Recensioni recenti di Solus Grimwelder

Blackguards 2 is the follow up to the first The Dark Eye computer RPG in many years. Those who haven't played the first game will be able to enjoy this one, but a great deal of the backstory will be lost as almost all the main characters are returning from the first game. But this game is far less traditional RPG than the first. You won't be traveling the world completing quests and collecting loot. Instead you will be leading an army of mercenaries called The Silent Legion as you attempt to wrest control of the city of Mengbilla from its current ruler.

As such, the concept of dungeons from the first game is gone. Every map point is a location to conquer. Doing so rewards you both with new gear and XP for your named characters, as well as improved abilities for your army. That army is represented in battle as nameless, faceless grunts. How many of these grunts are present in battle is decided by the game. Their loyalty is unquestioning (for story reasons), so you never have to worry about either losing too many mercenaries or losing their loyalty.

But overall Blackguards 2 is a strategy game. The tactical battles remain nearly identical to the first game, the only notable addition being a crouch behind cover button. But your strategies will have changed as you now have numerous foot soldiers happy to die for the cause. They serve as effective meat shields, although the fact that wounds are now healed and mana replenished after every fight means even your named characters need behave less defensively.

This might all sound like a downgrade from the first game, and in some ways this title is less punishing. It also does away with the traditional character attributes from the table top title, and a new skill for mages that allows them to wear metallic armor without reprecussion means that you can now create a battle mage that uses heavy plate armor, wields a 2-handed sword, fires flaming arrows with deadly precision, and still perform 3 or 4 spells masterfully. Main character Cassia receives enough XP by the end of the game to max out the entire talents and special talents tree, while mastering two or three weapons and three or four spells, depending on how many melee and ranged abilities you wish to give her.

The entire character system here is more freeform, eventually leaving you with four godly heroes by the end of the game who can stand their own against some truly formidable foes. But, again, that fits with the story, as these four heroes are inspiring an entire army of rank and file soldiers. Meanwhile, you also have to contend with a new system that allows you to interrogate prisoners. I'll openly admit to failing every single one of these interrogations so I cannot actually tell you what you get for succeeding. You also occasionally have to defend the territory you have conquered from counter attacks, and in these battles you get to turn the tables a bit and place traps for your enemies, while you place troops throughout the map to defend a central point. These battles are some of the most fun of the game, and offer a good change of pace compared to most normal fights which see you on the offensive.

So do all of these changes make for a better game? That's hard to say. It is certainly a more systemic one, with less linearity and far more freedom in both character development and story progress. There is also a lot more variability in the ending, with both good and bad options for your lead character as well as a variety of potential options for your three other heroes. That makes the game fairly replayable, a good thing considering it took me under 15 hours to beat it, compared to around 30 for the original. Is a shorter, more freeform approach better? Really it is a matter of preference. This really feels like a very different game from the first, despite featuring the same world, same characters, and same battle system. I personally really liked the new format, but if you are looking for the traditional RPG experience, you won't find it here.

This game is beyond broken. Despite 2+ years of updates there are so many basic pieces of functionality here that just don't work that it is impossible for me to recommend, despite enjoying the gameplay itself. Man O' War is a naval combat game set in the Warhammer universe. You can play as either a human or chaos captain and align yourself with a number of different factions within each, fighting their enemies as well as unplayable but present races like the Undead, the High Elves, the Ratmen, and the Dwarves. That you cannot select those races to play in the campaign is a major disappointment. You also have no ability to control the politics of the factions, beyond more or less forcing the faction you work for into war by attacking another faction they dislike. Nor can you govern or control any of the ports. This is a pure naval combat game, so don't expect Sid Meier levels of depth or complexity in the simulation here.

Despite the limited scope and lack of complexity the game is still riddled with significant, game breaking bugs. When hiring a wind mage, for example, the mage will often get stuck in his casting animation, never again to alter the direction of the wind for you, until you quit and restart. I've had quests fail to complete. I've had captured ships disappear from existence (no they were not sunk), I've had port sieges fail to remove the loading screen despite loading the level and beginning the siege. Over the loading image I would get messages about my crew dying one by one, and I could hear the battle in the background. Some of these issues could be fixed by reloading, some, like some of the quest bugs, I could never resolve and had to abandon the quest. This was especially infuriating when I had performed some multi-hour long task, losing significant crew and resources in the process, only to find you I was going to get jack for it because the game glitched.

