Recensioni recenti di Legolas_Katarn

Detailed battle system with a lot of options and characters to use, but easy to understand. Added turbo button can speed up everything, quick travel around towns and schools, good detailed maps make navigation easy. I assume turbo must speed up the in game clock as well both when moving and when skipping animations because I beat the game in about 58 hours, my Steam profile says I've had it on for 62 (just leaving it on while not playing), and the in game save file says I was playing for 83 hours. Cast of characters is likable, mostly cliche at first but better over time with a good supporting cast. Story is a bit slow being the first in a tetralogy and even adds an entirely different kind of battle system and type of playable unit during the very last fight. (After finishing the series this ended up being a good start to a solid series with it's own likable cast that starts to bring in the characters from previous games in the series)

Problems include hidden quests and items that you basically need a guide for. A poor battle initiation system where you attack enemies from behind or run into them from the back for bonuses in the fight, pretty much every enemy is alerted to you and runs at you immediately, making the strategy to run away until it gets to its set distance then attack it in the back when it turns while also using your characters with ranged attacks on the exploration field. Not really a problem but poorly thought out and that would have been a lot of wasted time without the turbo option in this version.

PC version adds more voice lines and improved the graphics compared to the PS3 and Vita releases.

A well written and presented story focused on self acceptance, societal expectations and gaslighting, early internet culture and interaction, fandom, and the fragility of partly anonymous but meaningful online friendships and relationships. Set in 1999 where you engage with your friends through instant messenger, doing a good job capturing the feel of its use, and an online community focused around a magical girl anime. Story condensed in length with final parental interaction standing in more for dealing with and overcoming a lifetime of masculine societal expectations, rather than something overcome in a day and a out of nowhere group messaging system.

GRIS is one of the most beautiful games I've played, watercolor world of moving and shifting parts and excellent attention to small details making the world feel alive. There isn't much else to give particularly high praise though. Mechanics are simple, often relaxing platforming and use of gained abilities to progress through a changing world as you add color to the grey after each stage. After each change the areas are quite different visually and can introduce some new enjoyable mechanics. A very on the nose theme of a frail starting woman overcoming grief made more obvious by hidden areas and achievements and too generic to be interesting. Good music.

One of the most interesting things about The Witcher 3 is how it subverts so many common genre and video game tropes, "bad guys" have motivations and there goals make sense, monsters might not all be so evil or have to be dealt with through combat, you aren't an all powerful hero righting all the wrongs of the world and making easy black and white (or in some cases nice guy/violent unhinged consequences be damned guy) decisions. You have moments where you can just enjoy the world or interacting with characters in normal or amusing events like getting drunk to lure out a vampire, going on a romantic dinner date with a sorceress, putting on plays, having a snowball fight, a hilarious drinking scene with other Witchers, navigating a maze of smelly cheese, painting soldier company emblems with a singing troll, etc. You get to spend time with almost every one of Geralts friends just engaging in amusing distractions rather than having a focus on combat or progressing the story. Moments like these not only makes the world feel like a more fleshed out alive place and allow us to get to know the characters that inhabit it, but it makes your character who is barely even supposed to have emotions feel so much more relatable and emotive than the terrible power fantasy, nearly invincible, one liner spouting heroes that video games (and often fantasy in general) usually give us. Character facial expressions and subtle movements do an excellent job of adding emotion to the excellent performances given by the voice actors, this is especially true for Geralt and Yennefer.

The most obvious thing that it manages to do so much better than other open world games, outside of characterization, is to have almost (chasing down trails in Witcher vision can get old) nothing but quality and interesting content in a game that will end up taking so much longer to finish than something like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, or Dragon Age which go out of their way to throw busywork and time wasting events at you so they can pretend to have a long and detailed game. Many quests can even branch based on your decisions or when you do them leading to very different scenes, events, objectives, and possibly allowing you to see the effect your choices had later on. Many larger games tend to have one interesting and different quest, Dragon Age 3 for example has you trying to prevent an assassination while mingling with party guests, The Witcher 3 has more interesting quests like that then most other games like it combined. Conversation options are handled much better than other games, in many scenes a certain choice can lead to a very different conversation happening, possibly even with additional choices, it could be humorous or more informative but it tends to be much more memorable than other games where it almost always leads back to the same dialogue path. Many of the game's scenes have excellent small touches that add a lot to the world and character such as guard stopping to look through a window as a bard performs, a doppler turning into Ciri and seeing Geralt's reaction of seeing her as an adult, Geralt eating an apple during an autopsy, etc.

