Recent reviews by belbonassa

The game is very bittersweet.

While the whole idea is great and i like the various mechanics it offers, it's very difficult and annoying to get anything war related done.

It's really annoying to go on the offensive because more often than not the game will give you several reasons to abandon siege and go back to your land, may that be enemy reinforcements, lack of resources or another clan taking advantage of you being away to attack you. Even when you have an ally to cover one of the sides so you can fully focus your attacks into a single target, the game still throws at you more reasons to abandon everything than to keep going. For example, it's extremely easy to lose the castle you just got for yourself because after the battle you have no forces to defend it properly.

It's very hard to reinforce battles that are already happening because usually your soldiers will not reach it in time, and as soon as you lose, the enemy will have it's units restored in their castle, so all that effort will be for nothing. You can't maneuver your armies all that well either because each second they stay on the field, they lose resources and have to go back to resupply, so unless you have planned every single step of your attack, you will not even be able to take advantage of attacking from multiple angles.

The game gives you access to small groups of soldiers which you can hire as mercenaries to help you out and annex them eventually, but sometimes when they lose a battle, you have to pay them again to reinforce you next time, which can be pretty annoying on the early game economy, which requires at least 1000 bucks to do any action such as hiring the mercenaries, sabotaging the enemy castles, etc. Eventually you can outgain all of those costs and all that will matter will be the time to take those actions but i find that pretty unbalanced.

The game has a manual battle option which doesn't work unless you have at least two allies on the field and other requirements which i still don't know to happen, but you can count that most of the battles you will not be able to manually fight. The battles are very simple and all you can do is order your units to walk to specific spots on the map and try to use your other units to do a pincer maneuver and kill everybody. Fighting manually is much better than waiting for the battles to finish on the campaign map, so you want to play every battle, but they end up ultimately being the exact same fight since there's only one good strategy.

Diplomacy requires you to send an officer to the clan you wish to gain trust with and that takes quite a while to get done, usually by the time you can finally have an alliance, you will already be at war with someone else, but having an alliance doesn't even mean you can count on your ally, it just means you won't be attacked by them. To have them reinforce you, you have to build even more trust and it is a resource that gets used whenever you ask them to do anything, so you need to keep sending officers if you wish to get anything done diplomacy wise. Just like with the economy, it's very annoying to deal with early game, but you might find yourself having a lot of officers to spare later on to do this for you.

You can become a stronger clan's vassal if you wish to not get immediately destroyed, but that costs you the entirety of the diplomacy system, which will be completely locked off for you with the exception of the clan you surrendered to, but that doesn't even guarantee they will help you out, that just guarantees they won't attack you.

After about 5 hours of gameplay i was still stuck on my 2 castles outgaining any costs i have while trying to wage war on the same enemy while they get reinforced every single time and whenever i'm close to getting their castle, either resources or lack of soldiers take it away from me. Any action i use to damage their castle or take their soldiers away to battle them out of the castle ends up being a waste of time and money since they get reinforcements from a much bigger ally and restore their units extremely fast at the same time.

In the end, i really like the idea of the game and it's simple yet complex enough to keep you hooked, but it's very annoying to play since the game keeps pushing you back to deal with X, Y or Z situation so the game ends up being reaaaally slow and unrewarding.

I would give this game a neutral review if i could.

While the overall game is great, like the mechanics, the hybrid battles, the sea battles and the administration of your ships, the game has one big problem which is balance. Do notice i played on Normal mode both for Naval and Land warfare.

One big thing that plagues the gameplay is the morale, which affects you twice as much as it affects your enemies. A lot of times enemy ships will be completely depleted of health and will be actively sinking, but the enemy will not surrender, while your ships will run away after taking just some light hull damage. It isn't much different in land battles, where your units will run for their lives after losing 2 units to artillery fire while the enemy can take over 7 shots and not care.

The second big thing that plagues the game is how it gives the AI so much to work with. The story missions are linear (You can click a button which makes the enemy escalate their ships together with yours) and the delevopers really thought about every action the player would make and placed obstacles there.

You want to flank an area? The developers have a couple of soldiers and artillery waiting for you.

You brough 200 men? The Developers made sure the enemies would have double.

You want your ships to assist your units on land? The developers made sure your cannons wouldn't be able to hit for just a couple of meters.

Basically whenever you want to try something to change the course of the battle, the developers put something there to stop you, in conjunction with the terrible morale your units have in comparison to the enemy units, you cannot win that engagement.

So like i said earlier, while the base of the game is great, the way you don't really have any freedom to change the course of the battles really kills it.

The game has been updated and added a text feature so now i am able to talk to the NPCs, though it has a limit of words you can type, so you gotta be more direct with your approach.

The keyboard also doesn't seem to work too well with the text system since i can't use comma.

Sometimes you gotta start your conversation twice with the NPCs before they will actually start answering your questions.

The game is a bit laggy for the small space you're in. Optimization would be nice.

Other than that, the game is pretty good and it's interesting to be able to have a much more direct communication with the NPCs and actually have answers based on your questions and not pre-proggramed and pre-written ones. It's a small taste of what could become a very immersive experience.

