Recent reviews by Ming

Enjoyable implementation of the board game. The animation flourishes and sounds add an extra dash of excitement that even the tabletop version can't provide. The AI is competent enough at Hard to keep my interest.

Divinity: OS2 is a unique blend of open world RPG and tactical fantasy combat. Because of its fairly open nature, you have more room for creative solutions than in a cut-and-dried RPG. However, because of its open nature, you'll most certainly encounter bugs and situations that leave you trapped. For this reason, the save and restore system is a must-use system because of potentially game-breaking bugs that require you to rewind to a safe spot.

This takes away from the immersion somewhat. But the main draw is the puzzle of tactical combat anyway. Meanwhile, your level advancements prepare you for more and more challenging tactical combat puzzles. If you like tactical puzzles, then know that that is the core game loop in the game despite the incredible amount of development time spent on the RPG world story.

There is an incredible amount of puzzles and side quests to explore. I would recommend not taking a completionist attitude towards this game and just try to enjoy it as a living rich world as a character in that world. Do this on "Story Mode" which is the easiest mode. If you enjoy the tactical combat, try another run on "classic" build. Tactician mode, the hardest mode, is by all accounts not as finely tuned and a bit too difficult with one-shots by NPCs randomly killing your party.

Despite playing this game for over 1000+ hours, I cannot recommend it to new buyers. The reason is simple--- the programmers will break it without warning and will not fix it. So your time with this game is limited. I had actually bought this game because they broke OOTP20. After they broke the Perfect Team mode in OOTP20, I bought 22 in order to continue playing that mode. Well, gosh darn it, they not only broke that mode, but they broke the regular game, too. Ratings do NOT show up in my game. This is pretty crucial to playing the game. Perhaps they may fix this. But they'll just break something else and start selling OOTP23 or 24 or whatever is next and you'll be out of a game. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to accept that OOTP games have an expiration date to them and play a different game now that this one has gone and died.

If there was only one game I could play for the rest of my life, it would be Hearts of Iron 4. Even if it's not historically accurate, there is still so much to explore about WW2 from different nations' perspectives.

It's very hardcore and not for casuals, however. There is a lot of detail and depth in this game, though ironically, the people who are really deep into it quibble about various small imperfections that do not fit actual historical situations that the developers may not have known about.

The Unreal Engine seems to have problems initializing the D3D driver with an HDMI TV. The sound may or may not work. You can hit alt-Enter to change from window/full-screen which will reset the D3D driver.

But various resolutions will or will not have sound. This is probably all on the Unreal Engine side because this all happens before the title spash when drivers are initializing. This is unfortunate because this is a good game that has an ant-farm style R&D management system with tactical missions and squad development.

If your two favorite things in the world are baseball and spreadsheets, then this is the perfect game for you!

This is a baseball sandbox game. You make a lot of decisions based on baseball statistics, so it seems like a lot of spreadsheets and data. But then the data comes to life in the form of players in the game. You need an imagination to make this work, sort of like Dwarf Fortress or The Sims.

I think they did a good job with translating the intangibles of baseball statistics into a working model of believable games. Occasionally, some unbelievable things happen, but you can just take it in stride as humorous rather than game-breaking. Besides, the real world also has plenty of these unusual events, so just accept that in your fictional baseball universe, this one time this weird thing happened.

I didn't think I would like it as much as I do. I played fantasy league baseball in the 80's, so I remember so many of the players from my league. And it's fun for me to see them again and follow a different trajectory than in real-life. I was devastated after working a trade to get Ryne Sandberg to play for the Red Sox. With Sandberg, Boggs, and Clemens on your team, how could you lose? Well, Sandberg had a couple of great years and then disappeared to free agency when I couldn't afford him anymore. Oh the heart break!

So, if you're an old baseball fan like me, or if you've played any fantasy leagues, this game really brings life to that dry statistics.