Recent reviews by Hephaestos

Good puzzles.

free weekend so not much play... and that's also because I didn't want to dig into it further.
The tutorial sux..... It's blocks of text telling you to go in menus, but once you open them, you can't see the tutorial's instructions.
They also tell you to do stuff without telling you how (pray x god who's not in the list), and make you build armies that bankrupt you... maybe tell about economy a bit more?

Also i rapidly got tired of the old cat and mouse fleeing army dance as in all paradox games. If you don't kill them, they come back full strenght, so pursue..... Done that a lot in their games already, not willing to spend hours on it again.

There's plenty of options and i'm sure the senate seems interesting to try to juggle, but at my level, i don't have the patience for this anymore. If you didn't over play paradox games, then i'm sure there's plenty to love here.

Free weekend... that's a crash every 6-7 minutes. Deleted the game on Uplay and installed on steam.... crashed after 6 ennemies.

This is ridiculous.

How is this game rated so high?

It's good, but there's plenty of enerving things.

Out of combat uses the same mechanics as combat but way way faster... so buffs last a few seconds.... and debuffs that are just a thorn in combat become the deadliest thing in the game. Add to this that magic activation, aiming, casting is slow as heck, it makes the hardest part of combat planning ahead your healing/debuffing before killing the last ennemy.

That's the reason why i'm writting this actually. Just finished a fight, rather easily... with my main guy having used immolate, so in the middle of a pool of fire. he's fine but i clicked to get him out of there and my whole team went in follow mode.... My 2 casters (undamaged in the fight) dead in seconds. Ridiculous. A) they should avoid the fire, B) i should have time to heal them, but no every step ticks....

Bah! wether it's my fault or a flaw of the game, it removes much of the enjoyment. My negative is to reflect this. the game is still good.

so i bought this game at launch and now there's a "prime status upgrade" while the base game I have is transformed to "free to play"....looks like team fortress... but NO, WTF!!!! this is worse than DLC, there's an actual downgrade to current owners of the game!! and the "DLC" adds what is being removed....
Other games that turn free to play give you a compensation or a prefered status, this one took away stuff and set you as "random grunt #1567157"

not that i've been playing the game much, just saw the "update" and felt compelled to post on this nonsense.

edit: I just saw this "Additionally, all existing CS:GO players have had their accounts upgraded to Prime Status."... well the game still asks me to pay 13,25€.

great adaptation of the board game. that and single player AI is well made so you can have fun alone too.

(free weekend)
Well my biggest grief with the game is that it's way too easy to die as a beginner... I mean we start, 30 paces in we hear gunshots, it's an other player, we target him from hiding....shoot, he flees, i shoot 2 more rounds then I get hit by a mob, kill him, see my partner is dead a few feet away, an other mob hits me, i reload, i'm dead.
yeah sure, i needed to move more, to melee the guy more than once.... still, full team wipe in less than a minute.

I'm sure the game gains to be played more, but this is a free weekend, so not enought time to learn a game that doesn't want to be learned.

Other negative is the aiming... felt slugish, especially against players that just strafe left right as in all fpses...
Also, i often shot with no ammo, the click sound should be different, louder.. I mean with a real gun you have the absence of kickback that is a direct tell, here you hardly notice it. In all i'm not a fan so i'm not recomending it.

I KSed the thing because it was recommended by SC and they were making tech deals with them (must have meant they had something under the hood right).... well i'm glad I did. This is not the type of game i'd pick up on release, but man would I have been missing on an experience.
2 things:
_ The picture you see in the shop are not what you see in game (there's less people, though i've had a good dozen on screen at a time and the scenes are less dynamic). Well there are cinematics, these are more packed.
_ This game tries to put you in the shoes of a peasant trying to make something of himself... you're not a superman/connan hybrid who can do sword wheelies to mow down crowds. If you don't defend, you die fast, and good AI (usually the NPCs with a shinning armor) can parry, counter and make you feel helpless... until you learn how to fight.


The game is gorgeous, but there are bugs, graphical ones (you can get rid of them by opening the map and closing it), hung conversations (happened to me twice... on at the same spot), fell through the world once (6 feet... but enough to be stuck), and there's plenty of collision errors with stairs and lowly elevated terrain (solved by jumping usually). So in my 30+ hours of play, i've lost about 2hrs due to bugs.... and it's not that enoying. Why? Because the game is punishing on it's own. You have limited save capacity (sleep in a real bed or use a rare potion) and your days last over an hour... make the quick math, you'll often will have been wandering the land for a while without saving when you get ambushed and lose everything. Now this is frustrating, until you accept it as a game design... I mean people play diablo in hardcore mode... this is way less punishing and also fits in the hard times theme.
Other than that, do know that the voice acting is top notch in this game, it's never a hassle to listen to the characters (i have subs enabled and seldom skip the voice), there are quite a few things happening in the wild... i've even encountered mini wars of 3vs3 people, been ambushed by a tree on the road.... they get creative besides the basic "attack him". Heck I even found a body with a blood trail that led me to a bandit camp. The world does feel alive, and that's what makes this game great.

This game is made to sunk in time without the feel of grinding. The quest are basically go there and fight, while activating 1-2 objectives, and feels a bit samey due to it being a tps, but in all it's entertaining and flows quite well. There's a wealth of missions and NYC has a lot of variety in the streets, so yeah, entertaining is the good word.

I played the free weekends... so will I buy the game?... no. I have too many other games that I already own unplayed too little time. If I didn't already have that backlog, this might be different as it fills a nice slot as an everlasting shooter/looter. So i'm putting a positive rating none the less, as this game is worth it's promotional price. Don't buy it full price however (barely any game is worth it anymore... sadly).

It's getting there... slowly.

One of the kickstarters I regret backing so high.
Only 90$ level... still much more than I should have, there was plenty of exclusive stuff.... then the remainder of the developpment became like being registered to a home deco magazin, with tons of new stuff to buy at each newsletter, houses, land deeds, decoration, clothing, tools, weapons.... The game's moto is "You thought of something you could buy? well we sure can sell it to you!". Really feels like the backers are cash cows here. Oh they might get a game in the end, maybe a good one even, but Lord British is sure to have funded his new trip to space.