Recent reviews by Orlay

It's a beautiful game that doesn't really do it for me as well as RDR1 did. I think the pacing of the story, as well as the illusion of choice breaks my immersion. I kind of wish they really put the story out of your hands from start to finish to tell the story they wanted to tell. I found myself frustrated at the hypocrisy of the narrative and I struggle to distinguish if that was by design or irony.

The gameplay is quite clunky - although more polished then GTAV. I think Rockstar has always struggled with UI. They are at war with themselves by giving you too many options that all basically accomplish the same thing.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure if I'm happy I experienced the game or just excited it's over.

It's fine on sale if you like sandbox games, but I would recommend Witcher 2, 3, or Ghost of Tsushima to scratch those itches. There are plenty of games both old and new that have a better story with far more enjoyable characters than RDR2.

IF you like old school survival horror, you will enjoy this. It's better than Callisto Protocol but worse than Dead Space. It does some interesting things with combat encounters and atmosphere that really make the game a treat for Survival Horror fans like me. That being said, new fans to the genre may find it difficult to adjust to the clunky/hindered combat in a game like this and may feel overwhelmed with the challenge throughout the game.

Conserve ammo. Upgrade your pistol damage first before anything else. Store your shotgun until you reach an encounter point that seems like you'll need a punch. Do not use any automatic weapon that shares ammo with your pistol. Enjoy.

Buy it. Immediately.

Review at 15 hours:

I held off buying this game until a few days ago because of the performance issues. I was so excited for the game, I didn't want the experience to be ruined by bugs and issues. I've played for a bit now and I wanted to post a review for others like me.

The game's current state is not perfect. In combat or neck deep in a mission, nothing breaks my immersion. However, cutscene textures load in after the scene or conversation has already started. When you change areas, the game has to reload the map for that zone and it lags hard for 5-6 seconds while it does. After that, I haven't noticed any stuttering. You will be changing areas a lot of the course of the story. The game likes to throw you back and forth between maps every one or two missions.

If you are someone that is impulsive about micro transactions, buy the deluxe edition when it's on sale. The deluxe edition comes with packs containing most of the paid DLC and there is no way to buy those bundles outside purchase of that deluxe edition. It'll save you money in the long run if you're someone that wants those additional cosmetics. If you've played monster hunter or capcom games before, you will not be surprised to see the same old school greed here.

That being said, there is plenty of earnable stuff in the game that will more than scratch the itch of your cosmetic fancy. In 15 hours, I've made about 8-9 different sets of armor.

Buy on sale, and enjoy.

A roguelite inspired by Hades.

Pros:
The artwork is great.
Controls are responsive.
The menu music is a bop.

Cons:
The voice acting is terrible and dialogue is poorly written.
"Vault" items, or Boons, feel flat.
Enemy variance is abyssmal.
Characters aren't initially interesting, from what I experienced, and I wasn't hooked into learning more.

Admittedly, I played less than two hours. Given steams refund policy, it's all I was willing to give the game with the way I was feeling playing it. I played three runs. I failed the first run on the last boss (which was actually scripted to give you two bosses at once?). I cleared the second run, and the third which happened to give me the bosses from the first run but one on one. That leads me to believe they want you to fail, so you experience the dialogue for failing first. Both runs ended after the first boss was defeated. The game has you start a new run from there. So you really only see 3-4 upgrades per run and then it's over. That doesn't leave a lot of room for run variance.

I really didn't like that the characters gave me repeated tutorial dialogue for opening vaults or unlocking bridges when I was already exposed to how progression through the levels works. Given my tastes for the voice acting, it was more grating that the character was repeating information several times that I was already given.

Admittedly, I may have been one or two runs from - perhaps? I don't know - unlocking another area, but I wasn't given that information through dialogue and I didn't feel like I was making any progress even though I was technically winning my runs.

Enemy variance was really low for the first (only?) arena. There's 4-5 enemy types. One charges at you. One smashes near you. Two fire balls at you. All of them are 3-5 punches from death always.

-I'm watching a stream on the store right now where the run ended after the first boss for them too. It's just an disappointingly shallow experience.

