Recent reviews by urknighterrant

Wow. What a remarkably forgettable experience!

I kinda liked the story idea. I loved the way they made fun of disaster histrionics by making toilet paper the in-game currency. The game play, however, was tedious and the art was uninspired. It reminded me a LOT of playing the old Akklaim South Park title back in the N64 days. I hated that game. Except maybe the split screen multiplayer. That was fun.

But I digress...

In the end, trying to turn South Park into a 3d world is just a really terrible idea. You won't get immersed into the game the way you can in most 3d games because, no matter how perfectly you reproduce the art style. it can never LOOK like South Park. South Park, as we have all lived it for SO many years, is a 2d experience.

The game play was just kind of a grind. If you like fast and furious hack n'slashers you might like this. Think Diablo, but without the in depth party dynamics, elegant combat system, and rich variety of enemies. And very low rez.

Meh.

There just aren't enough days in a person's life to waste on this kind of meh, so... No. Don't buy.

My rig is WAY over spec for this game, but even with the graphics set to the floor frame rate dropped to about ONE FRAME PER MINUTE. Locked up my damn rig. It wouldn't even bring up the pause screen. I had to use the task manager to stop the program.

I really wanted to love this game the way I loved the old Elite, but I may never know.

Anyway... I paid good money for a game that won't run, so... No. I can't recommend it.

Perfect.

I have not watched an episode of South Park in 10 years, and this game really felt like coming home. The 2d side scrolling format gives the entire game the feel that you're exploring the town with the kids from South Park. Visually, it feels like you're watching on TV...

The need to mash button combos to launch special attacks annoyed me at first, but it really does add to the game and if you can't do combos well... you can still beat the game. A lot of the games humor is locked behind your failures, making the occasional (or not so occasional) failure much more fun than smoking the game.


Perfect.

The JRPG combat format was another perfect choice. The system is pretty rudimentary, but it's still fun and engaging.

The turn based combat is absolutely essential to the game, but the blocking mechanic can be difficult you're trying to do quicktime actions while your entire body is convulsing with laughter and your eyes are ful of tears.

This will happen. More than a few times.

And that's the real magic of this game. The writing is magnificent. When you play a South Park game, you want South Park humor. This game delivers. It pokes fun at everyone and everything, and just like the show... If you can't take an occasional ribbing, don't bother. South Park brutally mocks EVERYTHING... Even YOU.

If you have a thin skin, South Park the Stick of Truth is NOT for YOU. Just like the TV show.

If you love South Park you'll love this game, even if you're not a fan of the JRPG genre.

This is a genuinely good game. Buy it.

Magnificently underwhelming. This is a wretchedly mediocre reboot of one of the greatest strategy games ever made.

I really like the combat. Very "Shadowrun Returns."

Everything else about this new version of X-Com is a pale shadow of the original game.

Glitz.
Sparkle.
Shallow, unlikable NPCs that tend to get a teeny bit repetitive.

Yay.

What made the old game great has been distilled down to small, easy-drinking shots of sickly sweetened liquors. It has an almost mobile-game quality. Buy the original. It's better. And probably cheaper.

Edit:
OK... I have put some real time into it. It IS X-Com, after all, and... That matters. It does FEEL like X-Com, at least, even if it's a particularly "meh" entry into the franchise.

Like I mentioned... The combat system is GREAT. It's true to the original experience, but it's using properly modern gaming conventions. It's much smoother and slicker than the original game, without being meaningfully different. Again... it reminds me very much of the Shadowrun Returns franchise, all of which I recommend highly.

But...

The STRATEGIC part of the game is basically pointless. You have ONE base. You never have to worry about the aliens finding or attacking it. You don't have to worry about storage space or barracks. You don't have to garrison your bases with high tech troopers and build point defense platforms to protect them.

You will never fight a pitched battle in a magnificently rendered 3D environment of a base map that you built.

That ENTIRE aspect of the game has simply been removed.

Dropping the procedural map generation for the battlefields utilized by the previous games was a mistake, IMHO. The pre-rendered maps are certainly pretty, but I preferred the variety and unpredictability of the maps in the original game.

This prioritization of style over substance is pretty typical of this game. To make matters worse, the "style" is not always particularly well executed. The admittedly necessary addition of voice acting, for example, has done this game no favors. While it's the same plot as the original game, the writing that has been trowled on top of it is AWFUL.

Look... If (like me) you have played the original games many times, and you're desperate for ANYTHING X-Com, this title will be adequate. Just... Wait for a sale.

Otherwise? This is really NOT a good game. If you really want to know why X-Com fans love this franchise so much, play the original game. This "modern," dumbed-down version of the game is a pale shadow of the rich experience that awaits you, there.

This game is a seriously over-rated exercise in mediocrity.

I really wanted to like Kingmaker, but I just don't. The writing is terrible. There is no plot progression. At first level you are tapped to build a kingdom? Seriously? I mean, fine... skip the rats in the basement quest... But JEEZE. At least make me earn an audience with the two most powerful figures in town. And what's with the Barbarian? She left her tribe, slew a frost giant, and stole his sword... AT FIRST LEVEL? Really? And she didn't get a SINGLE xp out of it?

This is some seriously weak, elementary school, fanfic level writing, here.

There are problems with the game design too. The worst of them is that there is no way to flee from combat. Often the only winning strategy to an encounter in an RPG is to swallow your pride and hoof it. Not in this game. In this game you're a bunch of lunkheads too proud and stupid to run away from an enemy that can easily TPK you.

