Recent reviews by FaolanHart

Atlas's magnum opus.; I truly mean that.
On a technical level it feels like all the best parts of the Persona series, refined from bloat & tedium. An engaging Job system much like that from Bravely Default, where each leveled Archetype, can, in-turn, empower the next with passives & unlocked skills.
As well as absolutely stunning UI that feels like the end point of the past Persona colour theory entries.
But truly what places this game so high for me is its writing.
Its proof that politics & social issues can enhance a game, they just need to be handled properly.
It is a story about the anxieties of life that make us all too human.
Prejudice, racism, classism. The corruption of power like nobility, religion, wealth & misguided ideals.
But also a story of unity, diversity, inner strength & utopian ideals.
Of the possible good mankind can achieve.
A self aware game that tells us that fantasy is not just a pointless distraction.
But something that gives up hope, inspires us, & provides safe haven when the real world seems too dire to face.
So long as we don't remain within, for that only leads to self-destruction.
Its characters are masterfully written, making you care deeply for some & utterly dispise others. There are no duds here, & each & every one of them deliver their lines with beautiful voice acting in which I could feel the emotion.
Due to such emotionally impactful writing, it left me in tears a multitude of times throughout the journey.
Its my new number one example of videogames being art.
Without question, my 2024 game of the year.

If this doesn't get GOTY there will be a riot.
While I think claims of "game of the decade" are a bit much.
Its not perfect, but it's damn near close.
To get the criticisms out of the way first. At the time of review.
* The game's feeling of player agency & choice goes out of the window for the most part in Act 3.
* Karlach's story is incomplete due to cut content, leaving only bad endings.
* Party & inventory management is far more fiddly than it needs to be. Games as far back as Dragon Age Origins have done this better.
* The Emperor can be a bit contrived at times.

Larian has done a good job at addressing other criticisms like hireling customisation, bugs & multiplayer issues.
So hopefully in time this list will nolonger apply.

Now on to the good.
Like Dragon Age Origins, Neverwinter Nights, & Pathfinder WOTR before it; BG3 is a game I will be coming back to for years to come.

There have been some changes to the very simple 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons to make classes often seen as weak more viable. The Monk & Ranger being prime examples.
But much of the 5th ed memes still apply. Yes Eldritch Blast & Fireball are still pretty much all you need.
The game does a better job then most at making your choices of race & class feel impactful.
Drow for example have a lot of interactivity due to their earned poor reputation in Faerun.
Doing a Jack Of All Trades run showcased just how many interactions there are for the classes.
Bards will usually have some smartass thing to say. Clerics something about their god, Druids something about nature.
Some class & race combinations will even have their own lines. Such as one early on specifically for a Tiefling Druid.
It has some of the best voice acting I have ever heard in a videogame, Lae'zel especially.
& pretty much every NPC, be they humanoid or animal. Sometimes even a corpse or two, will have something to say.
But not the player character, who is only partially voiced. Allowing you to fully roleplay your character how you want.
The game can get very serious & dark. But like any tabletop game I have played with friends, there are plenty of humorous & silly moments to break things up.

Act 1 especially is dripping with choice. So many ways to handle the various interactions.
Act 2 less so, but still very much open.
While Act 3 becomes a bit railroady in many areas. Some quests that feel vital & would make a lot of sense to tackle first,
such as the quests around the Steel Watch Foundry, can only be done at a much later point if you don't want to skip a bunch of content.

The companions are very strong in this game, a lot stronger than I thought they would be from the Early Access.
Lae'zel is a standout. Showing more growth over the game than any other companion in my playthrough.
Her romance is very sweet also. There is a lot more to her than the raw aggression many might only be able to see.
She is scared, has faith in her training & people & is overall a lot nicer than her kin.
Wyll feels like the true protagonist. A Warlock done right. With more depth than the typical evil power-hungry madman trope. He is a true hero through & through, is integral to much of the wider events & can have a very satisfying story.
Karlach is a big fiery puppy. The most wholesome & lovable member of the party. But its very obvious she was added late. She doesn't have much of a quest or conclusion. Although it can work out a little if you ship her with Wyll.
Minthara is a nice option for those who want to play as an evil bastard. Though also feels a bit lacking.
The rest I shall leave for you to discover. Astarion & Shadowheart are by far the most popular & already have a lot written about them.