In addition to the main quests, which there are many of, you can find a variety of monster contracts, treasure hunts that will get you unique recipes for witcher gear you can then craft, and smaller but often entertaining side missions. The treasure hunts aren't usually very exciting, often taking you to places you will already go for other quest and just requiring you to pick up an item, these can also be annoying as you can't track multiple objectives and might have to go back to an old area if you missed it, but some of them will take you to different areas or places where puzzles need to be solved or where extra game lore can be found. The map is also full of bandit camps, guarded treasures, monster lairs, underwater chests, prisoners to save, places of power, and areas that you kill enemies at so people and merchants can move back in. Unfortunately, many of these "treasure quests" that don't involve Witcher recipes end up being some weak or common equipment that you will likely have little use for. Completing the main story, all monster contracts, all side quests, Witcher gear treasure hunts, and traveling to many of the areas on the map (I didn't go to every monster lair or hidden/guarded treasure location) on the hard difficulty took about 90 hours, this is without adding in the time I will spend with the game's two expansions.

Full Review: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/139299/

The Banner Saga 2 is an excellent sequel that improves on the original in many ways. Starting a new game allows you to choose which of the two characters you want to play as, with both giving you the same starting companions, items, renown, etc. The better option is to import your play-through of the first game, doing so causes the game to remember many of the choices made, the characters you have with you, the items you have gathered, renown you saved, experience of your characters, and it even carries over how many NPC clansmen and fighters remained with your former group.

Characters can gain higher levels and learn passive chance based abilities that I mostly just ignored, stat caps remain the same however, promotions now cost less renown and allow you to learn a second ability of their class while some of the main characters learn unique skill. The game has the same great art and music as the first title with backgrounds during travels getting more detailed and being more varied. Battles have been improved with new enemies, new classes, obstacles, objectives, etc.

Different events and conversations happen based on who your main character is and you see the other characters taking a more active role in events. Clansmen now can help by actively foraging for food and they can be converted into fighters by spending some time at your trainer. There are no more poorly done war sections where you choose the obvious choice to save more people, instead clansmen saved is based on your number of fighters and you get bonus renown depending on how many you are protecting. Items have also been made affordable in markets though you can still ignore them.

The game has you controlling two separate caravans with one being lead by either Rook or Alette and another being lead by a character who was only introduced near the end of the last game, a character with a very different way of doing things than either Rook or Alette. The Banner Saga 2 ends up being even better than the first game.

The Banner Saga has you leading a group of warriors and civilians to escape the horde of Dredge that have been making their way through Human and Varl lands. You have to make choices and watch your supplies throughout your journey that will effect your caravan and the lives of those that fight in battle with you, certain choices can lead to characters leaving or being killed.

Making certain choices and winning battles will gain you renown which you can use to buy items in markets, buy supplies, or level up your characters. The renown system is one of the things that could use work as you never really have enough or have any need to buy items from the markets (except for supplies), characters that you spend a large amount of renown on can be killed or leave based on your choices or from story events, and there are a lot of events and stretches of area where supplies are scarce. Running out of supplies means that morale will go down, which effects the willpower stat in battle and will cause civilians and soldiers to die every day they go without food. Civilians aren't actually used for anything though and soldiers only matter when you run into large groups of enemies where you will enter a "war" and have to choose how to fight, you should always take the option to charge your enemies with your main characters because it will gain you the most renown and lose you the fewest soldiers, making the choices very uninteresting. Even the finale of the game that has you holding a town for a few days gives you a lot of what should be interesting options but the best thing to do is to always fight on the battlefield.