I appreciate the attempt to offer a spiritual successor to Baldur's gate, but this is a hard fail. The game has a few nice points. Graphically it felt like Baldur's Gate. I was actually incredibly excited at first glance. I was even willing to forgive the amateur writing... Until the gameplay fell apart.

The games strongest point is the way they treat NPCs. It was a breath of fresh air to have NPC's that cared about the decisions you make. They were, as I mentioned, a little over the top but they did have interactions and banter with one another, which was nice.

But overall?

Nope.

A for effort. But I don't give passing grades for effort. Overall grade: F.

Next time hire a damned writer, and don't force players to stupidly engage every random monster that crosses their path. Even Final Fantasy 1 had a "flee" action back in 1987. Baldur's Gate... the alleged spiritual inspiration for this game, had a flee option when it was published in 1998.I think it's reasonable to expect a game published in 2018 to have a similar, or even (God forbid) better option to allow for tactical retreats.

Ugh. I am SO disappointed. Game breaking bug in the TUTORIAL. There's just no excuse for that.

"Go deal with the pirate fleet captain."

Fine. I land on the planet, slaughter scores of pirates. No fleet captain. Search the surrounding area. No fleet captain. Finally I cheat and do a google search.

I had walked right past where the NPC was supposed to be, it just never spawned.

Typical Bethesda.

Do not buy. Give them a few months to iron out the bugs.

This game can be summed up in one word...

Meh.

Get it on sale if you like Lovecraftian horror, and keep your expectations low.

Still, I did give it a thumbs up...

If I had to offer one word to the designers as advice, that word would be, "verisimilitude." Don't cover your start area with monsters. Ease the player into the horror of the world. The starting harbor should be be a harbor. Maybe a few strange hints foreshadowing the horrors to come, but it's a little much to see piles of dead fish, half eaten sharks and octopus, and mutant rats... cats... crats... whatever they are... running around as soon as you step off the boat.

On the up side, it's a decent (if flawed) open world experience. The story is a bit of a cliche, but it does seem to have a player influenced path and (while I normally disapprove of deconstructing classic genres to appeal to "modern audiences") I do rather like the way it has strayed from Lovecraft's simple-minded (and completely racist) "purity of blood" moral tropes and replaced it with more modern commentary about power and corruption. It made for a much more complex world, and made it much harder to decide which path was the "right" one. I also loved the way the game treats the KKK as a bunch of self-aggrandizing clown shoes. Lovecraft is rolling in his grave and I'm OK with that. I adore the man's horror, but he was a POS human being and he deserved to die penniless and unrecognized in his day. This is one of many instances where a mediocre world's inability to recognize genius has actually proven a just force in the moral curve of the universe.

The save/inventory/rest/healing/combat systems are hopelessly outdated. Whole maps are copied and pasted to the point that all the building interiors are basically the same. The insanity meter is stupidly executed. The game only managed to reach a fraction of its potential... But, while it's not worth its current $40 price point, it is worth playing.

Just... Wait for it to go on sale.

Buyer beware. My laptop more than meets the recommended system requirements, and the game runs smooth as butter for 7 minutes at a time. Then the graphics card overheats and the blue-screen-of-WTF pops up, even with all the graphics settings set to low. I'm going to hang on to it. Once my kid is out of private school I'll buy a nice desktop rig and play it then. Just be aware that meeting, even exceeding, the system requirements is no guarantee the game will run.

Update 2/11/23:
OK... I bought a brand new, honkin' fast system with active cooling, an NVIDIA 3080ti GPU, and 16 gigs of RAM.

Game crashes on start.

Look... I got it running, EVENTUALLY. But JEEZE guys... Do BETTER. I will update again when I get a little actual game time under my belt.

EDIT: 9/15/23

OK... For the first time EVER I have changed my recommendation for a game. I don't know if my new rig (which is WAY over spec for the game) is just handling the hell out of a badly optimized game, or if CDPR has just updated the code, but it ran pretty seamlessly after the first crash.

Not a bad RPG within the limits in the medium. Like most cRPGs that try to dabble in moral ambiguity, the conversations break down completely by the end of the game.

"Johnny, we're both dead. We're on borrowed time. Rouge is still alive. Panam is still alive. I don't want to throw in with Arasaka any more than you do, but this is the ONLY way to save what's left of my skin without risking getting one of them killed."

Nope. Not an option. The writer never even thought of it.

It's an intrinsic limit of the CRPG. You really CAN'T write a menu driven conversation that allows for actual role playing. This is why pretty much any attempt to write a morally ambiguous RPG for a computer is... well... pointless.

But hey... A for effort, even if the end result is a C+.

Look, this is a good mod. It's just a mod. Kinda railroady, and modders do love to fix stuff that isn't broken.

It kept crashing on my machine, which more than meets the recommended tech requirements (it runs Skyrim smooth as butter). I got tired of it and uninstalled the game, but this isn't a common complaint so I assume it's a hardware problem specific to my rig.

Give it a play. I regret not being able to continue it. It really was a good game, just not so great that I was willing to deal with the frustration of the constant crashes.

While this game isn't nearly as bad as many people claim it is, it's still not a good game. I wanted to like it, but in the end... I just lost interest. It got... and it pains me to say this about a Mass Effect title... boring.

The company that made this game just isn't Bioware anymore. It's EA and, like everything EA, it's just relentlessly mediocre.