Recent reviews by Gregorovitch

A belated review here but if you’ve played the excellent Expeditions: Rome and have a little time on your hands, waiting patiently for Baldurs Gate 3 or XCOM3 perhaps, then seeing as this game can probably be picked up for next to nothing in a sale now if you got an itch for a really nice story driven RPG with some kick-ass turn based tactical squad combat which is a trade mark of this studio and some interesting quirky mechanics this is definiitely worth considering.

If you’re sitting on the fence on Rome, consider picking this up on sale and trying it out first. If you like this you’ll love Rome and there is much to like about Vikings.

The big difference between this title and Expeditions: Rome is Rome has far higher production values, is fully voice acted, stunningly well voice acted at that, which Vikings is not and most of the mechanics developed here for Vikings have been broadened and deepened for Rome. Rome is an AA going on AAA experience. Vikings is definitely off-beat indie territory.

The one thing I would warn folks about is that you must prepare your whole team (all 10 of them) for the finale (technically Act 3 but it’s really just a finale sequence) before you wind up your campaign in Britain (which is Act 2 and represents the bulk of the game). You must make sure you have crafted a full set of tactical items as well as decent weapons for them, levelled them up properly for combat etc before you head back to Denmark after you’ve completed the main Act 2 quest one way or another. If you don’t you will be very annoyed as you can’t craft anything in Act 3 and you can’t go back.

The reason for this is the finale is straight sequence of cutscenes and combat encounters you are forced through and for one single battle you will need all 10 of your team saddled up and battle ready instead of the normal 6 you will probably use for the whole of the rest of the game in combat (the other four probably being specced primarily as skill monkeys). Just one battle, but it matters.

The other major issue with this game is time limits. Yes, there are time limits in both Act 1 and Act 2. However you should not concern yourself with this. Unless you completely screw things up there is ample time to complete each Act within the limit, like twice as much as you need. There is also no benefit in messing around travelling around unnecessarily from camp to camp on the map because you don’t get either XP or loot from doing so.

Highly recommended for those that like story driven RPGs with good writing and hard core TB tactical combat. A criminally overlooked gem basically.

This a very good game IMHO. The Expedition games, this is the third after Conquistador and Vikings, are a genuinely unique series combining many RPG mechanics and approaches to story telling with hard core XCOM like (i.e. no or very low magic) turn based tactical combat and an XCOM-ish strategy layer (more on which later). This one has upped the anti considerably with respect to production values.

The highlights are:

* Very good writing. Some might quibble it’s a bit “Downton Abbey” at times however I think English toffs do a pretty good job of representing Roman aristocratic characters (which is what we are dealing with here in the main) for a modern global audience.

* Exceptionally good voice acting. I mean really good. I’m struggling to think of any game, even Bioware classics, that has better VO.

* Absolutely stunning location environment art.

* Satisfying depth and breadth to character development and equipment choices catering to many play styles in combat. If you can think it you can do it pretty much, short of machine guns.

* The sort of skill gap or range that can leave the noob limping away, their bloody arse handed to them big time, and the veteran expert defeating the same encounter in a turn or two without breaking sweat. In other words there’s some real meat and depth to it, lots to learn and enjoy.

* Some of the encounter design is fantastic. The big siege encounters at the end, sometimes in the middle, of each act are uniquely brilliant pieces of game design IMHO. A lot of other encounters are very cleverly designed. Many are puzzles in the sense that there is often an easy way to do it and a hard, sometimes very hard, way to do it. Spotting the easy way and pulling it off handily is very satisfying.

The game is a complete work of fiction, doesn’t pretend to be anything else notwithstanding the cameo appearances of a few historical characters like Cleopatra, Cicero and Cato, however a great deal of effort has gone into depicting the life of a Roman legion reasonably accurately within the constraints of what is entertaining and fun to play and of course with all the equipment etc. You even get the odd Latin lesson thrown in here and there.

Some might quibble at the girls in the squad. Pah! Girls like playing games too and when they do they mostly like to play female characters with a mixed group of companions. If you got a problem with that you can ♥♥♥♥ off and cry in a corner as far as I’m concerned.

Turning to a few of the main things people have disliked about the game, I’ll explain what they are and how you can avoid them being a problem for you in your game, a bit spoiler-ish but I think that’s reasonable since the game doesn’t do a brilliant job of explaining some of this stuff.

First up is legion battles. Folks find them boring and pointless because they can’t see how to affect their outcomes and don’t understand how they work. What the game does not explain well, at all really, is that the main criteria for success in legion battles are your legion XP and the strength and level of the legion strategy cards you have researched.

At the start of the game you have no legion XP and you have useless weak-arse cards. In order to get legion XP (which massively increases it’s combat strength) you have to kill more enemies than they kill of your soldiers. The way you kill more enemy soldiers than you lose is to deploy strong strategy cards. So at the start of the game this is a viscous circle and that's why folks bounce off it.