Looking forward to what could become of this.


-------------------------------------------------
Old review

I'll have to not recommend the game yet because the AI doesn't understand my accent, so i was pretty much having no answers for 15 minutes straight.

Would be interesting to be able to type to the AI instead of just speaking to them, that would fix the problem for non-native english speakers.

This is Klei's Magnum Opus (So far).

When will we get Day of Infamy Germanstorm?

People Playground is a little sandbox game where you do whatever you want with human ragdolls.

This sandbox has very cool physics and visual effects, from firing weapons to setting things on fire, pretty much everything from the physics and the engine are very well made.

This game also has a workshop with many great addons providing the player with more weapons and humans to choose from and a lot more such as maps and scripts.

The humans have a very well made gore mechanic, which kinda reminds me of Left 4 Dead 2 gore mechanic. In this game is you harm a ragdoll, depending on the weapon you used it might make a hole in their body, or it could be a stab wound which would make them bleed. You also have some interesting potions to use on the ragdolls which might burn their skin or revive them after experimenting. The ragdolls are very well made and they even have bones inside for when you destroy their body

Now talking about the things i dislike about this game: The lack of AI.
One of the things you might download on the workshop would be different ragdolls and different weapons, and while you can equip those weapons on the bodies, they are pretty much just for show. If you download some AI mod on the workshop they get to shoot the weapons, but the AI is so basic that it really isn't satisfying at all to make an entire army and then make them fight because the fight is gonna be bad.

From enemies breaking their own neck just walking forward to shooting through five allies to hit an enemy, the artificial intelligence on this game really lacks. That's why i am calling them ragdolls, because they have just enough intelligence to stand up and take the hit of whatever you're shooting at them.

Now i do recommend this game because it is a good sandbox, and it is a very good game if you are playing it with the mindset that you are just gonna shoot ragdolls. I would like this game a lot more if it had decent AI to do battles, specially because the workshop has a bunch of great NPC and weapon addons. There are no battles here because there is no AI here. It's just a game about crushing ragdolls and making them bleed.

This Total War game is very different from most of the games that came before it for one big reason: Focus on Diplomacy.

With that focus in mind, that means this game has 50/50 chance of someone liking it, or not. If you came for Total War because of the battles, you maybe won't find as much fun in this game because it's easy to go dozens of turns without a single fight. Not only that but the fights got a few changes, making some things better and some things worse.

Talking about Diplomacy first, this game has the best Diplomacy of any total war so far, where pretty much every single diplomatic action has "Points" of weight to them, which means that all you need to do to achieve a deal is make the balance a 0 - 0, that meaning that both of the sides will gain something from it. Of course, the points those diplomatic actions have depends on how much food, money or resources each character has, so it has a little bit more of depth than just matching zeroes, but if you do match the zeroes then there is nothing else to worry about. This is incredible thinking back to Total War Empire where you had no chance to know if the other country would accept your deal and most of the times you played without really touching Diplomacy.

This game also has RPG elements, which fit it okay i guess. I don't like too much the RPG elements on a historical game, but they are alright and bring some money when you're selling items that you don't need. Basically you'll find items, weapons and horses that have some traits which will make your attack faster, or more damaging pretty much like a RPG weapon. I play the game on Record mode, which is the most historical mode it has, and they don't fit too well there, but also don't get too much in the way.

Have not played Romance mode because i don't like the idea of having generals that can wipe the entire enemy army with weird superhuman skills instead of being good generals and leading their armies to the victory, but that's just my taste.

Talking about the fighting, you mostly won't do that much... You'll always have to take cities by force from time to time, but most of the the economy is based on the Diplomacy, so you're gonna spend a lot more time doing treaties instead of fighting. This can be a big turn off for those who wanted to fight. Of course you still have the custom battles, but they have a very different weight of actually worrying about not losing too many soldiers and doing strategies so you can win with the least casualties.

The battles have been changed a bit, they have got some good things and bad things:

Bad Things i've noticed:

1- There are no more battle animations. Some times when you don't have to worry about managing any soldiers, or when you're spectating a friend's battle in multiplayer, you'd zoom in the battle and watch the soldiers fight, except on Three Kingdoms this doesn't happen. The soldiers just swing the air and fall down to the ground. The only weight the "animations" have are cavalry charges because the characters do get thrown away, but they aren't as good as previous games. Of course you might not look too much into the battles and mostly manage them, in which you won't find much problem.

2- Missile units seems to have a big nerf. I've noticed that a single peasant can take over 4 arrows to go down. One of the things that i always liked about Total War was managing to get a good aim for the archers to take down stronger units while my soldiers hold them into place, but while this is still possible on Three Kingdoms, the arrows deal a lot less damage, some times getting less than 10 kill in the end battle. Of course stronger units do more damage, but i've never seen a missile unit so weak in any Total War game.

3- Cavalry is overly strong. This kinda reminds me of Medieval 2, where cavalry can take even spear units some times and win with not many casualties. In this game, if you manage to hit any unit by their sides or back, they are pretty much done for. That would be okay if your cavalry didn't just come back with a single horse lost. Usually you gotta think well about when using the cavalry, but here i've used them without minding too much and still came with pretty much 80% of the unit still alive after a big fight.