The Dark Urge is a perfect addition for those of us who like to play as an evil bastard, & unlike most games BG3 does not shy away from it. A very enjoyable run & the closest to a true Baldur's Gate experience.
Do you give in to the urge & become a true monster. Or do you fight against it & stay true to your heroic nature despite every fibre of your being craving brutality?

Combat is turn based & this has been a point of contention for some.
Personally I would also rather have real time with pause. However the system Larian has gone with is far from boring.
There are many tools at your disposal to control the battlefield & make life hell for your enemies.
Or you can play as a Barbarian & just throw everything in your pack at your enemies. Even other enemies.

I'm no reviewer & cannot really write anything that gives this game the credit it deserves.
I've not written a review in years & am mainly doing this for the Steam Awards badge. Because I care about that for some reason.
BG3 has introduced quite a few people to the CRPG genre. Its rare to see a game such as this get so much attention.
I hope people new to this genre will go on to try others & see why for many it is our favourite.
Larian has done a fantastic job & should be proud of themselves. They are a long running AA company & as far as we can tell have a real passion for what they make. As well as not engaging in the anti-consumer practices so common place in the industry today. After BG3 try out some of their other games if you haven't already. They deserve to be rewarded for making a solid game with none of the usual extra ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ attached. A rarity these days.
GOTY 2023

If I had played this before making my top 5 games of the year this game would have stolen 5th place from Saints Row 4.
Top-down action RPGs or “Diablo clones” as many people like to call them rarely amuse me for more than two or three hours, Path Of Exile however is a different story.
What makes Path of Exile so different? Well I think it is it’s character building that makes it so enthralling. I am playing as a witch, a necromantic witch using my own build; I summon hordes of zombies, skeletons & spectres to overwhelm my enemies whilst I hide in a corner & cry, occasionally raining down fire from the heavens. But that’s just one simple example of a huge number of possible builds each & every character can have.
Each character starts at a certain part of the passive skill tree, it is incredibly daunting at first but you’ll soon realise that it’s one of the best thought out skill trees out there, I dare say maybe the best I’ve seen. A witch for example starts at the intelligence slice, then we have the ranger at dexterity, the marauder at strength; then three other classes with a mix of two attributes & finally the scion who will start dead centre & is unlockable after beating the game for the first time.
These classes are purely the starting point, the canvas on which you build your character.
Skills are not dictated by class but by how much intelligence, strength & dexterity you have.
You will not gain them by levelling up, you will choose them from quest rewards & will find them as drops from killing enemies.
All these factors contribute to a huge amount of replay-ability.
There is no character creator so whilst you make look the same as every witch, ranger or shadow you may not play the same.
As for the gameplay itself, it is standard for the most part for any game of this style.
Kill hordes of enemies, gather tons of loot whilst completing various quests & once in a while take down a tough boss.
It sounds just as tedious as any other top-down action RPG yet whilst playing as the witch it never felt like that, it felt more tactical than your standard hit attack button until all bad things are dead approach.
The trading system is another great aspect of note, instead of collecting money you trade unwanted equipment for items & stack up enough of these items & you’ll get a usable or better item.
These are normally things that will permanently boost the effectiveness of armour & weapons or add magical effects to them. You’ll even get items that will change normal items to rare items.
If you trade three of the same flasks you’ll get a better flask that will heal more HP or restore more mana. This removes the annoyance of gold farmers & the monotony of grinding for gold.
In fact speaking of removing annoyances & monotony, that seems to be this game’s goal, to remove the things that makes your typical Diablo style top-down action RPG so tedious; & they, in my opinion, have succeeded.
Best of all Path of Exile is free & has the fairest free-to-play model I have ever seen, micro transactions are almost exclusively cosmetic with bank & character slot upgrades being the only exception.
That’s right none of the pay-walls you would usually find in free-to-play games.
Plus if you run it though Steam there is no need to make yet another account for an MMO.
There is absolutely no reason anyone should not at least try this game.
Fully recommended.

I now understand Saints Row 3.
SR 3 is the SR 1 of SR 4.
What I mean by this is that SR 1 was little more than an enjoyable GTA clone, riddled with problems & mediocrity. Then SR 2 came along & is arguably better than any GTA game to date, essentially becoming a competitor & doing many things better than the GTA series, becoming its own thing.
SR 3 tried to sever the GTA comparison, whilst many a gamer complained about the increased seriousness of the GTA series SR 3 aimed to satisfy them by removing all seriousness & becoming a parody of itself. As a result of this change of style it was a little rocky & like SR 1 whilst it was enjoyable it had many issues.