The way to get better strategy cards is to build the Workshop tent and it’s upgrades. However there is a problem with that – if you build it you will delay being able to upgrade top the Forge tent which enables you to upgrade your party’s weapons significantly. Many beeline the Forge for obvious reasons but that gimps their legion for the whole of Act 1. Personally I also beeline the Forge for the simple reason that I can still win legion battles with weak-arsed cards and crucially I can simply buy more soldiers whenever I need them. I can’t buy upgraded unique weapons. YMMV but this is probably the root of folks problems with legion battles, not understanding this trade off. Later game when you do get your Workshop up and running and upgraded in Act 2 your legion will get the cards to start kicking arse right, left and centre and it’s XP, and therefore it’s overall base combat strength will run off the scale.

Second up is the region “Pacification missions”. Annoyingly you can only take one of your main companions on these missions so have have to use a rag tag bunch of B team praetorians you hire who are usually under-equipped and come with less that ideal skill spreads and so on. Grrr.

The reason the game does this is to encourage you to equip your whole squad properly, including the B Team, and make sure you get to know them for the big siege battles were you will absolutely need to use all of them. However some folks feel they are being railroaded into this and they don’t like it.

You can make this pain go away by doing two things:

1. Buy every resource item required to make tactical equipment (pilums, bandages etc) you can lay your hands on as soon as you see it (you get it from traders in the town locations in each act). It feels expensive, it is expensive, but don’t be cheap just buy it already. That way you will have enough tactical items to equip your whole roster properly and they will always be ready for the fight without messing about dragging stuff from one character to another (which is truly a PITA).

2. Don’t get OCD about the best possible weapons and armour. Good is good enough, it’s much better to put all of them in good quality armour and use good quality weapons than to have a few of them with the best stuff and the others with trash. You can craft as much good quality gear as you like ‘cos you will loot ample supplies of good quality salvage. The pristine salvage is rare and you should save that up to upgrade the unique equipment used by your A team.

So, IMHO a cracking good game, top quality entertainment. ‘Nuff said, check it out..

This is a qualified recommendation – it’s not a game for everybody. It’s a hard core indie cRPG with a strong survival element which many may find too long-winded, fiddlesome and annoying. But if you are a fan of classic cRPGs and perhaps the sort of player that turns on survival mode in Fallout 4 or Skyrim and then adds extra hard core realism mods on top of that to make them worth playing then I would recommend a look at this game.

The game is a loving homage to the original Fallout 1 & 2 games with a generous slice of STALKER lore on the side. It’s ruleset is more a less a straight copy of FO1/2. So is it’s combat system. The story itself and setting is different of course, but there are still similarities in the structure of the narrative, quest design and character design. And it is very open ended and open world. Just like in FO1/2 you can definitely play this game your way, go where you want and do what you want.

This is not to say that the game doesn’t have problems and questionable design decisions, more than it’s fair share of them in fact (I’ll detail some below), but despite that I have not been able to put this game down from start to finish and the reason for that I would describe like this: Atom RPG somehow contrives to be worth a lot more than the sum of it’s parts. With all it’s jagged edges and annoyances it has no right to be as compelling a game experience as it is. Nevertheless, it is.

These are some of the things some players may bounce off of. YMMV:

1. There are no big shops in the game that will buy your loot for a decent price and have enough money to pay for it. You have to slog around waiting to meet random caravans and calling in on countless small traders to unload your stuff in small parcels. This works well in the early-mid game (immersion) but later gets to feel tedious and excessively time consuming. Grinding basically.

2. There is a constant struggle to find ammo for your weapons in sufficient quantity. Nobody, not even the main gun shop, will have more than a few rounds of even the most basic ammo in stock. Worse is that in general the better the weapon the rarer it’s ammo. Again this works well early-mid game but starts to grate hard later on.

3. There are a lot of random encounters, in fact 75%+ of your loot and XP comes from these. They are zoned into “difficulty controlled areas” across the map but nevertheless you will hit plenty of encounters early-mid game, even if you’re careful, that you have little to no chance of surviving and will have to reload quite frequently.

4. There is no hotkey to give you all the names of the numerous NPCs kicking around locations. In fact until you actually speak to them you don’t even know their names. Talking to all these NPCs and finding them if they relate to a quest you’re given can be a serious chore. It takes ages and not all of them are interesting. Most cRPGs label all NPCs and you can differentiate important ones from flavour ones by having a name rather that just “citizen” or “guard”. This game doesn’t and that can feel like too much “realism” sometimes.