And those are just the game breaking bugs. There are also tons of visual glitches and AI issues. The melee combat in this game is so utterly borked that I can barely describe its awfulness. Hit animations? This game doesn't have those. Block animations? Well the enemy is always blocking so that is their default animation. Hitting an enemy in this game just doesn't feel good. In fact it feels atrocious. It's like whacking thin air over and over until the enemy does some horrific ragdoll out of existence. And none of this comes close to explaining how just broken this whole thing is. I took out a 30 crew Galleon with my beat up ship crewed by 9 crew members by simply boarding it and cheesing the AI until I single handedly killed all 30 opponents. I had some solid gear by that point, but all my upgrade points had gone into ship related skills, so I had no level advantages for hand to hand combat, just a slightly better than average shield, a sword with frost damage, and a bolt action rifle. That is how bad the combat is. I beat the strongest human ship in the game, fully crewed by myself with nothing more than a weakly enchanted sword.

The only real danger comes from the sea monsters, of which I have fought the giant shark about 10 times the sea dragon once, and no other sea monster ever. I'm pretty sure there are more than two sea monsters, but I couldn't tell you what the rest were because in over 10 hours of play I never saw any. I also didn't see an elf, or a dwarf, or a skaven. I saw a couple undead ships when they decided to invade the Empire at one point, and a couple Chaos ships when I sailed North to get my snow sword, and the rest of the time I fought humans with the occasional ork thrown in.

So despite really liking the core naval combat, and appreciating all the progression aspects with your captain, ship, and crew, I just can't recommend a game that I ended every play session by just quitting in disgust after another bug caused me to lose hours of progress.

Codex of Victory is an attempt to marry the strategic layer of Xcom Enemy Unknown with the tactical battles of Advance Wars. It's not the worst idea but several issues keep this game from meeting its potential. Let's first look at the strategic layer. Those who have played Enemy Unknown will eventually see how similar it is. I say eventually because a several hour long tutorial segment left me very uncertain as to what exactly the strategic layer was meant to be. Eventually, though, it opens up into thee planets (think continents in Xcom) each with different territories (think countries) that must be defended. Lose too much territory and it is game over. To defend these nations you send attack parties on your handy space carrier. Unlike Xcom, units do not gain experience and at least after 10 hours of play they don't seem to gain much in the way of special abilities either. But we'll get to the tactical layer in a moment. Back at base you build new rooms which allow you to gather more resources and components with which to craft stronger units and gear. Meanwhile the cyborg enemies will attempt to take territories which you will defend and occasionally you will go on the offensive and attempt to take territory back, although this is an absurdly hard thing to do until at least mid game after you have substantially upgraded your units and found blueprints for better ones.

Eventually you will, like Xcom, need to collect the corpses of certain psychic aliens in order to discern the location of a base and then additional missions will progress the story from there and new units, rooms, and gear will unlock. It's all fairly standard, with the one major difference being that some territories provide you with two additional resources, metal and uranium, which you need to build news units and gear or perform some research. So if you lose all of those territories and don't have the units to take them back, that is also more or less game over.

The tactical layer is where this whole thing falls apart for me. Simply put, it is too simple. As mentioned they are going for something inspired by Advance Wars with a series of units placed on a fairly small map, with the usual goal of wiping out the opponent's base. In between are towns you can capture which will give you more AP per turn. AP is used both to move/attack units and to bring out your reinforcements, so there is a bit of a push/pull as you decide whether you need to use your limited AP to attack or if you maybe want to hold back and summon more troops. This is maybe the one interesting part of the tactical layer. Beyond that, the whole thing is just too simple. Units don't have skills. There are some very basic positioning bonuses here and there but you aren't getting flanking bonuses or anything like that. There are no status effects I have seen. You don't have any commander abilities either. So really there isn't a ton you can do to influence the outcome of the battle outside of placing your units in the right position at the right time. And if that doesn't do it then you aren't strong enough to win the battle.