Good Things i noticed:

1- Selecting and ordering units from afar feels a lot better now. I don't know what are the big differences from other Total War games, but now it feels a lot easier to just select the cavalry by clicking their circle and then clicking on the enemy from the other side of the map.

2- You have way more control over giving multiple orders. Even being able to just hold right click and draw the path your cavalry is gonna make while holding shift. While i don't use that many times, it's still a good addition.

3- Battles aren't too fast, neither too slow. Shogun 2 has very fast battles, where most of them aren't even 10 minutes long because of how fast soldiers fight, but here you can have a decent amount of fighting, even when it's between a weaker unit against a stronger one.

Neutral things:

1- CTRL + C to select cavalry and it's variations for other units doesn't work anymore, it's been changed for the F buttons, which is fine.

2- Map size feels pretty good. I don't think it's too big or too small, just fits well, doesn't take too long to reach the enemy army and doesn't take too long to go after routing enemies or to run away from the enemies if needed.

-----

I had mixed feelings about this game and i still do. Most Total War games excite me a lot but this one made me think twice before pressing the play button because of how it is built and how it works. I know a bunch of people really like it, and if you are looking for a better diplomacy on Total War, this might be your game, but if you think that the battles are the most important things, you might not like it too much.

In the end i'm gonna recommend it because it's a very interesting Total War game, but i still have mixed feelings about it.

This is a very fun and casual little game to play alone or with your friends whenever you feel like playing Smash Bros but can't play it.

The gameplay is very simples to learn with very few and easy to learn controls, such as weak and strong punches and defend/dash. The game gets more exciting as people learn to master those few moves and make amazing plays.

The game has no story, you just drop in a match and play. You can play with friends vs AI, AI only or with other people online, which is very nice to always have that kind of different options to play the game.

The game runs in any computer since it's very light and it's very casual, so you don't have to worry about if the game runs well or if you're gonna lose, so if you haven't played already i recommend trying.

Used to be a great game about 10 years ago.

Sadly now you can't even join a real player ship if you're a new account. Not many people around too.

Old free to play accounts also get deleted if you didn't pay for anything, so if you leave the game for a while it's the same as a hard reset.

Interesting game to look back to, but not really a good idea to invest many hours into it anymore.

Starbound is a space 2D sandbox game which lets you explore a infinite space and fight to restore order.

The story is very very simple, definetively not the thing you will be looking for when downloading this game. Removing all the writing out, you basically fight bosses until you finish the final boss while collecting some rocks. In this case, i would say that the story is very weak, and i think this game would benefit from having no writing but showing small information from time to time and let the players guess what is happening.

The gameplay is what you will be looking for here. This game is a sandbox game, which means you can change how much you like all the worlds you step in, building and destroying stuff and even making a colony of your own, which was the last thing i did in this game.

The fighting is also very interesting, since you have many weapons with different elements which will deal greater or lower damage to your enemies depending on their own elements, plus you have a few different types of weapons, so you can have different attacks and special attacks.

I could separate the enemies in this game in 3 categories:

Natives: Monsters that are native to their worlds and might be neutral or not, but not really a big deal.
Enemies: Usually raiders or enemies in missions, they will kill you on sight.
Bosses: Enemies with different weapons and attack patterns and a lot more health.

Fighting is quite nice in this game since you have elemental weapons and elemental monsters and it's always nice to use a spear to kill 3 enemies at the same time.

The Graphics are very good. They are pixelated 2D sprites, one of my favorite kinds of graphics, specially since they are very well made in this game. All the weapons have a animation for their attacks too and they give the weapons a better soul. The background is specially beautiful. It's always great to look at the sky at night and see that beautiful moon or moons depending on which planet you are. While the space itself is also very cool, i find the night a lot more gorgeous.

The soundtrack is very good. It really brings the space vibe and makes exploring a lot more relaxing. Boss fight songs change the pace so you get in a fighting mood, but in general i like a lot more the peaceful exploration music.

A lot of people say this is a Terraria's clone and i can see why: They both are sandbox games; they both are 2D pixelated games and they both have bosses, but after some brainstorming i think i found what the major differences are. Of course, the first one is that terraria is more focused on a medieval era while Starbound focuses on futuristic and space themes, but i think the major difference is how the content is presented to the player. In Terraria, everything is in a single world and you have to explore and kill bosses to get to the content, while on Starbound the content is separated in different worlds, meaning you will have to travel between the worlds if you want to get a specific content.

Of course all of that has it's good sides and bad sides, i like a lot more the space theme than the medieval theme from Terraria, but the way the content is presented is far superior on Terraria. It is really annoying to have to look into 3 different worlds to find all the objective items, meaning if you want to jump straight into a boss fight, you just can't. Since the universe is randomly generated, you might have to explore multiple planets to find a certain item of your interest and that is extremelly annoying.

In General, i really recommend Starbound. It has great animations, great sprites and a very pleasing soundtrack to explore and build with, just don't expect this to be the greatest game you ever played, because the way the content is presented can make some people give up on how slow it can be at times.