Recent reviews by Chemicals!

Decent game, love the Pathfinder system, and there's some fun characters.

But the story is basically Neverwinter Nights meets Descent into Avernus. It's worthwhile playing the game but if you're familiar with either of these other games (one a video game, the other a D&D campaign module for tabletop) you're going to get a sense of deja vu. I believe it would actually be fair to accuse them of plagiarism.

For the record: I prefer Pathfinder over D&D, this is just lazy writing.

The laziness accusation has more weight added to it owing to the terrible Crusades parts of the game where it suddenly turns into the worst RTS I've ever encountered. The only games I can think of that are similar to it are those ad farm mobile games where the object is to have a character with a bigger number attack an npc with a smaller number, you know what I'm talking about? The ones that are guaranteed to have false advertising. That's the Crusades mode. Its insultingly simple, and one of the top 5 most tedious experiences I've ever had.

I'm genuinely upset about how the Crusade portion just grinds the entire to a halt. It's miserable. I genuinely was able to look past the flagrant parallels and annoying characters for the Pathfinder system and the few characters I enjoyed, I even recommended the game to a friend already. Then I finished the first chapter and suddenly had to command an army of wood soldiers. I'm actually writing this review to avoid starting the game up again. I'm avoiding playing this game that I was enjoying just a few hours ago. This is miserable. The more time I think about this game the less I like about it.

It's a shame because I actually quite liked the previous game Kingmaker (which I'm just remembering is also the name of a popular Neverwinter Nights DLC) and had some high expectations for Rogue Trader, but now I'm thinking I'm just going to skip Rogue Trader entirely. If Wrath of the Righteous is any kind of foreshadowing Rogue Trader will just be a 40k reskin of Knights of the Old Republic, or who knows maybe they'll really push themselves creatively and do a 40k reskin of Skyrim.

Not a great game.

Is Void Bastards the best game ever made? No. Is it an epic and thrilling tale of adventure? Also no. Is it a well polished example of video game development? Still no, now please hold your questions for long enough for me to start my review.

Void Bastards might be game of the year. Mostly because 2019 has been a terrible year for games (it hasn't been great on other fronts either) but also because Void Bastards is far far better than anything else that's been released so far. The game looks great, really capturing the comic book aesthetic it's built around and the game plays great with only the a few minor bugs here or there, almost all of which are easily ignored (my first character out of the tutorial died after he clipped through the hull and fell into space, that's the worst bug I got.)

The action is good, combat mechanics are solid and reliable, controls and strategies are all simple enough to learn quickly but versatile and open enough to get creative with. Upgrades and unlocks work wonderfully.

The games atmosphere is solid, it really does capture the classic British Bureaucratic nightmare concept as seen from Douglas Adams with a bit of Simon Pegg's punk rock pop culture attitude. Of course it would be a lot funnier if either of those two had anything to do with the writing but just between the two of us I'm only trying not to gush about how much I enjoyed this game. It's a great shooter and survival horror, the roguelike aspect of the game allowing players to really stretch their legs and get comfortable enough to let the game be whatever they need it to be. This is great for me because as much as I appreciated all the survival horror elements the game brings to the table, I'm not the biggest fan of that genre and the option to dodge that entirely is appreciated all the more.

Seriously worth it, the game is technically very short but don't forget that it's a roguelike meaning it's as replayable as it could ever need to be so things like "story" and "gameplay length" don't count for crap. Just have fun with it.