There are no RNGs here. You always hit with full damage unless the enemy has armor in which case you subtract that armor score from your damage score and hit for that amount. You have a healing unit and a buffing unit, and eventually psychic units become a thing. But there just aren't enough options here to make battles interesting over the long haul. Worse, for each planet there are only two or three maps for the defense and attack missions. Only the story missions get unique maps. And you will partake in dozens, if not hundreds, of these defense missions in a game. I finally stopped after defending the same map from the same selection of enemies for the fifth time in a row. It's maddeningly boring and the AI isn't especially reactive. One super easy map can be beaten on the second turn every time as you start with a town within attack range of the enemy's base. Once you have enough units you can take the base out in the second turn before the enemy even has a chance to react. This map also has this whole thing where if you go through the center you take damage from some sort of crystal, but they give you a city on all four sides so why would you ever enter the middle? Well the answer is if you lost this territory then you flip positions. That doesn't sound like any fun either though.

All told, the limited options in the tactical layer, combined with the limited number of maps and unit placements means that the core loop of Codex of Victory gets old fast. I never came close to the end and I don't know if I will. The defense components are just too boring.

Genesis Alpha One is a game with issues that I really enjoyed regardless. It features dumb as a brick AI, repetitive missions, and a gameplay loop that sees you cleaning up fungal infections for more time than you do anything else. That said, getting to the point where you are able to deftly deal with all of the obstacles, even when multiple occur at a time, is incredibly satisfying.

The core loop here is pretty basic. You are the captain of a ship looking to find a new homeworld for one or more of the game's various species. In order to do so, you must upgrade your ship and expand your crew and your arsenal, lest you be destroyed by illness, aliens, pirates, or illnesses that spawn alien pirates. A lot of reviews here make it seem like the ship building and protection portion of the game is broken, and that you can't defend your ship effectively. One review said something about being unable to tech your way out of being the ship's janitor. This is technically true, but you can do numerous things to limit how much cleanup you need to perform manually. Illnesses can be researched and then crew can go to the sick bay to be healed. Decontamination chambers can be built that will kill alien lifeforms passing through them. A couple of those can all but eliminate the minor aliens from being a threat if well placed. Security gates can be purchased that will limit the movement of aliens around your ship. Beaming chambers can let you and the crew move to various points on the ship instantly. And turrets and force fields can be placed anywhere you wish to provide protection, while module upgrades will detect alien movement below deck before damage has occurred. Now if a powerful alien gets beamed aboard your ship while collecting debris you are probably still going to have to go manually fight it, as the most powerful aliens can wipe out a room worth of defenses and armed crew members. But those are rare cases. At best, 90% of the aliens, pirates, and illnesses that enter your ship will be destroyed before you need to do anything.

A key component to all of this is building your ship effectively. In my first playthrough my ship was destroyed by alien spiders which infested the air ducts. So in my following game I made sure that my tractor beam and hangar were located at the end of single access pathways containing no other essential areas and inaccessible to each other. Since losing the bridge means game over, I put the bridge behind both a decontamination chamber and a security gate. Then I put crew cabins, reactors, and greenhouses. Then another decontamination chamber and security gate, then storage areas for the various refined resources a genetic material, and then another decontamination chamber and security gate, and then the areas which would potentially see alien life. In this last area, again, I made sure there were single access ways to each of the major problem rooms. That way if a room became infected beyond the point of repair, I could simply manually detach it from the rest of the ship and let the alien life suffocate to death, after which I would reattach it.

All of this isn't to say that you can automate your defenses entirely, but in my most successful playthrough I was able to fend off two pirate attacks and two alien infestations all occurring at the same time without losing a single room on my ship. So it is possible if you build your ship with security in mind and focus your early efforts on building out your security systems before attempting to tackle high danger planets. Also worth noting, you can build multi-level ships, which can provide even greater buffers against potential infections. On my four story ship I used beaming stations to move about effectively, while ensuring my essential greenhouses and crew quarters remained free from alien infestation. After all they had to not only get through multiple layers of defenses, but also up two or three stories. Once you know that 80% of your ship is going to remain free from infection/infestation, you can focus your efforts on the handful of rooms where aliens can board your ship. Battle bots can be researched and built to defend locations without risk of infection. Gene splicing will allow you to clone crew members that are immune to certain types of damage. It does all work.

Of course none of this forgives the lousy away missions that see you doing the same thing every single time. Nor does it forgive the truly moronic AI that fails to notice a growing fungal infection three feet from their workstation. The game also contains no real story, and while there are different seeds for galaxy generation, the lack of variety in missions means that you are unlikely to want to play this game too many times through. All told, I really enjoyed making an effective ship that was able to defend against all types of attacks. Upgrading and researching new rooms and species kept me playing, but I can understand those who find the game too repetitive or frustrating. Suffice to say, though, that it is possible to have a successful run where you have to perform limited janitorial duties by the end of the game.