It's neat.

It's got some kinks to work out and bugs to fix. I think some of the power sets need to be tweaked as well, but it's pretty neat for what it is so far.

Mind-numbingly boring. The base experience of unlocking so many functions and forms of attack is neat at a glance. Some things, like the crafting or upgrades, are just another menu on the screen without feeling particularly meaningful.

From the drawing board, I probably would have suggested narrowing combat down to three weapons and making attacks feel unique and impactful. Standard Melee, Bow, Magic for this genre - and then introduce other weapons later after the polish for the initial weapons is there.

Next, the crafting benches are just a meaningless window. Having an entire bench to turn a "logs" to "wood" and "ore" to "ingots" is just a filler upgrade with ore and wood have no alternative use. Skip the table and just drop wood and ingots.

If you're going for mystic and magic, the Orc's tutorial dialogue is jarringly immersion breaking. He uses a lot of more modern speech mechanics, or insults that a gamer might giggle at but it's bad for world building. If the meme is your goal, cool. But if you want the rest of your world or lore to be impactful, his dialogue is sabotage.

Cut down on the skill tree and reform it in more of a borderlands style gameplay tree. Right now the skill tree you unlock is just "+50 strength. More boss damage" so you're taking really bare bones game play and speeding it up right away rather than ramping up the challenge and making upgrades feel necessary to meet those new difficulty goals. Game balance is hard work, and I think Dwarven Realms just has too many systems working together to dumb itself down. When I look at the game, I understand the ill defined scope upgrades took, but it would've been really nice to see a more refined path where upgrades felt more exciting to earn so you can be more excited about unlocking aoe dragons or something similar.

Whenever a strategy game comes out, it is always immediately compared to XCOM. This game is not as difficult as XCOM, at all. It is, however, a blast to play. Without spoiling anything, the characters are incredibly interesting both in personality and skill sets. Mission tone is defined both by your enemies and the team you get going into each breach.

The game is wonderfully paced with dialogue happening before and between missions and breaches. The story pacing is very engaging. The banter between allies is fantastic. The optional challenge objectives really force you to think of how you can domino your moves to complete all of them in one match.

There are many strategy games that use a rewind function within or without lore to ease players off of save scumming and some of them even complicate the mechanic. In Tactical Breach Wizards, your ability to rewind is both based in lore and incredibly responsive. This encourages you to try and handle each move you make smarter than the attempt before without stealing away the immersion and engagement from the round itself.

After you exercise your brain to complete a breach, you're drawn back into the story and reminded of the purpose you're doing each puzzle set. I find this to be very well done. Each breach gives you just enough time with each character to derive their personalities and motives without overstaying it's welcome. These scenes are all also skippable if you don't want petty narrative getting in the way of your attempts throw everyone out of windows.

I didn't quite finish every challenge in every level, nor did I complete every challenge level. I did finish the story, and complete as many challenges as I could the first time I came across them.

I thank the developers for creating this game for the world, and I am excited to see what they create next.

I had a lot of fun with this game and its humor throughout my playthrough. For someone like me, who clicks everything and talks to everyone, there felt like so much to see and find. I still missed a lot, and the game eludes to 4 possible endings.

However, after obtaining one ending I don't feel compelled to complete the others. The game lacks definitive closure and I am left wanting to know what happened more than just the guesses of my final conversations with certain characters could elude to. It could really benefit from a longer ending cutscene to wrap up all the effort you spent beating it.

Clear time for one playthrough 6 hours unassisted, with additional exploring.

NWTD is a beautiful game which interesting mechanics and a world that is fun to look at as a cautionary tale of the power of greed and the entrapment of immortality. The game is a trip to play and be a part of, like watching a movie.

However, the story sort of takes a weird left turn towards the end of the game where I imagine they tried to throw a twist in. It wont work for everyone, making some endings you can receive feel unsatisfying. However, for the patient explorer, there are endings that tie things up in the game differently if you can find it in yourself to play through the game more than once.

With no chapter select, I advise liberally backing up your saves after different decisions to avoid having to roll through heavily repeated gameplay in order to have all your questions answered.