Now we have Saints Row 4, taking the fun bits of SR 3 & running with them, becoming even sillier than SR 3, SR 4 is all about one thing, fun.
Tired of driving everywhere? No worries you now have superpowers & can glide in the air & run up buildings. Want to get down in a hurry? No problem, just dive down & cause an explosion wiping out all the pesky things that would have gotten in your way.
Essentially SR 4 is SR 3 done right & whilst many fans including myself long for another game like SR 2 I can’t deny the fact that I love the direction this series has taken.
I don’t think that I have ever played a sandbox game were simply running around the map has been so fun, reminds me of the PS2 game Sipderman 2 in a way.
Weapons are fun & more diverse with things like black hole shooters, a gun that shoots knives, even a gun that shoots wubs.
Customisation is at an all-time high also.
As you may have noticed about my recommendations I have an easier time complaining about things than I do praising, but if you like silly & cheesy in your sandbox games this is the game for you.

Oblivion is one of my top 10 games of all time & my second most played game of all time.
I play that game at least once every year & always finish it.
Skyrim is a game I played through once & loved it; it was my number one game of that year.
I now cannot get into it at all, no matter how much I try & how many mods I install it is impossible to get into again.
I now find it soulless & repetitive; whilst Oblivion was colourful Skyrim is a dull grey & white.
Almost every quest is a fetch quest that ends up in a Dwemer ruin or Draugr tomb meaning most of the enemies you kill will be robots & zombies. Great all we need are insectoid aliens & we have the holy trinity of overused enemies.
In fact most of the enemies you fight are boring, animals, bandits, zombies, robots, elves.
There are few daedra & when there are it’s only the human looking ones, saves them making a new body model.
What about the big selling point of the game, the dragons?
The first few times you kill a dragon it’s amazing & then you fight another one, & another, & another & another & another & so on.
They quickly become a nuisance, something to kill because you have to not because its fun & you want to.
I could go on listing all the problems with the game that goes beyond the fact that it still would be a buggy mess without community made patch mods.
The first time though it’s an amazing experience that’s unbelievably fun, I am recommending it only for that. Get it on sale.
After the first time though you notice all the flaws & see just how repetitive & dull it is.

Brothers is a game that has received quite allot of praise since its release & whilst I don’t think it’s a bad game by any means I think it’s one of those mediocre games that does one thing very well.
So let’s start with the most important thing in any game, the gameplay.
Its gameplay is nothing new, each brother is controlled via their own analogue stick & shoulder button, the big brother does things only a big brother could do & the little brother does things only a little brother could do. Namely little brother is smaller thus can do things like fit through bars & big brother can lift little brother to higher places. You pull leavers, climb on things & essentially find your way from A to B. This is not the games strength.
The story is also nothing you’ve never seen before; dad is sick, go find cure, along the way look at & experience sad things, again not it’s strength.
Speaking of sad things that seems to be the point, the entire goal of the game seems to be to make you sad &or cry; & like anything with that goal it often becomes really heavy-handed, fit with music screaming at you to FEEL SAD. I like many have a defiant reaction to that kind of thing & found myself carling less & less every time it did it. Look at this sad scene, listen to the sad music NOW CRY, FEEL SAD.
So what does it do well?
It’s environments; whilst bored right from the start I was eventually sucked into its world simply because I wanted to see more of it. It has some awe filled environments from a mountainous river littered with the corpses of giants to an abandoned castle were all the inhabitants have mysteriously turned into snow sculptures. What happened & why did it happen? You never find out & that’s part of the fun, it gives the impression of a huge world filled with things far more interesting than what you are doing.
So do I recommend it?
I get the feeling that when people praise its story they are actually thinking about the journey, not the story itself.
It’s one of those games were you’ll get nothing out of playing it yourself that you couldn’t get from simply watching a no-commentary let’s play.
But if it ever goes on sale for 50% off or less then give it a shot, it’s not bad, just mediocre.