5. The game follows exactly the FO1&2 system whereby your companions are under (*cough*) AI control, not yours. There is a system of sorts that allows you to set general orders for them and some specific orders in battle but it’s very clunky and often annoying. I would much rather the game allowed me to control my party and was rebalanced accordingly. IMO this is a mistake. Even if it’s what Fallout 1&2 did not everything about those games was good, and this is a prime example IMHO.

6. This is a zero hand holding game. No quest map markers. Precious little instructions in the journal. Skyrim it is not. ‘Nuff said.

One might be forgiven for thinking a list of problems like that would spell the kiss of death for a game, but as I said above this game is worth a lot more than the sum of it’s parts. It’s a tough survival-centric hard core cRPG and if you’ve played and beaten games like Pathfinder Kingmaker, Wasteland 2 and of course the original Fallout games then for all it’s faults I recommend giving it serious consideration.

This is a qualified, quite heavily qualified, recommendation. Not everybody would find this game worth their time and money because it has one unfortunate fundamental problem in an otherwise extremely well designed and (for an indie title) produced game:

The game is basically XCOM2 style combat meets Invisible Inc style stealth, but (in very simple terms) the combat is too difficult and the stealth is too easy to be entirely satisfying.

However it is also a ripsnorting good cold war spy thriller/mystery with a great story and atmosphere, a very interesting strategic layer that IMHO surpasses XCOM's strat layer by some margin, a mass of spy related mechanics and gismos to play with and just enough good, exiting, challenging missions to carry it. Plus there are certain ways you can play that will increase the “good mission” count somewhat.

So if you are into the cold war spy thing, the game is definitely worth a look, because apart from this difficulty problem, it is very good. I am so that is why I enjoyed it through to the end and make this qualified recommendation and I certainly recommend keeping a close eye on this studio in the future, they've got a real blockbuster in them IMO. But if you're looking for something like XCOM but better, it isn't, and if you're looking for something like Invisible Inc but better, it isn't.

So some detail on “the problem”.

The heart of the problem is that every mission map is both a stealth map and a combat map at the same time – you always start in stealth and if you get caught you go into combat. In the early game when you are new to the mechanics and make mistakes and your agents are still pretty useless this works brilliantly – you get a nail biting tense stealth section followed by a terrifying desperate escape attempt against seemingly insuperable odds. Would that it continued that way, but sadly it doesn't.

Once you learn the stealth mechanics it becomes, in most routine missions (and there are a LOTS of routine missions) it becomes far too easy to 100% complete the maps in pure stealth by rinsing a repeating exactly the same formula. If it's possible to do it in pure stealth (and in the overwhelming majority of missions it is) then it's also pretty straight forward to figure out how. It becomes repetitive and therefore boring and unsatisfying.

You can spice things up by deliberately starting open combat of course. But the problem with this is you can't clear a map in a satisfying way – the game sends infinite waves of reinforcements against you – and more importantly open combat severely punishes you at the strategic layer because it blows you agents cover, causes injuries which take a long time to heal up and other things that are for one reason or another awkward, difficult and/or expensive to deal with at the strat layer.

So it's basically stealth FTW, which is of course in keeping with the theme of the game, but unfortunately stealth is too easy most of the time.

You can however improve your game by doing certain things:

Play on hard difficulty – this is because you can't hide bodies on hard and that is going to make missions more interesting and cause a few more combat initiations (which although not optimal can be very welcome)

Get into capturing enemy agents alive as soon as possible. There are three separate ways this will improve your game:

a) You need to build the MKULTRA unit at you base to interrogate enemy agents properly. Once you have upgrade it to include a whole range of spy thriller related shenanigans (brainwashing, control phrases, locator beacons etc) to mess with the enemy spy networks and this is a major highlight of the game.

b) The intelligence you get from these enemy agents accelerates your game's progress getting you to meat and potatoes of the game's story faster with less filler routine missions to grind through.

c) Aside from the main story missions (which are on the whole pretty good although there are not that many of them compared to routine fare) the best missions in the game by far are the enemy base assault missions, especially the ones where there are three enemy agents on the map. This is because unlike most other missions these agents are not tagged for you on the map so you have to find them yourself, and this is dangerous and scary. It is decently challenging and pretty satisfying to finish these missions in pure stealth carrying three enemy agents out alive ready for processing in your MKULTRA.

The way you get more of these missions is to implant locators in previously captured enemy agents and release them which after a short time will give you their hideout location.

This an extremely well made and excellent game, much better than it has any right to be. If you like games like Maount & Blade or XCOM this is a no-brainer pick. It's a gem. There are three things people complain about mainly:

* lack of modding support
* RNG
* Grind

The lack of modding support is an issue, it will hurt the logevity of the game (compared to Mount & Blade for example) but ultimately this a low budget indie title, the devs have the choice to continue supporting this game or making another even better one, and they've chosen to do the latter. As far as I'm concenred that's their choice and good luck to them.

