Recent reviews by GGRPG

Not worth it at this price, absolutely overpriced. I'm not going to list everything I find good or bad, but here's what I felt was most important.

Pros:
1. EXCELLENT GAMEPLAY, combat is fun and all the vocations are fun. Boss battles keep you on your toes and it's a blast to climb on top of enemies to reach the weak spot. There's a vocation for everyone and this keeps the game interesting to discover what each of them has to offer.
2. INTERESTING MAP. It invites exploration and there's plenty of biome variety.


Cons
1. WORST QUEST DESIGN I'VE SEEN. Quests feel like work, not like fun. Most of the time you'll be the fetch-me-this person instead of the dragonslaying hero. This is my main objection and I'll go in more detail with it:

a. DULL FETCH QUESTS. Plenty of them will play like this: Character A needs something from Character B, go find him in the other side of the city (or the world sometimes). You run the distance and talk to Character B, who probably asks you to fetch a material, deliver it, and come back to Character A. That's it, rinse and repeat. Sometimes they'll just ask for specific objects, which most of the time you have in your storage. You got and fetch it, deliver it, and then it turns out they want more materials, so go run back to your storage and grab it. Running around is not fun.

b. ESCORT QUESTS. So. Many. Escort. Quests.

c. BUGGED QUESTS: There are far too many ways in which a quest can get blocked for things out of your control and you're forced to come up with "gamey" solutions to test what can get it back on track. A character you don't know is essential died off-screen (fell of a cliff, mobs, etc) and the quest doesn't start or can't continue. Someone you need to talk to spawned somewhere it shouldn't. To mention a few. The game never tells you anything about it and you have to go search it on the internet.

d. NO PROPER GUIDANCE OR SENSELESS SOLUTIONS. And yes, I know you can hire pawns that have already completed the quest, but there are still too many where no pawn will help you. When you go and search for the solution, it tends to have a forced and senseless rationale. You'll get the feeling that whoever wrote this did it not for the sake of fun, but to add more difficulty artificially.

e. UNNECESSARY WAITING. Quests will continuously ask you to wait a day or more to continue. Some have the audacity to ask you to come back to the quest giver, only to be given a small update and be told you need to wait even more. I don't know what the point of this is, but having to run great distances to the inn, camp or chair just to wait and then come back is a waste of time.

2. THE STORY IS A MESS. You can say bye to any aspirations of great plots, deep world-building and character depth. It had some progression in the first section, but after reaching the desert continent, writing is all-over the place and its quality takes a dive. To illustrate the lack of sense of progression and good storytelling structure: I was completing a couple of the main quests, and out of nowhere I'm fighting the dragon that's supposed to be the final boss (this fight is way easier than it should).

Let me close with this: there's not even a final boss and the ending is so unrewarding that is an outrage. Those who played DD1 remember how the Dragon was THE big bad. It's final fight is a combination of a chase sequence and actual fight while the dragon is bringing down an entire fortress on top of you. It one of the most cinematic boss fights you can have, and it comes with some of the most beautiful soundtracks in gaming and dialogue that makes you shiver.

In DD 2, he shows up out nowhere, asks if you want to fight, and you kill him. The dragon barely has any impact, its not prevalent in the story, and its not the main antagonist, favoring a guy called Phaesus throughout the whole game. So much for DRAGON's Dogma.

After playing for over 150+ hours, I waited until the 1.2 patch to see if this game's issues would be solved. They haven't.

The worst of which: this is a game about waiting. Wait until a building is constructed, then wait for the other one, and then the other one. You try to make it more enjoyable by constructing buildings that help you build things faster. And yet, performance is so poor that even at maximum speed, you'll have to wait approximately 5 or more minutes to finish each building. The situation is terrible playing with great powers, and it becomes horrible when playing with minors because not only the game's performance falls drastically the more you play, but you have a small construction sector where buildings take forever to finish.

