charging, btw, does ignore Overwatch and Ambush, but it has short range and its still counterintuitive; in most games abilities like that are supposed to stop charges.
In a system where the ambush ranges are variable, you have to show its range. Otherwise the player wouldn't know what to do, and stumble into a situation that could have been avoided if it had been designed properly.

The singleplayer compaign is fine at first, but it becomes repetive once you realize that the AI will always copy your composition; if you have 2 heroes, an impressive and 5 henchmen, the AI will use 2 heroes, an impressive and 5 henchmen.
Not to mention that the optional missions are nearly impossible to do, as each mission ends before you can gather the wyrdstone in time, or still their banner and take it to your cart.

The loot system is similarly flawed; as the mission abrubtly ends once a warband breaks, you can lose loot that's right at your feet, as the game won't let you manually loot it. Would it have been really that difficult to automatically add loot postgame that's in your warriors' control zones? This makes the marked for death optional mission harder and more tedious than it needs to.

Likewise, the morale system is a little clunky in that instead of testing to see if the warband breaks at the end of the round, where you'd think it would come in, its tested when a warrior's turn comes up in the initiative order. Why? Shouldn't it be at the end? I could have 5 guys to use afterwards to do stuff and grab loot, but the game won't let me due to how the morale system works.

The story quests are terrible. All they are are fetch quests where you have to make sure a special unit doesn't die as well, all while having to fight constantly respawning enemies. In a game where healing is hard to come across, this quickly becomes an exercise in frustration.

Furthermore, whilst the DLC units and factions are locked behind a paywall for the player, the AI will use them against you. Its obvious that the files are in the game on the player's computer, but the player still has to pay for them. This is no different from on disk DLC.

I can't say much about multiplayer, as there appears to be hardly any activity on skirmish mode.

There's a bunch of bugs as well concerning line of sight. You could clearly draw a line of sight from a warrior to a target, but the game won't let you attack for some reason.

Now don't get me wrong, I like this game. I will keep playing it. However, its also really flawed, and as such I can't recommend it, especially with a 30 euro price tag + about 28 euros of DLC.

Apparently the Devs are making necromunda, and I am looking forward to it. I just hope they don't make the same mistakes they made with mordheim, and avoid that DLC nonsense. The devs do communicate with their playerbase, and I appreciate that, which is why it bothers me to see such irritating design flaws in a game that could have been much more.

Best Russian meme since 2007.
10/10, would cheeki breeki again.