I have to say that I'm not sure I get the positive reviews on Steam for this game. At first I thought that maybe I just was missing something, or that I just wasn't doing what the game wanted from me. And that might be the case, but if after 3 hours of play I still can't figure out if the fault is mine or the game's that tells me that it is either the game's or I'm not being given enough feedback to improve, which also makes the fault the game's. And before anyone tells me I should just "get good", I have been playing tactics and strategy games for nearly 30 years. I played early Atari and DOS games in this genre. I played RTS games in their 90's golden age from Warcraft, to Age of Empires, and so on. I played turn based strategy titles from 4X games like Civilization to combat focused titles like Heroes of Might and Magic. I played strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics, and more. I played grand strategy titles from Paradox, focused war games from Slitherine, and everything in between. And of course I played this game's key inspiration, the Total War series, plus all of the games from Sega's other strategy studios like Dawn of War, Endless Space, and Company of Heroes. All of which is to say, I am not new to this genre. I've put tens of thousands of hours into it.

And this game either simply doesn't work, or its systems are so obtuse that I cannot comprehend them. Per the game's own description, I am supposed to be able to give units general commands, like attack this company, and the unit is supposed to figure out how to make that happen. Yet it never works. Units simply ignore my commands, or they get just within range, so that only the front line can hit the enemy and then open fire, making it so that almost no shots hit. I've sent a half dozen companies to take out one artillery position, and by the end of the day they have taken out half of its soldiers, if they even bothered to get in range at all.

So the claim that I don't have to babysit units is just a flat out lie. Success seems to only occur when I manually move my soldiers into position. And not as a group, as that also doesn't work. For one, the range of units is not displayed when you select multiple soldiers. And two companies that visually look identical can have dramatically different effective ranges. So you have to go in and manually move each company to the correct position. And mind you that by the end of the battle you are talking about armies consisting of several dozen companies comprising 50,000+ soldiers.

This might be manageable if there were more control options. For example, right now the only way to move a troop is to draw a path for them across the map. This is a great option, and one I wish Total War would adopt, as an option. But here it is the only way. So with dozens of companies needing to be moved, I have to manually select each one and then drag it where it needs to go. In those types of situations, a simple button press would be quicker and more efficient. If they are mainly going in a straight line I don't need to give them exact movement orders. But, again, for flanking, this system rocks. I can get my cavalry to cut a path between enemy lines and circle around for a rear charge all with a single command. That's great when I need that level of control. But when I need ten infantry companies to just move up to a new line it isn't. And, again, not all infantry units of the same type have the same range. So, yes, I can group units, but that isn't really helpful when no two units have the same stats. One company might need to move up ten yards, while another might have to make a mad dash 100 yards forward. It's just too much to manage at the speeds the game runs at.

Which brings me to my next point. All of this would still not be game breaking if I could easily slow down time and issue commands, but to my knowledge this is not an option. In Total War, Kingdom Wars, Ancestor's Legacy, and virtually every other game I can think of that has combat of this style, you can slow or increase the flow of time as needed. Here you can pause or run at normal speed. And that just isn't good enough. A half speed option would work wonders in making this game more playable.

Lastly, I want to talk about feedback. Because after three attempted campaigns all ended in failure I have no idea what I am doing wrong. Half the time my cannons don't fire. I make sure they are in range. I give them a target, but nothing happens. Why not? I don't know. I try different ammunition types. I put them at different elevations. Eventually they open fire, and rarely at the target I assigned. I get that the game is trying to simulate human beings with minds of their own, but generally when I give a command to an artillery unit I expect that it will at least attempt to follow that order. And if for some reason that is not possible, I would expect the game to inform me why it isn't possible, or hell, even inform me that it wasn't possible at all. Sometimes my cavalry can't perform a charge. Why? I don't know. I had two cavalry units at one point seemingly unwilling to perform any sort of attack. They literally stood in the middle of an artillery unit and did nothing. I ordered them to attack another unit. Nothing. Finally I ordered them to charge an infantry column. They casually walked towards said infantry and were of course butchered without firing a shot. Was the fault mine? I have no idea. Surely even with low morale the unit would still fire their guns even if they wouldn't charge, right? And a unit with low morale told to assault a much stronger foe should just flee rather than march to their deaths, right? I just don't get it.

