Recent reviews by Dovahkiin

God awful. Boring and lacking any sort of rational, straightforward tutorial. For a game that relies on lots of text, lacks any variety in representation of textual artefacts. Littered with misspellings, errors in capitalization, and other major grammatical errors (in either American or British systems). Not worth the 5.99 I paid for it.

I don't think I've ever played a rogue turn-based RPG quite like this before. ♥♥♥♥, I only died and came back /once/ after the Balrog fight because the Ainur don't know how to balance a ♥♥♥♥♥♥' mid-game boss battle. So, for a new experience and my pleasant surprise that _For the King_ is so polished beyond a typical Early Access game, I would recommend the title, given the bang for the buck.

That being said, I found that the rogue-element turn-based RPG is not exactly for me. RPG's require investing in progress and development of characters and story. When you are repeatedly murdered by outright circumstance and simply aggressive AI--even on the easiest level--over and over again and forced to restart from the beginning without any change, then the story and characters no longer matter. The only way to change the outcome in your favor across each restart of "The Quest," is to use a sort of lore currency in the game's "lore store," to permanently add new classes, possible items, locations, events, etc. that make you less, y'know, easily murdered at random.

The problem, for me, is that you need a reason in a story for the Sisyphean sort of repetition here, dying and starting all over again, and an option to move more quickly through the parts you successfully progressed through in past iterations. In Destiny 2, the death and reincarnation cycle is an instrinsic part of the story, and as you accumulate better loot drops, you can move through parts of the story you already mastered more quickly than in the initial encounter. Hell, even after I died, I didn't have to start out eating ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mushrooms and watching Radagast vomit on woodland creatures all over again; the Valar let me skip over all that past crap, sending me back as Gandalf the White, and making me use Eagles to quicktravel to places I previously visited on the Middle-earth map.

See what I mean?

The game is still a /delight/ to play, especially in its visuals. I mean, DAYYYYUM, son, on highest settings, and I never had a problem with FPS or lag. The mechanics are all familiar in the JRPG sort of sense, although they have been minorly tweak to be /slightly/ more unforgiving, especially in terms of the status ailments, scourges, lack of easily found health/vitality/cure ingredients, etc. I might be a demi-god, but I'm still impressed that I could get started and pretty much master game mechanics in 15 minutes. That's a smart game design. And, finally, I'll point out that even though the story is absolutely generic/god-awful/doesn't matter and the rogue-element-ish punishment can make this wizard quick to anger, I had trouble peeling myself away from the screen, hoping for a better outcome with one more go.

It's a medieval life and power simulation that never gets old, continues to receive regular DLC, looks beautiful, isn't hardware intensive, has diverse mod options with a still growing mod support community, possesses endless replayability options, and continually strives to strike the right balance between historical accuracy and gameplay mechainics. This game is the magnum opus of Paradox Interactive, and I love them for it.

There's so much to enjoy here that every gamer, from an adventurous Brandybuck to a homebody Bracegirdle, will love it. And the game (plus its extensive DLC collection) are often on sale for such a reasonable price that even a stubborn Proudfoot would admit it's worth a try.

I played Age of Empires when it first came out so very long ago, and I spent hours playing and loving that game. Heck, I enjoyed it so much that I ended up minoring in History in college just because the game inspired me to learn more about these cultures and people. When I saw Age of Empires II HD on Steam, I happily bought the game, expecting to relive a little of the magic of my youth. After playing some skirmish matches and on the campaign, I cannot recommend Age of Empires II HD for, really, any price.

My problems with this game do not have to do with the older graphics system or gameplay. On the contrary, the original visuals and gameplay were (and still are) quite charming and challenging respectively. My biggest problems stem from the hyped visual overhaul and new gameplay options. The original visuals were well done, yet I cannot distinguish any real difference between the original game's visuals and the "HD" visuals. The only difference, I assume, is that the "HD" means widescreen support as opposed to a real overhaul of the graphics. Since I don't play the game on widescreen, there's really no visual difference between the original and the HD.

As for the gameplay itself, I seem to encounter massive slow down in mid-to-late game skirmishes despite a pretty decent ROG laptop (Intel Core i5 2.5 GhZ, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M, 8 GB RAM). The developers warn that population should only be set at 75, but if the option runs up to 500 and offers "LudaKRIS" size maps, why would I stick to one of the lowest population and map settings when my rig can run Total War: Rome II on med-high settings without stuttering? When I try to play at the higher or medium settings for Age of Empires II HD, the game becomes virtually unplayable. Even at population sizes of 100, I experience significant slow down when playing with 7 AI. The fact is, if a modern gaming rig can't handle this rehash of a much older game with barelu updated graphics, then why even own it in the first place? Really disappointing showing, and I should've spent more time checking out the reviews on metacritic and the like before buying this game.

I was really looking forward to Warlock 2, but the game quickly became repetitive and tedious. As much as I enjoy building an army of monsters, dragons, warriors, and the like, the game pacing, ridiculous number of randomized monsters, mediocre diplomacy. and uninspired spellbook really squanders this game's awesome potential as a great 4X fantasy game. I guess I'll have to wait and see if Endless Legend succeeds where Warlock 2 clearly fails.

At the end of some games I feel the same as when I arrived in Isengard after the Last March of the Ents and showed Saruman how far he'd fallen from power, and other nights I feel like I'm reliving my fall from the bridge of Khazad-dum. 10/10

I've enjoyed my time with Starbound so far, but the devs really need to update the quest system and interaction with NPCs. As a co-op experience, this game is a lot of fun, but if you're more of a solitary player (like me), then you might get somewhat bored after a few hours of simply eradicating everything you see in order to build structures that you'll ultimately leave in search of more stuff to kill all over the galaxy.

I'm a fan of builder-sims in general. I think giving players a large set of digital tools and then giving them the freedom to create to their hearts content stimulates higher brain function and makes for high game replayability. Prison Architect delivers a rather unique experience--I can't think of any other prison building games--that's thoroughly enjoyable regardless of whether its your first prison or your 61st. Even better, the devs continue to actively update the game with content, tweaks, etc. I highly recommend giving this game a shot.

Ridiculously stupid good fun paired with seizure-inducing visuals and effects, 9/10

I played the game for over an hour and simply could not get into it. Nothing about it particularly excites me; the gameplay feels repetitive and underwhelming, and the diplomacy doesn't strike me as much more than clicking back and forth between various different colored text. Maybe there's a lot more later in the game, but I do not feel drawn in enough to devote the time and find out. The lackluster effect of this game is really disappointing coming from the folks who created AI Wars.