Recent reviews by erdelf

Quite an interesting new take on Civ. I do love the improvements on V and VI.

The new age system is quite nice to focus your goals.
For example starting with a military expansion civ to quickly reserve your initial area..
switching to a commercial civ (really profitable in the second age due to crossing oceans),
and ending with a science military civ to wipe the other factions via high tech.

An improved System for having a lot of cities..
by having most of them be towns that convert production to cash. Quite nice in the later ages.

Barbarians and city states are now more or less merged, by starting some of them as hostile.. and making them more or less upgrades.. starting from one tile, and slowly upgrading to proper city states.


Some negatives that I'm sure will be patched soon:
All victories are enabled and you can't disable them
Larger map size
Tech-wise ends in late WW2 with nukes.

TL;DR: This game is one of the worst AAA titles I played in some time.

Extremely railroady, bugs and crashes galore.
Requires extremely precise attacks, but has no lock-on, and doesn't even try to hit people.
That with slow combat that animation-locks you to death.
Bugs like people stabbing the air and killing you, ramming their weapons into their allies, somehow killing you.
On top of that the usual Nixxes port crashes.

Tons of invisible walls trying to railroad you into very specific ways, and the game absolutely fails if you somehow break free of it, forcing you to reload the checkpoint. Worse than linear action games.

All around, worst AAA game I've played in some time.

Wonderful new take on the story RPG genre.
This game was legitimately a surprise to me, but I got hooked early.
Fully and beautifully voiced, a game where your build matters in deduction and conversations, and decides how you are able to continue.

Overall I fell in love with this game in my first session, that quickly turned to 7 hours, and it just keeps on giving.

A very well made real time strategy game with the unique spin of having to handle the swarm.
The swarm is basically the only resource you care about, you don't have to mine gold or similar stuff but you start every encounter with 32k drones, and only later upgrades allow you to repair them after death.
If you manage to loose all your drones you lost, the entire point is to constantly use the swarm in creative ways to protect your mothership and destroy enemies at the same time.
Especially the energy move later is a tough decision to make as you can use even more drones to strengthen other drones, making for example for stronger walls that can withstand laser barrages.

As I participated in the second and third playtest I can also attest to how much the devs were willing to listen to the community during development, and a lot of stuff was tweaked or outright changed due to feedback.
The devs took the time to listen to the players and even discussed some possibilities with them.

To properly review this game, I have to differ between episodes 1-4 and 5.

Episode 1-4.

It was boring to say the least.
The setting was boring, the characters inconsistent.
The lack of knowledge about time travel mechanics disturbing.
The logic of the characters is pretty inconsistent.
It was always kinda strange to hear about something from a character that wasn't even there.
And these boring characters were really stupid most of the time.
The main character was bland and is mostly a whiny little kid.
The choices were.. a bit stupid, but mostly ok.


Episode 5:

The story went completely linear...
the choices you made before decided the linear line-out here.
the characters were stupid enough before, here they went completely stupid.
The stupid made up inconsistent rules about time rewind, were stupid enough before...
but here they are the focus.. the completely stupid focus.
(and made me even more angry at the the doc who reference in ep4.)

god... did I mention it was stupid !?

Note: pretty much a review-in-progress,
will probably be updated when important patches are coming.

Gameplay
it is kept simple through the whole game.
In the Tutorial you can easily test out all of the powers
(and get a exposition by bullies about your powers).
Through most of the game, you jump around,
try to hit the robots while you evade their shots.
A few nice mechanics like death rays and moving platforms are placed in the world.

Sound
Nicely done. It ties in with the atmosphere of the game
and doesn't distract too much.
The sfx are very nice as well (but the sound of one enemy seems to be cut off, the flying little enemy).

Graphics
Modelled completely in 3D this 2.5D side scroller has impressive graphics.
They look beautiful, but they don't distract.


Additional Notes:
The Boss fights are really a sudden change of difficulty.. so be prepared.
Sometimes little bugs happen (like one-sided invisible walls or missing collision), but they are mostly minor.
(Not sure about this one) The ability to punch is pretty much disabled through most of the game.. even tough it is one of the main characteristics of two powers.


Currently only 3 levels plus tutorial are available.

An sich ein gutes Spiel mit einer übersichtlichen Oberfläche und einem themenentsprechendem Design.
Die Maussteuerung ist einfach zu erlernen und es ist generell sehr verständlich gehalten.

Für Anhänger der Vorgänger allerdings nicht zu empfehlen, da dieses hier, nur noch optional mit der Konsole arbeitet,
und diese auch nicht alles durchführen kann, was benötigt wird.