Recent reviews by Budo99

"It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."

If you've ever played a Warhammer 40K game or read one of its books or rulebooks, you are familiar with the above paragraphs. But where did it come from? Apparently, it was from the original Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader rulebook.

So imagine my complete lack of surprise when I say I have never played a WH40K game that has so perfectly captured the lore and feel of the 40K universe than Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader.

If you are a fan of videogames (check), especially story-based turn-based RPGs (yup!), and anything 40K (ditto), this game is practically mandatory for you to play.

But that doesn't mean it is a perfect game.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this title. As the titular Rogue Trader, you are one of the very, very few people in the 40K universe whose life actually doesn't stink. You are essentially a merchant prince with your own city-sized starship, millions of individuals under your complete rule, riches untold, and you are the master of an entire sector of the galaxy including all of the star systems, planets, and people within your domain. All are there under your protection and solely to serve your will.

So why do I feel like I am struggling half the time with pointless tasks?

Gameplay wise, if you've played Baldurs Gate 1&2 or any Pathfinder game from Owlbear you know what the game mechanics are like with Rogue Trader. First, there's an extremely long campaign - I clocked in at 130 hours, and that included the need for me to backtrack a couple of times for about 10 hours or so (more on that later).

There's fully-realized characters where you can build deep relationships. A mountain of text and story. Lots of tasks to perform, many of which are often menial. There's a massive pile of inventory to juggle. Bottom line, if you decide to play and complete this game, you have a long-term investment on your hands. More on that word later.

If you're looking for something quick and easy like the awesome Warhammer 40K: Inquisitor (ie, Diablo 40K), this is not it. Here, you have methodical turn based combat, inventory juggling, a dictionary full of different spells (I mean abilities) to juggle, a very deep, flexible, and comprehensive character leveling process, and combat that is 100% strategy and not action based whatsoever.

Ah, the combat. There's a lot of it. A lot. They practically force feed it to you in this game. For the most part I liked it, but didn't love it. Look, I dig turn-based combat (how could I not? Baldur's Gate 3 and XCOM2 are a couple of my all time favorites), but there were so many powers to juggle. Also, the terms they use here are not the normal RPG vocabulary (wounds = hit points/health? Exploits? Toughness?). At times - 100 hours in mind you - I was just hitting abilities in combat with no idea how they'd impact the fight. I just knew when I stacked them all on one target my sniper would do double damage. Oh you can dive into the details but it just never felt intuitive. At least the combat balance was ridiculously underpowered. There were maybe only a handful of times across the dozens and dozens of encounters where I seriously felt like I wasn't playing easy mode (I wasn't). In Rogue Trader, it is quite common to create an overpowered build for you and your party members, even without trying. Part of this is due to the amazing gear that would drop.

Ah the gear. Do you like gear? Do you? Well here's a mountain of it. Oh you like lasguns? Have 500 lasguns! And a thousand chainswords! You get a chainsword! You get a chainsword! You get a chainsword!

Now to be fair, the excess of gear, weapons, items, and valuables in this is excessive for a reason. It's focused on a unique goods-based economy from a cargo perspective. Think about it. You have at your disposal entire economies, so a treasure chest of gold pieces isn't going to move the needle for you. Instead, the buy/sell economy is built entirely around your ship's cargo, and any loot that isn't useful can be turned into tradable goods. Trading these goods builds your reputation and profit factor, and this allows you to immediately pick up the items you do want from faction vendors.

For example: let's say you picked up 1000 chainswords. You can convert that into Melee Weapons cargo. You then trade that cargo with a pirate faction, increase your profit factor with that faction to, for example, Level 15, and now you can buy that armor you wanted that's available from the pirate faction vendor at PF15. It's a bit clunky, but once you get the basics you start to think more as a merchant and less as a hoarder like you do in most RPGs.

Some other criticisms: if you're not careful you might miss out on a couple of side story beats and major characters, some of which might make you miss entire major plot points and quests. Oh you can finish the game without them - in fact you can technically remove all your party members and just play with generic NPC merc types to fill out your party - but there needed to be a more obvious path to recruitment for a couple of them. One of the characters required I replay an old save from an earlier chapter and required about 10 hours of backtracking. I'm glad I did because he was awesome; still, I wasn't a fan of the unnecessary repeated gameplay extension.