After playing this for a bit I gave the show a try, only up to episode 4 as by the time of writing this only 4 episodes are out & so far it’s so cliché that even calling it cliché seems redundant. Nothing about the show is unique in anyway. It’s like they bought the How To Make A Sci-Fi Show Like Every Other One For Dummies. Yet it’s oddly cool, oddly interesting & oddly enjoyable even though it borrows from oh so many places that it’s more like a fan fiction than a real show. The game you ask? The game is exactly the same. The voice acting is bad, the story is cliché, the quests all involve you going somewhere & holding E on a few things & nothing about it is unique in any way.
So why am I recommending it? Well like the show for as less than average as it is I found it oddly enjoyable, the combat never got old even though I rarely replaced my weapons since I almost always got worse loot than the items I already had & that’s pretty much what carried it. Well that & the fact that it’s the least-social MMO I’ve ever played, never forced me to look for a group & is completely solo-able. That is an experience I’ve NEVER had with an MMO & to me is a good thing as I want a vast open world RPG in my MMO not a lets stand around for hours looking for a group or grinding just to progress. Yeah this is another recommendation where I ♥♥♥♥♥ about it more than praise but if the 70 hours of playtime is anything to go by you can bet that I by no means hated it & rather enjoyed it. Not going to win a spot in a top games of the year list but it’s enjoyable for what it is. Now I think I’m going to start the episode missions.

First thing first, I’ve never liked the Tomb Raider games so I shall not be compering this with the older ones, but with that said this is a reboot & we all know what reboots always do, they alienate the old fans & make new ones. Since I’m recommending this you can assume that they’ve made a new fan in me. So like always I’ll list the negatives first. Quick time events; about twice I rage quit this game after finally beating one of the more obnoxious quick time events that killed me over & over again which always felt like a cheap way to die. Incidentally the ONLY time I ever died was during a QTE so one could also say that it’s too easy, at least on normal.
On a more positive note beyond that this game is awesome, the platforming is smooth & once you grow used to the environment you’ll be jumping, climbing & running better than any white-cloaked assassin. Lara’s dexterity also plays into combat, sure you can just stay in cover but the games AI while easy isn’t dumb & will attempt to flank you & draw you out of cover with TNT or molotovs. The best combat moments come into play when you run & climb around the environment to get the advantage & dodging the attacks of your enemy before sticking an arrow in their face. Speaking of arrows it’s nice to see a bow in a game that’s more than just a gimmick & actually often more useful in combat than the other weapons. While the story is nothing new & the other characters I personally didn’t care all that much about beyond Lara’s farther figure Lara herself is better than she’s ever been, you care about this character which is more than I can say about most game protagonists & her transition from terrified castaway to ultimate badass is far more believable & takes more time than that of Far Cry 3. This Tomb Raider is truly a great game & I’m looking forward to seeing more from this new & much improved Lara, just hopefully without quick time events.

Risen 2 is a pretty nice improvement on the original. The pirate theme is a welcome change in this RPG market of nothing but elves & dwarves, the story & characters are much more enjoyable & memorable even though the story is the standard chosen one must rise to save the world & most of the NPC models look the same. Unfortunately the combat while improved still suffers from the same tedium that the original had. Improving skills is also just as annoying as the first, you will never have enough gold & everything costs it even quite a few quests. Still while the Risen series has so far had many an issue the games are still enjoyable enough for me to recommend them. Here’s hoping for a Risen 3 & that they keep the pirate theme.

Sadly it would appear this game is an unplayed/underrated gem. I myself only picked it up during the recent winter sale & there is little about it on the web, especially positive. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this game given how much negativity there is surrounding it.
I am a fantasy lover & playing as something other than yet another human or elf was a welcome change.
The twist is that the orcs & goblins are the oppressed race who are brutally murdered, tortured & turned into slaves & pets by the evil human race.
Of course not all orcs are pleasant & not all humans are power hungry racist zealots.
The music was a character itself, it has been a while since I really got into the music in a game & have found myself humming various songs.
The combat is rather like that of Dragon Age, during battle you can hold space to slow down the action to a crawl giving you time to select what skills you want the characters to use; doing so is advisable as you won't win many battles spamming the auto attack. Although I found for the tougher bosses spamming the stun punch is pretty much the only way you can win. The game has it's faults, auto saves can be annoying, the last fight in particular, some parts of the cutscenes cannot be skipped, you will often get stuck in endless revives meaning just as you revive one character the one doing the reviving will die & this can go on & on & on dragging out fights. Much like The Walking Dead this game is a one time ride, it's linier & everything is a corridor so unless you care about achievements enough to go through a second time I doubt you'll play more than once. I personally found the use of the word ♥♥♥♥ & it's variations distracting, not that I'm offended by swearing I just thought it was used way too much & isn't really a curse word that fits the setting; I prefer it when fantasy games make up their own curse words.
All in all I had fun with this game, certainly enough to recommend it though not at full price given it's issues & short length.