Diplomacy is horrible, war is still in early access, so the game's most important aspect is the economy, and it's the same cycle of waiting for buildings to finish. Fun at first, while you experiment. Terrible later, when you notice almost all your game time, with every single country, consists of you looking at your screen doing nothing. I had the hopes that implementing the private construction pool would make it fast enough to solve the issue, but it's still a long way to go.

Edit: I see some people have considered this review useful, so here's a freeLC of what you'll be getting with Victoria 3.

If that wasn't enough, this revolutionary waiting "mechanic" permeates into everything:

Want to change a law? You have to wait quite a while until a meter fills up, then a dice roll decides if the law passes or if you have to keep waiting for it to fill again. Repeat it until fortune favors you. And if the current ruling group doesn't want this law? Guess what: you have to wait until one that does it is strong enough because otherwise you're most likely going to have an illegitimate government that can't pass laws.

Want to go to war? You have to wait for another meter to fill up. Did the war start? You do nothing, just stay there until your generals or the enemy start battles automatically and hope you win.

I repeat: This is not something you realize at first while you learn, but with time you'll see most of this game consists of you staring at your screen doing NOTHING besides clicking some buttons from time to time. Where's the fun in waiting for a building while waiting for a law, while waiting for a war while waiting for a battle, so we can wait more while we're waiting? There are many games focused on economy that have a more proactive gameplay without sacrificing complexity, but this is not one of them. Victoria 3 is best described as the most "proactive" idle game in the market.

Infinite hours of joy. High replayability. Played it with a friend and we have had an amazing experience so far, besides a few bugs. Modding can make it even better, but be careful not to break it.

It represents a fun logistical and political challenge to control your gang and struggle for the control of the underworld. It has amazing potential to be even better, the developers are very active and read all concerns. For now, it lacks some depth, but I'm sure the developers will continue working on it to make this one of the best management simulators.

You made the second great tale of the new update a PVP zone. Now there's people standing there solely waiting for other players to kill them. My friend and I first suffered a bug because the campers finished the puzzles first, but it took 30 minutes to notice the game was stuck. Then we find the 3-4 campers in a room no player can't avoid. How could you have not predicted this would happen? Campers have the potential of ruining the whole experience of your new update, just as spawn campers ruin it for the normal mode. I can't even report it in the game because their names are not saved and I can't remember them. You make it too easy for toxicity to take over your game, fix it! If this was a free game, fine, but I paid for this and I demand the experience isn't ruined by your mistakes.

Sin haber jugado el primer Evil Genius, como muchos encuentro la secuela decepcionante.

La interfaz no es cómoda, los controles de la cámara y posicionamiento de objetos son irritantes, pero lo peor en mi experiencia es la mecánica de cómo lidiar con los agentes invasores: debes hacerles clic uno a uno y seleccionar uno de tres botones para poder lidiar con ellos.

No suena que sea mucho, pero es increíblemente frustrante cuando te llegan 5 agentes cada 2 minutos y a todos deben seleccionarlos uno a uno en el momento que salen del yate o si no tus esbirros no harán nada para detenerlos. Todo el aspecto de gestión requiere demasiado de tu atención y así es difícil poder jugar como un villano (más bien se siente como profesor de kindergarden).

El mapa del mundo para llevar a cabo tu plan de dominación mundial no tiene variedad, solo hay tres tipos de misiones: dinero, bajar tensión, secuestrar personaje. No hay riesgo de fracaso, los esbirros son como una moneda para llevar estas misiones a cabo, pero de estos tienes un número infinito. Hay misiones que se tardan una hora en completarse. ¿Cuál es el desafío? ¿Cuál es la diversión?

El resultado final es un juego aburrido que no vale la pena hasta que los desarrolladores lo reestructuren casi por completo. Mastermind: World Conqueror hizo un mucho mejor trabajo que Evil Genius 2 en casi todos los aspectos, y ese es un juego de navegador gratuito.

Boring as no other.