Speaking of characters, the romance stories are kind of hit or miss. They're generally well written and interesting, but the one NPC I had a particular interest in had such a difficult tightrope to walk to gain her favor, if you make one mistake it requires you to practically replay half the game. Sorry, not going to happen.

Finally the major story. The basics of it were great, but sometimes the lore and dialogue were so true to the universe that it could be difficult to follow and would require multiple glossary checks. I'm looking at you, Adeptus Mechanicus. Overall, though the plot was solid. This problem with the length and the pacing, though, is typical of Owlcat and its similar to the experience with the Pathfinder series. You will spend the first couple of acts getting absolutely blown away with the story's pacing and awesomeness, things eventually slow down, a bit later you'll get lost a couple of times figuring out what to do next, backtrack because some interesting side quests were ca

The Baldur's Gate series has been my all time favorite videogame series for decades.

DECADES.

I was optimistic when I saw previews that this game, while it might not hit the heights of BG1 and 2, would at least not embarrass the series. I thought it would be good, maybe even great at best.

I am so happy to be wrong.

This game is every bit as worthy as the others to sit in the pantheon of the Baldur's Gate series. It has leaped over my hopes and expectations for what this game could be. It reminds me of my first reaction to the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, or if the Disney Sequel Trilogy for Star Wars was as good as The Empire Strikes Back.

Well, 1 out of 2 ain't bad.

Thank you Larian. THANK YOU. It's so rare when something in our lives with such high expectations meets and exceeds our hopes. But you did it. You crazy bastards, you DID IT.

Wildermyth is brilliant. It's basically procedural RPG fantasy XCOM2 combined with Massive Chalice (that game by DoubleFine where you breed new heroes and they travel to different regions to prevent an apocalypse). The stories, characters and dialogue in this game are semi-procedurally generated. The impressive part is that it is good. It's cohesive. Interesting. Funny. Meaningful. I'm deeply impressed by this title. I agree with PC Gamer that basically said this game, while not the perfect RPG, is a milestone for how to develop RPGs in the future. I'm excited about this title, but I'm really excited about the games that are going to take this formula and evolve and expand upon it further. It's a great time to be a gamer.

I can't believe after playing this game literally over 20 years later how amazingly well the game still holds up. Still one of my all time favorite games, surpassed only by Baldur's Gate 2.

Just played about 40 hours in Dawn of Man, and I really enjoyed it a lot. Basically the game is a combination of Stardew Valley, Banished, and a better version of the tribal stage in Spore.

The game ranged between slow (sometimes too slow) and challenging but never overwhelming. I was actually surprised how attached I became to my settlement which started with a small family of 6 in the paleolithic age that I got up to over 150 people in an ant-farm town in the iron age.

What I particularly liked about the game is how well-automated a lot of the tasks are. While you can certainly micromanage when things get slow, you don't have to dive into the details. You can assign tasks and areas where a job needs to be completed, and the settlement (and the individual settlers themselves) does a surprisingly good job automating the tasks and taking care of their needs so you can focus more on the strategy of how you want your set of tents to grow into a thriving town.

A special shout out to the artwork and the detail. There's such variety across the board where you don't feel like you're looking at the same 2 pieces of work unless you really dig for it. For example: there's different kinds of trees and grain and fruit. Sometimes you can get lost watching a family of bears as they go for a drink at the river. Does that bush of strawberries look tasty (it does!), well have one of your kids go pick them and bring them back to the settlement.

I only have a few minor quibbles. The game can get repetitive at times, which is not surprising because I'm certain that was what life was like for these folks, but the occasional random events other than raider attacks or disease would be especially welcome. Even random variations like a particularly tough winter or a flooding river would have thrown some additional welcome bumps in the road. The raider attacks were fairly straightforward to manage, although I have to acknowledge I played on the most straightforward scenario where the attacks are more of a minor challenge and not the main hurdle in some of the more difficult settings.

Overall, this game kind of reminds me of Euro Truck Simulator. A game where initially you wonder why you're playing it, then wonder why you're enjoying it so much - a kind of zen-out experience. This is definitely a game that I will return to again because it accomplished something that I find increasingly rare in city builders - it made me care about my little community.

Best one of the series yet. AC has revolutionized itself and Bayek is the best main character since Ezio