I could go on but my point is made. This game is an unplayable mess. Confusing and obtuse at the least, and potentially broken at worst. There are no tool tips, no in game help options. The tutorial videos teach you the controls and nothing else. All in all, there are dozens of better war games on Steam. Don't bother with this mess.

Have played less than an hour of this game, which I understand means I'm about a third of the way done. That's good because the mechanics here are so thin and uninteresting I doubt I will make it through the next 2-3 hours of the game. Don't let the videos fool you, this is a trial and error style stealth game. Think OG Xbox era Splinter Cell. If you get seen it's pretty much game over. So you crouch through the world (the crouch button is inexplicably a hold and not a toggle, meaning I spent about 45 minutes holding down the X button on my Xbox controller today) and try to find your way around some brain dead robots and aliens. The platforming mainly occurs during setpiece encounters a la the Uncharted series. And like in those games, it all looks and feels awesome the first time, and makes you want to kill yourself by the fifth. You need split second timing to make poorly telegraphed jumps. Sometimes (again like in Uncharted) you have to wait for a platform to begin crumbling before it tilts towards your target. How do you know this? Trial and error. Enemies will see and kill you from off screen. There is no tutorial. Not a word of text outside of the menus.

It's a beautiful game. Just absolutely gorgeous. The first five minutes or so are amazing. And then enemies show up and then I played 40 minutes of dated, boring, and frustrating stealth sequences and here I am writing this review.

The combined Total Warhammer experience is arguably the best game The Creative Assembly has made and is a masterclass in race design, unit differentiation, and large scale tactical comabt.

I really wanted to like this game but I found it incredibly boring and obtuse. It's incredibly difficult to tell if you are making progress with no concrete quest objectives or markers. I'm fine exploring to find what I need to do in a game, but numerous design decisions derail this. One, areas you have previously explored can be subject to scripted sequences that you have no way of knowing will occur there. I routinely was at a loss on what to do and just traveled from location to location until an event popped up letting me progress. Exploration is fine. But going through the same handful of areas over and over again because a random but essential even might pop up isn't exploring, it is just wasting my time. Although these events might not be essential. I can't really tell as after the first mission I have yet to progress the main plot. I have explored every area multiple times over, completed numerous side quests, but have yet to see anything regarding the main plot nor any indication of what I am supposed to do to progress.

If the questing wasn't confusing enough, it doesn't help that every aspect of this game us underexplained, assuming it is explained at all. Character creation is awful, with almost no detail as to what various skills and traits do. I had to go through the creation three or four times after making a choice that it turns out was incompatible with a later choice. Your inventory is likewise baffling. Items are sorted into a variety of categories but I can't for the life of me tell you what those categories are. I know one is weapons and another is for outfits. The remaining half dozen? Couldn't tell you what they are. There is no text explaining this, and the icons used on the tabs are meaningless shapes. I get the sword icon is for weapons and the hat icon for clothes. But what does a diamond mean? How about a chalice? I thought that latter might be quest items until numerous quest items were placed in the diamond tab which I thought might be a tab for junk. I have no idea.

There are two types of companions. One type joins your official party while the other just tags along like a mercenary. This made sense with the first mercenary because I had to pay him a fee. Clear enough, I thought. You pay for the companions you don't manage/level and not for the ones you do. But then the very next companion I got joined me with no charge but for a dedicated story reason but was considered a mercenary, while a zombie without any real story motivation was a full fledged companion. I just didn't and don't understand it.

I could go on but suffice to say that after four hours of playing I had enough. I don't mind exploration. I don't mind games that play with concepts of sanity. But I wasn't scared here. I wasn't disturbed. I was frustrated and bored. It really shouldn't be this hard to adapt Lovecraft into game form but here we are yet again with a failure.

This is a boring, buggy, unappealing mess of a game. I only got about a fifth of the way through before having to turn it off as I was falling asleep while trying to play. You play a soul lost in hell trying to escape. A demon called the Red Goddess is either helping you, hindering you, or potentially both. The story is nearly non-existent and mainly takes the form of obtusely written notes you find scattered throughout the levels. The gameplay meanwhile is also nearly nonexistent. You basically are following an incredibly linear path through Hell. There are traps and demons you have to circumvent, and when your body is destroyed your soul can simply inhabit a replacement. Thus in many situations it is easiest to just die to a demon or trap and inhabit a new body at the point where you were trying to get to.