The RNG in this game is pure - no quarter asked or given to either the player or the AI. As such it can be brutal. It's supposed to be. But just like XCOM the extent to which the RNG can wreck you is directly proportional to your skill and atteention to detail. It will casue you ro lose brothers occasionally but if you play well it won't cause you to lose battles or the game itself. It will merely amplify the consequences of bad decisions and losing your cool.

Finally to the question of grind. It is important to understand that this game is desinged to be played ironman. In ironman mode it is a test of skill, nerve and charcter. It is incredibly exiting and creates stories with intense highs and lows, joys and sorrows, successes and failures and also creates all sorts of different characters to colour the journeies.

But if you savescum the game loses all of that magic and becomes repetative, predictable, grindy and ultimnately pointless. You have been warned. Don't fire up this game and think you're going to win it first time out. Just play ironman and expect to last a few days and die horribly first time. Then try again and last a little longer maybe. That way you will learn to play so much better and get the real experience of Battle Brothers.

Not convinced? All you got to do is weatch a few LPs of even the best players. You will hear a constant litany of whining:

"Oh no. NOOOOOO!"
"You cannot be serious!"
"Why did I do that, Just WHY!"
"He missed again! OMG he missed again"
"OMG, they've got three marksmen. I think we've had it"
"I should have retreated. I know I should have retreated. Why didn't I retreat?"

When even the best players can be reduced to tears. you know you've got a really good game on your hands.

I recently picked up Endless Space on sale and was pleasantly surprised that I found it to be a much better game than I had expected. If you enjoy space 4X games like GalCiv2 or you wanted to try one out, I think this is a good pick. Overall it is well designed in all areas and a lot of thought has been put into both the UI and the game play mechanics.

One highlight of the game is the depth of the star system development systems. There are a lot of different planet types (about 11) with different and plausible characteristics, moons and bonus resources and there up to six planets per system which are dealt out randomly for each new game. There are also a lot of different techs to research related to colony development that significantly affect what planets you can colonise and how you can develop them. This adds up to a richer experience in this area than,say, GalCiv2, and also sets up a different challenge and opportunity set for each new game since easily colonisable planets are rare and you can't colonise difficult ones willy-nilly until teched up to do so.
You do need to do a fair bit of micromanagement to develop your empire as specific build orders and priority choices are necessary for effective play. The game allows you to set an AI helper to devop a system for you but this is mostly not recommended because it tends to colonise new planets in a system too early leading to a big drop in approval (probably becasue they use the same algorythms the AI factions use and they do not suffer the same level of approval hits as you do).
The fleet combat system is surprisingly fun and exiting IMO. Getting attacked (and you will be) is an adrenalin-fueled experience because unlike GalCiv2 you do not know the strength of configuration of enemy ships except when in actual battle so you can easily find youself on the receiving end of a nasty butt-kicking and enemy ships crawling all over your systems. Unlike many 4X and strategy games in Endless Space there are several things you can do about this, it's not necessarily game over.

Firstly you can play the rock-paper-scissors ship design game which follows GalCiv's system of mass driver/beam/missile countered by armour/shield/point defence repectively. The key mechanic is that unlike most games you can instantly retrofit your existing ships if you have the money to do so, so one key military tech and a refit can turn the tables very quickly (and of course the enemy can do that to you too). Secondly you can deploy heroes (with combat bonuses) and play the second level rock-paper-scissors game of tactical battle cards to win crucial fights against the odds. Thirdly you can build defence structures in your systems that can massively slow down attempts to invade them, much more so than in , say, GalCiv giving you time to up-tech and refit. It becomes apparent as you play that a lot of thought has gone into this and it works surprisingly well IMO.

The diplomacy systems are well presented but I have not played long enough to evaluate how good the the diplomacy AI (including victim selection) systems really are. It seems to be pretty good and sensible at certain things, but be unable to adapt its strategy if what its trying to do diplomatically doen't work. For example my neighbour is the strongest faction in the game and gets into a war on three fronts. He desparatly wants an alliance with me and keeps asking for one (which is a sensible goal) but I won't play ball becasue I want to cut him down to size and steal some of his juicy systems. What he couldn't do was realise this was the case and cosy up to someone else to before attacking me instead, he couldn't interpret my actions as the threat they were it seems. However diplomacy AI is extremely difficult to do given it has to compete with human capabilities of averice, treachery and cunning honed over millions of years of evolution: I rate it as above average at the moment, some way behind Paradox's CK2 and EUIV but ahead of GalCiv2.

In summary I think this game is well designed and fun to play so long as you enjoy tinkering with star system development and ship designs over time between adrenalin fueled war episodes. Not ground-breaking, not a classic, but above average.