The battle system is turned based and has some good ideas, such as characters having armor and strength where strength represents how much damage someone does and their health. They also have a stat that shows how much armor they can break and willpower that can be used to fuel their active class ability and that can be used to move further, increase armor damage, or to increase strength damage. Trying to do strength attacks on a unit with higher armor will only do one damage and their armor may deflect the attack completely. It's a good system but is kind of ruined by the weird meta game it creates where you want to run around wounding all of the enemies instead of killing them due to the terrible turn order system the game uses. The turn order has one of your men goes followed by one of theirs, what this means is that if you are down to two enemies left they will keep getting turns while you have to play through your six characters, some that might be too far away or too wounded to attack the enemy. Luckily when you get down to one enemy your entire force gets to move before they do. Characters that lose all their strength in battle are wounded for 1-3 days and have their strength reduced by the number of days if they take part in a battle again, it's more of an annoyance than anything else, often they will heal during your travel between fights and it seems to go against the feel of the game where anyone could be killed. Battles are often very easy as well, which makes the war battles even stranger when hundred of enemies fight your hundreds of soldiers, and you easily win often losing only losing a dozen NPC soldiers by the end.

The game has you controlling two different forces throughout it and you end up not getting much time or interaction with most of the game's characters. Battles can still be fun when the turn order isn't causing problems and the game has great art, music, good writing, an interesting world, and some good choices to make along the way.

Pony Island is an adventure/puzzle/platforming game where after attempting to repair a malfunctioning arcade machine you end up trapped playing a game designed by the devil. A game with some similarities to something like The Stanley Parable or The Beginners Guide in how it plays with normal gaming concepts and ideas to make something interesting. Pony Island is easily worth trying for the low asking price. Near the end the game uses Steam in the best way that I've seen.

Metal Gear Rising is easily one of the most fun hack and slash games I've played with good combat mechanics, a very fun to use blade mode that has to be used for defense as well as attack, great boss fights, and a soundtrack that goes very well with the action. That alone would make it a game I recommend but Revengeance not only manages to be a great hack and slash game but it manages to be a great Metal Gear game if not the best, not just with the kind of plot and characters you would expect from the series but from the entertaining codec calls, being able to use stealth while hiding in boxes and barrels, to comedic moments in cutscenes and the collectibles that would be common in a Metal Gear game such as a soldier becoming distracted by and petting a cat as his boss goes on the series usual rant about his ideas or finding hidden MIBs (men in boxes).

Where The Water Tastes Like Wine starts with you losing a poker game which ends up causing you to be turned into a skeleton that has to travel America collecting and spreading the stories of the people. The game features great music, voice acting, backgrounds, and writing. You will collect over 200 short stories that can morph into more farcical tales twice after you tell them to 16 main characters who then go on to share the stories you told them. These main character will show up at campfires and telling them the kind of stories they want to hear will allow you to get to know their true selves better until you complete their storylines. The varied short stories with a diverse cast of characters are often interesting or entertaining which is impressive for the number of them in the game.

On the negative side the movement over the map of America is slow and reflective but doesn't work as well in a game this size, it doesn't help that the art for the map also gets very dull fast. You can pay for train rides or hitchhike in cars but even when you get in a car you are stuck riding in it until the next town even if you start passing things you would want to get out for. A health, stamina, and money system feels like like a pointless addition since you just respawn in the last major city you were in if you die, which just ends up adding more time to game that already starts to overstay its welcome. It can be very difficult to tell genre of some stories unless you try to use them and then remember what it was so you can just keep telling that story over and over which is a more dull way to play the game.

I enjoyed the game and respect the work that a lot of the people that wrote for this game have done over the years but some of the odd design choices and the playtime likely lasting over 10 hours is not something most will appreciate. This really would have been better a a twine or point and click style thing rather than whatever they were trying to do adding all these "gamey" elements to it.

Work as a bartender in a cyberpunk dystopia setting. Serve drinks while learning about your character, customers, and co-workers, and finding sparks of hope and optimism through your interactions with your regulars. News, blogs, and message boards at home give more details about the city and world. Great writing, art, and music playlist. Good variety of characters discussing their life, job, class, sexuality, politics, existentialism, mortality, family life, sex work, AI, etc. Nice to see a sex worker portrayed positively and as nuanced person.

Somewhat dull mechanics, most interesting thing you're going to have to do is remember something about your regulars drink orders to unlock their ending or happen to have bought tea to serve someone from the game's store in between going to work. What drinks you serve can effect a person's mood but knowing when to deviate from someone's stated order or having to know to do something to be prepared for a future event to reveal more of the story as opposed to taking things in an alternate but still narratively satisfying route is a bit limiting.