Levels are mazes (in some case literally so) and filled with collectables, although none of them seem to have much in the way of gameplay benefit so I don't know why you would want to waste the time. There is an upgrade system, but most upgrades are either useless or just unlock when you reach the required point in the story. A handful let you see enemies and objects through walls, which is mildly helpful, but most just do things like increase your health, an odd upgrade when most obstacles are one hit kills regardless. Another increases your stamina which is used to sprint. In this stealth/puzzle game. Like if you are sprinting then it is almost certainly too late for any of these upgrades to matter, or you are supposed to be sprinting, in which case the game must be designed in such a way that anyone can complete the segment regardless of upgrade choices.

So no story, almost no gameplay, useless upgrades, not remotely scary, confusing, boring, and so buggy that I had to restart the first level three times before I managed to get to the end without it breaking. What utter tripe.

I have a great degree of respect and nostalgia for the works of Looking Glass Studios and the various successor studios that followed. Ultima Underworld, Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, Arx Fatalis, Bioshock, Dishonored and others are all among my favorite games and series. Hearing that work had begun on a new Underworld game was a dream come true for me. The involvement of Paul Neurath and Warren Spector made the prospects even better. I backed the original Kickstarter half a decade ago to the tune of $100. That Kickstarter promised a highly reactive, systems based, experience, where the physical manipulation of the environment would allow for dramatic changes to the long term behaviors of both allies and enemies.

Combined with a story set in Richard Garriott's new Avatar universe, and things seemed too good to be true. And it turns out they were. The final product comes nowhere close to meeting these lofty goals. Beyond that, though, what is present is barely functional at worst, and a solid step away from greatness at best. To start with the good, the highlight of this new game for me is the traversal. Pulling from Arkane's Dishonored series, Underworld has numerous abilities that allow you to get all around the fairly large levels. You can of course run, jump, and mantle up ledges. But with the right combination of skills and spells you can also wall run, double jump, float, and even summon clouds that let you create platforms in mid air. This all feels great and works as expected. At its best these movement abilities, combined with a propagating fire system that lets you burn down large swatches of any given area, can allow you to solve some quests in ways that make you feel incredibly clever. But far too often wonky physics or poorly telegraphed hazards impede your progress in all the wrong ways. Those wonky physics are also the cause of numerous bugs, some of which are game breaking, and all of which cause significant slowdown even on high end machines.

Combat, meanwhile is basic and far too easy. While recent patches have upped the difficulty somewhat, it is still far too easy to eliminate any enemy in your path. While I am not yet on the lower levels of the Abyss, thus far I have rarely had to fight more than two enemies at once. It's simply too easy to dodge out of the way of enemy attacks, and your attacks often throw an enemy against a wall, and you can keep hitting them as they get up. On the one hand, it feels great to whack a skeleton with a giant mace and see him hurtle across the room and smash into a wall. Compared to how little enemies reacted to your hits in early development builds this is a night and day improvement. But it has made the combat more or less trivial.

And lastly we have the story and world, which is where this whole thing really falls into negative territory for me. Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Bioshock, Thief, Deus Ex, Dishonored. All these games are built around distinct, living, breathing worlds. I still remember my awe at some of the interplay between the various factions in Ultima Underworld, or how my mind was blown when Deus Ex knew I stepped into the women's bathroom as a man. For being an immersive sim, Underworld lacks both immersion and simulation. The world building is dull. The infamous lizard folk from the original games return but inexplicably now speak perfect English. To be clear, backer opinion was almost unanimous in supporting the lizard folk not speaking English. Having to translate their language was one of the most interesting and unique questlines in the original Underworld. Yet now that is gone. Furthermore, lizard folk in the city seem to have no daily routine. They just sit motionless. You can't anger them. Can't steal from them. Can't kill them. They are just props.

And maybe most disappointing of all is the lack of atmosphere. The art style presented here is nice, and there are some beautiful designs, but it lacks cohesion and direction. The original game is spooky. My heart would be beating out of my chest as I snuck through darkened areas filled with deadly enemies. You can still put out torches here, but there is nowhere that feels as richly atmospheric as in the original. The whole thing is just hugely disappointing.

And that pretty much sums up my overall feelings. Disappointed. With the patches in place Underworld isn't a broken game in most cases. It just isn't a very interesting one. The traversal and fire mechanics show you what the team was going for, but they have missed the mark in every other area, leaving us with a game that feels half finished and nowhere close to what was promised.